Landscape and the Visual Hermeneutics of Place, 15001700 (Intersections, 75) 9789004436220, 9789004440401, 9004436227

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Landscape and the Visual Hermeneutics of Place, 1500–1700

Intersections Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture

General Editor Karl A.E. Enenkel (Chair of Medieval and Neo-Latin Literature Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster e-mail: kenen_01@uni_muenster.de) Editorial Board W. van Anrooij (University of Leiden) W. de Boer (Miami University) Chr. Göttler (University of Bern) J.L. de Jong (University of Groningen) W.S. Melion (Emory University) R. Seidel (Goethe University Frankfurt am Main) P.J. Smith (University of Leiden) J. Thompson (Queen’s University Belfast) A. Traninger (Freie Universität Berlin) C. Zittel (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice / University of Stuttgart) C. Zwierlein (Freie Universität Berlin)

volume 75 – 2021

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

Landscape and the Visual Hermeneutics of Place, 1500–1700 Edited by

Karl A.E. Enenkel Walter S. Melion

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustrations: The central image is Landscape with Penitent Saint Jerome. Herri met de Bles. Oil on wood, 75.7 × 105.8 cm. Namur, Belgium. Courtesy Musée Provincial des Arts Anciens du Namurois. The background image is Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (Capricorn in early to mid-spring) from the Emblemata Evangelica, 1585. Adriaen Collaert after Hans Bol. Engraving, 15.1 × 20.7 cm. Courtesy Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-1978-85). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lovis Corinth Colloquium (9th : 2019 : Emory University), author. |  Enenkel, K. A. E., editor. | Melion, Walter S., editor. Title: Landscape and the visual hermeneutics of place, 1500–1700 / edited  by Karl A.E. Enenkel, Walter S. Melion. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2021] | Series: Intersections :  interdisciplinary studies in early modern culture, 1568–1181 ; volume 75  | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020042172 (print) | LCCN 2020042173 (ebook) |  ISBN 9789004436220 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004440401 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Landscapes in art—Congresses. | Landscapes in literature—  Congresses. | Arts, European—Themes, motives—Congresses. Classification: LCC NX650.L34 L68 2019 (print) | LCC NX650.L34 (ebook) |  DDC 700/.46—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020042172 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020042173

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1568-1181 ISBN 978-90-04-43622-0 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-44040-1 (e-book) Copyright 2021 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Lovis Corinth Colloquium IX For Herbert L. Kessler Critico omnium consensu hoc tempore summo

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Contents Acknowledgements xi List of Illustrations xii Notes on the Editors xxvi Notes on the Contributors xxix

Part 1 Introduction: The Hermeneutic and Exegetical Potential of Landscapes 1

Introduction: Landscape and the Visual Hermeneutics of Place, 1500–1700 3 Walter S. Melion

2

Parabolic, Periphrastic, and Emblematic Ekphrasis in Hans Bol’s Emblemata Evangelica of 1585 23 Walter S. Melion

PART 2 Constructions of Identity: Landscapes and the Description of Reality 3

Landscape Description and the Hermeneutics of Neo-Latin Autobiography: The Case of Jacopo Sannazaro 89 Karl Enenkel

4

Landscape in Marcus Gheeraerts’s Fable Illustrations 124 Paul J. Smith

5

Order or Variety? Pieter Bruegel and the Aesthetics of Landscape 158 Boudewijn Bakker

6

Schilderachtig: A Rhyparographic View of Early 17th-Century Dutch Landscape Painting 195 Reindert Falkenburg

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7

Landscape with Landmark: Jacob van Ruisdael’s Panorama of Amsterdam (1665–1670) 209 Stijn Bussels

8

Jacob van Ruisdael’s The Jewish Cemetery, c. 1654–1655: Religious Toleration, Dutch Identity, and Divine Time 234 Shelley Perlove

9

‘Car la terre ici n’est telle qu’un fol l’estime’: Landscape Description as an Interpretative Tool in Two Early Modern Poems on New France 261 William M. Barton

part 3 Constructions of Artificial Landscapes: Gardens, Villegiatura, Ruins 10

Hermeneutics and the Early Modern Garden: Ingenuity, Sociability, Education 291 Denis Ribouillault

11

The Politics of Space of the Burgundian Garden 326 Margaret Goehring

12

The Stratigraphy of Poetic Landscape at the Esquiline Villa 367 Sarah McPhee

13

Poussin’s Allegory of Ruins 391 Andrew Hui

14

‘False Art’s Insolent Address’: The Enchanted Garden in Early Modern Literature and Landscape Design 422 Luke Morgan

part 4 Constructions of Imaginary Landscapes 15

Narrative Vitality and the Forest in the Furioso 457 Troy Tower

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16

Epic Salvation: Christ’s Descent into Hell and the Landscape of the Underworld in Neo-Latin Christian Epic 479 Lukas Reddemann

17

World Landscape as Visual Exegesis: Herri met de Bles’s Penitent Saint Jerome 507 Michel Weemans

18

Cities of the Dead: Utopian Spaces, the Grotesque, and the Landscape of Violence in Early Modern France 547 Kathleen Long Index Nominum 573

Acknowledgements The Corinth Endowment, gifted to the Emory Art History Department by Kay Corinth in honour of her father-in-law, the painter Lovis Corinth, made possible the colloquium at which the first versions of the essays in this volume were delivered. In 2016, her sister Mary Sargent substantially increased this endowment. The annual colloquia provide an interdisciplinary forum for the study of early modern northern art. The editors are grateful to Claire Sterk, President of Emory University, Michael Elliott, Dean of Emory College, Carla Freeman, Senior Associate Dean of Faculty, Lisa Tedesco, Dean of the Laney Graduate School, and Sarah McPhee, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Art History and Departmental Chair, for their lively interest in and support of the Corinth Colloquia. Richard (Bo) Manly Adams, Jr., Director of Pitts Theology Library and Margaret A. Pitts Assistant Professor in the Practice of Theological Bibliography, made his fine collections available to the participants. Kim Collins, Humanities Librarian, did the same at the Rose Library of Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books. Linnea Harwell, Academic Degree Programs Coordinator in Graduate Studies, facilitated the colloquium with incredible grace and efficiency, and assisted our visitors in ways too numerous to count. Blanche Barnett, Academic Department Administrator, provided essential administrative support during the planning and implementation of the colloquium. Christopher Sawula, Visual Resources Librarian, and Becky Baldwin, Assistant Librarian, supplied both images and technical expertise. Last but not least, the editors owe a great debt of thanks to Annie McEwen, whose assistance at every stage ensured that this volume saw the light of day.

Illustrations 1.1 2.1 2.2

2.3

2.4

2.5

2.6

2.7

2.8

2.9

2.10

2.11

2.12

Hendrick Goltzius, Portrait of Frederick de Vries, 1597. Engraving, 358 × 263 mm. British Museum, London 6 Adriaen Collaert after Hans Bol, Title Plate from the Emblemata Evangelica, 1585. Engraving, 15.2 × 21 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-1978-81) 30 Adriaen Collaert after Hans Bol, Mary and Joseph Arrive at the Inn (Capricorn in early to mid-winter) from the Emblemata Evangelica, 1585. Engraving, 15.2 × 20.7 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-1978-92) 35 Adriaen Collaert after Hans Bol, The Angel Instructs Joseph to Flee, and the Flight into Egypt (Aquarius in mid- to late winter), from the Emblemata Evangelica, 1585. Engraving, 15.3 × 20.8 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-1978-82) 35 Adriaen Collaert after Hans Bol, Calling of the Apostles Peter and Andrew (Pisces in late winter to early spring) from the Emblemata Evangelica, 1585. Engraving, 15.3 × 20.7 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-1978-83) 37 Adriaen Collaert after Hans Bol, Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (Capricorn in early to mid-spring) from the Emblemata Evangelica, 1585. Engraving, 15.1 × 20.7 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-1978-85) 37 Adriaen Collaert after Hans Bol, Parable of the Sower (Aries [instead of Taurus] mid- to late spring) from the Emblemata Evangelica, 1585. Engraving, 15.1 × 20.7 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-1978-84) 40 Adriaen Collaert after Hans Bol, Christ and the Woman of Samaria (Gemini in late spring to early summer) from the Emblemata Evangelica, 1585. Engraving, 15.1 × 20.8 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-1978-86) 40 Adriaen Collaert after Hans Bol, The Parable of the Rich Fool (Cancer in early to mid-summer) from the Emblemata Evangelica, 1585. Engraving, 15.1 × 20.8 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-1978-87) 43 Adriaen Collaert after Hans Bol, Parable of the Good Shepherd (Leo in mid- to late summer) from the Emblemata Evangelica, 1585. Engraving, 15.1 × 20.8 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-1978-88) 43 Adriaen Collaert after Hans Bol, Parable of the Plucking of the Ears of Corn (Virgo in later summer to early fall) from the Emblemata Evangelica, 1585. Engraving, 15.1 × 20.7 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-1978-89) 45 Adriaen Collaert after Has Bol, Parable of the Barren Fig Tree (Libra in early to mid-fall) from the Emblemata Evangelica, 1585. Engraving, 15.4 × 20.6 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 45 Adriaen Collaert after Hans Bol, Parable of the Unjust Husbandmen (Scorpio in mid- to late fall) from the Emblemata Evangelica, 1585. Engraving, 15.3 × 20.6 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-1978-91) 47

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2.13 Adriaen Collaert after Hans Bol, Parable of the Kingdom of Heaven (Sagittarius in late fall to early winter) from the Emblemata Evangelica, 1585. Engraving, 15.1 × 20.6 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-1978-91A) 47 3.1 Titian, portrait of Sannazaro, oil on canvas, 85,7 × 72,7 cm. Picture Gallery, Buckingham palace. Public domain 91 3.2A Monte Stella (left), Monte Merola (middle), and Monte Tubenna (right), on the slopes of the hills and in the valleys woods with holm oaks 97 3.2B Road map of San Mango with Monte Stella, Monte Merola and Monte Tubenna. https://opentopomap.org, Creative Commons 97 3.3 Slopes with a wood of holm oaks. Creative Commons: By Drow Male, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivo:Quercus_ilex .001_-_Monfrague.JPG 97 3.4A Author’s portrait of Petrarch, in Canzoniere, MS Cologny-Genève, Bibliotheca Bodmeriana 130, f. 10v. Creative Commons, CC BY-NC 4.0, http://e-codices.unifr .ch/de/fmb/cb-0130/10v 103 3.4B Author’s portrait of Petrarch. Woodcut illustration to Petrarca, Canzoniere (Venice, Bernardino Stagnino: 1513), fol. 3 v 104 3.4C Girolamo Santacroce (1502–1537), Bronze medal with portrait of Jacopo Sannazaro, recto. Creative Commons: “By I, Sailko, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27784196” 105 3.4D Bartolomeo Ammannati, Portrait bust on Sannazaro’s grave monument, S. Maria del Parto, Naples. Creative Commons 3.0: By Mentnafunangann, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index. php?curid=33374693 105 3.4E Bartolomeo Ammannati, Apollo, Sculpture of Sannazaro’s grave monument, S. Maria del Parto, Naples. Creative Commons: “Di User:Mentnafunangann – File:Chiesa di Santa Maria del Parto a Mergellina 11.JPG and other files in the same category, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index. php?curid=33374695” 105 3.5A French illuminator, Shepherd/ poet Meliboeus meets his colleague Tityrus playing the flute, 1469. Illustration to Virgil, Eclogues, manuscript Dijon (Burgundy), Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 493, fol. 3 v, to the first Eclogue, incipit: ‘Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi […]’ 109 3.5B Master of the Vraie cronicque descoce, 15th century. The shepherds/poets Corydon and Alexis. Public domain 110 3.5C “Melisaeus”, i.e., Giovanni Pontano, second president of the humanist academy of Naples. Portrait medal by Adriano Fiorentino, bronze, 8.4 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection. Wikimedia commons. Public Domain 111

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3.6A Giulio Campagnola, Young shepherd seated in a landscape looking toward an old man in the lower right, buildings in the background and a tree and mountain at left (ca. 1515–1518), engraving, image 13.3 × 7.9 cm, sheet 13.8 × 8.3 cm. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Metropolitan Museum, Public Domain 112 3.6B The Virgilian shepherds venerating the mythical poet Daphnis at his grave in an Arcadian landscape. Grave inscription: “Daphnis ego in sylvis” (“I am Daphnis in the woods”, Virgil, Eclogue 5, 43). Woodcut illustration to Virgil’s 5th Eclogue, in idem, Opera (Strassburg, Johann Grüninger: 1502). https://commons .wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Daphnis_ego_in_sylvis.jpg 115 3.7 Jacopo Sannazaro’s villa with Santa Maria del Parto at Mergellina. Detail of “La fedelissima Città di Napoli”. Etching by Alessandro Baratta and Nicolas Perrey (Naples: 1680). Naples, National Library. Public domain 117 3.8A “S V” – “Sepolcro di Virgilio” (Sepulcrum Vergilii) – Virgil’s grave with a laurel tree above Sannazaro’s grave chapel “S.M.P.D.G.” (“Sancta Maria Partus Dei Genetrix”). Woodcut from Scipione Mazella: “Sito et antichità della città di Pozzuolo” (Naples: 1595). Public Domain 119 3.8B Inscription on Sannazaro’s grave. Naples, Santa Maria del Parto. Wikimedia Commons: By Mentnafunangann – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons .wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33354350 119 4.1 Marcus Gheeraerts, “The Animal Chameleon”. Etched illustration to Eduard de Dene’s De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (Bruges, Pieter de Clerck for Marcus Gheeraerts: 1567). From: Facsimile ed. W. Le Loup – M. Goetink (Roeselare: 1978) 72–73 125 4.2 Andrea Alciato, Emblemes (Lyon, Macé Bonhomme for Guillaume Rouille: 1549) 77. https://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/french/facsimile .php?emb=FALb050 126 4.3 Conrad Gessner, Historia animalium, liber I. De quadrupedis oviparis (Zurich, Christopher Froschauer: 1554) 3. https://www.e-rara.ch/zuz/content/ pageview/2119268 127 4.4 Marcus Gheeraerts, Titleprint. Etched illustration to Eduard de Dene’s De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (Bruges, Pieter de Clerck for Marcus Gheeraerts: 1567). From: Facsimile ed. W. Le Loup – M. Goetink (Roeselare: 1978) 129 4.5 Marcus Gheeraerts, “The Animal Chameleon”. Drawing, 9.5 × 11.3 cm. SKD, Kupfer Stichkabinet. https://skd-online-collection.skd.museum/Details/ Index/887500 132 4.6 Marcus Gheeraerts, “The Lion and the Fox”. Drawing, 9.5 × 11.2 cm. SKD, Kupfer Stichkabinet. https://skd-online-collection.skd.museum/Details/ Index/887449 133

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4.7 Marcus Gheeraerts, “The Lion and the Fox”. Etched illustration to Eduard de Dene’s De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (Bruges, Pieter de Clerck for Marcus Gheeraerts: 1567). From: Facsimile ed. W. Le Loup – M. Goetink (Roeselare: 1978) 20 134 4.8 Lancelot Blondeel, The Death of Marcus Licinius Crassus (1558). Oil on panel, 56.6 × 70.9 cm. Groeningemuseum Brugge – www.artinflanders.be – photographer Hugo Maertens 136 4.9 Marcus Gheeraerts, “The Fox and the Raven”. Etched illustration to Eduard de Dene’s De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (Bruges, Pieter de Clerck for Marcus Gheeraerts: 1567). From: Facsimile ed. W. Le Loup – M. Goetink (Roeselare: 1978) 20 137 4.10 Marcus Gheeraerts, “The Crow and the Sheep”. Etched illustration to Eduard de Dene’s De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (Bruges, Pieter de Clerck for Marcus Gheeraerts: 1567). From: Facsimile ed. W. Le Loup – M. Goetink (Roeselare: 1978) 38 138 4.11 Joannes van Doetecum (I) or Lucas van Doetecum after the Master of the Small Landscapes, Haycart on Village Road (1559–1561). Etching, 16.7 × 20.0 cm. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. http://hdl.handle.net/10934/ RM0001.COLLECT.344299 139 4.12 Marcus Gheeraerts, “The Lion and the Boar”. Etched illustration to Eduard de Dene’s De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (Bruges, Pieter de Clerck for Marcus Gheeraerts: 1567). From: Facsimile ed. W. Le Loup – M. Goetink (Roeselare: 1978) 134 140 4.13 Pieter Huys after Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Two Galleys Sailing Behind an Armed Three-Master with Phaeton and Jupiter in the Sky (1561–1565). Engraving, 26.1 × 34.3 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/ collection/search/383048 141 4.14 Marcus Gheeraerts, “Jupiter and the Bee”. Etched illustration to Eduard de Dene’s De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (Bruges, Pieter de Clerck for Marcus Gheeraerts: 1567). From: Facsimile ed. W. Le Loup – M. Goetink (Roeselare: 1978) 20 142 4.15 Marcus Gheeraerts, “The Elephant and the Dragon”. Etched illustration to Eduard de Dene’s De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (Bruges, Pieter de Clerck for Marcus Gheeraerts: 1567). From: Facsimile ed. W. Le Loup – M. Goetink (Roeselare: 1978) 90 143 4.16 Giovanni Battista Franco, Four Elephants, a Lion and a Boar. Copperplate print, 33.2 × 47.7 cm. Photo: Andreas Praefcke. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Franco_Elephants_lion_and_boar.jpg 144

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4.17 Marcus Gheeraerts, “The Lion, the Donkey and the Fox”. Etched illustration to Eduard de Dene’s De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (Bruges, Pieter de Clerck for Marcus Gheeraerts: 1567). From: Facsimile ed. W. Le Loup – M. Goetink (Roeselare: 1978) 52 145 4.18 Lion Attacking a Horse. Sculpture. Capitoline Museums. https://commons .wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lion_attacking_a_horse,_probably_made_in_ northern_Greece_or_Asia_Minor,_325%E2%80%93300_BC,_restored_in_ Rome_in_1594,_Capitoline_Museums_(22169854685).jpg 146 4.19 Marcus Gheeraerts, “The Eagle and the Vixen”. Etched illustration to Eduard de Dene’s De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (Bruges, Pieter de Clerck for Marcus Gheeraerts: 1567). From: Facsimile ed. W. Le Loup – M. Goetink (Roeselare: 1978) 84 148 4.20 Marcus Gheeraerts, “Jupiter and the Frogs demanding a King”. Etched illustration to Eduard de Dene’s De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (Bruges, Pieter de Clerck for Marcus Gheeraerts: 1567). From: Facsimile ed. W. Le Loup – M. Goetink (Roeselare: 1978) 36 149 4.21 Marcus Gheeraerts, “Of the Old Stork”. Etched illustration to Eduard de Dene’s De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (Bruges, Pieter de Clerck for Marcus Gheeraerts: 1567). From: Facsimile ed. W. Le Loup – M. Goetink (Roeselare: 1978) 48 153 5.1 Philips Galle, Temperantia after Pieter Bruegel, c. 1560. Engraving, 22.3 × 28.7 (plate). From the Series of Seven Virtues, published by Hieronymus Cock. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. RP-P-OB-7376. Image © Rijksmuseum 159 5.1a Philips Galle, Temperantia after Pieter Bruegel, detail 161 5.2 Limbourg Brothers, The Month of July with the Castle of Poitiers, 1411–1416. Miniature in Les très riches heures du duc de Berry. Chantilly, Musée Condé, Ms. 65, fol. 7v. Image © Musée Condé 166 5.3 Master of the Getty Froissart, The Province of Flanders, 48 × 23 cm. Miniature (whole page) in Le trésor des histoires, Bruges, c. 1475–1480. London, British Library, Cotton MMS Augustus AV, fol. 345v 167 5.4 Simon Marmion, The Firmament above the Earth, 44 × 30 cm. Miniature (whole page) in Le livre des sept âges du monde, atelier Jacquemart Pilavaine, Mons, c. 1455. Brussels, Royal Library of Belgium, ms. 9047, fol. 12 168 5.5 Master of Bellaert, The Earth, 1485. Woodcut in Bartholomaeus Anglicus, Van den proprieteyten der dinghen (Haarlem: 1485). Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam, Special Collections. Image © University of Amsterdam 170 5.6 Joachim Patinir, The Penitence of Saint Jerome, ca. 1512–1515. Oil on wood, c. 119 × 152 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image © Metropolitan Museum 171

Illustrations 5.7

5.8

5.9

5.10

5.11

5.12

5.13

6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8 6.9

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Herri met de Bles, Landscape with David and Bathsheba, 1535–1540. Oil on panel, 46.2 × 69.2 cm. Boston, Isabella Steward Gardner Museum, inv. no. P25w40, Image © Isabella Steward Gardner Museum 175 Hans Vredeman de Vries, Lazarus before the Palace of the Rich Man, c. 1565–1570. Oil on panel, 42 × 66 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. no. SK-A-2390. Image © Rijksmuseum 176 Johannes or Lucas van Doetecum after Pieter Bruegel, Milites Resquientes, 1555–1556. Etching and engraving, 32.5 × 44.2 cm (plate). Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. no. RP-P-OB-7363. Image © Rijksmuseum 180 Bernard van Orley, The Month of September: Hunters at Groenendaal Priory, c. 1530. Pen and brush in brown, grey and red, 39 × 57 cm (design for the tapestry series The Hunts of Maximilian).Leiden, Leiden University Library / Print Room, inv. no. PK-T-2046 181 Pieter Bruegel, The Return of the Hunters, 1565. Oil on wood, 116,5 × 162 cm. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemäldegalerie, inv. no. 1838. Image © Kunsthistorisches Museum 183 Pieter van der Heyden after Pieter Bruegel, Lent, 1570. Engraving, 22.8 × 28.7 cm (plate). Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. no. RP-P-1892-A-17338. Image © Rijksmuseum 185 Pieter van der Heyden after Pieter Bruegel, Summer, 1570. Engraving, 22.5 × 28.5 cm (plate). Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. no. RP-P-1892-A-17339. Image © Rijksmuseum 186 Jan van Goyen, Landscape with a Dilapidated Farmhouse, 1631. Oil on panel, 40 × 54 cm. The Hague, Mauritshuis Museum 195 Paulus Potter, Cows in a Meadow near a Farm, 1653. Oil on canvas, 58 × 66.5 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum 196 Meindert Hobbema, Wooded Landscape with Strollers in a Village, 1665. Oil on canvas, 93 × 128 cm. Washington, National Gallery of Art 197 Boëtius à Bolswert, after Abraham Bloemaert, Farm Cottage, 1613. Etching, 15.4 × 24.4 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art 199 Jan van Goyen, Dune Landscape with Cottage and Figures, 1629. Oil on panel, 48 × 70.5 cm. Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza 199 Pieter Molijn, Landscape with Open Gate, ca. 1630–1635. Oil on panel, 33.5 × 48 cm. Washington, National Gallery of Art 200 Salomon van Ruysdael, Landscape with Sandy Road, 1628. Oil on panel, 28.5 × 39.5 cm. Pasadena (CA), Norton Simon Museum 201 Adriaen Brouwer, The Bitter Draught, ca. 1636–1638. Oil on panel, 47.5 × 35.5 cm. Frankfurt, Städel Museum 202 Jan van Goyen, Cottage on a Heath, ca. 1630–1635. Oil on panel, 40 × 60.5 cm. London, National Gallery 203

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6.10 Salomon van Ruysdael, Road in the Dunes, 1631. Oil on panel, 56 × 86.5 cm. Budapest, Museum of Fine Arts 205 6.11 Jan van Goyen, Landscape with a Dilapidated Fence, ca. 1630–1635. Oil on panel, 36.5 × 54 cm. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum 206 7.1 Jacob van Ruisdael, Panorama of Amsterdam, Its Harbor, and the IJ, c. 1670. Oil on canvas, 41.5 × 40.7 cm. London, National Gallery, on loan from a private collection 210 7.2 Jacob van Ruisdael, Panoramic View of the Northern Part of Amsterdam and the IJ, c. 1665. Drawing with black chalk and gray wash, 86 × 152 mm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Public domain 211 7.3 Cornelis Anthonisz., Bird’s Eye View on Amsterdam, 1544. Etching, 100.7 × 109.3 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Public domain 212 7.4 Claes Jansz. Visscher, View on Amsterdam As Seen From the IJ, 1611. Etching and engraving, 62.8 × 171.7 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Public domain 212 7.5 Jacob van Ruisdael, View on the IJ on a Stormy Day, c. 1660. Oil on canvas, 107 × 125 cm. Worcester: Worcester Art Museum. Public domain 213 7.6 Jurriaan Pool, Inauguration of the new Town Hall, 1655. Silver, 7 × 7 cm. Amsterdam, Amsterdam Museum. Public domain 214 7.7 Gerrit Adriaensz Berckheyde, The Dam in Amsterdam, 1660. Oil on canvas, 70 × 110 cm. Antwerp: Royal Museum of Fine Arts. Public domain 215 7.8 Jacob van Ruisdael, Winter View of the Hekelveld, c. 1665. Oil on canvas, 49.5 × 65 cm. Scotland, Private Collection. Public domain 215 7.9 Jacob van Ruisdael, The Dam Square, c. 1670. Oil on canvas, 52 × 65 cm. Berlin, Gemäldegalerie. Public domain 216 7.10 Marble floor of the Citizens’ Hall in the Former Town Hall of Amsterdam, now Royal Palace. Photo: Benning & Gladkova. Image © Stichting Koninklijk Paleis Amsterdam 220 7.11 Elias Noski, Engraved Stone with Huygens’ Laudatory Poem, 1660. Black marble, 100 × 90 cm. Amsterdam, Amsterdam Museum. Public domain 224 7.12 Jacob van Ruisdael, Landscape with a Ruined Castle and a Village Church, 1665–72. Oil on canvas, 109 × 146 cm. London, National Gallery. Public domain 227 7.13 Gerrit Adriaensz. Berckheyde, View of the Golden Bend in the Herengracht, 1671–1672. Oil on panel, 42.5 × 57.5 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Public domain 229 7.14 Pieter Jansz. Saenredam, The Old Town Hall of Amsterdam, 1657. Oil on panel, 65.5 × 84.5 cm. Amsterdam, Amsterdam Museum. Public domain 230 7.15 Jacob van Ruisdael, Interior of the Oude Kerk, c. 1670. Drawing, 482 × 415 mm. Paris, École des Beaux-Arts. Public domain 231

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Jacob Isaaksz van Ruisdael, The Jewish Cemetery, 1654 or 1655. Oil on canvas, 142.2 × 189.2 cm. Gift of Julius H. Haass in memory of his brother Dr. Ernest W. Haass, 26.1. Detroit Institute of Arts 234 8.2 Jacob van Ruisdael, Jewish Cemetery, 1654/1655. Oil on canvas, 84 × 95 cm., Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden 235 8.3 Jacob Isaaksz van Ruisdael, The Jewish Cemetery, detail, 1654 or 1655. Oil on canvas, 142.2 × 189.2 cm. Gift of Julius H. Haass in memory of his brother Dr. Ernest W. Haass, 26.1. Detroit Institute of Arts 237 8.4 Jacob van Ruisdael, Two Watermills and an Open Sluice, 1653. Oil on canvas, 66 × 84.5 cm. J. Paul Getty Museum 239 8.5 Jacob van Ruisdael and Thomas de Keyser, The Arrival of Cornelis de Graeff and Members of his Family at Soestdijk, his Country Estate, c. 1660. Oil on canvas, 118.4 cm × 170.5 cm. Dublin, Courtesy of National Gallery of Ireland 242 8.6 Jacob van Ruisdael, The Portuguese-Jewish Cemetery at Ouderkerk on the Amstel, c. 1654. Black chalk and pen with gray wash, 19.2 × 28.3 cm. Haarlem, Teylers Museum 249 8.7 Jacob van Ruisdael, The Portuguese-Jewish Cemetery at Ouderkerk on the Amstel, c. 1654. Black chalk and pen with gray wash, 19 × 28.3 cm. Haarlem, Teylers Museum 250 10.1 Plan of the gardens of Versailles revealing the face of Mickey Mouse. Front cover of Lafcadio Mortimer, Miqué ou les oreilles de Dieu, Montorgueil, Collection Pansémiotique, 1993. Photo: BNF/Gallica 295 10.2 Sphinx, Sacro Bosco, Bomarzo, ca. 1560–1584. Photo: Wikimedia Commons 296 10.3 Pirro Ligorio, The Education of Hippolytus, in Life of Hippolytus / Virbius, fol. 6r, ca. 1568. Pen and brown ink, with brown and gray wash, over black chalk, on paper, 324 × 222 mm. New York, The Morgan Library and Museum, inv. 2006.22. Photo: The Morgan Library and Museum 303 10.4 Attributed to Matthias Greuter, The Garden of the Jesuit Noviciate of Sant’Andrea al Quirinale, Rome, in Louis Richeome, Peinture spirituelle […], (Lyon, Pierre Rigaud: 1611). Photo: Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon 306 10.5 Sébastien Leclerc, Plan of the Labyrinth of Versailles, from Charles Perrault and Isaac de Benserade, Labyrinthe de Versailles (Paris, L’Imprimerie Royale: 1677). Etching, 21.5 × 14.7 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. 31.77.30. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art 309 10.6 Jacopo Zucchi, The Fox and the Crow (Aesop’s Fables), detail from the Studiolo of Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici in the gardens of the Villa Medici, Rome, 1577, fresco. Photo: Wikimedia Commons 311

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10.7 Plan of the Gardens of the Villa Manin at Passariano, ca. 1720–1730 (photomontage after Palazzo degli Ecc[ellentissi]mi N.N. H.H. Conti Manini, nel Locco di Perseriano nel Friuli, Eighteenth century, Udine, Biblioteca Civica, Fondo Manin). Photo: After Francesca Venuto, La villa di Passariano. Dimora e destino dei nobili Manin, Passariano di Codroipo (Udine), Associazione fra le pro loco del Friuli Venezia Giulia, 2001 313 10.8 Deleitando ensena [it delights and instructs], emblem in Diego de Saavedra Fajardo, Idea principis christiano, politici, centum symbolis expressa (Bruxelles, Ioannes Mommartius, suis et Francisci Vivieni sumptibus: 1649) 31, symbola politica, symbolum V. Photo: Wikimedia Commons 314 10.9 Mario Bettini, Apiariorum philosophiae mathematicae […] (Venetiis, Baleonius: 1655). Augsburg, Staats- und Stadtbibliothek, call number 2 Math 12. Photo: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek 316 10.10 Franc-Antoine de la Porte, Jardinage de façon nouvelle dédié à très haute et très illustre princesse Marie de Médicis (Paris: 1616). Engraving, 41 × 35 cm, BNF, Paris. Photo: BNF 317 10.11 Stefano della Bella, The Young Duke Cosimo III drawing in the Garden of Villa Medici, 1656. Etching from Six grandes vues, dont quatre de Rome et deux de la Campagne romaine, 31.1 × 27.7 cm, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. 2012.136.535.1. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art 319 11.1 Anonymous, Fête Champêtre at the Court of Philip the Good of Burgundy (Dijon: Musée des Beaux Arts inv. No. 3981) © Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon 328 11.2 Simon Bening (workshop), March, The Golf Book, c. 1530. Illuminated manuscript, 130 × 95 mm (London: British Library ms. Add. 24098, fol. 20 v) © The British Library Board 338 11.3 Goswijn van der Weyden, attr. Fifteen Mysteries and the Virgin of the Rosary, c. 1520. Oil on panel, detail: 25.1 × 53.3 cm (New York City: The Metropolitan Museum of Art No. 1987.290.3a-p) © The Metropolitan Museum of Art 342 11.4 Jean Hennecart, Foliant de Yonnal presents his book to Rudolf of Denmark, in Guillebert or Hugh de Lannoy (attr.), Instruction d’un jeune prince, c. 1470, manuscript illumination (Paris: Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal ms. 5104, fol. 14 r) © BnF 345 11.5 Master of the Life of Joseph, Portraits of Philip the Fair and Joanna of Castile from the Zierikzee Triptych, c. 1505–1506. Oil on panel, @ 125 × 47 cm each (Brussels: Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium inv. 2405, 2406) © Royal Museum of Fine Arts Belgium [RMFAB], Brussels/photo: RMFAB 347 11.6 Anonymous Parisian illuminator, frontispiece for Guillaume de Nangis, Chronique Abrégée, c. 1470, manuscript illumination (Bibliothèque Nationale de France ms. Fr. 2598, fol. 1 r). © BnF 350

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11.7 Remy de Puys, Liedric and Ganymede/Joshua: La Triumphante et solennelle entrée faicte sur le nouvel et joyeux advènement de très hault, très puissant et très excellent prince Monsieur Charles, prince des Hespaignes […] en la ville de Bruges, l’an 1515, le XVIIIe jour d’avril après Pasques […] (Paris, Gilles de Gourmont: c. 1515), fol. 8r. © Source gallica.bnf.fr / BnF 356 11.8 Remy de Puys, Emperor Charles V as Orpheus: La Triumphante et solennelle entrée faicte sur le nouvel et joyeux advènement de très hault, très puissant et très excellent prince Monsieur Charles, prince des Hespaignes […] en la ville de Bruges, l’an 1515, le XVIIIe jour d’avril après Pasques […] (Paris, Gilles de Gourmont: c. 1515), fol. 25r. © Source gallica.bnf.fr / BnF 358 12.1 Giovanni Battista Falda, View of the Papal Garden on the Quirinal Hill. Etching, 23.5 × 41.27 cm. From Li Giardini di Roma (Rome, Giovanni Giacomo De Rossi: ca. 1676–1683). Collection of Vincent J. Buonanno (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by Digital Production Services, Brown University Library, Providence, RI) 368 12.2 Giovanni Battista Falda, Plan of the Papal Garden on the Quirinal Hill. Etching, 26.04 × 41.27 cm. From Li Giardini di Roma, (Rome, Giovanni Giacomo De Rossi: ca. 1676–1683). Collection of Vincent J. Buonanno (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by Digital Production Services, Brown University Library, Providence, RI) 368 12.3 Giovanni Battista Falda, Nuova pianta et alzata della città di Roma con tutte le strade piazze et edificii (Rome, Giovanni Giacomo De Rossi: 1676). Etching and engraving, 155 × 157 cm. Collection of Vincent J. Buonanno (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by Digital Production Services, Brown University Library, Providence, RI) 369 12.4 Giovanni Battista Falda, Nuova pianta et alzata della città di Roma con tutte le strade piazze et edificii (Rome, Giovanni Giacomo De Rossi: 1676). Etching and engraving, 155 × 157 cm. Detail of Cardinal Nerli’s Garden. Collection of Vincent J. Buonanno (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by Digital Production Services, Brown University Library, Providence, RI) 370 12.5 Jacob Ferdinand Voet, Cardinal Francesco Nerli (1636–1708), 1673. Oil on canvas, 130 × 92.5 cm. Dedication on the letter “A […] E.mo et R.mo Sig. Cardinale Nerli/ Roma”. Public domain. Image © Wikimedia Commons 371 12.6 Giovanni Battista Falda, Cardinal Nerli’s villa, 1677. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (890145). Public Domain. Image © Getty Research Institute 374 12.7 Map of Rome. From Rodolfo Amedeo Lanciani, Forma Urbis Romae (Rome, 1901), plate 23. Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Rome, Dg 155-4930/4 gr raro. Detail of the Esquiline region. Public domain. Image © Bibliotheca Hertziana 377

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12.8 Francesco Aquila, Clio, 1704. Etching. From Raccolta di statue antiche e moderne (Rome, Domenico De Rossi: 1704), plate cxii. Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Rome, Do 105–3040/a gr raro. Public domain. Image © Bibliotheca Hertziana 379 12.9 Pirro Ligorio, Tower of Maecenas. Woodcut. From Effigies antiquae Romae ex vestigiis aedificiorum ruinis testimonio veterum auctorum fide: numismatum monumentis, aeneis, plumbaeis, saxeis, tiglinisque (Rome, Apud Caroli Losi: 1773 [orig. Michele and Francesco Tramezzino, 1561]), plate 2. Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, G6714 .R 7 L53 1773 FOLIO. Public domain. Image © Emory University Digital Library Publications Program 380 12.10 Giovanni Battista Falda, Cardinal Nerli’s villa, 1677. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (890145). Detail from the lower right side with author and date. Public Domain. Image © Getty Research Institute 381 12.11 Giovanni Battista Falda, Cardinal Nerli’s villa, 1677. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (890145). Detail of the cardinal walking his garden paths. Public Domain. Image © Getty Research Institute 383 12.12 Giacomo Cantelli, Il Regno di Navarra, 1690. 58 × 44 cm. From G.G. De Rossi (ed.), Mercurio Geografico overo Guida Geografica in tutte le parti del Mondo (Rome, Giovanni Giacomo De Rossi: 1690). The David Rumsey Collection, www.davidrumsey.com. Public Domain. Image © David Rumsey Map Collection 388 12.13 Giacomo Cantelli, Il Regno di Navarra, 1690. 58 × 44 cm. From G.G. De Rossi (ed.), Mercurio Geografico overo Guida Geografica in tutte le parti del Mondo (Rome, Giovanni Giacomo De Rossi: 1690). The David Rumsey Collection, www.davidrumsey.com. Detail of the dedicatory cartouche. Public Domain. Image © David Rumsey Map Collection 389 13.1 Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with Saint John on Patmos, painted 1640. Oil on canvas, 100.3 × 136.4 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago. Creative Commons Zero 392 13.2 Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with Saint Matthew, painted 1640. Oil on canvas, 99 × 135 cm. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie. Image © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie 393 13.3 Jean Lemaire, Artists Sketching among Antique Ruins, painted ca. 1630. Oil on canvas, 97.8 × 73 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Image © Victoria and Albert Museum, London 399 13.4 Sebastiano Serlio (engraver and designer). Woodcut illustration, ca. 1545. Frontispiece of the Italian Libro primo d’architettura; Il secondo libro d’architettura di perspectiva (Venice, Sessa: 1560), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, public domain 400

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13.5 Sebastiano Serlio (engraver and designer), Cityscape. Woodcut illustration, ca. 1545. Libro primo d’architettura[;] Il secondo libro d’architettura di perspectiva (Venice, Sessa: 1560), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, public domain 403 13.6 Nicolas Poussin, Plague of Ashdod, painted 1628–1630. Oil on canvas, 148 × 198 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Mathieu Rabeau 404 13.7 Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion, painted in 1648. Oil on canvas, 116.5 × 178.5 cm. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Courtesy National Museums Liverpool 405 13.8 Nicolas Poussin, The Triumph of David, painted 1630–1639. Oil on canvas, 118.4 × 148.3 cm. Dulwich Picture Gallery, London. Image © Trustees of Dulwich Picture Gallery 410 13.9 Nicolas Poussin, Rest on the Flight into Egypt, painted 1655. Oil on canvas, 105 × 145 cm, Hermitage, St. Petersburg. Image © Hermitage Museum/ Bridgeman Art 412 13.10 Nicolas Poussin, Massacre of the Innocents, painted ca. 1625–1629. Oil on canvas, 118 × 179 cm. Musée Condé, Chantilly. Photo © Josse / Bridgeman Images 413 13.11 Nicolas Poussin, Et in Arcadia ego, painted c. 1637–1638. Oil on canvas, 87 × 120 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Image © Musée du Louvre / RMN / Angèle Dequier 415 14.1 Reclining female figure, Sacro Bosco, Bomarzo. Photo: Luke Morgan 423 14.2 Giambologna, Fata Morgana, private collection. Photo: Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain 425 14.3 Giambologna, Appennino, 1579. Villa Medici (now Demidoff), Pratolino. Photo: Luke Morgan 428 14.4 Salomon de Caus, Problem 23, from Book I, Les Raisons des forces mouvantes (Paris, Charles Sevetre: 1624). Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington, D.C. 431 14.5 Frontispiece: Robert Greene, The Honorable Historie of Frier Bacon, and Frier Bongay (London, Elizabeth Allde: 1630). Photo: Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain 437 14.6 Giovanni Guerra, Dining Grotto, Pratolino, Albertina 37214, Vienna 443 14.7 Giovanni Fontana, “The Artificial Resurrection of the Dead”. From Giovanni Fontana, Bellicorum instrumentorum liber, Cod. Icon. 242, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, 1420–1440 448 16.1 Albrecht Dürer, Christ in Limbo. Woodcut, 44.1 × 30.3 cm, part of the Great Passion, 1510 481 16.2 Robert Clarke, Christiad (1670). Engraved title page 487 17.1 Herri met de Bles, Landscape with penitent saint Jerome. Oil on wood, 75.7 × 105.8 cm. Namur, Musée des arts anciens du namurois. Detail, right

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Illustrations part with penitent Jerome in prayer. Image © Musée des arts anciens du namurois 508 Herri met de Bles, Landscape with penitent saint Jerome. Oil on wood, 75.7 × 105.8 cm. Namur, Musée des arts anciens du namurois. Image © Musée des arts anciens du namurois 518 Herri met de Bles, Landscape with the preaching of John the Baptist. Oil on wood, 86 × 120.5 cm. Bruxelles, Musées royaux des beaux-arts. Image © Musées royaux des beaux-arts 519 Herri met de Bles, Landscape with penitent saint Jerome. Oil on wood, 75.7 × 105.8 cm. Namur, Musée des arts anciens du namurois. Detail, left part with spring and animals. Image © Musée des arts anciens du namurois 522 Herri met de Bles, Landscape with penitent saint Jerome. Oil on wood, 75.7 × 105.8 cm. Namur, Musée des arts anciens du namurois. Detail, upper right part with celestial radiance. Image © Musée des arts anciens du namurois 523 Herri met de Bles, Landscape with penitent saint Jerome. Oil on wood, 75.7 × 105.8 cm. Namur, Musée des arts anciens du namurois. Detail, blooming plants at the saint’s right. Image © Musée des arts anciens du namurois 526 Herri met de Bles, Landscape with penitent saint Jerome. Oil on wood, 75.7 × 105.8 cm. Namur, Musée des arts anciens du namurois. Detail, grotto with saint Jerome and the owl. Image © Musée des arts anciens du namurois 528 Herri met de Bles and Lambert van Noort, Landscape with penitent saint Jerome. Oil on wood, 116.7 × 81.6 cm. Namur, Musée des arts anciens du namurois. Image © Musée des arts anciens du namurois 531 Herri met de Bles and Lambert van Noort, Landscape with penitent saint Jerome. Oil on wood, 116.7 × 81.6 cm. Namur, Musée des arts anciens du namurois. Detail, Saint Jerome’s hand and stone of penitence with the monogram “LVN”. Image © Musée des arts anciens du namurois 532 Herri met de Bles, Landscape with the preaching of John the Baptist. Oil on wood, 86 × 120.5 cm. Bruxelles, Musées royaux des beaux-arts. Detail central part. Image © Musées royaux des beaux-arts 534 Herri met de Bles, Landscape with the preaching of John the Baptist. Oil on wood, 86 × 120.5 cm., Bruxelles, Musées royaux des beaux-arts. Detail blind man and his guide. Image © Musées royaux des beaux-arts 535 Herri met de Bles, Landscape with the preaching of John the Baptist. Oil on wood, 86 × 120.5 cm., Bruxelles, Musées royaux des beaux-arts. Detail owl attacked by birds. Image © Musées royaux des beaux-arts 537 Hans Vredeman de Vries, Scenographiae, plate 13 (Hollstein 43): Left, trees with two deer; right, palace courtyard with fountain, 1560. Engraving, 20.5 × 25.8 cm.

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Image at https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search?q=Scenographiae&v=&s=&ii =3&p=1. Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 560 Hans Vredeman de Vries, Theatrum Vitae Humanae, “Ruyne”, 1577. Engraving, 21.0 × 27.4 cm. Image at https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search/objects?q =Theatrum+vitae+humanae&p=1&ps=12&st=Objects&ii=4#/RP-P-1939-329,4. Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 562 Hans Vredeman de Vries, Scenographiae, plate 18 (Hollstein 48): Interior of a hall, cross-vault decorated with grotesques, 1560. Engraving, 20.8 × 25.7 cm. Image at https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search?q=Scenographiae&v=&s=&ii =3&p=1. Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 563 Hans Vredeman de Vries, Scenographiae, plate 16 (Hollstein 46): Left, a loggia, the vault supported by satyr terms; right, view of a garden in front of a palace, 1560. Engraving, 20.8 × 25.6 cm. Image at https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/ search?q=Scenographiae&v=&s=&ii=3&p=1. Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 565 Hans Vredeman de Vries, Scenographiae, plate 7 (Hollstein 37): Interior giving a view into a second room with chimney (centre) and a courtyard (right); with decorated chimney on the left, supported by male terms, 1560. Engraving, 21 × 26 cm. Image at https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search?q=Scenographiae &v=&s=&ii=3&p=1. Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 566 Hans Vredeman de Vries, Caryatidum, plate 7 (Hollstein 230): Six female terms, the left one encased in strapwork, the two on the right with spiraled legs, 1565? Engraving, 16.1 × 23.7 cm. Image at https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/ search#!?q=Caryatidum. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 567 Hans Vredeman de Vries, Scenographiae, plate 2 (Hollstein 32): Interior of a church, in the far background a statue on a pedestal, the pedestals of the columns decorated with moresques, 1560. Engraving, 21 × 25.6 cm. Image at https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search?q=Scenographiae&v=&s=&ii=3&p=1. Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 568 Hans Vredeman de Vries, Scenographiae, plate 4 (Hollstein 34): View into a hall with columns of the Tuscan order placed on pedestals, 1560. Engraving, 21.1 × 25.5 cm. Image at https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search?q=Scenographi ae&v=&s=&ii=3&p=1. Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 570

Notes on the Editors Karl Enenkel is Professor of Medieval Latin and Neo-Latin at the University of Münster (Germany). Previously he was Professor of Neo-Latin at Leiden University (Netherlands). He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has published widely on international Humanism, early modern culture, paratexts, literary genres 1300–1600, Neo-Latin emblems, word and image relationships, and the history of scholarship and science. Among his major book publications are Francesco Petrarca: De vita solitaria, Buch 1. (1991); Die Erfindung des Menschen. Die Autobiographik des frühneuzeitlichen Humanismus von Petrarca bis Lipsius (2008); Die Stiftung von Autorschaft in der neulateinischen Literatur (ca. 1350–ca. 1650). Zur autorisierenden und wissensvermittelnden Funktion von Widmungen, Vorworttexten, Autorporträts und Dedikationsbildern (2015); The Invention of the Emblem Book and the Transmission of Knowledge, ca. 1510–1610 (2019), and Ambitious Antiquities, Famous Forebears. Constructions of a Glorious Past in the Early Modern Netherlands and Europe (with Koen Ottenheym, 2019). He has (co)edited and co-authored some 35 volumes on a variety of topics; key topics are addressed in Modelling the Individual. Biography and Portrait in the Renaissance (1998), Recreating Ancient History (2001), Mundus Emblematicus. Studies in Neo-Latin Emblem Books (2003), Cognition and the Book (2004), Petrarch and his Readers (2006), Early Modern Zoology (2007), Meditatio – Refashioning the Self. Theory and Practice in Late Medieval and Early Modern Intellectual Culture (2011), Portuguese Humanism (2011), The Authority of the Word (2011), Discourses of Power. Ideology and Politics in Neo-Latin Literature (2012), The Reception of Erasmus (2013), Transformation of the Classics (2013), Neo-Latin Commentaries and the Management of Knowledge (2013), Zoology in Early Modern Culture (2014), Iohannes de Certaldo. Beiträge zu Boccaccios lateinischen Werken und ihrer Wirkung (2015), Discourses of Anger in the Early Modern Period (2015), Jesuit Image Theory (2016), Emblems and the Natural World (2017), The Figure of the Nymph in Early Modern Culture (2018), Solitudo. Spaces, Places, and Times of Solitude in Late Medieval and Early Modern Cultures (2018), The Quest for an Appropriate Past in Literature, Art and Architecture (2018), Artes Apodemicae and Early Modern Travel Culture, 1550–1700, and Reinventing Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Pictorial and Literary Transformation in Various Media, 1500– 1800. He has founded the international series Intersections. Studies in Early Modern Culture (Brill); Proteus. Studies in Early Modern Identity Formation;

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Speculum Sanitatis: Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Medical Culture (500–1800) (both Brepols), and Scientia universalis. Studien und Texteditionen zur Wissensgeschichte der Vormoderne (LIT-Münster). He is currently preparing a critical edition of and a commentary on Erasmus’s Apophthegmata, books V–VIII. Walter Melion is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Art History at Emory University in Atlanta, where he has taught since 2004 and currently directs the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. He chaired the Art History Department in 2011–2014 and 2015–2017. He was previously Professor and Chair of Art History at The Johns Hopkins University. He has published extensively on Dutch and Flemish art and art theory of the 16th and 17th centuries, on Jesuit image-theory, on the relation between theology and aesthetics in the early modern period, and on the artist Hendrick Goltzius. In addition to a four-part monograph on Jerónimo Nadal’s Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia (2003, 2005, 2007, 2014), and exhibition catalogues on scriptural illustration and on religious allegory in Dutch and Flemish prints of the 16th and 17th centuries (2009 & 2019), his books include Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel van Mander’s ‘Schilder-Boeck’ (1991) and The Meditative Art: Studies in the Northern Devotional Print, 1550– 1625 (2009). He is co-editor of Image and Imagination of the Religious Self in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (2008), Early Modern Eyes (2010), Meditatio – Refashioning the Self: Theory and Practice in Late Medieval and Early Modern Intellectual Culture (2010), The Authority of the Word: Reflecting on Image and Text in Northern Europe, 1400–1700 (2011), Ut pictura meditatio: The Meditative Image in Northern Art, 1500–1700 (2012), Imago Exegetica: Visual Images as Exegetical Instruments, 1400–1700 (2014), The Anthropomorphic Lens: Anthropomorphism, Microcosmism, and Analogy in Early Modern Thought and Visual Arts (2014), Image and Incarnation (2015), Personification: Embodying Meaning and Emotion (2016), Jesuit Image Theory (2016), Ut pictura amor: The Reflexive Imagery of Love in Artistic Theory and Practice, 1400–1700 (2018), Quid est sacramentum? Visual Representation of Sacred Mysteries in Early Modern Europe, 1400–1700 (2019), and Quid est secretum? Visual Representation of Secrets and Mysteries in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700 (2020). His articles number more than seventy. He was elected Foreign Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010. Between 2014 and 2015, he was Chaire Francqui at the Université Catholique de Louvain. Melion has been the recipient of the 2016 Distinguished Scholar Award of the American Catholic Historical Association, and the 2019 Baker Award of the Michael C. Carlos Museum, and

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has been Scholar in Residence at The Newberry Library since 2017. He is series editor of Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History. Two books in progress are approaching completion: Imago veridica: The Form, Function, and Argument of Joannes David, S.J.’s Four Latin Emblem Books and Cubiculum cordis: Printed Images as Meditative Schemata in Customized Dutch and Flemish Manuscript Prayerbooks, 1550–1650. An English-language edition of Karel van Mander’s Grondt der edel vry Schilder-const, with commentary, is forthcoming from Getty Publications in 2021. Melion recently completed his term as President of the Sixteenth Century Society.

Notes on the Contributors Boudewijn Bakker is retired head curator of the Stadsarchief Amsterdam. In 1969 he wrote his doctoral thesis on Cock’s Series of Roman Ruins. Since then his main field of research has been the theory and practice of Netherlandish landscape and townscape painting. His publications include Nederland naar ’t leven. Landschapsprenten uit de Gouden Eeuw, exh. cat. Museum Het Rembrandthuis (with Huigen Leeflang, 1993); Landscapes of Rembrandt: His Favorite Walks, exh. cat. Stadsarchief Amsterdam and Fondation Custodia (with Jan Peeters and Erik Schmitz, 1998); and Landscape and Religion from Van Eyck to Rembrandt (2012). He is currently preparing a publication on Jan de Bisschop, prae-classicist aesthetics and Dutch landscape painting. William M. Barton studied Latin and Greek in Britain and Canada before gaining his PhD in Classics and early modern Latin from King’s College, London in 2015. His research has focused on the representation of the natural environment in early modern literature. In his current work, this interest extends into the field of natural philosophy and the role of Latin literature in the development of the ‘new science’. His research into the Latin of the New World, especially that of French Canada, concentrates on the reception of Classical literature and attitudes towards the natural environment in early writing about this region. Stijn Bussels is Professor at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society and Head of the Department of Art History. He has published widely on agency in the visual arts and on concepts such as the sublime, theatricality, vividness, and magnificence. He was Principal Investigator of the ERC starting grant “Elevated Minds. The Sublime in the Public Arts in Seventeenth-Century Paris and Amsterdam”. He has edited special issues of Art History (2010), and the Journal of the Historians of Netherlandish Art (2013). His two monographs are The Antwerp Entry of Prince Philip in 1549: Rhetoric, Performance and Power (2012) and The Animated Image: Roman Theory on Naturalism, Vividness and Divine Power (2012). Reindert Falkenburg is currently a Visiting Professor of Early Modern Art and Culture at NYU Abu Dhabi. His research interests include Dutch 17th-century landscape painting,

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late-medieval carved altarpieces, and early modern hermeneutics of ‘speculation’. His recent book-size publications are Especulationes sobre el paisaje: del Bosco a Bruegel (2019), Bruegel (co-authored with Michel Weemans, 2018), and The Land of Unlikeness – Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (2011). Margaret Goehring is an Associate Professor of Art History at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, NM. She is a specialist on late medieval and renaissance manuscript illumination and painting in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands. She is the author of Space, Place & Ornament: The Functions of Landscape in Medieval Manuscript Illumination (2014) as well as co-editor with Kate Dimitrova of Dressing the Part: Textiles as Propaganda in the Middle Ages (2015). Andrew Hui is Associate Professor of Humanities at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. He is author of The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature (2016) and A Theory of the Aphorism from Confucius to Twitter (2019). Sarah McPhee is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Art History at Emory University. Her research focuses on Baroque architecture and urbanism, sculpture, cartography, and print culture. Her books include Bernini’s Beloved. A Portrait of Costanza Piccolomini (2012); Bernini and the Bell Towers. Architecture and Politics at the Vatican (2002); Filippo Juvarra. Drawings from the Roman Period 1704–1714, Part II, (1999); and the exhibition catalogue Antichità, Teatro, Magnificenza: Renaissance & Baroque Images of Rome (2013). Luke Morgan is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Director of Art History in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Monash University. He is also an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His publications focus on the history of landscape design and experience in early modern Europe and include the books Nature as Model: Salomon de Caus and Early Seventeenth-Century Landscape Design (2007), and The Monster in the Garden: The Grotesque and the Gigantic in Renaissance Landscape Design (2016). Shelley Perlove is Professor Emerita at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, since retirement in 2012 from the University of Michigan-Dearborn. She specializes in the

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religious and political culture of Netherlandish and Italian early modern art, with emphasis on Rembrandt, Bernini, Heemskerck, and Guercino. Her work in progress includes studies of Rembrandt’s Lucretia, the Enochic myth of the Fallen Angels, and the religious works of the followers of Rembrandt. She is the author of Bernini and the Idealization of Death (1990); (with co-author Larry Silver) Rembrandt’s Faith. Church and Temple in the Dutch Golden Age (2009); and Pursuit of Faith. Etchings by Rembrandt in the Thrivent Financial Collection of Religious Art (2010). She co-edited (with George Keyes) Seventeenth-Century European Drawings in Midwestern Collections (2015), and (with Dagmar Eichberger) Visual Typology in Early Modern Europe (2019). Kathleen P. Long is Professor of French in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University. She is the author of Another Reality: Metamorphosis and the Imagination in the Poetry of Ovid, Petrarch, and Ronsard, and Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe. She edited High Anxiety: Masculinity in Crisis in Early Modern France, Religious Differences in France, and Gender and Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Europe. She has written numerous articles on the work of Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné, on gender in early modern Europe, and on monsters. Currently she is preparing a translation into English of L’isle des hermaphrodites, a book on libertine literature in the wake of the Wars of Religion, and a book-length study on the relationship between early modern discourses of monstrosity and modern discourses of disability. She is the coeditor for a series on Monsters and Marvels: Alterity in the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds (Amsterdam University Press). Lukas Reddemann studied Latin, History and Classical Cultures at the Universities of Münster and Toulouse. He received his M.A. in 2017 and his M.Ed. in 2018 and has since been research associate with the Seminary for Latin Philology of the Middle Ages and the Modern Age at the University of Münster. His research focuses on Latin literature in the 16th and 17th centuries. In his PhD project, supervised by Karl Enenkel, he investigates Early Modern Latin descriptions of states in the Dutch Republic, the so-called ‘Republics’. Denis Ribouillault is Associate Professor of Early Modern Art and Architecture at the Université de Montréal with a special interest in cultural landscape and gardens. He has held faculty posts at the University Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and the Courtauld Institute of Art. He has published widely on early modern villa

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culture, representations of the landscape, including Renaissance cartography, gardens, and the links between art and science. He is the author of Sacred Landscape. Landscape as Exegesis in Early Modern Europe (2011, with Michel Weemans); De la peinture au jardin (2016, with Hervé Brunon); and Rome en ses jardins. Paysage et pouvoir au XVIe siècle (2013). Paul J. Smith is Emeritus Professor of French literature at Leiden University. His has published widely on 16th-, 17th-, and 20th-century French literature, its reception in the Netherlands, French and Dutch fable and emblem books, literary rhetoric, intermediality, and early modern zoology. His main book publications include Voyage et écriture. Etude sur le Quart Livre de Rabelais (1987); Het schouwtoneel der dieren. Embleemfabels in de Nederlanden (1567–ca. 1670) (2006); Dispositio. Problematic Ordering in French Renaissance Literature (2007); and Réécrire la Renaissance, de Marcel Proust à Michel Tournier. Exercices de lecture rapprochée (2009). He edited Éditer et traduire Rabelais à travers les âges (1997), and coedited, among other works, Le paradoxe en linguistique et en littérature (1996); Montaigne and the Low Countries (1580–1700) (2007); Early Modern Zoology. The Construction of Animals in Science, Literature and the Visual Arts (2007); Emblems and the Natural World (2017); Natural History in Early Modern France (2019); Langues hybrides. Expérimentations linguistiques et littéraires (2019); and Early Modern Catalogues of Imaginary Books (2020). Troy Tower is associate lecturer of Italian at the University of Massachusetts, Boston and an editor, translator, and researcher with a specialization in early modern Italian poetry and collaborative experience across the humanities, arts, and social sciences. With Jane Tylus he co-edited the first complete critical edition of Gaspara Stampa’s verse (2010), and with Ramie Targoff he co-edited Vittoria Colonna’s earliest poetry to accompany its first English translation (2021). Michel Weemans teaches at the Fine Art School of Bourges. He is a member of the CEHTA (Centre d’histoire et théorie des arts) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His scholarship has focused on landscape, on sixteenth-century Netherlandish painting, and on the hermeneutics of the Renaissance image. He co-curated the exhibitions Une image peut en cacher une autre (Paris, Grand Palais, 2009) and Fables du paysage flamand. Bosch, Bles, Brueghel, Bril (Lille, Palais des Beaux-Arts, 2012–2013). His monographs include Le paysage extravagant (2012); Herri met de Bles. Les ruses du paysage

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au temps de Bruegel et d’Érasme (2013); and Bruegel (with Reindert Falkenburg, 2018.) He is co-editor of Reproductibilité et Irreproductibilités de l’oeuvre d’art (2001); Le paysage sacré. Le paysage comme exégèse dans l’Europe de la première modernité (Sacred Landscape. Landscape as Exegesis in Early Modern Europe, 2011); Imago Exegetica. Visual Images as Exegetical Instruments (2014); The Anthropomorphic Lens. Anthropomorphism, Analogy and Microcosmism in Early Modern Art and Literature (2015); and Voir double. Pièges et révélations du visible (2016).

Part 1 Introduction: The Hermeneutic and Exegetical Potential of Landscapes

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Chapter 1

Introduction: Landscape and the Visual Hermeneutics of Place, 1500–1700 Walter S. Melion The scholarly literature on landscape, defined as the spatially and/or temporally extended description of place, either in image and/or text, is vast. The hermeneutic functions of landscape in various genres and proto-genres of early modern painting have increasingly become a focus of scholarly attention.1 Whether a primary or secondary element in such pictures, landscape, more than merely inviting close viewing, calls for interpretation or, better, for the application of a method or principle of interpretation. Pieter Bruegel’s Seasons (1565), for example, as Bertram Kaschek has pointed out, are evocative of the imagery of Psalm 47; conversely, viewed through the exegetical frame of Augustine’s reading of this psalm, the Seasons operate as signifiers of divine beauty, goodness, and being, even while insisting, through their mutability and inconstancy, on the immutability and constancy of God.2 The descriptive effects that make these and other landscapes visually compelling are often complementary to motifs and structural devices – analogy, antithesis, chiasmus, and periphrasis, for example – that can be seen to operate in the parallel domains of text and image, both as visual tropes and rhetorical figures. When types of terrain, such 1 See, for instance, Adler W., Landscapes and Hunting Scenes, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard 18, 2 vols. (London – Oxford: 1986); Falkenburg R.L., Joachim Patinir: Landscape as an Image of the Pilgrimage of Life (Amsterdam – Philadelphia: 1988); McTighe S., Nicolas Poussin’s Landscape Allegories (Cambridge – New York: 1996); Büttner N., Die Erfindung der Landschaft: Kosmographie und Landschaftskunst im Zeitalter Bruegels (Göttingen: 2000); Rosenberg P. – Cristiansen K. (eds.), Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions, exh. cat., New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New Haven: 2008); Ribouillault D. – Weemans M. (eds.), Le paysage sacré: le paysage comme exégèse dans l’Europe de la première modernité (Florence: 2011); Bakker B., Landscape and Religion from Van Eyck to Rembrandt, trans. D. Webb (Farnham, SY – Burlington, VT: 2012); Unglaub J., Poussin’s Sacrament of Ordination: History, Faith, and the Sacred Landscape (New Haven: 2013); Kleinert C., Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) and his Landscapes: Ideas on Nature and Art (Turnhout: 2014); Kaschek B., Weltzeit und Endzeit: Die “Monatsbilder” von Pieter Bruegel d. Ä. (Paderborn – Munich: 2012); Weemans M., Herri met de Bles: les ruses du paysage au temps de Bruegel et d’Erasme (Paris: 2013); and Falkenburg R. – Weemans M., Pieter Bruegel (Paris: 2018). 2 Kaschek, Weltzeit und Endzeit 306–330.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004440401_002

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as mountains, meadows, woods, marshes, lakes, and streams, or the skies that arch over them, or the flora and fauna that populate them – trees, shrubs, flowers, animals, and people either resident or passing through – are analogized, contrasted, and/or made to interact, whether in a poem or a painting, a prose text or a printed image, how do the contingent and dynamic systems of relation that comprise these features, activate them in meaningful ways? Put simply, how do they mean, both with human figures and independent of them? What kinds of sustained interpretative engagement do they invite or, better, demand from the viewer? Between 1500 and 1700, the efflorescence of pictorial landscape went hand in hand with the literary and rhetorical exploration of landscape’s affective and signifying effects. Countless lyric poems and cycles visualize landscape as the place whither one goes in search of the poetic source; in heptameral poetry, it epitomizes the divine potency of the Creator; in epic poetry, it is the place through which one journeys or errantly wanders while striving to reach a goal and achieve a purpose; in sacred literature, it marks the stages of the soul’s journey toward God. The visual evocation of place also constitutes one of the chief topics of rhetorics and poetics. In landscape texts, the evocation of other sensory effects complementary to the visual – the sound of birdsong, for example, or the fragrance of flowers, or the sensation of the sun’s warmth – likewise invites an interpretative response. How did these textually produced images and effects function as interpretative affordances, and how did they jibe with the pictorial images and effects encompassed by landscape imagery? How was landscape construed as a visual hermeneutic in both text and image, and what were the discursive contexts that invited construals of this sort? The seventeen essays in this volume, first presented over a year ago at a three-day colloquium held at Emory University, and now edited by Karl Enenkel and myself, address these and other questions about how landscapes convey meaning, the cases they make and the manner of their making. To take an example discussed more fully in the opening essay of this volume, Hans Bol’s parabolic landscape series, Emblemata Evangelica (Evangelical Emblems) of 1585, engraved by Adriaen Collaert, consists of seasonal landscapes that embed various parables, such as the Workers in the Vineyard, the Plucking of the Ears of Corn, and the Unjust Husbandmen. Christ generally stands in the foreground, from where he promulgates these parables to sundry auditors, one per print, as if asking them to see how the stories unfold by stages within the panoramic landscapes behind him, at whose thresholds he and they are situated. The implication is that the parabolic episodes, together with their associated landscapes, originate with and from him, having been conjured up by his sermons. Set at various times of the year, the panoramas extend both laterally and into depth, subdivided into multiple topographical zones

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that recede gradually, the narrative sequence likewise moving from front to back. The beholder’s line of sight into the landscape and the story-line are thus precisely coterminous. The Emblemata, by depicting Christ as promulgator of these landscapes, affirms that he is the source of all we see, on earth and sea and in the sky, and that the process of looking at a landscape and of navigating its optical itineraries coincides with the process of parsing a parable. For Bol and Collaert, whose series was modeled on Pieter Bruegel’s landscape prints, the elaboration of place does more than provide the setting within which the parabolic events unfold: rather, the landscape activates and guides the process of interpretation. Landscape could function as an hermeneutic prompt in secular imagery as well. Hendrick Goltzius’s Portrait of Frederick de Vries of 1597 alludes to the interwoven themes of love and loss, diaspora and homeland, by inserting elegiac Ovidian allusions to the song of Orpheus, within a pastoral greenwood [Fig. 1.1].3 The setting – a tree-topped hill opening onto further wooded hills and mountains at left and seaside cliffs at right – recalls the distinctive landscape of Arcadia, as rendered by Virgil, who diverged from Theocritus in situating his poems not in Sicily but in the bosky hills and riverside groves of an imagined Peloponnese. Moreover, the anthropomorphic tree that shelters Frederick, its bark rippling with emergent faces, evokes the Thracian hilltop where Orpheus sat to sing about his twice-lost Eurydice, and by the beauty of his song caused myriad species of trees to come to life and gather round him. The allusion to the miraculous effect of Orpheus’s song stands for the enlivening effect of Goltzius’s art which, the print implicitly claims, has the power to bring Frederick’s portrait to life. Landscape, Virgilian and Ovidian, pastoral and metamorphic, elicits the elegiac theme of presence in absentia, and plays an instrumental role in spinning the web of suggestive reference that allows Goltzius to demonstrate his ability to confer on the print’s dedicatee, Frederick’s father Dierick, a living image of his absent son. No theoretical statement on the form and function of pictorial landscape is more comprehensive or insightful than chapter 8, “Van het landtschap” (On Landscape), of Karel van Mander’s didactic poem Den grondt der edel vrij schilder-const (Foundation of the Noble Art of Painting), Book I of his six-part Schilder-Boeck (Book on Picturing) of 1604. Here he explores various types of terrain, from lowland marshes to mountainous cliffs, and of weather, from bright, sunny spring days to the dark, stormy days of winter, that the landscape 3 On this print, see Melion W.S., “The Trope of Anthropomorphosis in Hendrick Goltzius Venus and Cupid (1590), Venus, Bacchus, and Ceres (1593), and Portrait of Frederick de Vries (1597)”, in Melion – Woodall J. – Zell M. (eds.), Ut pictura amor: The Reflexive Imagery of Love in Artistic Theory and Practice, 1500–1700, Intersections 48 (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2017) 158–228.

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FIGURE 1.1 Hendrick Goltzius, Portrait of Frederick de Vries, 1597. Engraving, 358 × 263 mm British Museum, London

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painter must be adept at describing; he also recounts the technical and material means, from pigments to brushstrokes, whereby the perceptual and affective effects appropriate to landscape can best be produced. The most conspicuous feature of this account is its emphasis on the way in which landschap mobilizes the viewer’s eyes, propelling them skyward, then toward the distant horizon, from there reversing course as the eyes scan from background to foreground; during the course of their virtual journey, they climb hills and steep mountains, plunge into gullies, then level off as they reach valleys and plains, before once again sinking into low-lying wetlands, or twisting and turning as they follow serpentine rivers and streams. The sights one sees when tracking along these vectors and following such itineraries are both natural and manmade; they include clifftop fortresses, forest hamlets, riverine towns, and seaside cities: Aye, see indeed how up above [nature] paints [the dawn], With what greater beauty of varied colours, Of so many mixtures: one might believe That molten gold thus glistens in the furnace, [….] See, on the other side, morning has already covered over The great vault of heaven with the fine azure of lake pigments [….] See the whole of the distant landscape wearing the form Of the air, as if flowing into the atmosphere; Stationary mountains appear like moving clouds; On either side of the vanishing point, like floor tiles On the plain, ditches, furrows, all that we see, Narrows as it recedes [….] Above all, it shall behoove us sharply to define Our foreground, in order to make everything else recede, And to place up front something large, As did Bruegel, and others of great name [….] As we weave together our [fore-, middle-, and back-] grounds, Letting the one issue from the other, In the manner that twisting serpents creep, [….]

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On rising, hilly, barren ground Let no beautiful bluish greens be obtained by coaxing, As appear in low-lying meadowed dales, Which Cynthian Apollo with his radiant arrows Even under the signs of the crab, lion, and maiden, Can do little or nothing to fade, [….] Rushing streams with swelling curves Shall be allowed to swerve through these marshlands, And water one shall ever let search for declivities; Therebeside one shall build (in order boldly to display one’s art) Cities reaching toward higher ground, With fortresses on clifftops, fallen into ruin: Now climbing a bit higher, let us attend To ample fields subdivided into bounded zones. [….] Ploughed farmlands, too, cut through with furrows, Or sometimes fields, their harvests reaped, Now grasslands and greenswards, just as they should be, With canals, hedges, or twisting roads: [….] And now, to drive away sadness, have we come To the shadowy realm of the Hamadryads, That is, to trees [and woods] […].4 4 Mander Karel van, Den grondt der edel vry schilder-const, in idem, Het Schilder-Boeck (Haarlem, Paschier van Wesbusch: 1604): [Fol. 34v] ‘Ay siet doch eens, hoe schildert men daer boven, Wat meerder schoonheyt, van verwen verscheyden, En soo veel mengsels: ay machmen gheloven, Dat ghesmolten Goudt soo blinckt in den Oven, […]. ‘Siet ter ander sijd’ heeft alree de Morghen stondt overcleedt met schoon asuerich laken […] [Fols. 34v–35r] ‘Siet al t’verre Landtschap ghedaente voeren Der Locht, en schier al in de Locht verflouwen, Staende Berghen schijnen wolcken die roeren, Weersijdich op’t steeck, als plaveyde vloeren,

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According to Van Mander, the painting and viewing of landscape activate the eyes, inviting them to roam and to dwell on varieties of things and colours (‘verscheydenheyt, soo van verw’ als wesen’), and thereby exercising a therapeutic effect on both painter and beholder, restoring their tired spirits:5 Youthful painters, having long sat hunched [over your work], Tangled up in art, constantly cramming, Ever desirous of learning more, until half blind, You’ve worn out your dulled senses, In’t veldt, sloten, voren, wat wy aenschouwen, Oock achterwaert al inloopen en nouwen, [….] [Fol. 35v] ‘Alvooren onsen voor-grondt sal betamen Altijts hardt te zijn, om d’ander doen vlieden, En oock voor aen yet groots te brenghen ramen, Als Brueghel, en sulcke van grooter namen, [….] [Fol. 36r] ‘Als wy onse gronden dus vast beknopen, En soo van d’een in d’ander laten strijcken, Ghelijck ofter swierende aders cropen, [….] [Fol. 36r–v] ‘Van verhevender heuvel-gronden schralich Laet u geen schoon blaeuverwich groen ontsmeecken, Ghelijck als van neder Beem-gronden dalich, Al waer Cynthius met zijn pijlen stralich Jae selfs onder het Kreefts, Leeuws, oft Maeghts teecken, Seer weynich oft gantsch niet en can verbleecken, [….] [Fol. 36v] ‘Vloedt-stroomen met hun uytloopende hoecken Salmen in dees meersschen oock laten swerven, Doende t’water altijt de leeghte soecken, Daer beneven bouwend’ (om Const vercloecken) De Steden, streckende naer hoogher erven, Met Sloten op Clippen, quaet om bederven: Nu wat hoogher climmende, laet ons wacker In percken deelen deen ghestreckten Acker. [….] ‘Oock gheploegd’ Ackers, met vooren doorsleghen, Oft somtijts velden met ghemaeyde vruchten, Nu Beemden en Ackers zijnde te deghen, [….] [Fol. 37r] ‘Nu zijn wy ghecomen, om drucx verstroyen, Tot t’schaduwich rijck der Hamadryaden, Dats tot de Boomen […]’. 5 Ibid., fol. 36r.

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Stop for now, you’ve been pulling the plough long enough; From labor allow yourselves duly to be unyoked, For even strong men crave rest, No bow may always be pulled taut. [….] And come, let’s open the gate early, Together shorten the hours, lighten the spirits. And go look at the beauty out there, Where the wild beaked music-makers pipe; There we shall see many sights, That serve us to fix landscape Onto linen canvas or hard oaken planks from the North, Come, you shall (I trust) thank yourselves for having journeyed.6 Van Mander’s argument is deliberately circular: he views nature as if it were a painted landscape, in order to teach the aspiring schilder to paint landscapes that appear entirely natural. Such landscapes will reproduce the experience, the optical sensations, attendant on viewing nature from multiple vantage points – near or far, receding or approaching, direct or meandering. The painter must also recognize that artifice is a natural phenomenon, and that nature, in her forms and colours, is capable of exceptional variation:

6 Ibid., fol. 34r–v: ‘Schilder-jeught, die langh hebt verhaemt gheseten, Verwert in de Conste met stadigh blocken, Dat ghy staersichtich schier stomp hebt versleten U sinnen, leer-lustigh om meer te weten, Houdt op, t’is voor ditmael ghenoech ghetrocken Den ploegh, van den arbeydt wilt u ontjocken In tijts, want rust hoeft oock den stercken Mannen, Den bogh’ en mach altijt niet zijn ghespannen. [….] ‘En comt, laet ons al vroech met t’Poort ontsluyten T’samen wat tijdt corten, om s’gheests verlichten, En gaen sien de schoonheyt, die daer is buyten, Daer ghebeckte wilde Musijcker fluyten, Daer sullen wy bespieden veel ghesichten, Die ons al dienen om Landtschap te stichten Op vlas-waedt, oft Noorweeghsch’ hard’ eycke plancken, Comt, ghy sult (hop’ ick) de reys u bedancken’.

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But in the joyful season of Spring, It behooves us to attend to the noble Adornments of jewel-like colors, and to be diligent In producing that emerald and sapphire green Pavement with its variegated squares, And coiling its way amidst them, the flourishes Of murmuring, crystal-clear streams, Flowing between green, grassy banks.7 Van Mander saw landscape and history painting as inextricably linked, and it should therefore come as no surprise to learn that he elaborates upon the manner and meaning, as opposed to form and function, of landscape not in chapter 8 but in chapter 5 of Den grondt, “Van het ordinanty ende inventy der historien” (On the Composition and Invention of Histories), in a lengthy ekphrastic excursus lasting fifteen stanzas. His source was one of the ekphrastic landscapes in Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia, more precisely, the prosa terza that immediately follows the Annotazioni all’ Egloga seconda.8 The “Third Prose Section” chiefly delineates the sacrifices and ceremonies performed in honor of the goddess Pales by her devotees, the shepherds and shepherdesses of Arcadia. As they enter the temple precinct, they see a landscape painting inset above the entry portal, the intricacies of which Sannazaro describes in great detail as if he were seeing it with them. Van Mander introduces his paraphrase of Sannazaro’s ekphrasis by emphasizing that he will be using it to view history painting through the lens of landscape painting, not merely appreciating the latter as a corollary adornment to an historical subject.9 In this instance, he aims to show that landscape is determinative for how history is seen and interpreted, or, better, how a single 7 Ibid., fol. 36v: ‘Maer in des vroylicken Lenten saysoene, Op d’edel ghesteentighe verwe ciersels Behoeftmen te letten, en vlijt te doene, Dat Esmaraldich oft Saphyrich groene Plaveysel te maken met zijn schakiersels, Oock midden daer door slingherende swiersels Der morrende Beeckskens Cristalijn-glasich, Vloeyende tusschen groene sponden grasich’. 8 See Sannazaro J., Arcadia, ed. G. Corniani (Milan: 1806) 27–30. On Van Mander’s familiarity with Sannazaro, see Miedema H. (ed. – trans.), Karel van Mander, Den grondt der edel vry schilder-const, 2 vols. (Utrecht: 1973) 2:483–484. 9 Van Mander applies the term historie to any pictorial subject mainly consisting of human figures who enact an episode from history or mythology.

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landscape may accommodate the intercalation of many histories, on the model of the Arcadian picture he is describing. His term for history used in this way, as an interpolation into landscape, is byvoechsel (addendum, supplement): Some seek, in curious ways, By means of various skilful addenda, To insert historical deeds, In such a manner that their significance could hardly be guessed, Even if one knew the story in advance, Whereof I here impart an example, As recounted by Jacopo, a poet originating From the city named after one of the Sirens [i.e., Naples].10 As will soon become evident, the motions of the eyes darting from one landscape feature to the next – the process of viewing, in other words, to be mapped out in chapter 8 – establish the modus operandi that situates the many mythological scenes comprised by the ekphrastic painting whose composition and component elements Van Mander now sets out to paraphrase. Within the picture, figure after figure is caught in the act of gazing, often stealthily, in a metaportrayal of the viewer’s act of beholding, which is likewise stealthy, in the sense of occurring without the knowledge or consent of the pictured figures. Van Mander starts by setting the pictorial scene: one sees hills and woods overgrown with trees (‘heuvels en bosschen, met boomen verwildert’), cows grazing here and there on green grasslands (‘weyden in de groene beemden veel kudden verspreyt’), herders milking cows, sheering sheep, and singing to the accompaniment of bagpipes (‘eenigh op sackpijpen sachmen daer spelen, ander schenen, wilden oock in hun singhen t’ghluydt nae bootsen’).11 Amidst this pastoral setting, somewhere between woodland and meadow (‘bosschen […] daer sachmen weyden’), one catches sight of group of nymphs; half hidden behind a large chestnut tree, they dangle an oaken wreath in front of a 10 11

Van Mander, Den grondt, fol. 19r: ‘Eenighe soecken, door soo vreemde paden, Met verscheyden byvoechselen behende, By te brenghen d’Historiale daden, Datmen qualijck den sin soude gheraden, Of men al schoon de gheschiedenis kende, Waer van ick hier een exempel voorwende, Welck verhaelt Jacobus, Poet verschenen Wt der Stadt, ghenaemt nae een der Syrenen’. Ibid., fol. 19r.

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goat, amusedly staring as it tries to gnaw at the leaves, oblivious to the blades of green grass growing at its feet.12 And while they peer at the goat peering at the wreath, unbeknownst to them a troop of goat-legged satyrs spies upon the nymphs from behind a mastic tree. What above all, in the eyes of many had A particularly pleasing, graceful character, Was the nude company of nymphs, Half hidden behind the trunk of a chestnut tree. [….] In the meantime, four satyrs, With horned heads and the legs of goats, Were come stealthily to peep around a mastic tree, And plot how to grab them from behind By their shoulders; one could at once see How the nymphs, catching wind Of their arrival and cunning intention, Made ready posthaste to flee into the wood, Without fear of brambles or thorn bushes.13 The nymphs take flight, swimming to the opposite shore of a nearby river, its banks filled with surging stormwater; and panting from their strenuous effort, having reached safety, they look back to mock their would-be captors (‘zijnd’ over t’water ten anderen boorde, blasend’ […] hen vervolghers met den werck’ ende woorde, bespottelijck verweten’). A bend in this same river, and yet 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., fol. 19r–v: ‘Waer het ghene dat in d’ooghen van velen Had eenen behaeghlijcken sonderlinghen Welstandighen aerdt, boven ander dinghen, Dat waren Nimphen, al naeckte compagnen, Half bedeckt achter eenen struyck Castagnen. [….] ‘Middeler tijdt daer vier Satiren t’samen, Met hoornen op het hooft, en Geyten beenen Door een Mastickboom struyck al soetgens quamen Van achter reyckend’, op dat syse namen By hen schouderen, daer sachmen met eenen, Die alree hun comst en archlistich meenen Hadden vernomen, snel nae t’bosch toe vluchten, Sonder voor struycken oft bramen te duchten’.

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another tree – this time a wild olive – leads to the next mythological episode: shaded by this tree, Apollo ostensibly watches over the flocks of Admetus; however, a pair of bulls, their horns locked in greeting, has distracted him, and looking intently at them, he fails to notice Mercury stealing away with the heifers entrusted to his care (‘niet siend’ hoe Mercurius den subtijlen, […] hem zijn koeyen heeft ontstolen terwijlen’). By the river stands a large rock in the shape of a man pointing, the vestige of the old shepherd Battus who was turned to stone for attempting to deceive Mercury and expose him as a thief (in een steen verandert, op sulcker ghijsen, als schijnende metten vingher te wijsen’).14 As trees and a river led from the episode of nymphs and satyrs to that of Apollo, Mercury, and Battus, so large stones like landmarks lead from that episode to the next. Disguised as a herder, Mercury sits on a boulder and plays a rustic flute, craftily trying to lull Argus to sleep before killing him.15 His ultimate aim is to free Jupiter’s paramour Io, who has been turned into a snowy white heifer: Further below, beside a great boulder, Sat Mercury, his cheeks distended, Playing a rustic flute, his manner sly, His eyes peering crosswise, A white heifer standing beside him; And filled full with cunning he seemed To consider, how best he might Deceive the many-eyed Argus.16

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The story of Apollo, Mercury, and Battus comes from Book 2 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses; see Metamorphoses, ed. G.P. Goold – trans. F.J. Miller (Cambridge, MA – London: 1916; reprint ed. 1984) 106–109. 15 The story of Mercury, Argus, and Io comes from Book 1 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses; see ibid., 42–49. 16 Van Mander, Den grondt, fol. 19v: ‘Aen eenen grooten steen, noch meer beneden, Sat Mercurius met wanghen verheven, Spelend’ op een Ruyspijp, met loose zeden En dweerse ooghen, aensiende ter steden Een witte Veerse, die hem stont beneven, En scheen dat hy gants met schalckheyt doordreven Bedachte, hoe best soude wesen moghen Den gheooghen Argus van hem bedroghen’.

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On the other side of the boulder a true shepherd, asleep amidst his flocks, lies beneath a high oak tree, his dog sniffing the shoulder bag he uses as a pillow (‘aen d’ander sijde was in slaep gheleghen, een herder midden zijner geyten onder eenen seer hooghen eycken-boom’). The presence of the moon (either Diana or Selene), gazing raptly down at him, identifies this shepherd as Endymion, whose love Jupiter eternalized through the gift of perpetual sleep (‘blijd’ ooghe de mane aensiende desen, vermoeddement Endymion te wesen’).17 Close by, beside an elm, yet another shepherd, this one as false in love as Mercury in intention, uses his sickle to carve the name Enone on the tree’s trunk. This is Paris, who abandoned Enone, his first love, when Venus, keen to win his favor, promised him Helen of Troy.18 Van Mander cleverly alludes to his broken vows when he says that Paris failed fully to inscribe Enone’s name, having been diverted from his task by the sudden arrival of Mercury with Venus, Juno, and Minerva in tow. The judgment of Paris then ensues: […] but having come under foot Of the three goddesses, and being quite unable To finish, he left it as is, In order to render judgment and thus forestall the quarrel Between these three, over who was loveliest and worthy of the prize, Who for this reason now stood naked before him.19

17 Van Mander probably knew the story of Diana / Selene and Endymion from Ovid’s Amores 1:13, 43, though his most likely source was either Gyraldo Giglio Gregorio, De deis gentium (Basel, Ioannis Oporinus: 1555), 346; or Cartari Vincenzo, Le imagini dei dei de gli antichi (Venice, Francesco Ziletti: 1580) 107. 18 Van Mander, Den grondt, fol. 20r. Van Mander would have known the story of Paris and Oenone from Ovid’s Heroïdes 5; see Heroides and Amores, trans. G. Gowerman (London – New York: 1914) 56–69. He would have known the story of the judgment of Paris from Homer’s Iliad 24:25–30 and Lucian’s Dialogues of the Gods 20, but chiefly from Heroïdes 17; see Heroides and Amores, 232–235. 19 Van Mander, Grondt, fol. 20r: […] maer wesend’ overronnen Van dry Goddinnen en haddet niet connen Gants eyndighen, maer alsoo laten blijven, Om gheven oordeel tot belet van kijven, Tusschen dees dry, wie schoonst den prijs waer weerdich, En daerom al naeckt voor hem stonden veerdich’.

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Van Mander refers to the judgment scene as the picture’s true scopus, its chief episode and thematic center of gravity: ‘This now, that is, the judgment of Paris, is the scopus of the history’.20 But as he soon makes patently clear, the true moral of the story has little to do with Paris proper, and instead redounds to the Grondt’s, indeed the Schilder-Boeck’s, larger theme of pictorial excellence as expressed in and through technical skill, above all the schilder’s ability to deceive the viewer’s eyes: But what was very ingenious, pleasing, and apposite, Worthy to be considered and seen, Was the great attention with which This judicious painter of fine sharp wit, Had made Juno and Minerva to stand, Each in her person exceptionally beautiful, Each so utterly perfect that he himself could not Have presumed to do better. Now, since he did not know how to make Venus More beautiful than the other two, as is her wont, He portrayed these two from the front, But taking subtle advantage of the situation, He, a wise artist (‘wijs Artiste’), painted Venus subtly, with her back turned, By this trick of artifice (‘list’) licensing pleasure, Giving one to think that were she to turn herself, She would bring the others’ beauty to distraction.21 20 Ibid.: ‘Dit is nu heet scopus der History, te weten, t’vonnis van Paris’. 21 Ibid.: ‘Maer t’gheen t’overlegghen en te aensiene Stondt, seer vernuftich, bevallijck, ydoone, Was de groote aendacht, fraey van ingiene, Van desen discreten Schilder, door wiene Daer stonden ghemaeckt, uytnemende schoone Iuno en Minerva elcke persoone, Soo gants volcomen, als dat hy van beter Te doen niet hadde moghten zijn vermeter. ‘Nu hy Venus dan schoonder, nae t’behooren, Als d’ander twee te maken niet en wiste, Heeft hy, daer dese twee stonden van vooren, Venus gheschildert subtijl in’t orbooren, Met den rugg’ om ghewent, als wijs Artiste, Ontschuldighende t’behaghen met liste, Ghevende t’bedencken, mocht sy haer keeren, Sy soude des anders schoonheyt onteeren’.

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Landscape supplies the instrument whereby Van Mander reaches his conclusion, his scopus: by stages the eyes travel from bosky hills and grasslands to a meadow beside which grow chestnuts and mastics, then across a turbulent river, before reaching an olive growing near a bend of said river, near to which there stand a stone in the form of a man and a second larger stone, and growing beside them a tall oak, and close by, an elm, at the base of which the scopus of this sequence is enacted. Each of the places is the locus for an act of viewing: the nymphs’ of a goat, the satyrs’ of the nymphs, the nymphs’ of the satyrs, Apollo’s of the two steers, Battus’s of thieving Mercury, Mercury’s in disguise of Argus, the Moon’s of Endymion, and Paris’s of Mercury and the three goddesses, this last leading to an account of the Arcadians’ and, through them, of the reader-viewer’s act of beholding the fictive picture Van Mander / Sannazaro is describing. Finally, enshrined within the catena (concatenated sequence) of places and of acts of viewing, there is the catena of themes bodied forth by the byvoechsels embedded within these prior loci: the satyrs’ attempted deception of the nymphs, Mercury’s deception of Apollo, Battus’s abortive deception of Mercury, Mercury’s guileful deception of Argus, Paris’s betrayal-deception of Enone, Venus’s ruthless deception of naive Paris (which leads finally to his death during the siege of Troy), and at last, the painter’s deception of the beholder, who is tricked into thinking that the painter has portrayed Venus in all her beauty and seductive charm, when in fact, this feat of pictorial legerdemain was beyond his skill. Within this series of deceptions, Endymion, guileless and ingenuous, serves as a contrapposto (antithesis) that enhances by contrast the theme of deceit and beguilement. The nature of pictorial skill, then, is Van Mander’s true scopus, but couched in the pictorial language of the byvoechsel – the historical addendum or supplement inserted as an ornament to landscape – it becomes discernible as a function of the landscape, through the integration of its component parts that facilitates the spatial and thematic process of enchainment and concatenation. Within this layered system of pictorial compilation, landscape operates as the discursive field wherein an hermeneutic of deception is adduced as the pictorial basis for a northern theory of art. Few contemporaries could have matched the sophistication of Van Mander’s Grondt, but it is surely worth noting that his claims about the interpretative possibilities of landschap paired with byvoechsels were fully understood and endorsed. This becomes apparent from one of the laudatory poems published amongst the preliminaries to the Grondt, P.C. Ketel’s “Landtschap-SchilderLiedt, nae de wijse: Schoon lief ghy zijt prijs waerdt alleene” (Landscape Painter’s Song, after the Model: Lovely Dear, You Alone Are Worthy of the Prize). Ketel emulates in small the form and argument of chapter 8 and the

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gist of the section on byvoechsels from chapter 5. Like Van Mander, he opens his nine-stanza poem by urging the aspiring painter to go out of doors, observe the dawn and rising sun, and consider how its light makes all things visible and thereby representable: The all-seeing eye, the great heavenly sign, The light of the world that to each person’s vision Reveals whatever is on earth. Take coal and chalk, pen, ink, paper, And draw what you see, as your desire dictates, At all times follow the eye’s lead.22 Having allowed his eyes to guide him, to speed toward the vanishing point then circle back to the foreground (‘hoe t’gheen van veers verschiet, al tot een Centrum vliedt, wat ghy van bys bespiedt’), the painter must then set himself down in a pleasant spot, like Virgil’s Tityrus, who, seated at ease in the shade of a spreading beech, opens Eclogue 1 by singing about his native woods and pleasant fields.23 Ketel enjoins his reader to do the same, to paint in praise of his local trees, fields, and flora as did Tityrus of his woodland muse: Youth, eager for instruction, set yourself down Next to Tityrus in the woods, and there look to your profit, What’s of use to you can be learned, The manifold things, confected far and near.24 The same holds true for the land’s other features, both natural and man-made – its cities and villages, rivers and streams, its farmlands and labouring peasants. Whereas previously he had alluded to Virgil’s Eclogues, he now invokes 22 23

Van Mander, Den grondt, fol. **6v: ‘Des Weerelts licht, dat elcx ghesicht Hier openbaert, t’gheen is op d’Aerdt. Neemt kool en krijt, pen, inckt, pampiere, Om teeck’nen dat ghy siet, oft u de lust ghebiedt, Hebt acht altijt, op t’ooghs bestiere’. Ibid. See Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid 1–6, ed. G.P. Gould – trans. H.R. Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: 1916) at https://www.theoi.com/Text/VirgilEclogues.html#1 (accessed 3 May 2020). 24 Van Mander, Den grondt, fol. **7r: ‘Leer-lustigh’ Ieught, zijt neer gheseten By Tityr in het woudt, en daer u nut aenschout, Het gheen u deught, can doen te weten, De dinghen menichfout, van veers naeby ghebout’.

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Pamphilus Mauritianus’s popular pseudo-Ovidian drama, De arte amandi (On the Art of Loving): All that pleases you, in Paus’s [= Pamphilus Mauritianus’s] pleasure ground, Be it woodland, mountain, or grotto, wherever chance casts the eye, Portray it after the life, but knowledgeably, Here city, castle, manor-house, there peasant’s cottage, hut, or hovel, Thitherward paths, bridges, leaving nothing out.25 Ketel closes by counseling the painter, once returned home, to bring to completion the things drawn out of doors, enlivening them with colors, so that his reputation as a landscape painter of note is enhanced. Carry on with the landscapes you’ve been making, and have described in your book, And with the colours you’ve ground, give them (the semblance of) life, So that Fame, gliding by, Confers on your work a great name, And through good notices, free of fault, You procure money, counted up, From many noble lovers of the arts.26 The reference to the painter’s ‘book’ (‘in’t Boeck beschreeft’) has a dual purchase: on the one hand, the artist’s sketchbook; on the other, the books cited in the poem – Virgil’s Eclogues and Pamphilus’s De arte amandi – through which he views his native landscape. Conversely, his experience of landscape, both as 25

Ibid.: ‘At t’gheen u greyt, in Paus warande, T’zy bosch, t’zy bergs oft Grot, waer t’oogh op werpt het lot, Nae conterfeyt, maer met verstande, Hier Stadt, Casteel, en Slot, daer Boer-huys, hut, oft cot, Gins weghen, bruggen, tot, geen overschot’. On Pamphilus and De arte amandi, written in the twelfth century and still popular in rhetorical circles when Ketel wrote his poem, see Garbaty T.J., “Pamphilus, de Amore: An Introduction and Translation”, The Chaucer Review 2 (1967) 108–139. 26 Van Mander, Den grondt, fol. **7r: ‘T’geen ghy in’t Boeck beschreeft, sulcx lantschaps doen aencleeft, Met verwen die ghy wreeft, maeckt dat het leeft (In schijn), soo sweeft, de Fame, En brengt u werck, een groote name, Door t’goet opmerck, bevrijdt van blame, Liefhebbers veel, der Consten eel Crijght ghy haer gheldt, daer voor ghetelt’.

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observer and draughtsman-painter, provides a frame for his reading of these poems: the imagery of ‘Pamphilus’s pleasure ground’ is filtered through his drawings after ‘city, castle, manor-house’, ‘streams and fountains’, ‘grassy fields and four-footed beasts’, ‘milkmaids loudly singing’, ‘hunters abroad with their hounds’, ‘rustic couples, he’s and she’s, sailing on little lakes, and kissing lustily’, all of which he has remarked and portrayed after the life (‘slaet dit al gae, en bootst het nae’).27 Likewise, the other things he has diligently seen and drawn – the multifarious woodland trees with their distinctive foliage, sharply defined when seen close up, and the flowers, their colours softened by distance – filter his reading of Eclogue 1.28 His boeck, in other words, is twofold, comprising both his tekenboek (book of drawings) and his duodecimos (his pocket editions of Virgil and Pamphilus). Of course, a third inflection of boeck would also apply – the book of memory stocked by things seen and drawn, and by things visualized on the basis of texts read.29 To see and draw after nature, on this account, is a way of reading Virgil and Pamphilus, and reading them redounds upon how nature is seen and recorded, which is tantamount to insisting once again on the status of landscape as an hermeneutic that calls forth processes of viewing and picturing that imbricate image and text. The image-based methods of interpretation that pictorial and literary landscapes invited between 1500 and 1700 are the stuff of this volume’s seventeen essays. The opening essay by Walter Melion serves as an extended exordium, using Bol’s Emblematica evangelica to exemplify the rich hermeneutic and exegetical potential of landscape. The first section focuses on landscape and the hermeneutics of the self: autobiographical and self-authorizing in the case of Jacopo Sannazaro (Enenkel); integral to the tripartite form, function, and argument of the emblems in Marcus Gheerarts fable collection, De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (Smith); an epitome of order in variety in the paintings and prints of Pieter Bruegel (Bakker); rhyparographic in the distinctively rendered 27 Ibid., fol. **7r: ‘Hier Stadt, Casteel, en Slot’, ‘beecxkens meldt, fonteynkens cieren’, ‘op’t grasigh veldt, viervoete dieren’, ‘boerinnekens soos’, haer Koeykens melcken, al singhend’ overluydt’, ‘Iaghers loos met honden telcken’, ‘t’samen paren, een hy en sy, in’t meerken varen, en hoe met lust, d’een d’ander kust’. 28 Ibid.: ‘De dinghen menichfout, van veers naeby ghebout, Hoe t’veerst van t’naest verstout, dat ghy onthoudt Des voorgrondts stout, voorcomen: Siet op’t hardt loof, der voorster bomen, En merckt hoe doof, van veers de blomen Vertoonen haer, ghy wordt ghewaer, Wat herdt oft soet, men schildren moet’. 29 On the trope of memory as book or codex, see Plumley Y. – Di Bacco G. – Jossa S., Citation, Intertextuality, and Memory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 2 vols. (Exeter: 2011).

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commonplace views of Jan van Goyen and Pieter Molijn (Falkenburg); topical and anagogical in Jacob van Ruisdael’s panoramic view of Amsterdam and its environs (Bussels); elegiac and multi-confessional in Van Ruisdael’s Jewish Cemetery (Perlove); and an instrument of identity and alterity in the New World poetry of Marc Lescarbot and Laurent Le Brun, S.J. (Barton). The second section examines the hermeneutic functions of the garden landscape: after a theoretical résumé of the poetics of this type of landscape (Ribouillault), the essays discuss Hesdin and other Valois, Burgundian, and/or Habsburg gardens (Goehring); the gardens of the Esquiline Villa in Rome (McPhee); the spolia evocative of antique and early Christian place in Poussin’s Landscape with Saint Matthew and Landscape with Saint John on Patmos (Hui); and the enchanted gardens of Alcina and Armida as imitated by the followers of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and Torquato Tasso’ L Gerusalemme liberata (Morgan). The final section explores the hermeneutics of the imagined landscape: the metanarrative functions of Ariosto’s landscape ecologies (Tower); topothesia and the rhetorical quality of enargeia as exemplified in Neo-Latin poems of the Harrowing of Hell (Reddemann); the world landscape as a ladder of spiritual ascent in selected landscapes by Herri met de Bles (Weemans); and the spectral connotations of violence in the early-seventeenth century French novel, The Island of the Hermaphrodites, and in Hans Vredeman de Vries’s Scenographiae (Perry Long). Bibliography Adler W. Landscapes and Hunting Scenes, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard 18, 2 vols. (London – Oxford: 1986). Bakker B. Landscape and Religion from Van Eyck to Rembrandt, trans. D. Webb (Farnham, SY – Burlington, VT: 2012). Büttner N. Die Erfindung der Landschaft: Kosmographie und Landschaftskunst im Zeitalter Bruegels (Göttingen: 2000). Cartari Vincenzo. Le imagini dei dei de gli antichi (Venice, Francesco Ziletti: 1580). Falkenburg R.L. Joachim Patinir: Landscape as an Image of the Pilgrimage of Life (Amsterdam – Philadelphia: 1988). Falkenburg R. – Weemans M. Pieter Bruegel (Paris: 2018). Garbaty T.J. “Pamphilus, de Amore: An Introduction and Translation”, The Chaucer Review 2 (1967) 108–139. Gyraldo Giglio Gregorio. De deis gentium (Basel, Ioannis Oporinus: 1555). Kaschek B. Weltzeit und Endzeit: Die “Monatsbilder” von Pieter Bruegel d. Ä. (Paderborn – Munich: 2012).

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Kleinert C. Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) and his Landscapes: Ideas on Nature and Art (Turnhout: 2014). Mander Karel van. Den grondt der edel vry schilder-const, in idem, Het Schilder-Boeck (Haarlem, Paschier van Wesbusch: 1604). McTighe S. Nicolas Poussin’s Landscape Allegories (Cambridge – New York: 1996). Melion W.S. “The Trope of Anthropomorphosis in Hendrick Goltzius Venus and Cupid (1590), Venus, Bacchus, and Ceres (1593), and Portrait of Frederick de Vries (1597)”, in Melion – J. Woodall – M. Zell (eds.), Ut pictura amor: The Reflexive Imagery of Love in Artistic Theory and Practice, 1500–1700, Intersections 48 (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2017) 158–228. Miedema H. (ed. – trans.). Karel van Mander, Den grondt der edel vry schilder-const, 2 vols. (Utrecht: 1973). Ovid P. Heroides and Amores, trans. G. Gowerman (London – New York: 1914). Plumley Y. – Di Bacco G. – Jossa S. Citation, Intertextuality, and Memory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 2 vols. (Exeter: 2011). Idem, Metamorphoses, ed. G.P. Goold – trans. F.J. Miller (Cambridge, MA – London: 1916; reprint ed. 1984). Ribouillault D. – Weemans M. (eds.). Le paysage sacré: le paysage comme exégèse dans l’Europe de la première modernité (Florence: 2011). Rosenberg P. – Cristiansen K. (eds.). Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions, exh. cat., New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New Haven: 2008). Sannazaro J. Arcadia, ed. G. Corniani (Milan: 1806). Unglaub J. Poussin’s Sacrament of Ordination: History, Faith, and the Sacred Landscape (New Haven: 2013). Virgil P. Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid 1–6, ed. G.P. Gould – trans. H.R. Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: 1916). Weemans M. Herri met de Bles: les ruses du paysage au temps de Bruegel et d’Erasme (Paris: 2013).

Chapter 2

Parabolic, Periphrastic, and Emblematic Ekphrasis in Hans Bol’s Emblemata Evangelica of 1585 Walter S. Melion Designed by Hans Bol, engraved by Adriaen Collaert, and published by Aegidius Sadeler in 1585, the Emblemata Evangelica ad XII signa coelestia consists of twelve panoramic landscapes, matched to the signs of the Zodiac and months of the year, ten of which – late winter in Pisces to late autumn in Sagittarius – feature Christ teaching by means of parables as he journeys through the Holy Land [Figs. 2.1–2.13].1 Two further scenes of journeying preface these landscapes: the series opens with Mary and Joseph Arrive at the Inn (Capricorn in early winter), and with The Angel Instructs Joseph to Flee, and the Flight into Egypt (Aquarius in mid-winter) [Figs. 2.2–2.3]. The first two plates thus portray the itineraria that ensured the future propagation of the Gospel by Christ; their position at the start of series implies that they can be read as proto-parables – allegories of the imminence of the Word (the journey to Bethlehem), and the Word’s journey into the world (the flight into Egypt). Collaert’s prints after Bol illustrate the twelve months by depicting them as seasonal landscapes within which Christ is seen to purvey and also to enact such parables as the Workers in the Vineyard, the Plucking of the Ears of Corn, and the Unjust Husbandmen; set at various times of the year, they unfold by stages, in multiple episodes, that 1 On the Emblemata Evangelica, see Diels A. – Leesberg M. (comps.), Leesberg – Balis A. (eds.), The New Hollstein Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings, and Woodcuts, 1450–1700: The Collaert Dynasty, 8 vols. (Ouderkerk aan den Ijssel: 2005–2006) II 5–14, nos. 225–237; Mielke U. – Hautekeete S. (comps.), Luijten G. (ed.), The New Hollstein Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings, and Woodcuts, 1450–1700: Hans Bol, 2 vols. (Ouderkerk aan den Ijssel: 2015) II 88–102, nos. 71–83; and Hautekeete S., Emblemata Evangelica, Hans Bol, exh. cat., Koninklijke Bibliotheek van België (Brussels: 2015). On Adriaen Collaert, see Diels, “Introduction”, in New Hollstein: The Collaert Dynasty I: lv-lxvii. Diels dates the series ca. 1585, and notes that Collaert engraved two other series after Hans Bol in the mid-1580s, both of which embed parables within landscapes: Biblical Scenes and Hunting Scenes in Decorative Borders (Diels, “Introduction” lv; New Hollstein: The Collaert Dynasty II 241–59, nos. 449–472); and Parable of the Prodigal Son (Diels, “Introduction” lv; New Hollstein: The Collaert Dynasty II 79–81, nos. 304–307). Also cf. the undated series illustrating the parable of the prodigal son in roundels (ibidem 77–78, nos. 300–303). Bol was a Lutheran, as Diels observes, and left Antwerp for Amsterdam in 1584; see Diels, “Introduction” lxxxiv, n. 126.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004440401_003

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extend from the foreground to the distant background [Figs. 2.5, 2.10, 2.12]. In each print where he appears, Jesus addresses two or more auditors, gestures toward the landscapes that embed his parables, and thereby indicates that he is describing these vistas and the events they contain; his auditors generally respond by following his lead, gazing or pointing in the same direction as he. This is to say that the ten parabolic Emblemata Evangelica not only show Christ speaking in parables, but also visualize these very parables, allowing us to see how vivid, expansive, and rich in detail were the images impressed by the Lord upon the mind’s eye of his attentive, if occasionally reluctant interlocutors.2 The landscapes can be construed, then, as ekphrastic images or, more precisely, images within the images, that reveal the rhetorical power of Christ who adeptly wields ekphrases to visualize and propagate gospel truths. That the parables’ protagonists populate landscapes continuous with the foreground settings wherein he speaks, demonstrates how convincing is their effect: these stories appear to operate here and now, in the present of the people to whom he narrates them.3

2 On visual metaphor as the basis of parabolic analogy and similitude, see Meurer H.-J., Die Gleichnisse Jesu als Metaphern: Paul Ricoeurs Hermeneutik der Gleichniserzählung Jesu im Horizont des Symbols “Gottesherrschaft/Reich Gottes” (Bodenheim: 1997) 213–222. Pre-modern exegetes, responding to scriptural use of the term ‘parable’ in Matthew (eight stories) and Luke (six stories), often took parabola, a word of Greek derivation, as a synonym for the Latin similitudo, on which see Wailes S.L., “Why did Jesus Use Parables? The Medieval Discussion”, Medievalia et Humanistica, n.s. 13 (1985) 43–64; and idem, Medieval Allegories of Jesus’ Parables (Berkeley – Los Angeles – London: 1987) 3–5. On the sovereignty of the Lord as the universal subject of the parables of Jesus, see Weder H., Die Gleichnisse Jesu als Metaphern: Traditions- und redaktionsgeschichtliche Analysen und Interpretationen (Göttingen: 1980) 67–69. On the Christology of kingship in the parables, see Blomberg C.L., Interpreting the Parables (Downers Grove, IL: 1990) 289–324. On the poetics of parable formation and its roots in the allegory of the kingdom of God, see Hendrick C.W., Parables as Poetic Fictions: The Creative Voice of Jesus (Peabody, MA: 1994) 3–72. More generally, on the kingdom of God as the major historical referent of the parables, see Dodd C.H., The Parables of the Kingdom (New York: 1936); and Jeremias J., The Parables of Jesus, trans. S.H. Hooke (London: 1954; revised ed., New York: 1972). 3 On parabolic narration as a dramatized Sprachform, see Harnisch W., Die Gleichniserzählungen Jesu: eine hermeneutische Einführung (Göttingen: 1985) 71–84. In Christian exegesis, as Philip Rollinson explains, the term parable (from paraballo) is used to signify analogous comparison, comparative placement of one thing against another, and, more specifically, a prophetic utterance whose meaning is veiled by comparative analogy; see Rollinson P., Classical Theories of Allegory and Christian Culture (Pittsburgh: 1981) 33–42.

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The Ekphrastic and Emblematic Manner and Meaning of the Emblemata Evangelica

How, we may ask, was ekphrasis understood by Bol and Collaert’s contemporaries; what notion or, better, notions of description does the Emblemata Evangelica bring to light [Figs. 2.1–2.13]? The term ekphrasis and its cognates descriptio and hypotyposis would have had a dual purchase in Antwerp, as three popular rhetorical treatises, Jan van Mussem’s Rhetorica of 1553, Matthijs de Castelein’s De const van rhetoriken of 1555, and Cyprian Soarez’s De arte rhetorica libri tres of 1560, make amply evident.4 Written for the classroom, Van Mussem’s humanist text was the first classical rhetorical handbook composed in Dutch. Largely based on the Pseudo-Cicero’s Ad Herennium, Cicero’s De inventione, Quintilian’s institutio oratoria, and Erasmus’s De conscribendis epistolis and De copia rerum ac verborum, as Jan Vanderheyden and Marijke Spies have demonstrated, the Rhetorica focuses on the principles of première rhétorique, which is to say, on questions of affective and persuasive argumentation, and its chief constituents – invention, disposition, and selected figures of eloquence. Widely circulated within the Jesuit school network, Soarez’s De arte rhetorica adapts and reconciles the rhetorics of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian; the five parts of rhetoric – invention, disposition, eloquence, memory, and pronunciation – are discussed in the 4 On Van Mussem and the Rhetorica, see Jan F. Vanderheyden, “Jan van Mussem I”, Verslagen en mededelingen der koninklijke Vlaamse academie voor taal- en letterkunde (1952) 289–306; Vanderheyden, “Jan van Mussem II”, ibidem 923–948; Vanderheyden, “De Rhetorica van Jan van Mussem ‘ghecolligiert wt …’”, Verslagen en mededelingen der koninklijke Vlaamse academie voor taal- en letterkunde (nieuwe reeks) (1975) 173–233; Vanderheyden, “De status van Jan van Mussem en zijn Rhetorica”, ibidem (1977) 13–54; and Spies M., Rhetoric, Rhetoricians, and Poets: Studies in Renaissance Poetry and Poetics, ed. H. Duits – T. van Strien (Amsterdam: 1999) 40–44. On De Castelein and De const van rhetoriken, see Stuiveling G., “Schaken met De Castelein”, Spiegel der Letteren 7 (1963–64) 161–184; Iansen S.A.P.J.H., “Speurtocht naar het leven van Matthijs Castelein. Archivalia en onzekerheden”, Verslagen en mededelingen der koninklijke Vlaamse academie voor taal- en letterkunde (nieuwe reeks) (1970) 321–446; Coigneau D., “Matthijs de Castelein (1485?-1550)”, Jaarboek De Fonteine (1985–86) 7–13; and Spies, Rhetoric, Rhetoricians, and Poets 40–44. On Soarez’s De arte rhetorica, see Flynn L.J., S.J., “The De arte rhetorica of Cyprian Soarez, S.J.”, Quarterly Journal of Speech 42 (1956) 367–374; Flynn, “Sources and Influence of Soarez’s De arte rhetorica’,” ibidem 43 (1957): 257–265; Marc Fumaroli, “Définition et description: scolastique et rhétorique chez les Jésuites des XVIe et XVIIe siècles”, Travaux de linguistique et de littérature 18 (1980) 37–48; Bauer B., Jesuitische ars rhetorica im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe (Frankfurt am Main – Bern – New York: 1986) 138–240; Conley T.M., Rhetoric in the European Tradition (Chicago – London: 1990) 153–155; Fernandes Pereira B., Retórica e eloquencia em Portugal na época do Rinacimento (Coimbra: 2005) 550–584; and Mack P., A History of Renaissance Rhetoric, 1380–1625 (Oxford: 2011) 177–183.

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book’s three major subsections, with invention comprising the three rhetorical modes – epideictic, judicial, and deliberative – and eloquence subtending the chapters on memory and pronunciation. Unlike Van Mussem and Soarez, De Castelein appropriates classical sources for a treatise centered on the arts de seconde rhétorique – not the formal and structural principles of argumentation, but rather, the techniques of prosody, especially rhyme, rhythm, equisonance, and, of course, colorful elocution. Whereas Van Mussem and Soarez subsume descriptio and hypotyposis under the rubric of ornate diction, with Van Mussem attaching it to exornatio (exornatie, verchierene, i.e., ornamentation), and Soarez treating it as an instrument of demonstrative oratory, De Castelein gives description pride of place not by defining but, rather, by exemplifying it: his treatise opens with an extended ekphrasis of the fictional place and circumstances wherein his poem cum poetic treatise arose.5 For all three authors, description is an affective device that marshals verbally produced images to stir the emotions. Soarez succinctly defines the two forms ekphrasis could take: it focuses either on describing action, as in Cicero’s In Verrem II, 5, 161, or on circumstances, as in Cicero’s Pro Milone, cited in Institutio oratoria IX, 2: Hypotyposis, which Cicero calls description, is a certain image of things exposed to view and expressed in words, such as seems rather to be seen than heard, or demonstration of things to sight as if they taking place here and now, as is done, for example, in the 7th speech against Verres [i.e., In Verrem II, 5, 161]: ‘Inflamed by viciousness and fury, he entered the forum, his eyes ablaze, and cruelty flaring from the whole of his face’. […] In his Pro Milone, Cicero demonstrates marvelously what Clodius would have done, had he seized the praetorship’. This transfer into present events will be more worthy of admiration if we introduce it with, for example: ‘Suppose that you see […]’ – as Cicero does: ‘These things which you see not with your eyes, you may discern in your minds’.6 5 On descriptio and its kinds, as species of ‘chierlijck, statelijc, ende heerlijck spreken’, see Mussem Jan van, Rhetorica, dye edele const van welsegghene (Antwerp, Weduwe van Henric Peetersen: 1553), fols. 54v–55r. On descriptio or hypotyposis, see Cyprian Soarez, De arte rhetorica libri tres ex Aristotele, Cicerone et Quinctiliano praecipue deprompti (Coimbra, Ioannes Barrerius: 1562; reprint Cologne, Gosvinus Cholinus: 1581) 121–122. For the descriptive excursus that inaugurates the first part of De Const van rhetoriken, the “Theoriestrofen”, see Castelein Matthijs de, De const van rhetoriken (Ghent, Jan Cauwel: 1555) 1–4. 6 Soarez, De arte rhetorica 121–122: ‘Hypotyposis, quam descriptionem Cicero appellat, est proposita quaedam forma rerum ita expressa verbis, ut cerni potius videatur quam audiri Vel

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Van Mussem, whose emphasis falls on argumentation, favors action over circumstance. The manner of descriptive ornamentation (‘maniere van verchierene’) he advocates consists in using ‘forceful words to narrate and demonstrate what will be the result of such and such things’.7 He addresses his preliminary example to judges: they must consider the repercussions of a death sentence before issuing so dire a verdict. The cause of justice requires them first to visualize its deleterious effects on the condemned man’s parents and children.8 He directs his second example toward military leaders: if the orator wishes to curb their belligerent impulses, he must describe to the best of his ability a city brutally conquered by an enemy army, its children and elders slain, its youths enslaved, its women violated, the scenes of devastation so numerous and disturbing that ‘noone could convey in words or fully express the catastrope’ of such events.9 Instead, one must rely on the efficacy of pregnant images. De Castelein justifies his descriptive engagement differently. The pleasure and potency of his poem on the poetics of rhetoric lie in its pastoral imagery of a locus amoenus, set in the countryside outside Oudenaarde, whither he goes to draw poetic inspiration from nature; this hilly, well-watered place, replete with greenery and birdsong, and the panoramic vista opening out from it, are portrayed as sources of refreshment that engender positive lyrical sentiments and, more particularly, give rise to the melodious strophes, stanzas, and verses, and the vivacious, ornate, and equisonant diction that Van Mussem so ardently espouses. Furthermore, it is here that he claims to have encountered Mercury, the god of eloquence, face to face. The poem’s first ten stanzas, a tour de force of ekphrastic writing, describe the setting and circumstances leading to this pregnant encounter that animates the poet and poem:

est rerum, quasi gerantur, sub aspectum pene subiectio, ut actione in Verrem septima: “Ipse inflammatus scelere ac furore in forum venit, ardebant oculi, toto ex ore crudelitas emicabat” [Cicero, In Verrem II, 5, 161]. […] Mire tractat haec Cicero Pro Milone, quae facturus fuerit Clodius, si praeturam invasisset [= Quintilianus, Institutio oratoria IX, 2, 41]. Haec translatio temporum erit verecundior, si proponamus talia: “Credite vos intueri”, ut Cicero: “Haec, quae non vidistis oculis, animis cernere potestis” [ibidem 42]’. 7 Van Mussem, Rhetorika, fol. 554v: ‘Noch een schoone maniere van verchierene, te weten alsmen claerlijck met stercken woorden verhaelt ende openbaert, wat van sulcken of sulcken saken naervolgen moet’. 8 Ibidem. 9 Ibidem, fol. 55r: ‘[…] niemant en soude met woorden connen vertellen, noch te vulle wtspreken het groote onmenschelijcke iamere’.

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[…] To Edelaerd’s Wood I wend my way, Strolling along the green plain; Through Wolf’s Pass I went, as was my custom, To that serpentine pool, that lovely font. This gushing stream well met, Delicious to many a taste, Broidered not by artifice, But by Nature herself adorned, Rejoicing every heart bravely, Well resembles Creusa’s splendid fountain, […] Guarded round about by a mountain, [With] many fine valleys of great renown to the west: Even Pyramus’s fountain compares not at all. A tree crooked and tall, by God’s grace, Shadows the boscage of this sweet source, Which makes its home amongst the roots, About three bowshots distant from Oudenaarde. Bright as silver is [the water’s] color, Pure its fragrance; standing in its shade, One looks past the watery source, seeing all that lies below; Without anyone’s help, effortlessly It assists all who see it, be they man or woman: Here I found myself, beside this beautiful landscape (landauwe), As one freshly desirous of giving himself over to poetry. Free from sorrow, I drew forth my tablet, And went to sit under the accustomed ash tree. Here was I abstract from men or beasts, Full with joy, free from all care. With birdies singing, all atwitter, [….]10 10

De Castelein, De const van rhetoriken, 1–2: Naer den Edelaerd-bosch steldic my te weghe Om wandelen langhs den groenen pleine, Duer Twolf-gat track ick naer daude pleghe, Naer den Slanghen-brouck die schoon fonteine.

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Bol and Collaert’s titular print, as we shall soon see, ascribes to Christ everything comprised by these parabolic panoramas. Viewed from the vantage point provided by Van Mussem and De Castelein, Christ can be designated the ekphrastic author in two senses: he describes the actors and actions that body forth the parable’s analogical argument; and he describes the parable’s environs, the landauwe (landscape setting) within which it unfolds. The landscape setting functions like De Castelein’s poetic source, refreshing our senses and renewing our sentiments, thereby preparing us to respond creatively to the things we encounter in this place. The conjunction of parabolic story and landscape implicitly identifies Christ as both rhetor and poet who, in Soarez’s words, represents the events to sight (‘sub aspectum’) that he wishes us to discern with our eyes rather than merely hearing with our ears (‘ut cerni potius videatur quam audiri’). The Emblemata Evangelica may be interpreted as emblematic in this sense: under a zodiacal sign that fulfills the function of a titulus, an epigrammatic distillation of the parable – the quatrain inscribed beneath each print – combines Dit sprutende water zeer wel gheraeckt Twelck menighen smaeckt delicieuslick, Niet by artificien ommestaeckt, Maer by rechter Naturen toe-gemaeckt, Elcks herte verblydende couraieuselick Ghelijckt wel Creusis de fonteyne pompeuselick […] En rondomme met eenen beergh bewaerd, An tweste veel schoone valleyen vermaerd, Piraems fonteyne en waerds gheen comparatie, Eenen boom crom ende hooghe, byder Gods gratie, Beschaud van dezen zoeten borre de baudegaerde, Inde wortels van dien haudt hy zijn statie, Omtrent twee stalen boeghscheuten van Audenaerde. Claer als een zelver es hy van coleure, Zuvere van gheure, staende al ind schauwe, Den grond hier af zietmen al den putte deure Zonder iemans toedoen, vry van labeure, Thelpt hem diet ziet, tzij man oft vrauwe: Hier vand ick my langhs des schoonder landauwe Als die hem tot dichtene wilde al versch vitten, Mijn schaelge reeckte ick, vry vranck van rauwe, En ghijngh onder den ghecostumeerden Hersch zitten. Hier was ick abstract van meynschen en beesten, Om svreughts vulleesten, los alder quale, De voghelkins zonghen alle ten zeesten, [….]

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FIGURE 2.1 Adriaen Collaert after Hans Bol, Title Plate from the Emblemata Evangelica, 1585. Engraving, 15.2 × 21 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-1978-81)

with a complementary pictura to explore the manner of the Lord’s teaching with parables [Figs. 2.1–2.13]. But the print series is not only emblematic; it is also periphrastic, for the parables, implanted within the landscapes, are presented contingently, by reference to their attendant circumstances. The parables, seen in this way, prove to be complexly hybrid constructions, at once ekphrastic, periphrastic, and emblematic in form, function, and argument. The series’ title-page further complicates their status by ascribing to them a specific evangelical task: the parabolic emblemata, ranged under the signs of the zodiac (‘ad XII signa coelestia’), and subdivided into twelve months (‘ad […] totidem anni menses accommodata’), have been adduced to combat the grievous sin of idolatry (‘idololatricum cultum’); whereas humankind is inclined to worship created things in place of God, these evangelical emblems, by portraying these selfsame things (‘per has ipsas creaturas’), serve to restore veneration of the Creator, source of all creation (‘ad unius omnium Creatoris cultum revocat’), and spiritually to set before our eyes the kingdom of heaven (‘regnum coeleste mystice ob oculos ponit’) [Fig. 2.1].11 Understood in these terms, the 11 Emblemata Evangelica Ad XII signa coelestia sive totidem anni menses accommodata, quibus Christus homines, qui astris, ad distinguenda tantum tempora initio a Deo (ut est Gen. 1) conditis, idololatricum cultum praestiterant, per has ipsas

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Emblemata Evangelica, in depicting Christ as promulgator of the parables, who speaks these landscape images into existence, affirms Christ the Word as the source of all we see, in heaven and on earth, whose action of putting these things before our eyes – ekphrastically, periphrastically, emblematically – invites us to draw an analogy between parable-formation and the creation of the temporal world. Indeed, the title-page enforces this analogy by alluding to Genesis 1, specifically to God’s creation of the starry firmament for the express purpose of tracking time: ‘ad distinguenda tantum tempora initio a Deo, ut est Gen. I’. Moreover, the terrestrial world that unfolds before our eyes in the form of a panoramic vista, stands proxy, as I hope to show, for the universal scope of the Gospel, advanced by Christ to secure the salvation of sinful and oblivious humankind. In sum, the bulk of the article that now follows examines the ekphrastic manner and meaning of Hans Bol’s Emblemata Evangelica, asking how and why these panoramic images are shown, metadiscursively, to issue from Christ, in the form of periphrastic emblems that implicitly analogise the Creation to the kinds of panoramic and parabolic image-making on view in the prints. Why were these particular parables chosen, and what is their connection to the signs and months to which they allude? What do these images tell us about the evidentiary value of ekphrases: how do they operate, in other words, as evidentia oculorum (visual proof) of the doctrine that the works of nature, indeed all of creation, originate in a single Creator who is alone worthy of veneration? And finally, what is the relation between ekphrasis and itinerarium: how do these ekphrastic images activate the trope of journeying, and how precisely do the ten parabolic landscapes relate to the two non-parabolic episodes from the infancy of Christ with which the print series opens and closes.12 I shall argue that Bol’s choice of parables, and his strategy of using landscape to encourage virtual travel down a course, pathway, or itinerary, and to evoke the theme of spiritual voyaging, derive from Erasmus’s account, in his paraphrases on the Gospels, of the specific parables Bol illustrates. Furthermore, the parabolic theme of journeying through a landscape in body and spirit, as handled by Bol, creaturas ad unius omnium Creatoris cultum revocat, et regnum coeleste mystice ob oculos ponit. “Evangelical Emblems adapted to the twelve celestial signs, or to just as many months of the year, by means of [or: in] which [emblems] Christ calls back men who had given themselves over to idolatrous worship of the stars – whereas God had created them [the stars] solely for the purpose to measuring time (as Gen. 1 has it) – calls them back to the worship of the sole Creator of all things through the created things themselves and places before their [mens’] eyes the kingdom of heaven in a mystical manner [or: method of explanation]”. 12 On the parabolic functions of landscape as a portrayal of spiritual topography, see Bruun M.B., Parables: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Mapping of Spiritual Topography, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 148 (Leiden – Boston: 2007) 87–109, 167–312.

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closely parallels Dirck Volckertsz. Coornhert’s treatment of this theme in his ‘moral conversations’ and treatises. 2

Christ as the Parabolic Source of the Emblemata Evangelica

Let us begin by returning to the title-page and reading it closely [Fig. 2.1]. On one level, the text can be thought to refer to gospel parables as evangelical emblems, presumably in the sense that parables, though comprised by words that cohere into texts, are in fact intensely visual, consisting of pregnant images that operate in and through the visual allegories they body forth.13 Their 13

On the allegorical form and function of the synoptic parables, see Black M., “The Parables as Allegory”, Bulletin of The John Rylands Library Manchester 42 (1959–1960) 273–287. Black offers a corrective to the established view, put forward by Adolf Jülicher in Die Gleichnisreden Jesu, 2 vols. (Freiburg im Breisgau: 1886; reprint ed., 1899), that the parables of Christ, with the single exception of the Parable of the Sower, are descriptive and morally exemplifying rather than allegorical. The counterargument, elegantly distilled by Black’s readings of the Parables of the Sower, the Wicked Husbandmen, and the Good Samaritan, is that ‘difference [between parable and allegory] are of degree not of kind, and while we must beware of attaching absurd allegorical meanings to details which form no more than the scenic background of a story, we may well be impoverishing our understanding of the parables of Jesus by excluding allegory simply on the basis of the Jülicher canon that the parables are not allegorical’. Cf. Hugh McNeile A., The Gospel According to St. Matthew (London: 1915) 186. On metaphor as the foundation for a parabolic theory of allegory, see Weder, Die Gleichnisse Jesu as Metaphern 58–67; and idem, “Wirksame Wahrheit: Zur metaphorischen Qualität der Gleichnisrede Jesus”, in Weder (ed.), Die Sprache der Bilder: Gleichnis und Metapher in Literatur und Theologie (Gütersloh: 1989) 110–127. On the parable as ‘some interesting particular case of the similitude’, and on its relation to ‘illustration’ and ‘allegory’, see Linnemann E., Parables of Jesus: Introduction and Exposition (London: 1966; reprint ed., 1971) 1–2, 3–8. On the distinction between Parabel and Gleichnis, the former designed to metaphorize typical behavior or a normative set of circumstances, the latter to metaphorize specific, singular, or exceptional behavior or circumstances, see Mell U., Die Zeit der Gottesherrschaft: Zur Allegorie und Gleichnis von Markus 4,1–9 (Stuttgart: 1998) 75–77. Mell ultimately argues that parabolic metaphor operates in both registers. On the scholarly tendency to distinguish between parable, which compares the activity of the story to Jesus’s understanding of the kingdom of God, and allegory, which encodes numerous meanings into the story’s constituent elements, see Blomberg, Interpreting the Parables 29–36; and, on the alternative strand of parable interpretation that reads parable as allegory, 36–47. Blomberg, in ibidem 49–60, esp. 68, citing contemporary literary critics such as Michael Murrin, Holly W. Boucher, Gayatri C. Spivak, Angus Fletcher, and Edwin Honig, concludes that the ‘parables of Jesus are sufficiently similar to other demonstrably allegorical works that many of them too must probably be recognized as allegories. […] Commonly, the primary details which disclose an allegorical level of meaning are the narratives’ principal characters, and the meanings ascribed to them must be ones which the stories’ original audiences could have been expected to grasp in their historical setting’.

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hermeneutic is jointly visual and verbal, since they make their case by positing images and texts in tandem; and their meaning is discovered by decoding analogies between the corporeal things they show and the spiritual things these concrete images embed. Additionally, the titular text not only ascribes the parables to Jesus, but also identifies him as the source of the evangelical emblems here assembled, which is to say, designates him the true author of these verbal-visual emblemata consisting of events set in landscapes that extend as far as the eyes can see. The title puts this very succinctly: Christ visualizes sacred mysteries (‘mystice ob oculos ponit’), making the kingdom of heaven mystically visible, as a corrective to idolatrous men who often mistake temporal for divine things (‘homines, qui […] idololatricum cultum praestiterant’). It is as if the title were claiming that this very series of prints issues from Christ himself, who puts them forward as emblems of the Gospel: Christ adapts gospel emblems to the twelve celestial signs or rather to the like-numbered months: whereby he recalls to worship of the one universal Creator, [those] men who had bestowed idolatrous worship on the stars fashioned by God for the sole purpose of telling time, and places the kingdom of heaven mystically before [their] eyes.14 The title, inscriptions, and, as argued below, the close correlation with Erasmus’s Paraphrases on the four Gospels indicate that Bol worked closely with a theological advisor. Stefaan Hautekeete, with reference to Bol’s preliminary studies for the Seven Spiritual Works of Mercy and the Seven Sacraments, plausibly observes that they were drawn to specifications provided by their publisher Philips Galle and an advisor. Galle, probably in consultation with this advisor, annotated the drawings, indicating how Bol should further alter and amplify them. Production of the modelli for the Emblemata Evangelica would have likely resulted from a similar process of development involving the publisher Aegidius Sadeler and a theological advisor well-versed in biblical exegesis and Erasmus’s Paraphrases. The frame supports the claim that Christ is the true source of these evangelical emblems by equating the four evangelists – Matthew and Mark above, and Luke and John below, accompanied by their respective attributes, the angel, lion, ox, and eagle – with the four seasons, symbolized above by winter kindling and verdant spring branches, along with musical instruments signifying 14

This paraphrase of the titular print is based on the more literal translation in note 11 supra. On the process of designing the Seven Spiritual Works of Mercy and the Seven Sacraments, see Hautekeete, “Introduction”, in Mielke – Hautekeete (comps.), Luijten (ed.), The New Hollstein: Hans Bol, II xxvii–ci, esp. lxxxi.

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springtime love and courtship, below by summer fruits and the fall vintage. At the sides hang attributes of late winter – clogs, a brazier, bundles of wood, and cured meats – and of high summer – sheaves of wheat, a rake and scythe, and shears. Centrally placed above and below are gardening tools and a flower pot (early spring), and ripening fruit and grapes (early fall). The conjunction of evangelists, instruments of the Word, with seasonal tools and produce stands for the pictorial association between parables and times of the year that originates, according to the title, with Christ himself. In format, the title-page sets the scene for what follows, for it is itself an exemplary emblem, pieced together from a titulus (‘Emblematica Evangelica’), a framing pictura, and an epigramma (‘Ad XII signa coelestia […] mystice ob oculos ponit’). The correlations between subject and season result from an attempt sequentially to harmonize the event shown with the relevant stage in the life of Christ, starting with the two episodes from his infancy and then jumping to the ten episodes from his ministry [Figs. 2.2–2.3, 2.4–2.13]. The cycle begins in early winter under the sign of Capricorn (22 December–20 January), which encompasses the feast of the Nativity: Mary and Joseph are refused a room at the inn perched on a hill above the town square of Bethlehem, while in the distance shepherds, soon to pay homage to the newborn Christ, keep watch over their flocks [Fig. 2.2]. The inscription condenses and paraphrases Luke 2:1–8.15 The dream of Joseph and flight into Egypt occur in mid-winter under the sign of Aquarius (21 January–19 February) [Fig. 2.3]. The inscription paraphrases Matthew 2:13–15.16 The calling of the apostles Peter and Andrew takes place in 15

16

‘Per glacies imbresque et saevae incommoda brumae Bethlemum gravida vetulus cum coniuge Joseph Festinat Maria edicto [i.e., edictum] dum Caesaris audit) Nec locus hospitio tota datur ullus in urbe. Luc. 2’. ‘Through ice and heavy rain, and the injuries of fierce winter, the elderly Joseph with his pregnant wife Mary hastens to Bethlehem (having heard the edict of Caesar), but no place of lodging is offered anywhere in the city. Luke 2’. Many of the inscriptions allude to the landscapes, justifying their presence either retrospectively, as the place through which the protagonists have passed, or proleptically, as the place through which they must go. Here allusion is made to the holy family’s difficult journey to Bethlehem. The texts ingeniously compress and paraphrase the parables, at the same time and in the briefest of terms unfolding their Christological meaning. ‘Dum glacialis hyems tectis se condere suadet, Josephum in somnis monet angelus aethere missus, / Ut subito fugiat cum prole et coniuge dirum Herodem, infantum spirantem pectore c[a]edes. Matt. 2’. ‘While icy winter urges that shelter be sought, the angel, sent from on high, warns Joseph in his dreams to flee with his son and wife fearsome Herod plotting in his heart the massacre of the young children. Matthew 2’. The landscape vista receding deeply into the distance points up the inscription’s reference to flight.

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FIGURE 2.2 Adriaen Collaert after Hans Bol, Mary and Joseph Arrive at the Inn (Capricorn in early to mid-winter) from the Emblemata Evangelica, 1585. Engraving, 15.2 × 20.7 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-1978-92)

FIGURE 2.3 Adriaen Collaert after Hans Bol, The Angel Instructs Joseph to Flee, and the Flight into Egypt (Aquarius in mid- to late winter), from the Emblemata Evangelica, 1585. Engraving, 15.3 × 20.8 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-1978-82)

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late winter under the sign of Pisces (20 February–20 March) [Fig. 2.4]. The event inaugurates Christ’s ministry to the disciples and immediately precedes his earliest efforts to promulgate the Gospel; he formulates his call to Peter and Andrew in the form of a parable, promising to convert them from mere fishers into fishers of men.17 The inscription paraphrases Matthew 4:18–22 and Mark 1:16–20.18 The parable of the workers in the vineyard, addressed to the chief priests and elders in the temple, instead appears to transpire at the threshold of the parabolic vineyard planted round with a hedge and fortified by a tower [Fig. 2.5].19 This is the first of several parables that Christ is shown delivering; 17

The modern exegetical tradition construes the reference to piscatores as an analogy tout court, whereas venerable sources such as the Glossa tend to treat it, at least implicitly, like an analogical parable; see, for instance, the spiritual reading of piscatores, in Biblia Sacra cum Glossa ordinaria, 6 vols. (Antwerp, Apud Ioannem Keerbergium, 1618) V: col. 89 C, and the interlinear reading of ‘mittentes retia in mare’, in ibidem, V: cols. 491– 492 a. On analogical metaphor as the chief basis of parable-formation, see Aerts L., Gottesherrschaft als Gleichnis? Eine Untersuchung zur Auslegung der Gleichnisse Jesu nach Eberhard Jünge, Ph.D. dissertation (Rome: Pontifical Università Gregoriana, 1990) 55–77; and, on narrative elaboration of parabolic metaphor, see ibidem 97–127. Also see, on implicit and explicit metaphor in the parables, and on the kinds of allegorical exegesis they call forth, Banschbach Eggen R., Gleichnis, Allegorie, Metapher: zur Theorie und Praxis der Gleichnisauslegung (Tübingen: 2007) 249–298. Hultgren A.J., The Parables of Jesus: A Commentary (Grand Rapids: 2002) 3, usefully identifies two types of parable: having defined parable as a ‘figure of speech in which a comparison is made between God’s kingdom, actions, or expectations and something in this world’, Hultgren distinguishes between parabolic narrative, wherein the comparisons take the form of stories, and parabolic similitude, wherein ‘the comparisons are made without stories but by means of the words “is like” or “is as if”’. The analogy of fishermen closely aligns with Hultgren’s comparison by similitude. On parabolic narration and its form and function, also see Klauch H.J., Allegorie und Allegorese in synoptischen Gleichnistexten (Münster: 1978) 22– 25. On parabolic narration and argumentation, and on their respective structures, see Linnemann, Parables of Jesus 8–30. 18 ‘Dum labor exercet piscantes aequore, fido Intentos operi, Deus ad meliora vocatos / Amplificare sui iussit pomoeria regni: In tenui fidum magnis adiungere fas est. Marci 1’. ‘While [these] fishermen are busy with their work on a calm sea, intent on faithful labor, God wants them to direct themselves to better things and commands them to expand the bounds of the kingdom: It is proper to apply to weightier things, those trustworthy in trifling matters. Mark 1’. The inscription draws an analogy between the extensive panoramic landscape and the parabolic admonition to evangelise the world by becoming fishers of men. For a fuller discussion of the inscriptions to emblemata 3–12, along with translations from the Latin, see the following subsection of this essay, “The Parabolic Landscapes and their Supporting Biblical Paraphrases”. 19 On the parable of the workers in the vineyard, see Jülicher, Die Gleichnisreden Jesu, II 385– 406; Klauch, Allegorie und Allegorese 286–316; Weder, Die Gleichnisse Jesu als Metaphern

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FIGURE 2.4 Adriaen Collaert after Hans Bol, Calling of the Apostles Peter and Andrew (Pisces in late winter to early spring) from the Emblemata Evangelica, 1585. Engraving, 15.3 × 20.7 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-1978-83)

FIGURE 2.5 Adriaen Collaert after Hans Bol, Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (Capricorn in early to mid-spring) from the Emblemata Evangelica, 1585. Engraving, 15.1 × 20.7 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-1978-85)

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he stands at the threshold of the image, from where the parable is projected into space and time, and, even while speaking it into existence, he appears to be incorporated into its setting and circumstances. By situating Jesus both outside and inside the parable, the image adduces him jointly as the parable’s source and subject. His position and gestures parallel those of the householder who leans against the vineyard’s gate at lower right, and this parallelism further encodes him as the parable’s chief protagonist. One of the two disciples at left, positioned halfway up the hilltop ledge where Christ discourses, attentively mimics his gesture of pointing, thereby indicating that he takes his master’s parable to heart. The story of the vineyard transpires in the middle ground, whereas the escarpment at left, mountaintop fortress at right, and distant mountain range stand for the ‘strange country’ whither the householder departs, in the words of Matthew 21:33. This all happens in early spring, under the sign of Aries (21 March–20 April, mistakenly shown as Taurus), the springtide of Christ’s ministry, so to speak. Although this parable appears relatively late in the Gospel of Matthew, it appears early in the series, because vines are planted and dressed in the early spring. Parabolic time is privileged over the order of events in the synoptic Gospels, as a function of the ruling assumption that the subject of this parable is God’s preparation of his people for the coming of Christ. The time of the parable, the season of planting, licenses its placement near the start of the sequence since it tells the story of the first planting of the Gospel in human hearts. The inscription explicitly paraphrases Matthew 21:33, and implicitly, Isaiah 5:1–10, which compares the recalcitrant Israelites to wild grapes that spoil the Lord’s vineyard.20

20



218–230; Wailes, Medieval Allegories of Jesus’ Parables 147–153; Blomberg, Interpreting the Parables 247–251; Harold Jones I., The Matthean Parables: A Literary and Historical Commentary (Leiden – New York – Cologne: 1995) 371–390; and Hultgren, The Parables of Jesus 351–382. ‘Munitam, turri et praecinctam saepe [i.e., sepe], colonis Vitiferum Dominus collem locat, aptaque viti / Tempora largitur, larga ut vindemia inundet. Esaiae 5. Quid sperare sibi potuit gens perdita maius? Matt. 21’. ‘The Lord hires out a vineyard guarded by a tower and encircled by a hedge, and lets the vine-bearing hill to husbandmen, and vouchsafes conditions favorable to the vine, that a plentiful harvest may abound. Isaiah 5. What more could the lost people hope for themselves? Matthew 21’. The reference to the husbandmen as a people who have lost their way licenses the print’s association of the vineyard with the panoramic landscape and its meandering pathways and river. Bol returns to this parable later in the series: whereas here he focuses on the planting, hedging, and furnishing of the vineyard, activities that take place in springtime (Matthew 21:33), the second appearance of the vineyard instead features the murder of the vintner’s son at the time of the mid-autumn harvest (Matthew 21:37–40).

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The parable of the sower likewise turns on the visual analogy between Christ, speaker of the tale, and the sower, the tale’s chief actor [Fig. 2.6].21 Here historical time, relatively early in the life of Christ minister, coincides with parabolic time, for sowing generally occurs in mid-spring, under the sign of Taurus (21 April–20 May, mistakenly shown as Aries). The inscription paraphrases Luke 8:4–15.22 Christ and the woman of Samaria alludes to four parables: Christ holds forth beside the well that he has just analogised to himself, the source of living water ‘springing up unto life everlasting’; walking down the road to Samaria at right, the eponymous woman duplicates the Lord’s gesture since she has become his messenger, who delivers news of the Messiah to her countrymen [Fig. 2.7].23 Christ addresses his disciples, the foremost of whom, perhaps Peter, responds by pointing at himself. This exchange encapsulates the second and third parables: Jesus compares the provisions the man carries, to the nourishing spiritual meat the Messiah consumes when he fulfills the will of God. The man’s gesture of reception identifies him as he who receives what the Lord has sown, or, in the words of John 4:36: ‘And he that reapeth receiveth wages and gathereth fruit unto life everlasting: that both he that soweth and he 21

On the parable of the sower, see Jülicher, Die Gleichnisreden Jesu II 514–538; Linnemann, Parables of Jesus 114–119; Klauch, Allegorie und Allegorese 185–218; Weder, Die Gleichnisse Jesu als Metaphern, 108–116; Wailes, Medieval Allegories of Jesus’ Parables 96–103; Blomberg, Interpreting the Parables, 226–229; Hendrick, Parables as Poetic Fictions 164– 186; and Hultgren, The Parables of Jesus 181–202. On this parable as an allegory of the promulgation of the Gospel, see Mell, Die Zeit der Gottesherrschaft 55–65; and, on this parable’s use of an epic form of narrative allegory, 66–73. 22 ‘Ubertim licet humano spargantur in agro Semina divini verbi, perpauca benigne / Dant fructus; senti sed enim sub pectore vepres, Et vitiosa necant germen vitale flagella. Luc. 8’. ‘Although the field of humankind is bestrewed plentifully with the seeds of the divine word, only very few bear fruit readily; but the thorny shrub and the vicious young shoots of the heart kill the sprig of life. Luke 8’. By identifying the field (‘in agro) with the heart (‘sub pectore’), the inscription invites the reader-viewer to construe the panoramic landscape in two senses: it may be seen as the larger field of the world that awaits the sowing of the word; alternatively, as the world within the heart, full of pastures, pleasure gardens, and roadways, wherein the word is scattered but fails to germinate. My thanks to Karl Enenkel for pointing out that Prudentius, Contra Symmachum 1040–1041, underlies this subscription. 23 The modern exegetical tradition reads the reference to living water as an extended analogy, whereas the Glossa treats it like a parabolic analogy; see Biblia Sacra cum Glossa ordinaria V: col. 1078 F and 1078: [Nicolaus de Lira] 14–15. On spiritual meat and the harvest of eternal fruit, see ibidem, col. 1084 F and 1084: [Nicolaus de Lira] 13; col. 1821 C and 1821: [Nicolaus de Lira] 3–4.

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FIGURE 2.6 Adriaen Collaert after Hans Bol, Parable of the Sower (Aries [instead of Taurus] mid- to late spring) from the Emblemata Evangelica, 1585. Engraving, 15.1 × 20.7 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-1978-84)

FIGURE 2.7 Adriaen Collaert after Hans Bol, Christ and the Woman of Samaria (Gemini in late spring to early summer) from the Emblemata Evangelica, 1585. Engraving, 15.1 × 20.8 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-1978-86)

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that reapeth may rejoice together’.24 Finally, the well-watered woodland vista, dense with foliage, brings to mind the fourth parable, which compares fruitful evangelical labor to the countryside round about, richly growing and greening as the harvest approaches. To raise one’s eyes and look at the landscape is to bear witness to the rich harvest of the Word, parabolically prophesied in John 4:35: ‘Do not you say: there are yet four months, and then the harvest cometh? Behold, I say to you, lift up your eyes, and see the countries. For they are white already to harvest’.25 This verdant imagery illustrates high spring, under the sign of Gemini (21 May–21 June), just on the cusp of summer. The inscription paraphrases John 4:1–42.26 The parable of the rich fool, taking his rest amongst his properties – fields and meadows, flocks and harvests, dovecote and beehives – unaware that while servants build him a barn, his life is rapidly unspooling, plays out under the sign of Cancer (22 June–22 July), during early summer, when the first forage is gathered [Fig. 2.8].27 The season connotes the summer of Christ’s ripening ministry, when, according to Luke 12:1, ‘great multitudes stood about him, so that they trod one upon another’. The inscription distills the argument of Luke 12:13–34, embodied by the fool whose treasure and heart are in material things, as is evident from the way he gazes at his possessions and hearkens to a man pointing at the newly built barn.28 24 On spiritual meat and the harvest of eternal fruit, see ibidem, col. 1084 F and 1084: [Nicolaus de Lira] 13; col. 1821 C and 1821: [Nicolaus de Lira] 3–4. 25 On the analogy of evangelical labor to the richly fruiting countryside, see ibidem, col. 1821 C and 1821: [Nicolaus de Lira] 2–3. 26 ‘Floribus en pulchris tellus depicta renidet, Arboribusque comae, viridantes aethere surgent. / Dulciaque amborum pertentant gaudia pectus, Qui se[r]vit simul, et messem qui colligit amplam. Joha. 4’. The opening interjection, ‘Behold’ ( John 4:35), in concert with the dual reference to sowers and reapers of the word’s benefits, insists that the bountiful landscape be seen as an allusion to the ‘countries white already to harvest’, where the Gospel is both sown and harvested, and where both they ‘that soweth’ and they ‘that repeath, may rejoice together’ in Christ ( John 4:36). 27 On the parable of the rich fool, see Jülicher, Die Gleichnisreden Jesu II 608–617; Weder, Die Gleichnisse Jesu als Metaphern 108–116; Wailes, Medieval Allegories of Jesus’ Parables 219–220; Blomberg, Interpreting the Parables 266–268; Hendrick, Parables as Poetic Fictions 146–163; and Hultgren, The Parables of Jesus 104–110. 28 ‘Ingens ad vitium mortales ducit opum vis, Aedificantque suis nova frugibus horrea, cunctam / Figentes temere terrena in mole salutem. At messe ignotus potitur, cellaque recondit. Luc. 12’. The term moles refers to a large collection of people or things, to vast size, bulk, or expanse; in conjunction with terrena, it situates these expansive reaches of people or things in the world at large, and thus licenses the print’s panoramic setting.

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The parable of the good shepherd is distinctive from the other parables in that Jesus emphatically identifies himself as the parable’s subject on three occasions, saying in John 10:9, ‘I am the door [of the sheepfold]’, in John 10:11, ‘I am the shepherd […] [who] giveth his life for his sheep’, and in John 10:14, ‘I am the good shepherd: and I know mine, and mine know me’ [Fig. 2.9].29 Consequently, the print, the eighth in the series, fully portrays Jesus as the shepherd. He turns to call to his flock, and the sheep closely follow him, ‘because they know his voice’ ( John 10:4). He moves toward the sheepfold’s door, another image of himself, unlike the thieves and robbers that ‘climbeth up another way’ ( John 10:1) and reach through holes in the wall ‘to steal and to kill and to destroy’ ( John 10:10). In the distance are the pastures to and from which he daily leads his sheep ( John 10:9). The parable, delivered midway through the Gospel of John and thus, by implication, midway through the ministry of Christ, has for its setting a mid-summer panorama warmed by the blazing sun, under the sign of Leo (23 July–22 August). The inscription combines the imagery of John 10:1–18 with that of Ezechiel 34:13–14 and 34:26–27, the prophecy of the Messiah who shall come to shepherd his people, ‘gather[ing] them from out of the countries [where they have been scattered] and bring[ing] them to their own land’, ‘feed[ing] them in the mountains of Israel, by the rivers, and in all the habitations of the land’.30 The parable of plucking ears of corn on the sabbath day is the least conventional of the series’ ten parables, for the main event – the disciples plucking the ears – does not so much illustrate a fictional parable as serve as an evidentiary object of parable formation [Fig. 2.10].31 The disciples’ action and the pharisaic opprobium it elicits are parabolised by Christ, who justifies the plucking by 29

On the parable of the good shepherd, see Drury J., The Parables in the Gospels: History and Allegory (New York: 1989) 158–164. 30 ‘Qui pecudes tenera debebat pascere in herba, Lacte frui tantum, et vellus deglubere currant [sic, i.e. curat]. / At bonus educit pastor, pecudesque reducit. Ezeh. 34. Quique alia irrepunt, fures sunt atque latrones. Joha. 10’. ‘He who ought to pasture the flocks on tender grass, merely enjoys their milk and attends only to shearing their fleece. But the good shepherd leads the sheep forth and brings them home. Ezechiel 34. Whosoever steal in by another way are thieves and robbers. John 10’. Taken from Ezechiel 34, the imagery of the wide world from out of which the shepherd gathers his flocks to pasture them in the mountains, by the rivers, and throughout Israel, formed the basis for Bol’s landscape panorama. 31 The Glossa, unlike the modern exegetical tradition, converts the plucking of the ears of corn into a parabolic analogy, as in the case of the allusions to living water in John 4 and to fishers of men in Matthew 4; see Biblia Sacra cum Glossa ordinaria V: col. 217 B-C and cols. 217–18: [Nicolaus de Lira] 1.

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FIGURE 2.8 Adriaen Collaert after Hans Bol, The Parable of the Rich Fool (Cancer in early to mid-summer) from the Emblemata Evangelica, 1585. Engraving, 15.1 × 20.8 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-1978-87)

FIGURE 2.9 Adriaen Collaert after Hans Bol, Parable of the Good Shepherd (Leo in mid- to late summer) from the Emblemata Evangelica, 1585. Engraving, 15.1 × 20.8 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-1978-88)

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interpreting it as an allusion to 1 Kings 15:22, Ecclesiasticus 4:17, and Osee 6:6, and as a reaffirmation of two Old Testament events – David’s eating of the loaves of proposition (1 Kings 21:6) and the temple priests’ sacrificial exemption of the sabbath law (Numbers 28:9). All these references bolster Christ’s contention that the disciples may licitly pluck the ears because he, the ‘Son of man [who] is Lord even of the sabbath’, demands ‘mercy, and not sacrifice’ (Matthew 12:7–8) from his followers. The parable, if properly decoded, reveals the divine authority of Christ, and as such, it blazes forth his true identity even more fully than the parable of the good shepherd. Since the parable conveys both his true lineage and the fullness of his vocation, showing that he is the Son of man and of God, it rightfully unfolds in late summer, under the sign of Virgo (24 August–23 September), when the summer wheat, having fully ripened, is harvested. The threshers and gleaners who populate the landscape, dressed like Flemish peasants, confirm that the old sabbath law has been contravened, not only in the time of Christ but also now and in the future. Gazing at Christ and, beyond him, at the landscape, the figure to his right, seated at the threshold of the image, with hand to heart, functions as a surrogate for the viewer, who is thus enjoined similarly to internalise what the parable reveals. The inscription paraphrases Matthew 12:1–8.32 Christ broadcasts the parable of the barren fig tree (Luke 13) later during his ministry, after the parables of the sower (Luke 8) and of the rich fool (Luke 12), and for this reason, as well as because the parable’s subject takes place during the autumn harvest of fruits and vegetables, the tenth print in the series is set in the early fall, under the sign of Libra (24 September–23 October) [Fig. 2.11].33 As in the parables of the workers in the vineyard and of the sower, Christ’s pose and gestures double those of his counterpart in the parable, the owner of the vineyard who demands that the fig tree, if it fails to fruit, must be cut down. Ironically, the impenitent Pharisee standing beside Christ repeats the 32

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‘Colligere Autumni fructus est tempore quovis, Quos grati accipimus divini munere verbi. / At Pharisaea cohors falsa pietate tumescens, Discipulos damnat quorum hoc sudore paratur. Matt. 12’. The antithesis between the punctilious, prideful Pharisees and the humble disciples who gather in the fruits of the word by the sweat of their brow, provides the allegorical justification for the landscape’s two major zones – the foreground where Christ admonishes the Pharisees, and the middle- and background filled with harvesters, gleaners, and carters who serve as analogues to the disciples. On the parable of the barren fig tree, see Jülicher, Die Gleichnisreden Jesu II 3–11; Klauch, Allegorie und Allegorese 316–325; Jones, The Matthean Parables 425–428; Wailes, Medieval Allegories of Jesus’ Parables 220–225; Blomberg, Interpreting the Parables 268–271; and Hultgren, The Parables of Jesus 241–246.

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FIGURE 2.10

Adriaen Collaert after Hans Bol, Parable of the Plucking of the Ears of Corn (Virgo in later summer to early fall) from the Emblemata Evangelica, 1585. Engraving, 15.1 × 20.7 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-1978-89)

FIGURE 2.11

Adriaen Collaert after Has Bol, Parable of the Barren Fig Tree (Libra in early to mid-fall) from the Emblemata Evangelica, 1585. Engraving, 15.4 × 20.6 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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pose of his antithetical counterpart, the gardener who pleads for the tree, in the manner of a good confessor who advocates for the sinner, hoping that true penitence will bear fruit in his soul. The inscription paraphrases Luke 13:6–9.34 Spoken just after the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, when the ministry of Christ was coming to its close and the events of the Passion were about to begin, the parable of the unjust husbandmen serves as a coda to the parable of the workers in the vineyard [Fig. 2.12].35 Since it is one of the later parables, and describes the gathering of a vintage, it comes next to last in the series, appearing under the mid-autumn sign of Scorpio (24 October–22 November). The parable prophesies the Passion, and announces that God shall transfer the promise of salvation to ‘other husbandmen who will render him the fruit in due season’ (Matthew 21:41). This is presumably why Christ’s attitude repeats that of one of the householder’s servants, whom several husbandmen prepare to assault in the vineyard, and why the Pharisee positioned lower down the hillside looks like one of the henchmen who murder the householder’s son outside the vineyard gate. The inscription paraphrases Matthew 21:34–40.36 The parable of the kingdom of heaven, taken from Matthew 22, concludes the series, coming last because it was tendered after the parables of the vineyard (Matthew 21), the plucking of the ears (Matthew 12), and the unjust husbandmen (Matthew 21) – and foretells the Last Judgment, when the Father will rescind his invitation to the marriage feast of his Son, and all who failed to heed his call will find themselves cast ‘into the exterior darkness’ (Matthew 22:13) [Fig. 2.13].37 Accordingly, the parable is set in a late autumn landscape, 34

‘Frugifera eximijs effertur laudibus arbor Quae tempestivos dat fructus grata colono. / Vindice sed merito sterilis ruit icta bipenni. Saepe tamen precibus differtur poena malorum. Luc. 13’. ‘The fruitful tree which gratefully confers seasonable fruits on the husbandman, is praised highly. But the barren one, having justly been struck by the vengeful ax, falls to ruin. Yet often is the punishment of evildoers deferred by the prayers of supplication. Luke 13’. Dispersed throughout the vast landscape, the many fruiting trees stand for the universal blessings bestowed by the Lord on all in whom the word ripens and fructifies. 35 On the parable of the unjust husbandmen, see note 20 supra. 36 ‘Vitiferum Dominus collem elocat; ergo fideles Mittit oportuno vernas pro fructibus anno. / Natum etiam mittit quem spretum protinus illi Turgidi avaritia quae, odio invidiaque trucidant. Matt. 21’. Like the panoramic landscape, the repeated use of the term mittit recalls that the owner of the hillside vineyard has retired to a distant place – ‘a strange country’ (Matthew 21:33) – from where he sends his servants and son to collect the vintage. 37 On the parable of the kingdom of heaven, also commonly known as the parable of the great supper or feast, see Jülicher, Die Gleichnisreden Jesu II 407–433; Linnemann, Parables of Jesus 88–97; Via, Die Gleichnisse Jesu 164–177; Weder, Die Gleichnisse Jesu

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FIGURE 2.12

Adriaen Collaert after Hans Bol, Parable of the Unjust Husbandmen (Scorpio in mid- to late fall) from the Emblemata Evangelica, 1585. Engraving, 15.3 × 20.6 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-1978-91)

FIGURE 2.13

Adriaen Collaert after Hans Bol, Parable of the Kingdom of Heaven (Sagittarius in late fall to early winter) from the Emblemata Evangelica, 1585. Engraving, 15.1 × 20.6 cm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-1978-91A)

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under the sign of Sagittarius (23 November–21 December), when fall yields to dark winter. As winter is the season of the Nativity, when the cycle commences, so fall is the season when the cycle draws to a close. The same holds true, of course, for Christ, whose ministry is ending and Passion approaching. Singly amongst Emblemata Evangelica, the Parable of the Kingdom of Heaven excludes the figure of Christ, perhaps because the parable focuses on God the Father not Christ the Son; although the servants who spread word of the feast betoken the Church and its ministers, the bridegroom in whose honor ‘beeves and fatlings are killed, and all things are [made] ready’ (Matthew 22:4), is never described. Indeed, the parable dwells not on the Son’s mercy but on the Father’s righteous indignation, which causes him to lay waste to the hilltop city besieged and burning in the distance. Positioned at left, the king and his messenger closely recall the figures of Christ and the two Pharisees in the Parable of the Unjust Husbandmen, but whereas Christ admonishes his unwilling auditors, beckoning them to see and accept what he purveys, the king imperiously commands, arms akimbo and sceptre raised. The Emblemata Evangelica therefore finishes on an admonitory note: make haste, Bol warns, lest the time of instruction passes; destruction awaits whoever declines the Father’s summons, failing to attend Son’s nuptials. The inscription paraphrases Matthew 21:1–14.38 3

The Parabolic Landscapes and Their Supporting Biblical Paraphrases

The anonymous theologian who worked with Bol and Sadeler, ensuring the scriptural accuracy of their images, was author of the ingenious biblical paraphrases that explain and license the location of the parables within expansive landscape vistas. These elaborations of scriptural and parabolic places, in their scale, scope, and descriptive density, can best be characterised as periphastic and visually circumlocutory. The landscapes not only respond to the

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177–193; Harnisch, Die Gleichniserzählungen Jesu 230–253; Wailes, Medieval Allegories of Jesus’ Parables 161–166; Blomberg, Interpreting the Parables 233–240; and Hultgren, The Parables of Jesus 332–341. ‘Regalem ad coenam, natum coniungere sponsae, Dum parat, invitat Dominus; renuere vocati, / Scilicet indigni; mox hinc genus omne vocavit Convivas, poenis pravos ubi mulctat acerbis. Matt. 22’. The landscape vista that opens out onto a roadway and waterway attaches to the phrase ‘renuere vocati’, which distils the argument of Matthew 22:5, ‘But they neglected, and went theirs ways’, as also to the phrase ‘hinc genus omne vocavit’, which summarises Matthew 22:10, ‘And his servants going forth into the [high]ways, gathered together all that they found’.

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paraphrases, but also to the further passages found in the chapters cited by name and number at end of each quatrain. The Calling of the Apostles Peter and Andrew, for example, occurs on the shore of a vast inland sea lined with towns, harbors, docks, a fortress, and a lighthouse, to indicate what it is Peter and Andrew are being called to undertake – namely, to evangelise the world, spreading news of the Gospel far beyond the borders of Israel [Fig. 2.4]: While [these] fishermen are busy with their work on a calm sea, Intent on faithful labor, God wants them to direct themselves to better things And commands them to expand the bounds of the kingdom: It is proper to apply to weightier things, those trustworthy in trifling matters. Mark 139

The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard is enacted on a hillside adjoining other well-watered vineyards, in accordance with Isaiah 5:1, which describes a ‘vineyard on a hill in a fruitful place’ [Fig. 2.5]. The inscription closes by implying that this vineyard has been seen and measured against all the others, as if they were being appraised in tandem; compared with them, it is superior, leaving nothing to be desired: The Lord hires out a vineyard guarded by a tower and encircled by a hedge, And lets the vine-bearing hill to husbandmen, and vouchsafes conditions Favorable to the vine, that a plentiful harvest may abound. Isaiah 5

What more could the lost people hope for themselves? Matthew 2140

The sweeping vista of carefully planted gardens, ploughed farmlands, pastures, and meadows, which surround the field being sown by the farmer in the Parable of the Sower, and the village, towns, and chateau dotted throughout the landscape, provide the backdrop for this parable because Luke 8:1 states that Christ journeyed far, ‘travell[ing] through cities and towns’ on his way to the place where he promulgated the parable [Fig. 2.6].41

39 See note 18 supra. 40 See note 20 supra. 41 See note 22 supra.

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In the same way, the panoramic backdrop to Christ and the Woman of Samaria comprises the countryside of Judea and Galilee, through which Christ wandered before delivering his parable ( John 4:3) [Fig. 2.7]. Furthermore, Christ devises a corollary parable to encourage his disciples to reap the harvest of souls he has seeded with the Gospel. He compares these neophytes to the many countries discernible in an expansive landscape, and analogises their evangelical mission to the action of gazing attentively at such a landscape’s constituent parts. Viewing the sum total of these parts is tantamount to gathering them in, and in this sense, stands for the evangelical vocation of harvesting converts: ‘Behold, I say to you, lift up your eyes, and see the countries; for they are white already to harvest’ ( John 4:35). Paying close attention to the verdancy of the landscape in the print, the inscription embroiders upon these references to beholding as reaping. The vista is construed as a parabolic picture painted by Christ: Behold, the earth brightly shines, painted with lovely flowers and trees, And the trees’ greening stalks rise heavenward, Sweet joys perfuse the hearts of both them who serve, And them who collect the ample harvest. John 442

The inscription to the Parable of the Rich Fool subtly adapts the agricultural imagery of Luke 12: the evangelist’s references to ‘plenty of fruits’ (Luke 12:16) and ‘much goods laid up’ (Luke 12:19) are subsumed into ‘earthly might’ or, alternatively, ‘a vast terrestrial undertaking’ (‘terrena in mole’), a change in terminology that better correlates to the print’s panorama of the rich man’s far-flung estates [Fig. 2.8]. Immense possessions lead mortal men to vice, And they build new granaries for the produce of their fields, Heedlessly placing all their safety in earthly might. But a stranger will obtain the harvest and store it in [or: bring it to] his granary. Luke 1243

This adjustment corresponds to the rich man’s gaze, jointly directed as it is to his servant and his estate; in turn, where he looks corresponds to the panorama of earthly and terrestrial things evoked in Luke 12:56 to signal the rich 42 See note 26 supra. 43 See note 28 supra.

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man’s misplaced priorities: ‘You hypocrites, you know how to discern the face of the heaven and of the earth: but how is it that you do not discern this time’. In like manner, the landscape panorama in the Parable of the Good Shepherd expatiates on the inscription’s reference to pasturing flocks in meadows rich with tender grass (‘Qui pecudes tenera debebat pascere in herba’) [Fig. 2.9].44 Instead, the vista replete with shady pastures, hilly woodlands, and distant mountains illustrates the prophetic imagery of Ezechiel 34:13–14 and 34:26– 27, which describes the homeward journey of God’s chosen people from faroff countries, and their arrival to a homeland rich in fruitful pastures and mountainous forests. This landscape imagery bears witness to the promise of divine mercy: And I will bring them out from the peoples, and will gather them out of the countries, and will bring them to their own land: and I will feed them in the mountains of Israel, by the rivers, and in all the habitations of the land. I will feed them in the most fruitful pastures, and their pastures shall be in the high mountains of Israel. Ezechiel 34:13–14

And I will make them a blessing round about my hill [...]. And the tree of the field shall yield its fruit, and the earth shall yield her increase, and they shall be in their land without fear. Ezechiel 34:26–27

This print is distinctive, as noted above, in that it portrays Christ as the subject of his parable; the action of calling his flock encodes his practice of speaking to the multitudes in parables. Also implicit here, in the image of Christ the good shepherd, is the notion, registered in John 10:40, that ministering to his flock entailed journeying to find them. We might put this as follows: Christ is seen to have entered the landscape he has generated parabolically, and in this particular sense, pasturing becomes indistinguishable from parabolising: ‘And he went again beyond the Jordan, into that place where John was baptising first; and there he abode’. The inscription to Plucking Ears of Corn on the Sabbath Day conflates late summer with early autumn, to emphasise that the season shown in the print is a time of universal gathering [Fig. 2.10]. The fields of ripened grain extending far into the distance correlate to this allusion to a harvest that knows no bounds: 44 See note 30 supra.

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To gather autumn fruits which we have gratefully received By gift of the divine word is ever timely. But the pharasaic cohort, swollen up with false piety, Impugns the disciples by whose sweat [the autumnal harvest] is obtained. Matthew 1245

As in the case of the previous print, so in this one, the usage of parables (‘divini munere verbi’) equates to engagement with the countryside. The road that cuts through the landscape, leading from Christ in the foreground to distant villages and riverine towns, connects to the numerous passages in Matthew 12 having to do with the ministry of journeying: At that time Jesus went through the corn on the sabbath. Matthew 12:1

And when he had passed from thence, he came into their synagogues. Matthew 12:9

But Jesus knowing it retired from thence: and many followed him, and he healed them all. Matthew 12:15

Scriptural references to journeying, taken from the chapters cited in the inscriptions, license the landscape panoramas in the final three parable prints. Based on Luke 13, the Parable of the Barren Tree marks an early stage in the final journey of Christ to Jerusalem [Fig. 2.11].46 He thus stands above a highway, and the event that inspired his parable about sin and repentance – the collapse of the tower in Siloe that slew eighteen men (Luke 13:4) – is visible in the distance at left, as if the parable he speaks were operating in the space between far and near, then and now. As Luke 13:22 states, he ‘went through the cities and towns teaching, and making his journey to Jerusalem’. And Luke 13:33 has Jesus himself elucidate the journey he is making: ‘Nevertheless I must walk today and tomorrow, and the day following, because it cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem’. The Parable of the Unjust Husbandmen foreshadows the death of Christ in Jerusalem; he and the parable’s protagonists are positioned at the head of a roadway that recedes distantly, and both he and the Pharisees are shown 45 See note 32 supra. 46 See note 34 supra.

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walking toward the vineyard where the husbandman’s son is slain [Fig. 2.12]. Motion into the landscape enhances the theme of going forth to the vineyard, in fulfillment of the Father’s will, and receives pride of place in the inscription: The Lord hires out the vine-bearing hill; then, at the right season He sends faithful servants for the fruits. His son, too, he sends, Whom having been spurned, those [hirelings] Swollen up by avarice, hatred, and envy, forthwith cruelly slay. Matthew 2147

The context for this paraphrase is the journey to Jerusalem by way of Bethania and Bethphage, as Matthew 21:1 and 21:17–18 make clear. The Parable of the Kingdom of Heaven features this same journey, which becomes the print’s main allegorical subject: the road linking foreground and background, the king’s palace and the fortified city, stands for the ‘highways’ whither he sends ministers to find willing guests (Matthew 22:9) [Fig. 2.13]. The city doubles as Jerusalem, whose recalcitrance and ultimate destruction the parable prophesies. The panoramic format of the final print makes its parabolic argument perspicuous: God sets his ministers journeying into the world, and woebetide the people who refuse to rejoice in his Son, for their road leads to perdition. While he prepares to join son and bride, the Lord issues invitations To a royal feast; evidently unworthy, the invitees decline; Hence he presently called upon every sort of table companion, And at the same time punished the wrongdoers with harsh penalties. Matthew 2248

4

Erasmus and the Parabolic Trope of the Panoramic Vista

The decision to embed the parables within landscape vistas, as a way of tracking the gospel journeys of Christ and his ministers, and of calling upon the viewer to journey with them in body, heart, and spirit, most likely derives from Erasmus, whose Paraphrases on Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John make repeated

47 See note 36 supra. 48 See note 38 supra.

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use of the trope evangelical journeying.49 Time and again, Erasmus’s paraphrases of the chapters cited in the inscriptions, describe events as itineraria that extend panoramically into the world at large and produce effects universal 49 On the form, function, and argument of Erasmus’s paraphrases, see Bainton R.H., “The Paraphrases of Erasmus”, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 57 (1966) 67–76; Rabil A., Jr., Erasmus and the New Testament: The Mind of a Christian Humanist, Monograph Series in Religion 1 (San Antonio: 1972) 128–139; idem, “Erasmus’ Paraphrases of the New Testament”, in DeMolen R.L., ed., Essays on the Works of Erasmus (New Haven – London: 1978) 145–161; Payne J.B. – Rabil A., Jr. – Smith W.S., Jr., “The Paraphrases of Erasmus: Origin and Character”, in Sider R.D. (ed.), Collected Works of Erasmus 42: New Testament Scholarship – Paraphrases on Romans and Galatians (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 1984) ix–xix; Mynors R.A.B., “The Publication of the Latin Paraphrases”, in ibidem xx–xxix; Krüger F., Humanistische Evangelienauslegung: Desiderius Erasmus von Rotterdam als Ausleger der Evangelien in seinen Paraphrases, Beiträge zur historischen Theologie 68 (Tübingen: 1986); Bateman J.J., “From Soul to Soul: Persuasion in Erasmus’s Paraphrases on the New Testament”, Erasmus in English 15 (1987–1988) 7–27; Sider R.D., “‘In terms quite plain and clear’: The Exposition of Grace in the New Testament Paraphrases of Erasmus”, Erasmus in English 15 (1987– 1988) 16–25; Phillips J.E., “Food and Drink in Erasmus’s Gospel Paraphrases”, Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook 14 (1994) 24–45; Cottier J.-F., “L’Exhortatio ad studium evangelicae lectionis: Èrasme Paraphraste et son lecteur”, Moreana 39.150 (2002) 21–38; Roussel B., “Exegetical Fictions? Biblical Paraphrases of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries”, in Pabel H.M. – Vessey M. (eds.), Holy Scripture Speaks: The Production and Reception of Erasmus’ Paraphrases on the New Testament (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 2002) 59–83; Vessey M., “The Tongue and the Book: Erasmus’ Paraphrases on the New Testament and the Arts of Scripture”, in Pabel – Vessey (eds.), Holy Scripture Speaks 29–58; Cottier J.-F., “Les Paraphrases sur les Évangiles d’Érasme: Le latin, instrument de vulgarisation des Ecritures”, in Bury E. (ed.), Tous vos gens à latin: Le latin, langue savante, langue mondaine (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles) (Geneva: 2005) 331–345; idem, “Lucernam accendere in meridie? Du bon usage de la paraphrase biblique selon Érasme”, in François W. – Den Hollander A. (eds.), Infant Milk or Hardy Nourishment? The Bible for Lay People and Theologians in the Modern Period (Leuven: 2009) 65–86; idem, “Erasmus’s Paraphrases: A ‘New Kind of Commentary’?”, in Rice Henderson J. (ed.), The Unfolding of Words: Commentary in the Age of Erasmus (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 2012) 27–46; Rice Henderson J., “Editor’s Addendum: Translating an Erasmian Definition of Paraphrase”, in ibidem, 46–54; Bloemendal J., “Erasmus’ Paraphrases on the New Testament – Introduction”, Erasmus Studies 36 (2016) 105–122; and idem, “Exegesis and Hermeneutics in Erasmus’ Paraphrases on Luke”, Erasmus Studies 36 (2016) 148–162. On the literary style of Erasmus’s paraphrases, see Chomarat J., Grammaire et rhétorique chez Érasme, 2 vols. (Paris: 1981) II 587–710; idem, “Grammar and Rhetoric in the Paraphrases of the Gospels by Erasmus”, Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook 1 (1982) 30–68; Cottier J.-F., “La théorie du genre de la paraphrase selon Érasme”, in Ferrer V. – Mantero A. (eds.), Les paraphrases bibliques aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Geneva: 2006) 45–58; and idem, “Four Paraphrases and a Gospel: How to Rewrite without Repeating Yourself”, Erasmus Studies 36 (2016) 131–147. On Erasmus as exegete and his relation to the exegetical tradition, see Rummel E., Erasmus’ Annotations on the New Testament: From Philologist to Theologian, Erasmus Studies 8 (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 1986) 52–74.

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in scope. His paraphrastic elaborations visualise these events as expansive landscapes through which Christ is seen to wander. Take his account of Luke 2: he insists on the universal scope of the Nativity by situating it not merely in Bethlehem, or even the Roman imperium, but in the world at large: […] now hear the still more marvellous origin of Jesus Christ, who was going to be the sole Prince of the entire world and invite, not by threats or terrors but by good deeds and wholesome teaching, all the nations of the whole world to the acknowledgment of his name. So it was arranged in the divine plan that under Augustus Caesar, who controlled a considerable part of the world and, having secured matters far and wide, was governing the Roman empire, all the provinces that acknowledged Roman power should be assessed. In this way it would become evident how much further the reign of Christ extended than the reign of Caesar, and how the kingdom of him who takes nothing away but instead bestows heavenly gifts was much more peaceful than the kingdom of Caesar.50 Whereas there were still many territories that Augustus had failed to subdue by force of arms, Christ gathers ‘the whole globe into one church as into one kingdom’, uniting the world without using its worldly resources, and reconciling a plethora of languages, rituals, religions, and ‘foreign and far distant nations’ into one indivisible community of faith.51 Erasmus’s vivid paraphrase licenses indeed calls for the world landscape that unfurls behind Joseph and the Virgin in Mary and Joseph Arrive at the Inn [Fig. 2.2]. The paraphrase on Matthew 2 extends the imagery of sovereignty over the whole world, arguing that the Savior’s birth was revealed by stages, first to Jewish shepherds, then gentile kings, and then to the peoples of Egypt, so that by wonderful design Christ became known to the world little by little’.52 By his 50 Sider R.D. (ed.), Collected Works of Erasmus 47: New Testament Scholarship – Paraphrase on Luke 1–10, trans. J.E. Phillips (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 67–68). Cf. Erasmus Desiderius, In Evangelium Lucae Paraphrasis Erasmi Roterdami per autorem recognita (Basil, Johannes Frobenius: 1526) 34. On Erasmus’s Paraphrase of Luke, see Phillips J.E., “Sub evangelistae persona: The Speaking Voice in Erasmus’ Paraphrase on Luke”, in Pabel – Vessey (eds.), Holy Scripture Speaks 127–150; eadem, “On the Road to Emmaus: Erasmus’ Paraphrase of Luke 24:27”, Erasmus of Rotterdam Yearbook 22 (2002) 68–80; Sider R.D., “Preface”, in Sider, ed., Paraphrase on Luke 1–10, trans. Phillips, ix–xi; Phillips J.E., “Translator’s Note”, in ibidem xiii–xix; and Bloemendal, “Exegesis and Hermeneutics”. 51 Sider, ed., Paraphrase on Luke 1–10, trans. Phillips, 68. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Lucae Paraphrasis 34. 52 Sider R.D. (ed.), Collected Works of Erasmus 45: New Testament Scholarship – Paraphrase on Matthew, trans. D. Simpson (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 2008) 46. Cf. Erasmus Desiderius,

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Nativity he fulfilled God’s promise to ‘all races of the world’, whom he wished to show that salvation was being offered to them also.53 The ‘entire world was about to experience’, as Erasmus puts it, the Lord’s ‘power, wisdom, and goodness surpassing that of any human being’.54 On this account, far supplants near, and distant peoples and nations claim the privilege of the Jews, becoming the ‘first-fruits of faith’.55 The planar staging of the landscape in The Angel Instructs Joseph to Flee, and the Flight into Egypt, its layered construction, nicely complements Erasmus’s firmly held belief that the divine plan was made known by stages, the mystery of the Nativity having been revealed gradually, first to one people, then another [Fig. 2.3]. The flight into Egypt, by bringing the Egyptians into contact with Christ, was conducive to strengthening belief in him, and for this reason the wide world through which the child journeyed, even though it ‘could not lay claim to any credit in a divine work’, was yet an instrument through which that divine work could be made known.56 Appreciated in these terms, Bol’s panoramic vista drives home the point that the mystery of the Nativity pertained to the world at large, and that knowledge of it resulted from a series of itineraria – of Mary and Joseph from Nazareth to Bethlehem, of shepherds from field to manger, of Magi from Orient to Occident, and of the Holy Family from Israel to Egypt. The prominence of landscape in the Calling of the Apostles Peter and Andrew accords with the hermeneutic emphasis on landscape in Erasmus’s paraphrase

53 54 55 56

In Evangelium Matthaei D. Erasmi Rot. Paraphrasis (Lyon, Sebastianus Gryphius: 1544) 42. On Erasmus’s Paraphrase on Matthew, see Schlingensiepen H., “Erasmus als Exeget auf Grund seiner Schriften zu Matthäus”, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 48, N.S., 2 (1929) 16–57; Holeczek H., “Die deutschen Ausgaben der Erasmusparaphrasen und die Vorrede zur Matthaeusparaphrase”, in idem, Erasmus Deutsch 1: Die volkssprachliche Rezeption des Erasmus von Rotterdam in der reformatorischen Öffentlichkeit 1519–1536 (Stuttgart – Bad Cannstatt: 1983) 109–128; Backus I., “Deux cas d’évolution théologique dans les ‘Paraphrases’ d’Érasme: La version inédite du fragment de la ‘Paraphrase sur Matthieu’ (1521) et de l’Épître à Ferdinand (1522)”, in Chomarat J. – Godin A. – Margolin J.-C. (eds.), Actes du Colloque international Érasme (Tours, 1986) (Geneva: 1990) 141–151; Cottier J.-F., “Genèse d’une écriture: Érasme et la généalogie du Christ: A propos du fragment inédit de la Paraphrase sur Matthieu”, in Deproost P.A. – Maurant A., Images d’origines, origines d’une image: Hommages à Jacques Poucet (Louvain-la-Neuve: 2004) 429–444; and Sider R.D. – Simpson D., “Preface”, in Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Matthew, trans. Simpson, ix–xvi. Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Matthew, trans. Simpson, 47. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Matthaei […] Paraphrasis 42. Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Matthew, trans. Simpson, 48. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Matthaei […] Paraphrasis 43. Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Matthew, trans. Simpson, 52. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Matthaei […] Paraphrasis 47. Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Matthew, trans. Simpson, 53. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Matthaei […] Paraphrasis 48.

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on Matthew 4 [Fig. 2.4]. Paying close attention to the geography of the place where Christ enlisted his first two followers, he expounds its admonitory function and designates it a harbinger of the shift from the old dispensation to the new. Landscape for Erasmus operates as a pregnant scriptural image: He went to the city of Capernaum, called “Capernaum by the sea” because it is bounded by the lake of Gennesaret, within the borders of Zebulun and Naphtali, two tribes, that is, in the former of which is Galilee, and in the latter is Galilee of the gentiles. By this image Christ was already then threatening, as it were, that, as the Jews rejected and persecuted the heralds of the gospel, the gospel would be brought to the gentiles.57 The specifics of Erasmus’s paraphrase, his description of populous Galilee and its many seaside ports and coastal cities ‘frequented even by foreigners engaged in trade’, tallies with Bol’s teeming image of the Galilean countryside.58 That he portrays the Sea of Galilee as if it were a wide river may be a response to Erasmus’s pointed analogy between John the Baptist at the Jordan and Jesus at Gennesaret; so too, Jesus’s motion left to right, and the parallel motion of light dispersing clouds in the distance, perhaps illustrates Erasmus’s point that Christ was bringing light to both sides of Galilee, not only to the land of Zebulun and Nephtali, but also to Galilee of the gentiles. The fact that the fisherfolk in their ships and on the shore pay no heed to Jesus, and that the landscape qua landscape, but not its inhabitants are keyed to his presence, precisely agrees with Erasmus’s assertion that ‘few are fit for the heavenly philosophy’, and that most people rejoice to feed their eyes on the world’s ‘novel spectacles’, taking no pleasure in higher things.59 Seen in this way, the landscape, even as it threatens to distract, also warns us to keep our eyes anchored in Christ. The Calling of the Apostles Peter and Andrew also derives from Mark 1, and Erasmus’s paraphrase on this gospel is equally consonant with Bol’s image. He has placed Christ on a headland where he stands between the sea’s two shores, as if walking from one coastline toward the other. He thereby illustrates Erasmus’s notion that Christ extends evangelical grace to both Galilees, to Jews and gentiles alike, that he bodies forth the true meaning of ‘Galilee’, which is ‘transmigration’, that by crossing from shore to shore he bridges the divide 57 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Matthew, trans. Simpson, 78. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Matthaei […] Paraphrasis 69. 58 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Matthew, trans. Simpson, 79. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Matthaei […] Paraphrasis 70. 59 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Matthew, trans. Simpson, 82. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Matthaei […] Paraphrasis 73.

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between the Old Law’s ceremonies and the New Law’s heavenly doctrine. What Jesus here offers, states Erasmus, pertains to the ‘whole church, which was to be gathered from all nations of the world’.60 For Erasmus, Capernaum operates as a ‘simile for the whole world’, to which Christ and his elected ministers come ‘to proclaim salvation to all’.61 Bol brings together wide expanses of land, water, and air, and he situates Christ at the point where all three elements intersect: silhouetted against the sea, he strides on the shore, his garments billowing in the breeze. Thus positioned, he exemplifies the metaphor devised by Erasmus to designate the process of spiritual transformation he elsewhere calls transmigratio: The Mosaic law had its season. There was a time when the light of the evangelical truth dawned gradually and the shadows of the law had to vanish, when the power of the Spirit came forth and the flesh gave way. Just as in the natural transformation of things the change is facilitated by an intermediate stage that has an affinity with both sides…. Earth does not suddenly become air; water forms the intermediate stage – it is gradually thinned out into the lighter element.62 To the extent that Bol’s Christ supplies the interstice that mediates between and binds these elements, he signifies the process of spiritual renewal that migrates people from Old Law to New, gathering them up under the sign of the Gospel. Luke 5 is the third source of the Calling of the Apostles Peter and Andrew, and Bol cleaves very closely to Erasmus’s paraphrase on this Gospel [Fig. 2.4]. Artist and author visualise the calling in the same way: ‘Jesus was standing on the shore, close to Lake Gennesaret, which the Hebrews sometimes call a “sea” because it stretches a great distance in length and breadth, and because, producing a breeze above itself, it is stirred by frequent waves’. Erasmus emphasises that Jesus was alert to his surroundings and astutely assessed them: he withdrew to this ‘less disturbed place’ because he judged his previous lakeside 60 Sider R.D. (ed.), Collected Works of Erasmus 49: New Testament Scholarship – Paraphrase on Mark, trans. – annot. E. Rummel (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 1988) 22. Cf. Erasmus Desiderius, In Evangelium Marci Paraphrasis (Basil, Johannes Frobenius: 1534) 39. On Erasmus’s Paraphrase on Mark, see Rummel E., “Preface” and “Translator’s Note”, in Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Mark, trans. – annot. Rummel, ix–x, xi–xiv. 61 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Mark, trans. – annot., Rummel, 26, 27. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Marci Paraphrasis 46, 48. 62 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Mark, trans. – annot., Rummel, 21. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Marci Paraphrasis 37.

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location too cramped, ‘hardly suitable for a preacher of the gospel’.63 He chose this new location in Capernaum to ensure that he would be visible to Peter and Andrew, and indeed, to anyone else who wished to see him. And he selected this lakeside spot for its symbolic meaning as well, to demonstrate that there is ‘no place where the seeds of the gospel word should not be scattered’, neither on land or sea.64 These remarks indicate that Christ bestowed on the landscape an hermeneutic and therapeutic value, and as such, they provide a warrant for the predominance of the landscapes in Bol’s Emblemata Evangelica. Many of Erasmus’s paraphrases insist on the fact that Christ was journeying when he taught with parables. This helps to explain why Bol often positions him at left or right of the pictorial field, implying that while he discourses, he is en route from one place to another. And yet, even though he is shown in transit, the landscapes invariably underscore his importance: he usually anchors the point where pathways start or meet, and this same point is usually where the diagonal axes defined by the countryside’s component parts – hillsides, hedges, fields, roadways, woodlands, and shorelines – intersect. Often, his location is marked by one or more vertical elements, such as trees, towers, or gables. The paraphrase on Matthew 21, the gospel underlying the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, supplies one explanation for why Bol composed his landscapes in this manner [Fig. 2.5]. According to Erasmus, Christ was proceeding toward Jerusalem, ‘going to his death knowingly and willingly’, and wanted to impress this truth upon his disciples, making evident to them that ‘he must go to Jerusalem and there meet his death’.65 This is surely why here, as elsewhere, Bol shows him pointing the way forward, and at the same time turning back to ensure that the people following him, whether disciples or Pharisees, can see where he is going, how, and why. Erasmus states: ‘In the event, when the time had come, not only did he not hide, but of his own accord he thrust himself forward, and did so in such a way that by the novelty of his display he stirred the mind of the entire city […]’.66 His location, in other words, how 63

Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Luke 1–10, trans. Phillips, 163. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Lucae Paraphrasis 79. Luke’s description of this episode, as Erasmus emphasises, opens with a call to his correspondent, Theophilus, to broaden his field of vision so that it encompasses the full scope of an expansive ‘image of the Church being born and growing vigorously’. See Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Luke 1–10, trans. Phillips, 163, Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Lucae Paraphrasis 78–79. 64 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Luke 1–10, trans. Phillips, 179. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Lucae Paraphrasis 87. 65 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Matthew, trans. Simpson, 290–91. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Matthaei […] Paraphrasis 259. 66 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Matthew, trans. Simpson, 291. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Matthaei […] Paraphrasis 260.

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he has gotten here, and where he will go, carries allegorical significance, as Erasmus insists in his account of the ass and colt that Jesus commandeers for the purpose of processing into Jerusalem: ‘The apostles did not yet understand these things, but this, which would be understood only later, was now being signified’.67 In the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard the very distant mountain range alludes to the ‘strange country’ where the householder – namely, God the Father – has withdrawn, from which place he sends his servants, the prophets, and finally his son, the Christ, to labor in the vineyard and gather the vintage. The vineyard occurs a second time in the Parable of the Unjust Husbandmen, where the husbandman’s ministers are molested and his son is killed by usurping tenants [Fig. 2.12]. Christ strides toward the vineyard gate, the parabolic threshold of self-sacrifice, affirming ‘by the novelty of his display’ his intention to walk this path.68 Landscape and his movement through it are the means whereby he bears parabolic witness to his impending Passion. Erasmus’s paraphrase on Luke 8, the scriptural source of the Parable of the Sower, virtually demands that the parable be set in an extensive landscape [Fig. 2.6]. He draws a parallel between the sower of the Gospel, and Christ and his apostles, calling them ‘ceaseless wanderers intent on their single task’, which is to seed the world with gospel teaching.69 The wide world, then, is their of place of action. The sower’s field expands in Erasmus’s telling: its borders become limitless, for the ‘Son of Man leaves no place bare of this seed’.70 Crisscrossed with paths and roadways, the landscape also answers to Erasmus’s conviction that Christ and the apostles were poor because ‘they were continually changing their location and travelling from one spot to another’.71 The analogy in the print between the attitude of the sower and of Christ, who points at both the landscape and the sower’s field, accommodates Erasmus’s analogy between this specific parable and the hermeneutic of parables more generally. What the sower disperses in the field, Christ disperses in the world by means of parables that must take root, be watered and cultivated if they are fully to bear fruit. What he broadcasts under cover of parables to the select few 67 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Matthew, trans. Simpson, 293. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Matthaei […] Paraphrasis 261. 68 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Matthew, trans. Simpson, 291. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Matthaei […] Paraphrasis 260. 69 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Luke 1–10, trans. Phillips, 231. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Lucae Paraphrasis 110. 70 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Luke 1–10, trans. Phillips, 235. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Lucae Paraphrasis 112. 71 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Luke 1–10, trans. Phillips, 232. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Lucae Paraphrasis 110.

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who can parse them, is like seed sown in a single field, but the ultimate beneficiaries of his parabolic doctrine, exegetically to be harvested, are the whole world and its every inhabitant: ‘For now nothing is being transmitted to you privately or under cover of parables that is not to be made clear later to the whole world; nor is anything now so dark and hidden from the understanding of the uneducated that in the course of time it is not to be uncovered through you and brought out for the knowledge of all’.72 Based on John 4, Christ and the Woman of Samaria depicts Christ seated beside Jacob’s well at Sychar, the hilly terrain of Samaria visible behind him [Fig. 2.7]. Bol’s panorama conforms with Erasmus’s paraphrase on John 4, which opens with a detailed account of the long arduous journey from Judea to Galilee, by way of Samaria, that Christ had chosen to make on foot. Having incensed the Pharisees with his preaching, Jesus departs lest by his presence he further foment their jealous rage; to reach Galilee, from where he has come, he must first pass through Samaria, and seizing this opportunity, he decides to implant the gospel teaching amongst the region’s gentile inhabitants.73 So a mental map of these regions was very much on his mind, implies Erasmus, when he arrived at Sychar, on the outskirts of which he stationed himself, selecting this spot with the utmost deliberation. By this same token, Bol’s panoramic vista can be thought to allude to the time and effort Christ invests in planning where, when, and how he propagates the Gospel, and in plotting his evangelical itinerary. According to Erasmus, Christ also utilizes the journey from Judea to Samaria as a way of demonstrating his humanity. In all these respects, landscape proves crucial to understanding the meaning of the events chronicled in John 4: When he came to the city of Samaria called Sychar, there was no food, for the disciples, longing only for the Lord, had not thought about provisions. 72

Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Luke 1–10, trans. Phillips, 236–237. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Lucae Paraphrasis 112–113. 73 Sider R.D. (ed.), Collected Works of Erasmus 46: New Testament Scholarship – Paraphrase on John, trans. J.E. Phillips (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 1991), 52–54. Cf. Erasmus Desiderius, Paraphrasis Des. Erasmi Rot. in Evangelium Joannis (Lyon, Sebastianus Gryphius: 1542) 76–77. On Erasmus’s Paraphrase on John, see Rabil A., Jr., “Erasmus’ Paraphrase of the Gospel of John”, Church History 48 (1979) 142–155; Phillips J.E., “The Gospel, the Clergy, and the Laity in Erasmus’ Paraphrase on the Gospel of John”, Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook 10 (1990) 85–100; Sider R.D., “Preface”, in Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on John, trans. Phillips, ix–x; Phillips J.E., “Translator’s Note”, in ibidem, xi–xvi; Backus I., “Jesus and His Family in Erasmus’ Paraphrases on Luke and John”, in Pabel – Vessey (eds.), Holy Scripture Speaks, 151–174; and Christ-von Wedel C., Erasmus of Rotterdam: Advocate of a New Christianity (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 2013), 125–131, 133–144.

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To avoid offering the Jews a plausible cause for finding fault with him on the grounds that he had abandoned the Israelites and gone over to the godless and wicked people […], Jesus himself did not go into the city; he let the disciples go into town to buy food. He himself stayed there alone, partly to wait for their return and partly not to miss the chance for a miracle, since he knew what was going to happen […]. Jesus was tired from his long journey, which he made on foot, not on horseback or in a carriage (even then giving us an example of how a preacher of the gospel should be), so he sat down in a likely spot, leaning over the spring and refreshing himself in the air around it. It was about the sixth hour as the Jews figure time, when the sun approaches midday and doubles the burden of work with its heat. By these signs Jesus showed that he was a true human, subject to the same physical changes as other humans.74 The key message to the Samaritan woman, that the Gospel excludes noone, not even the Samaritans whom their fellow Jews considered apostates, is likewise transmitted through the medium of landscape, as Erasmus makes plain, writing as if in the voice of Christ: ‘“Woman”, he said, “have faith in me […]. In the future you will worship the Father neither on this mountain (for he is not the God of this mountain only but of the whole world) nor in Jerusalem. But wherever devout people gather there will be Jerusalem”’.75 For Erasmus, then, as for Bol, landscape can be viewed as the discursive medium in and through which the Gospel spreads, gradually expanding to encompass the world. Erasmus insists on this point, repeatedly reading Samaria as an index of evangelical ministry. For example, he affirms that the journey through Samaria was a matter both of necessity and humaneness: for the Jews, a necessity, since by absenting himself from Judea, he assured that his fellow Jews would not rashly reject him; for the Samaritans, an example of charity, since he stayed with them for two full days, dispensing the grace of the Gospel. He thus showed the Samarians that the Gospel brings salvation ‘not just to the Jewish race but to the whole world’, a point that can equally be discerned in Bol’s sweeping or, better, encompassing landscape.76 Erasmus also provides a rationale for Bol’s gestural conformation of the Samaritan woman to Christ; as Erasmus puts it, her faith has converted her from a ‘sinner into an apostle, telling the story [of 74 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on John, trans. Phillips, 54. Cf. Erasmus, Paraphrasis […] in Evangelium Joannis 76–77. 75 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on John, trans. Phillips, 58. Cf. Erasmus, Paraphrasis […] in Evangelium Joannis 82–83. 76 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on John, trans. Phillips, 61. Cf. Erasmus, Paraphrasis […] in Evangelium Joannis 88.

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her meeting with the Lord] to everyone she met’.77 She has become, in other words, a living image of Jesus. The seated figure of the householder gazing at his vast estates or, better, at the terrestrial world and its sensory pleasures, in the Parable of the Rich Fool, is consonant with Erasmus’s reading of enthrallment to the world as the key theme of this parable in his paraphrase on Luke 12 [Fig. 2.8]. Whereas for the Christ and the disciples, all four of whom turn their back on the panoramic vista spread out behind them, the world is of little worth, for the householder and people of his ilk love of the world and its treasures trump everything: ‘Again, those who love always have their heart bent on the object of their love. But your heart ought to be always in heaven. And it will be always there if you have nothing on earth that you either admire or love but have all your treasure stored up in heaven’.78 By contrast, Christ, who points at the householder, even as he eschews the landscape, concerns himself not with the world per se but with the ‘sins of the whole world’, which he strives to purify in the flames of gospel teaching: ‘Once kindled it will sweep up the whole world far and wide in its flames’.79 Erasmus, like Bol, visualizes the antithesis between worldliness and godliness by contrasting the bonds of nature, which anchor men in the world, with the close-knit solidarity of godly men, more tightly bound by the Spirit than by nature: ‘For the bonds of the Spirit press more tightly than the bonds of nature’.80 For Erasmus, this distinction plays out most patently in the difference between two kinds of attention – that given to landscape phenomena and that bestowed on gospel doctrine. Bol embodies this opposition in the two kinds of relation to landscape respectively exemplified by the householder and by Christ and his three disciples: For when you see a cloud coming up in the west, you promptly predict that there will be rain, and what you predict happens. And again, when you feel the south wind blowing, you promptly predict that there will be a heat wave, and your forecast does not disappoint you. Yet it makes little difference whether it rains or not; but it makes all the difference that you attain everlasting salvation through the gospel faith […]. In the things 77 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on John, trans. Phillips, 59. Cf. Erasmus, Paraphrasis […] in Evangelium Joannis, 84. 78 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Luke 11–24, trans. Phillips, 38. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Lucae Paraphrasis 147. 79 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Luke 11–24, trans. Phillips, 42. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Lucae Paraphrasis 149–150. 80 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Luke 11–24, trans. Phillips, 43. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Lucae Paraphrasis 150.

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of this life you are wise; in eternal matters you see nothing. You observe the appearance of sky and land and from them you deduce forecasts of future events. Yet how is it that you do not notice from the appearance of so many signs that the time is near that brings salvation to all if it is accepted or eternal destruction if it is neglected?81 The hilly meadowlands that fill Bol’s Parable of the Good Shepherd allow him to emphasise that aspect of the parable which Erasmus also foregrounds – namely, the theme of the good shepherd’s pasturing of his flock in open fields [Fig. 2.9]. Erasmus claims in the paraphrase on John 10 that Christ, in implanting the pasture as a metaphor of eternal life, is actually pasturing his auditors, whom he guides into the pastures of eternal life by way of the sheepfold of gospel teaching. The good shepherd leads his sheep ‘out of the pens in which they were confined’, ‘into the open fields’, going ‘in front of the flock, lest they wander off’, and the flock ‘follows him as he goes before’, passing through the sheepfold door ‘his Father had opened’.82 The Lord’s exposition of the parable in John 10:9 (‘I am the door’.), 10:11 (‘I am the good shepherd’.), and again in 10:14 (‘I am the good shepherd’.) centers, Erasmus argues, on the image of going forth into a landscape rich in the fodder of virtue and good works: ‘But when the Pharisees did not understand what this parable meant, he saw fit to uncover it […]. And nowhere will pastures be lacking but everywhere the material for doing good will be provided so that he may both benefit others and himself return to the fold fattened on good works’.83 The Erasmian landscape expands to encompass the world, for the shepherd gathers and pastures his sheep ‘in other nations’.84 More precisely, the sheepfold massively dilates until it and the world become indistinguishable: ‘And so there will be the same sheepfold for all, and there will be only one shepherd’.85 In turn, Erasmus reads the parable’s pastoral imagery as a reference to the coming of Christ the Word into the world, whose inhabitants he shepherds to salvation through parabolic

81 82 83 84 85

Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Luke 11–24, trans. Phillips, 44. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Lucae Paraphrasis 150. Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on John, trans. Phillips, 130. Cf. Erasmus, Paraphrasis […] in Evangelium Joannis 187. Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on John, trans. Phillips, 131. Cf. Erasmus, Paraphrasis […] in Evangelium Joannis 187. Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on John, trans. Phillips, 133. Cf. Erasmus, Paraphrasis […] in Evangelium Joannis 191. Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on John, trans. Phillips, 134. Cf. Erasmus, Paraphrasis […] in Evangelium Joannis 192.

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preaching.86 Seen in these terms, the parable of the good shepherd signifies the mystery of the Incarnation, which is visualised as the pasturing of the world’s sheep by its guardian shepherd. And, in a metadiscursive trope, the parable of the good shepherd is thus construed as a parable about parable formation. Erasmus accomplishes this exegetical sleight of hand by viewing John 10:24–39, in which Jesus openly identifies himself to the Jews as the Son of God, the Word incarnate, through the lens of the parable: If God’s conversation with mortals makes gods and sons of God out of mortals, does it seem intolerable to you if I call myself the Son of God, since I am myself the word of God, and since I was with him before I came into the world, and have an equal share of all things with him? […] But if you do see God the Father bringing forward his power in me, if you do not want to have faith in my words, then certainly believe in the deeds themselves, which you see with your own eyes.87 These deeds of course include preaching and, we might add, parabolic imagemaking. Erasmus closes with the observation that Christ, when he slipped away from the Jews who sought to kill him, did so by leaving the city for the countryside by the Jordan; his very location, close to where John the Baptist preached and baptised, prompted people to recall what John had said about him, when he called him the Messiah.88 Here again, place or, more precisely, the visualisation of place proves essential to parsing the meaning of John 10. Ipso facto, Bol’s portrayal of the parable, its insertion into a panoramic landscape, can be appreciated as fully consistent with the importance of setting in Erasmus’s paraphrase on John 10. Erasmus’s paraphrase on Matthew 12 can similarly be brought to bear on the landscape setting of the Parable of Plucking the Ears of Corn [Fig. 2.10]. Bol positions Christ between a seated disciple at left who signals his devotion by placing hand to heart, and two Pharisees, one of whom points at the group of five disciples plucking grain at right. With his raised left hand, Christ makes a point of his parable and also calls attention to the landscape filled with labouring 86

See Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on John, trans. Phillips, 134: ‘Anyone who does not recognize this shepherd will suffer destruction. And so that the destruction will not be my fault, I carry out the role of the good shepherd even to the point of the loss of my life’. Cf. Erasmus, Paraphrasis […] in Evangelium Joannis 191. 87 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on John, trans. Phillips, 138. Cf. Erasmus, Paraphrasis […] in Evangelium Joannis 197–198. 88 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on John, trans. Phillips, 138–139. Cf. Erasmus, Paraphrasis […] in Evangelium Joannis 198–199.

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peasants who embody his argument that the Old Law’s prescriptions and prohibitions no longer obtain. The landscape, as noted above, along with everything in it, originates with Christ, whose parable brings it into view. The seated disciple who gazes past Christ into the distance identifies him as the source, the intermediate agent, of the parabolic vista unfurling beyond him and his interlocutors. By the same token, the Pharisees’ refusal to look at the landscape underscores their resistance to the parable’s message: they are blind to it. The connection Bol strongly infers between Christ’s speech and setting resonates with Erasmus’s conviction that a person’s words must be accounted as deeds: their effect will be salutary when they issue from a good heart, insidious when they issue from a bad one. Spoken as if in the voice of Christ, this insight applies most directly to him; it appears to arise from his commitment to preaching in parables intended impactfully to change the world: For there, in truth, words too will be accounted as deeds. From your words you will either be pronounced just, if good things have come forth from a good heart, or you will be condemned as unjust, if evil things have come forth from an evil heart. […] whereas the tongue has been given so that by it we might profit ourselves and our neighbour, and by that organ celebrate the glory of God.89 That the disciple’s intent gaze coincides with the road receding deeply into the landscape calls to mind Erasmus’s corollary point that true Christian devotion is comparable to a long journey: it carries whomever the Gospel has touched to Christ, from anywhere in the wide world this person finds himself drawn by the Word. Erasmus equates such a person to the Queen of Sheba, who ‘left her kingdom and homeland, and set out on a long journey to King Solomon, not moved by any fear, but only by a longing for wisdom’.90 In these terms, too, Bol’s landscape proves pregnant with meaning. And it correlates here as elsewhere in the Emblemata Evangelica to the attention paid by Erasmus to Judea and Israel as places of journeying, through which Christ by his constant wandering revealed his boundless mercy and inimitable virtue. Referring to Jesus’s decision in Matthew 12:15 to move on lest the Pharisees, enraged by his parable, attempt there and then to destroy him, and eternally damn themselves, Erasmus writes that he ‘withdrew from the place’ and, ‘wanting to demonstrate 89 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Matthew, trans. Simpson, 202. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Matthaei […] Paraphrasis 184–185. 90 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Matthew, trans. Simpson, 205. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Matthaei […] Paraphrasis 187.

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gospel gentleness’, ‘partially gave way to them’, imparting the heavenly doctrine elsewhere.91 Bol’s landscape, seen from this perspective, alludes to the indexical relation between journeying and divine mercy. There is one additional way in which Erasmus’s paraphrase on Matthew 12 can be thought to inform Bol’s Parable of Plucking of the Ears of Corn [Fig. 2.10]. The allusion to journeying telegraphed by the admonitory gesture of Christ’s left hand is counterposed to the gesture of his right, with which he points at the seated disciple. This illustrates Matthew 12:49: ‘And stretching forth his hand towards his disciples, he said: Behold my mother and my brethren’. Now, Erasmus concludes his paraphrase with a long disquisition on this passage, observing that Jesus stretched out his hand toward the disciples ‘who were sitting nearby, eagerly and silently drinking in his salvific teaching’.92 This reading of the passage perfectly accounts for the seated disciple and his ardent gesture of reception. In conjunction with the landscape at which he stares, the disciple appears to imbibe the gist of the sermon Jesus is preaching – namely, that family is a matter of kinship neither by blood nor place, but by ‘affinity of spirits’.93 Whithersoever Christ goes, explains Erasmus, he is with family, for his kinsmen are any and all who follow him in obeying the will of the Father. The landscape vista, by its very scope and variety, implies this new notion of kinship that converts any place in the world into a home for the Christian heart. Based on Luke 13, the Parable of the Barren Fig Tree opens onto a vast landscape that evokes this chapter’s complementary parables of the mustard seed and of leaven, as paraphrased by Erasmus [Fig. 2.11]. The first parable, as he notes, reconstitutes in the form of an image the actual tree, barren of figs, encountered by Christ.94 The second and third parables are drawn from ordinary, even despised things that symbolically prophesy a great truth – the universal proliferation of the Gospel; the parables dilate on the image of a mustard seed and the image of leaven, causing them grandly to expand into the image of the wide world.95 Embedded within this expansive image is the imagery of the first 91 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Matthew, trans. Simpson, 196. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Matthaei […] Paraphrasis 178–179. 92 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Matthew, trans. Simpson, 207. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Matthaei […] Paraphrasis 189. 93 See note 92 supra. 94 Christ first recounts the parable, then happens upon the tree, which is seen, after the fact, as the source of his parabolic image. See Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Luke 11–24, trans. Phillips, 48. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Lucae Paraphrasis 152. 95 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Luke 11–24, trans. Phillips, 52–53; in particular, see 53, where Erasmus converts the earth and the yeast into an expansive image of the whole of Israel, whither Christ now journeys in fulfillment of his parable: ‘So saying Jesus hastened towards the place where the grain of mustard was to be planted in the earth, where the

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parable, which signifies the welcome harvest of faithful souls that have borne gospel fruit, and the rejection of barren souls. Bol’s composition performs the same operation by inserting the protagonists of the first parable – the farm owner and his vine dresser – into a panoramic landscape that signifies how the ‘kingdom of God will spread itself most broadly’, and how the ‘humble teaching of the gospel will someday take over all the nations of the world’.96 Erasmus, like Bol, reads the three parables as interconnected: ‘Now Jesus wanted to show that report and knowledge of the gospel teaching, and the performance of miracles as well, would indeed come to very many people, but that no one would be saved who did not lay aside all the lusts of this world and follow the humble Christ’.97 The ubiquitous peasants labouring in adjacent orchards illustrate the moral of these parables, as pithily summarized by Erasmus, again in the voice of Christ: ‘You must make an effort’.98 The fruit trees growing everywhere – in orchards, amidst hedgerows, and atop embankments – combined with the forward motion of Christ, who is about to walk into the landscape, call to mind that as he journeyed to Jerusalem, ‘he went through various cities and villages’, teaching ‘everyone, lest any opportunity for the gospel be wasted’.99 The panoramic landscape full of messengers sent to invite guests to the nuptial banquet in Bol’s Parable of the Kingdom of Heaven, corresponds to Erasmus’s paraphrase of this parable, which stresses not only that ‘gentiles were everywhere to be called to the gospel’, but more particularly, that the king’s servants hurried ‘in every direction through the crossroads and public squares’ and ‘assembled [guests] from all places’ [Fig. 2.13].100 Earlier in this article, I posed the question why Christ does not appear in this parable, at least not explicitly. Erasmus provides an alternative answer in his paraphrase of Matthew 22:44, where Christ cites Psalm 110:44 to demonstrate that the Christ

yeast was to be hidden in the flour. For he was journeying to Jerusalem, where he knew he was to be killed. Yet as he went through the various cities and villages he taught everyone, lest any opportunity for the gospel be wasted’. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Lucae Paraphrasis 154. 96 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Luke 11–24, trans. Phillips, 52. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Lucae Paraphrasis 154. 97 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Luke 11–24, trans. Phillips, 48. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Lucae Paraphrasis 152. 98 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Luke 11–24, trans. Phillips, 53. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Lucae Paraphrasis 155. 99 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Luke 11–24, trans. Phillips, 53. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Lucae Paraphrasis 154. 100 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Matthew, trans. Simpson, 303. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Matthaei […] Paraphrasis 270.

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is more than just the son of David: he is himself the Lord.101 Here and earlier in Matthew 22, when he spoke about the king, Christ was giving a ‘hint’ of his identity and vocation, rather than speaking openly.102 He was setting an exegetical task for the apostles, his messengers of the Word, couching obscurely in riddles the gospel truths he desired them to ‘explain later in their own time’.103 Understood in this way, the king in the parable of the kingdom who sends out his servants is an image of Christ himself; this parabolic image is adduced ‘obscurely, to be sure’, since Christ wishes to signify his divine nature and authority for the apostles exclusively.104 This may explain why the Parable of the Kingdom is the most encoded of the twelve emblemata, containing no visually explicit analogy between Christ and his parabolic alter ego. 5

Dirck Volckersz. Coornhert: Moral Conversation and the Parabolic Journey

Throughout the Emblemata Evangelica the biblical time of the foreground scenes where Christ dispenses parables gradually elides into landscapes punctuated by contemporary villages, towns, and cities, and mainly populated by contemporary figures. In the Parable of the Sower, for example, the eponymous sower is a Flemish peasant, and so too are the man and woman labouring in the chateau garden nearby, under the watchful eye of the chatelaine [Fig. 2.6]. In the Parable of the Barren Fig Tree, the householder and his gardener wear biblical dress, but the figures busily harvesting fruit around them are dressed like latter-day peasants [Fig. 2.11]. The clear implication is that the parable is relevant to all times, its moral and doctrinal message universal in scope. That Christ is shown walking, en route from one place of gospel ministry to the next, and that he appears poised to enter the parabolic landscape, implies additionally that the gospel teaching encapsulated in his parable applies to him as well as to us. It journeys, so to speak, with Christ its source from the past into the 101 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Matthew, trans. Simpson, 311. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Matthaei […] Paraphrasis 277. 102 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Matthew, trans. Simpson, 302–203. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Matthaei […] Paraphrasis 270. 103 Sider (ed.), Paraphrase on Matthew, trans. Simpson, 311: ‘A larger crowd of Pharisees then convened. As they had put Jesus to the test with many questions, he in turn now proposed a question for them too, hinting – obscurely, to be sure, and in a riddle, which he left for the apostles to explain later in their own time’. Cf. Erasmus, In Evangelium Matthaei […] Paraphrasis 276–277. 104 See note 103 supra.

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present, in the manner of all parables, which are designed to enshrine gospel truth in everyday things, and to reveal the presence of Christ in everyday matters. The notion that parables are no less essential to spreading the Gospel now than they were in Christ’s time, that parable-formation entails journeying as ministers of the Word, richly informs the moral writing of Dirck Volckersz. Coornhert, the greatest Dutch parabolist of the later sixteenth century. Many of his dialogic moral treatises take the form of stichtelijke gespraken (‘moral conversations’) amongst two or more speakers who utilise parables to elucidate and accentuate their moral arguments.105 (For Coornhert parables are clarifying instruments that provoke constructive argumentation, rather than a method of concealing the ‘mysteries of the kingdom of heaven’ from the uninitiated, as in Matthew 13:11.) More often than not, these conversations take place while the speakers travel on foot, by coach, or by boat, and this framing circumstance allows Coornhert implicitly to equate his protagonists’ journeys with the evangelical ministry of Christ who, as we have seen, moved constantly from place to place, strving everywhere to minister the Gospel. These journeys are prompts to the reader: they invite him to visualise the landscapes through which Coornhert’s speakers travel while reflecting on Scripture and parsing it parabolically. The conjunction of parable, landscape, and journey in his literary works, especially the gespraken, perfectly parallels Bol’s Emblemata Evangelica, which embed Christ within parabolic landscapes of his own making, and thereby extend actual scriptural journeys into parabolic ones.

105 On Coornhert’s moral dialogues, epsecially as pertains to his toneelspelen (allegorical plays), see Geeraerts D., “De dialogen van D.V. Coornhert. Een vergelijkend onderzoek”, Spiegel der letteren 2 (1958) 241–255; eadem, “In margine. De dialogen van D.V. Coornhert: Poging tot datering”, Spiegel der letteren 5 (1961) 37–47; and Fleurkens A.C.G., Stichtelijke lust. De toneelspelen van D.V. Coornhert (1522–1590) als middelen tot het geven van morele instructie (Hilversum: 1994) 58–117. Fleurkens traces his method of argumentation to four principles of humanist argumentation codified by Rudolf Agricola and Philipp Melanchthon, and adapted by rederijkers associated with the Eglentier Chamber of Amsterdam: anchoring of invention in biblical loci communes; cultivation of the relation between general theses and finite hypotheses; arguing a case in utramque partem, i.e., pro and con; and emphasis on strategies of refutation. These principles can be seen to operate as well in Coornhert’s moralizing prints, on which see Veldman I.M., De wereld tussen Goed en Kwaad, exh. cat., Stedelijke Musea, Gouda (The Hague: 1990), 11–33, esp. 31–33. The moral treatises I shall be citing make use of parabolic allegory – eschewing personification, they are populated by common folk who find themselves in recognizable situations – but their dialogic method of argumentation cleaves closely to the four structural criteria identified by Fleurkens. On parabolic usage in Coornhert’s moralizing stories and dialogues, see Voogt G., Constraint on Trial: Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert and Religious Freedom, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 52 (Kirksville, MO: 2000) 81–151 passim.

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Take Het Kruyt-Hofken van stichtelijcke gespraken, in desen tyden tusschen verscheyden personen, op verscheyden plaetsen, ende van verscheyden Religions-saken gevallen, vol trouwe waerschouwinghen voor menichvuldige dolingen, huysdendaechs loop hebbende (The Herb Garden of Elevating Conversations, Conducted in these Days [i.e., in the recent past] in Various Places, and Concerning Various Religious Matters, Full of Well-Intentioned Moral Warnings for all Manner of Strays [i.e., all kinds of people who have lost their way]), composed between 1568 and 1577, and first published in Haarlem ca. 1582.106 The title, along with the dedication to Wouter Verhee, purports to reveal that the conversations took place while Coornhert was himself in transit. He urges Verhee to visualise the dialogues as having occurred on the road, en route from one inn to the next, and he describes the book as a place that subsumes all these other places. It is a locus amoenus, an herb garden, as various in its plantings as are the topics he is about to discuss, and the places where these topics were first broached: For many years, my dearest friend Verhee, I have wandered abroad, visiting many places, and have heard a multitude of scriptural topics discussed on the road and in hostels, some of which I noted down and now I want to publicise for the instruction and use of many. Having seen so much diversity in matters of faith, I realised that this my herb garden would be variously interpreted by cause of the variety of herbs to be found therein.107 The scene Coornhert sets is evocative of Bol’s images of Christ preaching while on the move, and in particular, of the parabolic gardens he calls forth in the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, the Parable of the Rich Fool, and the Parable of the Barren Fig Tree [Figs. 2.5, 2.8, 2.11].

106 On the Kruyt-Hofken I, see Becker B.B., “Nogmaals datering van Coornherts dialogen”, Spiegel der Letteren 7 (1963–64) 119–128, esp. 127; and Voogt, Constraint on Trial 149. 107 Coornhert Dirck Volckertsz., Het Kruyt-Hofken I. Van stichtelijcke gespraken, in desen tyden tusschen verscheyden personen, op verscheyden plaetsen, ende van verscheyden Religions-saken ghevallen, vol trouwe waerschouwinghen voor menichvuldige dolingen, huysdendaechs loop hebbende., in III. Deel van Dirck Volckersz. Coornherts Wercken waer van eenige noyt voor desen gedruckt zyn. (Amsterdam, Jacob Aertsz. Colom: 1630), fol. 73r: ‘Veele jaren hebbe ick, hertvruntlijcke Verhee, uytlandich gheswerft, vele plaetsen gehanteert, ende vele schriftelijcke saecken hebbe ick hooren handelen opten wegen ende in de herbergen, van welcke ic eenige aentekende, die ick dencke ter vruuden bede tot nut van veelen gemeyn te maken. Nu sach ick opte groote verscheydenheyt die daer is in gelovens saken, des ick wel verstont dat dit mijn Cruyt-hofken, overmits der kruyden verscheydenheyd daer inne zijnde, verscheydelijck sal beduyt worden’.

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If the Kruyt-Hofken’s dialogues are traces of the homiletic gospel conversations in which Coornhert engaged while traveling abroad, the subjects under discussion are analogised to landscapes and discursively transported through them. The twelfth dialogue, on sensory pleasure and its intrinsic goodness, marshals several landscape analogies: Coornhert first compares pleasure to a stagecoach that refreshes our tired bodies and minds, facilitating passage through the landscape of life, and sweetening the bitter tedium of our days;108 and then to a sunny landscape permeated by solar rays, where fogs and mists are burned away, and our vision restored;109 and finally, in a negative key, he compares the misuse of sensory pleasure to a person who, rather than moving forward, stops midway through a landscape, losing sight of the city at journey’s end.110 Such a person mistakes the pathway for his goal, whereas the true purpose of bodily pleasure is to foster progress on the road of virtue. Coornhert sums up his argument in a parable: If a person allows himself to think that he lives in order to eat, to drink […] and to enjoy other bodily pleasures: they [these pleasures] will become his final end, he will remain in transit, and will never reach the city of God, Virtue, Goodness and Salvation. Is this not justly called a misuse of [sensory] pleasures?111 Coornhert appropriates the roadway he is actually traversing and converts it into a parabolic image of life’s journey; by the same token, the landscape through which he is traveling becomes the parabolic setting of the putative traveler’s progress, or lack of progress, toward a specific destination – the city 108 “Of alle lust zondigh is”, in ibidem, fol. 80r: ‘Dat merckt men licht uyt het voorseyde: te weten, tot wech-neminghe van de verdrietigheyt die gheleghen is in de onderhoudinghe van de natuyre der menschen, sulcx dat die luste den mensche genoeg streckt een waghen op den wegh des levens, tot vermaeckelijcke rust van de vermoeyde nature, suyckerende also veel bittere moeyelijckheden met die soete luste’. 109 Ibidem: ‘Bovendien streckt zy ooc tot voorhoedinghe van veele manslachtigheyden, die de menschen uyt swaerder vermoeytheden, lichtelijck met strick, swaerdt, fenijn, ende anders hen selve souden aen doen, om van sulcke vermoeytheden ontslaghen te sijn, so die vrolijcke luste sulcke swarigheden, niet anders dan der Zonnen radien den dampighen nevelen, doet verdwijnen’. 110 Ibidem: ‘Als die onwijse mensche van ‘tmiddel sijn eynde maeckt, ende in sulcker wijsen den wegh voor beter houdt dan die stadt of des weghes eynde, dat het eynde niet meer achtende, stille blijft zitten opten wegh’. 111 Ibidem: ‘Als dan yemant hem latende duncken dat hy leeft om te eeten, te drincken […] ende andere lijflijcke lusten te ghenieten: Soo worden dese sijn uyterste eynde, hy blijft opten wegh zitten, comt nimmermeer totter Stadt Godes, ter deughen, tot goetheydt noch saligheydt: Is dat niet wel te recht een misbruyck der lusten te noemen’?

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of God. If we eat and drink to keep our health and quell sorrow, then we improve ourselves and speed Godward; if we turn bodily pleasure into an end in itself, then we divagate from God.112 He closes the dialogue by having his interlocutor openly parabolise the respective journeys he and Coornhert are midway through: ‘No, I long for this [our] journey; now at once I want to start with my journey, and, you, hasten to take up yours. God will call us soon to journey toward virtue’.113 Coornhert’s treatment of his theme, his parabolic projection of it into a landscape setting, precisely matches the exegetical strategy we see at play in Bol’s panoramic emblemata [Figs. 2.2–2.13]. As Bol applies this strategic device twelve times in the series, so too, Coornhert repeatedly returns to the landscape trope of a journey taken. The trope becomes particularly elaborate in the twenty-third dialogue, ‘Whether men may know surely if they are on the right path, and are making progress upon it’. Here again, journey through a landscape generates the by turns dialogic and homiletic activity of parable-making: In a wagon, a Roman Catholic and an All-Purpose Catholic travel together. Having come to a crossroads with four divergent paths, the Roman Catholic said to the other man: ‘In like manner one finds four divergent doctrines, and each takes his own for the right path, yet only one of these can be righteous’.114 In response, Coornhert’s proxy the All-Purpose Christian, argues that no sectarian can rightfully claim to have a monopoly on the heavenward path (‘den rechten wech ten Hemelwaerts’).115 If there is one true pathway, that way is Christ the Word who has bequeathed Holy Writ to be our guide; and the guidance of Scripture, implies Coornhert, is algemeen – which is to say, all-purpose, 112 Ibidem: ‘Maer als wy eeten ende drincken om der natueren vermoeytheyt te stillen ende die stercke gesontheydt te onderhouden, ten eynde wy voorderlijck spoeden mogen opten wech der stadt Godes waert, tot Gode waert, ende tot self goet worden, ende dat hy nu in’t ghevoel van dese luste, dat vet of die luste Gode opoffere met waerdighe danckbaerheydt, dat zijn wijse goedtheyt ooc door sulcke middelen den menschen heeft willen aenlocken ende voorderen ter deuchden’. 113 Ibidem: ‘Neen, my vernoecht voor dese reyse, ic wil nu op mijn reyse, ghy oock haest op u reyse, God vordert ons allen spoedelijck opter deughden reyse’. 114 “Of men hier seker mach weten datmen is opten rechten wech, ende oock datmen daer op vordert”, in Coornhert, Het Kruyt-Hofken., fol. 87v: ‘Op eenen Wagen reden een Roomsch Catholijck ende een Alghemeyn Catholijck. Die komende aen eenen scheytwech van vier sonderlinghe weghen, sprack die R. tot d’ander: Alsoo vint men nu vierderley leeringen die elck in den zijnen voor recht acht, nochtans en macher maer een rechte zijns’. 115 Ibidem.

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not confessionally bounded. The All-Purpose Catholic therefore admonishes his companion to visualise Christ at the forefront, cutting a path through the junctions and byways that threaten to lead us astray, leaving us lost in the complicated landscape of the world: […] and he focuses our attention not only on his words but also on his life, his journeys, his footsteps, so that they who journey therein, who follow him in prompt obedience, journey safely on the right path of life that is Christ himself. […] Thus you agree that whosoever wanders in obedience to God, in brotherly love, in mercy, humility, and similar true Christian virtues, journeys in Christ Jesus himself, who is the right path of life.116 Speaking through the All-Purpose Catholic, Coornhert avows that walking in the footsteps of Christ entails a transformation of self, for one’s former ways are left behind, and new pathways forged. This is to say, he continues, citing Psalm 1:1 and 1:6, that the true Christian proves newly capable of discerning the Psalmist’s image of the two paths – the way of the righteous and the way of the wicked – and of advancing on the trail blazed by Christ who embodies the only true way forward: ‘And so too may the wanderer who advances on this path, which is Christ, know that by the grace of God in Christ Jesus he now commits fewer sins than was his wont, and now obeys God more’.117 The imagery of paths and roadways crisscrossing an actual landscape that has been visually metaphorised into a parabolic one perfectly accords with Bol’s template for his parable prints: pointing the way, Christ invariably advances toward a roadway, often one of many, that winds through complicated seasonal terrain. The topography changes from print to print, and is always intricately multilayered, but no matter how convoluted or vast, a pathway through it is made evident by Christ who gestures toward one or more parabolic scenes situated just beyond him. Anchored in the landscape, these episodes establish the crucial entrypoint into the panorama of the world to be traversed with Christ. 116 Ibidem, fol. 88r–v: ‘[…] en wijst hy ons niet alleen op die leeringhe zijnre woorden, maer oock zijn leven, wandel ende voetstappen, soo dat die ghene die daer inne wandelen, ende hem soo in daetlijcker gehoorsaemheyt navolghen, ontwijfelijck wandelen opten rechten wech des levens die Christus selve is. [….] Soo houdy dan mede dat soo wie daer wandelt in de ghehoorsaemheyt Gods, inde broederlijcke liefde, in sachtmoedicheyt, ootmoedicheyt, ende derghelijcke andere ware Christelijcke deuchden dat die wandelt in Christo Jesu selve, die de rechte wech des levens is’. 117 Ibidem, fols. 88v–89r: ‘Alsoo mede mach, jae moet die toenemende wandelaer op desen wech, die Christus is, weten, dat hy nu door Godes ghenade in Christo Jesu wat min dan hy plach sondighet, ende Gode wat meer ghehoorsaemt’.

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And like Coornhert, Bol provides markers that allow the viewer to track his passage through the landscape as he journeys in imitation of Christ. For both Coornhert and Bol, these markers are settlements and buildings, respectively located near and far, that delimit the endpoints of a pathway. Coornhert describes them as mutually visible signpoints that measure one’s likeness to Christ, in the visual language of landscape: This decrease of sins and increase of virtues is in truth to leave behind evil and associate with the good, which is true progress on the way of life. Could that happen to someone without his discerning, feeling, and knowing it? Suppose that a person is going along the right path from one town to another, and underway is able to discern both towns: how could it be that advancing, he should fail to discern that the town he leaves is getting smaller, and conversely, the city he approaches is growing larger? And thus, it is likewise impossible for Christians on life’s way, leaving the world for the heavenly Jerusalem, not to notice that the world is becoming small, and the city of God growing large before their eyes.118 This remarkable passage, in adducing landscape imagery as the surest measure of the imitatio Christi, supplies a potent raison d’être for Bol’s elaboration of circumambient landscapes in the Emblemata Evangelica. It is important to state that I am putting Coornhert forward as a counterpart to Bol, not as his source, and excerpting elements from the Kruyt-hofken that partially give voice to the exegetical meaning of Bol’s landscape emblemata. Another text by Coornhert, more straightforwardly exegetical, alerts us to other possible meanings implicit in Bol’s landscapes. Coornhert’s exegesis of Matthew 21, titled after verse one, In dien tijdt als Jesus Jerusalem ghenaecte, etc. (In the Time when Jesus Drew Nigh to Jerusalem, etc.), functions as an appendix to the Tweede deel van hooft ende hert-sorghe (Second Part of the Concerns of Head and Heart).119 Possibly composed in the 1560s but published only in 118 Ibidem, fol. 89r: ‘Dit verminderen van sonden, ende dit vermeerderen van deughden, is inder waerheydt het quaet laten ende het goede hanteren, ‘twelck ware vorderinghe is opten wegh des levens: Soude dat oock in yemanden moghen zijn buyten zijn ondervinden, ghevoelen, ende weten? Soo yemandt gaet den rechten wech van d’eene Stadt tot een ander, die hy beyde magh zien: Hoe ist moghelijck, dat hy voortgaende niet en soude zien, dat die Stadt daer van hy gaet, kleynder, ende wederom de stadt daer toe hy gaet, grooter wert in zijnen ooghen? Alsoo ist mede onmoghelijck dat die Christen op den wegh des levens, gaende van de werelt nae’t Hemelsche Jerusalem, niet en soude mercken dat die werelt kleyn ende die Stadt Gods groot wort in zijn ooghen’. 119 On the Hooft en hert-sorghe, see Veen P.A.F. van, “Enkele opmerkingen bij de rijmen in Coornherts Wellevenskunste”, De nieuwe taalgids 43 (1950) 168–173; Veldman I.M.,

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1606, this short text argues that anyone who listens attentively to the word of the Lord, paying close attention, we may presume, to the parables that cluster in this chapter – that of the barren fig tree, of the laborers in the vineyard, and of the unjust husbandmen – will visualise how Christ made his way to Jerusalem, site of his impending Passion. To listen to his words is to journey to this place, with one’s eyes fixed fervently, like his, on the distant city that prefigures, as if in a vision, the future peace of God and men (‘ende alsoo inne te rijden in Jerusalem – ghesichte des vreden – daer op henluyden starrende ooghen met verlanghen zijn ghevestiget’).120 It is also to depart from one’s false assumptions (‘uyt heur eyghen goetduncken treden’) by cleaving attentively to Christ’s words (‘onderdanichijck in haer Meesters woorden blijven’).121 Most importantly, it involves opening oneself to Christ (‘ontblotinge van hem selve’) or, better, conforming oneself to him (‘een goede wandel der Christformighen menschen’), so that his transforming words – namely, his parables – are taken to heart:122 […] but where God himself graciously speaks, and humankind assiduously learns, there will the man who listens and learns become learned and wise; all who are thus drawn by the Father, and thereby truly understand that Jesus is the Christ, go out of themselves to Christ, who appears before them as if they were lost sons and offers himself freely as the light of understanding and the bread of living power […].123 By situating Christ’s words in the context of his final journey to Jerusalem, associating them with images of voyaging to a distant place, and explicitly viewing them through a parabolic lens (the parable of the lost son), Coornhert

120 121 122 123

“Coornhert en de prentkunst”, in Bonger H. (ed.), Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert. Dwars maar recht (Zutphen: 1989) 115–143, esp. 120; and idem, The Life and Work of Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert, ed. – trans. G. Voogt, Studies in the History of Ideas in the Low Countries (Amsterdam – New York: 2004) 159. Coornhert Dirck Volckertsz., In dien tijdt als Jesus Ierusalem ghenaecte, etc., in III. Deel van Dirck Volckersz Coornherts Wercken, fol. 414v. Ibidem, fol. 414r. Ibidem, fol. 414v. Ibidem, fol. 414r: ‘[…] maer soo waer God selve ghenadelijck spreeckt, ende de mensche aendachtelijk hoort, ende daer God selve onderwijst, ende de mensche neerstelijck leert, daer wert de hoorende ende de leerende mensche verstandigh ende gheleert, alle die alsoo ghetrocken zijn van den Vader, en nu waerachtlijc daer door verstaen dat Jesus is Christus, die gaen oock inder waerheydt uyt heur selven tot Christum, de welcke henluyden als verlooren Soonen voor komt ende sigh selve om niet henluyden aenbiedet tot een Licht des verstandenissen, ende Broodt des levendighen krachten […]’.

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responds to Matthew 21 in the manner of Bol’s Parable of the Barren Fig Tree, Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, and Parable of the Unjust Husbandmen [Figs. 2.5, 2.11, 2.12]. Like Bol, he is prompted by Christ’s words to visualise farflung places the Savior may be imagined traversing as he strides to meet his fate. These places, suggests Coornhert, are contemporary with the world wherein we familiarly roam (‘inde Werelt’), but which we shall merely pass through, rather than fixedly inhabit, if we join Christ in striving after Jerusalem. And again like Bol, Coornhert contrasts the aspiration of journeying with Christ, with Pharisaic recalcitrance: ‘[…] what avails it that Christ is come into the world, if he comes not into my soul’?124 Similar images and tropes pervade Coornhert’s great treatise on Christian ethics, the Zedekunst, dat is wellevenskunste, vermids waarheyds kennisse vanden mensche, vande zonden ende vande dueghden (The Moral Art, that is, the Art of Living Well, through Man’s Knowledge of Truth, of Sins, and of Virtues), first published in Gouda in 1586, just a year after the Emblemata Evangelica.125 Redene (‘reason’), its nature, workings, and moral purpose, take center stage early in the treatise. Coornhert describes it as a visual faculty, calling reason the ‘mind’s vision’ (‘een ghezichte des gemoeds’); on this basis, he then compares its operation to the viewing of a landscape, in which reason searches for the right path leading to virtue and goodness (‘den rechten wegh, tot verkryghighe van ‘tgoede leedende’), and endeavors to avoid the shadowy, convoluted paths leading to the mere semblance of righteousness (‘met moeyelycke verwerringhen op duystere onweghen […] alzo afleedende vant ware tot het valsche ghoed’).126 The faculty of reason is discursive: For where reason sets to work, there thought busily ventures to discover things unknown, in what is known. It springs and gambols from one thing to the next, gazes now at this, now at that, searching out the good and the true. […] In springing and gamboling, it wanders to and fro (which one commonly designates ‘discourse’ or ‘consideration’); reason journeys 124 Ibidem: ‘wat baet my doch dat Christus inde Werelt is ghekomen, als hy niet en is ghekomen in mijn siele’? 125 On the Wellevenskunst, see Brink J. ten, Dirck Volckertsen Coornhert en zijne Wellevenskunst. Historiesch-Ethische Studie (Amsterdam: 1860) xxi–xxx, 151–86; and Becker B. (ed.), D.V. Coornhert, Zedekunst dat is wellevenskunst (Leiden: 1942; reprint ed., Utrecht: 1982) vii–xxx, 11; Fleurkens, Stichtelijke lust 76, 148, 170, 174, 186, 215, 236–237, 247, 262, 268, 324, 330, 334–335, 341–342, 374, 380; Voogt, Constraint on Trial 66, 68, 77, 125, 132, 150, 157, 204, 228; and Bonger, Life and Work of Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert 157–174 passim. 126 Coornhert Dirck Volckertsz., Zedekunst, dat is Wellevenskunste, vermids waarheyds kennisse vanden mensche, vande zonden ende vande dueghden nu alder eerst beschreven int Neerlandsch, ed. B. Becker, Leidsche drukkken en herdrukken 3 (Leiden: 1942) 107–108.

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through methods and proofs, drawing proof from disavowal, thence to approval and affirmation, as in ‘’tis night or day’: being not night (disavowal), it must needs be day (affirmation). It also draws proof from avowal leading to disavowal.127 Reason, on this account, is exercised when one attentively surveys whatever is visible to the eyes (‘andachtelyck en merckt opten eyghenschappe ende aard der dinghen’), passing through, as if traversing, the nature and properties of the things one sees (‘die de redene int doorlopen der zelve hem is verthoonende ende voor oghen stellende’).128 Accordingly, good counsel, when properly exercised, distinguishes amongst a multitude of pathways (‘vande verscheyden weghen voor hem legghende de recht wegh’), showing how to get from dark places into the light, from wild to well-ordered places (‘dan verstreckt zy een licht inde duysternissen ende een wegh des wets inde wildernissen’).129 Coornhert offers cognitive categories and terminology that invite application to Bol’s parabolic landscapes: attentive viewing of these landscapes, which involves moving to and fro, here and there, discovering things familiar and unfamiliar, finding one’s way to those protagonists and circumstances the parable portrays as good, or those it portrays as bad, and pondering how and why they are diffused into the panoramic setting, can be seen in Coornhert’s terms as representing the functional operation of reason. Seen in this way, looking at the landscape is one and the same as decoding the parable, surveying its lineaments, reasoning one’s way through it. The parallel I have tried to draw between Coornhert’s Zedekunst and Bol’s Emblemata is further licensed by Coornhert’s assertion that reason, in producing wisdom, fashions as image of the truth. Reason cognises by means of images, and when misused or poorly exercised, it approves or even substitutes a false image for the true: ‘No, indeed, that would be a tricksy wisdom, which leaves a man to his iniquity, under the deceptive appearance of virtue, comparable to beholding a well painted image of food that yet leaves the hungry 127 Ibidem: ‘Want waar de reden int werck is, daar zyn de ghedachten onledigh om uyt eenighe bekende dinghen andere die onbekent zyn, na te spueren. Zy springt of huppelt vant een opt ander. Daar anschouwt zy nu ditte, dan datte, onderzoeckene wat ghoed is ende waarachtigh…. In zulck huppelen ende springhen, herwaarts ende ghins lopende (twelckmen ghemeynlyck nu noemt discoureren, dats redenpleghen), wandert de reden door alle middelen van bewyzinghen. Zy neemt hare blycken vant lochenen tot het toestemmen of ja zegghen, als: tis nacht of tis dagh. Ten is gheen nacht (dits het lochenen), dus ist dagh (dits het toestemmen). Zy neemt oock hare blycken vant ochenen tot het lochenen’. 128 Ibidem 115. 129 Ibidem 115, 109.

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man in his former hunger, empty and undernourished’.130 Coornhert’s claim that reason puts forth a true image of virtue coincides with Bol’s attempt to picture parabolic landscapes that mobilise the eyes in the way that reason, as described by Coornhert, activates the mind: But very few men discern which is the right way that leads to a good life, as one can see from the infinite varieties of pathway, as many and various as the men who variously select and traverse them, this one choosing one, that one another. That the great majority of travelers pays no heed to the path they walk, or whether it be the right way or the wrong, reveals how obstinately they advance along these various paths, especially when we consider that there is only one true way, and that if every traveller were to recognize these other ways as wrong, they would forsake them and search after the right path.131 Bol’s figure of Christ, journeying through the world, parabolising it, pointing the way forward, offers himself as a paradigm for every Christian voyager desirous of walking with him, and an antidote to every restive wanderer’s impulse to stray from the Lord. The panoramic, parabolic landscapes become sacramental media, passage through which enables the spiritual traveler to draw closer to Christ. Bibliography Aerts L., Gottesherrschaft als Gleichnis? Eine Untersuchung zur Auslegung der Gleichnisse Jesu nach Eberhard Jünge, Ph.D. dissertation (Rome: Pontifical Università Gregoriana, 1990). Backus I., “Deux cas d’évolution théologique dans les ‘Paraphrases’ d’Érasme: La version inédite du fragment de la ‘Paraphrase sur Matthieu’ (1521) et de l’Épître à Ferdinand

130 Ibidem, 179–180: ‘O neen, dat waar een toversche wysheyd, die onder eenen bedrieghlycken schyn van dueghde den mensche in zyn ongherechticheyd zoude laten, niet anders dan het anschouwen van welgheschilderde spyze den hongerighen mensche als te voren in zynen hongher ydel ende onverzaadt laten zoude’. 131 Ibidem 205: ‘Dat oock weynigh menschen acht slaan op haren wegh die zy bewanderen, of die de rechte zy dan niet, ontdeckt ons de hardneckighe voortghang van zo groote menighte ghanghers op zo verscheyden weghen, ghemerckt daar maar een eenighe rechte wegh is, ende al d’andere zo zy op hueren wegh merckten, elck hueren onwegh voor zulx verstaan, die verlaten ende na den rechten wegh zoecken zouden’.

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(1522)”, in Chomarat J. – Godin A. – Margolin J.-C. (eds.), Actes du Colloque inter­ national Érasme (Tours, 1986) (Geneva: 1990) 141–151. Backus I., “Jesus and His Family in Erasmus’ Paraphrases on Luke and John”, in Pabel H.M. – Vessey M. (eds.), Holy Scripture Speaks: The Production and Reception of Erasmus’ Paraphrases on the New Testament (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 2002) 151–174. Bainton R.H., “The Paraphrases of Erasmus”, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 57 (1966) 67–76. Banschbach Eggen R., Gleichnis, Allegorie, Metapher: zur Theorie und Praxis der Gleichnisauslegung (Tübingen: 2007). Bateman J.J., “From Soul to Soul: Persuasion in Erasmus’s Paraphrases on the New Testament”, Erasmus in English 15 (1987–1988) 7–27. Bauer B., Jesuitische ars rhetorica im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe (Frankfurt am Main – Bern – New York: 1986). Becker B.B., “Nogmaals datering van Coornherts dialogen”, Spiegel der Letteren 7 (1963– 1964) 119–128. Biblia Sacra cum Glossa ordinaria, 6 vols. (Antwerp, Apud Ioannem Keerbergium: 1618). Black M., “The Parables as Allegory”, Bulletin of The John Rylands Library Manchester 42 (1959–1960) 273–287. Bloemendal J., “Erasmus’ Paraphrases on the New Testament – Introduction”, Erasmus Studies 36 (2016) 105–122. Bloemendal J., “Exegesis and Hermeneutics in Erasmus’ Paraphrases on Luke”, Erasmus Studies 36 (2016) 148–162. Blomberg C.L., Interpreting the Parables (Downers Grove, IL: 1990). Bonger H., The Life and Work of Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert, ed. – trans. G. Voogt, Studies in the History of Ideas in the Low Countries (Amsterdam – New York: 2004). Bonger H. (ed.), Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert. Dwars maar recht (Zutphen: 1989). Brink J. ten, Dirck Volckertsen Coornhert en zijne Wellevenskunst. Historiesch-Ethische Studie (Amsterdam: 1860). Bruun M.B., Parables: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Mapping of Spiritual Topography, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 148 (Leiden – Boston: 2007). Castelein Matthijs de, De const van rhetoriken (Ghent, Jan Cauwel: 1555). Chomarat J., Grammaire et rhétorique chez Érasme, 2 vols. (Paris: 1981). Chomarat J., “Grammar and Rhetoric in the Paraphrases of the Gospels by Erasmus”, Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook 1 (1982) 30–68. Christ-von Wedel C., Erasmus of Rotterdam: Advocate of a New Christianity (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 2013). Coigneau D., “Matthijs de Castelein (1485?–1550)”, Jaarboek De Fonteine (1985–1986) 7–13.

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Conley T.M., Rhetoric in the European Tradition (Chicago and London: 1990). Coornhert Dirck Volckertsz., Het Kruyt-Hofken. Van stichtelijcke gespraken, in desen tyden tusschen verscheyden personen, op verscheyden plaetsen, ende van verscheyden Religions-saken ghevallen, vol trouwe waerschouwinghen voor menichvuldige dolingen, huysdendaechs loop hebbende., in III. Deel van Dirck Volckersz. Coornherts Wercken waer van eenige noyt van eenige noyt voor desen gedruckt zyn. (Amsterdam, Jacob Aertsz. Colom: 1630). Coornhert Dirck Volckertsz., In dien tijdt als Jesus Ierusalem ghenaecte, etc., in III. Deel van Dirck Volckersz Coornherts Wercken waer van eenige noyt van eenige noyt voor desen gedruckt zyn. (Amsterdam, Jacob Aertsz. Colom: 1630). Coornhert Dirck Volckertsz., Zedekunst, dat is Wellevenskunste, vermids waarheyds kennisse vanden mensche, vande zonden ende vande dueghden nu alder eerst beschreven int Neerlandsch, ed. D. Bruno Becker, Leidsche drukkken en herdrukken 3 (Leiden: 1942). Cottier J.-F., “L’Exhortatio ad studium evangelicae lectionis: Èrasme Paraphraste et son lecteur”, Moreana 39.150 (2002) 21–38. Cottier J.-F., “Genèse d’une écriture: Érasme et la généalogie du Christ: A propos du fragment inédit de la Paraphrase sur Matthieu”, in Deproost P.-A. – Maurant A., Images d’origines, origines d’une image: Hommages à Jacques Poucet (Louvain-la-Neuve: 2004) 429–444. Cottier J.-F., “Les Paraphrases sur les Évangiles d’Érasme: Le latin, instrument de vulgarisation des Ecritures”, in Bury E. (ed.), Tous vos gens à latin: Le latin, langue savante, langue mondaine (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles) (Geneva: 2005) 331–345. Cottier J.-F., “La théorie du genre de la paraphrase selon Érasme”, in Ferrer V. – Mantero A. (eds.), Les paraphrases bibliques aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Geneva: 2006) 45–58. Cottier J.-F., “Lucernam accendere in meridie? Du bon usage de la paraphrase biblique selon Érasme”, in François W. – Den Hollander A. (eds.), Infant Milk or Hardy Nourishment? The Bible for Lay People and Theologians in the Modern Period (Leuven: 2009) 65–86. Cottier J.-F., “Erasmus’s Paraphrases: A ‘New Kind of Commentary’?”, in Henderson J.R. (ed.), The Unfolding of Words: Commentary in the Age of Erasmus (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 2012) 27–46. Cottier J.-F., “Four Paraphrases and a Gospel: How to Rewrite without Repeating Yourself”, Erasmus Studies 36 (2016) 131–147. Diels A. – Leesberg M. (comps.), Leesberg – Balis A. (eds.), The New Hollstein Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings, and Woodcuts, 1450–1700: The Collaert Dynasty, 8 vols. (Ouderkerk aan den Ijssel: 2005–2006). Dodd C.H., The Parables of the Kingdom (New York: 1936). Drury J., The Parables in the Gospels: History and Allegory (New York: 1989).

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Erasmus Desiderius, In Evangelium Lucae Paraphrasis Erasmi Roterdami per autorem recognita (Basil, Johannes Frobenius: 1526). Erasmus Desiderius, In Evangelium Marci Paraphrasis (Basil, Johannes Frobenius: 1534). Erasmus Desiderius, Paraphrasis Des. Erasmi Rot. in Evangelium Joannis (Lyon, Sebastianus Gryphius: 1542). Erasmus Desiderius, In Evangelium Matthaei D. Erasmi Rot. Paraphrasis (Lyon, Sebastianus Gryphius: 1544). Fernandes Pereira B., Retórica e eloquencia em Portugal na época do Rinacimento (Coimbra: 2005). Fleurkens A.C.G., Stichtelijke lust. De toneelspelen van D.V. Coornhert (1522–1590) als middelen tot het geven van morele instructie (Hilversum: 1994). Flynn L.J., S.J., “The De arte rhetorica of Cyprian Soarez, S.J.”, Quarterly Journal of Speech 42 (1956) 367–374. Flynn L.J., S.J., “Sources and Influence of Soarez’s De arte rhetorica’”, Quarterly Journal of Speech 43 (1957) 257–265. Fumaroli M., “Définition et description: scolastique et rhétorique chez les Jésuites des XVIe et XVIIe siècles”, Travaux de linguistique et de littérature 18 (1980) 37–48. Geeraerts D., “De dialogen van D.V. Coornhert. Een vergelijkend onderzoek”, Spiegel der letteren 2 (1958) 241–255. Geeraerts D., “In margine. De dialogen van D.V. Coornhert: Poging tot datering”, Spiegel der Letteren 5 (1961) 37–47. Harnisch W., Die Gleichniserzählungen Jesu: eine hermeneutische Einführung (Göttingen: 1985). Hautekeete S., Emblemata Evangelica, Hans Bol, exh. cat., Koninklijke Bibliotheek van België (Brussels: 2015). Hendrick C.W., Parables as Poetic Fictions: The Creative Voice of Jesus (Peabody, MA: 1994) 3–72. Holeczek H., “Die deutschen Ausgaben der Erasmusparaphrasen und die Vorrede zur Matthaeusparaphrase”, in Holeczek, Erasmus Deutsch 1: Die volkssprachliche Rezeption des Erasmus von Rotterdam in der reformatorischen Öffentlichkeit 1519–1536 (Stuttgart – Bad Cannstatt: 1983) 109–128. Hultgren A.J., The Parables of Jesus: A Commentary (Grand Rapids: 2002). Iansen S.A.P.J.H., “Speurtocht naar het leven van Matthijs Castelein. Archivalia en onzekerheden”, Verslagen en mededelingen der koninklijke Vlaamse academie voor taal- en letterkunde (nieuwe reeks) (1970) 321–446. Jeremias J., The Parables of Jesus, trans. S.H. Hooke (London: 1954; revised ed., New York: 1972). Jones I.H., The Matthean Parables: A Literary and Historical Commentary (Leiden – New York – Cologne: 1995).

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Jülicher A., Die Gleichnisreden Jesu, 2 vols. (Freiburg im Breisgau: 1886; reprint ed., 1899). Klauch H.J., Allegorie und Allegorese in synoptischen Gleichnistexten (Münster: 1978). Krüger F., Humanistische Evangelienauslegung: Desiderius Erasmus von Rotterdam als Ausleger der Evangelien in seinen Paraphrases, Beiträge zur historischen Theologie 68 (Tübingen: 1986). Linnemann E., Parables of Jesus: Introduction and Exposition (London: 1966; reprint ed., 1971). Mack P., A History of Renaissance Rhetoric, 1380–1625 (Oxford: 2011). McNeile A.H., The Gospel According to St. Matthew (London: 1915). Mell U., Die Zeit der Gottesherrschaft: Zur Allegorie und Gleichnis von Markus 4,1–9 (Stuttgart: 1998). Meurer H.-J., Die Gleichnisse Jesu als Metaphern: Paul Ricoeurs Hermeneutik der Gleichniserzählung Jesu im Horizont des Symbols “Gottesherrschaft/Reich Gottes” (Bodenheim: 1997). Mielke U. – Hautekeete S. (comps.), Luijten G. (ed.), The New Hollstein Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings, and Woodcuts, 1450–1700: Hans Bol, 2 vols. (Ouderkerk aan den Ijssel: 2015). Mussem Jan van, Rhetorica, dye edele const van welsegghene (Antwerp, Weduwe van Henric Peetersen: 1553). Mynors R.A.B., “The Publication of the Latin Paraphrases”, in Sider R.D. (ed.), Collected Works of Erasmus 42: New Testament Scholarship – Paraphrases on Romans and Galatians (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 1984) xx–xxix. Payne J.B. – Rabil A., Jr. – Smith W.S., Jr., “The Paraphrases of Erasmus: Origin and Character”, in Sider R.D. (ed.), Collected Works of Erasmus 42: New Testament Scholarship – Paraphrases on Romans and Galatians (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 1984) ix–xix. Phillips J.E., “The Gospel, the Clergy, and the Laity in Erasmus’ Paraphrase on the Gospel of John”, Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook 10 (1990) 85–100. Phillips J.E., “Translator’s Note”, in Sider R.D. (ed.), Collected Works of Erasmus 46: New Testament Scholarship – Paraphrase on John, trans. J.E. Phillips (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 1991) xi–xvi. Phillips J.E., “Food and Drink in Erasmus’s Gospel Paraphrases”, Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook 14 (1994) 24–45. Phillips J.E., “On the Road to Emmaus: Erasmus’ Paraphrase of Luke 24:27”, Erasmus of Rotterdam Yearbook 22 (2002) 68–80. Phillips J.E., “Sub evangelistae persona: The Speaking Voice in Erasmus’ Paraphrase on Luke”, in Pabel H.M. – Vessey M. (eds.), Holy Scripture Speaks: The Production and Reception of Erasmus’ Paraphrases on the New Testament (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 2002) 127–150.

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Phillips J.E., “Translator’s Note”, in Sider R.D. (ed.), Collected Works of Erasmus 47: New Testament Scholarship – Paraphrase on Luke 1–10, trans. J.E. Phillips (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 2016) xiii–xix. Rabil A., Jr., Erasmus and the New Testament: The Mind of a Christian Humanist, Monograph Series in Religion 1 (San Antonio: 1972). Rabil A., Jr., “Erasmus’ Paraphrases of the New Testament”, in DeMolen R.L. (ed.), Essays on the Works of Erasmus (New Haven – London: 1978) 145–161. Rabil A., Jr., “Erasmus’ Paraphrase of the Gospel of John”, Church History 48 (1979) 142–155. Rice Henderson J., “Editor’s Addendum: Translating an Erasmian Definition of Paraphrase”, in Rice Henderson (ed.), The Unfolding of Words: Commentary in the Age of Erasmus (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 2012) 46–54. Rollinson P., Classical Theories of Allegory and Christian Culture (Pittsburgh: 1981). Roussel B., “Exegetical Fictions? Biblical Paraphrases of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries”, in Pabel H.M. – Vessey M. (eds.), Holy Scripture Speaks: The Production and Reception of Erasmus’ Paraphrases on the New Testament (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 2002) 59–83. Rummel E., Erasmus’ Annotations on the New Testament: From Philologist to Theologian, Erasmus Studies 8 (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 1986). Rummel E., “Preface” and “Translator’s Note,” in Robert D. Sider, ed., Collected Works of Erasmus 49: New Testament Scholarship – Paraphrase on Mark, trans. and annot., Erika Rummel (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 1988), ix–x, xi–xiv. Schlingensiepen H., “Erasmus als Exeget auf Grund seiner Schriften zu Matthäus”, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 48, N.S, 2 (1929) 16–57. Sider R.D., “‘In terms quite plain and clear’: The Exposition of Grace in the New Testament Paraphrases of Erasmus”, Erasmus in English 15 (1987–1988) 16–25. Sider R.D., “Preface”, in Sider (ed.), Collected Works of Erasmus 46: New Testament Scholarship – Paraphrase on John, trans. J.E. Phillips (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 1991) ix–x. Sider R.D. – Simpson D., “Preface”, in Sider (ed.), Collected Works of Erasmus 45: New Testament Scholarship – Paraphrase on Matthew, trans. D. Simpson (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 2008) ix–xvi. Sider R.D. – Simpson D., “Preface”, in Sider (ed.), Collected Works of Erasmus 47: New Testament Scholarship – Paraphrase on Luke 1–10, trans. J.E. Phillips (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 2016) ix–xi. Sider R.D. (ed.), Collected Works of Erasmus 49: New Testament Scholarship – Paraphrase on Mark, trans. – annot., E. Rummel (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 1988). Sider R.D. (ed.), Collected Works of Erasmus 46: New Testament Scholarship – Paraphrase on John, trans. J.E. Phillips (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 1991).

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Sider R.D. (ed.), Collected Works of Erasmus 45: New Testament Scholarship – Paraphrase on Matthew, trans. D. Simpson (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 2008). Sider R.D. (ed.), Collected Works of Erasmus 47: New Testament Scholarship – Paraphrase on Luke 1–10, trans. J.E. Phillips (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 2016). Soarez Cyprian. De arte rhetorica libri tres ex Aristotele, Cicerone, et Quinctiliano praecipue deprompti (Coimbra, Apud Ioannem Barrerium: 1562; reprint ed., Cologne, Apud Gosvinum Cholinum: 1581). Spies M., Rhetoric, Rhetoricians, and Poets: Studies in Renaissance Poetry and Poetics, eds. H. Duits – T. van Strien (Amsterdam: 1999). Stuiveling G., “Schaken met De Castelein”, Spiegel der Letteren 7 (1963–1964) 161–184. Vanderheyden J.F., “Jan van Mussem I”, Verslagen en mededelingen der koninklijke Vlaamse academie voor taal- en letterkunde (1952) 289–306; “Jan van Mussem II”, 923–948. Vanderheyden J.F., “De Rhetorica van Jan van Mussem ‘ghecolligiert wt …’,” Verslagen en mededelingen der koninklijke Vlaamse academie voor taal- en letterkunde (nieuwe reeks) (1975): 173–233. Vanderheyden J.F., “De status van Jan van Mussem en zijn Rhetorica,” Verslagen en mededelingen der koninklijke Vlaamse academie voor taal- en letterkunde (nieuwe reeks) (1977): 13–54. Veen P.A.F. van. “Enkele opmerkingen bij de rijmen in Coornherts Wellevenskunste”, De nieuwe taalgids 43 (1950) 168–173. Veldman I.M., “Coornhert en de prentkunst”, in Bonger H. (ed.), Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert. Dwars maar recht (Zutphen: 1989) 115–143. Veldman I.M., De wereld tussen Goed en Kwaad, exh. cat., Stedelijke Musea, Gouda (The Hague: SDU Uitgeverij, 1990). Vessey M., “The Tongue and the Book: Erasmus’ Paraphrases on the New Testament and the Arts of Scripture”, in Pabel H.M. – Vessey M. (eds.), Holy Scripture Speaks: The Production and Reception of Erasmus’ Paraphrases on the New Testament (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 2002) 29–58. Voogt G., Constraint on Trial: Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert and Religious Freedom, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 52 (Kirksville, MO: 2000). Wailes S.L., “Why did Jesus Use Parables? The Medieval Discussion”, Medievalia et Humanistica, n.s. 13 (1985) 43–64. Wailes S.L., Medieval Allegories of Jesus’ Parables (Berkeley – Los Angeles – London: 1987). Weder Hans, Die Gleichnisse Jesu als Metaphern: Traditions- und redaktionsgeschichtliche Analysen und Interpretationen (Göttingen: 1980). Weder Hans, “Wirksame Wahrheit: Zur metaphorischen Qualität der Gleichnisrede Jesus,” in Weder (ed.), Die Sprache der Bilder: Gleichnis und Metapher in Literatur und Theologie (Gütersloh: 1989), 110–127.

PART 2 Constructions of Identity: Landscapes and the Description of Reality

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Chapter 3

Landscape Description and the Hermeneutics of Neo-Latin Autobiography: The Case of Jacopo Sannazaro Karl Enenkel Landscape description as a part of autobiography seems to be a novelty of Renaissance humanism. Such descriptions occur in a number of autobiographies of leading humanists, such as Petrarch, Enea Silvio Piccolomini (Pius II), Michael Marules, Giannantonio Campano, Giovanni Pontano, Eobanus Hessus, Petrus Lotichius Secundus, and Jacopo Sannazaro; actually, there are many more examples, also from minor humanists, such as Joannes Fabricius (Schmid) from the Elsaß, the Austrian nobleman Sigmund von Herberstein, or the Belgian Jacques de Slupere.1 The memoirs (Commentarii) of Pius II abound in descriptions of various Italian landscapes and cityscapes – the pope presents himself as a restless campaigner travelling through Italy;2 the very father of humanism, Francis Petrarch, depicts himself as a solitary dweller in the woods of the valley of Vaucluse in Provence;3 Michael Marules is a poor exile, wandering through the endless steppes of Asia until he reaches the utmost North, the Riphaean mountains;4 and so on. What is the reason why these and other humanists constituted themselves in landscapes? It is tempting to think that this is due to the programme of ‘the discovery of man and the world’, ascribed by Burckhardt to the Renaissance as a pivotal element of its mindset. Are the descriptions the result of a kind of inherent realism? Do these humanists describe the landscapes in which they lived, simply because 1 For humanist autobiography, see my Die Erfindung des Menschen. Die Autobiographik des frühneuzeitlichen Humanismus von Petrarca bis Lipsius (Berlin – New York: 2008), with further bibliographical references. For the description of landscapes and its importance for humanist autobiography cf. especially the parts on Petrarch (40–107), Enea Silvio Piccolomini (266–329), Giannantonio Campano (229–249), Eobanus Hessus (429–449), Jacopo Sannazaro (513–545), Jacques de Slupere (619–640), and Hans Schmid (575–618). 2 Cf. Enenkel, Die Autobiographik des frühneuzeitlichen Humanismus 304 ff. 3 Cf. inter alia my “Petrarch’s Constructions of the Sacred Place in De vita solitaria and Other Writings”, in Enenkel K.A.E. – Göttler Ch. (eds.), Solitudo. Spaces, Places, and Times of Solitude in Late Medieval and Early Modern Cultures, Intersections. Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture 56 (Leiden – Boston: 2018) 31–80. 4 Cf. Enenkel, Die Autobiographik des frühneuzeitlichen Humanismus 368 ff.

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they ‘perceived’ them and could not help describing them, as they were inclined to describe everything they saw? This seems unlikely, even in the case of such a maniacal describer as Pius II, as I have tried to show in my monograph Die Autobiographik des frühneuzeitlichen Humanismus.5 Or were the landscape descriptions triggered by new types of identity formation, whether new national, regional, or local identities,6 or intellectual (e.g., humanist) or confessional ones? For example, between 1508 and 1530 the humanists Desiderius Erasmus, Cornelius Aurelius, and Gerard Geldenhouwer created a new Dutch national viz. regional identity, which they legitimized through the reconstruction of ancient “Batavia”.7 Erasmus described Holland as one of the richest, most prosperous and urban areas of Europe, where the cities excelled in ‘elegant’ architecture. Nowhere in the world, says Erasmus, is there a greater proportion of well-educated, civilized people. One thing is assured: in humanist autobiographies the descriptions of landscapes and places are never casual, accidental, or ornamental, but instead are pivotal for the self-presentation of the authors, albeit in various ways. This contribution inquires into the hermeneutics of humanist self-presentation in terms of landscape. It intends to analyse the literary devices and strategies that the humanists applied, and tries to understand the meaning of landscape descriptions in autobiographical writing. The ‘Verlandschaftung’ (landscaping)8 of the humanist persona has, as I hope to demonstrate in the present case study, a certain ‘Sitz im Leben’: it aims to secure acceptance in the Republic of Letters through the self-fashioning and self-authorization of the described persona as a Neo-Latin writer. My example is one of the most admired Neo-Latin and Italian poets of the 16th century, Jacopo Sannazaro (1457–1530), who exerted his influence on both sides of the Alps, and in both Latin and vernacular poetry, and who was also an outstanding humanist scholar, president of the Academy of Naples, respected nobleman, diplomat, and secretary to the duke of Calabria and the king of Naples [Fig. 3.1]. Sannazaro was very much attached to Naples as a centre 5 In the sections “Papst und Caesar: Pontifikatsgeschichte als Feldherrendiskurs oder die Maximierung der Evidenzrede” (312–319), and “Enea und Aeneas: hermeneutische ‚Erlebnisse‛ oder Einschreiben in den epischen Diskurs” (319–329). 6 For the construction of national, regional, or local identities cf. Enenkel K.A.E. – Ottenheym K.A., Ambitious Antiquities, Famous Forbears. Constructions of a Glorious Past in the Early Modern Netherlands and in Europe (Leiden – Boston: 2020); idem (eds.), The Quest for an Appropriate Past in Literature, Art and Architecture, Intersections. Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture 60 (Leiden – Boston: 2019). 7 Cf. my “The Batavians as ancestors in Early Dutch Humanism: Erasmus, Aurelius and Geldenhouwer”, chapter 6 of Enenkel – Ottenheym, Ambitious Antiquities, Famous Forbears. 8 I coined this terminus in Die Autobiographik des frühneuzeitlichen Humanismus 513 (“Verlandschaftung des Ichs”).

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FIGURE 3.1 Titian, portrait of Sannazaro. Oil on canvas, 85.7 × 72.7 cm Picture Gallery, Buckingham Palace

of humanist culture, which is connected with his positions at both the royal court and the humanist Academy. Sannazaro excelled in almost all genres of Latin poetry: lyric, epigram, bucolic, elegy, and epos. To his collection of elegies, which he edited and finished during the last years of his life, he added an autobiography (Elegy III, 2), in which he describes his entire life right up until the days of the work’s composition, and which he ends in a melancholic way, with an image of his grave. His female friend Cassandra Marchese, a noblewoman of Naples to whom he dedicated his autobiography, is supposed to take care of his grave.

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Sannazaro’s autobiography begins with a description of a landscape in the mountains of the Picentino, where the castle of his grandfather, Baldassare di Santo Mango, baron of San Mango, Filetta, San Cipriano, and Castiglione, was situated:9 1 Est Picentinos inter pulcherrima montes Vallis; habet patrios hic pia turba deos. Quam super, hinc caelo surgens Cerretia rupes Pendet: at huic nomen Cerrea sylva dedit. 5 Parte alia sacrae respondent saxa Tebennae, Quique rigens Merulae nomine gaudet apex. Et circum nigra late nemus accubat umbra, Plurima qua riguis effluit unda iugis, Semiferi, si vera canunt, domus horrida Fauni, 10 Convectant avidae quo sua lustra ferae. Accipit hic tergo formosum bucula taurum, Accipit immundum sima capella marem. Mille tori Dryadum, Satyrorum mille recessus, Antraque sylvicolae grata latebra deae. 15 Vivula nomen aquae, tenuique Subuncula rivo Et quae de gelida grandine dicta sonant. Huc mea me primis genitrix dum gestat ab annis, Deducens caro nupta novella patri, Adtulit indigenis secum sua munera divis, 20 In primis docto florea serta gregi.

There lies a most beautiful valley amid the Picentine mountains: here a devoted people venerates its ancestral gods. Above it, rising on this side to heaven, hangs the cliff of Cerretia; a forest of oak trees has given this its name. On the other side lie the holy rocks of Tebenna (Tubenna), and the rigid mountaintop that rejoices in the name Merola. Roundabout 9 For Sannazaro’s biography cf. Vecce C., “Sannazaro, Iacopo”, in Dizionario biografico degli Italiana 90 (2017), http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/iacopo-sannazaro_%28Dizionario -Biografico%29/; Kidwell C., Sannazaro and Arcadia (London: 1993); Percopo E., “Per la giovinezza del Sannazaro”, in Barbi M. (ed.), Miscellanea di studi critici in onore di Arturo Graf (Bergamo: 1903) 775–781; Percopo E., “Vita di Jacobo Sannazaro”, Archivio storico per le province napoletane, n.s., 17 (1931) 87–198; Corti M., “Sannazaro, Iacobo”, in Dizionario critico della letteratura italiana (Turin: 1986) 82–88; Kennedy W.J., Jacopo Sannazaro and the Uses of Pastoral (Hannover – New Hampshire – London: 1983) 10–27; Altamura A., Jacopo Sannazaro. Con appendici di documenti e testi inediti (Naples: 1951).

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the mountain rocks broods a broad forest blackly shaded, where bounteous torrents flow from the well-watered slopes. This, if they tell truly, is the dread dwelling of the half-wild Faunus, where greedy beasts gather in their lairs. Here the heifer receives on her back the handsome bull, the snub-nosed she-goat receives her squalid male. A thousand couches for Dryads, a thousand hideaways for Satyrs, and caves, happy retreats for the goddess who cherishes the woods. The water is called Acquavivola (Vivula) and Savoncola (Subuncula) with its lissom flow, and Gelidagrandine which got its name from frozen hail. When from my first years my mother, a young bride, carried me here, leading me to her dear father (i.e., Baldassare di Santo Mango), she brought her gifts with her for the native gods, above all garlands of flowers to the learned flock.10 In his autobiography, Sannazaro suggests that he passed his childhood and youth in this landscape. He entered it, as he says, in his earliest childhood (l. 17). He was born in July 1457 (not 1458);11 because he reports that his mother, Masella, was still a young bride (l. 18) when she brought him there, this must date to before October 1462, when Masella became a widow.12 Remarkably, Sannazaro does not mention that he stayed elsewhere in his childhood and youth; in his autobiography he appears still to have been dwelling in the known landscape when he finished his first major work, the Arcadia.13 Reading the autobiography, one gets the impression that he stayed in this landscape until 10 For the Latin text of Sannazaro’s works and English translation, see Jacopo Sannazaro, Latin Poetry. trans. C.J. Putnam, I Tatti Renaissance Library 38 (Cambridge, Mass. – London: 2009), 240–243 (Elegies III, 2). Here and henceforth the English translations are by Michael Putnam, unless otherwise indicated; here after Putnam’s translation, with a number of alterations. 11 For 1457 as the year of his birth, see Vecce, “Sannazaro”; cf. Corti M., “Ma quando è nato Iacobo Sannazaro?” in Aquilecchia G. – Cristea S.N. – Ralphs S. (eds.), Collected essays on Italian language and literature presented to Kathleen Speight (Manchester: 1971) 45–53; many times, Sannazaro’s year of birth is erroneously given as 1458. 12 And probably also before 1460 or 1459: Masella and Cola surely married at least one year before Sannazaro’s birth, i.e. in the middle of 1456 at the latest. For the date of the death of Sannazaro’s father on 7 October 1462, cf. Vecce, “Sannazaro”. 13 For the Arcadia, cf. the commented editions by Carlo Vecce: Sannazaro Iacopo, Arcadia. Introduzione e commento, I Classici italiani 26 (Rome: 2013), Helmuth Widhammer: Sannazaro Iacopo, Arcadia. Hrsg., übersetzt und kommentiert von Helmuth Widhammer (Stuttgart: 2018), and Erspamer F. (ed.), L’Arcadie. Édition critique. Introduction, traduction, notes et tables par G. Marino; avec une préface de Y. Bonnefoy (Paris: 2004). Cf. also Angela Caracciolo Aricò A. – Canfora D. (eds.), La Serenissima e il Regno. Nel V Centenario dell’Arcadia di Iacopo Sannazaro. Atti del Convegno di Studie (Bari – Venice 4–8 October 2004) (Bari: 2006).

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he composed his fisherman songs, Eclogae piscatoriae.14 In his autobiography, Sannazaro does not give any dates for his writings. The reader who has no information about their composition and publication dates from other sources naturally assumes that the poet composed his fisherman songs just after he finished his ‘pueritia’, i.e. as a young man, between the ages of 16 and 23. However, Sannazaro actually composed his fisherman songs in 1499, at the age of 42. The majority of Sannazaro’s biographers took his autobiographical narrative of Elegy III, 2 at face value, and this starts with the early biographers, such as the philosopher and historian Giovanni Battista Crispo (in Italian) and the Paduan professor of philology Giovanni Antonio Volpi (in Latin).15 Crispo (ca. 1558–ca. 1598) and Volpi (1686–1766) not only accepted but enriched it with another circumstantial and emotional narrative: according to Vulpius the poet was born under a bad star – in the year of his birth all kinds of prodigies and calamities occurred.16 In consequence, Sannazaro lost his father at a very young age, and the poor mother with her young sons became impoverished (‘[…] Donna [Masella] la quale costretta della povertà’).17 His mother could no longer afford to live in expensive Naples, so she left the town and lived with her boys out in the country, in the Picentino (‘in Picentinos concessit [sc. mater cum filiis]’).18 This country life was characterized by poverty and austerity (Volpi: ‘mater […] ibi [sc. in Picentinis] parce admodum continenterque vivebat’; Crispo: ‘parcamente vivendo’),19 and young Sannazaro became a country boy. The implication is that his life did not greatly differ from those of the local shepherds. Nevertheless, the boy genius had already started write back then: there, in the Picentino, as the biographers would have it, he began

14 Cf. Elegies III, 2, 53–58, Latin Poetry 244–245. 15 Giovanni Battista Crispo, Vita di Giacopo Sannazaro (Rome, Fracesco Coattino: 1593; letter of dedication to Aldo Manucci d.d. 1 May 1592), fol. r–v. Joannes Antonius Vulpius, Jacobi sive Actii Synceri Sannazarii Neapolitani viri patricii vita, in Sannazaro, Opera Latine scripta, ed. Janus Broukhusius (Amsterdam, widow of Gerard Onderdelinden: 1727) 491–530. For Crispo cf. Romano A., “Crispo, Giovanni Battista”, in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani 30 (1984), http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/giovan-battista-crispo_ (Dizionario-Biografico)/, and S. Catalano, Vita di G. B. C., in Io. Baptistae Pollidori frentani et Stephani Catalani gallipolitani opuscola nonnulla (Naples: 1793) 79–100; for Crispo’s biography of Sannazaro cf. Bianchi L., “Un gallipolino biografo di Jacopo Sannazaro”, Rinascenza Salentina, n.s., 10 (1942) 25–27, and Percopo, “Vita di Jacobo Sannazaro” 103, 115, 138, 161, 169, 171, and 175. 16 Vulpius, Sannazarii vita 495. 17 Crispo, Vita di Giacopo Sannazaro, fol. r. 18 Vulpius, Sannazarii vita 495. 19 Ibidem; Crispo, Vita di Giacopo Sannazaro, fol. v.

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composing the Arcadia.20 Its bucolic content seemed naturally to reflect young Sannazaro’s country life. It is true that the early biographers lacked precise information about its dates of composition. However, this was not their first concern: they were more interested in connecting the bucolic work with the poet’s country life in the Picentino. Thus, in the biographical narratives by Crispo and Vulpius, Sannazaro passed almost his entire childhood and youth in the countryside, from 1462 until about 1475 or 1476, and during that period he began to compose his Arcadia. However, the composition of the Arcadia is closely connected to Sannazaro’s engagement with the court of Alfonso of Aragon, duke of Calabria, and his close relationship with Ippolita Sforza, Alfonso’s wife, and this took place only in the 1480s. Sannazaro began the work in 1481, when he accompanied Alfonso on a military campaign in the north, probably during a stay in Ferrara.21 He finished the work (its first version, with the title Libro pastorale nominato Arcadio) in 1486 and presented a dedication copy to Ippolita Sforza. Sannazaro’s recent biographer Carol Kidwell (1993) is likewise inclined to take his autobiographical poems at face value, and she thinks along the same lines as Crispo and Vulpius. She even entitles her biography Sannazaro and Arcadia. She has mother Masella staying with the boys at the family estates for some five (or six) years, from around 1470 until 1474 or 1475, and thus, again, approximately until the end of his ‘pueritia’,22 from the age of 1223 or 13 until 17 or 18; she also thinks that young Sannazaro was already a writer then, and that he fell in love with a country girl. From the landscape description of Elegy I, 1 (see below) Kidwell deduces that ‘this elegy may have been written to his old teacher when the juvenile Sannazaro was living with his mother and brother in the Picentine mountains and writing parts of his Arcadia’.24 For KidweIl, the Arcadia ‘does read like the work of a gifted adolescent – as does much of Keats’s poetry. Adolescence brings with it the sort of distraught emotions 20 Ibidem: ‘parcamente vivendo, ove Giacomo diede principio al componimento della Arcadia’. 21 See Vecce, “Sannazaro”. 22 Kidwell, Sannazaro and Arcadia 4: ‘[…] Masella […] began to find Naples too expensive, so, around 1470, she took her two boys to the ancestral domain in the Picentine mountains north of Salerno. […] The family were still in the area nearby San Cipriano in 1474 […]’. Also, William Kennedy, in his Jacopo Sannazaro and the uses of the Pastoral 13, maintains that the poet’s country life lasted from 1469 to 1473. 23 Cf. ibidem 205 (note 15 to page 4): ‘I believe that they left Naples no earlier than 1470 so that Sannazaro would have been at least 12 years old […]’. With respect to this and other dates one must consider that Kidwell departs from the wrong date of Sannazaro’s birthday in 1458 instead of 1457 (cf. supra). 24 Ibidem 205 (note 13 to page 4), emphasis mine.

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described in the Arcadia, the insecurity, the feeling of failure, self-pity, the realisation of death […], the brooding melancholy, the desire to burst free and the heightened sensitivity to beauty accompanying the first stirrings of passion’. In a similar way, Kidwell takes an erotic sonnet of Sannazaro at face value, and deduces from it that he was ‘falling in love with a girl in the mountains at the end of his 16th year, i.e. in 1475’,25 thus experiencing in the mountains of the Picentino ‘the first stirrings of passion’. If one studies detailed maps of San Mango Piemonte, situated some 15 km to the north-east of Salerno, one understands that Sannazaro’s landscape description is based on realistic features: this is apparent not only from the historically correct names but also from the elements from which he builds up the landscape. North of San Mango there is indeed a long valley with dense oak forests; it lies between a rocky mountaintop to the left, the modern Monte Stella (934 metres), and the peak of Monte Merola to the right, which is backed by the rocks of Monte Tubenna [Figs. 3.2A and 3.2B, Fig. 3.3]. However, the impression that Sannazaro passed his childhood and youth there, which is also imposed on the reader through the title of the elegy, “Quod pueritiam egerit in Picentinis” (“That he passed his childhood/youth in the Picentine mountains”), is highly deceptive. In fact, for almost all of this period Sannazaro lived in the town of Naples. He only stayed on the estates of his grandfather in San Mango (and San Cipriano) sometimes for holidays, and additionally for a certain period when his mother Masella was troubled by economic difficulties after the death of her husband in 1462, and the family subsequently lost key possessions, such as the palace in Naples.26 However, shortly after this crisis she returned with her sons to Naples, where she found a new home in the palace of a relative, the nobleman Iacobetto Mormile. As early as 1468, after the death of his grandfather, the possessions of San Mango were confiscated by the crown of Naples, so it is very unlikely that the family stayed there for a substantial period after 1468. It was in Naples that young Sannazaro received his education in Latin grammar, rhetoric, and poetry from the humanists Lucio Crasso, a lecturer at the university of Naples and member of the Academia Pontaniana, and from Giuniano Maio, a nobleman and professor at the university of Naples (from 1456 to 1488). Sannazaro certainly did not grow up as a country boy, but in the highly cultivated atmosphere of urban humanism, with close ties to the university of Naples, the Aragonese court, and the humanist Academy of Naples. 25 26

Ibidem (note 17 to page 4); the poem is Rime I, 21, in Opere volgari, ed. Mauro (Bari: 1961). For these and other details, cf. Percopo, “Per la giovinezza del Sannazaro”; idem, Vita di Jacopo Sannazaro.

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FIGURE 3.2A

Monte Stella (left), Monte Merola (middle), and Monte Tubenna (right), on the slopes of the hills and in the valleys are woods with holm oaks https://www.risorseimmobiliari.it/salerno/vendita-castello-san-cipriano -picentino-3693327.html

FIGURE 3.2B

Road map of San Mango with Monte Stella, Monte Merola, and Monte Tubenna https://opentopomap.org, Creative Commons

FIGURE 3.3 Slopes with a wood of holm oaks Creative Commons: By Drow Male, CC BY-SA 3.0, https:// es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivo:Quercus_ilex.001_-_Monfrague.JPG

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A striking feature of Sannazaro’s description of landscape is the religious character he ascribes to the landscape and its inhabitants. When he calls the rocks of Tebenna ‘sacred’ (‘sacra saxa Tebennae’, l. 5), this may be explained by the fact that on the Monte Tubenna was a sanctuary of Mary (Santa Maria a Tubenna).27 However, his remark that there ‘a devoted people venerated the ancestral gods’ (‘habet patrios hic pia turba deos’, l. 2) seems a bit odd from the viewpoint of Christian religion. Why the plural ‘gods’? Why ‘ancestral’? This suggests that their religion was different from the common belief of 15th-century Italy. If one reads a bit further, it appears that ‘ancestral’ religion refers to the cults of pagan antiquity: Sannazaro calls the landscape ‘the awe-inspiring dwelling of Faunus’, the Roman god of the woods and of fertility (‘domus horrida Fauni’, l. 9); the formula “domus of a god” was an element of antique landscape descriptions, for example of Virgil’s famous topothesia of the bay on the African coast where Aeneas anchored: Virgil calls the beautiful rocks on the shore the ‘domus of the Nymph’.28 Actually, San Mango also turns out to be the home of nymphs: of Dryades, nymphs of the trees, and of their companions, the Satyrs (l. 13). Moreover, San Mango is also the ‘domus’ of other demi-gods and gods from antiquity: of Diana, ‘the goddess of the woods’ (l. 14), and of Apollo and the Muses (ll. 21–30; ‘grex […] Aonidum’ [Aonides = inhabitants of Aonia = Muses],29 l. 21; ‘Delius’, l. 23 [Delius = lord of Delos = Apollo]). Actually, the gods are omnipresent in this landscape with its ‘thousand couches for Dryads, a thousand hideaways for Satyrs, and caves, happy retreats for the goddess who cherishes the woods’. That omnipresence of the gods of antiquity, stated in the landscape description, leads in Sannazaro’s autobiographical account to a religious experience the humanist maintains to have had in the sacred valley: his mother took him there in order to bring an offering to the Muses. The Muses accepted the gift of garlands of flowers, and in return they baptized the boy with the water of the holy fountain and crowned him with ivy and laurel; accompanied by Apollo, the Muses formed a circle and danced around him: 27

Moreover, there is another sanctuary of Maria on the Monte Stella, and a hermitage on the Monte Merola. However, Sannazaro does not mention them in his description of the landscape. In the case of the Monte Tubenna, he only calls the rocks ‘sacred’ but does not say that a sanctuary of Mary was situated close to the hilltop, looking down on San Mango. 28 Virgil, Aeneid I, 168. For Virgil’s topothesia, its construction, and its meaning cf. Reeker H.D., Die Landschaft in der Aeneis (Hildesheim – New York: 1971); Enenkel, Autobiographik des frühneuzeitlichen Humanismus 529–530. 29 Aonia is a landscape in Boeotia; the Muses are called ‘offspring of Aonia’ viz. ‘inhabitants of Aonia’ because Mount Helicon is situated in this landscape. Cf. Strauch D., “Aonia”, in Der neue Pauly 1 (1996), cols. 821–822.

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19 Grex erat Aonidum, coetu comitata sororum Ipsa sui princeps Calliopea chori. Delius argutis carmen partitus alumnis, Flectebat faciles ad sua plectra manus. 25 Atque hic me sacro perlustravere liquore, Cura quibus nostrae prima salutis erat. Tum lotum media puerum statuere chorea, Et circumfusis obstrepuere sonis. Denique praecinctumque hederis et virgine lauru, 30 Ad citharam dulces edocuere modos.

The flock of the Muses appeared; Calliope herself was the leader of the chorus, and she was accompanied by the throng of her sisters. The Delian shared the song with his melodious protégées, and he was bending supple fingers to his lyre. And here they, whose chief concern was my well-being, baptized me with blessed water. Then in the middle of their chorus they placed the boy they just had baptized, and enclosed him with a roundel of sound. Finally, they garlanded him with ivy and virgin laurel and taught him the sweet measures of the lyre.30 What Sannazaro describes here is a rite de passage, of becoming a poet, in German, the Dichterweihe, an act of consecration, after the example of Hesiod, Ennius, and Propertius.31 In the course of this ritual, the Muses taught young Sannazaro how to play the cithara and to sing, i.e., to compose metrical poetry in Latin. Following the tradition of Greek and Roman literature, humanist writers applied the Dichterweihe and the coronation with laurel as a means of authorizing themselves as Latin poets.32 In his autobiographical construction of this ritual Sannazaro seems to imitate his friend and role model as a poet, Giovanni Pontano, who authorized himself in a very similar way in his first substantial collection of poetry, Parthenopeus sive Amores, namely through 30 Translation after Putnam, with alterations. 31 For the consecration of the poet, cf. the ground-breaking study of Kambylis A., Die Dichterweihe und ihre Symbolik. Untersuchungen zu Hesiodos, Kallimachos, Properz und Ennius, Bibliothek der klassischen Altertumswissenschaften, neue Folge, 2. Reihe 7 (Heidelberg: 1965). 32 Cf. Enenkel K.A.E., Die Stiftung von Autorschaft in der neulateinischen Literatur (ca. 1350– ca. 1650). Zur autorisierenden und wissensvermittelnden Funktion von Widmungen, Vorworttexten, Autorporträts und Dedikationsbildern, Mittellateinische Studien und Texte 48, chapter IV.1, “Autorschaftsstiftung durch antike Gottheiten: Gebet zu den Musen, Bitte um Inspiration, Dichterweihe, Furor poeticus” 381 ff. (Leiden – Boston: 2015).

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being baptized with water from the sacred fountain.33 Pontano’s consecration as a poet also takes place in a similar landscape: in the green woods on the slope of a mountain: Nymphae, quae nemorum comas virentis Atque undas Aganappidas tenetis Et saltus gelidos virentis Haemi, Vos, o Thespiadum cohors dearum, Vestris me socium choris et antris Vulgi avertite dentibus maligni, Et me Castaliae liquore lymphae Sparsum cingite laureis corollis Cantantem modo Sapphicis labellis.34 Nymphs who inhabit the woods with their green hair, the fountain of Aganippe [i.e., the fountain of the Muses on mount Helicon] and the cold slopes of the Haemus mountain range,35 you, holy crowd of Thespian goddesses, please save me, your companion who joins you in your grottoes, save me from the assaults of the malicious plebs. Baptize me with the water of Castalia and crown me with laurels – because soon I will sing in the Sapphic metre (emphasis mine). In the 15th–16th centuries, many other humanists claimed to have had experienced similar religious rituals, among others, Basinio Basini da Parma, Leonardo Griffi, and Joannes Policarpus.36 It is important to note that the consecrating device of baptism with sacred water is connected with a coronation with a laurel wreath: this actually refers to another authorizing means of humanists, the laurea poetica, bestowed to intellectuals by emperors and popes.37 This starts with the pater et princeps of humanism, Francis Petrarch, who also invented this new rite of self-fashioning as poet laureate:38 the poet laureate 33 34 35 36 37

Cf. Enenkel, Die Stiftung von Autorschaft in der neulateinischen Literatur 403–410. Parthenopeus sive Amores I, 8, “Ad Musas”. Mount Helicon, the mountain of the Muses, belongs to the Haemus range. Enenkel, Die Stiftung von Autorschaft in der neulateinischen Literatur 403–410. Ibidem, chapter II.2, “Autorisierung durch Ritual und Herrschaftszeremoniell: P.L. (Poeta laureatus) und P.C. (Poeta Caesareus) – Dichterkrönungen” 275–345; Flood J.L., Poets Laureate in the Holy Roman Empire, 4 vols. (Berlin – New York: 2006). 38 Petrarch was actually crowned poet laureate in 1341 in Rome, at the Capitol. For the coronation and the document that was issued cf. Wilkins E.H., “The coronation of Petrarch”, Speculum 18 (1943) 155–197; Mertens D., “Petrarcas ‘Privilegium laureationis’”, in Borgolte M. – Spilling H. (eds.), Litterae Medii Aevi. Festschrift für Johannes Autenrieth

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dwelling as a hermit (solitarius) in the valley of the Muses (= Vaucluse), staying at his ‘Helicon transalpinus’, as he called the rock wall at the end of the valley where he had his fountain of Apollo and the Muses, a new Hippocrene (= the fountain of the Sorgue, in today’s Fontaine de Vaucluse). And Petrarch had actually laid out a well at this place, and there he planted laurel trees, the trees of Apollo, in order to mark the sacred character of the poet’s dwelling.39 And furthermore, Petrarch identified his Muse (Madonna Laura) with the poet’s laurels (laurea) and fame: Laura = laurea. Petrarch’s rite of self-fashioning became widely known not only through verses but through illuminations as well, specifically his author’s portraits. For example, in a manuscript of the Canzoniere, written and illuminated shortly after 1500 in Padua, Petrarch is depicted in his sacred landscape of the ‘lonely valley’ of Vaucluse [Fig. 3.4A]: the poet, wearing the laurels, is sitting in front of the rock wall, his ‘transalpine Helicon’, where the fountain of the Muses gushes forth; the poet is accompanied by a legitimizing Apollo, who is playing the lyre, and he sits under the laurel tree; the female face in the tree represents Petrarch’s Muse Laura.40 Importantly, Petrarch usually presented himself as a solitary man (solitarius, a new kind of hermit) in the lonely landscape of Vaucluse in his autobiographical writings, among others in De vita solitaria,41 in his collection of letters Familiarium rerum, Epistole metrice, and in the Canzionere,42 and this aspect of himself is also expressed in numerous author’s portraits. For example, in (Sigmaringen: 1988) 225–247. Moreover, for the coronation ceremony, Petrarch held a Latin speech, which he edited, in a much augmented form, a couple of years later; cf. Godi C., “La Collatio laureationis del Petrarca”, Italia medioevale e umanistica 13 (1970) 13–27. After his coronation, Petrarch used the title poeta laureatus in the title inscriptions of all his Latin works. 39 For Petrarch’s self-fashioning as a solitary poet living in a sacred place cf. my “Petrarch’s Constructions of the Sacred Place in De vita solitaria and Other Writings”, in Enenkel – Göttler (eds.), Solitudo 31–80. 40 Cf. Enenkel, Die Stiftung von Autorschaft in der neulateinischen Literatur 392–393; idem, “Petrarch’s Construction of the Solitary Place” 42–44; for Petrarch’s author’s portraits cf. also Trapp J.B., “The Iconography of Petrarch in the Age of Humanism”, in idem, Studies of Petrarch and His Influence (London: 2003) 1–117, and Enenkel K.A.E., “The Author’s Portrait as Reader’s Guidance: the Case of Francis Petrarch”, in Brusati C. – Enenkel K.A.E. – Melion W.S. (eds.), The Authority of the Word. Reflecting on Image and Text in Northern Europe, 1400–1700, Intersections. Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture 20 (Leiden – Boston: 2012) 151–180. 41 Cf. Enenkel, “Petrarch’s Constructions of the Sacred Place in De vita solitaria and Other Writings”. 42 Cf. Enenkel, Die Autobiographik des frühneuzeitlichen Humanismus 40–107; Maggi A., “You will be my solitude”, in Kirkham V. – Maggi A. (eds.), Petrarch. A Guide to the Complete Works (Chicago – London: 2009) 179–195.

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the Paduan manuscript Vaucluse is characterized as a solitary place through the depiction of a town in the far distance; the town represents ideologically and morally the opposite of the sacred solitary place. For Petrarch ‘the town’ is Avignon, which he framed in his writings as the modern Babylon. On the Paduan author’s portrait, the town is characterized as such through the tower of Babylon at its centre [Fig. 3.4A]. In an author’s portrait made in Venice in 1513, the landscape plays an important role too: the solitary poet sits in a lonely landscape, in the pose of ‘the thinker’ [Fig. 3.4B]. The rocks in the background depict Vaucluse as a ‘closed valley’ (val-chiusa; vallis clausa). And again, this type of landscape is connected with the sacred character of the place, visualized through the poet’s coronation with a laurel wreath; this time it is Apollo himself who crowns Petrarch, who is again seated at the well of the Muses, under his laurel tree. Petrarch’s self-fashioning as poeta laureatus turned out to be very influential, especially in the 15th and 16th centuries, when humanists regarded becoming a poet laureate to be of prime importance.43 Although dozens of coronations took place, many Neo-Latin poets did not achieve this honour. For them, it made sense to compose autobiographical poems in which they anticipated their coronation through the description of literary consecrations and coronations. And, naturally, this kind of self-consecration was especially interesting for the freshmen in the Republic of Letters. This was the case with Sannazaro’s predecessor as head of the humanist Academy of Naples, Pontano. He composed his debut work as a poet, Parthenopeus sive Amores, in 1555–1558.44 He was still staying in Umbria then, and thus his Muses and the landscape in which the coronation took place were Umbrian.45 Importantly, young Pontano was at that time not yet poet laureate: he achieved that honour only at the age of about sixty, when he was crowned by Pope Innocentius VII.46 When he wrote his autobiographical elegy III, 2, Sannazaro was already an old man. However, the consecration and coronation by the Muses was still greatly important to him, because in real life he was never crowned poet laureate. Sannazaro 43 Enenkel, Die Stiftung von Autorschaft in der neulateinischen Literatur 403–410. 44 For Pontano’s poetry cf. the edition by Johannes Oeschger: Ioannis Ioviani Pontani Carmina. Egloghe – Elegie – Liriche (Bari: 1948); for the Parthenopeus cf. also Iacono A., Le fonti del Parthenopeus sive Amorum libri di Giovanni Gioviano Pontano (Naples: 1999). 45 Cf. Soranzo M., “‘Umbria pieridum cultrix’ (Parthenopeus, I. 18): Poetry and Identity in Giovanni Gioviano Pontano (1429–1503)”, Italian Studies 67 (2012) 23–36; idem, Poetry and Identity in Quattrocento Naples (London – New York: 2014). 46 For Pontano’s biography cf. Figliovolo B., “Pontano, Giovanni”, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 84 (2015) 729–740; Kidwell C., Pontano, Poet and Prime Minister (London: 1991); and Monti Sabia L., Un profilo moderno e due vitae antiche die Giovanni Pontano (Naples: 1998), Quaderni dell’Accademia Pontaniana 25; Deutscher T.B., “Pontano, Giovanni”, in Contemporaries of Erasmus, vol. 3, 113–114.

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FIGURE 3.4A

Author’s portrait of Petrarch, in his Canzoniere: the humanist poet laureate sitting at his Helicon, at his fountain of the Muses, his Hippocrene. On top of the rock the winged horse Pegasus, from which the fountain Hippocrene originated. MS Cologny-Genève, Bibliotheca Bodmeriana 130, fol. 10 v Creative Commons, CC BY-NC 4.0, http://e-codices.unifr.ch/ de/fmb/cb-0130/10v

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Author’s portrait of Petrarch. Woodcut illustration to Petrarca, Canzoniere (Venice, Bernardino Stagnino: 1513), fol. 3 v

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FIGURES 3.4C–E C. Girolamo Santacroce (1502–1537), Bronze medal with portrait of Jacopo Sannazaro, recto. (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Girolamo_santacroce,_medaglia_ di_jacopo_sannazzaro,_recto.JPG). D. Bartolomeo Ammannati, Portrait bust on Sannazaro’s grave monument, S. Maria del Parto, Naples. E. Bartolomeo Ammannati, Apollo, Sculpture of Sannazaro’s grave monument, S. Maria del Parto, Naples

became a poet laureate in other ways: the claims expressed in his literary works were well received by his audience. For example, the important Renaissance sculptor Girolamo Santacroce (1502–1537) rendered him on a medal as poeta laureatus [Fig. 3.4C], and in a similar way sculptor Bartolomeo Ammanati depicted him on a portrait bust on his grave monument [Fig. 3.4D], and, as a means of legitimization, added Apollo, whom he also adorned with the laurel wreath [Fig. 3.4E]:47 The effect of authorization immediately appears in the next lines of Sannazaro’s autobiography: the animals of the sacred landscape of the Picentino welcome him in the same way as the mythical singer Orpheus was worshipped: all kinds of birds and other animals come to him and acknowledge him as a divine poet. As a final result of all this, young Sannazaro was, as he puts it himself, ‘admitted to the crowd of the shepherds’, i.e., received among the humanist poets; only after this initiation did he dare to sing his first song:

47

For the grave monument, cf. Deramaix M., “Maroni musa proximus ut tumulo: L’église et le tombeau de Jacques Sannazar”, Revue de l’art 95 (1992) 25–40, and Carrella A.M., La chiesa di S. Maria del Parto a Mergellina (Naples: 2000); Croce B., “La Tomba di Jacopo Sannazaro e la chiesa di S. Maria del Parto”, Napoli Nobilissima 1 (1892) 68–76.

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31 Tantus erat laetis avium concentus in agris, Ut posses ipsos dicere adesse deos. Venerat omne genus pecudum, genus omne ferarum, Atque illa festum luce habuere diem. 35 Tunc ego pastorum numero sylvestria primum Tentavi calamis sibila disparibus Deductumque levi carmen modulatus in umbra, Innumeros pavi lata per arva greges.

In the joyous fields there was such great harmony of birds that you could say that the gods themselves were at hand. Every type of farm animal, every type of wild beast, had come, and on that day held festival. Then, among the crowd of shepherds, for the first time I attempted sylvan whistlings on uneven reeds and, after I had sounded a fine-spun song in the slight shade, I fed countless sheep across the broad pastures. After the rendition of this ritual one looks with different eyes at Sannazaro’s description of the landscape around San Mango; now it seems to require a typological reading: the beautiful valley, amid the ‘sacred rocks’, is meant as a representation of antique forerunners – the well-known fountain sanctuaries of the Muses, such as Aganippe or Hippocrene, which were situated in valleys – and San Mango’s mountaintops are representations of the sacred mountains of the Muses in antiquity, such as the Helicon, Parnassus, and Pindus. After this typological re-lecture, one understands the composition of Sannazaro’s landscape in a more complete sense. Sannazaro’s self-depiction as dweller in the woods actually differs from what one might expect of the scion of a noble family. If Sannazaro was at San Mango, he would have stayed in his grandfather’s castle. But in his autobiography, he did not even mention the castle, let alone describe the beauty or size of the building, its garden, or the impressive fortification walls. Instead, he focussed on a lonely valley outside the family possessions, densely overgrown with holm oaks [Fig. 3.3]. This is not exactly representative of the aesthetics of the kingdom’s barons. Rather, he construes San Mango as a sacred place for poets. In fact, it is the sacred landscape that makes poets – the remote valley where they receive the Dichterweihe. Characteristically, Sannazaro also begins his whole collection of elegies with a description of a landscape, in Elegy I, 1, ll. 9–26. Here, again, the poet depicts himself as a dweller in the lonely woods, and again, the woods are inhabited by gods of antiquity, such as the ‘pagan Muses’ (‘paganae Musae’, l. 9); Amor,

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the god of love (l. 10); and Pales, the goddess of shepherds and of the flocks’ fertility (l. 18). In this context, Sannazaro describes a pagan ritual: the shepherds invoke Pales through an offering of fresh, warm milk (‘pastorum turba […] rogat agrestem lacte tepente Palem’, ll. 17–18). In other respects, too, the landscape resembles that of San Mango, as described in elegy III, 2 (cf. above): it is mountainous (in ll. 13 and 17 caves are mentioned), the woods in the valley are shady, there are streams (ll. 25–26), and the landscape is inhabited by shepherds. This landscape is the habitat of the poet; it is the place of inspiration and writing, and, interestingly, his verses ‘dictated by the Muses’ take on the quality of the landscape, as they become ‘silvestria carmina’, ‘songs of the woods’ (ll. 9–10); love songs are triggered by the loneliness of the place where ‘only the woods respond to the secret laments of love’ (ll. 11–12). Sannazaro makes it clear that this landscape is not meant as a temporary dwelling, e.g., during a bout of lovesickness. He says that dwelling in the woods is ‘his way of life and his fate’: ‘Hoc vitae genus, hoc stadium mihi fata ministrant’.48 And he hopes that posterity will commemorate him as such: ‘Hinc opto cineres nomen habere meos’. Interestingly, Sannazaro has connected his self-authorization through the description of a landscape with his grave monument; he expresses his wish that his grave might be located in his beloved woods. That leads him to a phantasy: he imagines that Tityrus visits his grave monument (‘tumulum meum’, l. 21) and ‘covers it with garlands of fresh ivy’, and that Damoetas will ‘spread flowers’ on it ‘with both hands’, while Corydon and Alexis will dance in his honour. Tityrus, Damoetas, Corydon, and Alexis are all shepherd-poets that populate Virgil’s Eclogues. Tityrus was one of the most famous characters of the Eclogues: the work starts with his name, and he represents the author, Virgil, himself [Fig. 3.4A]. This means that in his Elegies Sannazaro authorizes himself as a Latin poet through Virgil and his Eclogues, i.e., his pastoral poetry. The landscape of the woods represents a Virgilian landscape, the land of Latin poets: At mihi paganae dictant silvestria Musae 10 Carmina, quae tenui gutture cantat Amor. Fidaque secretis respondet silva querelis, Et percussa meis vocibus antra sonant. […] 15 Hoc vitae genus, hoc studium mihi fata ministrant; Hinc opto cineres nomen habere meos. 48 Line 15, emphasis mine.

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Me probet umbrosis pastorum turba sub antris, Dum rogat agrestem lacte tepente Palem. Me rudis indocta moduletur arundine Thyrsis; 20 et tam constanti laudet amasse fide. Inde super tumulumque meum Manesque sepultos Tityrus ex hedera serta virente ferat. Hic mihi saltabit Corydon, et pulcher Alexis, Damoetas flores sparget utraque manu. 25 Fluminibusque sacris umbras inducet Iolas, dum coget saturas Alphesiboeus oves.49 But my rural Muses recite rustic songs which Love sings with slender throat. The trusty woods make answer to my covert laments, and the grottoes re-echo, struck by my words. […] The fates furnish me with this mode of living, this inclination. From this I want my ashes to have renown. May the troop of shepherds within their shady grottoes grant me approval, when with warm milk they pray to Pales of the Fields. Let untrained Thyrsis sing of me on his rude reed, and praise my having loved with faith so true. Then over the grave that buries my remains may Tityrus [Fig. 3.5A] spread garlands of fresh ivy. Here Corydon and beautiful Alexis [Fig. 3.5B] will dance for me, with each hand Damoetas will scatter flowers. Iolas will shroud the sacred streams with shade while Alphesiboeus will gather the full-fed flock. The landscape description of Elegy I, 1, 9–26, suggests another, more specific typological and allegorical reading of the autobiographical landscape of elegy III, 2: this regards Sannazaro’s self-description as a shepherd, writer of bucolics, and reincarnation of Virgil, the Roman pater et princeps of bucolics. It turns out that Sannazaro’s autobiographical landscape, notwithstanding its realistic elements, can only be understood via a thoroughly allegorical reading. And it was Virgil who in his Eclogues firmly tied bucolics with allegory and autobiography:50 his shepherds were masks for his Roman poet colleagues. In Neo-Latin poetry he was closely followed by Boccaccio and Petrarch, who in his

49 Sannazaro, Elegy I, 1, 9–26. 50 Cf., inter alia, Korenjak M., “Der antike Biographismus und die bukolische Tradition”, Antike und Abendland 43 (2003) 58–79; Herrmann L., Les masques et les visages dans les Bucoliques de Virgile (Brussels: 1930).

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FIGURE 3.5A

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French illuminator, Shepherd/poet Meliboeus meets his colleague Tityrus playing the flute, 1469. Illustration to Virgil, Eclogues, manuscript Dijon (Burgundy), Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 498, fol. 3 v, to the first Eclogue, incipit: ‘Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi […]’.

Bucolicum carmen even reinforced allegory and autobiography.51 And in his autobiographical elegy Sannazaro worked along the lines of Virgil and Petrarch. Sannazaro says that after his consecration as a poet he was admitted among the shepherds (pastores), and that he played for the first time the shepherd’s pipe (‘calamis … disparibus’, l. 36). Subsequently, he followed the shepherds Androgeus, Melisaeus, and Opicus, and their sacred rites (ll. 39 and 42). This is an allegorical way of saying that he became a Neo-Latin poet and member of

51 On Petrarch’s reception of Virgil’s Eclogues in the Bucolicum carmen see Berghoff-Bührer M., Das Bucolicum carmen des Petrarca: Ein Beitrag zur Wirkungsgeschichte von Vergils Eclogen (Bern: 1991); Carrai S., “Pastoral as Personal Mythology in History”, in Kirkham – Maggi (eds.), Petrarch 165–177; cf. also the commented Latin ed. with English trans.: Bergin Th.G., Petrarch’s Bucolicum carmen (New Haven: 1974); Pétrarque, Bucolicum carmen, Lat. text and French trans. by M. Francois and P. Bachmann with F. Roudaut (Paris: 2001).

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FIGURE 3.5B

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Master of the Vraie cronicque descoce, 15th century. The shepherds/poets Corydon and Alexis https://www.europeana.eu/portal/de/record/9200122/Bibliographic Resource_1000056114056.html?q=who%3A%28Master+of+the+% 27Vraie+cronicque+descoce%27%29#dcId=1569225130150&p=1

the humanist Academy of Naples:52 Androgeus was the academician’s name of the scholar and poet Antonio Beccadelli (1394–1471), the founder and president of the academy; Melisaeus (l. 42), a typological representation of Virgil’s shepherd Meliboeus, was the name of another leading humanist, Giovanni Pontano [Fig. 3.5C]. And the same persons, masked as shepherds, also figure in Sannazaro’s bucolic prosimetrum Arcadia, which became one of the most influential writings of the 16th century.53 It was the Arcadia that triggered the appearance of shepherds in the visual arts in this period, especially in the 52

For humanist landscapes, pastoral and otherwise, cf. Bauer W.M., “Die ‘Akademienlandschaft’ in der neulateinischen Dichtung”, Euphorion 63 (1969) 40–53. 53 Jacopo Sannazaro, Arcadia, eds. Erspamer F. – Fedi R. (Milan: 1990); on this work cf. Riccucci M., Il neghittoso e il fier connubbio: storia e filologia nell’Arcadia di Jacopo Sannazaro (Naples: 2001); Saccone E., “L’Arcadia di Iacobo Sannazaro: storia e delineamento di una struttura”, Modern Language Notes 84 (1969) 46–91; Marnoto R., A “Arcadia” de Sannazaro e o bucolismo (Coimbra: 1996); Hubbard Th.K., The Pipes of Pan. Intertextuality and Literary Filiation in the Pastoral Tradition from Theocritus to Milton,

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FIGURE 3.5C

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“Melisaeus”, i.e. Giovanni Pontano, second president of the humanist Academy of Naples. Portrait medal by Adriano Fiorentino, bronze, 8.4 cm New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection. Wikimedia commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/File:Portrait_medal_of_Giovanni_Giovano_ Pontano_MET_1271r.jpg

Veneto [Fig. 3.6A].54 Thus, ‘following the sacred rites of the shepherds’ is to be interpreted first as ‘respecting the sacred rites of composing Neo-Latin poetry’, and second as ‘participating in the ceremonies of the Academy’. In this way Sannazaro construes his autobiographical landscape as a bucolic landscape, the dwelling of shepherds and gods. In this “thick” interpretation, ‘taking care of the flock’ means to compose poetry; ‘following a fellow shepherd’, to imitate and emulate a contemporary Neo-Latin poet. As a member of the humanist Academy of Naples and as a Neo-Latin poet, Sannazaro also had allegorical names: Actius Sincerus (‘the Pure one, the Venerator of Apollo’) and Ergastus

54

4th ed. (Ann Arbor: 2001); Caracciolo Aricò A., L’Arcadia del Sannazaro nell’autunno dell’umanesimo, Biblioteca di cultura 507 (Rome: 1995). Cf., inter alia, Rosand D., “Pastoral Topoi: on the Construction of Meaning in Landscape”, Studies in the History of Art 36 (1992) 160–177.

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FIGURE 3.6A

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Giulio Campagnola, Young shepherd seated in a landscape looking toward an old man in the lower right, buildings in the background and a tree and mountain at left, ca. 1515–1518. Engraving, image 13.3 × 7.9 cm, sheet 13.8 × 8.3 cm Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

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(‘the Rural Man’, ‘the Farmer’).55 For example, his allegorical name Actius Sincerus appears on his grave monument in the chapel S. Maria del Parto, under his portrait bust as poet laureate [cf. Fig. 3.4D] and in his grave inscription [Fig. 3.8B]. The religious features that characterize Sannazaro’s highly symbolic landscape go back to Virgil. The landscape of Virgil’s Eclogues is a literary construction that represents a sacred realm, with sacred fountains (such as Arethusa),56 mountains (such as Maenalus),57 and trees, such as laurel trees, myrtles,58 pines,59 and oaks.60 And in the bucolic landscape of Virgil’s Eclogues gods also are present, including Apollo and the Muses; the gods of the woods Silvanus, Faunus, Pan,61 and Diana;62 and, as in Sannazaro’s autobiography, Nymphs – indeed, even the Dryads63 are mentioned (l. 13). In Virgil’s Arcadian landscape religious rites take place: altars are erected there to the gods, e.g., to Apollo;64 statues are dedicated, e.g., to Priapus65 and Diana;66 and the shepherds are also supposed to have constructed grave monuments, e.g., to Daphnis.67 The shepherds are deeply pious people: they venerate the gods in devoted rites, through their songs, by making vows,68 and by bringing them offerings – for example, the shepherd Corydon offers the head of a wild boar and the horns of a deer to 55 Cf., e.g., Mancini C., “I Nomi Accademici di Jacopo Sannazaro”, Atti dell’Accademia Pontiana 24 (1894). 56 Eclogue 10, 1. Arethusa was originally a nymph from Arcadia; when the river god Alpheus tried to seduce her, she was saved by Artemis, who turned her into a river which flowed under the sea to Sicily (cf. Ovid, Metamorphoses V, 572–641). 57 Eclogue 10, 15. 58 Ibidem 7, 62. 59 Ibidem 7, 24: ‘sacra […] pinu’ – ‘on the holy pine tree’; the pine was sacred to Pan, the main god of Arcadia; cf. Propertius, Elegiae I, 18, 20, ‘Arcadio pinus amica deo’ (‘the pine tree loved by the god of Arcadia’); as Virgil has it in the Eclogues, pines grew on Arcadia’s major mountain, the Maenalus (8, 22–23); the mythical origin of the pine was the metamorphosis of the nymph Pitys, the Arcadian Pan’s love; cf. Coleman’s commentary in Vergil, Eclogues, ed. R. Coleman (Cambridge: 1977) 213–214. 60 Eclogue 7, 13: ‘(hic) eque sacra resonant examnia quercu’ – ‘(here) the swarming bees are buzzing under the sacred oak’; the oak was sacred to Jupiter. 61 Ibidem 6, 27 (Fauni); Pan: 10, 21; 24–27; esp. 26: ‘Pan deus Arcadiae venit, quem vidimus ipsi/ […]’ – ‘Pan appeared, the god of Arcadia, whom we saw ourselves […]’. 62 Ibidem 7, 29. 63 Ibidem 5, 59; for Naiads cf. 10, 9–10. 64 Ibidem 5, 66–67. 65 Ibidem 7, 35–36: ‘Nunc te (sc. Priape) marmoreum pro tempore fecimus; at tu,/ Si fetura gregem suppleverit, aureus esto’ – ‘Now, for the time being, we made a statue of you from marble./ If fertility will increase our flock, you shall be from gold’. 66 Ibidem 7, 31–32. 67 Ibidem, 5, 42–44. 68 E.g. ibidem 5, 74–81.

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Diana,69 and the shepherd Menalcas at Daphnis’s grave offers a large crater of olive oil.70 After the comparison with Virgil’s Eclogues, we now better understand the second line of Sannazaro’s landscape description where he says that ‘here a devoted people venerated its ancestral gods’. Although the oak forests are a realistic feature of the landscape around San Mango, woods are at the same time a requisite of the artificial, symbolic Arcadian landscape of bucolic poetry.71 Virgil constructed his landscapes from mountains and rocks, valleys, streams, and ‘woods’ (‘silvae’). In a programmatic line, the shepherd Corydon says: ‘above all we love the woods’ (‘nobis placeant ante omnia silvae’),72 and by ‘woods’, shady mountains are always meant as well. There the ritual of singing a song takes place, e.g., in Eclogue 2 Corydon dwells ‘in the mountains and in the woods’ (‘montibus et silvis’, l. 5), where he sings ‘under the dense roof of shadowy beech trees’ (‘inter densas, umbrosa cacumina, fagos’, l. 3).73 The landscape consisting of mountains and woods constitutes the shepherds’ identity. And, as Sannazaro in Elegy I, 1, longed to be buried in the woods, the grave monument of shepherd Daphnis is actually situated in the woods, with the inscription ‘Daphnis ego in silvis, hinc usque ad sidera notus/ Formosi pecoris custos, formosior ipse’ – ‘Here I, Daphnis, lay in the woods, famous all over the world, my fame reaches the stars,/ Shepherd of a beautiful flock, being himself even more beautiful [than his flock]’ (Eclogue 5, 43–44; Fig. 3.6B). It does not come as a surprise that Sannazaro’s own bucolic work, the Arcadia, also starts with a description of the known landscape of the Picentino,

69 Ibidem 7, 29–30; ibidem, shepherd Thyrsis offers milk to Priapus; in 7, 24, shepherd Corydon potentially offers his pipes to Pan. 70 Ibidem 5, 67–68. 71 On Virgil’s artificial and symbolic landscape settings in the Eclogues cf., inter alia, Flintoff E., “The Setting of Virgil’s Eclogues”, Latomus 33 (1974) 814–846; Jachmann G., “L’Arcadia di Virgilio come passaggio bucolico”, Maia 5 (1952) 161–174; Jenkyns R., “Virgil and Arcadia”, Journal of Roman Studies 79 (1989) 26–39; idem, Virgil’s Experience: Nature and History, Times, Names, and Places (Oxford: 1998); Leach E.W., Vergil’s Eclogues: Landscapes of Experiences (Ithaca, NY: 1974); Snell B., “Arkadien. Die Entdeckung einer geistigen Landschaft”, Antike und Abendland 1 (1945) 26–31 = idem, Die Entdeckung des Geistes. Studien zur Entstehung des europäischen Denkens bei den Griechen, 5th ed. (Göttingen: 1980) 257–274 = idem, “Arcadia: The Discovery of a Spiritual Landscape”, in idem, The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought (Oxford: 1953) 281–309; Binder G. – Effe B., Antike Hirtendichtung, 2nd ed. (Düsseldorf – Zurich: 2001) passim; Pöschl V., Die Hirtendichtung Virgils (Heidelberg: 1964) passim. 72 Virgil, Eclogue 2, 62. 73 Cf., inter alia, Smith P.L., “Lentus in umbra: A Symbolic Pattern in Vergil’s Eclogues”, Phoenix 19 (1965) 298–303.

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FIGURE 3.6B

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The Virgilian shepherds venerating the mythical poet Daphnis at his grave in an Arcadian landscape. Grave inscription: “Daphnis ego in sylvis” (“I am Daphnis in the woods”, Virgil, Eclogue 5, 43). Woodcut illustration to Virgil’s 5th Eclogue, in idem, Opera (Strasbourg, Johann Grüninger: 1502) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Daphnis_ego_in_sylvis.jpg

with its ‘lonely woods’, mountains, ‘lonely slopes’, ‘tall spreading trees’, shade, ‘springs issuing from living rocks’, valleys, shepherds, and flocks: The tall spreading trees [i.e., the holm-oakes of the Picentino]74 by nature brought forth in the shaggy mountains are wont to give the onlooker more pleasure than cultivated plants pruned by expert hands in ornate gardens, and wild birds singing on green branches in lonely woods give more pleasure to him who listens than tame ones in their elaborately pretty cages in crowded cities. Again, for the same reason, […] sylvan songs carved in the coarse bark of beech trees delight the reader no less than sophisticated verse written on smooth parchment in gilded tomes, and shepherds’ waxed reeds [i.e. pan pipes]75 offer a more pleasing sound 74 75

Annotation and emphasis mine. Annotation and emphasis mine.

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through the flowery valleys than the polished and high-priced flutes of musicians in pompous reception rooms. And who doubts that a spring issuing naturally from living rock and surrounded by small green grasses is not more delightful to the human mind than all other fountains artfully constructed of the whitest marble and gleaming with much gold? Therefore […] among these lonely slopes, to the listening trees and those few shepherds who will be there I shall be able to rehearse the rough eclogues sprung from natural talent, uttering them as bare of ornament as I heard them sung by the shepherds of Arcadia under the delightful shade, to the murmur of the clearest of fountains […].76 And in this landscape, as in that of Virgil’s Eclogues, the shepherds, representing poets, perform religious rites and worship past poets at their graves. Just as in Virgil’s Eclogue 5 the shepherds wail for Daphnis at his grave ‘in the woods’, and just as Sannazaro imagined himself being worshipped as a past poet at his grave ‘in the woods’ in the landscape description of Elegy I by the Virgilian shepherds, Arcadia’s shepherds (i.e., the Latin poets of the Academy of Naples) in the 5th eclogue worship Androgeo, i.e., their former president Antonio Beccadelli. It is Ergasto (‘the Farmer’, i.e., Sannazaro himself) who sings Androgeo’s praises at his grave, while the other shepherds are dancing around the monument: […] Other mountains, other plains,/ Other thickets and streams/ You [i.e., Androgeo] see in the heavens, and more spring flowers/ Other Fauns and wood gods/ Through sweet summer places/ Follow the nymphs in more fortunate loves./ So among soft scents,/ Singing sweetly in the shade/ Between Daphnis and Meliboeus,/ Our Androgeo sits/ And, with rare sweetness, he fills the heavens,/ Tempering the elements/ With the sound of unaccustomed foreign accents’.77 It is in this allegorical reading that Sannazaro’s bucolic landscape of his autobiographical Elegy III, 2, is relevant not only for his childhood, but for a substantial part of his life, ‘until he moved to the shore in order to catch fish’, as he says in ll. 53–57. This is an allegorical expression for the fact that he composed

76 77

Arcadia, prooemium; for the English text cf. Kidwell, Sannazaro and Arcadia 10; emphases mine. Cf. Kidwell, Sannazaro and Arcadia 22.

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FIGURE 3.7 Jacopo Sannazaro’s villa with Santa Maria del Parto at Mergellina. Detail of “La fedelissima Città di Napoli”, etching by Alessandro Baratta and Nicolas Perrey (Naples: 1680) Naples, National Library. Public domain

fisherman songs. When he wrote his Eclogae piscatoriae,78 he had moved to his new villa in Mergellina, which stood on the seashore, just a bit outside of Naples [Fig. 3.7]. The villa, which Sannazaro received in 1499, was a present from Frederick IV of Aragon, king of Naples (1496–1501). From now on Mergellina would be the landscape setting in which Sannazaro situated his works in both a literal and an allegorical sense. Characteristically, his collection of lyrical poetry, Epigrammata, again begins with an autobiographical landscape description (Epigrammata I, 2). Mergellina, as it is situated at the seashore, represents a type of landscape that is very different from the Picentine mountains. It may come then as a surprise that in the description of Mergellina we find almost the same elements as in that of San Mango: a rock or mountaintop in combination with a dark and shadowy wood; a remote and lonely place outside the city; and from the rock flow springs and streams. And furthermore, the curious landscape of Mergellina has a deeply religious character, like that of San Mango: in line 1 it appears that the villa is situated on a ‘sacred rock’, and in 78 Cf. Mustard W.P. (ed.), The Piscatory Eclogues of Jacopo Sannazaro (Baltimore: 1914); Smith N.D., “The Genre and Critical Reception of Jacopo Sannazaro’s Eclogae Piscatoriae (Naples, 1526)”, Humanistica Lovaniensia 50 (2001) 199–219; Nash R., Arcadia and the Piscatorial Eclogues (Detroit: 1966); Rosalba G., Le Egloghe Piscatorie di Jacopo Sannazaro (Naples: 1908).

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line 2 it is called ‘Nympharum domus’, the dwelling of the Nymphs (as in Virgil’s famous topothesia from the Aeneid). The rock with its forest of laurel trees represents the place where the fountains of the Muses, Aganippe and Hippocrene, originate. The woods of laurel trees are the proper dwellings for Apollo and the Muses. And, indeed, Sannazaro identifies Mergellina with the Greek sanctuaries of Aganippe, Hippocrene, and Thespiae, and with the sacred mountains of the Muses, the Helicon and Pindus: 10

15

Tu mihi solos nemorum recessus Das et haerentes per opaca laurus Saxa; tu fontes Aganippidumque Antra recludis. Nam simul tete repeto tuasque Sedulus mecum veneror Napaeas, Colle, Mergillina, tuo repente Pegasis unda

20

Effluit, de qua chorus ipse Phoebi Et chori Phoebus pater atque princeps Nititur plures mihi iam canenti Ducere rivos.

24

Ergo tu nobis Helicon et udae Phocidos saltus hederisque opacum Thespiae rupis nemus, et canoro Vertice Pindus. You (Mergellina) open out the fountains and grottoes of the Aganippides (Muses of the fountain of Aganippide). For as soon as I revisit you and by myself eagerly worship your Napaean nymphs, suddenly from your hill, Mergellina, flows the water of Pegasus from which Phoebus’s chorus itself (the Muses) and Phoebus, the chorus’s father and leader, strive now to lure more streams for me as I sing. And so you are our Helicon and glades of moist Phocis, our forest of the Thespian rock, shadowy with ivy, and Pindus with its echoing peak.

Here, again, Sannazaro constitutes himself in an autobiographical landscape construction which excels through a “thick”, typological interpretation. Although Mergellina is situated on the seashore, on a very low hill, in Sannazaro’s

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FIGURES 3.8A and 3.8B “S V” – “Sepolcro di Virgilio” (Sepulcrum Vergilii) – Virgil’s grave with a laurel tree above Sannazaro’s grave chapel “S.M.P.D.G.” (“Sancta Maria Partus Dei Genetrix”). Woodcut from Scipione Mazella: “Sito et antichità della città di Pozzuolo” (Naples: 1594). http://www.mdz-nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver .pl?urn=urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bs … 8B. Inscription on Sannazaro’s grave Naples, Santa Maria del Parto

autobiographical landscape description it takes on the – figurative – features of the Greek mountains Pindus and Helicon, which are actually about 1750 and 2600 metres high. Laurel trees did not belong to the original flora of Mergellina, but they nevertheless appear in Sannazaro’s imaginary autobiographical landscape. Of course, it may well be that he had planted some in order to construe a sacred poet’s place, such as Petrarch did. But most importantly, on the hill above the villa lay a monument which had the greatest power to legitimize Sannazaro’s status as a sacred Latin poet: the ‘tomb of Virgil’ [Fig. 3.8A].79 This tomb was regarded as Virgil’s grave, certainly at least from the time of Petrarch, who visited it in 1341, just before he was crowned poet laureate. And in this sense, the Mergellina landscape that was meant to legitimize Sannazaro as a poet, was a Virigilian landscape, too. Already from the landscape description of the first elegy, quoted above, it appears that Sannazaro longed to be buried in the Virgilian landscape of the Eclogues. The tomb of Virgil himself had, of course, in this respect an even greater attraction, which is reflected in the epigram composed by fellow humanist Pietro Bembo for Sannazaro’s grave monument: ‘Scatter flowers to the sacred ashes. Here lays the famous Sincerus who as a poet came closest to Virgil, as his grave is the closest to Virgil’s grave’ [Fig. 3.8B].

79 Trapp J.B., “The Grave of Vergil”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 47 (1984) 1–31.

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Bibliography Alabiso A.Ch., “La chiesa di S. Maria del Parto: le vicende artistiche”, in Carrella A.M., La chiesa di S. Maria del Parto a Mergellina (Naples: 2000) 67–79. Altamura A., Jacopo Sannazaro. Con appendici di documenti e testi inediti, Studi e testi umanistici. Serie 1: Studi di storia letteraria 1 (Naples: 1951). Baudy G.J., “Hirtenmythos und Hirtenlied. Zu den rituellen Aspekten der bukolischen Dichtung”, Poetica 25 (1993) 282–318. Bauer W.M., “Die ‘Akademienlandschaft’ in der neulateinischen Dichtung”, Euphorion 63 (1969) 40–53. Bentley J.H., Politics and Culture in Renaissance Naples (Princeton: 1987). Berghoff-Bührer M., Das Bucolicum carmen des Petrarca: Ein Beitrag zur Wirkungsgeschichte von Vergils Eclogen (Bern: 1991). Binder G. – Effe B., Antike Hirtendichtung, 2nd ed. (Düsseldorf – Zurich: 2001). Caracciolo Aricò A., “Lo scrittoio del Sannazaro. Spogli verbali preparatori della produzione latina posteriore all’Arcadia”, Lettere italiane 46 (1994) 280–314. Caracciolo Aricò A., L’Arcadia del Sannazaro nell’autunno dell’umanesimo, Biblioteca di cultura 507 (Rome: 1995). Carrara E., La poesia pastorale (Mailand: 1905). Carrella A.M., La chiesa di S. Maria del Parto a Mergellina (Naples: 2000). Crispo Giovanni Battista, Vita di Giacopo Sannazaro (Rome: 1593). Croce B., “La Tomba di Jacopo Sannazaro e la chiesa di S. Maria del Parto”, Napoli Nobilissima 1 (1892) 68–76. Deramaix M., “Maroni musa proximus ut tumulo: L’église et le tombeau de Jacques Sannazar”, Revue de l’art 95 (1992) 25–40. Deramaix M., “Otium Parthenopeium à la Renaissance: le lettré, l’ermite et le berger”, Bulletin de l’Association Guillaume Budé (1994) 187–199. Enenkel K.A.E., Francesco Petrarca, De vita solitaria, Buch 1. Kritische Textausgabe und ideengeschichtlicher Kommentar (Leiden – New York – Cologne – Copenhagen: 1990). Enenkel K.A.E., Die Erfindung des Menschen. Die Autobiographik des frühneuzeitlichen Humanismus von Petrarca bis Lipsius (Berlin – New York: 2008). Enenkel K.A.E., “The Author’s Portrait as Reader’s Guidance: The Case of Francis Petrarch”, in Brusati C. – Enenkel K.A.E. – Melion W.S. (eds.), The Authority of the Word. Reflecting on Image and Text in Northern Europe, 1400–1700, Intersections. Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture 20 (Leiden – Boston: 2012) 151–180. Enenkel K.A.E., Die Stiftung von Autorschaft in der neulateinischen Literatur (ca. 1350– ca. 1650) (Leiden – Boston: 2015).

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Enenkel K.A.E., “Petrarch’s Constructions of the Sacred Place in De vita solitaria and Other Writings”, in Enenkel K.A.E. – Göttler Ch. (eds.), Solitudo. Spaces, Places, and Times of Solitude in Late Medieval and Early Modern Cultures, Intersections. Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture 56 (Leiden – Boston: 2018) 31–80. Enenkel K. – De Jong-Crane B. – Liebregts P. (eds.), Modelling the Individual. Biography and Portrait in the Renaissance. With a Critical Edition of Petrarch’s Letter to Posterity (Amsterdam – Atlanta: 1998). Enenkel K.A.E. – Ottenheym K.A., Ambitious Antiquities, Famous Forbears. Constructions of a Glorious Past in the Early Modern Netherlands and in Europe (Leiden – Boston: 2020). Enenkel K.A.E. – Ottenheym K.A. (eds.), The Quest for an Appropriate Past in Literature, Art and Architecture, Intersections. Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture 60 (Leiden – Boston: 2019). Flintoff E., “The Setting of Virgil’s Eclogues”, Latomus 33 (1974) 814–846. Flood J.L., Poets Laureate in the Holy Roman Empire, 4 vols. (Berlin – New York: 2006). Garber K., Der locus amoenus und der locus terribilis. Bild und Funktion der Natur in der deutschen Schäfer- und Landlebendichtung des 17. Jahrhunderts, Literatur und Leben, N.F. 16 (Cologne – Vienna: 1974). Garber K. (ed.), Europäische Bukolik und Georgik (Darmstadt: 1976). Grant W.L., Neo-Latin Literature and the Pastoral (Chapel Hill, NC: 1965). Herrmann L., Les masques et les visages dans les Bucoliques de Virgile (Brussels: 1930). Hubba Th.K., The Pipes of Pan. Intertextuality and Literary Filiation in the Pastoral Tradition from Theocritus to Milton, 4th ed. (Ann Arbor: 2001). Jachmann G., “L’Arcadia di Virgilio come passaggio bucolico”, Maia 5 (1952) 161–174. Jenkyns R., “Virgil and Arcadia”, Journal of Roman Studies 79 (1989) 26–39. Kambylis A., Die Dichterweihe und ihre Symbolik. Untersuchungen zu Hesiodos, Kallimachos, Properz und Ennius (Heidelberg: 1965). Kennedy W.J., Jacopo Sannazaro and the Uses of the Pastoral (Hannover – New Hampshire – London: 1983). Kidwell C., Sannazaro and Arcadia (London: 1993). Korenjak M., “Tityri sub persona. Der antike Biographismus und die bukolische Tradition”, Antike und Abendland 49 (2003) 58–79. Krauter K., Die Renaissance der Bukolik in der lateinischen Literatur des 14. Jahrhunderts: von Dante bis Petrarca (Munich: 1983). Leach E.W., Vergil’s Eclogues: Landscapes of Experiences (Ithaca, NY: 1974). Lieberg G., “De Sannazario humanista et de necessitudinibus, quae ei cum poetis veteribus, imprimis Vergilio, Tibullo, Propertio, intercedunt”, Latinitas 41 (1993) 330–342. Löhr W.D., Lesezeichen. Francesco Petrarca und das Dichterbild bis zum Beginn der Renaissance (Ph.D. dissertation, Berlin: 2003).

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Mancini C., “I Nomi Accademici di Jacopo Sannazaro”, Atti dell’Accademia Pontiana 24 (1894). Marnoto R., A “Arcadia” de Sannazaro e o bucolismo (Coimbra: 1996). Maylender M., Storia delle accademie d’Italia, 5 vols. (Bologna: 1926–1930). Mertens D., “Petrarcas ‘Privilegium laureationis’”, in Borgolte M. – Spilling H. (eds.), Litterae Medii Aevi. Festschrift für Johannes Autenrieth (Sigmaringen: 1988) 225–247. Minieri Riccio C., Cenno storico della accademia pontaniana (Naples: 1876). Minieri Riccio C., Biografie degli accademici alfonsiniani, detti poi pontaniani, dal 1442 al 1543 (Naples: 1881). Nash R. (ed. and trans.), The Major Latin Poems of Jacopo Sannazaro. Translated into English prose with commentary and selected verse translations (Detroit: 1996). Niccoli S., “Jacopo Sannazaro”, in Carrella A.M., La chiesa di S. Maria del Parto a Mergellina (Naples: 2000) 49–64. Percopo E., “Per la giovinezza del Sannazaro”, in Barbi M. (ed.), Miscellanea di studi critici in onore di Arturo Graf (Bergamo: 1903) 775–781. Percopo E., “Vita di Jacobo Sannazaro”, Archivio storico per le province napoletane, n.s., 17 (1931). Pöschl V., Die Hirtendichtung Virgils (Heidelberg: 1964). Riccucci M., Il neghittoso e il fier connubbio: storia e filologia nell’Arcadia di Jacopo Sannazaro (Naples: 2001). Rosand D., “Pastoral Topoi: on the Construction of Meaning in Landscape”, Studies in the History of Art 36 (1992) 160–177. Sannazaro Jacopo, Latin Poetry, trans C.J. Putnam, I Tatti Renaissance Library 38 (Cambridge, Mass. – London: 2009). Sannazaro Jacopo, Arcadia. Introduzione e commento da Carlo Vecce, I Classici italiani 26 (Rome: 2013); Arcadia. Hrsg., übersetzt und kommentiert von Helmuth Widhammer (Stuttgart: 2018); Erspamer F. (ed.), L’Arcadie. Édition critique. Introduction, traduction, notes et tables par G. Marino; avec une préface de Y. Bonnefoy (Paris: 2004). Schäfer E. (ed.), Sannazaro und die Augusteische Dichtung (Tübingen: 2006). Smith N.D., “The Genre and Critical Reception of Jacopo Sannazaro’s Eclogae Piscatoriae (Naples: 1526)”, Humanistica Lovaniensia 50 (2001) 199–219. Smith P.L., “Lentus in umbra: A Symbolic Pattern in Vergil’s Eclogues”, Phoenix 19 (1965) 298–303. Snell B., “Arkadien. Die Entdeckung einer geistigen Landschaft”, Antike und Abendland 1 (1945) 26–31. Snell B., “Arcadia: The Discovery of a Spiritual Landscape”, in idem, The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought (Oxford: 1953) 281–309. Soranzo M., Poetry and Identity in Quattrocento Naples (London – New York: 2014). Steppich C.J., Numine afflatur. Die Inspiration des Dichters im Denken der Renaissance (Wiesbaden: 2002).

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Tateo F., L’umanesimo etico di Giovanni Pontano (Lecce: 1972). Tateo F., L’umanesimo meridionale (Bari: 1972). Trapp J.B., “The Grave of Vergil”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 47 (1984) 1–31. Trapp J.B., “The Iconography of Petrarch in the Age of Humanism”, in idem, Studies on Petrarch and his Influence (London: 2003) 1–117. Vecce C., “Sannazaro, Iacopo”, in Dizionario biografico degli Italiana 90 (2017), http:// www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/iacopo-sannazaro_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/. Volpi Giovanni Antonio (Vulpius Joannes Antonius), Jacobi sive Actii Synceri Sannazarii Neapolitani viri patricii vita, in Sannazaro, Opera Latine scripta, ed. Janus Broukhusius (Amsterdam, widow of Gerard Onderdelinden: 1727) 491–530.

Chapter 4

Landscape in Marcus Gheeraerts’s Fable Illustrations Paul J. Smith The present article1 will address the illustrations made by Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder (ca. 1520–ca. 1590) from Bruges for a Flemish fable collection entitled De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (1567).2 This fable collection was made in collaboration with the poet Eduard de Dene (ca. 1505–ca. 1578), also from Bruges, who wrote the texts – 107 fables in total. The result of this coproduction was modern – even innovative – for its time, for various reasons. Firstly, it is the first Dutch fable book that is modeled upon the well-known threepart structure of the emblem, with its motto, pictura, and subscriptio. This socalled ‘emblematic fable’3 was not an invention by Gheeraerts or De Dene; this format was taken from the Parisian printer and emblematist Gilles Corrozet (1510–1568).4 Compared to Corrozet’s woodcut illustrations, made by Bernard Salomon (1506 or 1510–ca. 1561), a technical novelty was Gheeraerts’s use of etching, which enabled him to render very precisely the details of furs and feathers, and of faraway landscapes – I will come back to this. Another innovation was Gheeraerts’s and De Dene’s use of sources other than the traditional Aesopian fable corpus, as can be seen from fable 35,5 (“Het dier Chameleon” 1 This article originates from the Dutch NWO research project Aesopian Fables 1500–2010: Word, Image, Education. I thank Dirk Geirnaert and Meredith McGroarty for reading a first version of this article. 2 De Dene Eduard – Gheeraerts Marcus, De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (Brugge, Pieter de Clerck for Marcus Gheeraerts: 1567). 3 The term was coined by Barbara Tiemann. See Tiemann B., Fabel und Emblem: Gilles Corrozet und die französische Renaissance-Fabel (Munich: 1974). 4 Corrozet Gilles, Les fables du tresancien Esope (Paris, Denis Janot: 1542). The edition used by De Dene and Gheeraerts was Corrozet Gilles, Les fables d’Esope Phrygien, mises en Ryme françoise (Lyon, Jean de Tournes and Guillaume Gazeau: 1549), with illustrations by Bernard Salomon. For further information about both editions, with specific reference to the fable The Cricket and the Ants, see Mos H. – Smith P.J., “Trajectoires d’une fable illustrée: La Cigale et la Fourmi, de Corrozet à La Fontaine, et au-delà”, RELIEF. Revue Électronique de Littérature Française, 11.1 (2017) 96–113 (https://www.revue-relief.org/articles/abstract/10 .18352/relief.954/). 5 The numbering of the fables is taken from the pioneering article by Scharpé L., “Van De Dene tot Vondel”, Leuvensche Bijdragen 4 (1900) 5–63 (especially 60–63). © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004440401_005

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Figure 4.1 Marcus Gheeraerts, “The Animal Chameleon”. Etched illustration to Eduard de Dene’s De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (Bruges, Pieter de Clerck for Marcus Gheeraerts: 1567) From: Facsimile ed. W. Le Loup – M. Goetink (Roeselare: 1978) 72–73

(The Animal Chameleon) [Fig. 4.1]): its text is adapted from Alciato’s emblem in the French translation by Barthélemy Aneau (ca. 1510–1561),6 and the illustration is by Pierre Vase (1520?-after 1590), also named Pierre Cruche or Pierre Eskrich [Fig. 4.2]. However, Gheeraerts’s illustration of the chameleon does not come from Eskrich but from natural history, from Conrad Gessner’s Historia ani­malium, book II (1554) to be precise [Fig. 4.3].7 Close comparison 6 Alciato Andrea, Emblemes, transl. Barthélemy Aneau (Lyon, Macé Bonhomme for Guillaume Rouille: 1549) 77. 7 Gessner Conrad, Historia animalium, Liber II. De quadrupedis oviparis (Zurich, Christoffel Froschauer: 1554) 3. On the successive illustrations of the chameleon, from the first editions of Alciato’s Emblematum liber to the Warachtighe fabulen and beyond, see Smith P.J., “Een veranderlijk dier. De kameleon tussen natuurlijke historie en emblematiek”, De Boekenwereld 29.1 (2012) 33–43; and idem, “Inconstant et variable. Le caméléon entre histoire naturelle et emblématique”, Textimage, Varia 4, Spring 2014: https://www.revue-textimage.com/09_ varia_4/smith1.html. On text and image in the chameleon emblem in the Latin editions of the Emblematum liber, see Enenkel K.A.E., The Invention of the Emblem Book and the Transmission of Knowledge, ca. 1510–1610 (Leiden – Boston: 2019) 29–38.

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Figure 4.2 Andrea Alciato, Emblemes (Lyon, Macé Bonhomme for Guillaume Rouille: 1549) 77 https://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/french/facsimile. php?emb=FALb050

Smith

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Figure 4.3 Conrad Gessner, Historia animalium, liber I. De quadrupedis oviparis (Zurich, Christopher Froschauer: 1554) 3 https://www.e-rara.ch/zuz/content/pageview/2119268

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of Gessner’s and Gheeraerts’s illustrations of the animal teaches us that, unexpectedly, Gheeraerts’s illustration turns out to be much more realistic than Gessner’s in the rendering of the chameleon’s characteristic snout and protruding eyes (Gessner’s chameleon has unrealistic deep-set eyes and a grinning mouth). It is therefore not unthinkable that Gheeraerts ‘corrected’ his model by a de visu observation of a living or stuffed animal. In any case, natural history, be it from direct observation or book knowledge, is definitely an important source of the Warachtighe fabulen.8 The use of the emblematic layout and of motifs from emblem books and natural history is among many other innovations by which De Dene and Gheeraerts intended to upgrade the ‘mongrel’ fable to a truly literary genre. All references to Aesop and his humble origins have been systematically deleted from the collection’s title print, paratexts, and fable texts. The collection’s title print [Fig. 4.4] illustrates well the book’s literary ambitions.9 In the title print the traditional, deformed figure of Aesop, surrounded by animals or symbolic objects from his life, has been replaced by a handsome youth. His crown indicates that he is the ruler of the three realms in the animal kingdom, represented by their respective leaders: the eagle for the creatures of the air, the lion for the terrestrial animals, and the dolphin for the aquatic animals. This is evidently an illustration of the two Psalm quotations on the title page: Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet: All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field; The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas. Psalm 8: 47 – King James Version

8 See Ashworth Jr. W.B., “Marcus Gheeraerts and the Aesopic Connection in SeventeenthCentury Scientific Illustration”, Art Journal 44.2 (1984) 132–138; and Smith P.J., “L’histoire naturelle et la fable emblématique (1567–1608): Marcus Gheeraerts, Eduard de Dene, Gilles Sadeler”, in Perifano A. (ed.), La transmission des savoirs au Moyen Age et à la Renaissance, vol. 2, Au XVIe siècle (Besançon: 2005) 173–186. 9 The following analysis of the title print is taken from Smith P.J., “Title Prints and Paratexts in the Emblematic Fable Books of the Gheeaerts Filiation (1567–1617)”, in Bossier P. – Scheffer R. (eds.), Soglie testuali. Funzione del paratesto nel secondo Cinquecento e oltre. Textual Thresholds. Functions of Paratexts in the Late Sixteenth Century and Beyond (Rome: 2010) 157–200 (more specifically 163).

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Figure 4.4 Marcus Gheeraerts, Titleprint. Etched illustration to Eduard de Dene’s De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (Bruges, Pieter de Clerck for Marcus Gheeraerts: 1567) From: Facsimile ed. W. Le Loup – M. Goetink (Roeselare: 1978)

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These quotations underscore the book’s religious character, absent from the traditional fable books. They are also harbingers of the biblical quotations that accompany every fable illustration of the book, replacing Corrozet’s secular subscriptiones.10 The tripartite division of the animal kingdom, inspired by the Psalmist, expresses not only the book’s religious upgrades but also its natural historical pretentions: one of the natural historical sources of the Warachtighe fabulen – the anonymous Der Dieren Palleys11 (The Palace of the Animals) (1520) – also has a title print in which the three realms of the animal kingdom are depicted. The attributes Gheeraerts’s young man holds in his left hand symbolize his control over these three reigns: a bird net, a hunting horn, and a harpoon. In his right hand he holds a number of objects related to the making of the book. The artist’s palette and the burin stand for the painter (inventor) and the engraver (executor), who in the case of the Warachtighe fabulen are united in a single person: Marcus Gheeraerts. The title print’s wind instrument (an oboe) is a reference to the musical side of the work, namely, De Dene’s command of poetic meter. Holding in a single hand the attributes of poetry and painting, the youth symbolizes another major novelty of the book: the collaboration of the two sister arts. This collaboration seems to correspond to an artistic ideal, which in fable literature was perfectly realized some years later by the Italian Giovan Mario Verdizotti (ca. 1530–ca. 1607), who was the first to write and illustrate his own fable book, Cento favole morali (1570).12 The celestial globe (a globe on which, very aptly, the zodiac – the circle of animals – is visible) stands for encyclopaedic knowledge, which, from a Renaissance point of view, poets and artists required, and which rose far above the restricted Aesopian world.

10 The use of biblical subscriptiones is an intriguing element in the Warachtighe fabulen: Gheeraerts and De Dene thus encouraged meditation on bible verses and, by doing so, undoubtedly upgraded the fable genre. A striking and remarkable characteristic of their biblical subscriptiones is that they offer texts taken from Catholic as well as from Protestant bible editions. See Geirnaert D. – Smith P.J., “The Sources of the Emblematic Fable Book De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (1567)”, in Manning J. – Porteman K. – Van Vaeck M. (eds.), The Emblem Tradition in the Low Countries (Turnhout: 1999) 23–38 (especially 25–27). 11 Der Dieren Palleys (Antwerp, Jan van Doesborch: 1520). 12 Verdizotti Giovan Mario, Cento favole morali (Venice, Giordano Zeleti: 1570). Verdizotti’s fable book turned out to be a source for the new fables Gheeraerts illustrated for the Esbatement moral des animaux (Antwerp, Gerard Smits for Philips Galle: 1578). See my “Two Illustrated Fable Books: the Esbatement moral des animaux (1578) and Verdizotti’s Cento favole morali (1570)”, in Van Dijkhuizen J.F. – Hoftijzer P. – Roding J. – Smith P.J. (eds.), Living in Posterity. Essays in Honour of Bart Westerweel (Hilversum: 2004) 249–258.

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Landscape Backgrounds

All these novelties have been repeatedly addressed by art historians and literary historians.13 There is one element that has been overlooked until now, namely, the role of backgrounds in Gheeraerts’s illustrations, especially his landscape backgrounds. This omission is all the more surprising because, according to the authoritative Schilder-boeck (1604) by Carel van Mander (1548– 1606), landscape painting was one of Gheeraerts’s specialties: Marcus Geerarts, dat een goet Meester is geweest, die verscheyden wercken dede, wesende, wesende universael, oft in alles wel ervaren, t’zy beelden, Landtschap, Metselrijen, ordinantien, teyckenen, hetsen, Verlichterije, en alles wat de Const mach omhelsen. In Landtschap was hy seer aerdigh […].14 Marcus Gheeraerts, an excellent master, who executed diverse works, being universal, that is, much experienced in all things: portraits, landscapes, architectural ornaments, composition, drawing, etching, illumination, and everything belonging to art. He was a very good landscape painter […]. The importance of landscape is highly visible in the chameleon fable: whereas Eskrich depicts a rather indefinite wilderness in the background of his emblematic picture [Fig. 4.2], Gheeraerts’s etching technique made it possible to portray a recognizably Flemish landscape, which is as detailed as it is suggestive: detailed because it enables him to render, among other things, the horse cart on the wooden bridge, and suggestive because a few drawn lines are sufficient to suggest a wide panoramic landscape under a cloudy sky. Landscape backgrounds were important to Gheeraerts, as can be seen from the drawings that served as the original designs for his etchings [Fig. 4.5]. These drawings, recently identified by Dirk Geirnaert, are housed in the Dresden Kupferstich Kabinett.15 They are not simply reversed Nachzeichnungen, as 13

See, for instance, Hodnett E., Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder of Bruges, London, and Antwerp (Utrecht: 1971), and Smith P.J., Het schouwtoneel der dieren. Embleemfabels in de Nederlanden (1567–ca. 1670) (Hilversum: 2006). 14 Van Mander Carel, Het Schilder-Boeck (Haarlem, Paschier van Wesbusch: 1604), fol. 258 r. https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/mand001schi01_01/mand001schi01_01_0238.php. 15 See his blog post: https://www.leidenartsinsocietyblog.nl/articles/one-hundred-and-eleven -drawings-identified-as-the-work-of-marcus-gheeraerts. These drawings will be edited and published by our Leiden fable project in one of the next volumes of the Brill series Intersections.

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Figure 4.5 Marcus Gheeraerts, “The Animal Chameleon”. Drawing, 9.5 × 11.3 cm. SKD, Kupfer Stichkabinet https://skd-online-collection.skd.museum/Details/Index/887500

is erroneously stated on the website of the Kupferstich Kabinett,16 but are Gheeraerts’s original designs for his etchings. In most preparatory drawings, only the contours of the animal and human protagonists would have been pricked17 to facilitate transfer to the drawing ground (probably made of a blend of asphalt, pitch, and wax), whereas the background details of Gheeraerts’s landscapes are either left unpricked or only partly pricked. This is because Gheeraerts copied them freehand onto the drawing ground, thus proving his mastery as a landscapist. 16 ‘Nachzeichnung einer Illustration in De warachtighe Fabulen der Dieren’. See: https:// skd-online-collection.skd.museum/Home/Index?page=1&q=gheeraerts (last consultation: 29 April 2019). 17 These holes are only visible on the back side of the drawings, and are not discernible on the Kupferstich Kabinett’s website.

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Figure 4.6 Marcus Gheeraerts, “The Lion and the Fox”. Drawing, 9.5 × 11.2 cm. SKD, Kupfer Stichkabinet https://skd-online-collection.skd.museum/Details/Index/887449

Gheeraerts’s drawing for the chameleon fable is particularly interesting because it shows the artist’s hesitations and choices about how to render the landscape. The etched landscape is much less crowded than in the original drawing. The drinking cattle have disappeared, and so have the two rowboats. This was probably done for compositional reasons: the cattle would have distracted the readers’ attention from the animal protagonist, and the chameleon would have been swallowed up by the horizontal band comprising the two boats and the wooden bridge. Fable 9, “Den Leeu ende Vos” (The Lion and the Fox), gives another example of Gheeraerts’s last-minute decisions with respect to the landscape [Figs. 4.6 and 4.7]. he decided at the last moment to remove the Italianate architectural background, putting the animals in an open landscape, which was, indeed, much more fitting for the fable story’s content.

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Figure 4.7 Marcus Gheeraerts, “The Lion and the Fox”. Etched illustration to Eduard de Dene’s De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (Bruges, Pieter de Clerck for Marcus Gheeraerts: 1567) From: Facsimile ed. W. Le Loup – M. Goetink (Roeselare: 1978) 20

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Variety and Pictorial Quotations

One of the main characteristics of Marcus Gheeraerts’s backgrounds is their variety in terms of themes and genres: one finds landscapes, seascapes (and coastal panoramas), and interiors. There are two main types of landscape: wild nature (landscapes without a human presence), and landscapes with signs (mostly architectural) of human activity, either in the past (ruins) or present (villages, churches, castles, windmills, etc.). The second type can be subdivided into two main categories: Flemish landscapes and Italianate (or Mediterranean) landscapes. With some precaution (because not all fables can be part of just one category), I have come to the following working typology of the different backgrounds:18 18

Wild nature landscapes: fables 1, 4, 7, 25, 31, 44, 47, 51, 60, 66, 90, 97, 99; Flemish cultivated landscapes: fables 10, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 22, 23, 35, 38, 42, 43, 53, 54, 55, 57, 59, 61, 63, 64, 65,

LANDSCAPE IN MARCUS GHEERAERTS ’ S FABLE ILLUSTRATIONS Landscape

Seascape Interior/farmyard Other (no particular background)

Wild nature Flemish Foreign/Italianate

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13 fables 30 fables 31 fables  5 fables 26 fables  2 fables

The last category contains two fables: fable 102, “Esel en zijn drie Meesters” (The Donkey and its Three Masters), and fable 103, “Vanden voghel Phenix” (Of the Bird Phoenix).19 In fable 102 Gheeraerts has minimized the etched landscape background: tiny human figures visible in the drawn landscape have disappeared – it is not clear why, maybe in order to avoid overpopulating of the illustration. In fable 103, the absence of landscape is logical from the viewpoint of the phoenix myth: only the burning sun is depicted. Here, too, a last-minute choice was made: contrary to the etching, the drawing gives a vague suggestion of a seascape (a few tiny sailboats can be seen). These categories coincide with some pictorial genres or subgenres in vogue in Bruges and Antwerp at that time. The works of four artists offer useful comparanda: Lancelot Blondeel, the “Meester van de kleine landschappen” (Master of the Small Landscapes), Cornelis van Dalem, and Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Lancelot Blondeel (1498–1561) was a painter from Bruges and probably a friend of De Dene. De Dene wrote his epitaph, in which he praised the painter as ‘wetenlick inde Architecture gheheel’ (an expert in the whole field of architecture).20 In his Schilder-boeck, Van Mander writes: ‘Hy was een wonder verstandigh Man in Metselrije, en Antijcke ruinen’ (He had an admirable knowledge in masonry and antique ruins).21 Blondeel’s architectural expertise can be gauged by his painting The Death of Marcus Licinius Crassus (1558) 69, 84, 86, 87, 88, 92, 94, 100, 106; foreign/Italianate cultivated landscapes (usually, but not always, ruins) can be distinguished from the Flemish landscapes by the presence of rock masses: fables 2, 3, 9, 19, 20, 24, 26, 33, 36, 37, 40, 41, 46, 48, 50, 52, 58, 67, 70, 73, 74, 75, 76, 80, 82, 85, 91, 95, 96, 98, 105; seascapes: fables 6, 21, 68, 79, 101; interiors/farmyards: fables 5, 8, 11, 13, 16, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 39, 45, 49, 56, 62, 71, 72, 77, 78, 81, 83, 89, 93, 104, 107. 19 It is probably mere coincidence that these two fables are successive, and both placed at the end of the book. 20 De Dene Eduard, “Epitaphium Landslood Blondeel”, in idem, Testament rhetoricael, eds. W. Waterschoot, D. Coigneau, et al., Jaarboek ‘De Fonteine’, volumes XXVI, XXVIII en XXX (1976–1980). https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/dene001test01_01/dene001test01_01_0341.php. 21 Van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck, fols. 204v–205r. https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/mand001s chi01_01/mand001schi01_01_0185.php.

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Figure 4.8 Lancelot Blondeel, The Death of Marcus Licinius Crassus (1558). Oil on panel, 56.6 × 70.9 cm Groeningemuseum Brugge – www.artinflanders.be – photographer Hugo Maertens

[Fig. 4.8].22 Gheeraerts copied this strange elevated ruin in his background landscape of fable 70, “Vos ende Rave” (The Fox and the Raven) [Fig. 4.9].23 The other Roman ruins he depicted24 are not immediately retraceable to one particular source, but are quite similar to the ruins figuring in the authoritative print collections made and published by Hieronymus Cock (1518–1570). Gheeraerts’s marked preference for Flemish farmhouses and small villages coincides with an important shift in Flemish landscape painting. According to Larry Silver, this shift is visible in a very influential collection of prints 22 On this painting, see Harth A., “De dood van generaal Marcus Licinius Crassus”, in Van Oosterwijk A. (ed.), Vergeten Meesters. Pieter Pourbus en de Brugse schilderkunst van 1525 tot 1625 (Bruges: 2017) 141. 23 I thank Dirk Geirnaert for drawing my attention to the similarity between Blondeel’s painting and Gheeraerts’s fable illustration. 24 Fables 40, 67, 75, 85.

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Figure 4.9 Marcus Gheeraerts, “The Fox and the Raven”. Etched illustration to Eduard de Dene’s De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (Bruges, Pieter de Clerck for Marcus Gheeraerts: 1567) From: Facsimile ed. W. Le Loup – M. Goetink (Roeselare: 1978) 20

published by Hieronymus Cock, entitled Multifarium casularum ruriumque lineamenta curiose ad vivum expressa (1559) (Prints, curiously drawn from nature, of multiple little farmhouses), with an extensive subtitle in Dutch, here given in Silver’s translation: ‘Many and very attractive places of various cottages, farms, fields, roads, and the like, ornamented with animals of all sorts. All portrayed from life, and mostly situated in the country near Antwerp’.25 The subtitle sketches a new pictorial program: the collection’s prints are no longer large, constructed, more or less imaginary landscapes, but ‘“portrayed from life” and expressly local’.26 The prints were etched by Joannes van Doetecum (I)

25 Silver L., Pleasant Scenes and Landscapes. The Rise of Pictorial Genres in the Antwerp Art Market (Philadelphia: 2006) 45–46. 26 Ibidem 46.

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Figure 4.10

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Marcus Gheeraerts, “The Crow and the Sheep”. Etched illustration to Eduard de Dene’s De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (Bruges, Pieter de Clerck for Marcus Gheeraerts: 1567) From: Facsimile ed. W. Le Loup – M. Goetink (Roeselare: 1978) 38

(ca. 1530–1605) or Lucas van Doetecum (active 1554–1578) after the Master of the Small Landscapes, whose identity is unknown.27 Among the interests Gheeraerts and this anonymous artist share is their remarkable preference for horse carts of various types. For example, the hay cart depicted in fable 18, “Craeye ende t’Schaep” (The Crow and the Sheep), [Fig. 4.10] is very similar to the one by the Master of the Small Landscapes [Fig. 4.11]. The Antwerp painter Cornelis van Dalem (ca. 1530–1573) was another specialist on the topic of farmhouses and small villages, but he is also known for his rock landscapes and grotto scenes. Especially well known are his extensive

27 For hypotheses on his identity and attributions, see https://rkd.nl/nl/explore/artists/ 113269.

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Figure 4.11

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Joannes van Doetecum (I) or Lucas van Doetecum after the Master of the Small Landscapes, Haycart on Village Road (1559–1561). Etching, 16.7 × 20.0 cm Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001. COLLECT.344299

rock masses, sparsely covered with trees and pierced by one or two large, round holes that open onto a distant landscape.28 Similar scenes can be seen in seven of Gheeraerts’s landscapes, of which fable 66, “Leeu ende wild Vercken” (The Lion and the Boar) [Fig. 4.12], is by far the most striking.29 In the cases of Hieronymus Cock, the Master of the Small Landscapes, and Cornelis van Dalem we are dealing with mere similarities to Gheeraerts’s landscapes, not with real models. It is likely that only Blondeel’s elevated ruin served as a direct model. This was certainly also the case for one of Pieter Brueghel’s seascapes, which consisted of a very precise rendering of all kinds of ships – Larry Silver speaks of ‘ship portraits’30 – a much appreciated subgenre in the Antwerp art scene. The seascape in question is Brueghel’s The Fall of Phaeton

28 See, for instance, his painting The Dawn of Civilisation (ca. 1565). 29 The other fables are 33, 36, 37, 46, 52, and 91. 30 Silver, Pleasant Scenes and Landscapes 220.

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Figure 4.12

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Marcus Gheeraerts, “The Lion and the Boar”. Etched illustration to Eduard de Dene’s De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (Bruges, Pieter de Clerck for Marcus Gheeraerts: 1567) From: Facsimile ed. W. Le Loup – M. Goetink (Roeselare: 1978) 134

(1564–1565), engraved by Pieter Huys (ca. 1519–ca. 1584) [Fig. 4.13]. This print combines a mythological scene and a seascape containing two ships, a galley and a three-masted ship. Gheeraerts’s illustration of fable 101, “Iupiter ende de Bije” (Jupiter and the Bee) [Fig. 4.14], was inspired by Brueghel’s mythological setting, and Gheeraerts’s two ‘ship portraits’ are clearly and directly – mirrorwise – copied from Brueghel. It is striking that with the possible exception of one particular fable, there are no anthropomorphic landscapes – a genre that had been in vogue ever since the landscapes of Patinir and Herri met de Bles. Gheeraerts produced a fine example of such a landscape in the form of a huge human head or skull in his print Allegory of Iconoclasts (1567). The one possibly anthropomorphic landscape is the above-mentioned fable 66, “The Lion and the Boar”: the rock mass in the background with its two holes looks like a skull. This is well in line

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Figure 4.13

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Pieter Huys after Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Two Galleys Sailing Behind an Armed Three-Master with Phaeton and Jupiter in the Sky (1561–1565). Engraving, 26.1 × 34.3 cm Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/ collection/search/383048

with the fable’s theme: the two animal protagonists, the lion and the wild boar, are literally fighting for their lives, and on the tree above, a vulture is perched, waiting (albeit unsuccessfully) for them to die. Besides landscapes, seascapes, and fable and emblem books, Gheeraerts’s illustrations contain other pictorial quotations. The elephant in fable 44, “Elephant ende Draecke” (The Elephant and the Dragon) [Fig. 4.15], was copied from an etching by Giovanno Battista Franco (ca. 1510–1561) dating from about 1540 [Fig. 4.16],31 who was himself inspired by a drawing attributed to Titian. 31 First noticed by Gilles Chambon, blogspot http://art-figuration.blogspot.com/2016/12/ les-animaux-mis-en-scene-dans-la.html (accessed 29 September 2019). See also Smith P.J., “Art et Science: le défilé des animaux dans L’Arche de Noé sur le Mont Ararat, peinture de Simon de Myle (1570)”, in De Gendt A.M. – Montoya A.C. (eds.), La pensée sérielle, du Moyen Age aux Lumières (Leiden – Boston: 2019) 194–217. It is interesting to note that one of the first imitators of Gheeraerts, the painter Simon de Myle (active ca. 1570),

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Figure 4.14

Marcus Gheeraerts, “Jupiter and the Bee”. Etched illustration to Eduard de Dene’s De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (Bruges, Pieter de Clerck for Marcus Gheeraerts: 1567) From: Facsimile ed. W. Le Loup – M. Goetink (Roeselare: 1978) 204

Franco depicted a group of four elephants – the second from right being the one that was copied by Gheeraerts. identified Franco as Gheeraerts’s source. In his painting The Animals leaving The Arch of Noah on Mount Ararat (1570), De Myle copied very closely no fewer than 23 animals from the Warachtighe fabulen. Only the elephant is based not directly on Gheeraerts but on Gheeraerts’s source, Franco. De Myle’s elephant is mirror-reversed in comparison to Gheeraerts’s – which would be very uncommon in a painted copy – whereas it is a direct, not mirror image of Franco’s elephant. Moreover, in the details of the elephant’s ear, De Myle’s elephant is again closer to Franco’s elephant than to Gheeraerts’s. And the most convincing argument that De Myle copied Franco’s and not Gheeraerts’s elephant is that he also copied another elephant from Franco’s print (namely, the first elephant at left). Probably for reasons of composition, this second elephant has been copied in mirror reversal. In doing so, De Myle did not quite succeed in appropriately rendering the animal’s back and neck.

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Figure 4.15

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Marcus Gheeraerts, “The Elephant and the Dragon”. Etched illustration to Eduard de Dene’s De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (Bruges, Pieter de Clerck for Marcus Gheeraerts: 1567) From: Facsimile ed. W. Le Loup – M. Goetink (Roeselare: 1978) 90

Another surprising pictorial quotation is Gheeraerts’s lion in fable 25, “Leeu Esel ende Vos” (The Lion, the Donkey and the Fox) [Fig. 4.17]. This lion seems to have been inspired by the famous Greek sculpture Lion Attacking a Horse [Fig. 4.18], admired by Michelangelo and on display at the Capitoline at Rome, of which it had long-since become an icon, comparable to the lupa capitolina. One notes the position of the lion’s claws and the folding of the horse’s skin under the lion’s bite – all details copied by Gheeraerts. In Gheeraerts’s time, the sculpture was quite fragmentary: the horse had neither head nor legs, only a torso.32 Scholars and artists engaged in much speculation about the sculpture’s

32

It was only in 1590 that the sculpture that the missing parts of the lion and the horse were filled in.

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Giovanni Battista Franco, Four Elephants, a Lion and a Boar. Copperplate print, 33.2 × 47.7 cm Photo: Andreas Praefcke. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Franco_Elephants_lion_and_boar.jpg

original appearance. Gheeraerts took advantage of this interpretative uncertainty to change the horse into a donkey, not without humour.33 Another category of Gheeaerts’s backgrounds are his Flemish interiors, pictured with much attention to the technical details of workshop tools and equipment. This interest in Flemish artisanal interiors is remarkable, especially noticeable in the first thirty fables of the Warachtighe fabulen,34 which picture the interiors of a butchery (fable 5), a sculptor’s atelier (fable 13), a smithy (fable 16), and a poor peasant’s hut (fable 29). This interest is also related to Gheeraerts’s fascination with technical objects, which we find elsewhere in the book, such as a ‘meil-kiste’ (meal chest) (fable 49), ‘dobbel netten’ (a special kind of bird trap) (fable 65), and ‘bie-buucken’ (beehives) (fable 72), all 33

Here we see once again that Simon De Myle has recognized Gheeraerts’s source: he corrects Gheeraerts’s comic, rather disrespectful interpretation by painting not a donkey but a white horse, imitating the shining white colour of the sculpture. One notices that De Myle represents the horse without a head, just like the Capitoline sculpture, which at his time was also headless. 34 As we shall see, novelties in fable books are often highlighted at strategic places in the book, at its beginning and ending.

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Figure 4.17

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Marcus Gheeraerts, “The Lion, the Donkey and the Fox”. Etched illustration to Eduard de Dene’s De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (Bruges, Pieter de Clerck for Marcus Gheeraerts: 1567) From: Facsimile ed. W. Le Loup – M. Goetink (Roeselare: 1978) 52

mentioned by name by De Dene. For this interest in Flemish interiors, tools, and objects I could find no directly comparable examples in contemporary art from Bruges or Antwerp, but not long after Gheeraerts this technical interest became fashionable in print series and emblem books. The question is, what is the significance of all these pictorial quotations and allusions, referring to the latest art fashions in Bruges and Antwerp? I think that these are meant to support the general literary and artistic elevation of the little-esteemed genre of the Aesopian fable: as we have seen, this elevation is characteristic of the whole collection of Warachtighe fabulen. But the pictorial references also serve strategically to position the artist himself: Gheeraerts not only promotes himself as an innovative etcher and animal painter, he also shows his proficiency in other pictorial (sub)genres – he presents, as it were, his artistic visiting card. Gheeraerts’s self-profiling as a ‘universal’ painter (in the words of Van Mander), turned out to be of great help

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Figure 4.18

Lion Attacking a Horse. Sculpture Capitoline Museums. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Lion_attacking_a_horse,_probably_made_in_northern_Greece_or_Asia_ Minor,_325%E2%80%93300_BC,_restored_in_Rome_in_1594,_Capitoline_ Museums_(22169854685).jpg

when he had to flee from Bruges to London in 1568, just after the publication of the Warachtighe fabulen. In London he immediately picked up where he had left off, and very successfully re-established his career as a painter and a book illustrator. 3

Landscape and Fable

Let us now turn to the relationship between background landscape and fable. At first sight, one has the general impression that there is no connection at all between foreground and background. This can be seen in the fable of The Animal Chameleon. Typical of Gheeraerts are the tiny figures in the landscape background, mostly peasants, fishermen, or travelers. They do not notice the fable scene represented in the foreground. This striking disconnection

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between background and foreground has been compared to Pieter Brueghel’s famous painting The Fall of Icarus. In this painting the ploughman does not pay any attention to Icarus’s dramatic downfall: in the words of Edward Hodnett, Gheeraerts’s biographer: ‘ordinary life goes indifferently on’,35 presaging the English poet W.H. Auden’s poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” (1938), and perhaps also the Dutch poet Weremeus Buning’s poem “De ballade van de boer” (The Ballad of the Peasant) (1935): ‘Maar de boer, hij ploegde voort’ (But the peasant, he kept on ploughing). The disconnection between foreground and background is highlighted even more by the exoticism of the chameleon in contrast with the Flemish landscape. One also finds the inverse: typical Flemish animals in a foreign landscape, for instance, in the above-mentioned fable of “The Fox and the Raven”. Occasionally, a background figure seems to contain a humorous element, contrasting with the serious and dramatic foreground scenes. Van Mander wrote about Gheeraerts’s landscapes: ‘veel hebbende de manier, van een gehuckt pissende Vrouken ergen op een brughsken oft elder te maken’ (he often used to picture a little squatting pissing female figure on a little bridge or somewhere else).36 The Warachtighe fabulen does not contain such illustrations of pissing women – the only comparable figure is a shitting carter, squatting behind his vehicle (fable 46). In his rewriting of fable 87, “Vos ende Buck” (The Fox and the He-Goat), the Dutch poet Joost van den Vondel (1587–1679)37 was struck by a remarkable inconsistency between the fable foreground and the landscape background. The fable tells us how the thirsty fox and goat found a water well, into which they descended to quench their thirst. This story is highly improbable, because Gheeraerts’s illustration shows that there is plenty of water: in the immediate background, Gheeraerts pictured a pond with a rowboat in it. Vondel found an appropriate solution to this improbability by changing the well into a wine cellar. All these intended and unintended disconnections can easily make us overlook the multiple connections existing between background and foreground. Sometimes these connections quite traditionally address the narrative structure of the fable – traditionally, because this kind of connection can already be found in the first printed illustrated fable book: Steinhöwel’s Äsop (1476).38 35 Hodnett, Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder of Bruges 37. 36 Van Mander, Het Schilder-Boeck, fol. 258 r. 37 Vondel Joost van den, Vorsteliicke Warande der dieren (Amsterdam, Dirk Pietersz. Pers: 1617), fol. 107 r. 38 Steinhöwel Heinrich, Buch und Leben des hochberühmten Fabeldichters Aesopi (Ulm, Johann Zainer: 1476).

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Figure 4.19

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Marcus Gheeraerts, “The Eagle and the Vixen”. Etched illustration to Eduard de Dene’s De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (Bruges, Pieter de Clerck for Marcus Gheeraerts: 1567) From: Facsimile ed. W. Le Loup – M. Goetink (Roeselare: 1978) 84

But Gheeraerts tries to vary and refine the narrative structure of traditional fable illustration, sometimes by representing not two, but even three moments from the story’s plot, and in changing its chronology. In some cases the background has a retrospective function: it depicts what happened before the fable scene, which is represented in the foreground. Thus, in fable 41, “Arendt ende Vosinne” (The Eagle and the Vixen) [Fig. 4.19], in the background the eagle is shown chasing and catching a fox cub; at the top of the illustration the same eagle feeds her nestlings with the dead cub, and in the foreground the mother fox, the vixen, takes revenge by setting the eagle’s nest on fire. Another example of a threefold retrospective illustration can be found in fable 17, “Iupiter ende Puden ofte Vorsschen” (Jupiter and the Frogs demanding a King) [Fig. 4.20]. In this fable the three decisive moments of the narrative are represented from background to foreground: in the background Jupiter is throwing the wooden log; in the middle-ground the frogs are pictured, sitting disrespectfully on the

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Figure 4.20

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Marcus Gheeraerts, “Jupiter and the Frogs demanding a King”. Etched illustration to Eduard de Dene’s De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (Bruges, Pieter de Clerck for Marcus Gheeraerts: 1567) From: Facsimile ed. W. Le Loup – M. Goetink (Roeselare: 1978) 36

log; and finally, in the foreground the frogs are being devoured by the stork, which was sent by Jupiter to punish them. Conversely, the background could also be prospective when it contains the fable’s outcome and dénouement. See, for instance, fable 43, “Wolf ende Vos” (The Wolf and the Fox), in which the fox is ultimately killed by the dogs (scene pictured in the background), or fable 64, “Havick ende Cockuut” (The Goshawk and the Cuckoo), in which the goshawk is caught by a peasant who will put it in a cage, the one hanging from the tower in the background, where the cuckoo mocks the goshawk. One notices Gheeraerts’s variation in rendering the fable narrative. I will come back to the aspect of variety, which is, I think, crucial in Gheeraerts’s art of illustration. But in spite of this variation, most illustrations are neither retrospective nor prospective: they simply focus on a single, choice moment of the story.

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Mostly the function of the landscape background is to give a naturalistic context: thus, the ‘Vlaamse Haan’, the Flemish rooster, is put into a Flemish landscape (fable 94, “Vlaemsche ende Turksche Hane” (The Flemish and the Turkish Rooster)). However, this at first sight rather simplistic naturalism is used by De Dene and Gheeraerts to highlight their cooperation: indeed, De Dene quite systematically refers in his texts to the characteristics of the depicted landscape, or alternatively, Gheeraerts depicts what De Dene describes in his text. This cooperation between the two sister arts, and more specifically, the insistence on this cooperation (by describing the details of the illustration, or the inverse, by illustrating the details of the text), are things that are quite new in the history of the illustrated fable. I will give some examples of this mechanism by going rapidly through the opening fables of the book. Why the opening fables? As has been suggested above, in fable books novelties are mostly put together and highlighted in so-called ‘strategic’ places – the beginning and the end of the book, marking the novelty of the collection as a whole compared with its immediate predecessors. Examples of this strategic ordering can be found in most of the fable books from the Gheeraerts filiation: thus, in the above-mentioned anonymous Esbatement moral des animaux (1578), which is a French adaptation of the Warachtighe fabulen, 17 of the 18 newly made fables (also illustrated by Gheeraerts) are put among the first 67 fables of the book. And 5 of the 18 new fables constitute the first 5 opening fables of the Esbatement moral. In the anonymous Theatrum morum (1609),39 a German adaptation of the Esbatement moral and containing 15 new fables. Fourteen of the newly invented fables (which have exotic animals as a thematic novelty) are put among the first 29 fables, whereas the fifteenth new fable, “Vom gefangnen Knecht und Esel” (Of the Imprisoned Valet and the Donkey), is placed at the end of the book. And in a Dutch translation of the Esbatement moral by Anthoni Smyters (ca. 1545–1625/1626), the only new fable, “De Vader met syn Sonen” (The Father and His Sons), is put at the end.40 All this is also applicable, mutatis mutandis, for the novelties of the Warachtighe fabulen. Thus, the opening fable, “Basiliscus ende het Wezel” (The Basilisk and the Weasel), implies a rupture with the traditional opening of fable books, for two main reasons. First, the book does not begin with the traditional fable of The Cockerel and the Pearl (or Diamond), the best known ‘meta-fable’, the ‘fable of the fable’,41 which warns the reader not to follow the example of the 39 Theatrum morum. Artliche gesprach der thier (Prague, Paul Sesse: 1608). This fable book was probably written and illustrated by the Flemish artist Aegidius Sadeler (1570–1629), active at the court of Rudolph II in Prague. 40 Smyters Anthoni, Esopus Fabulen (Rotterdam, Jan van Waesberghe: 1604). 41 Speckenbach K., “Die Fabel von der Fabel. Zur Überlieferungsgeschichte der Fabel von Hahn und Perle”, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 12 (1978) 178–229.

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cockerel, disdaining the precious stone it finds, i.e., the precious moral of this fable and all fables of the book. Secondly, this fable’s topic is not taken from the traditional Aesopian corpus but from natural history, where the natural antipathy between the basilisk and the weasel is a topic frequently alluded to. Moreover, several textual details seem to have been taken from a specific Dutch compilation on natural history, namely the above-mentioned Der Dieren Palleys (1520), which discusses the antipathy between the two animals. The untitled last fable of the Warachtighe fabulen, on the piety of the stork (fable 107), is also based on information found in Der Dieren Palleys. And, more generally, the last five fables of the Warachtighe fabulen are not of Aesopian origin. Returning to our argument: in the opening fables we see that there is a substantial relationship between landscape and story, and, moreover, that this relationship (with one exception) is explicitly expressed by De Dene. So, one novelty – the relationship between landscape and fable – is put, as it were, in the spotlight by another novelty (the symbiotic cooperation between artist and poet) Let us take a closer look. In the book’s first fable on “The Basilisk and the Weasel”, De Dene remarks in his opening lines that the Basilisk Bederft de boomen / cruuden / en de lucht altoos Door zyn erch venijn / alle dijnghen zeer schadelick / The basilisk poisons the trees, herbs and the air all around by its strong venom, which is very noxious to all things. And indeed, Gheeraerts’s landscape is a barren wilderness, with only a few scarce plants. In the second fable, “Den Leeu ende T’peert” (The Lion and the Horse), there is in the landscape background a left-right contrast reflecting the scene at the foreground, which opposes horse and lion. The lion is related to the rocky wilderness, depicted behind the animal, whereas the horse is connected to the peaceful meadow and human civilization. The meeting of brutal nature and peaceful civilization in the centre of the illustration is underlined by De Dene, who writes in his opening line: ‘Den Leeu vandt een Peert in het groene gras’ (The lion found a horse in the green grass). A similar left-right contrast can be seen in the illustration of the following fable, “De Paeu ende Nachtegale” (The Peacock and the Nightingale), in which Juno chooses (and is depicted at) the side of the nightingale. In this fable, however, De Dene does not make any explicit reference to the landscape background, and in not doing so he marks an interruption in the continuity of the self-representative collaboration between poet and artist. As we shall see,

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these moments of disrupted expectation and changing Erwartungshorizont (to use a term from German literary theory) are characteristic of Gheeraerts’s and De Dene’s rather obsessional preoccupation with variety. In the next fable, “Den Esel ande Haze” (The Donkey and the Hare), De Dene restores the broken continuity by beginning rather insistently with an evocation of the wild landscape associated with the lion and depicted by Gheeraerts: ALzoo den Leeu in een wilde contreye Oprechte een Armeye Daer die viervoetighe Dieren gheropen waren / Zijn zy ghecommen door berghen / dal / en valeye / When in a wild region the Lion wanted to set up an army, and called there together the four-legged animals, they came to him over hill and dale. All these connections between foreground and landscape background are diegetic: they concern mainly the narrative elements of the fable story. In fact, there are hardly any moralistic connections between foreground and background. I found only a few possible examples of this type of connection. Thus, the morality of the previously mentioned fable 18, “The Crow and the Sheep” [Fig. 4.10], is the world’s injustice: just as the sheep can do nothing against the aggressively pecking crow sitting on the poor animal’s back, so the oppressed have to endure the aggression of the oppressor, in the words of De Dene: D’onnoosel simpele vol ongheuals […] Salmen t’pack legghen meest op den hals The burden will mostly be put around the neck of stupid, simple, unfortunate people. All the figures in the landscape background seem to denote this message: horses are beaten (both the horse pulling the hay cart and the horse with a rider), fish are caught, and the poor figure on the bridge, who is carrying a heavy burden, especially seems to illustrate De Dene’s concluding sentence on the ‘unfortunate people’, whose necks are loaded with burdens. Or are these background figures mere elements of the Flemish couleur locale, and nothing more? The other example, fable 23, “Vanden ouden Hovaere” (Of the Old Stork), has another moral: follow the example of the storks because they take care of their children, for in return they will have help from their children when they grow old, or in De Dene’s words:

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Figure 4.21

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Marcus Gheeraerts, “Of the Old Stork”. Etched illustration to Eduard de Dene’s De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (Bruges, Pieter de Clerck for Marcus Gheeraerts: 1567) From: Facsimile ed. W. Le Loup – M. Goetink (Roeselare: 1978) 48

[…] om Vader en Moedere Bystant te doene in noodts bedwangen, Van wien zij secours hebben ontfangen […] in order to give assistance to father and mother, oppressed by need, from whom they had received help. The storks’ tireless care for their nestlings is depicted at the top of the illustration [Fig. 4.21]. In the lower background a young woman is opening the door of her house, perhaps to invite in the two approaching poor old people. Are they her parents? Some other details of this illustration can be interpreted in a similar vein. The church depicted in the background seems to denote the bird’s piety,42 as it is the enemy of snakes – Gheeraerts’s stork holds this symbol of 42

See also the concluding fable of the Warachtighe fabulen on the piety of the stork.

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sin and the devil in its bill. And the church might also underline the two quotations from Ecclesiasticus in the subscriptio text below Gheeraerts’s etching: […] help thy father in his age, and grieve him not as long as he liveth. And if his understanding fail, have patience with him; and despise him not […]. Ecclesiasticus 3: 12–13 – King James Version

Honour thy father with thy whole heart, and forget not the sorrows of thy mother. Remember that thou wast begotten of them; and how canst thou recompense them the things that they have done for thee? Ecclesiasticus 7: 27–28 – King James Version

This brings us to the semantic polyvalence of the numerous details of the background landscapes and interiors, which are remarkable, even if they are not immediately understandable. For instance, the spiderweb at the smithy’s window (fable 16): Is this an allusion to the spider’s activity, in contrast with the dog’s laziness? Or to the animal’s art, which is superior to the smith’s artistry, and human art in general? The relevance of both accounts could easily be argued from the spider’s traditional symbolism. And the religious procession behind the cockerel and the precious diamond (fable 22): Is this a scene of daily life, or a hidden critical allusion to Roman Catholic practices, made by the Protestant-minded Gheeraerts? The interpreter might well hesitate as well about the swine looking out from its pigsty at the woman killing the hen that lays golden eggs (fable 32): Is this a picturesque detail or a condemnation of the woman’s greed? And the innumerable crosses on churches, chapels, in fact everywhere in the landscapes, are of course typical of Flemish landscape in general; but by their omnipresence seems to underscore the religious impact of the fables. All these details have a rhetorical effect: they make the reader think about the fable and its possible meanings. 4

Conclusion

In any case, apart from potential differences of interpretation, the most striking features of Gheeraerts’s landscapes and other backgrounds are their insistent presence and their remarkable variety, which latter quality was so much appreciated by Carel van Mander. This variety is perceptible from one illustration to the next, as can be seen by comparing successive fables: some sets

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with the same type of background can be identified,43 but these sets consist of rather brief sequences, mostly not unbroken. We are dealing here with an artistic phenomenon that has been labelled varyingly in literary theory – ‘deautomatization of perception’, ‘ostranity’ or ‘ostranéité’ (Russian formalism), or ‘singularization’ (Todorov) – and which is close to the above-mentioned disturbed or changing Erwartungshorizont. This variety is also visible, even more so, in the fables’ topics and morals. Not a single fable of the Warachtighe fabulen has the same animal protagonist or the same moral as the preceding one or the following one – contrary to most other fable books, which tend to put fables with the same animals together – especially the frequently occurring ones, such as lions, foxes, wolves, dogs, horses, and sheep.44 As a result of the book’s ‘de-automatization of perception’, landscapes are not merely decorative backgrounds, which can be skipped easily and automatically, but instead they all demand a moment of reflection and interpretation. They make the reader/beholder think about possible meanings, and also make him/her alert to artistic allusions and quotations. To come back to some of the fables, especially fables 18 and 23, with their possibly moralizing background landscapes, or fable 66, with its possibly anthropomorphic landscape: the reader/ beholder asks himself or herself: What is the connection between the background landscape and fable story as told by De Dene and foregrounded by Gheeraerts? How does Gheeraerts express and exhibit his modernity and his artistic newness? The same questions about the landscape background can be posed for the numerous fable illustrators who were directly or indirectly influenced by Gheeraerts: Aegidius Sadeler in Germany; Francis Ogilby’s illustrators Dirk Stoop, Francis Cleyn, Wenceslas Hollar, and Francis Barlow (and Barlow, too, in his capacity as a fable author and illustrator) in England; and in France, Isaac Briot, illustrator of Jean Baudoin’s Fables d’Esope, and François Chauveau, illustrator of Jean de La Fontaine.45 But this is another story, captivating but untold.

43

The longest series are formed by fables 14, 15, 17, 18, and 53, 54, 55, 57, 59, 61, 63, 64, 65, and 84, 86, 87, 88 (all Flemish landscape series); fables 73, 74, 75, 76, and 95, 96, 98 (foreign landscapes); and fables 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34 (interiors and farmyards). See also note 18. 44 For some striking examples, see my “Dispositio in the Emblematic Fable Books of the Gheeraerts Filiation (1567–1617)”, in Adams A. – Van der Weij M. (eds.), Emblems of the Low Countries. A Book Historical Perspective (Glasgow: 2003) 149–169. 45 On Chauveau’s background landscape in relation to La Fontaine’s fable texts, see Mos – Smith, “Trajectoires d’une fable illustrée”.

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Bibliography Alciato Andrea, Emblemes, transl. Barthélemy Aneau (Lyon, Macé Bonhomme for Guillaume Rouille: 1549). Ashworth Jr. W.B., “Marcus Gheeraerts and the Aesopic Connection in SeventeenthCentury Scientific Illustration”, Art Journal 44.2 (1984) 132–138. Corrozet Gilles, Les fables du tresancien Esope (Paris, Denis Janot: 1542). Corrozet Gilles, Les fables d’Esope Phrygien, mises en Ryme françoise (Lyon, Jean de Tournes and Guillaume Gazeau: 1549). De Dene Eduard – Gheeraerts Marcus, De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (Bruges, Pieter de Clerck for Marcus Gheeraerts: 1567). Facsimile ed. W. Le Loup – M. Goetink (Roeselare: 1978). De Dene Eduard, Testament rhetoricael, eds. W. Waterschoot, D. Coigneau, et al., Jaarboek ‘De Fonteine’, volumes XXVI, XXVIII en XXX (1976–1980). Der Dieren Palleys (Antwerp, Jan van Doesborch: 1520). Enenkel K.A.E., The Invention of the Emblem Book and the Transmission of Knowledge, ca. 1510–1610 (Leiden – Boston: 2019). Esbatement moral des animaux (Antwerp, Gerard Smits for Philips Galle: 1578). Geirnaert D. – Smith P.J., “The Sources of the Emblematic Fable Book De warachtighe fabulen der dieren (1567)”, in Manning J. – Porteman K. – Van Vaeck M. (eds.), The Emblem Tradition in the Low Countries (Turnhout: 1999) 23–38. Gessner Conrad, Historia animalium, Liber II. De quadrupedis oviparis (Zurich, Christoffel Froschauer: 1554). Harth A., “De dood van generaal Marcus Licinius Crassus”, in Van Oosterwijk A. (ed.), Vergeten Meesters. Pieter Pourbus en de Brugse schilderkunst van 1525 tot 1625 (Bruges: 2017) 141. Hodnett E., Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder of Bruges, London, and Antwerp (Utrecht: 1971). Mos H. – Smith P.J., “Trajectoires d’une fable illustrée: La Cigale et la Fourmi, de Corrozet à La Fontaine, et au-delà”, RELIEF. Revue Électronique de Littérature Française, 11.1 (2017) 96–113 (https://www.revue-relief.org/articles/abstract/10.18352/relief.954/). [Sadeler Aegidius], Theatrum morum. Artliche gesprach der thier (Prague, Paul Sesse: 1608). Scharpé L., “Van De Dene tot Vondel”, Leuvensche Bijdragen 4 (1900) 5–63. Silver L., Pleasant Scenes and Landscapes. The Rise of Pictorial Genres in the Antwerp Art Market (Philadelphia: 2006). Smith P.J., “Dispositio in the Emblematic Fable Books of the Gheeraerts Filiation (1567– 1617)”, in Adams A. – Van der Weij M. (eds.), Emblems of the Low Countries. A Book Historical Perspective (Glasgow: 2003) 149–169.

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Smith P.J., “Two Illustrated Fable Books: the Esbatement moral des animaux (1578) and Verdizotti’s Cento favole morali (1570)”, in Van Dijkhuizen J.F. – Hoftijzer P. – Roding J. – Smith P.J. (eds.), Living in Posterity. Essays in Honour of Bart Westerweel (Hilversum: 2004) 249–258. Smith P.J., “L’histoire naturelle et la fable emblématique (1567–1608): Marcus Gheeraerts, Eduard de Dene, Gilles Sadeler”, in Perifano A. (ed.), La transmission des savoirs au Moyen Age et à la Renaissance, vol. 2, Au XVIe siècle (Besançon: 2005) 173–186. Smith P.J., Het schouwtoneel der dieren. Embleemfabels in de Nederlanden (1567–ca. 1670) (Hilversum: 2006). Smith P.J., “Title Prints and Paratexts in the Emblematic Fable Books of the Gheeaerts Filiation (1567–1617)”, in Bossier P. – Scheffer R. (eds.), Soglie testuali. Funzione del paratesto nel secondo Cinquecento e oltre. Textual Thresholds. Functions of Paratexts in the Late Sixteenth Century and Beyond (Rome: 2010) 157–200. Smith P.J., “Een veranderlijk dier. De kameleon tussen natuurlijke historie en emblematiek”, De Boekenwereld 29.1 (2012) 33–43. Smith P.J., “Inconstant et variable. Le caméléon entre histoire naturelle et emblématique”, Textimage, Varia 4, Spring 2014: https://www.revue-textimage.com/09_ varia_4/smith1.html. Smith P.J., “Art et Science: le défilé des animaux dans L’Arche de Noé sur le Mont Ararat, peinture de Simon de Myle (1570)”, in De Gendt A.M. – Montoya A.C. (eds.), La pensée sérielle, du Moyen Age aux Lumières (Leiden – Boston: 2019) 194–217. Smyters Anthoni, Esopus Fabulen (Rotterdam, Jan van Waesberghe: 1604). Speckenbach K., “Die Fabel von der Fabel. Zur Überlieferungsgeschichte der Fabel von Hahn und Perle”, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 12 (1978) 178–229. Steinhöwel Heinrich, Buch und Leben des hochberühmten Fabeldichters Aesopi (Ulm, Johann Zainer: 1476). Tiemann B., Fabel und Emblem: Gilles Corrozet und die französische Renaissance-Fabel (Munich: 1974). Van Mander Carel, Het Schilder-Boeck (Haarlem, Paschier van Wesbusch: 1604). Verdizotti Giovan Mario, Cento favole morali (Venice, Giordano Zeleti: 1570). Vondel Joost van den, Vorsteliicke Warande der dieren (Amsterdam, Dirk Pietersz. Pers: 1617).

Chapter 5

Order or Variety? Pieter Bruegel and the Aesthetics of Landscape Boudewijn Bakker From around 1400 onward, landscape has occupied an increasingly significant position in Netherlandish painting. Over the last few decades the literature on this subject has grown enormously. This is especially true for the sixteenth century and for the world landscape that flourished at that time, culminating in the rich oeuvre of Pieter Bruegel.1 One aspect that has received relatively little attention in these studies is the question of aesthetics, in particular the pictorial composition of the landscape and the organization of its component parts within the pictorial space. In this respect the Netherlandish painted landscape shows a great deal of variation, which invites further investigation into the choices the painters made. This is not easy, because to the extent that early Western European literature on the arts paid any attention to landscape painting, its aesthetic aspects were rarely if ever discussed. However, it may be worthwhile to take a closer look at the few existing pieces of information that survive. In this essay I draw attention to the concepts of ‘order’ and ‘variety’, which are found in many original texts and which have also been the subject of historical research in recent decades.2 I will outline the history of this pair of concepts from St. Augustine to Karel van Mander and examine their reflection 1 I owe a debt of thanks to my patient editors Walter Melion and Karl Enenkel, and especially to Walter for his inspiring and thoughtful comments on an earlier version. I also thank Huigen Leeflang and Stijn Bussels, who kindly commented my first text. For the Latin translations, Daan den Hengst was my critical proofreader; for English it was Penny Sandfort. 2 See on order: Puttfarken T., The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting (New Haven: 2000), in particular 43–185; Feinstein D.H., Der Harmoniebegriff in de Kunstliteratur und Musiktheorie der italienischen Renaissance, Ph.D. diss. (Freiburg im Breisgau: 1977), in part. 26–60, 123–134; Collins S.L., From Divine Cosmos to Sovereign State: An Intellectual History of Consciousness and the Idea of Order in Renaissance England (New York – Oxford: 1989); and Laguardia E., Nature Redeemed: the Imitation of Order in Three Renaissance Poems (The Hague: 1966). On variety: Couzinet M.-D., “La variété dans la philosophie de la nature: Cardan, Bodin”, in Courcelles D. de (ed.), La varietas à la Renaissance. Actes de la journée d’étude organisé par l’École nationale des chartes (Paris, 27 avril 2000) (Paris: 2001) 105–121. On both: Focking M. – Huss B. (eds.), Varietas und Ordo: Zur Dialektik von Vielfalt und Einheit in Renaissance und Barock (Stuttgart: 2003); and Ogden H.V.S., “The Principles of Variety and Contrast in Seventeenth Century Aesthetics, and Milton’s Poetry”, Journal of the History of Ideas 10 (1949) 159–182. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004440401_006

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FIGURE 5.1 Philips Galle, Temperantia after Pieter Bruegel, c. 1560. Engraving, 22.3 × 28.7 (plate). From the Series of Seven Virtues, published by Hieronymus Cock Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. RP-P-OB-7376. Image © Rijksmuseum

in early Western European landscape painting, particularly in Pieter Bruegel’s works. The incentive to write this essay was the intriguing print Temperantia after his design [Fig. 5.1].3 Bruegel included a painter in this composition as a representative of his own art, and this figure could be a key to Bruegel’s own views on aesthetic matters. 1

Pieter Bruegel and Temperantia

Temperantia belongs to a series of allegories on the Seven Virtues that were designed by Bruegel and published in 1559–1560 by Hieronymus Cock.4 In this 3 See Sellink M. in Orenstein N. (ed.), Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington DC – Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (New York – Rotterdam: 2001) 191–193, cat. nos. 76–77. 4 Grieken J. van – Luijten G. – Stock J. van der (eds.), Hieronymus Cock: The Renaissance in Print, exh. cat., Museum M, Louvain; Fondation Custodia, Paris (Louvain – Paris: 2013) cat.

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series, the virtues are depicted in the form of personifications surrounded by realistic scenes from daily life.5 In these scenes Bruegel shows how his contemporaries practiced the virtue in question. This also applies to the virtue Temperantia or temperance, with connotations of moderation, measure, order and self-control. Bruegel pictures Temperantia as a female figure with several attributes, among which a bridle, a pair of spectacles and, most prominently, a clock on her head. So far, the allegory is rather unusual but in line with latemedieval pictorial tradition.6 For the everyday scenes, however, Bruegel has devised a highly original form, namely, representations of the Seven Liberal Arts. Just above the clock on Temperantia’s head is a large globe surrounded by the sun, the moon and the stars. A scholar stands on the globe to measure the movement of the firmament. This figure represents Astronomy, which is apparently given pride of place among the other arts, which are then depicted clockwise around Temperantia. Equally remarkable is that Bruegel has expanded the Liberal Arts by adding three ‘visual’ arts that originally belonged to the Mechanical Arts: architecture, sculpture and painting.7 The representatives of these ten sciences and arts demonstrate the application of temperance within their respective field or profession. They do this in a typically Bruegelian way, by showing mainly examples of intemperate behaviour.8 The astronomer, for instance, is almost falling off the earth, the surveyor is holding his instrument in completely the wrong way, architects

nos. 54.1–54.7; on Bruegel and Cock, see Riggs T., “Bruegel and his Publisher”, in Simson O. von – Winner M. (eds.), Pieter Bruegel und seine Welt (Berlin: 1979) 165–173. 5 Cf. Veldman I., “From Allegory to Genre”, in idem, Images for the eye and soul: function and meaning in Netherlandish prints (1450–1650) (Leiden: 2006) 193–222. 6 See Mori Y., “The Iconography of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Temperance” in Mori Y. – Denhaene G. (eds.), The World of Bruegel in Black and White, exh. cat. Royal Library of Belgium, Brussels – Bunkamura Museum of Art, Tokyo etc. (Tokyo: 2010) 28–43; White L., “The iconography of Temperantia and the Virtuousness of Technology”, in Rabb T.R. – Seigel J.E., Action and Conviction in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Memory of E.H. Harbison (Princeton, N.J.: 1969) 197–219, reprinted in idem, Medieval Religion and Technology: Collected Essays (Berkeley – Los Angeles – London: 1978) 181–204; and Stridbeck C.G., Bruegelstudien: Untersuchungen zu den ikonologischen Problemen bei Pieter Bruegel d.Ä., sowie dessen Beziehungen zum Niederländischen Romanismus (Stockholm: 1956; reprint Soest: 1977), 162–170 (Temperantia). 7 Bruegel was not the only Antwerp artist in doing so. In a painting probably also from c. 1559– 1560, Frans Floris added the same three ‘visual’ arts to the seven Liberal Arts. See Van de Velde C., Frans Floris (1519/20–1570) Leven en Werken, 2 vols. (Brussels: 1975), vol. I, 262–265; vol. II, fig. 58. Cf. Kristeller P.O., “The Modern System of the Arts”, in Idem, Renaissance Thought II (New York – London: 1965) 163–227, in part. 181–183. 8 Cf. Müller J., Das Paradox als Bildform: Studien zur Ikonologie Pieter Bruegels d. Ä. (München 1999).

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FIGURE 5.1a Philips Galle, Temperantia after Pieter Bruegel, detail

are measuring a quasi-ancient column that looks more like the stem of a wine glass, and so on.9 The circle ends with Rhetorica, which is represented by performers at a street theatre, including a jester, who recall the Rederijkers.10 One may suspect that this section, and the jester in particular, represents Bruegel’s own comment on the other depicted scenes. One of the most intriguing details in this composition is the painter sitting in a corner, half-hidden, his back to us, behind the chair of one of the moneycounting merchants who represent Arithmetic [Fig. 5.1a]. The painter’s panel is completely blank and sits on a conspicuous easel with regularly placed holes and pins to adjust the height of the panel.11 Apparently these details are indications of the way in which this painter practices the virtue of temperance, rightly or wrongly, but how should we interpret them? The central role of time, seeing and measuring in this allegory probably gives an indication of Bruegel’s intention. But what is the role of astronomy here? Is there any connection 9 Quasi-antique columns of this strange type really existed, designed by Bramante; see Mori, “Temperance”, 37. For criticism of ‘measureless’ astronomic curiosity in sixteenthcentury visual arts, see Veldman I., De maat van kennis en wetenschap (Amsterdam: 1988). 10 Cf. Schuffel, “De Zeven Vrije Kunsten”. Cf. Gibson W.S., “Artists and Rederijkers in the Age of Bruegel”, Art Bulletin 63 (1981) 426–446. 11 Stridbeck stresses the moral meaning of the print and does not attribute a special role to astronomy. He distinguishes a portrait study on the painter’s panel (however, the panel on Bruegel’s preliminary study is empty). See Stridbeck, Bruegelstudien 167. Mori’s otherwise comprehensive study does not mention the painter at all; see Mori, “Temperance”.

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between astronomy, measuring and the art of painting landscapes? The Latin caption is of no particular help. It was added, as usual, by an unknown humanist acquaintance of Cock or the engraver, Philips Galle. It was intended as an additional commentary on the subject of the print and does not say much about the intentions of the designer.12 To find an answer to our questions we need to consult medieval and humanistic writers about aesthetics.13 2

Order and Variety in Medieval Aesthetics

The foundations of medieval aesthetics were laid by St. Augustine, particularly in his works De ordine and De musica.14 For him, beauty manifests itself first and foremost in the unity, the inner agreement and coherence, in short, the ordo of the cosmos (which, by the way, means order): ‘For there is no ordered thing which is not beautiful’.15 Order exists, generally speaking, in the right proportion between the parts themselves and in relation to the whole.16 St. Augustine’s beauty does not exist in the individual elements of the cosmos as such but in their mutual relationship. This relationship is determined by number. It can be summarized in the biblical triad mensura, numerus, pondus (‘measure, number and weight’).17 Thus for St. Augustine and his medieval successors, number became the essence of both material and immaterial reality and at the same time the essence of their beauty. Special ‘sacred’ numbers 12

The caption reads in translation: ‘We must see to it that we do not appear to be slaves of sensual pleasures, wasteful and luxuriant, and on the other hand that we are not, as slaves of miserly greed, live in vulgar narrow-mindedness’. See for its function, Coelen P. van der, “Producing Texts for Prints: Artists, Poets and Publishers”, in Brusati C. – Enenkel K. – Melion W., The Authority of the Word: Reflecting on Image and Text in Northern Europe, 1400–1700 (Leiden – Boston: 2012) 75–100. 13 On medieval and Renaissance aesthetics in general, see Gilbert K.E. – Kuhn H., A History of Esthetics (London: 1956; reprint New York: 1972), chs. V (“Medieval Esthetics”) and VI (“Renaissance (1300–1600)”). On aesthetics in the Middle Ages, see Eco U., Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, trans. Bredin H. (New Haven – London: 1986); and Carruthers M., The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages (Oxford: 2013). For additional selected sources, see Tatarkiewicz W., History of Aesthetics, 3 vols. (The Hague – Paris – Warshaw: 1970), vols. 2 and 3. 14 See on St. Augustine, Svoboda K., L’esthétique de Saint Augustin et ses sources (Brno: 1933); and Tatarkiewicz, Medieval Aesthetics 47–58 (“The Aesthetics of St. Augustine”). 15 See Tatarkiewicz, Medieval Aesthetics 60, cit. 4. 16 In his aesthetics St. Augustine drew heavily on Cicero; see Svoboda, St. Augustin, passim. 17 Sapientia 11:21. On St. Augustine, in particular his discussion of order, number, measure, contrast and parity, see Tatarkiewicz, Medieval Aesthetics 60–61, cit. 4–13; and Svoboda, St. Augustin, passim, esp. the references to mesure, ordre and nombre.

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were three (continents, geometric dimensions), four (elements, seasons, times of the day, winds, body fluids, temperaments), seven (planets, days of the week, colours of the rainbow, etc.), and twelve (signs of the zodiac, months). In medieval aesthetics a special place was reserved for the number two in the two-sidedness or symmetry which is characteristic of the body of humans and animals.18 This symmetry is a reflection of the equilibrium, harmony or ratio of the cosmos as a whole and therefore also a criterion of beauty for human products such as buildings. In addition to the strict and abstract ordo with its variants, there was a second aesthetic quality, which from the outset formed an – albeit minor – element of medieval aesthetics, but which gradually received more and more attention, i.e., varietas (variety, diversity). For St. Augustine, varietas and copia (abundance) characterized the visible, material things in this world. For that reason alone, variety ranked lower than order. However, it was a necessary complement of that order, because sensory pleasure in visible reality may lead to the inner vision of higher spiritual truths. For St. Francis the enjoyment of the infinite diversity of animals and plants was a direct path to God himself.19 Even the older St. Augustine could praise the unmistakable and irresistible attractiveness of Creation, unrestrained by theoretical objections. In The City of God he calls on man to behold ‘the manifold diversity of beauty in sky and earth and sea; the abundance of light and its miraculous loveliness in sun and moon and stars; the dark shades of woods, the colour and fragrance of flowers; the multitudinous varieties of birds with their songs and their bright plumage; the countless different species of living creatures of all shapes and sizes, among whom it is the smallest in bulk that moves our greatest wonder.’20 He expressed the intrinsic interweaving of order and variety nowhere better than in his comment on King David’s harp playing: ‘For the concord of different sounds, controlled in due proportion, suggests the unity of a well-ordered city, welded together in harmonious variety.’21 18 See Gilbert – Kuhn, Medieval Esthetics 136–137. 19 See Sorrell R.D., St. Francis of Assisi and Nature: Tradition and Innovation in Western Christian Attitudes toward the Environment (Oxford: 2009). 20 Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. Bettenson H. – intr. Knowles D. (Harmondsworth: 1962), Book XXII, Chapter 24, p. 1075. 21 For St. Augustine on beauty as the harmony of order and variety (or contrast) see Gilbert – Kuhn, Medieval Esthetics 130, 131, 137, 139; idem, 152, referring in particular to The City of God, Book XVII, Ch. 14. St. Augustine relied on Cicero, who praises nature in De natura deorum for her insatiabilis varietas, her ‘inexhaustible variety’; see Melion W.S., Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel van Mander’s Schilder-Boeck (Chicago: 1991) 175–176 and 301, note 9.

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Contrast was held to be a special category within the general variety of the visible world. Even more than the general difference between many things, the contrast between two particular elements greatly contributed to articulating and accentuating the co-operation of variety and order, for example, in the contrast between high and low, light and dark. Within the concept of variety, ‘contrast’ formed, as it were, the complementary alternative to ‘pair’ or ‘duality’ within the numerical order.22 The harmony of order and diversity also implies an orderly hierarchy in Creation. But within that hierarchy, each individual creature is in principle of equal value. Medieval aesthetics had no place for ugliness. According to Augustine, the flea possesses as much beauty in its orderly and symmetrical physique as creatures that are higher in the hierarchy.23 In the fifteenth century, St. Augustine’s enthusiasm for the wonderful world around him was reflected in the writings of Dionysius the Carthusian, one of the last great scholastic thinkers, who was the court philosopher of Philip the Good.24 In his De venustate mundi et pulchritudine Dei, he devoted a separate passage to God’s wisdom, as it is revealed in the visual attractiveness of Creation. He begins by pointing out the wise ordering of the four elements as well as the regular cyclical alternation of day and night, months and seasons, birth and decay, and the ordering of creatures according to species. But he quickly embarks upon a panegyric on the enormous wealth and variety in nature, treating in succession earth, air, water and fire (i.e., the heavenly bodies) in high-spirited eulogies. In two other works, in fact two versions of a collection of hymns to the beauty of God himself, Dionysius again praises both qualities. On the one hand, there is the aspect of order and regularity, which is represented above all by the heavenly bodies determining the rhythm of life as measured in days and years. The earth, too, is arranged in orderly fashion, as we may read in the Bible.25 On the other hand, there is multiplicity, diversity, variety: ‘You have brought together in the sea countless species of fish, and to untold numbers of species of quadrupeds and birds you have given a place to live on the earth and in the sky’. Even the various weather phenomena are allotted their own psalm.26 22 23 24 25 26

See Tatarkiewicz, Medieval Aesthetics 61, cit. 12, 13 (St. Augustine). See ibid. 63, cit. 20. See Bakker B., Landscape and Religion from Van Eyck to Rembrandt (Farnham: 2012) 55–60. ‘Over the earth, Lord, you have stretched your line, (and thus) laid its foundations and its measures’, Dionysius writes, alluding to the Book of Job. Or, quoting from Sapientia: ‘Thou hast ordered all things in measure, and number, and weight’. ‘In the sky, Lord, you generate multiform effects of pressure and breath, such as clouds, winds and rains…. various phenomena: comets … coronas, maelstroms, falling stars … frost and fog, hail, snow and rainbows, and the flying dragon’.

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Landscape into Art: Early Solutions in Western Europe

Much earlier already, in the course of the fourteenth century, William of Ockham and other natural philosophers had become convinced that the physical side of reality, perceived by the senses, has its own value in addition to that of metaphysical reality.27 The steadily increasing appreciation among philosophers of visible reality manifested itself simultaneously in the visual arts, initially in Italy but soon also in Western Europe. Starting in the second half of the fourteenth century, painters increasingly attempted to represent the particularities of people and things, setting them within a convincing spatial context, be it an interior or a landscape. This usually took the form of an explicit combination of ‘history’ and ‘landscape’ within one composition.28 The earliest landscapes that were convincing in their spatial effect appeared in images of the twelve labours of the months.29 In the Très riches heures du duc de Berry, the Limbourg Brothers explicitly made a direct connection with the cosmic order by way of the twelve signs of the zodiac [Fig. 5.2].30 In series such as these, the twelve different landscapes functioned as spatial counterparts to the seasonal human labours, allowing the painter to visualize cyclical change within the world order, as the temporal counterpart to the three-dimensional variety of the spatial world. As an extra element of order within spatial diversity, the Limbourgs depicted several monthly labours in landscapes respectively dominated by one of the castles owned by the Duke de Berry. In this way they directly linked the possessions of the duke and thus his own person to the world order.31 The enumeration of the countries of the world offered a second possibility of inserting visible nature into the lineaments of a traditional literary model. In the Trésor des histoires (1475–1480) the anonymous Flemish artist illustrates 27 28

See Bakker, Landscape and Religion 45–47 and notes 11–17. As early as the twelfth century, Hugo van St. Victor had recommended that one illustrate written histories with ‘the places where they happened’ (‘loca, in quibus geste sunt’). See Zinke D., Patinirs ‘Weltlandschaft’: Studien und Materialien zur Landschaftsmalerei im 16. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt a.M. – Bern – Las Vegas: 1977) 30. 29 See Pächt O., “Early Italian Nature Studies and the Early Calendar Landscape”, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13 (1950) 13–47. For developments during the next two centuries, see Bruynen Y., “Over de Twelf Maendekens en de Vier Tyden ’s iaers: de Maanden en Jaargetijden in de kunst van de Nederlanden circa 1500 to 1700”, in Bruynen Y. – Huys Janssen P. (eds.), De vier jaargetijden: de kunst van de Nederlanden 1500–1750 (Zwolle: 2002) 51–71. 30 See Lognon J. – Cazelles R. – Meiss M., Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry (London: 1969). 31 Cf. Bakker, Landscape and Religion 125–128 (“The Political landscape”).

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FIGURE 5.2 Limbourg Brothers, The Month of July with the Castle of Clain near Poitiers, 1411–1416. Miniature in Les très riches heures du duc de Berry. Chantilly, Musée Condé, Ms. 65, fol. 7v Image © Musée Condé

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FIGURE 5.3 Master of the Getty Froissart, The Province of Flanders. Miniature, 48 × 23 cm (whole page), in Le trésor des histoires, Bruges, c. 1475–1480. London, British Library, Cotton MMS Augustus AV, fol. 345v Image © British Library

the description of Flanders with the portrayal of that region, which apparently was his own homeland [Fig. 5.3].32 In his miniature we look across the garden of a watermill, lying in an everyday Flemish landscape, on an extended and varied landscape with cities, mountains and seas, probably as a summary of the whole earth of which Flanders is just a part. But most of these early landscape miniatures suggested a view of the whole world, always within a narrative context. The manuscript Les sept âges du monde (c. 1455) starts with a miniature by Simon Marmion showing how God the Father creates the wellordered world in the form of the firmament (the element fire) and below it the earth with the elements earth, water and air [Fig. 5.4].33 32 See Kren T., “Landscape in Flemish Illuminated Manuscripts before Patinir”, in Vergara A., Patinir: Essays and Critical Catalogue (Madrid: 2007) 117–133, in particular, 121–123. See further: Pächt O., “La Terre de Flandres”, Pantheon 36 (1978) 3–16. An interesting aspect of this picture is that the artist gives us a preview of the future results of man’s cultivation. 33 See Lachièze-Rey M. – Luminet J.-P., Figures du ciel: de l’harmonie des sphères à la conquête spatiale (Paris: 1998) 135; Smeyers M., Flemish Miniatures from the 8th to the Mid-16th Century. The Medieval World on Parchment (Louvain: 1999) 328, 330–331.

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FIGURE 5.4 Simon Marmion, The Firmament above the Earth. Miniature, 44 × 30 cm in Le livre des sept âges du monde, atelier Jacquemart Pilavaine, Mons, c. 1455. Brussels, Royal Library of Belgium, ms. 9047, fol. 12

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A fourth opportunity to present landscapes in a strictly ordered way was offered by encyclopediae systematically describing the four elements separately.34 A good example is Jean Corbechon’s Livre des propriétés du monde, an adaptation of the famous De propretatibus rerum by Bartholomeus Anglicus (c. 1450–1475).35 Not long after, Jacob Bellaert published a Dutch translation of the same book under the title Vande proprieteyten der dinghen.36 This edition is famous for its beautiful woodcut illustrations, including that of the element earth [Fig. 5.5]. The Bellaert Master used the same model here as did his immediate predecessors, but he has raised the horizon to such an extent that it provides an opportunity to accentuate the landscape’s diversity, especially through contrasts such as near and far, high and low, water and land, city and country, nature and culture (only the human beings are absent). Three decades later, this method, which has become known as the ‘world landscape’, was fully explored by Joachim Patinir and Herri met de Bles. Patinir’s landscapes are characterized by an extremely high horizon. There is no atmospheric perspective and the viewer floats as if peering through binoculars from the sky, zooming in on ever new locations and human scenes. One might call it a polyphocal landscape in bird’s eye view. The many pointedly different sublandscapes are so cleverly arranged that the viewer does not notice that there is no dominant central point of view. In Patinir’s Penitence of St. Jerome, for example, the painter shows high and steep mountains against low, flat lands, bare grey rocks against green wooded lands, dark against light areas, and, last but not least, the four elements [Fig. 5.6]. Thanks to Patinir’s clever play of opposites, the viewer’s first impression is one of just endless variety. On closer inspection, however, one discovers the consistent, almost systematic application of rather strong contrasts, which could be characterized as Patinir’s way of ordering the world’s variety. Thanks to Patinir, Herri met de Bles and other pupils and followers, the world landscape as a pictorial paradigm became so popular that it came to dominate Netherlandish landscape painting during most of the sixteenth century.37 34 See Cahn W., ‘Medieval Landscape and the Encyclopedic Tradition’, in Poirion D. – Freeman Regalado N. (eds.), Contexts, Style and Values in Medieval Art and Literature (New Haven: 1991) 11–24. 35 See Kren, “Landscape” 59. 36 Bartholomaeus Anglicus, Vande proprieteyten der dinghen (Haarlem, Bellaert: 1485). 37 The popularity of the painted world landscape was reflected widely in chivalric novels, ekphrastic literature, travel accounts and modern versions of the classic hexameron. See a.o. Gruenter R., “Zur Problem der Landschaftsdarstellung im höfischen Versroman”, in Ritter A. (ed.), Landschaft und Raum in der Erzählkunst (Darmstadt: 1975) 293–335; Berkum A. van, Parthonopeus van Bloys (Leiden: 1897); Börsch-Supan E., Garten-, Landschaft- und Paradiesmotive im Innenraum. Eine ikonografische Untersuchung (Berlin:

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FIGURE 5.5 Master of Bellaert, The Earth, 1485. Woodcut in Bartholomaeus Anglicus, Van den proprieteyten der dinghen (Haarlem: 1485) Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam, Special Collections. Image © University of Amsterdam

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FIGURE 5.6 Joachim Patinir, The Penitence of Saint Jerome, c. 1512–1515. Oil on wood, c. 119 × 152 cm New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image © Metropolitan Museum

4

Alberti’s Method: Mathematical Order

At the same time, however, there existed a completely different way of portraying the visible world, based on a completely different way of thinking. Shortly after 1400, Leon Battista Alberti and other Italian artists and art theorists had become convinced that it was the painter’s first task to create as exactly as possible the illusion of space, volume and distance on a flat surface, as they 1967), a.o. 210 (Alexander Romance); Baxandall M., Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition 1350–1450 (Oxford: 1971) 106–107, 165–166 (Bartholomaeus Facius); Busch W. (ed.), Landschaftsmalerei (Geschichte der klassischen Bildgattungen in Quellentexten und Kommentaren, vol. 3) (Berlin: 1997) 58–64 (Petrarca); ‘The Commentaries of Pius II’, Books VI–IX, trans. F.A. Gragg – notes L.C. Gabel, Smith College Studies in History 35 (1951) 569, 600 (Pius II Piccolomini); Bakker, Landscape and Religion 161–162, with notes 91–97 (Maurice Scève, Du Bartas and French 16th-century encyclopedic poems in general).

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would appear if reflected in a mirror; the result was construed as an image of the physically visible world, not of an imagined world seen as a microcosm of Creation as a whole.38 They did not accept the traditional method of spatial ordering, which was based on overlap and the gradual diminution of landscape elements such as mountains, buildings, etc. Instead they endorsed the method of central or linear perspective, which was based on geometry, the fountainhead of all the arts.39 The development of this method was in line with the general aspiration of the artists to raise painting to the level of the Liberal Arts, in particular by emphasizing its scientific and, in particular, mathematical nature.40 Linear perspective makes pictorial use of the optical fact that to the human eye all parallel lines appear to converge in one vanishing point on the horizon.41 The main difference compared with the traditional polyphocal landscape was the introduction of one, physically plausible viewpoint, from which the viewer could survey the painted landscape. This had a unifying, regulating and stabilizing effect on the whole scene. A second important difference was that even in landscape pictures straight lines were seen as an essential element in the spatial composition. In practice this meant that the painter had to choose some kind of geometrically ordered element – ancient or classical architecture, formal gardens, rationally ordered cultivated lands – to realize his spatial construction. For the inventors of the system this was no objection. Linear perspective had been designed by architects who used the Roman architect Vitruvius as their guide. Vitruvius taught that the principles of beauty were to be found in the universal laws of proportion and symmetry and could be formulated in mathematical terms.42

38 See Gilbert – Kuhn, A History of Esthetics 162–165. 39 Puttfarken, Pictorial Composition 69–96 (“Perspective and Composition”); Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators 121–139 (“Alberti and the Humanists: Composition”); and Jäger M., Die Theorie des Schönen in der Italienischen Renaissance (Cologne: 1990) 35, with texts by Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Luca Pacioli etc. Cf. Feinstein, Harmoniebegriff, as cited in note 2. 40 Kristeller P.O., “The Modern System of the Arts”, in Idem, Renaissance Thought II (New York – London: 1965) 163–227, in particular, 181–183. For Alberti’s claim in this respect see Gilbert – Kuhn, A History of Esthetics 166; for the required moral, technical and intellectual virtues see 170–175. 41 See White J., The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Representation (London: 1957) 113–134; Stumpel J.F.H.J., “Perspective’s veil: On the composition of storie and Alberti’s theory of the artificial image,” in idem, The province of painting: theories of Italian Renaissance art, Ph.D. diss. (Utrecht: 1990). 42 See Tavernor R., On Alberti and the Art of Building (New Haven – London: 1998) 39–48.

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The painter who accepted all these conditions was limited in several ways. First, he could only allow in his pictorial composition what is theoretically visible from one point of view, and not, as before, all things that can be combined convincingly within one virtual landscape space. It is true that Alberti appreciated it when a painting showed a wide range of details, but only under strict conditions: In food and in music novelty and abundance please, as they are different from the old and usual. So copiousness and variety please in painting. I say that that istoria is most copious in which, each in their own place, are mixed old, young, maidens, women, youths, young boys, fowls, small dogs, birds, horses, sheep, buildings, landscapes and all similar things. I will praise any copiousness which belongs in that istoria, […]. However, I prefer this copiousness to be embellished with a certain variety, yet moderate and grave with dignity and truth. I blame those painters who, where they wish to appear copious, leave nothing vacant. It is not composition but dissolute confusion which they disseminate.43 In Alberti’s view, the landscape and everything that goes with it therefore basically falls under the parerga or by-work of the istoria. It may enliven the performance to a certain extent, but it must not distract the viewer’s attention from the main history. This condition is related to a second important principle cherished by Alberti and his followers: the idea that all human art must strive for formal beauty, formulated in terms of mathematical proportion. The consequence of this important criterion was that it limited the painter in the choice of possible subjects and motifs even more.44 Moreover – Alberti does not state this explicitly, but it may be inferred from his general rules – variety was only possible insofar as these accidental motifs were visible from a single vantage point. In fact, with his theory of painting, Alberti applied the classical theater model 43 Alberti L.B., On Painting, trans. and notes J.R. Spencer (New Haven – London: 1966) 75–76. The Italian text: Alberti L.B., Della pittura, ed. L. Mallè (Florence: 1950) 91–94. 44 See for Aberti’s aesthetics, Tatarkiewicz W., History of Aesthetics, Vol 3: Modern Aesthetics, ed. D. Petsch (The Hague – Paris – Warshaw: 1973) 79–98. On p. 330, Tatarkiewicz summarizes the humanist theory of art based on Alberti’s ideas as follows: ‘Beauty consists in order, the proper arrangements of parts and fit proportion, in the preservation of one measure, and in harmony of forms (concinnitas) […]. Beauty is seen with the eyes, but evaluated by the reason, mastering the imagination. […] Nature is the model for art, but art may surpass nature if only because it can select from it which is best. […] art must be based on principles, and adhere to general rules; […] it must become a rational discipline, making use of science, and must even itself become as a science’.

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of Aristotle – unity of time, place and action – to painting, a century before it would be introduced in the Italian theory of drama.45 In Italy, the principles of the new Florentine perspectival method and also the hierarchical spatial relationship between historia and landscape were adopted fairly quickly.46 For the landscape backgrounds, by the way, many painters sought inspiration from their Dutch contemporaries, who were widely admired for their expertise in this field.47 In the North, the acceptance of Alberti’s principles took much longer to take hold. Here, linear perspective was introduced by Dürer, in particular for the depiction of human figures and interiors.48 Lucas van Leyden applied it for the first time with great accuracy in a landscape-like exterior in his engraving Ecce Homo from 1510.49 For a long time, however, there was little interest among painters in the formal geometries of the mathematically ordered landscape. An interesting, early attempt to realize such a landscape is Landscape with David and Bathsheba by Herri with the Bles, from about 1535 [Fig. 5.7].50 For this composition Bles used the same model as the Master of the Getty Froissart [Fig. 5.3], even including the figure looking out of the window on the right side of the picture. However, he transformed it according to Alberti’s method, systematically organizing the entire composition around one central vanishing point on the horizon. The essential difference with the Albertian system is that, completely contrary to Alberti’s principles, the point of view here is not at human eye level but much higher. Moreover, Bles filled the entire view with all kinds of details. Another striking peculiarity, different from his Italian models, is the abrupt transition from the palace garden to the vast and mountainous background. All in all, the result is a somewhat peculiar and ambiguous whole. Nevertheless, the painting must have made a great impression on

45 See Carlson M., Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey, from the Greeks to the Present (Ithaca N.Y. – London: 1993) 37–56 (“The Italian renaissance”). 46 See Stumpel, “Perspective’s veil” 175–185. 47 See, for instance, Hale J., Italian Renaissance Painting from Masaccio to Titian (Oxford: 1977), figs. 11 (Bottticelli), 20 (Fra Angelico), 42 (Antonello da Messina), 45 (Bellini), 46, 49 (Mantegna), 50 (Antonio and Piero Pollaiuolo), 58–59 (Piero della Francesca), 82 (Gentile da Fabriano), 86, 88, 89 (Giorgione), and 125 (Leonardo da Vinci). Seidel M. – Roberts M. – Ilg U., Italian Art of the Renaissance, Vol. I, Painting (Venice – Munich: 2005), passim. 48 See a.o., Kemp M., The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven – London: 1990). 49 Filedt Kok J.P. (ed.), The New Hollstein: Lucas van Leyden (Amsterdam – Rotterdam: 1996) 90–91, cat. no. 71. 50 An in-depth iconological interpretation is presented by Michel Weemans in Herri met de Bles: les ruses du paysages au temps de Bruegel et d’Erasme (Paris: 2013) 135–147.

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FIGURE 5.7 Herri met de Bles, Landscape with David and Bathsheba, 1535–1540. Oil on panel, 46.2 × 69.2 cm Boston, Isabella Steward Gardner Museum, inv. no. P25w40. Image © Isabella Steward Gardner Museum

his contemporaries, given the fact that several variations on it have been preserved, painted by Bles himself and by Lucas Gassel.51 A generation later, the possibilities of mathematical perspective were systematically explored by Hans Vredeman de Vries, also in its application to the painted landscape. His Lazarus at the House of the Rich Man of c. 1570 shows an elaborate palace façade with supposedly Vitruvian proportions, a strictly formal garden and, in the background, a mountainous landscape [Fig. 5.8].52 The picture is strictly composed along geometric lines. The steeple of the square loggia lies exactly on the center perpendicular, the horizon lies just behind the balcony on the left, and the viewer’s eye meets the faces of the people standing 51 See for Bles: Chong A., “Landscape with David and Bathsheba”, in idem et al., Eye of the Beholder (Boston: 2003) 137; for Gassel: Koopstra A. (ed.), Lucas Gassel van Helmond: Meester van het landschap, exh. cat. Helmond, Museum Helmond (Zwolle: Waanders 2020), 124–130 (cat. nos. 29–30). 52 See Borggrefe H. – Fusenig Th. – Uppenkamp B., Tussen stadspaleizen en luchtkastelen: Hans Vredeman de Vries en de Renaissance, exh. cat., Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp (Antwerp: 2002) 15.

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FIGURE 5.8 Hans Vredeman de Vries, Lazarus before the Palace of the Rich Man, c. 1565–1570. Oil on panel, 42 × 66 cm Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. no. SK-A-2390. Image © Rijksmuseum

on the balcony at the same height. An interesting aspect of this painting is the remarkable use of contrasts. Just as with Bles, so here too the ‘natural’ landscape that appears behind the formal garden is not organized according to the rules of mathematical order applied everywhere else in the picture. The combination results in a striking effect of contrast between nature and culture, which we may assume was intentional. Other contrasting pairs are the vertical façade and the flat garden, and, of course, the subject itself – the rich man and the poor Lazarus. 5

Pieter Bruegel: Order in Variety

How did Pieter Bruegel react to this new method? He probably knew at least one of the several variations on Bles’s David and Bathsheba. He must also have known De Vries rather well.53 It may be assumed that Bruegel was aware of the 53 Both of them had worked as young assistants (c. 1549) of Pieter Coecke van Aelst, and somewhat later at Claude Dorisy’s workshop in Mechelen, and they shared Hieronymus

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theoretical foundation of De Vries’s ‘scientific’ method, and also of the condescending attitude towards the Dutch landscapes which in Italy since around 1500 had taken the place of the former general admiration.54 Dutch landscape painters now were presumed to be no more than able craftsmen without the capacity of rational invention. The new attitude was best articulated by Francisco de Holanda, speaking on behalf of Michelangelo: ‘In Flanders […] they paint stuffs and masonry, the green grass of the fields, the shadow of trees, and rivers and bridges, which they call landscapes, with many figures on this side and many figures on that. And all this, though it pleases some persons, is done without reason or art, without substance or vigour […]’.55 Vasari said it more subtly but even more venomously: in his time scarcely a shoemaker’s house could be found without Northerners’ landscapes, implying that landscape was a rather vulgar specialty, one that appealed more to Northern painters and unlettered art lovers.56 According to the Venetian Paolo Pino, writing in 1548, Northerners used a mirror to paint their landscapes. There is nothing wrong with this, Pino writes, but in the end Italians – Titian above all – triumph in this field of art, because they know to choose the beautiful parts from the whole.57 This unfavorable judgment was even adopted by some humanists in the Netherlands. Dominicus Lampsonius, in his written and engraved series of portraits or famous Netherlandish painters, published in Antwerp in 1572, formulated it as follows: ‘The Netherlanders are particularly praised as good painters of landscape, the Italians of people, or gods. No wonder: It’s for a reason that the proverb says: “The Italian has his brain in his head, the Netherlander in his diligent hand”.’58 Justus Lipsius would write in his De constantia (1583):

54 55 56 57 58

Cock as their print publisher. See Orenstein, Bruegel the Elder 5; and Borggrefe et al., Vredeman de Vries 15. See Gombrich, “Renaissance Theory” 107–121. Holanda F. de, Four Dialogues on Painting, ed. A.F.G. Bell (London: 1928) 16. Cf. Puttfarken, Pictorial Composition 100–101. See Frey K. – Frey H.-W. (eds.), Der literarische Nachlass Giorgio Vasaris, 3 vols. (Munich: 1923–30), vol. I 187–88. For Italian opinions on Netherlandish landscape painting see Zinke, Weltlandschaft, 74–86 (“Italien, Humanismus und nordische Landschaftsmalerei”). See ibid. 85, with texts by Pino and others, such as Cristoforo Sorte and Giampaolo Lomazzo. See Lampson D., Les effigies des peintres célèbres des Pays-Bas, ed. Jean Puraye (Paris: 1956) 45. The original edition is Lampsonius Dominicus, Pictorum aliquot celebrium Germaniae inferioris effigies […]. (Antwerp, Widow of Hieronymus Cock: 1572). Lampsonius here cites Anton Francesco Doni; see Zinke, Weltlandschaft 92. See on Lampsonius also Melion, (Chicago: 1991) 143–160.

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[Langius:] Traveling, you say, does not take your mind away even from real adversities? Does not the view of those fields, rivers and mountains distract you from the pain you feel? [Lipsius:] Yes, maybe they do so for a time, but not for long and not for sure. Just as our eyes are not entertained for a long time by a painting, however beautiful it may be, so the variety of people and places attracts our attention, thanks to their novelty, but not for long.59 Here Lipsius most likely refers to the traditional Dutch world landscape with its endless variety of motifs. Bruegel’s answer to these challenges may be read in his print Temperantia. The allegory is apparently based on the traditional idea that man must adhere in his deeds and works to the example of the movement of the celestial bodies.60 This idea was still generally accepted in Bruegel’s time. The orderly organization of the cosmos was even a favorite subject among thinkers and writers of the sixteenth century, from Erasmus to Calvin, Cardano, Montaigne and Marsilio Ficino, whether applied to the visual arts, the organization of the state or the behaviour of the individual human.61 The idea also appealed to people in Bruegel’s own environment, such as Abraham Ortelius.62 Ortelius adorned the title page of his Theatrum Orbis Terrarum with several citations from Cicero and Seneca, all suggesting that man is created to admire, contemplate and imitate the firmament.63

59 See Lipsius J., De Constantia / Von der Standhaftigkeit, trans. – comm. F. Neumann (Mainz: 1998) 20–22. 60 See Cassirer E., The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy (New York etc.: 1964), passim. For printed images illustrating this belief: Veldman I., Leerrijke reeksen van Maarten van Heemskerck, exh. cat., Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem (Haarlem: 1986), in particular, 67–87 (“De mens en de kosmos”). 61 See Ritter J. – Gründer K. (eds.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, 13 vols. (Basel – Stuttgart: 1971–2007), vol. VI (“Ordnung”), cols. 1280–1282; and Dijksterhuis E.J., The Mechanisation of the World Picture: Pythagoras to Newton, trans. C. Dikshoorn (Princeton, N.J.: 1986) 223–247. 62 See Melion, Karel Van Mander 173–182; and Muylle J., “Pieter Bruegel en Abraham Ortelius. Bijdrage tot de literarische receptie van Pieter Bruegels werk”, in Smeyers M. (ed.), Archivum artis lovaniense. Bijdragen […] J.K. Steppe (Leuven: 1981) 319–337. The basic study on Bruegel, Ortelius and landscape painting is Müller-Hofstede J., “Zur Interpretation von Pieter Bruegels Landschaft: Ästhetischer Landschaftsbegriff und Stoische Welbetrachtung”, in Simson – Winner (eds.), Pieter Bruegel und seine Welt 73–142; see for a critical comment on Müller-Hofstede’s interpretation, Bakker, Landscape and Religion 154–159. 63 See on these citations Hofstede, “Zur Interpretation” 130–137; Bakker, Landscape and Religion 154–169, note 44.

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Bruegel essentially proclaims the same message in his allegory of Tempe­ rantia, thereby sparing neither his own colleagues nor, implicitly, himself. He mocks the painter who sits in a corner looking at his empty panel and apparently failing to heed the rules of size and order that should also apply to him. The painter’s only way of realizing that order is the regularly adjustable height of his panel, Bruegel appears to suggest. But despite his emphasis on the imitation of the cosmic order in painting, Bruegel apparently did not share De Vries’s strict adherence to mathematical perspective. An indication of this is the anecdote told by Karel van Mander about De Vries, who had painted (probably on a façade of the patron’s house) a summer pavilion with an open door, in which Bruegel by way of a practical joke had painted a courting peasant couple. The idea is that Bruegel was making fun of De Vries’s perspective art in a good-natured way.64 The question now is how Bruegel himself dealt with the ideal of order and regularity, particularly in his landscapes. Without any doubt, he knew from his own experience the solutions that had been developed in Italy for the combination of an historia and a landscape background. Remarkably, although Bruegel was used to composing landscapes in many different ways, it took a very long time for him to experiment with Vredeman de Vries’s strictly geometric method. Instead – at least for his more ambitious landscapes – he abided by Patinir’s and Bles’s model of the world landscape with its heavy emphasis on the world’s variety. However, he manipulated it in such a way that it also refers to and is constructed according to the rules of numerical and mathematicalgeometric ordering of the world. He did this in two ways. The first way was to adapt the traditional world landscape to the requirements of mathematical perspective. Bruegel’s landscapes consistently recede toward the horizon; they are far less crowded with competing scenes and motifs than Patinir’s, and, most importantly, they are seen from a single vantage point organically integrated into the landscape as a whole. More than once, for instance in his Large Landscapes, but not only there, he emphasizes this by introducing a human figure who directs the viewer’s gaze into the distance [Fig. 5.9].65 Bruegel did not invent this method. Hieronymus Cock’s elder brother Matthijs and a few other Antwerp artists had experimented with it, 64 See Monballieu A. “Een werk van P. Bruegel en H. Vredeman de Vries voor de tresorier Aert Molckeman”, Jaarboek van het Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (1969) 113–136. 65 See for this series Orenstein, Bruegel the Elder 120–135, cat. nos. 22–34; and Sellink M., Bruegel: The Complete Paintings, Drawings and Prints (Ghent – New York: 2007) 64–78, cat. nos. 21–22 (preparatory drawings) and 23–34 (prints).

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FIGURE 5.9 Johannes or Lucas van Doetecum after Pieter Bruegel, Milites Resquientes, 1555–1556. Etching and engraving, 32.5 × 44.2 cm (plate) Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. no. RP-P-OB-7363. Image © Rijksmuseum

but Bruegel was the first to apply it consistently and systematically.66 All these artists, Bruegel included, were doubtlessly inspired by landscape drawings and prints by Giulio Campagnola and other northern Italian artists of the school of Titian.67 In addition, Bruegel must have been able to study Titian’s methods during his stay in Italy. Just like their Italian forerunners, the Antwerp artists 66 See on Hieronymus Cock’s series of 12 etchings based on drawings by Matthijs Cock: Van Grieken – Luijten – Van der Stock, Hieronymus Cock, cat. no. 94 (1558). For drawings: Hand O. – Judson J.R. – Robinson W.W. – Wolff M., The Age of Bruegel: Netherlandish Drawings in the Sixteenth Century, ex. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (Washington, D.C. – New York: 1986–1987), cat. nos. 34 (Matthijs Cock, 1540), 84 (Cornelis Massijs, 1540). 67 See Sellink M., cat. entry 13 (“Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Italian Landscape after Domenico Campagnola, 1554, recto”), in Orenstein, Bruegel the Elder 104–106; Aikema B. – Martin A.J., “Crosscurrents with Germany: The Spread of the Venetian Renaissance”, in Aikema B. – Brown B.L. (eds.), Renaissance Venice and the North: Crosscurrents in the Time of Dürer, Bellini and Titian (London: 1999) 332–423; and Châtelet A., “Domenico Campagnola et la

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FIGURE 5.10

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Bernard van Orley, The Month of September: Hunters at Groenendaal Priory, c. 1530. Pen and brush in brown, grey and red, 39 × 57 cm (design for the tapestry series The Hunts of Maximilian) Leiden, Leiden University Library / Print Room, inv. no. PK-T-2046

apparently preferred a quasi-accidental or at best quasi-intuitively composed view to a construction that foregrounded the mathematical order to be discerned in Creation. The second way of embedding the painted landscape in a larger orderly context was offered by the traditional series of months, seasons, elements and so on. A famous example is the tapestry series known as The Hunts of Maximilian, designed by Bernard van Orley and Jan Tons and manufactured in 1530–1533 for the Brussels court [Fig. 5.10].68 The series, which was repeated a few times for different buyers, consists of twelve hunting parties for different naissance du paysage ordonné”, in Interpretazioni veneziane; studi in onore di Michelangelo Muraro (Venice: 1984) 331–341. 68 See Balis A. – Jonge K. de – Delmarcel G. – Lefébure A., Les chasses de Maximilien (Parijs: 1993); Bücken V. – De Meûter I. (eds.), Bernard van Orley, exh. cat. Paleis voor Schone Kunsten, Brussels (Brussels: 2019) cat. no. 51.

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types of game corresponding with the twelve months.69 These parties are all located in recognizable places around Brussels associated with the imperial court, and in this and other respects the series recalls the ducal castles in the Très riches heures du duc de Berry. Here too, the social status of the monarch is directly related to the hierarchical and cyclical order of the cosmos. Probably thanks to the renown of the Hunts of Maximilian and a few comparable series of the months by a.o. the miniature painter Simon Bening (also inspired by the Très riches heures), the genre of seasonal series experienced a strong revival in Bruegel’s own time, particularly in printmaking. Several such series were published in Antwerp; in most of them, however, the elements, planets, months or seasons are represented by allegorical personifications accompanied by realistic scenes from the world of man and provided with a caption in Latin.70 Considering this cultural-historical context, it is easy to understand Nicolaes Jonghelinck’s wish to have Pieter Bruegel paint a series of six large landscapes representing the labours of the months, to be hung in the dining room of his country house outside of Antwerp.71 The idea in itself was completely original, at least on this scale. One might consider it as the personal response of a rich and high-ranking Antwerp burgher to the tapestry series made for the imperial court in Brussels. Sitting at table in Jonghelinck’s dining room, his guests would have had a virtual view of the whole well-ordered world around them as the natural habitat of their proud host. At the same time, the series would illustrate his intellectual status, as a logical continuation of the other pictorial and sculptural series on traditional themes in his home, though these were explicitly and conventionally allegorical. In addition, thanks to the print series of the twelve Large Landscapes, Jonghelinck knew perfectly well that Bruegel’s particular expertise lay in the composition of wide and compelling panoramas. 69 For the duplicates see, Campbell T.P. (ed.), Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence, exh. cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (New York: 2002) 241. 70 See Veldman I., “From allegory to genre”, in idem, Images for the eye and soul: function and meaning in Netherlandish prints (1450–1650) (Leiden: 2006) 193–222. 71 Sellink M. – Gibbs M. – Calster P. van, Bruegel: The Complete Paintings, Drawings and Prints (Ghent – New York: 2007) 201–211, cat. nos. 134–138, with bibliography. The recent literature on the series is extensive; see for three exercises in close reading: Falkenburg R.L., “Pieter Bruegel’s ‘Series of the Seasons’: On the Perception of the Divine Order”, in: Vander Auwera J. (ed.), Liber amicorum Raphaël De Smedt, vol. II (2001) 253– 276; Kaschek B., Weltzeit und Endzeit. Die ‘Monatsbilder’ Pieter Bruegels d. Ä. (Munich: 2012); and Weemans M., “Pieter Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow and Insidiosus Auceps as Trap Images”, in Kaschek B. – Müller J. – Buskirk J., Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Religion (Leiden – Boston: 2018) 245–276. The most recent contribution is Pénot S. – Oberthaler E., “The Seasons”, in Oberthaler E. a.o. (eds.), Bruegel. The Master, exh. cat., Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (London: 2018) 214–241.

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Pieter Bruegel, The Return of the Hunters, 1565. Oil on wood, 116.5 × 162 cm Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemäldegalerie, inv. no. 1838. Image © Kunsthistorisches Museum

For Bruegel, this commission was the most ambitious task that he ever set himself. He decided, without doubt in consultation with Jonghelinck, to deviate from the usual twelve months and to opt for six seasonal pairs of two months, and this in an unusually large format, so that he could present season-bound human activities in a quasi-universal world landscape. For him this was the ideal opportunity to demonstrate his complete control of the Albertian rules and also his ability to apply them in his own way. Five of the six huge canvases have been preserved, one of the most popular of which is the one representing December–January, usually known as The Return of the Hunters [Fig. 5.11]. From the top of a steep hill we survey a wide and deep valley extending to the horizon, with low, partly wooded hills on the left and steep barren rocks on the right. From the left foreground a parapet of diminishing trees and a second one of houses lead our eye over a dam between rectangular frozen ponds, toward a vanishing point that lies halfway up the mountain’s slope. The arched bridge and the two dikes between the ponds form horizontal lines, in this way articulating the landscape’s depth. These lines, subtly deployed by the painter,

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produce an effect of recession as persuasive as the architectural geometries and the horticultural forms and orthogonals in De Vries’s painting. With the Six Seasons Bruegel combined at least two time-honoured traditions: on the one hand the painted series of twelve months or four seasons (summarized in a series of six) representing the cyclical order of the world, and on the other hand the more recent but very strong tradition of the world landscape, mirroring the infinitely varied abundance of Creation. Moreover, the series could be seen as Bruegel’s pictorial answer to the condescending comments from certain artistic and humanistic quarters on the supposed ‘reasonless’ character of northern landscape painting, both outside and within the Netherlands. In the same year, 1565, Bruegel was commissioned by Hieronymus Cock to design a second seasonal series, this time for prints representing the four seasons.72 Here, too, he left out the allegorical personifications that were at the time usual for this type of series and replaced them with contemporary people, in the older tradition of the months series. To Bruegel this offered a new challenge: how to apply linear perspective to landscapes emphatically populated with human activities. For some reason, work proceeded slowly. The first drawing, for Spring, was ready before the end of the year, but the second, for Summer, only three years later (1568) [Figs. 5.12 & 5.13], and further preparation was interrupted by his untimely death in 1569. Cock had Hans Bol design the two remaining seasons and published the complete series in 1570. Bruegel must have taken this commission very seriously. In both designs he went further than before in experimenting with the possibilities of linear perspective. Spring is especially remarkable [Fig. 5.12]. Here he made full use of the possibilities for linear perspective that a formal garden offers, applying it in a highly sophisticated way unprecedented in his earlier work, as if he wanted to surpass Vredeman de Vries in the art of perspective. Most pointedly, the lines that are perpendicular to the image plane intersect at far left, outside the picture. For Summer he chose a different but equally daring spatial concept: without any straight line that is recognizable as such, there is one unmistakable vanishing point, just to the right of center [Fig. 5.13]. Just as in a few late paintings, he also foregrounds the human figures as much as possible, to such an extent that the scythe and the leg of the man in front project beyond the threshold of the image, in a perspectival joke that doubles as a show of technical brilliance. It is as if in these final designs Bruegel wanted to outdo the propagandists of the linear perspective system not only in the traditional Dutch specialty – landscape – but also in their own field, in an ultimate demonstration of harmony through order and variety. 72

For the drawings and the prints, see Sellink, Bruegel 223–227.

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FIGURE 5.12

6

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Pieter van der Heyden after Pieter Bruegel, Lent, 1570. Engraving, 22.8 × 28.7 cm (plate) Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. no. RP-P-1892-A-17338. Image © Rijksmuseum

Van Mander on Order and Variety

During Bruegel’s lifetime, as far as we know, neither he nor any of his colleagues wrote about their artistic motives and methods.73 However, Karel van Mander’s Schilder-Boeck, published in 1604, reflects ideas on art that had been circulating for at least half a century among the more ambitious artists of Brabant and Holland. Moreover, and in accordance with the painting practice of that age and region, Van Mander was the first art theoretician to devote a separate chapter to landscape painting.74 Some relevant passages may even be read as a verbal explanation of paintings like Bruegel’s The Return of the Hunters. 73 See Miedema H., Theorie en praktijk: Teksten over schilderkunst in de Gouden Eeuw van de Noordelijke Nederlanden (Hilversum: 2017) 29–38. 74 See Melion, Karel van Mander 1–12 (“The Affinity of History and Landscape”); and Bakker, Landscape and Religion, 175–199 (“A Painter Writing on Landscape Painting”).

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Pieter van der Heyden after Pieter Bruegel, Summer, 1570. Engraving, 22.5 × 28.5 cm (plate) Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. no. RP-P-1892-A-17339. Image © Rijksmuseum

Van Mander is not always precise in his formulations, but considering the book as a whole, it becomes clear that he embraces the categories of order and variety, striving for a balance between them. The model picture that he seems to have envisioned while writing consists of a human action or ‘history’ that is embedded in an extensive landscape, like a theatre performance surrounded by a landscape functioning as a very wide stage set.75 Chapter 5, on Composition, specifically deals with human ‘history’. The opening words are: ‘All things share the same, fundamentally ethical regularity and order’.76 In order to demonstrate this precept in his own work, the painter needs strictly to 75 Cf. Melion, Karel van Mander 6; and Puttfarken, Pictorial Composition 193–194. 76 Mander K. van, Den Grondt der edel vry Schilder-const, ed. H. Miedema, 2 vols. (Utrecht: 1973), vol. I, chap. 5, verses 1–2: ‘In gheschickte gheregheltheyt vol zeden / Oft Ordinanty / bestaen alle dinghen’. See on Van Mander’s account of order and variety, Melion, ‪Karel van Mander 5–12.

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follow the guidelines or rules that nature herself has framed for us: ‘So now let us establish […] in an orderly fashion […] certain rules and fixed laws, which […] nature has revealed to us in a rational way, so that we would not unknowingly adopt a system without fixed measures, rules and regulations’. And: ‘Nature herself teaches and lays down good laws’.77 Later on in this chapter he deals with the criteria of profusion and variety: ‘just as in music various sounds of singers and musicians harmonize, so do many different figures [in the art of painting]’. He then posits the example set by nature: ‘Nature is beautiful thanks to variety’.78 Referring to Alberti, Van Mander states that landscape and architecture offer ways of diversifying the picture.79 A few verses further on, however, again paraphrasing Alberti, he states that ‘great masters have learned to focus on simplicity […] and, using few figures, know how to give their things a beautiful and charming appearance’.80 In this chapter Van Mander refrains from fully discussing the relation between variety and order. In chapter 8, which deals in particular with landscape, diversity and copiousness receive a broader discussion with many examples, which together actually create a vast and multifaceted world landscape in words. An essential aspect of Van Mander’s interpretation of variety is that he makes no hierarchical distinction between beautiful or less beautiful. To him, as for Dionysius the Carthusian one and a half century before him, every creature was worthy of the artist’s attention because of its specific nature and properties, and the same held true for man-made products. It is precisely the existence of irregular, crooked, decayed and even nasty and bizarre phenomena that, in giving variety to the world, makes it admirably diverse.81 However, Van Mander continues, we should not exaggerate this either: ‘We must strive for a great deal of diversity, both in color and in forms, wisely and intelligently, because that creates great praiseworthy beauty. But on the other hand, we must avoid thoughtlessly applying too many cities, houses, mountains 77 See Van Mander, Grondt, chap. 4, verse 4 (and marginal remark): ‘Dus laet ons nu dan ordentelijck sette / Ghewisse regulen en vaste wetten / Die […] ons de Natuer heeft vercondicht met reden / op dat wy onwetende niet en treden / In eenich stelsel der postueren/buyten / Ghewisse maten, rechten en statueten’ (‘Natuere leert en stelt self goede wetten’). 78 See ibidem, chap. 5, verse 19 (and marginal remark at verse 20): ‘En als veelderley gheluydt van de Musycken / maeckt Harmonie, van die songhen en speelden / Alsoo doen hier ook verscheyden Beelden’. (‘Door de verscheydenheyt is Natuere schoon’.) 79 Ibidem, chap. 5, verse 26. See also verse 25 with the marginal note: ‘Van rijckelijc zijn Ordinatie te vervullen’ (About lavishly filling one’s composition). 80 Ibidem, chap. 5, verse 29. 81 See Bakker, Landscape and Religion 251–254.

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or other things, for excess takes a lot away from enjoying a balanced composition, if only because of an overly deep background’.82 ‘The Italians […] usually show just one viewpoint and build their plans, their buildings and whatever else they depict very stably’.83 Titian was especially good at this, Van Mander writes, but he puts Bruegel at least on an equal footing with him.84 Also, when it comes to issues of depth and perspective, Van Mander looks for the golden mean. It is true that he naturally accepts the use of the linear perspective. But it must be applied in such a way as to preclude the insertion of unnaturally straight lines. He therefore advises the young painter to use geometric elements that are already present in the landscape, like ditches and square fields, which ‘from both sides like tiled floors narrow and taper towards the vanishing point’.85 It almost seems as if Van Mander had Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow in mind here, although he himself almost certainly never saw it.86 But he certainly could have pointed to Bruegel’s Spring and Summer prints, because these were without doubt for sale in Amsterdam and elsewhere. Looking back at Bruegel’s artistry and Van Mander’s theory, we can conclude that they both strove in their own field for a harmonious balance between order and variety as seemingly polar but in reality complementary qualities. In that endeavor, they actually practiced the virtue that was the subject of Bruegel’s print Temperantia. 7

Excursus: Bruegel’s Pictorial Influence as a Landscape Painter

Bruegel’s grandiose experiment with the six seasons was never repeated, at least not on the same scale. It is true that thanks to his innovations the world landscape and especially its derivatives in the form of extremely wide and richly adorned panoramas remained popular for a few decades, particularly in the Southern Netherlands. But after around 1600, the world landscape as a pictorial concept, in the Dutch Republic in particular, broke up into a large number of sub-landscapes, leaving the panorama seen from a dune or other sand hill as just one of the many genres and sub-genres within Dutch landscape

82 83 84 85 86

See Van Mander, Grondt, chap. 8, verse 23. Ibidem, Grondt, chap. 8, verse 23. Ibidem, Grondt, chap. 8, verses 24–25. Ibidem, chap. 8, verses 8–9. See Buchanan I., “The Collection of Niclaes Jongelinck II: ‘The ‘Months’ by Pieter Bruegel the Elder”, The Burlington Magazine 132 (1990) 541–550, in particular, 541–542.

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painting.87 Painted series of months or seasons with a limited visual range also retained a certain attraction. The same applies to the ‘perspective landscape’, in which the painter strongly emphasized the geometric elements present in the landscape. Yet all these three genres retained just a modest niche, each with its own select and limited audience of enthusiasts and collectors. All this applies to the field of painting. Things took a completely different turn in the world of prints. After Bruegel’s death, the popularity of landscape series continued well into the seventeenth century. This was especially true for series of the elements, parts of the day, and months. In these series, by the way, the landscape claimed a more and more prominent position at the expense of the associated action or ‘history’, and slowly but surely only purely topographical and related series would remain. Irony has it that in this very area Bruegel’s contribution was remarkably modest. The flourishing of the genre had been initiated by Hieronymus Cock with a large number of exemplary editions, of which Bruegel’s Great Landscapes and his share of the Four Seasons were only one, albeit important, part.88 The famous Small Landscapes around Antwerp, long attributed to Bruegel, were most probably drawn by a different, unknown hand.89 The order of the Brussels city authorities to record the Willebroek Canal in a series of paintings was not realized due to his death.90 Nevertheless, Bruegel’s many compositional and topical inventions doubtlessly contributed a lot to the rich flowering of landscape as a genre in later times. However, one may wonder if this also applies to the Six Seasons. They were certainly an absolute highlight in Bruegel’s own oeuvre and in the history of landscape as a pictorial concept, but they cannot have contributed much to its immediate future, because soon after their completion they left Antwerp and the Netherlands.91 Perhaps as a result of this, we must conclude that they were also the spectacular announcement of an approaching end. The harmonic balance that Bruegel accomplished here between order and variety on a large scale was never achieved again. 87 Van Mander may have foreseen this far-reaching specialization. See Van Mander, Grondt, ‘Voor-reden’, fols. 5v–6r., where he praises the many verscheydenheden in style and subject matter in the art of his contemporaries. 88 See Sellink M., “‘He was Himself very Inventive of Landscapes’: Hieronymus Cock and Landscape”, in Van Grieken – Luijten – Van der Stock, Hieronymus Cock 52–57. 89 Ibid. 97a–97b, in particular note 3. 90 See Van Mander, Lives, fol. 233v, lines 41–44: ‘De Heeren van Brussel hadden hem een weynigh voor zijn doot aenbesteedt te maken eenighe stucken van het delven van de Brusselsche vaert nae Antwerpen, dan is door zijn sterven achterweghe bleven’. 91 See Buchanan, “Jonghelinck”, as cited in note 86.

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Grieken J. van – Luijten G. – Stock J. van der (eds.), Hieronymus Cock: The Renaissance in Print, exh. cat., Museum M, Louvain; Fondation Custodia, Paris (Louvain – Paris: 2013). Gruenter R., “Zur Problem der Landschaftsdarstellung im höfischen Versroman”, in Ritter A. (ed.), Landschaft und Raum in der Erzählkunst (Darmstadt: 1975) 293–335. Hale J., Italian Renaissance Painting from Masaccio to Titian (Oxford: 1977). Hand O. – Judson J.R. – Robinson W.W. – Wolff M., The Age of Bruegel: Netherlandish Drawings in the Sixteenth Century, ex. cat. (Washington D.C. – New York: 1986–1987). Jäger M., Die Theorie des Schönen in der Italienischen Renaissance (Cologne: 1990). Kaschek B., Weltzeit und Endzeit. Die ‘Monatsbilder’ Pieter Bruegels d. Ä. (Munich: 2012). Kemp M., The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven – London: 1990). Koopstra A. (ed.), Lucas Gassel van Helmond: Meester van het landschap, exh. cat. Helmond, Museum Helmond (Zwolle: Waanders 2020). Kren T., “Landscape in Flemish Illuminated Manuscripts before Patinir”, in Vergara A., Patinir: Essays and Critical Catalogue (Madrid 2007) 117–133. Kristeller P.O., “The Modern System of the Arts”, in Idem, Renaissance Thought II ((New York – London: 1965). Lachièze-Rey M. – Luminet J.-P., Figures du ciel: de l’harmonie des sphères à la conquête spatiale (Paris: 1998). Laguardia E., Nature Redeemed: the Imitation of Order in Three Renaissance Poems (The Hague: 1966). Lampson D., Les effigies des peintres célèbres des Pays-Bas, ed. Jean Puraye (Paris: 1956). Lampsonius Dominicus, Pictorum aliquot celebrium Germaniae inferioris effigies […]. (Antwerp, Widow of Hieronymus Cock: 1572). Lipsius J., De Constantia / Von der Standhaftigkeit, trans. – comm. F. Neumann (Mainz: 1998). Lognon J. – Cazelles R. – Meiss M., Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry (London: 1969). Mander K. van, Den Grondt der edel vry Schilder-const, ed. H. Miedema, 2 vols. (Utrecht: 1973). Melion W.S., Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel Van Mander’s Schilder-Boeck (Chicago: 1991). Miedema H., Theorie en praktijk: Teksten over schilderkunst in de Gouden Eeuw van de Noordelijke Nederlanden (Hilversum: 2017). Monballieu A. “Een werk van P. Bruegel en H. Vredeman de Vries voor de tresorier Aert Molckeman”, Jaarboek van het Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen (1969) 113–136. Mori Y., “The Iconography of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Temperance” in Mori Y. – Denhaene G. (eds.), The World of Bruegel in Black and White, exh. cat. Royal Library of Belgium, Brussels – Bunkamura Museum of Art, Tokyo etc. (Tokyo: 2010) 28–43.

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Müller J., Das Paradox als Bildform: Studien zur Ikonologie Pieter Bruegels d. Ä. (München 1999). Müller-Hofstede J., “Zur Interpretation von Pieter Bruegels Landschaft: Ästhetischer Landschaftsbegriff und Stoische Welbetrachtung”, in Simson O. von, – Winner M. (eds.), Pieter Bruegel und seine Welt (Berlin: 1979) 73–142. Muylle J., “Pieter Bruegel en Abraham Ortelius. Bijdrage tot de literarische receptie van Pieter Bruegels werk”, in Maurits Smeyers (ed.), Archivum artis lovaniense. Bijdragen […] J.K. Steppe (Leuven: 1981) 319–337. Ogden H.V.S., “The Principles of Variety and Contrast in Seventeenth Century Aesthetics, and Milton’s Poetry”, Journal of the History of Ideas 10 (1949) 159–182. Orenstein N.M. (ed.), Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. – Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (New York – Rotterdam: 2001). Pächt O., “Early Italian Nature Studies and the Early Calendar Landscape”, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 13 (1950) 13–47. Pächt O., “La Terre de Flandres”, Pantheon 36 (1978) 3–16. Pénot S. – Oberthaler E., “The Seasons”, in: Oberthaler E. a.o. (eds.), Bruegel. The Master, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (London: 2018). [Piccolomini E.S.] ‘The Commentaries of Pius II’, Books VI–IX, trans. F.A. Gragg, notes L.C. Gabel, Smith College Studies in History 35 (1951). Puttfarken Th., The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting (New Haven: 2000). Reynders A., De Middelnederlandse Parthonopeus van Bloys en zijn Oudfranse origineel: een studie van de vertaal- en bewerkingstechniek (Louvain: 2002). Ritter J. – Gründer K. (eds.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, 13 vols. (Basel – Stuttgart: 1971–2007). Sellink M., cat. entry 13 (“Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Italian Landscape after Domenico Campagnola, 1554, recto”), in Orenstein N.M. (ed.), Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. – Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (New York – Rotterdam 2001) 104–106. Sellink M., cat. entry 77 (“Philips Galle after Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Temperantia (Temperance), c. 1560”), in Orenstein N.M. (ed.), Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. – Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (New York – Rotterdam 2001) 191–193. Sellink M. – Gibbs M. – Calster P. van, Bruegel: The Complete Paintings, Drawings and Prints (Ghent – New York: 2007). Sellink M., “‘He was Himself very Inventive of Landscapes’: Hieronymus Cock and Landscape”, in Grieken J. van – Luijten G. – Stock J. van der (eds.), Hieronymus Cock: The Renaissance in Print, exh. cat., Museum M, Louvain; Fondation Custodia, Paris (Louvain – Paris: 2013) 52–57.

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Smeyers M., Flemish Miniatures from the 8th to the Mid-16th Century. The Medieval World on Parchment (Louvain: 1999). Sorrell R.D., St. Francis of Assisi and Nature: Tradition and Innovation in Western Christian Attitudes toward the Environment (Oxford: 2009). Stridbeck C.G., Bruegelstudien: Untersuchungen zu den ikonologischen Problemen bei Pieter Bruegel d.Ä, sowie dessen Beziehungen zum Niederländischen Romanismus (Stockholm: 1956; reprint Soest: 1977). Stumpel J.F.H.J., “Perspective’s veil: On the composition of storie and Alberti’s theory of the artificial image,” in idem, The province of painting: theories of Italian Renaissance art, Ph.D. diss. (Utrecht: 1990). Svoboda K., L’esthétique de Saint Augustin et ses sources (Brno: 1933). Tatarkiewicz W., History of Aesthetics, 3 vols. (The Hague – Paris – Warshaw: 1970). Tavernor R., On Alberti and the Art of Building (New Haven – London: 1998). Van de Velde C., Frans Floris (1519/20–1570) Leven en Werken, 2 vols. (Brussels: 1975). [Vasari] Der literarische Nachlass Giorgio Vasaris, eds. Frey K. – Frey H.-W., 3 vols. (Munich: 1923–30). Veldman I., Leerrijke reeksen van Maarten van Heemskerck, exh. cat. (Haarlem: 1986). Veldman I., De maat van kennis en wetenschap (Amsterdam: 1988). Veldman I., “From allegory to genre”, in idem, Images for the eye and soul: function and meaning in Netherlandish prints (1450–1650) (Leiden: 2006) 193–222. Vergara A., Patinir: Essays and Critical Catalogue (Madrid: 2007). Weemans M, Herri met de Bles: les ruses du paysages au temps de Bruegel et d’Erasme (Paris: 2013). Weemans M., “Pieter Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow and Insidiosus Auceps as Trap Images”, in Kaschek B. – Müller J. – Buskirk J., Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Religion (Leiden – Boston: 2018) 245–276. White J., The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Representation (London: 1957). White L., “The iconography of Temperantia and the Virtuousness of Technology”, in Rabb T.R. – Seigel J.E., Action and Conviction in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Memory of E.H. Harbison (Princeton N.J.: 1969) 197–219, reprinted in idem, Medieval Religion and Technology: Collected Essays ((Berkeley – Los Angeles – London: 1978) 181–204. Zinke D., Patinirs ‘Weltlandschaft’. Studien und Materialien zur Landschaftsmalerei im 16. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt a.M. – Bern – Las Vegas: 1977).

Chapter 6

Schilderachtig: A Rhyparographic View of Early 17th-Century Dutch Landscape Painting Reindert Falkenburg There are not many people, I presume, who would disagree with Walter Gibson, by the sheer look of Jan van Goyen’s Landscape with a Dilapidated Farmhouse (1631), in the Mauritshuis Museum, The Hague [Fig. 6.1], that this is a “rustic scene.” It is not immediately evident, however, that, or if, the definition Gibson’s gives of the ‘rustic landscape’ actually fits the image.1 Citing

FIGURE 6.1 Jan van Goyen, Landscape with a Dilapidated Farmhouse, 1631. Oil on panel, 40 × 54 cm The Hague, Mauritshuis Museum 1 Gibson W.S., Pleasant Places: The Rustic Landscape from Bruegel to Ruisdael (Berkeley – Los Angeles – London: 2000). © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004440401_007

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FIGURE 6.2 Paulus Potter, Cows in a Meadow near a Farm, 1653. Oil on canvas, 58 × 66.5 cm Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum

Constantijn Huygens’ Hofwijck poem: “Too tame would be all too formal; too wild would be all too rough,” Gibson writes, “The rustic landscape as I define it, avoids both of these extremes. Rather, it shows the Dutch countryside as it could be seen near the towns and cities of the seventeenth century, an unheroic, comfortable scenery with its familiar windmills and waterways, its pollarded willows, thatch-roofted cottages, cultivated fields, and cows; it can also include woods sheltering perhaps some cottages or a hut.”2 This definition seems quite fitting for paintings such as Paulus Potter’s Cows in a Meadow near a Farm (1653), Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam [Fig. 6.2], or Meindert Hobbema’s Wooded Landscape with Strollers in a Village (1665), National Gallery of Art, Washington [Fig. 6.3]. These landscapes indeed come across as “Pleasant Places,” a term 2 Gibson, Pleasant Places xxiv.

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FIGURE 6.3 Meindert Hobbema, Wooded Landscape with Strollers in a Village, 1665. Oil on canvas, 93 × 128 cm Washington, National Gallery of Art

Gibson uses to qualify the ‘rustic landscape’ as an image that evokes the pleasures, pastimes and peacefulness of life in, and visits to, the countryside.3 While Van Goyen’s landscape shows a group of revelers approaching a country inn in the background, it hardly looks ‘pleasant’ in this particular sense since its emphasis is on a small group of dilapidated cottages that are situated on a barren sand dune next to a wet and muddy dirt road, where some peasants are lounging around. These weathered ‘rustic ruins,’ as Gibson calls them, are ‘pleasant,’ he explains, because they are ‘schilderachtig’ (‘painterly’).4 Referring to notions of ‘schilderachtigheid’ propagated by neo-classicist writers in the 3 Gibson Pleasant Places especially 27–49. 4 Schilderachtig / schilderachtigheid plays a central role as qualifier of Dutch 17th-century painting in general, and landscape painting par excellence, in Wilhelm Martin’s foundational survey of Dutch art: Martin W., De Hollandsche schilderkunst in de zeventiende eeuw, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: 1935–1936); cf. M. Westermann’s historiographical review of this work in The Art Bulletin 96 (2014) 120–124. For an excellent survey and critical assessment of the term schilderachtig in 17th-century art writing, see Bakker B., “Schilderachtig: discussions of a seventeenth-century term and concept”, Simiolus 23 (1995) 147–162. Cf. Emmens J.A.,

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second half of the 17th-century, who maintained that ‘schilderachtig’ means, or should mean, “worthy to be painted,” Gibson expounds how painters in the first half of the century cherished an concept of ‘schilderachtigheid’ that included even motifs that are abject in real life. For this assessment he quotes Jan de Bisschop, who in 1671 wrote, in a rather dismissive tone: Because it is clearly a wrong judgment to believe that what in real life is unseemly, is good and pleasant when represented in art … [and that] more schilderachtich [my emphasis] and in art to be preferred is a misshapen, old, wrinkled person, rather than a well-formed, fresh and youthful person; a dilapidated or disorderly building rather than a new, and artfully crafted one; a beggar and peasant rather than a nobleman or king; a withered, crooked and badly grown tree rather than a green tree with a well-grown crest … an error which however until recently was deeply rooted in the minds of many, also prominent people of our country, and which had become generally accepted: so that almost everything that to the eye was disgraceful, was chosen, and even sought after, [as motif] for paintings and drawings as something holy and special.5 Thus, Boëtius à Bolswert’s engraving, after Abraham Bloemaert’s design, of a Farm Cottage [Fig. 6.4], offers a “charming testimonial of rural negligence and decay.” Here, Gibson’s argument – unintentionally – begins to reveal the paradoxical nature of the early 17th-century concept of schilderachtigheid. Because if we accept the thesis that Bloemaert’s design, and with him Jan van Goyen’s, Pieter Molijn’s and Salomon van Ruysdael’s portrayals – in paintings and etchings – of ill-shaped, ruinous farmhouses, weathered fences, crooked trees, mud pools etcetera [Figs. 6.5–6.7], were based on this concept Rembrandt en de regels van de kunst (Verzameld werk, vol. 2) (Amsterdam: 1979) especially 152–169. 5 Bisschop Jan de, Paradigmata Graphices variorum Artificum, voor-beelden der teken-konst van verscheyde meesters (The Hague, Claes Jansz Visscher: 1671) preface: “Want het is claerlijck een verkeertheyt van oordeel te gelooven dat ‘t geen in ‘t leven voor ‘t gesicht is afsienelijck, inde konst en uytgebeeld sij goet en behaghelijck … dat meer schilderachtich sij en voor de konst verkieselijck een mismaeckt, out, verrimpelt mensch, als een welgemaeckt, fris en jeugdich; een vervallen of ongeschickt gebouw, als een nieuw en nae de konst getimmert; een bedelaer en boer, al seen edelman of Coningh; een dorre, cromme en qualiick gewassen boom, als een groene en wel gekroonde … Welcke verkeertheyt nochtans voor weynich jaren by vele en voorname fraeye geesten onses Vaderlants seer diep was ingewortelt, en geworden genoechsaem een gemeen gevoelen: soo dat by na alles dat voor het oogh verwerpelijck was, tot schilderen en teekenen verkoosen ja gesocht wiert als heilichdom en wat bisonders.”

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FIGURE 6.4 Boëtius à Bolswert, after Abraham Bloemaert, Farm Cottage, 1613. Etching, 15.4 × 24.4 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

FIGURE 6.5 Jan van Goyen, Dune Landscape with Cottage and Figures, 1629. Oil on panel, 48 × 70.5 cm Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

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FIGURE 6.6 Pieter Molijn, Landscape with Open Gate, ca. 1630–1635. Oil on panel, 33.5 × 48 cm Washington, National Gallery of Art

of ‘schilderachtigheid,’ this rustic-run-down environment was not chosen because it was a ‘pleasant place,’ but because this was considered an unpleasant place – in real life not in itself pleasing to the eye, or pleasant to be in. These paintings are not pictorial celebrations of Dutch soil, reclaimed from their hostile maritime environment, that bear witness of a “pride of place,”6 but exercises in a particular, paradoxical form of ‘schilderachtigheid.’ It is not my intention here to further analyze or critique Gibson’s effort to make these paintings fit his concept of ‘pleasant places,’ who argues that rustic decay and neglect for or a 17th-century viewer would have positive connotations of “humble life, the life of virtuous poverty.”7 I would, rather, like to raise the question, how we could understand a pictorial strategy that thrives on the paradox of choosing paint-unworthy subjects as a means to create pleasant paintings.

6 Cf. Schama S., “Dutch Landscapes: Culture as Foreground”, in Sutton P. (ed.), Masters of Dutch 17th-Century Dutch Landscape Painting, exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts (Boston: 1987) 71. 7 Gibson Pleasant Places 157.

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FIGURE 6.7 Salomon van Ruysdael, Landscape with Sandy Road, 1628. Oil on panel, 28.5 × 39.5 cm Pasadena (CA), Norton Simon Museum

In view of the limited space available, I can only offer some very tentative answers to this question. The first is that when we look at, for example, Pieter Molijn’s Landscape with Open Gate of ca. 1630–5, in the National Gallery [Fig. 6.6], we are looking at a landscape version of a ‘tronie’ – a ‘schilderachtig landscape tronie,’ so to speak, similar to the portrait/genre-like ‘tronies’ of Adriaen Brouwer [cf. Fig. 6.8] and Rembrandt.8 We may understand the ‘landscape tronie’ as an exercise in schilderachtigheid as such, by painting paintunworthy, disgraceful subjects, in a rough, direct, uncouth manner that can verge on the bizarre, combined with a cursory level of representational precision. From the point of view of pictorial decorum this is entirely appropriate and in line with art theoretical notions and concerns of the time (if one would 8 Cf., among others, De Vries L., “Tronies and other single figured Netherlandish paintings”, Leids Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 8 (1989) 185–202; Hirschfelder D., Tronie und Porträt in der niederländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: 2008); Gottwald F., Das Tronie. Muster – Studie – Meisterwerk. Die Genese einer Gattung der Malerei vom 15. Jahrhundert bis zum Rembrandt (Munich – Berlin: 2011); Hirschfelder D. – Krempel L. (eds.), Tronies. Das Gesicht in der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin: 2014).

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FIGURE 6.8 Adriaen Brouwer, The Bitter Draught, ca. 1636–1638. Oil on panel, 47.5 × 35.5 cm Frankfurt, Städel Museum

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FIGURE 6.9 Jan van Goyen, Cottage on a Heath, ca. 1630–1635. Oil on panel, 40 × 60.5 cm London, National Gallery

have had any, looking at these pictures). Van Goyen’s ‘slurring’ handling of paint [Fig. 6.9], as several scholars have noted,9 totally fits the muddy sludge of the matter he represents, and will have been admired as a particular achievement according to the ‘naer het leven’ concept and the pursuit of an art that imitates and emulates nature. But what this particular form of schilderachtigheid, of ‘landscape tronie,’ does is that it confronts the viewer with a subject matter that in real life one would not particularly be inclined to like and look at, at least not with feelings of delight, pride, empathy and identification. In this regard, ‘landscape tronies’ by Molijn, Van Goyen and Ruysdael, especially those of the late 1620’s and 1630’s, recall the confrontational mode of ‘rustic’ subjects painted by Pieter Bruegel, Pieter Aertsen and other ‘rhyparographic’ painters in the mid sixteenth century. There, too, we face an art form that plays with the conventions of pictorial decorum, which Jürgen Müller

9 On Van Goyen’s painting technique, see especially Gifford E.M., “Jan van Goyen en de techniek van het naturalistische landschap”, in Vogelaar C. e.a., Jan van Goyen, exh. cat., Stedelijk Museum ‘De Lakenhal’ (Leiden: 1996) 22–37.

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has dubbed “Das Paradox als Bildform,”10 and which I have tried to connect to the ancient rhetorical trope of the ‘paradoxical encomium,’11 the praise, in this case the pictorial praise, of base and praise-unworthy subjects – such as the praise of heavenly and spiritual love, versus worldly and corporeal love, or the representation of an anonymous kitchen maid in the pictorial mode of the ‘state portrait’ of a king. I am not arguing here that the generation of Jan van Goyen – both painters and their audience – necessarily was aware of the ancient rhetorical concept of the ‘paradoxical encomium,’ or that all would have read Pliny the Elder’s Historia naturalis where he speaks of Peiraikos, the ‘rhyparographos’ (the ‘filth painter’).12 But the ‘rhyparographic schilderachtigheid’ of Van Goyen’s landscape paintings and that of his contemporaries (including Bloemaert, Brouwer, and others), is very similar to the paradoxical ‘Bildformel’ explored by Pieter Aertsen cum suis.13 I cannot address here the various questions that may arise from this thesis, but concentrate of the question, what this means in terms of the visual hermeneutics of this type of landscape painting. One way of approaching this question is to look at the activities (or the lack thereof) of humans and animals inhabiting, or traveling through, the landscape, such as in Salomon van Ruysdael’s Landscape with travelers (1631) in the National Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest [Fig. 6.10]. I am not advocating a moralistic reading of the scenery here – as would the swine that are lounging near a dirt pool on the left surrounded by empty beer barrels, contain a visual commentary on the nature of the outing of the travelers in the cart who, as so often in this type of landscape painting, appear to be heading for some relaxation in a country inn. What I 10 Müller J., Das Paradox als Bildform: Studien zur Ikonologie Pieter Bruegels d. Ä. (Munich: 1999). 11 See Falkenburg R.L., “Alter Einoutus. Over de aard en herkomst van Pieter Aertsens stillevenconceptie”, Netherlands Yearbook for Art History (NKJ) 40 (1989) 41–66; Falkenburg R.L., “Pieter Aertsen, Rhyparographer”, in Koopmans J. e.a. (eds.), Rhetoric – Rhétoriqueurs – Rederijkers (Proceedings of the colloquium, Amsterdam, 10–13 November 1993) (Amsterdam – Oxford – New York – Tokyo: 1995) 197–217; Falkenburg R.L., “Pieter Aertsen’s Old Market Seller: Imitatio Artis as Paradox”, in De Vries A. (ed.), Cultural Mediators: Artists and Writers at the Crossroads of Tradition, Innovation and Reception in the Low Countries and Italy, 1450–1650 (Leuven: 2008) 1–22. 12 Historia naturalis, XXXV. 112. Hadrianus Junius, in his Batavia (1588), pp. 239–240, made an explicit comparison between Pieter Aertsen and Peiraikos – cf. Muylle J., “Pieter Aertsen en Joachim Beuckelaer in de kunstliteratuur”, in Joachim Beukelaer: het markt- en keukenstuk in de Nederlanden 1550–1650, exh. cat., Museum voor Schone Kunsten (Ghent: 1986–87) 16. 13 Cf. Falkenburg R.L., “Schilderachtig weer bij Jan van Goyen”, in Vogelaar C. e.a., exh. cat. Jan van Goyen, Stedelijk Museum ‘De Lakenhal’ (Leiden: 1996) 60–69.

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FIGURE 6.10

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Salomon van Ruysdael, Road in the Dunes, 1631. Oil on panel, 56 × 86.5 cm Budapest, Museum of Fine Arts

mean is that the position of the swine is a comment on that of the viewer of the painting, whose eye-level corresponds exactly with that of the swine. Scholars have often commented on lowering of the horizon in paintings by Van Goyen and Ruysdael, compared to the much higher placed horizon in earlier Flemish landscape painting. What they have refrained from saying is that this is not so much a shift from a bird’s eye point of view to a more “realistic” point of view of a human standing in the flat Dutch countryside, but that this is a shift to a ‘swine’s perspective. That is to say, we viewers of the painting are offered a ‘swine’s eye view’ of the landscape and are situated, on par with the swine, in the muck and the mud.14 From here we are first of all confronted 14 Klaver I.J., “Dutch Landscape Painting: Documenting Globalization and Environmental Imagination”, Proceedings from the Document Academy 1 (2014) 6, thus is wrong (referring to Alpers S., The Art of Describing, Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: 1983) 40) stating that in (realistic) Dutch 17th-century landscape painting there is “an absence of a positioned viewer”. Shaw L., “Van Goyen’s Puddles”, AA Files 65 (2012) 76–86, has been the first to speculate about the fundamental role of dirt and mud in Jan van Goyen’s landscape paintings.

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Jan van Goyen, Landscape with a Dilapidated Fence, ca. 1630–1635. Oil on panel, 36.5 × 54 cm Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum

with amorphous humps of sand, irregular dirt roads, patches of mud, wallows and crumbling dunes – i.e. earth-matter that hardly can said to have ‘form’ at all [cf. Fig. 6.9] – combined in many cases with specimen of crooked ‘rustic architecture,’ dilapidated fences etc. mentioned before. But this is also the position from which ‘verschieten’ (distances) unfold, views of deep recesses of land, in which all forms, natural and manmade, gradually become smaller and smaller until they visually merge with and disappear in the horizon. It is particularly the “Groundwork” of the ordinanty, another word used by Karel van Mander,15 of small ‘curiosities’ (buildings, trees, humans, animals, buildings etc.) that mark the contours of spatially receding earth forms, thus making them visually stand out against the sky and inviting the eye of the viewer to ‘rise from the mud’ and trace the recession of space into the deepest ‘verschieten.’ 15 See Melion W.S., Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel van Mander’s Schilder-Boeck (Chicago – London: 1991) 51ff; Puttfarken T., The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting (New Haven – London: 2000) 193–195; and Ribouillault D., “Regurgitating Nature: On a Celebrated Anecdote by Karel van Mander about Pieter Bruegel the Elder”, Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 8 (2016) 37.

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The composition of the landscape, therefore, is laid out in such a fashion that it enables a transformative act of vision that comes with strong ‘uplifting’ bodily and mental sensations and associations. There is much more to say about the visual hermeneutics to which these landscapes appeal. It may suffice however for this occasion to say that it is the artistic tour-de force of using amorph humps of sand and crooked fences to create a sense of immense spatial recession and verschieten [Fig. 6.11] and to enable the viewer to transform his or her visual experience from a muddy swine’s perspective to that of the clairvoyant connoisseur, that makes these rhyparographic landscape paintings schilderachtig. Bibliography Bakker B., “Schilderachtig: discussions of a seventeenth-century term and concept” Simiolus 23 (1995) 147–162. Bisschop Jan de, Paradigmata Graphices variorum Artificum, voor-beelden der tekenkonst van verscheyde meesters (The Hague, Claes Jansz Visscher: 1671). Emmens J.A., Rembrandt en de regels van de kunst (Verzameld werk, vol. 2) (Amsterdam: 1979). Falkenburg R.L., “Alter Einoutus. Over de aard en herkomst van Pieter Aertsens stilleven-conceptie”, Netherlands Yearbook for Art History (NKJ) 40 (1989) 41–66. Falkenburg R.L., “Pieter Aertsen, Rhyparographer”, in Koopmans J. e.a. (eds.), Rhetoric – Rhétoriqueurs – Rederijkers (Proceedings of the colloquium, Amsterdam, 10–13 November 1993) (Amsterdam – Oxford – New York – Tokyo: 1995) 197–217. Falkenburg R.L., “Schilderachtig weer bij Jan van Goyen”, in Vogelaar C. e.a., exh. cat. Jan van Goyen, Stedelijk Museum ‘De Lakenhal’ (Leiden: 1996) 60–69. Falkenburg R.L., “Pieter Aertsen’s Old Market Seller: Imitatio Artis as Paradox”, in De Vries A. (ed.), Cultural Mediators: Artists and Writers at the Crossroads of Tradition, Innovation and Reception in the Low Countries and Italy, 1450–1650 (Leuven: 2008) 1–22. Gibson W.S., Pleasant Places: The Rustic Landscape from Bruegel to Ruisdael (Berkeley – Los Angeles – London: 2000). Gifford E.M., “Jan van Goyen en de techniek van het naturalistische landschap”, in Vogelaar C. e.a., Jan van Goyen, exh. cat., Stedelijk Museum ‘De Lakenhal’ (Leiden: 1996) 22–37. Gottwald F., Das Tronie. Muster – Studie – Meisterwerk. Die Genese einer Gattung der Malerei vom 15. Jahrhundert bis zum Rembrandt (Munich – Berlin: 2011). Hirschfelder D., Tronie und Porträt in der niederländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: 2008).

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Hirschfelder D. – Krempel L. (eds.), Tronies. Das Gesicht in der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin: 2014). Klaver I.J., “Dutch Landscape Painting: Documenting Globalization and Environmental Imagination”, Proceedings from the Document Academy 1 (2014) 1–13. Martin W., De Hollandsche schilderkunst in de zeventiende eeuw, 2 vols. (Amsterdam: 1935–1936). Melion W.S., Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel van Mander’s Schilder-Boeck (Chicago – London: 1991). Müller J., Das Paradox als Bildform: Studien zur Ikonologie Pieter Bruegels d. Ä (Munich: 1999). Muylle J., “Pieter Aertsen en Joachim Beuckelaer in de kunstliteratuur [ca. 1560–1610]”, in Joachim Beukelaer: het markt- en keukenstuk in de Nederlanden 1550–1650, exh. cat., Museum voor Schone Kunsten (Ghent: 1986–87) 14–17. Puttfarken T., The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting (New Haven – London: 2000). Ribouillault D., “Regurgitating Nature: On a Celebrated Anecdote by Karel van Mander about Pieter Bruegel the Elder”, Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 8 (2016) 1–43. Schama S., “Dutch Landscapes: Culture as Foreground”, in Sutton P. (ed.), Masters of Dutch 17th-Century Dutch Landscape Painting, exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts (Boston: 1987) 64–83. Shaw L., “Van Goyen’s Puddles”, AA Files 65 (2012) 76–86. De Vries L., “Tronies and other single figured Netherlandish paintings”, Leids Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 8 (1989) 185–202. Westermann M., review of Martin De Hollandsche schilderkunst, The Art Bulletin 96 (2014) 120–124.

Chapter 7

Landscape with Landmark: Jacob van Ruisdael’s Panorama of Amsterdam (1665–1670) Stijn Bussels From the late 1650s till the end of his life, Jacob van Ruisdael lived and worked in the vibrant city of Amsterdam.1 Around 1665, he climbed to the top of the city’s pride and glory, the new Town Hall, and stood on the platform of the unfinished cupola. Still under construction, the cupola was one of the building’s most prominent features. The splendid view visible from this vantage point must have had quite an impact on the painter, since soon after, he created one of the most intriguing works of his later career [Fig. 7.1].2 Ruisdael elevates his viewers by giving them a breath-taking panoramic view over the city’s oldest neighborhoods. Typically, Ruisdael places the cityscape under an expansive blue sky ornamented by white and grey clouds which take up most of the painting’s space. In a characteristic play of light and shadow, he portrays the houses, churches, and towers of ancient Amsterdam: bathed in sunlight, the steeple of the Oude Kerk particularly stands out. The inner harbour, known as the Damrak, the river IJ, and, on the other side of the water, the polder of Volewijk and the Waterland just behind it, are full of ships. A drawing, now in the Rijksmuseum, served as preparatory study [Fig. 7.2].3 In comparing it with the painting, we immediately notice a crucial difference in the foreground – the scaffolding so evident in the drawing has been entirely left out. Ruisdael does nothing more than leave some indications of building material. He shrouds most of the foreground in darkness, thus emphasising the deep gap between the Town Hall and the houses directly opposite. The pillar at left delicately balances the composition, but also enforces the feeling of vertigo.

1 I would like to thank the contributors of the Emory conference “Landscape and the Visual Hermeneutics of Place” for their most valuable feedback on my contribution during the conference, in particular the organisers of the conference and editors of this volume, Karl Enenkel and Walter Melion. Special thanks to Boudewijn Bakker and Erik Schmitz. 2 On the painting, see Slive S., Jacob van Ruisdael, A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, Drawings and Etchings (New Haven – London: 2001) 17–18; and Walford E.J., Jacob van Ruisdael and the Perception of Landscape (New Haven – London: 1991) 163–164. 3 Slive, Jacob van Ruisdael 493.

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FIGURE 7.1 Jacob van Ruisdael, Panorama of Amsterdam, Its Harbor, and the IJ, c. 1670. Oil on canvas, 41.5 × 40.7 cm London, National Gallery, on loan from a private collection. Public domain

Ruisdael’s Panorama of Amsterdam has fascinated many generations of art historians. Seymour Slive in his catalogue raisonné reproduces it on the back cover and at the start of the catalogue.4 John Walford, in Ruisdael and the Perception of Landscape, emphasises the strong impact of the painting by relating it to the countless prints showing Amsterdam in bird’s-eye view, seen from 4 Ibid.

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FIGURE 7.2 Jacob van Ruisdael, Panoramic View of the Northern Part of Amsterdam and the IJ, c. 1665. Drawing with black chalk and gray wash, 86 × 152 mm Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Public domain

high above the river IJ. Cornelis Anthonisz’s mid-sixteenth-century view is one of the most famous [Fig. 7.3]. Another pictorial type Ruisdael would have known consists of the many views of the city from the polders reclaimed from the river IJ: Claes Jansz. Visscher’s famous print is one of the most elaborate examples [Fig. 7.4]. Ruisdael’s Panorama of Amsterdam reverses these common views of Amsterdam seen from the IJ: surprisingly, he utilizes the numerous dwellings and storehouses, the harbour and ships, as a mere prelude to the far-reaching landscape. Walford writes: ‘Town prospects from the Middle Ages onwards typically show the city from the land, as the culminating point of interest, which Ruisdael here uniquely reverses’.5 However, Walford merely mentions this reversal, but does not come to a better understanding of it. Walford further compares the painting to Ruisdael’s other depictions of Amsterdam and concludes that ‘none is more original in conception, more detailed in execution and more striking in effect than his Panorama of Amsterdam’.6 Hence, Ruisdael’s other paintings of Amsterdam underscore how distinctive the Panorama of Amsterdam is. The other Amsterdam images do not elucidate his handling of city and landscape, nor do they clarify the painter’s 5 Walford, Jacob van Ruisdael 165. 6 Walford, Jacob van Ruisdael 163.

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FIGURE 7.3 Cornelis Anthonisz., Bird’s Eye View on Amsterdam, 1544. Etching, 100.7 × 109.3 cm Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Public domain

FIGURE 7.4 Claes Jansz. Visscher, View on Amsterdam As Seen From the IJ, 1611. Etching and engraving, 62.8 × 171.7 cm Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Public domain

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FIGURE 7.5 Jacob van Ruisdael, View on the IJ on a Stormy Day, c. 1660. Oil on canvas, 107 × 125 cm Worcester: Worcester Art Museum. Public domain

choice of viewpoint atop the Town Hall. In his View on the IJ, the harbour is barely visible [Fig. 7.5]. There the only thing that seems to hold Ruisdael’s attention is the enormous force of water and wind. He does not interact with the dominant tradition of showing the grandeur of Amsterdam and her splendid Town Hall, praised as one of the wonders of the world, from the banks of the river IJ. In contrast with Ruisdael, many contemporary painters endeavoured to express this grandeur, giving a central place to the cupola and the surrounding church towers. In a famous medal that Jurriaan Pool engraved for the inauguration of the Town Hall in 1655, this dominant view on the city from the polder is explicitly connected to the new prestigious building [Fig. 7.6]. If the Town Hall from which Ruisdael gazed over Amsterdam makes no appearance in his seascape View on the IJ, it likewise fails to dominate (or even appear in) his cityscapes of Amsterdam. In this respect, his city views diverge markedly from those of artists such as Jan van der Heyden and Gerrit Berkheyde. Van der Heyden and Berkeyde can in fact be credited with propagating interest in the Town Hall as an impressive landmark of Architectura

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FIGURE 7.6 Jurriaan Pool, Inauguration of the new Town Hall, 1655. Silver, 7 × 7 cm Amsterdam, Amsterdam Museum. Public domain

Moderna (Modern Architecture, i.e., Dutch Classicism) [Fig. 7.7]. By contrast, Ruisdael consistently pays little or no attention to the building. In one of his winter views, he sets the Town Hall completely in the mist [Fig. 7.8]. Moreover, in his four depictions of the Dam, he looks time and again at the other side of the square.7 In one of these paintings we see the Weigh House and the Damrak, as well as the Oude Kerk towering on the right above the city [Fig. 7.9]. Ruisdael thus shows the view he would have had from his own house on the corner of the Rokin, above the bookshop of Hieronymus Sweerts, where he lived from about 1670 onwards.8 From Ruisdael’s other depictions of Amsterdam, we may conclude that the painter, in spite of having the Town Hall daily in view, generally chose to disregard it. Seen in relation to his total oeuvre, this state of affairs confirms that Ruisdael was not interested in the architecture of his own time. He mostly concentrated on landscapes filled with the residual elements of bygone eras. However, in what follows, I will argue that the top of the Town Hall was more than a convenient vantage point from which to record a verifiably panoramic view over ancient Amsterdam. Unfortunately, Ruisdael’s artistic intentions cannot be sourced from the available archival materials, but by relating Ruisdael’s Panorama of Amsterdam, along with his preparatory study, to dominant discourses regarding the Town Hall, it should prove possible to reconstruct the significance of the painting’s viewpoint. Encouraged by Ruisdael to imagine 7 On the four paintings, see Slive, Jacob van Ruisdael, cat. nrs. 1, 6, 7 and 8. 8 Walford, Jacob van Ruisdael 165.

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FIGURE 7.7 Gerrit Adriaensz Berckheyde, The Dam in Amsterdam, 1660. Oil on canvas, 70 × 110 cm Antwerp: Royal Museum of Fine Arts. Public domain

FIGURE 7.8 Jacob van Ruisdael, Winter View of the Hekelveld, c. 1665. Oil on canvas, 49.5 × 65 cm Scotland, Private Collection. Public domain

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FIGURE 7.9 Jacob van Ruisdael, The Dam Square, c. 1670. Oil on canvas, 52 × 65 cm Berlin, Gemäldegalerie. Public domain

him-/herself standing on top of the Town Hall, how might a seventeenthcentury viewer have been expected to reckon with the building’s status as the city’s newly prominent landmark? Panorama of Amsterdam challenges our modern art-historical categorization of painterly genres, as we are not dealing with a landscape painting, neither with a cityscape painting. So in his late career, we see Ruisdael, arguably the most successful painter of landscapes in his time, exploring the limits of his own speciality thanks to his reverse presentation of a landscape starting from the city. Seen from a less anachronistic point of view, we can construe the Panorama of Amsterdam as a fascinating attempt to reckon with the complex relation between nature and culture. The painting plays against expectations by operating at the threshold between divine and human creation. It is precisely this fine line that many of the laudatory poems on the new Amsterdam Town Hall acknowledge. There the benevolence of God and the providence of the burgomasters are jointly credited with having provided the impetus for construction of the building. In what follows, I will argue that Ruisdael, like the poets who praised the Town Hall, expected the viewer to look beyond the

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merely visible and to reflect upon the interwovenness of the divine and the human spheres. In his Landscape and Religion, Boudewijn Bakker clarifies how early modern Dutch paintings, drawings, and prints of landscape did more than merely describe what they depict. He discusses the importance of the centuries-old anagogical element. The viewing experience of landscape was thus rooted in this most profound level of biblical exegesis. The etymology of anagoge (ἀναγωγή) points at the upwards movement of climbing/ascending: in its application to Scripture, anagogy connotes the reader’s spiritual ascent heavenward, toward the contemplative experience of God. Reflection on the Book of Scripture was complementary to spiritual reflection on God’s other, indeed first, book – the Book of Nature. The believer could anticipate the heavenly experience of God by first dwelling attentively on nature as God’s First Book of Creation. By turning to landscape in this way, the exegetical viewer affirms ‘that even though creation was corrupted by the Fall of Adam and Eve, it still serves as the “First Book” of God, both because of its inherent divine qualities and because of God’s obvious concern for man and the world’.9 Not only nature itself, but also visual representations of nature were believed to bring the viewer closer to God thanks to anagogy. Franciscus Junius expresses this conviction eloquently at the start of his comprehensive De pictura veterum (On the Painting of the Ancients), first published in Latin in 1637, and translated a year later into English, and in 1641 into Dutch.10 The influential Dutch art theoretician emphasises the close link between God, the creator of the world, and the painter who creates a truly excellent work of art. Since the painter excels in contemplating and imitating the world, he can help his audience to come to a better understanding of the divine: art thus mediates their appreciation of their surroundings. Painters have the power to make God’s presence in nature conspicuous: ‘Painters undertake to expresse such things as Nature is not able to doe’.11 Junius’ ideas are echoed in Vondel’s essay 9 Bakker B., Landscape and Religion. From Van Eyck to Rembrandt, trans. Diane Webb (London – New York: 2012) 213. Cf. De Klijn M., De invloed van het Calvinisme op de Noord-Nederlandse landschapsschilderkunst, 1570–1630 (Apeldoorn: 1982). 10 For Junius’ influence on Dutch artists, see Weststeijn T., Art and Antiquity in the Netherlands and Britain. The Vernacular Arcadia of Franciscus Junius (1591–1677) (Leiden: 2015). For further research on Junius, see the rich work of Colette Nativel. Her latest publication on Junius with an extended bibliography is: “Lecture du ‘Traité du sublime’ par Franciscus Junius F. F.”, Lias. Journal of Early Modern Intellectual Culture and its Sources, Bussels S., Van Oostveldt B. and Jansen W. (eds.), Special Issue: The Sublime in Early Modern Theories of Art and Architecture 43 (2016) 263–279. 11 This quote is Junius’ own translation into English of Theophylact Simocatta’s Epistolae XXXVII. Junius F., The Painting of the Ancients – De pictura veterum, according to the

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Bespiegelingen (Reflections) of 1662, which explicitly links landscape painting with God’s creation.12 However, I want to go a crucial step further by looking beyond nature and the visual arts. The anagogical interpretation of the First Book of God was not restricted to nature stricto sensu and depictions of her, but encompassed urban surroundings as well, along with pictures of them. Not only paintings, prints, and drawings of nature were believed to bring the viewer closer to God; monumental architecture could have the same uplifting effect. Because of their height, large buildings, especially churches, were appreciated, not unlike expansive vistas of earth, sky, and sea, as ways of thinking about God’s works. From late antiquity onwards, authors praised churches for spiritually bringing heaven closer to the worshipper.13 By the sixteenth century, courtly and urban architecture could also function as meditative instruments, their grandeur functioning as an analogue to the greater sublimity of the Lord.14 This was certainly how contemporaries justified the time and labour invested in the Amsterdam Town Hall, as well as its material and artisanal magnificence. A rich set of sources, previously unstudied, demonstrates how the Town Hall was construed as a grand endeavour of the Amsterdam burgomasters, but certainly also as God-given and divinely sanctioned.15 Recent research has brought more than one hundred poems on the Town Hall to light, written from the 1640s, when the first plans for the building were made, up until the end of the seventeenth century, with a surge around the inauguration of the building in 1655.16 The fact that several poems were written before the Town Hall was constructed indicates that they do not give a neutral account of the English translation (1638), eds. K. Aldrich – P. Fehl – R. Fehl (Berkeley: 1991) 1.1.3. 12 See Bakker B., “Een goddelijk schilderij: Vondel over landschap en schilderkunst in zijn Bespiegelingen van 1662”, Neerlandistiek.nl 5 (2005): https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/ 1874/28482 Accessed June 29th, 2019. 13 Elsner J., “The Rhetoric of Buildings in the De Aedificiis of Procopius”, in James L. (ed.), Art and Text in Byzantium (Cambridge: 2007) 33–57; Friedländer P., Johannes von Gaza, Paulus Silentiarius and Prokopius von Gaza: Kunstbeschreibungen justinianischer Zeit (Hildesheim: 1912); and Webb R., “The Aesthetics of Sacred Space: Narrative, Metaphor, and Motion in ekphraseis of Church Buildings”, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 53 (1999) 59–74. 14 Kranz G., Das Architekturgedicht (Köln: 1988); and Smith C., Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism, Ethics, Aesthetics, and Eloquence 1400–1470 (Oxford: 1992). 15 Exceptions are Albrecht S. – De Ruyter O. – Spies M., Vondels Inwydinge van ’t stadhuis t’Amsterdam (Muiderberg: 1982); and Spies M., “Minerva’s commentaar. Gedichten rond het Amsterdamse stadhuis”, De zeventiende eeuw 9 (1993) 15–34. 16 This research is primarily done in the PhD project of Laura Plezier as part of the ERC starting grant ‘Elevated Minds. The Sublime in the Public Arts in Seventeenth-Century Paris and Amsterdam’.

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building, but were used as an important means to legitimate the grandiose project. Indeed, most of the poets can be politically linked to the municipality. The burgomasters even paid several of them for writing their laudatory poems. The poets primarily register the overwhelming impact of the construction and respond to the building’s sumptuous decorations, both without and within. Many poets describe being elevated to celestial heights, heights redolent of a pagan apotheosis, but also of Christian salvation. They often engage in anagogical interpretation of the building, praising it as an expression of divine presence. These texts are a crucial context wherein to situate the edifice Ruisdael climbed to paint his remarkable Panorama of Amsterdam. A good example is a laudatory poem written in 1656 by the eminent politician, author, and art lover Constantijn Huygens. Praising the flourishing city of Amsterdam and her excellent rulers, the poem is primarily meant as a diplomatic present. However, the central focus is anagogical. More particularly, it celebrates the white marble floor of the Citizens’ Hall and its three inlaid maps for bringing men closer to heaven [Fig. 7.10]. The famous cartographer Joan Blaeu had designed the two ‘spheres’ of the world and the accompanying ‘sphere’ of the firmament. Huygens not only admires the newest scientific insights of which these maps give evidence; he also urges the reader-viewer to imagine standing there alone and meditating in solitude on the maps’ significance. Then he encourages the reader-viewer to climb upward into the highest regions of the empyrean. The maps trigger a mental process leading the visitor into the heavenly domain: Leert onder het gewemel Van ‘twoelighe Stadthuijs Gedencken aen den Hemel, En treedt vrij in ‘tgedruijs, Als vander aerd’ geresen Op Sterr en Son en Maen; Hier werdt u in bewesen Hoe dat het eens naer desen Den saligen sal gaen. Learn amidst the hustle-bustle Of the tumultuous Town Hall To recall Heaven And enter freely into the commotion Of the Stars and Sun and Moon

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Marble floor of the Citizens’ Hall in the Former Town Hall of Amsterdam, now Royal Palace Photo: Erik and Petra Hesmerg. Image © Stichting Koninklijk Paleis Amsterdam

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As if you are elevated from the earth; Here you are given proof Of how in the life hereafter The Blessed will be treated.17 In his laudatory poem Huygens relates the overwhelming impact of the Citizens’ Hall in the new Town Hall to the heavenly spheres. The meditative exercise that Huygens describes resembles the kind of anagogical exegesis that Bakker considers applicable to seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting. By combining previous analyses of Ruisdael’s landscape paintings and the laudatory poems on the Town Hall – Huygens’ verses on the marble floor of the Citizens’ Hall being a test case – we can begin to deduce how the Panorama of Amsterdam, seen from the summit of the new edifice, was interpreted by Ruisdael’s contemporaries. It was more than a convenient vantage point from which a curious tourist might take in the bustling city below. Huygens was by no means the only poet to relate the Town Hall to the heavenly spheres. In many other poems – those by the famous poets Joost van den Vondel and Jan Vos, for example – the building is praised for being truly sublime, a means whereby the visitor might rise to Olympian heights.18 Such poems reached their apogee when the burgomasters ceremonially inaugurated their new workplace in 1655. Many poets connect this ceremonial occasion to famous Greco-Roman mythological events and figures, thus linking the building to Jupiter and Olympus. However, as Vondel and many other poets explain, these Olympian heights must be seen metaphorically to evoke the Christian empyrean.19 The famous commemorative medal of Jurriaan Pool is a visual counterpart to these efforts to magnify the building [Fig. 7.7]. On the obverse is a view of Amsterdam seen from the IJ; on the reverse is a rare image of the actual inauguration ceremony. Although the cupola was still under construction in 1655, it appears on the medal as if already fully built. The Dam 17 Huygens C., De gedichten van Constantijn Huygens naar zijn handschrift uitgegeven, ed. J.A. Worp, 9 vols. (Groningen: 1895) VI 82–83. My translation. 18 The ERC Starting Grant “Elevated Minds. The Sublime in the Public Arts in SeventeenthCentury Paris and Amsterdam” supported a study of these laudatory poems; see, for example, Bussels S., “Meer te verwonderen, als immer te doorgronden. Het Amsterdamse stadhuis, een overweldigende burgerspiegel”, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 126 (2013) 234– 248; and idem, “Medusa’s Terror in the Amsterdam Town Hall. How to Look at Sculptures in the Dutch Golden Age”, in Eck C. van (ed.), Idols to Museum Pieces. The Nature of Sculpture, its Historiography and Exhibition History, 1640–1880 (Berlin: 2017) 85–102. 19 Spies M., Rhetoric, Rhetoricians and Poets. Studies in Renaissance Poetry and Poetics (Amsterdam: 1999), chapter 8.

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is crowded with people watching the burgomasters process into their new headquarters. Their names are inscribed on the stone lying in the foreground, next to the mythological hero Amphion who famously built the walls of the citadel of Thebes by playing his magical lyre. Several laudatory poets likewise link the rulers of Amsterdam to this son of Jupiter. Another correspondence between the medal and the poems appears high in the sky, where the ancient god of commerce, Mercury, flies near the cupola. Many of the poets use him as a mouthpiece to express admiration for the new building in the equally awestruck company of Jupiter and his fellow gods.20 The Greco-Roman mythological register from which Pool and the poets draw their allusions to the sublimity of the Town Hall, even while providing a context for Ruisdael’s Panorama of Amsterdam, is also distinctive from it. A more abstract, less metaphorical sublimity is discernible in Ruisdael’s painting: for one thing, no Olympians can be spotted hovering near the building. One must look to another register poets utilized in praising the Town Hall. Huygens, for instance, in lauding the floor of the Citizens’ Hall, evokes a sublimity that goes far beyond the merely anecdotal. Huygens elaborates on the sublime as a great and noble quality newly discernible in the literature, art, and architecture of the young Republic; this quality produces an irresistible and overwhelming effect, replete with strong and often conflicting emotions such as awe, fear, and admiration, in the beholder. From the mid-sixteenth century onwards, a growing interest in Pseudo-Longinus’ Greek treatise Peri hypsous (On the Sublime) emerged throughout the whole of Europe.21 In the direct milieu of Huygens, humanists such as Daniel Heinsius, Gerardus Vossius, and Franciscus Junius explicitly referred to Longinus in their poetics and art theory, using his text to license sublimity as the main aim of both poets and artists.22 However, in conjunction with Longinus’ theory of sublimity, the seventeenth-century sublime continued to be shaped by the religious notion of sacer horror – the awe, fear, and admiration that contact with the divine stirs up. Throughout the whole of the medieval and early modern Christian world, the sublime was a synonym for the sacred: to cite one key example, the term appears in the title of the 20 See Bussels S., “The Wondrous Town Hall of Amsterdam. Laudatory Poems on the Impact of Art and Architecture”, in Alexander A. – Gilby E. – Marr A. (eds.), The Places of Early Modern Criticism (Oxford: forthcoming). 21 Bussels S. – Van Oostveldt B. – Jansen W. – Knegtel F. – Plezier L., “Sublime”, in Sgarbi M. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy (Dordrecht: 2018): 10.1007/ 978-3-319-02848-4_1136-1. 22 Jansen W., Appropriating Peri hypsous: Interpretations and Creative Adaptations of Longinus’ Treatise On the Sublime in Early Modern Dutch Scholarship (Ph.D. dissertation, Leiden University, 2019).

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famous papal bull of 1537, Sublimis Deus, that forbade the enslavement of the Indians, emphasising God’s infinite, sublime love for the human race.23 God’s sublimity patently manifests itself in his wonders, which surpass every human endeavour, even the seven ancient wonders of the world. Divine manifestations of the sublime also exceed human understanding, being irresistible and overwhelming in the extreme.24 Huygens brings these two traditions of dealing with sublimity together in another poem that he devoted to the Town Hall. The poem involves a complex play on human and divine excellence; the analogy serves to honour the building as a landmark of layered sublimity. Huygens wrote this poem in 1657 to eulogize the Amsterdam burgomasters for their patronage of the Town Hall. Distributed in various media, the poem became very famous in its own right.25 Printed in books and city guides, it was also recited at several official banquets held in the Town Hall. A beautifully calligraphed version exists as well. However, the poem most famously appears on the black marble slab that Elias Noski carved and gilded for the Burgomasters room of the Town Hall, where it still hangs [Fig. 7.11]. The poem was and still is well-known for presenting the Town Hall as the eighth wonder of the world.26 Huygens explicitly relates the ambitious project to the exceptional prosperity of Amsterdam, giving due credit to the four Burgomasters who conceived the idea of building such a marvel. However, quite surprisingly, in the middle of his laudatory poem, Huygens’ tone dramatically changes: he imagines the Town Hall as a transient phenomenon, under threat of extreme and unpredictable natural forces. He writes:

23 Prien H.-J., “Sublimis Deus”, in Fahlbusch E. et al. (eds.), Encyclopedia of Christianity (Leiden/Boston: 2017): http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/browse/encyclopedia-of -christianity Accessed June 29th, 2019. “Medusa’s Terror in the Amsterdam Town Hall. How to Look at Sculptures in the Dutch Golden Age”, in Eck C. van (ed.), Idols to Museum Pieces. The Nature of Sculpture, its Historiography and Exhibition History, 1640–1880 (Berlin: 2017) 85–102. 24 Daston L. – Park K., Wonders and the Order of Nature: 1150–1750 (New York: 1998). 25 Bussels S. – Plezier L. – Vaeck M. van, “Amsterdam sierlijk verbonden met God. Het lofdicht op het Amsterdamse stadhuis van Constantijn Huygens”, Spiegel der Letteren 59 (2017) 261–290. 26 In their reviews users of prominent travel guides as Tripadvisor.com still use the moniker ‘Eighth Wonder of the World’ to praise the Amsterdam Town Hall: https://www.trip advisor.com/ShowUserReviews-g188590-d244447-r403716730-Royal_Palace_Amsterdam -Amsterdam_North_Holland_Province.html Accessed June 29th, 2019.

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FIGURE 7.11

Elias Noski, Engraved Stone with Huygens’ Laudatory Poem, 1660. Black marble, 100 × 90 cm Amsterdam, Amsterdam Museum. Public domain

Geluck aende ee. heeren regeerders van Amsterdam, in haer niewe stadthuijs. Doorluchte Stichteren van ‘s Werelds Achtste wonder, Van soo veel Steens om hoogh op soo veel Houts van onder, Van soo veel kostelicks soo konstelick verwrocht, Van soo veel heerlickheits tot soo veel nuts gebrocht; God, die U Macht en Pracht met Reden gaf te voeghen, God gev’ u in ‘t Gebouw met Reden en Genoeghen Te thoonen wie ghij zijt, en, daer ick ‘t al in sluijt, Heil zij daer eewigh in en Onheil eewigh uijt. Is ‘t oock soo voorgeschickt, dat deze Marmer-muren Des Aerdrijcks uyterste niet hebben te verduren,

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En, werdt het noodigh dat het Negende verschijn’ Om ‘t Achtste Wonderwercks nakomelingh te zijn, God, uwer Vad’ren God, God uwer Kind’ren Vader, God soo nae by U, zij die Kind’ren soo veel nader, Dat haere Welvaert noch een Huijs bouw’ en besitt’ Daer bij dit Niewe stae als ‘tOude stond bij dit. Congratulations to the Noble Rulers of Amsterdam, in their New Town Hall Exalted Founders of the World’s Eighth wonder, Of so much Stones above, on so much Wood below, Of so much costliness, so artfully conceived, Of so much delight brought to so much advantage; God, who gave You Power and Splendor to use with reason, God gives you in this Building with Reason and Bliss To show yourselves for who you are, and, since I am leaving nothing out, Salvation is eternally in this place, and mischief eternally out of it. But if it be foreordained that these Marble-walls Don’t have it in them to endure the earth’s extreme forces, And, were it to become necessary a Ninth [Wonder] to appear As a descendant to the Eighth Wonderwork, God, the God of your Fathers, the God of your Children, Let God, who is so close to You, be yet closer to these Children, That their Prosperity may construct another House and possession In relation to which this New [Town Hall] stands, as the Old stood in relation to it.27 The poem moves through a series of intricate tropes. First, the poet praises the new Town Hall as the eighth wonder of the world, an example of human excellence – outstanding, indeed astonishing in its workmanship. Then he emphasises that God’s blessing on the Amsterdam burgomasters is what mobilized or, better, animated the process of construction. There follows a sudden shift in tone, when Huygens anticipates the building’s eventual decay and even destruction. He thus embraces the popular topos that great civilizations are built on the ruins of the old. However, Huygens was anything but a pessimist. Directly after imagining the Town Hall in a ruinous state, he expresses the belief that Amsterdam and its new Town Hall will ultimately overcome 27 Huygens, De gedichten VI 108. My translation.

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every disaster and adverse eventuality.28 Ultimately, a new Town Hall will arise, more extraordinary than the one that preceded it. For Huygens, the promise of triumph over death and decay has its source in God. The prosperity of the city is directly linked to the action of divine providence. Huygens views the Town Hall as a wondrous, but also a merely temporary manifestation of the eternal bond between the citizens of Amsterdam and God. As extraordinary as the building is, it is only a sign of something mightier, since the divine providence which made it possible will always surpass every kind and degree of human excellence. By presenting the Town Hall as an expression of God’s supreme providence, Huygens implicitly responds to the popular biblical story of the Tower of Babel, so frequently visualised by artists, writers, and rhetoricians in the Dutch Republic, often with Pieter Bruegel’s pictures in mind. The two constructions can be viewed as pure antipodes. Whereas Amsterdam’s Town Hall was seen as divinely sanctioned, an architectural warrant of the Lord’s approbation, the Tower of Babel signified divine disapproval. Eventually, due to their overweening ambition, the citizens of Babel suffered the wrath of God. The notion that the Town Hall was above all a monument sanctioned by God, a concrete expression of divine favour, can be brought to bear on Ruisdael’s Panorama of Amsterdam. First of all, the changes Ruisdael made in the painting, as compared to the drawing, become all the more striking when viewed in light of this idea. The scaffolding indicating that the cupola is still under construction has disappeared; loose stones, a pillar, and part of the cornice appear in its place. Ruisdael’s love of picturesque ruins, expressed in many of his other works [Fig. 7.12], turns up in a painting directly connected to the showpiece of Dutch Classicism. For the seventeenth-century viewer, this must have seemed less strange than it does to us. Just as Huygens’s laudatory poem imagines the new Town Hall in ruins, as a prelude to evoking the divine promise of victory over decay, so too, Pool’s medal positions conspicuous ruins in the foreground [Fig. 7.6]. Thanks to the presence of the column, there is even a striking visual resemblance to the Panorama of Amsterdam. By referring to Huygens and Pool, I do not mean to suggest that the laudatory poem or the medal had a direct influence on Ruisdael’s painting. As both were famous in their time, that influence is perfectly plausible, but nevertheless impossible to prove. Both Huygens’ poem and Pool’s medal are highly rhetoricized examples of how the new Town Hall was refashioned by its admirers: 28

Cf. other early modern European literary traditions which play on the relation between decay and renewal, e.g., the French Renaissance poetry discussed Smith P., Dispositio. Problematic Ordering in French Renaissance Literature (Leiden – Boston: 2007), chapter 4.

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FIGURE 7.12

Jacob van Ruisdael, Landscape with a Ruined Castle and a Village Church, 1665–72. Oil on canvas, 109 × 146 cm London, National Gallery. Public domain

we might call them ‘re-constructions of the actual construction’. Textual and visual representations prepared visitors of the Town Hall to expect something totally out of the ordinary. Hence, the sublimity of the building was not only defined by the monumental architecture, but also by dominant discourses that rebuilt the building in a metaphorical sense, in the mind’s eye. Many viewers of Panorama of Amsterdam would have been familiar with the prominent poetic and pictorial portrayals of the Town Hall that identified it as a most extraordinary landmark. Like the readers of Huygens’ poem and the viewers of Pool’s medal, the viewers of Ruisdael’s painting were invited to view the prestigious building through the antithetical lens of ruined ancient monuments. However, neither Huygens nor Pool, or Ruisdael present their audience with an image of pure decay. On the contrary, Huygens calls attention to the eternal bond between the building, the city it represents, and God who conquers the depredations of time. Pool shows the new Town Hall proudly rising over ancient ruins. He visualises how Amsterdam renews the golden age of Amphion, and even surpasses his legendary architectural powers. Ruisdael, for his part, offers his viewers – just

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beyond the scattered stones, pillar, and cornice which though part of the building works, are already evocative of ruins – an overwhelming view over prosperous Amsterdam. The viewers are raised high into the sky. And yet, looking over the city at the marvellous cloud formations, they are given to see that the Book of Nature transcends even the most powerful earthly constructions, even the Amsterdam Town Hall. There is a crucial difference that we need to address as well. Whereas Huygens and Pool explicitly celebrate the Town Hall and link it to a present time of prosperity and to a bright future, Ruisdael indulges his preference for the ‘anti-modern’ and totally neglects the actual building. There is no clear reference to the Town Hall as the pre-eminent landmark of Dutch Classicism, as nothing about the stones and pillar in the foreground specifically connects them to this particular building. Moreover, the artist focusses emphatically on the historical city. In his volume Aanzien van Amsterdam, Boudewijn Bakker points out that Ruisdael excludes the new neighborhoods of Amsterdam; instead he concentrates on the medieval city, with the tower of the Oude Kerk spotlit by the sun.29 Why did Ruisdael not choose to show the other side of the city, a truly remarkable epitome of urban expansion, with its rich canal houses, so fashionably depicted by artists as Berkcheyde [Fig. 7.13]? I would like to argue that this choice can be explained by further exploring the possibility that Ruisdael’s Panorama of Amsterdam is primarily a celebration of divine benevolence, exemplified not only by the implicit presence of the monumental Town Hall itself, but also by Amsterdam’s rich and storied past. Huygens alludes to God’s enduring esteem for Amsterdam when, addressing the city’s burgomasters, he refers to ‘the God of your Fathers’. Other poems praising the Town Hall are far more explicit about God’s abiding commitment to Amsterdam. Many poets compare the new Town Hall to the Gothic Town Hall that burned down in 1652. The fire is described as a divine portent sanctioning the construction of a new Town Hall. More important is the fact that many poets, in praising the simplicity of the old building, avow that its replacement is equally simple, though in a novel way: the monumentality of the new Town Hall, combined with its lack of superfluous, meretricious ornament, makes it a legitimately grand, impressively sober successor to the original building. A moving record of the old Town Hall – Pieter Saenredam’s famous painting – hung in the burgomasters’ new chambers, commissioned by them 29 Bakker B., “De stad in één blik: het oog van de kunstenaar”, in Bakker B. – Schmitz E. (eds.), Het aanzien van Amsterdam. Panorama’s, plattegronden en profielen uit de Gouden Eeuw (Bussum: Thoth, 2007) 174–175.

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FIGURE 7.13

Gerrit Adriaensz. Berckheyde, View of the Golden Bend in the Herengracht, 1671–1672. Oil on panel, 42.5 × 57.5 cm Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Public domain

to emphasise the harmonious connection between the old centre of government and the new [Fig. 7.14].30 Ruisdael perhaps invites his viewers to make a similar connection. From a vantage point atop the city’s newest monument they look out over a panorama of the old city and its most prominent building, the Oude Kerk. For centuries, the Oude Kerk was considered the city’s most important church, due in part to its venerable antiquity.31 It clearly fascinated Ruisdael, whose 30 Darnell L., “A Voice from the Past: Pieter Saenredam’s The Old Town Hall of Amsterdam, Historical Continuity, and the Moral Sublime”, Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 8 (2016) DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2016.8.2.6. 31 See, for example, the founding act of the New Church, issued by bishop Frederik van Blankenheim of Utrecht on 15 November 1408, whereon he states that the Oude Kerk will always stay the ‘mother church’: Bont B.J.M. de, “De O.L.Vrouwe- of Nieuwe Kerk te Amsterdam”, Bijdrage tot de geschiedenis van het Bisdom Haarlem 31 (1908) 247. For a more general history of the Oude Kerk, see Jansse H., De Oude Kerk te Amsterdam. Bouwgeschiedenis en restauratie (Zwolle: 2004). My thanks to Boudewijn Bakker for these references.

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Pieter Jansz. Saenredam, The Old Town Hall of Amsterdam, 1657. Oil on panel, 65.5 × 84.5 cm Amsterdam, Amsterdam Museum. Public domain

only church interior portrays the building [Fig. 7.15]. In the Panorama of Amsterdam, he turns his attention to the church’s exterior, placing it in view of its secular, though divinely licensed counterpart, the new Town Hall. A relic of Amsterdam’s past is thus implicitly connected to an architectural token of the city’s prosperous present and promising future. It bears stating that the Oude Kerk was closely associated with the city’s rich maritime past, thanks to the tombs of naval heroes contained therein – Jacob van Heemskerck, for instance, the admiral who annihilated the Spanish fleet at the Battle of Gibraltar. The tower of the Oude Kerk, shining in the sun’s full light, would surely have brought such heroic deeds to mind; along with the Damrak and the river IJ teeming with ships in the distance, the Oude Kerk encourages the viewer to trust in the Lord’s stalwart defence of Holland. Church, avenue, and harbour celebrate the city’s maritime force and the overseas trade that made its burgers so prosperous. Behind the old city, one can see the Volewijck and the Waterland, a landscape that had become another great source of wealth, after centuries of intensive land reclamation and dyke-building. This humanmade landscape must have enforced the viewer’s pride in Amsterdammers’ stewardship over the resources providently bestowed on them by God

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FIGURE 7.15

Jacob van Ruisdael, Interior of the Oude Kerk, c. 1670. Drawing, 482 × 415 mm Paris, École des Beaux-Arts. Public domain

To conclude, in the Panorama of Amsterdam Ruisdael offers us a stunning vista under an impressive, cloud-filled sky, made newly visible to visitors privileged to stand on the platform intended for the Town Hall’s cupola. Most strikingly, the painter does not give any attention to the actual building, but depicts the densely packed dwellings of medieval Amsterdam, over which its oldest and most respected church of the city, the Oude Kerk, stands sentinel in the full light of day. Behind it, the Damrak, the IJ, and the Waterland give evidence of

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the sustained growth of Dutch control over the sea. Hence, in contrast with many poets and other painters, Ruisdael does not put the focus on modern architecture, but instead evokes Amsterdam’s honourable past. More intensely and more unexpectedly than many topographical interpretations of the city, Ruisdael’s painting must have encouraged its viewers to reflect on the significance of what they saw, alerting them to the eternal bond between God and their city. Bibliography Albreacht S. – De Ruyter O. – Spies M., Vondels Inwydinge van ’t stadhuis t’Amsterdam (Muiderberg: 1982). Bakker B., “Een goddelijk schilderij: Vondel over landschap en schilderkunst in zijn Bespiegelingen van 1662”, Neerlandistiek.nl 5 (2005): https://dspace.library.uu.nl/ handle/1874/28482 Accessed June 29th, 2019. Bakker B., “De stad in één blik: het oog van de kunstenaar”, in Bakker B. – Schmitz E. (eds.), Het aanzien van Amsterdam. Panorama’s, plattegronden en profielen uit de Gouden Eeuw (Bussum: Thoth, 2007) 162–176. Bakker B., Landscape and Religion. From Van Eyck to Rembrandt, trans. Diane Webb (London – New York: 2012). Bakker B., “Medusa’s Terror in the Amsterdam Town Hall. How to Look at Sculptures in the Dutch Golden Age”, in Van Eck C. (ed.), Idols to Museum Pieces. The Nature of Sculpture, its Historiography and Exhibition History, 1640–1880 (Berlin: 2017) 85–102. Bussels S., “Meer te verwonderen, als immer te doorgronden. Het Amsterdamse stadhuis, een overweldigende burgerspiegel”, Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 126 (2013) 234–248. Bussels S. – Plezier L. – Vaeck M. van, “Amsterdam sierlijk verbonden met God. Het lofdicht op het Amsterdamse stadhuis van Constantijn Huygens”, Spiegel der Letteren 59 (2017) 261–290. Bussels S. – Van Oostveldt B. – Jansen W. – Knegtel F. – Plezier L., “Sublime”, in Sgarbi M. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy (Dordrecht: 2018): 10.1007/ 978-3-319-02848-4_1136-1. Bussels S., “The Wondrous Town Hall of Amsterdam. Laudatory Poems on the Impact of Art and Architecture”, in Alexander A. – Gilby E. – Marr A. (eds.), The Places of Early Modern Criticism (Oxford: Forthcoming). Darnell L., “A Voice from the Past: Pieter Saenredam’s The Old Town Hall of Amsterdam, Historical Continuity, and the Moral Sublime”, Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 8 (2016) DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2016.8.2.6. Daston L. – Park K., Wonders and the Order of Nature: 1150–1750 (New York: 1998).

LANDSCAPE WITH LANDMARK: VAN RUISDAEL ’ S PANORAMA OF AMSTERDAM 233 De Bont B.J.M., “De O.L.Vrouwe- of Nieuwe Kerk te Amsterdam”, Bijdrage tot de geschiedenis van het Bisdom Haarlem 31 (1908) 191–257. De Klijn M., De invloed van het Calvinisme op de Noord-Nederlandse landschapsschilderkunst, 1570–1630 (Apeldoorn: 1982). Elsner J., “The Rhetoric of Buildings in the De Aedificiis of Procopius”, in James L. (ed.), Art and Text in Byzantium (Cambridge: 2007) 33–57. Friedländer P., Johannes von Gaza, Paulus Silentiarius and Prokopius von Gaza: Kunstbeschreibungen justinianischer Zeit (Hildesheim: 1912). Janse H., De Oude Kerk te Amsterdam. Bouwgeschiedenis en restauratie (Zwolle: 2004). Jansen W., Appropriating Peri hypsous: Interpretations and Creative Adaptations of Longinus‘ Treatise On the Sublime in Early Modern Dutch Scholarship (Ph.D. dissertation, Leiden University, 2019). Junius F., The Painting of the Ancients – De pictura veterum, according to the English translation (1638), eds. K. Aldrich – P. Fehl – R. Fehl (Berkeley: 1991). Kranz G., Das Architekturgedicht (Köln: 1988). Nativel C., “Lecture du ‘Traité du sublime’ par Franciscus Junius F.F.”, Lias. Journal of Early Modern Intellectual Culture and its Sources, Bussels S., Van Oostveldt B. and Jansen W. (eds.), Special Issue: The Sublime in Early Modern Theories of Art and Architecture 43 (2016) 263–279. Prien H.-J., “Sublimis Deus”, in Fahlbusch E. et al. (eds.), Encyclopedia of Christianity (Leiden/Boston: 2017): http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/browse/encyclopedia -of-christianity Accessed June 29th, 2019. Slive S., Jacob van Ruisdael, A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, Drawings and Etchings (New Haven – London: 2001). Smith C., Architecture in the Culture of Early Humanism, Ethics, Aesthetics and Eloquence 1400–1470 (Oxford: 1992). Smith P., Dispositio. Problematic Ordering in French Renaissance Literature (Leiden – Boston: 2007). Spies M., “Minerva’s commentaar. Gedichten rond het Amsterdamse stadhuis”, De zeventiende eeuw 9 (1993) 15–34. Spies M., Rhetoric, Rhetoricians and Poets. Studies in Renaissance Poetry and Poetics (Amsterdam: 1999). Walford E.J., Jacob van Ruisdael and the Perception of Landscape (New Haven – London: 1991). Webb R., “The Aesthetics of Sacred Space: Narrative, Metaphor and Motion in ekphraseis of Church Buildings”, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 53 (1999) 59–74. Weststeijn T., Art and Antiquity in the Netherlands and Britain. The Vernacular Arcadia of Franciscus Junius (1591–1677) (Leiden: 2015). Worp J.A. (ed.), De gedichten van Constantijn Huygens naar zijn handschrift uitgegeven (Groningen: 1895).

Chapter 8

Jacob van Ruisdael’s The Jewish Cemetery, c. 1654–1655: Religious Toleration, Dutch Identity, and Divine Time Shelley Perlove Jacob van Ruisdael’s two versions of the painting known as The Jewish Cemetery, in the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in Dresden, have long been viewed by scholars and collectors alike as one of the most celebrated Dutch landscapes of the seventeenth century [Figs. 8.1– 8.2]. This study of The Jewish Cemetery focuses most closely upon the brighter, larger Detroit version, whose wealth of details are more clearly legible, but also

FIGURE 8.1 Jacob Isaaksz van Ruisdael, The Jewish Cemetery, 1654 or 1655. Oil on canvas, 142.2 × 189.2 cm. Gift of Julius H. Haass in memory of his brother Dr. Ernest W. Haass, 26.1 Detroit Institute of Arts © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004440401_009

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FIGURE 8.2 Jacob van Ruisdael, Jewish Cemetery, 1654/1655. Oil on canvas, 84 × 95 cm Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden

discusses specific elements in the Dresden painting that differ significantly from the Detroit version. Featuring a Jewish cemetery with some decayed, overturned tombstones, a dead, fallen tree, as well as the ruins of Egmont in the distance, Jacob’s landscape has been long viewed as an allegory of the transience of life’s journey. The interpretation of the painting as an allegory of human life, expressed in 1835 by the collector John Smith, has been repeated by such esteemed scholars as Seymour Slive and John Walford.1 Critical commentaries in 1 I am grateful for Walter S. Melion’s astute comments. John Smith in 1835 described both versions of the Jewish Cemetery as: ‘The Jews’ Burial Ground; but are evidently intended as allegories of human life.’ See Smith John, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch, Flemish, and French Painters 6 (London, Messrs. Smith: 1829–1842) 4. Other sources that view the landscape as an allegory are: Seymour S., Jacob van Ruisdael. Master of Landscape (New Haven: 2005) 84; and Walford E.J., Jacob van Ruisdael and the Perception

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the nineteenth century focused chiefly upon the tombs as poetic invocations of mortality; the sepulchral monuments, however, are integral to defining the space as a cemetery – a site of death. The French critic Jean Joseph Taillasson in 1807 noted the landscape’s ‘sweet melancholy’, and described the tombs as ‘silent, resting places, surrounded by trees, and with a spirit of sadness […]’.2 In his famous essay of 1816, Goethe offered a romanticized interpretation of The Jewish Cemetery.3 He characterized the sepulchral monuments as ancient, from a very remote past, and remarked upon the tombs and mourners in the background [Fig. 8.3]: In their ruined state the tombs even point to a past beyond the past; they are tombstones of themselves […]. The decay of the tombs themselves is conveyed with great tact and artistic taste, and the eye dwells willingly on it. But then the spectator is surprised, for in the far distance he senses – rather than sees – newer and more modest monuments around which the mourners are occupied – as if the past can leave us nothing but mortality.4 Despite these nineteenth-century commentaries and their sentimental emphasis on the site of the Jewish cemetery, Slive recognized elements of hope implicit in such details of the landscape as the emergent, foliate growth, brightening sky, and prominent rainbow.5 John Walford observes, on the interpretation of van Ruisdael’s painting: […] it is a misconception to imagine that his [Jacob’s] landscapes reveal a melancholy disposition […]. The reflective tone of his paintings expresses

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of Landscape (New Haven: 1991) 95, 97, 99. For a comprehensive and insightful treatment of allegory and Northern European landscape painting, see Bakker B., Landscape and Religion from Van Eyck to Rembrandt, trans. D. Webb (Burlington, VT: 2012) 41–114. Taillasson Jean Joseph, Observations sur quelques grands peintres (Paris, Duminil – Lesueur: 1807) 49. Goethe saw the Dresden version, displayed in the art museum since 1754, in 1768 and 1790; the Detroit version was held in private hands until it entered the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1926. For the provenance of the Detroit painting, see Keyes G.S. – Kuretsky S.D. – Rüger A. – Wheelock A.K., Jr, Masters of Dutch Painting in the Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit – London: 2004) 199, 201, cat. 82. Goethe Johann Wolfgang von, “Ruysdael als Dichter”, in Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände 3 (3 May 1816), reprinted in Goethes Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe, ed. E. Trunz et al., 7th rev. ed. (Munich: 1973) 141–142. Art historians have tended to ignore the part of the quotation relating to the tombs and mourners in the background. For a good English translation, see Gage J., Goethe on Art (Berkeley – Los Angeles: 1980) 213–215. Slive, Master of Landscape 84.

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FIGURE 8.3 Jacob Isaaksz van Ruisdael, The Jewish Cemetery, detail, 1654 or 1655. Oil on canvas, 142.2 × 189.2 cm. Gift of Julius H. Haass in memory of his brother Dr. Ernest W. Haass, 26.1 Detroit Institute of Arts

not so much his personal feelings and moods as an understanding of the world common to his generation […].6 My analysis eschews a personalized, romanticized reading of the landscape, and instead proceeds from an optimistic understanding of the timely and significant political and religious events that took place between 1568 and about 1654–1655, when The Jewish Cemetery was painted. Also of serious significance are the millenarian concerns prevalent in the 1650s, which impart spiritual and 6 Walford, Perception of Landscape 14.

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temporal meaning to the Jewish cemetery at Ouderkerk, especially in relation to the rainbow invoking the end of days. The present analysis focuses most intensely on the hermeneutics of the major site in the landscape – the Jewish cemetery at Ouderkerk-on-the-Amstel, still in existence today and located about six miles southeast of Amsterdam. The Jewish burial ground named Beth Haim (House of Life) appears in combination with a place of Dutch patriotism at Egmond Binnen, the ruins of the Romanesque abbey and the choir of the nearby early Gothic church, both heavily damaged in the Dutch Revolt.7 A small, half-timbered Westphalian cottage embedded within these ruins evokes another political event of immense historical significance – the Treaty of Münster in Westphalia of 1648 [Fig. 8.3]. The Westphalian building is absent, however, in the Dresden version. All three places, conjoined within a single landscape in the Detroit picture, are geographically distant from one another; Jacob’s painting therefore may be categorized as a hybrid landscape. Beth Haim is located about 34 miles from the Egmond ruins near Alkmaar. Typical of Westphalian frame construction, the house within the Egmond ruins may be associated with the vernacular architecture of an area in Germany about 119 miles from Egmond and 130 miles from Ouderkerk.8 The watermill in Jacob’s Two Watermills and an Open Sluice in the J. Paul Getty Museum, painted around 1653, features half-timbered buildings similar to the cottage in the Detroit landscape [Figs. 8.1, 8.3–8.4]. The artist visited and sketched all three sites in the early 1650s before he painted The Jewish Cemetery. His sketch of the ruins of Egmond Castle was used in the Dresden landscape, but no drawing survives by Jacob of the ruins of the Romanesque abbey and choir of the nearby early Gothic church of Egmont Binnen that appear in the background of the Detroit landscape. Ann Jensen Adams in 1994 noted the tendency to invoke local sites in Dutch hybrid landscapes.9 While Adams acknowledges that art historians have successfully identified the various native sites employed in Dutch painting, she regrets that scholars have failed to investigate their significance and meaning. 7 On the sites at Egmond and their iconography, see Renaud J.G.N., “De Iconografie van het slot te Egmond”, Maanblad voor beeldende Kunsten 17 (1940) 338–345. 8 For discussion of this type of Westphalian vernacular architecture and Jacob’s visit to this area with Nicolaes Berchem, see Kuretsky S.D. (ed.), Time and Transformation in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art, exh. cat., The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College (Poughkeepsie, NY: 2005) 170. For a comprehensive study of the architecture of Westphalia, see Schepers J., Haus und Hof westfälischer Bauern (Münster: 1960; 3rd ed., 1976). 9 Adams A.J., “Competing Communities in the ‘Great Bog of Europe’: Identity and Seventeenth-Century Dutch Landscape Painting”, in Mitchell W.J.T. (ed.), Landscape and Power (Chicago: 1994) 37–41.

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FIGURE 8.4 Jacob van Ruisdael, Two Watermills and an Open Sluice, 1653. Oil on canvas, 66 × 84.5 cm J. Paul Getty Museum

Adams justly argues that the use of regional sites was motivated by such factors as politics, economics, and religion. The art historian Boudewijn Bakker provides important insights on varied approaches to Dutch landscape painting in general. Most relevant to my study is his insightful discussion of the pertinent scholarship by Egbert Haverkamp Begemann, Alan Chong, Simon Schama, and Catherine Levesque.10 These writers, Bakker explains, focus on issues of ‘territory, history, and identity’, and 10 Haverkamp Begemann E. – Chong A., “Dutch Landscape and its Associations”, in Hoetink H.R. (ed.), The Royal Picture Gallery, Mauritshuis (Amsterdam: 1985) 56–67; and Schama S., “Dutch Landscapes: Culture as Foreground”, in Sutton P. (ed.), Masters of 17th-Century Dutch Landscape Painting, exh. cat., Boston Museum of Fine Arts (Amsterdam – Boston – Philadelphia: 1987–1988) 64–83; and Levesque C., “Landscape, Politics, and the Prosperous Peace”, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 48 (1997) 223–257.

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view Dutch landscape as the ‘expression of a new urban sense of patriotism with a strong historical component, the pride taken in the nation’s history’.11 Bakker’s statement is eminently pertinent to part of my investigation of Jacob van Ruisdael’s The Jewish Cemetery, the rest of which explores issues of religious meaning. The historical, political, moral, and religious aspects of the painting are best revealed by exploring the rich associative meanings attached to the diverse sites Jacob conjoined in The Jewish Cemetery. This method is instrumental in decoding the hermeneutics of this landscape. As demonstrated here, the juxtaposition of these disparate sites within the landscape evokes the political and religious history of the Dutch Republic from 1568–1654, all from the perspective of liberal members of the regent caste and/or the merchant patriciate in Holland. The site of the Jewish cemetery, with its emphasis upon death and decay, elicits the millenarian mission to convert Jews and bring about universal redemption. A general survey of the historical context of the painting provides the social and political underpinnings of my study. The picture’s probable date of 1654–1655 coincides with important events in Dutch history. Only six years earlier, in 1648, the United Provinces signed the Peace of Münster in Westphalia, which ended the 80-year conflict with the Spanish Crown and established the international sovereignty of the United Provinces. This was cause for great celebration, but the Dutch Republic experienced major challenges on the domestic front in the 1650s.12 William II of Orange attempted a military coup in Amsterdam in 1650, which was forestalled only by the threat of flooding, the refusal to open the city gates, and intense negotiations. After the sudden death of William II in the same year, the wealthy and powerful province of Holland, along with other provinces, abolished the office of stadholder and instituted what came to be known as the Stadholderless Era that lasted from 1650 to 1672, precipitating serious conflicts over issues of jurisdiction with the House of Orange.13 The job of stadholder fell to the Grand Pensionary, Johan de Witt, who ruled for 20 years and consolidated the social and political power of the elite regent and merchant classes of Holland. The First Anglo-Dutch war finally ended in 1654 with the signing of the Peace of Westminster, achieved after long, arduous negotiations in the Dutch Republic; the regents of Holland finally succeeded in ratifying the Act of 11 Bakker, Landscape and Religion 215. 12 Rowan H.H., John de Witt: Grand Pensionary of Holland (Princeton: 1978) 34–36. 13 For the Stadholderless period, see Rowan H.H., The Princes of Orange: The Stadholders in the Dutch Republic (Cambridge: 1988) 80–110; and Israel J., The Dutch Republic (Oxford: 1995) 703–713.

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Exclusion, which barred any member of the House of Orange from ascending to the stadholdership.14 The Orangists led a surge of opposition between 1652 and 1653, and De Witt responded by writing the Deduction in defense of the act, stating his position on the dangers of an inherited rulership: […] everyone should realize that, according to the judgement of all political writers of sound mind, high positions cannot be assigned, in a republic, to those whose ancestors held these posts, without considerable peril to freedom.15 The Province of Holland and its supporters ultimately prevailed over the Orangists, and the Treaty of Westminster along with the Act of Exclusion was finally signed in 1654, about the same year Jacob painted the Jewish Cemetery. The person who commissioned Jacob’s ambitious painting is unknown; this comes as no surprise since only one patron, the wealthy Amsterdam burgomaster Cornelis de Graeff, is associated with an extant painting by the artist. Jacob painted De Graeff’s villa and its surrounding landscape, collaborating with Thomas de Keyser who portrayed the patron’s family and their impressive carriage, in The Arrival of Cornelis de Graeff and Members of his Family at Soestdijk, his Country Estate of ca. 1660 [Fig. 8.5]. The opulence of the carriage, the richly caparisoned horses, and the dignified demeanor of the De Graeff family testify to the patron’s high social status. Seymour Slive relates this painting to a poem written for de Graeff by Joost van den Vondel in the same year, which praises Soestdijk as a place of respite from the busy political affairs of Cornelis, who was a prominent statesman.16 De Graeff or a member within his circle of wealthy, high-placed merchants and statesmen may have commissioned Ruisdael’s ambitious, expensive painting of the Jewish cemetery. My analysis proceeds from this plausible assumption. In the early 1650s Jacob was keenly interested in gaining entry to the Amsterdam art market. His landscapes began to appear in the collections of wealthy Amsterdam patrons in 1654, even before the artist’s move that year from Haarlem to Amsterdam.17 The fact that two versions of The Jewish Cemetery were painted by Van Ruisdael attests to its successful reception. 14

For discussion of the political conflicts surrounding the Act of Exclusion, especially from April to August 1654, see Rowan, John de Witt 230–239; and Israel, Dutch Republic 713–726. 15 De Witt argued in the Deduction that the Act of Exclusion did not violate the Union of Utrecht of 1579; see Rowan H.H., The Low Countries in Early Modern Times (London: 1972) 196, 250. 16 Seymour S. – Hoetink H.R., Jacob van Ruisdael, exh. cat., Mauritshuis, The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University (The Hague – Cambridge, MA: 1981–1982) 23–24. 17 Ibidem 21.

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FIGURE 8.5 Jacob van Ruisdael and Thomas de Keyser, The Arrival of Cornelis de Graeff and Members of his Family at Soestdijk, his Country Estate, c. 1660. Oil on canvas, 118.4 cm × 170.5 cm Dublin, Courtesy of National Gallery of Ireland

Cornelis de Graeff was one of the wealthiest and most prominent merchants and statesmen in Holland.18 He became a regent in 1650 and served as mayor ten times between 1646 and 1664. His political influence vastly increased when he appointed his nephew Johan de Witt Grand Pensionary in 1653. De Graeff and others of his social class adhered to the political policy known as ‘De Ware Vrijheid’ (True Freedom), which resisted central and foreign authority,

18

On Cornelis de Graeff, see Elias J.E., De Vroedschap van Amsterdam 1578–1795 (Amsterdam: 1963) cviii, 422–433; A.J. van der, “Cornelis de Graeff”, in van der Aa, Biographisch woordenboek der Nederlanden […] 7 (Haarlem: 1862) 348–349. Gary Schwartz views Cornelis de Graeff as the ‘magnificent’ burgomaster who wielded the immense power in Amsterdam after 1650; see Schwartz G., “Rembrandt’s Patrons Among the Clans of Holland”, Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Countries Studies 9.27 (1985) 6, 8, 15.

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and affirmed the legitimate rights of the patriciate of Holland to exert local jurisdiction.19 Like other members of the liberal regent class in Holland, Cornelis was tolerant in religious matters, and closely adhered to the decrees on freedom of conscience set forth during the conflict with Spain by the Union of Utrecht of 1579. He also supported the separation of church and state.20 During the Dutch Revolt the regents of Holland and Zeeland opposed the old, public church, confiscated its property, and deported its clergy.21 The liberal-minded regents and merchants favored a mild, non-dogmatic Protestantism in contrast to Orthodox Calvinists who advocated strict government control of Catholics, Jews, Lutherans, Anabaptists, Remonstrants (Arminians), and other religious groups.22 In 1657, about two years after painting The Jewish Cemetery, Jacob converted from Mennonism to Calvinism, perhaps to gain favor and secure commissions. The writings of the statesman Hugo Grotius were close to the ideas espoused by De Graeff, who visited the famous author in exile in Paris around 1640. Grotius was a leading thinker who sympathized with the position of the regent class. In Verantwoordingh van de wettelijcke regieringh van Holland [Response to the Legitimate Governing of Holland] of 1622, Grotius explained that the Orthodox ministers favored Calvin, while the regents adhered to the tolerant ideals of Erasmus.23 Some of the regents of Amsterdam, like Grotius, were Remonstrants (also known as Arminians), Calvinists who opposed the strict interpretation of the doctrine of predestination and the imposed confessionalism and church discipline of the Orthodox Calvinist Church.24 19 20 21 22 23 24

On ‘True Freedom’, see Deursen A. van, “The Dutch Republic, 1588–1780”, in Blom J.C.H. – Lamberts E. (eds.), History of the Low Countries, trans. J.C. Kennedy (New York – Oxford: 2006) 181–193. See idem, “Church and City Government in Amsterdam” in Kessel P. van – Schulte E. (eds.), Rome – Amsterdam: Two Growing Cities in Seventeenth-Century Europe (Amsterdam: 1997) 175–179. Israel, Dutch Republic 369. On Calvinism and church discipline see Deursen A. van, Plain Lives in a Golden Age: Popular Culture, Religion, and Society in Seventeenth-Century Europe, trans. M. Ultee (Cambridge: 1981) 260–271. Grotius Hugo, Verantwoordingh van de wettelijcke regieringh van Holland (Paris, n.p.: 1622) 29–30. On the religious disputes in Holland between the Orthodox Calvinists and the Remonstrants, see Perlove S. – Silver L., Rembrandt’s Faith. Church and Temple in the Dutch Golden Age (University Park, PA: 2009) 23–35; Bangs C., Arminius. A Study in the Dutch Reformation (Nashville: 1971) 338–343; and Israel, Dutch Republic 460–461.

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Cornelis and others of his class were committed to the goal of religious peace. Their abiding interests in irenicism were fueled by a millenarian movement that flourished in the Dutch Republic and England, especially in the mid-1650s, when the interactions between the two nations were most intense, especially after the conclusion of the Anglo-Dutch war in 1654.25 Attesting to the strength of millenarianism in England, Grotius reported that as many as eighty books expounding the end of days and the millennium had been published in 1649.26 The Christian millenarians believed that the Second Coming of Christ was imminent. With some variations, the following sequence of events was anticipated: first, the defeat of the fourth monarch (Islam and/or Rome); second, the destruction of the Anti-Christ (Rome, or ‘idolaters’ such as the contemporary Habsburgs); and third, the gathering, repentance, and conversion of the Jews and their return, led by Christ, to Jerusalem, when one thousand years of peace (the millennium) would commence around 1655 or 1656.27 Viewed as a necessary precondition for the Second Coming, Jewish conversion was the most pressing theological problem for Christian millenarians. The millenarians in Amsterdam were encouraged by the presence of Jewish messianists in their midst, some of whom – Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, for example – envisioned the following sequence of events: the destruction of the fourth beast of Daniel 7:7 (that is, the Spanish Inquisition); the assembly of the dispersed twelve tribes of Israel, together with the converted Gentiles, in the Holy Land; and finally, the arrival of the Messiah, King in Israel, to rule the world in peace and harmony for the millennium.28 This progression of events was similar to that espoused by Christian millenarians, who awaited the second rather than the first appearance of the Messiah. The Sephardi messianists believed their return to Judaism after three generations was miraculous; the Portuguese-Jewish theologian Abraham Pereyra called for all Jews to

25 On Christian millenarianism in Amsterdam, see Perlove S., “An Irenic Vision of Utopia: Rembrandt’s Triumph of Mordecai and the New Jerusalem”, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 56 (1993) 38–60; and Perlove – Silver, Rembrandt’s Faith 39–45. 26 On English millenarianism, see Toon P. (ed.), Puritans, the Millennium, and the Future of Israel: Puritan Eschatology (Cambridge: 1970); and Perlove, “An Irenic Vision of Utopia” 54. 27 Wall E. van der, “The Amsterdam Millenarian Petrus Serrarius (1600–1669) and the Anglo-Dutch Circle of Philo-Judaists”, in Berg J. van den – Wall E. van der (eds.), Jewish-Christian Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Dordrecht: 1988) 73–94; and Heide A. van der, “De Studie van het Jodendom in Nederland: Verleden, Heden, Toekomst”, Studia Rosenthaliana 17 (1983) 41–57. 28 Perlove, “An Irenic Vision” 53; Popkin R.H., “Jewish Messianism and Christian Millenarianism”, in Zagorin P. (ed.), Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment (Berkeley – Los Angeles: 1980) 67–69.

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repent in anticipation of the coming of the Messiah.29 Other messianists in Amsterdam included Rabbi Isaac Aboab de Fonseca, Simone Luzzato, Daniel Levi de Barrios, and Isaac Orobio de Castro, but the most famous of all was Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel.30 Menasseh was the focus of attention for such Christian Hebraists as John Dury and the Mennonites Gerbrand Anslo and Ameldonc Leeuw, who supported the rabbi’s printing press, studied Hebrew with him, and hoped to convert Menasseh to Christianity in anticipation of the millennium. The messianic movement gained considerable impetus in 1644 when a Sephardi explorer, Antonio Montezinos, claimed he had found two lost tribes of Israel in Ecuador.31 Menasseh was convinced that with the two tribes in America, all that remained to fulfill prophecies of Jewish dispersal before the Messiah’s Coming was the return of the Jews to England, from which they had been expelled in 1290.32 He cited Moses’s prophecy in Deuteronomy 28:64: ‘And the Lord shall scatter thee among all people, from one end of the earth even unto the other’. The discovery in Ecuador led Menasseh to publish a messianic tract in 1650, Esperança de Israel (Hope of Israel), which quotes prophecies of Jewish dispersion as a pre-condition for the coming of the Messiah foretold in Daniel 12:7 and Jeremiah 12:10.33 In 1655, the rabbi went on a mission to England, financed by Christian millenarians, to convince Oliver Cromwell to readmit the Jews to England and thereby hasten the advent of the millennium. The rabbi in his messianic publication of 1650, Piedra Gloriosa (with etchings by Rembrandt of apocalyptic events from the Book of Daniel), reminded Christians that in the end times salvation would come to the righteous Gentiles who had been kind to the Jews.34 In their efforts at Jewish conversion, the Christian millenarians in England and the Dutch Republic advocated tolerance and kindness towards the Jews, unlike the Spanish Habsburgs who imposed forced conversion and 29 Kaplan Y., From Christianity to Judaism: The Story of Isaac Orobio de Castro (Oxford: 1989) 375. 30 Ibidem 289, 342–343, 357–377; and Perlove, “An Irenic Vision of Utopia” 52. 31 Ben Israel M., The Hope of Israel: The English Translation by Moses Wall, 1652, ed. H. Méchoulan – G. Nahon, trans. G. Richenda (Oxford: 1987) 105–111. 32 Katz D., Philosemitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603–1655 (Oxford: 1982) 159–182, esp. note 76. 33 Ben Israel, The Hope of Israel, sects. 14, 35, notes 34, 125, 158, sects. 14, 35; Perlove, “Irenic Vision of Utopia” 53, note 81; and Zell M., Reframing Rembrandt: Jews and the Christian Image in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (Berkeley: 2002) 72–91. 34 Perlove, “Irenic Vision of Utopia” 59, note 131; and Perlove – Silver, Rembrandt’s Faith 134– 137. On Rembrandt’s etchings for the publication, see Zell, Reframing Rembrandt 72–91.

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the Inquisition in their efforts to convert Jews.35 A major obstacle to Jewish conversion in England and Holland, however, was the chaotic state of the Protestant church, beset by endless controversy and dissension. The irenics believed that Jewish conversion could only be achieved through the creation of a single, universal Christian church based on Scripture rather than dogma. Cornelis de Graeff was an irenic millenarian who financially supported the Bohemian pansophist/millenarian Jan Amos Comenius, in exile in Amsterdam. Comenius strove to formulate a system of universal knowledge, a non-dogmatic religion, and an international language, in the interests of religious peace and millenarianism. De Graeff hired Comenius to tutor his own sons. The Dutch industrialists Louis de Geer and his son Lawrence, as well as members of the Tulp and Trip families, financed the writings of the Bohemian exile and other millenarians.36 The political and religious events described above provided the context for Jacob’s landscape. It remains to examine the internal evidence of the painting itself: the plausibility of my interpretation will rely on the conjunction between the picture’s internal features and external circumstances. Van Ruisdael’s hybrid landscape is monumental in scale and visual impact, and its unexpected combination of disparate sites is fundamental to my discussion [Fig. 8.1]. Among these three sites, the most prominent is the Portuguese Jewish cemetery at Ouderkerk, a key site in the early history of the Sephardic refugees who came to Amsterdam from Spain and Portugal to escape the Inquisition.37 The members of this community were buried in this cemetery since its founding in 1614, the same year in which the Jews were officially granted religious freedom in Holland. This decree was both generous and exceptional in the early modern history of European Jewry. Many of the Portuguese Jews were conversos who had been forced to live as Catholics in Iberia for generations and who reverted to Judaism in Amsterdam. The Jewish cemetery was emblematic of the freedom granted Jews in Amsterdam where they were not restricted to the confines of a demarcated ghetto. 35 Perlove, “Irenic Vision of Utopia” 56–58. 36 Comenius and another millenarian, John Dury, were invited to Sweden in 1636 by Louis de Geer, who hoped to get this nation’s support for Dury’s writings. On 31 July 1656, Dury claimed that Lawrence de Geer had offered to print Dury’s manuscripts and have them translated into Dutch. See Turnball G., Hartlib, Dury, and Comenius (Liverpool: 1947) 67; and Perlove and Silver, Rembrandt’s Faith 58. On other millenarians active in Holland see Perlove, “Irenic Vision of Utopia” 56, 57, notes 105–109. 37 On the early history of the Iberian Jews in Holland, see Swetschinski D.M., “From the Middle Ages to the Golden Age, 1516–1621”, in Blom J.C.H. – Fuks-Mansfeld R.G. – Schöffer I. (eds.), The History of the Jews in the Netherlands, trans. A.J. Pomerans – E. Pomerans. (Oxford – Portland, OR: 2002) 44–81.

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Prevailing Dutch attitudes towards the Jews in the early decades of the seventeenth century were encouraging, but not entirely tolerant. Grotius, in his famous Remonstrance Concerning the Regulations to be Imposed upon the Jews in Holland and West Friesland of 1616, regretted that the Jews had ever been admitted in the first place, even though they brought private gain and trade to the Dutch economy.38 Nonetheless, out of ‘Christian charity’ and ‘forgiveness’ of their crimes, he recommended that they be allowed to stay and worship, just as long as they registered as Jews with the authorities; did not blaspheme Christianity; swore allegiance to the Dutch Republic; and promised to abide by the Law of Moses. Grotius also advocated traditional medieval restrictions on Jewish social interactions with Christians, such as intercourse or intermarriage, as a precaution against the threat of Christians converting to Judaism. He also cited certain benefits to letting Jews stay in Holland: Jewish scholars could teach Hebrew to Christians, facilitating efforts to convert Jews to Christianity. In 1619 the Estates General insisted that the general principle of religious conscience granted by the Union of Utrecht in 1579 be applied to Jews as well as Catholics.39 These statesmen commanded that no town in the northern provinces could compel Jews to wear identifying marks on their clothing, as was the custom elsewhere in Europe. Amsterdam was a place of religious, social, and economic freedom for the Jews, especially in comparison with their situation in other European cities.40 The Jewish cemetery attracted much attention from foreign tourists. Johan Jakob Schudt, a German visitor, remarked that ‘only in Holland could he not distinguish Jews from Christians by differences in dress’.41 The Englishman John Evelyn praised the Jewish cemetery at Ouderkerk during his visit there in 1641, where he saw: 38

On Amsterdam’s toleration of the Jews, see Nadler S., Rembrandt’s Jews (Chicago: 2003) 19–21; Swetschinski D.M., Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of SeventeenthCentury Amsterdam (London: 2000) 8–53; and Meier J., “Hugo Grotius’s ‘Remonstrantie’”, Jewish Social Studies 17 (1955) 91–104. 39 Cooperman B.D., “Amsterdam from an International Perspective: Tolerance and Kehillah in the Portuguese Diaspora”, in Kaplan Y. (ed.), The Dutch Intersection: The Jews and the Netherlands in Modern History (Leiden – Boston: 2008) 5, citing Register der Resolutien van de Heeren Ridderschakp, Edelen ende Gedeputeerden van de Steden van Hollandt ende West-Vrieslandt […], 1619, 283, 287. 40 Compare restrictions on the Jews in such other cities as Ferrara, on which see Perlove S., “Guercino’s Esther Before Ahasuerus and Cardinal Lorenzo Magalotti, Bishop of Ferrara”, Artibus et Historiae 19 (1989) 133–147; and eadem, “Power and Religious Authority in Papal Ferrara: Cardinal Serra and Guercino”, Kunsthistorisk Tidskrift 67 (1999) 19–30. 41 Schudt J.J., Jüdische Merckwürdigkeiten (1714) (Berlin: 1922), bk. 4, ch. 18, 1:272, cited in Zell, Reframing Rembrandt 19–20.

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a spacious field assigned them for their dead, which was full of Sepulchers, and Hebrew inscriptions, some of them very stately, of cost. In one of these Monuments, looking through a narrow crevice, where the stones were disjointed. I perceived divers books to lye, about a corps (for it seems they use) when any learned Rabby dies, to bury some of his books with him […].42 Evelyn was impressed by the books inserted within the stones of the burials of learned rabbis. His statement, which has not been quoted in full or discussed in relation to Van Ruisdael’s Jewish Cemetery, speaks to the prevailing respect for Jewish learning, which could then be marshaled to convert Jews. The burial site would have been a source of pride to such Hollanders as Cornelis de Graeff who supported a policy of religious toleration and kindness towards the Jews, inspired by the millenarian mission to convert them and bring about universal salvation. Jacob van Ruisdael executed two drawings of the Jewish cemetery at Ouderkerk around 1654 [Figs. 8.6 & 8.7]. One records the steeple and apse of the Romanesque church of St. Urban, still located near the cemetery [Fig. 8.6]. The other, drawn from the east, is closer in composition to the painting [Fig. 8.7]. More importantly, Van Ruisdael omitted the church located near the site and transformed the flat, simple topography into a lush, hilly terrain. These alterations imparted greater prominence to the ruins of Egmond in the distance. The cemetery as a site invokes the ravages of time, death, and decay, with its dead trees, one of which frames the view of the cemetery on the right; and the other, a single, broken limb, lies broken, arching over the stream. Overturned tomb slabs lie scattered on the ground. Some of the large, noble sepulchral monuments mark the graves of early, prominent rabbis and wealthy merchants of the Jewish-Portuguese community [Fig. 8.1].43 The intense light shines brightly on the white tomb near the center, with its pseudo-Hebraic inscriptions that identify the site as Jewish. The cracked, white slab marks the burial of the famous Sephardi physician Eliahu Montalto, who fled Portugal, reverted to Judaism in Italy, and served as court doctor to the Medici Granduke of Tuscany, and later to Marie de’ Medici in France. In accordance with his own wishes, Montalto’s body was transported for burial to Beth Haim.

42 Evelyn J., The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E.S. de Beer (Oxford: 1955) 41–42. 43 On the specific monuments, see Castro D.H. de, Keur van grafssteenen op de Ned. Portug.-Israël. Begraafplaats te Ouderkerk aan den Amstel (Leiden: 1883).

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FIGURE 8.6 Jacob van Ruisdael, The Portuguese-Jewish Cemetery at Ouderkerk on the Amstel, c. 1654. Black chalk and pen with gray wash, 19.2 × 28.3 cm Haarlem, Teylers Museum

Such scholars as Ernst Scheyer and Shana Stuart view van Ruisdael’s painting as entirely Jewish in its viewpoint and patronage.44 Scheyer maintains that the specificity of Montalto’s tomb slab satisfied the demands of a patron who was a descendant of the famous physician. Stuart postulates an unknown Jewish patron for the painting, whom she said awaited the coming of the Messiah, after the conversion of the Christians. Van Ruisdael’s landscape, however, is not Jewish in patronage, since the Sephardi of Amsterdam would not have appreciated the pseudo-Hebraic inscription on Montalto’s tomb slab, nor the decayed state of preservation of some of the monuments. The German art historian Wilfried Wiegand, in his dissertation of 1971, claimed that the impressive, demolished tombs in the painting give testimony 44 Scheyer E., “The Iconography of Jacob van Ruisdael’s Cemetery”, Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 55 (1977) 133–146; and Shana S., The Portuguese Jewish Community in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam: Images of Commemoration and Documentation (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Kansas: 1992) 309–310. Also see Zell, Reframing Rembrandt 206, note 7.

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FIGURE 8.7 Jacob van Ruisdael, The Portuguese-Jewish Cemetery at Ouderkerk on the Amstel, c. 1654. Black chalk and pen with gray wash, 19 × 28.3 cm Haarlem, Teylers Museum

to the outward ceremonial display of Judaism, as opposed to the humble spirituality of Christianity.45 He also cited Matthew 23: 27: Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness. This biblical passage was also quoted in Frans van Hoogstraten’s emblem book of 1668, Het voorhof der ziele, behangen met leerzaeme prenten en zinnebeelden (The Courtyard of the Soul, Hung with Instructive Prints and Emblems).46 This anti-Jewish interpretation, however, is not in keeping with the bright light 45 Wiegand W., Ruisdael Studien: Ein Versuch zur Ikonologie der Landschaftsmalerei (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Hamburg: 1971) 73–84, as discussed in Slive, Master of Landscape 74; and Zell, Reframing Rembrandt 34–37. 46 Hoogstraten Frans van, Het voorhof der ziele, behangen met leerzaeme prenten en zinnebeelden (Rotterdam, F. van Hoogstraten: 1668) 81–84.

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shining on Montalto’s tomb. John Walford also questions this negative reading and interprets the light as an allusion to 1 Corinthians 15:54–55: ‘Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting?’.47 Even more in keeping with a positive interpretation of the gravestones is Revelation 2:17, with its message of repentance, conversion, and promise of redemption at the end of days. The site of the Jewish cemetery, traditionally associated with death, emphasizes the victory over death that results from repentance and conciliation in the End of Days. He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches: To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it. These verses work well with the pseudo-Hebraic, unreadable inscription on Montalto’s white stone slab in the painting. Montalto’s white tomb slab and the cemetery itself may constitute an allusion to the millenarian agenda for Jewish conversion, which defies death itself. The cemetery’s proximity in the landscape to the Egmond ruins of the two churches infers that the conversion of the Jews coincides with the annihilation of death and the fall of earthly churches in the end time. The burial site itself is dark and filled with dense vegetation. The viewer cannot negotiate a path to the far reaches of the burial site, where a family of three, dressed in black, gathers in quiet reverence before three, prismatic tombstones [Fig. 8.3]. The husband, his son close beside him, points toward his wife, who holds a prayer book. In the Dresden landscape two figures in black stand in the background before these same tombs [Figs. 8.2 & 8.3]. Such figures may be identified as Jews visiting the cemetery and praying there. Their dignified comportment brings to mind the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam, who wished to be seen as constituents of a gens politica, ‘well-bred and courteous people, whose behavior exuded cultivation and good taste’.48 Documents from the Sephardic community record that officials of the synagogues urged their members to comport themselves with dignity, conduct business with fairness, and dress modestly to earn the respect of the city burghers.49 The 47 Walford, Perception of Landscape 101. 48 Kaplan Y., “Gente Politica: The Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam Vis-à-vis Dutch Society”, in Brasz C. – Kaplan Y. (eds.), Dutch Jews as Perceived by Themselves and By Others (Leiden – Boston – Cologne: 2001) 28. 49 Sutcliffe A., “The Boundaries of Community: Urban Space and Intercultural Interaction in Early Modern, Sephardi Amsterdam, and London”, in Kaplan Y. (ed.), The Dutch

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Jews in the painting appropriately display a simple, sober dignity for which the Sephardi were praised by the elites of Amsterdam and other nations. As stated by historian Adam Sutcliffe: ‘The Sephardim reflected back to the patricians of Amsterdam the values with which they most wanted their city to be associated: affluence, stability, and cosmopolitan tolerance’.50 City merchants admired Sephardi success in trade which contributed to their own wealth.51 Viewed in this light, the Jewish cemetery and its worshippers reflect the situation of the Jews of Amsterdam, whose humble piety seemingly anticipates their imminent repentance and conversion to Christianity. Elements within the landscape implicitly allude to the millenarian agenda to convert Jews and thereby hasten the parousia. The Jewish visitors within the dark reaches of the cemetery may be understood to be ‘imprisoned in the darkness of Babylon’ [Fig. 8.3].’ This metaphor was often employed by chiliastic Protestants who sought to convert Jews, as in John Dury’s tract of 1646, Israel’s Call to March Out of Babylon unto Jerusalem, which he distributed to the Jews of Amsterdam.52 The ‘march from Babylon’ would signal the return of the Jews from the diaspora/enslavement of Babylon to Jerusalem, before the arrival of the Messiah. Such other details in the painting as the intense light and rainbow invoke the Christian desire for Jewish conversion, in the interests of universal salvation at the end of days [Fig. 8.1]. The light bursting through the dark clouds brightly illuminates the dead tree and the white stone tomb of Montalto, as if bringing life to the dead. Protestant millenarians in contact with Rabbi Menasseh knew that the promise of resurrection was implicit within Judaism. The burial ground is named Het Beth Haim (House of Life) and inscribed on the cemetery gate is a passage from Ezekiel (37:12): Thus saith the Lord God. Behold I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, O my people: and I will bring you into the land of Israel. Many millenarians believed that the conversion of the Jews would be sudden and miraculous. In a letter written to the preacher Andre Colvius by the millenarian Dutch merchant Isaac Coymans, the merchant wrote: Intersection. The Jews and the Netherlands in Modern History (Leiden – Boston – Cologne: 2008) 20–31. 50 Ibidem, 21. 51 Israel J., “The Republic of the United Netherlands Until About 1750: Demography and Economic Activity”, in Blom J.C.H. – Fuks-Mansfeld R.G. – Schöffer I. (eds.). The History of the Jews in the Netherlands (Oxford – Portland: 2002) 85–115. 52 Dury John, Israel’s call to march out of Babylon unto Jerusalem (London, G.M. for T. Underhill: 1646).

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The conversion of these people [the Jews] to Christianity (of which we have some prophecies) will be truly miraculous, almost as much as the resurrection from the dead.53 As Bakker, Walford, and others have shown, such writers as John Calvin and Constantijn Huygens urged their readers to contemplate nature as God’s second book of revelation, as a means to understand God’s providential plan.54 The brightly lit rainbow in Ruisdael’s landscape is the epitome of a natural sign rife with divine intention. Walford and others understood it as an allusion to the bow that appeared in the sky after the flood, as told in Genesis 9:13–15: When God said to Noah, ‘I set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh’. The rainbow in the Jewish Cemetery also derives from Matthew 24:37: ‘As were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man’. This passage refers to the Second Coming. Many millenarians dated the time of Noah’s flood to 1,656 years after the Creation, adding for symmetry another 1,656 years after the birth of Christ, which would position the advent of the millennium in the year 1656. The conversion of the Jews then would herald the end of the world and the coming of the Messiah.55 The painting, dated around 1654/1655, can be seen closely to anticipate these cosmic events. Menasseh ben Israel believed that such political events as the Union of Utrecht, and especially the Treaty of Westphalia, were prefatory to the advent of the messianic age, because these decrees proclaimed freedom of conscience and above all marked the end of Spanish tyranny and the dreaded Inquisition. These events were envisioned as the dawn of redemption by the messianic Jews of Amsterdam.56 The other two sites in the landscape are rich in references to significant moments in Dutch history, from the revolt against the Spanish Crown, beginning around 1568, to the Treaty of Münster in Westphalia of 1648, which ended the 53 Méchoulan H., “Menasseh ben Israel au centre des rapports Judéo-Chrétiens en Hollande au XVIIe siècle dans une letter inédite d’Isaac Coymans à Andre Colvius”, Studia Rosentaliana 16 (1982) 21–24. 54 Bakker, Landscape and Religion 156–163; and Walford, Perception of Landscape 19–28. 55 Hill C., “Till the Conversion of the Jews”, in Popkin R.H., (ed.), Millenarianism and Messianism in English Literature and Thought, 1650–1800 (Leiden: 1988) 12–36. 56 See Baron S.W., A Social and Religious History of the Jews 9 (New York: 1937) v, vi.

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war with Spain. These seminal historical events, benchmarks in the formation of Dutch identity, were heralded by Jewish and Christian millenarians as crucial to the establishment of peace, freedom, and religious tolerance, conditions key to ushering in the end times. In the distance looms the impressive ruins of Egmond Binnen, the seat of the illustrious Counts of Lamoral since the middle ages. Lamoral of Egmond rose to the countship in 1541 and served as general and statesman in the Spanish Netherlands, just before the outbreak of the Eighty Years War. He, along with William I of Orange and the Count of Hoorn, tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Spanish government in the Netherlands to abolish the despised Inquisition.57 In 1568 the Duke of Alba ordered the public execution of Counts Egmond and Hoorne in the Grand Place in Brussels.58 Along with the assassination of William of Orange sixteen years later, their deaths were invoked to explain and justify the Dutch Revolt. Between 1573 and 1574, during the siege of nearby Alkmaar, Egmond became a center of intense conflict when Spanish soldiers occupied the castle and abbey. In order to prevent the enemy from retaking these key sites, William I of Orange ordered their destruction in 1575. The ruins thereafter became pregnant symbols of the Dutch Revolt. In the background of the Detroit landscape, the ruins of the Romanesque abbey and the choir of the early Gothic church of Egmond Binnen underscore the necessary sacrifice of the church when faced by the exigencies of the state. For Cornelis de Graeff and others of his social class in Amsterdam the separation of church and state, with the primacy of the needs of the state over the church, was an essential part of their beliefs. The Dresden version, which features the ruins of Edmond castle in the background, recalls the noble family and Egmond’s patriotic sacrifice of their own estate. The liberal regent-merchants of Amsterdam would have admired the patricians Lamoral, Hoorne, and William I of Orange for opposing the Inquisition and sacrificing their own lives for the sake of Dutch independence. While the regents of Holland opposed William II and III of Orange in the 1650s, in the interests of preserving local rights and jurisdictions, William I of Orange continued to be revered as the leader of the Revolt and champion of freedom of religious conscience, particularly as stated in the Union of Utrecht of 1579, article 13:

57 Israel, Dutch Republic 107, 144–146. 58 On the Count of Egmont Lamoral in Dutch historiography, see Rittersma Rengenier C., Mytho-Poetics at Work: A Study of the Figure of Egmont, the Dutch Revolt and Its Influence in Europe (Leiden – Boston: 2018).

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That every individual may be free in the exercise of his religion, and that no man may be molested or questioned because of his religion, in accordance with the aforesaid pacification agreed in Ghent.59 Freedom of conscience thereafter became a fundamental moral right in the Dutch Republic, foundational to the ideals of Dutch governance. Hugo Grotius, in his De Oudheid van de Bataafse nu Hollandse Republiek (The Antiquity of the Batavian Republic) of 1610, provided a mythical rationale for the Dutch revolt that must have resonated with the wealthy regentmerchants of Amsterdam.60 He demonstrated from Roman and medieval sources, mainly Tacitus, that contemporary Hollanders were descendants of the ancient Batavians.61 As Grotius explains in the dedication of this tract, such connections with the past are important, since ‘antiquity bestows a great degree of dignity [to a nation]’.62 The state receives strength as it ages, growing ever stronger. Grotius addresses the States General and refers to the world abroad to instruct on the Dutch form of government. The Batavians, progenitors of the Dutch people, he maintains, were always free, and never succumbed to a foreign power nor submitted to a prince; they were always self-governing. Grotius argues that the specific geography and climate of the Low Countries enabled the Dutch/ Batavians to assume a ‘republican constitution’.63 The only exception to their continued enjoyment of freedom occurred under the autocratic rule of King Philip II with its despised Inquisition. The monarch instituted religion ‘of the type that was used in Spain against Jews and Muslims, hiding under the cover of Christianity’.64 The need to regain Dutch freedom as it had formerly been practiced, ultimately led to the overthrow of the Spanish Crown. This was Grotius’s justification for the revolt.

59 Swetschinski, “Middle Ages to the Golden Age” 63. 60 Grotius H., The Antiquity of the Batavian Republic (with Notes by Petrus Scriverius), trans. – ed., J. Waszink Jan (Assen: 2000). The first identification of the ‘insula Batavorum’ with Holland, also using the term vaderland, derives from Erasmus of Rotterdam; see Erasmus, Ausgewählte Schriften, Lateinisch und Deutsch 7, ed. W. Welzig (Darmstadt: 1967) 614, cited in Sas N.C.F. van, Vaderland: Een geschiedenis van de vijftiende eeuw tot 1940 (Amsterdam: 1999) 29. 61 Rittersma, Mytho-Poetics at Work 176–177. Thijs Weststeijn discusses the Batavian myth in relation to Franciscus Junius’s The Painting of the Ancients of 1641l see Weststeijn, “Rembrandt and the Germanic Style”, in Dickey S. (ed.), Rembrandt and his Circle (Amsterdam: 2017) 44–66. 62 Grotius, Antiquity of the Batavian Republic 51. 63 Ibidem 51. 64 Ibidem 101, sect. 4.

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It remains to discuss the cottage situated within the Egmond ruins in The Jewish Cemetery. The inclusion of this structure resembling buildings of this kind in Westphalia is most curious since a cottage like this does not appear in any of the numerous prints of the famous Egmond ruins, nor is it included in the Dresden version of the painting. [Figs. 8.1–8.3]. While only a small detail in Jacob’s Detroit Jewish Cemetery, the half-timbered house evokes a momentous event of Dutch history that took place in Westphalia – the signing of the famous Treaty of Münster in 1648, ending the Eighty Years War. The treaty established Dutch sovereignty and allowed Spain to retain the southern Netherlands.65 In the spirit of religious toleration, the freedom of conscience granted under the Union of Utrecht was nominally extended to Catholics throughout the Netherlands. Spain was not permitted to oppose the public practice of Calvinism in the Southern Netherlands. Yet again, and most importantly, religious toleration was upheld as fundamental to the political and social ethos of the Dutch Republic. Jacob van Ruisdael’s Jewish Cemetery thus conveys a message of Dutch identity, rooting it in the mission of restoring ‘True Freedom’, bound up with the notion of religious toleration, if not liberty; and as Grotius asserts, shaped by the unique Batavian experience of climate and landscape. The writings of Grotius impart philosophical clarity to the political, social, and religious ideas of the circle from which came the unknown patron(s) of the two paintings. A wealth of ideas based upon a particular view of Dutch history are elicited through the sites conjoined within this hybrid landscape. By moving from one site to another different aspects of time are conveyed – historical time, with its sense of past and present, and also divine time of the Parousia. The emphasis in the landscape upon a Jewish burial ground in close proximity to Christian churches, all of them decayed, as if already at the threshold of the end times, puts forward an idea of religious toleration tinged with contemporary millenarian expectations of Jewish conversion. The divine promise distilled in the covenantal symbol of the rainbow overtops the landscape imagery of the world’s prophesied decay at the threshold of its renewal. In sum, the landscape may be characterized as historical, political, and eschatological in equal measure.

65 See Groenveld S., “The Treaty of Münster as the Culmination of a Progressive Revolution”, in Bussmann K. – Schilling H. (eds.), 1648: War and Peace in Europe, (Münster – Osnabrück: 1998) 123–131.

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Bibliography Aa J. van der, “Cornelis de Graeff”, in Biographisch woordenboek der Nederlanden […] 7 (Haarlem: 1862). Adams A.J., “Competing Communities in the ‘Great Bog of Europe’: Identity and Seventeenth-Century Dutch Landscape Painting”, in Mitchell W.J.T. (ed.), Landscape and Power (Chicago: 1994) 35–76. Bakker B., Landscape and Religion from Van Eyck to Rembrandt, trans. D. Webb (Burlington, VT: 2012). Bangs C., Arminius. A Study in the Dutch Reformation (Nashville: 1971). Baron S.W., A Social and Religious History of the Jews 9 (New York: 1937) v, vi. Ben Israel M., The Hope of Israel: The English Translation by Moses Wall, 1652, ed. H. Méchoulan – G. Nahon, trans. G. Richenda (Oxford: 1987). Castro D.H. de, Keur van grafssteenen op de Ned.Portug.-Israël. Begraafplaats te Ouderkerk aan den Amstel (Leiden: 1883). Cooperman B.D., “Amsterdam from an International Perspective: Tolerance and Kehillah in the Portuguese Diaspora”, in Kaplan Y. (ed.), The Dutch Intersection: The Jews and the Netherlands in Modern History (Leiden – Boston: 2008) 1–18. Deursen A. van, Plain Lives in a Golden Age: Popular Culture, Religion, and Society in Seventeenth-Century Europe, trans. M. Ultee (Cambridge: 1981). Deursen A. van, “Church and City Government in Amsterdam,” in Kessel P. van – Schulte E. (eds.), Rome Amsterdam. Two Growing Cities in Seventeenth-Century Europe (Amsterdam: 1997) 175–179. Deursen A. van, “The Dutch Republic, 1588–1780”, in Blom J.C.H. – Lamberts E. (eds.), trans. James C. Kennedy, History of the Low Countries (New York – Oxford: 2006) 181–193. Dury John, Israel’s call to march out of Babylon unto Jerusalem (London, G.M. for T. Underhill: 1646). Elias J.E., De Vroedschap van Amsterdam 1578–1795 (Amsterdam: 1963). Evelyn J., The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E.S. de Beer (Oxford: 1955) 41–42. Gage J., Goethe on Art (Berkeley – Los Angeles: 1980). Goethe Johann Wolfgang von, “Ruysdael als Dichter”, in Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände 3 (3 May 1816), reprinted in Goethes Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe, ed. E. Trunz et al., 7th rev. ed. (Munich: 1973). Groenveld S., “The Treaty of Münster as the Culmination of a Progressive Revolution”, in Bussmann K. – Schilling H. (eds.), 1648: War and Peace in Europe, (Münster – Osnabrück: 1998) 123–131. Grotius H., Verantwoordingh van de wettelijcke regieringh van Holland (Amsterdam: 1622).

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Grotius H., The Antiquity of the Batavian Republic (with Notes by Petrus Scriverius), trans. – ed., J. Waszink Jan (Assen: 2000). Haverkamp Begemann E. – Chong A., “Dutch Landscape and its Associations”, in Hoetink H.R. (ed.), The Royal Picture Gallery, Mauritshuis (Amsterdam: 1985) 56–67. Hill C., “Till the Conversion of the Jews”, in Popkin R.H., (ed.), Millenarianism and Messianism in English Literature and Thought, 1650–1800 (Leiden: 1988) 12–36. Israel J., The Dutch Republic (Oxford: 1995). Israel J., “The Republic of the United Netherlands Until About 1750: Demography and Economic Activity”, in Blom J.C.H. – Fuks-Mansfeld R.G. – Schöffer I. (eds.). The History of the Jews in the Netherlands (Oxford – Portland: 2002) 85–115. Kaplan Y., From Christianity to Judaism: The Story of Isaac Orobio de Castro (Oxford: 1989). Kaplan Y., “Gente Politica: The Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam Vis-à-vis Dutch Society”, in Brasz C. – Kaplan Y. (eds.), Dutch Jews as Perceived by Themselves and By Others (Leiden – Boston – Cologne: 2001) 21–40. Katz D., Philosemitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603–1655 (Oxford: 1982). Keyes G.S. – Kuretsky S.D. – Rüger A. – Wheelock A.K., Jr, Masters of Dutch Painting in the Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit – London: 2004). Kuretsky S.D. (ed.), Time and Transformation in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art, exh. cat., The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College (Poughkeepsie, New York: 2005). Levesque C., “Landscape, Politics, and the Prosperous Peace”, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 48 (1997) 223–257. Méchoulan H., “Menasseh ben Israel au centre des rapports Judéo-Chrétiens en Hollande au XVIIe siècle dans une letter inédite d’Isaac Coymans à Andre Colvius”, Studia Rosentaliana 16 (1982) 21–24. Meier Jacob, “Hugo Grotius’s ‘Remonstrantie,” Jewish Social Studies 17 (1955) 91–104. Nadler S., Rembrandt’s Jews (Chicago: 2003). Perlove S., “Guercino’s Esther Before Ahasuerus and Cardinal Lorenzo Magalotti, Bishop of Ferrara”, Artibus et Historiae 19 (1989) 133–147. Perlove S., “An Irenic Vision of Utopia: Rembrandt’s Triumph of Mordecai and the New Jerusalem”, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 56 (1993) 38–60. Perlove S., “Power and Religious Authority in Papal Ferrara: Cardinal Serra and Guercino”, Kunsthistorisk Tidskrift 67 (1999) 19–30. Perlove S. – Silver L., Rembrandt’s Faith. Church and Temple in the Dutch Golden Age (University Park, PA: 2009). Popkin R.H., “Jewish Messianism and Christian Millenarianism”, in Zagorin P. (ed.), Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment (Berkeley – Los Angeles: 1980) 67–69.

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Renaud J.G.N., “De Iconografie van het slot te Egmond”, Maanblad voor beeldende Kunsten 17 (1940) 338–345. Rittersma Rengenier C., Mytho-Poetics at Work: A Study of the Figure of Egmont, the Dutch Revolt and Its Influence in Europe (Leiden – Boston: 2018). Rowan H.H., The Low Countries in Early Modern Times (London: 1972). Rowan H.H., John de Witt: Grand Pensionary of Holland (Princeton, NJ: 1978). Rowan H.H., The Princes of Orange. The Stadholders in the Dutch Republic. (Cambridge: 1988). Schama S., “Dutch Landscapes: Culture as Foreground”, in Sutton P. (ed.), Masters of 17th-Century Dutch Landscape Painting, exh. cat. Amsterdam/Boston/Philadelphia, 1987–1988 (Boston, Museum of Fine Arts: 1987). Schepers J., Haus und Hof westfälischer Bauern (Münster: 1960; 3rd ed., 1976). Scheyer E., “The Iconography of Jacob van Ruisdael’s Cemetery”, Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 55 (1977) 133–146. Schudt J.J., Jüdische Merckwürdigkeiten (1714) (Berlin: 1922). Schwartz G., “Rembrandt’s Patrons Among the Clans of Holland”, Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Countries Studies 9.27 (1985) 3–16. Shana S., The Portuguese Jewish Community in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam: Images of Commemoration and Documentation (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Kansas: 1992). Slive S., with the assistance of Hoetink H.R., Jacob van Ruisdael, exh. cat., Mauritshuis, The Royal Cabinet of Painting (The Hague: 1881–1982) and The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University (Cambridge, MA: 1982). Slive S., Jacob van Ruisdael. Master of Landscape (New Haven: 2005). Smith John, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch, Flemish, and French Painters 6 (London, Messrs. Smith: 1829–1842). Sutcliffe A., “The Boundaries of Community: Urban Space and Intercultural Interaction in Early Modern, Sephardi Amsterdam, and London”, in Kaplan Y. (ed.), The Dutch Intersection. The Jews and the Netherlands in Modern History (Leiden – Boston – Cologne: 2008) 20–31. Swetschinski D.M., Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (London: 2000). Swetschinski D.M., “From the Middle Ages to the Golden Age, 1516–1621,” in Blom J.C.H. – Fuks-Mansfeld R.G. – Schöffer I. (eds.), trans. Arnold J. Pomerans and Erica Pomerans. The History of the Jews in the Netherlands (Oxford, Portland, Oregon: 2002) 44–81. Taillasson Jean Joseph, Observations sur quelques grands peintres (Paris, Duminil – Lesueur: 1807). Toon P. (ed.), Puritans, the Millennium, and the Future of Israel: Puritan Eschatology (Cambridge: 1970).

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Turnball G., Hartlib, Dury, and Comenius (Liverpool: 1947). Van der Heide A., “De Studie van het Jodendom in Nederland: Verleden, Heden, Toekomst”, Studia Rosenthaliana 17 (1983) 41–57. Van Hoogstraten Frans, Het voorhof der ziele, behangen met leerzaeme prenten en zinnebeelden (Rotterdam, F. van Hoogstraten: 1668). Van Sas N.C.F., Vaderland. Een geschiedenis van de vijftiende eeuw tot 1940 (Amsterdam: 1999). Walford E.J., Jacob van Ruisdael and the Perception of Landscape (New Haven: 1991). Wall E. van der, “The Amsterdam Millenarian Petrus Serrarius (1600–1669) and the Anglo-Dutch Circle of Philo-Judaists”, in Berg J. van den – Wall E. van der (eds.), Jewish-Christian Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Dordrecht: 1988) 73–94. Weststeijn T., “Rembrandt and the Germanic Style,” in Dickey Stephanie S., (ed.), Rembrandt and his Circle (Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press: 2017) 44–66. Wiegand W., Ruisdael Studien: Ein versuch zur Ikonologie der Landschaftsmalerei (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Hamburg: 1971). Zell M., Reframing Rembrandt: Jews and the Christian Image in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (Berkeley: 2002).

Chapter 9

‘Car la terre ici n’est telle qu’un fol l’estime’: Landscape Description as an Interpretative Tool in Two Early Modern Poems on New France William M. Barton 1

Introduction

French navigator Jacques Cartier (1491–1557) explored and mapped the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the shores of its eponymous river in a series of three voyages between 1534 and 1542. He was the first to use the name Canada for a part of the region and claimed it for the Kingdom of France in 1535.1 French colonial efforts in la Nouvelle-France would see their first official and lasting settlement under Samuel de Champlain (c. 1574–1635) only in 1608,2 but by the time France ceded their north American colonies to the British under the Treaty of Paris in 1763, New France extended into Saskatchewan to the west and as far south as Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Description of the natural environment that Europeans found in New France belongs, of course, to the most frequently addressed topics in early writing from and about this part of North America, alongside treatments of indigenous cultures and the expansion of “Old World” colonial interests.3 Michel de Montaigne had, indeed, called for precise accounts of the country’s

1 Cartier Jacques, Brief recit, et succincte narration, de la nauigation faicte es ysles de Canada, Hochelage et Saguenay et autres, auec particulieres meurs, langaige et cerimonies des habitans d’icelles: fort delectable à veoir (Paris, Ponce Roffet dict Faucher et Anthoine le Clerc frères: 1545). This account of Cartier’s second voyage (1535–1536) was published by Cartier’s secretary Jehan Poullet. On the publication of the work, its context in contemporary accounts of the New World among the French and the use of the name Canada for the area around present-day Quebec City see Laflèche G., “Literature on New France”, in Nischik R.M. (ed.), History of Literature in Canada: English-Canadian and French-Canadian (Rochester, NY: 2008) 48–66 (48–49). 2 Vallières M. “Québec (ville)”, in Graves B. (ed.), l’Encyclopédie Canadienne (Historica Canada: 2018). 3 For a helpful statement of this fundamental range of interests in early writing on the region see Laflèche, “Literature on New France” 48.

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regions in his essay Des Cannibales (I.31) dealing with indigenous culture.4 Beginning with Cartier’s Brief recit (1545) and its extraordinary descriptions of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, the river and its valley, writers dealt at length with the region’s dense forests, its apparently endless horizon, its waters teaming with fish and, naturally, the winter’s cold.5 As French efforts to establish a permanent settlement intensified in the first decade of the seventeenth century, so too did the number and detail of written reports from Canada’s eastern coast. Now prospective settlers, explorers and catholic missionaries (both Jesuit and Franciscan Récollets) contributed to an increasingly sustained written interest in la Nouvelle-France, its natural environment and autochthonous peoples.6 Moreover, just as in Europe’s other kingdoms involved in the ‘Age of Exploration’, an eager audience awaited accounts from the colonies at home in France and the authors among them quickly took up reported themes in their own writing.7 This study focusses on how the natural environment of New France was represented in early modern literary engagements with the region. More specifically, it will consider in which ways the landscape depicted in two literary treatments of the area figured as more than just an exciting or exotic background to a given narrative but rather served to guide a reader’s interpretation of a work and its author’s meaning. The texts singled out for analysis are two of the earliest, widely-circulated pieces of early modern poetry dealing with the theme of la Nouvelle-France: Les Muses de la Nouvelle-France by Marc

4 Montaigne Michel de, Les Essais ed. J. Balsamo – C. Magnien-Simonin – M. Magnien (Paris: 2007) I.31 (221): ‘Il nous faudroit des topographes qui nous fissent narration particuliere des endroits où ils ont esté’, ‘We would need topographers who provide us with particular description of the places they have been’. 5 Biron M. – Dumont F. – Nardout-Lafarge É., Histoire de la littérature québécoise (Montreal, QC: 2007) highlight these features of the natural landscape in their treatment of early accounts from the region (22–28). 6 Blodgett E.D., “Reports from la Nouvelle-France: the Jesuit Relations, Marie de l’Incarnation and Élisabeth Bégon”, in Howells C.A. – Kröller E.-M. (eds.), The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature (Cambridge: 2009) 29–46 offers a useful overview of this period. 7 In Chinard G., L’Amerique et le rêve exotique dans la littérature française au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: 1913) the chapter on the Jesuits in New France (122–150) opens with three memorable paragraphs underlining the public interest in the missions during the period. Even now over 100 years since its publication, Chinard’s work is still considered ‘unsurpassed’ in its treatment of contemporary literary responses in France to the striking and unusual features of the New World and its peoples by scholarship today, see Goddard P.A., “Canada in Seventeenth-Century Jesuit Thought: Backwater or Opportunity” in Warkentin G. – Podruchny C., Decentring the Renaissance. Canada and Europe in Multidisciplinary Perspective 1500–1700 (Toronto: 2001) 186–199 (for Chinard as ‘unsurpassed’ see n. 1).

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Lescarbot (c. 1570–1641), first published in 1609,8 and the Franciad of Laurent Le Brun S.J. (1607–1663), first published in 1639.9 These works and their authors are introduced in greater detail in the sections (I and II) dedicated to our texts below, but by way of introduction to the present study, a word here first on the selection of these sources and the approach taken in their analysis. In choosing to deal with poetic works over the prose material produced on New France in far greater quantity in the period, access to ‘literary landscapes’, the prime concern of this contribution, is more easily guaranteed: Scholarship on the concept of landscape in literature has done much work to distinguish between simple descriptions of the natural environment in a text (e.g. lists of natural phenomena, types of trees in an area, or the names of mountains) and true literary landscapes which construct value (be it aesthetic, moral or narrative, for example) out of a totality of natural surroundings worth more than simply the sum of its parts. In his recent, monograph-length contribution to the intensive German-language discussion on the concept of landscape in literature Weber offers a helpful and succinct summary of this idea: Aufgabe der Darstellung muss es sein zu zeigen, wie Erde und Himmel, wie Wasser und Bewuchs miteinander verknüpft sind. Eine bloße Aufreihung und, in der Literatur, eine bloße Aufzählung ergeben noch keine Landschaft.10 8 Les Muses de la Nouvelle-France was first published as an appendix to the author’s L’Histoire de la Nouvelle-France contenant les navigations, découvertes, & habitations faites par les François és Indes Occidentales et Nouvelle-France souz l’avœu et autorité de noz Rois Tres-Chrétiens et les diverses fortunes d’iceux en l’execution de ces choses, depuis cents ans jusques à hui (Paris, Jean Millot: 1609). L’Histoire along with Les Muses saw two further editions in 1611 and 1617 and Les Muses was reprinted again in 1618 as a self-standing publication: Lescarbot Marc, Les Muses de la Nouvelle-France (Paris, Adrian Perier: 1618). 9 Laurent Le Brun’s Franciad was first published as Nova Gallia Delphino (Paris, Jean Camusat: 1639). In subsequent editions, Le Brun changed the title to the Franciados libri II (Rouen, Jean Le Boullenger: 1650) and De Ponto, sive Canadensi barbarie et epistolae Heriodum (Paris, Simeon Piget, 1661). For a history of the work’s publication see O’Brien P., “La Franciade de Le Brun: Poétique ovidienne de l’exil en Nouvelle France”, Tangence 99 (2012) 38–60 (42–48). The short title of the Franciad is now common in modern studies. I follow the practice here. 10 Scholarship on the concept of landscape in literature and philosophy is vast. Weber builds on the influential essays of Simmel (Simmel G., “Philosophie der Landschaft”, in Kramme R. – Rammstedt A. (eds.), Georg Simmel. Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1909–1918 (Frankfurt: 2001) 471–482) and Lehmann (Lehmann H., “Die Physiognomie der Landschaft”, Studium Generale 3.4/5 (1950) 182–195) in Weber H.-K., Die Literarische Landschaft. Zur Geschichte ihrer Entdeckung von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Berlin – New York: 2010). The concise summary quoted above is to be found at p. 170.

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In choosing to deal with poetry then – to use a well-known précis, ‘the best words in the best order’ – difficulties over an author’s employment of natural scenery as literary landscape are easier to avoid. In turn, the focus on our two examples of particularly early poetic production from and about New France allows this study to deal with texts that are rarely discussed today.11 Moreover, the comparison of one work in the vernacular and another in Latin allows a treatment of texts that are even less frequently discussed together. Indeed, this diversity extends to our authors’ backgrounds and involvement with early French Canada: While one had spent a year living in one of France’s earliest colonial settlements in the area and claimed to have written his piece while on his voyage home,12 the other never once visited the New World and wrote his work within the walls of the Jesuit Collège de la Flèche in north-western France.13 The broad range and variety in the source material selected, then, allows a wide perspective on our theme and bolsters this study’s conclusions for contemporary attitudes towards Canada in early-seventeenth-century France. Descriptions of the natural world are, of course, wide-spread in literature dealing with all parts of the New World – the term itself contains an indication of the underlying geographical interest in “new” lands. Why, then, focus here on New France in particular? Aside from the lack of attention paid to the early literature written about this particular region already mentioned, contemporary critical discussion over the features of Canadian literature as a whole itself guides historians to the theme of the representation of natural landscape in writing from the region. After Northrop Frye’s influential description of what he saw as a key Canadian literary tradition of engagement with the natural world; ‘[…] everything that is central in Canadian writing seems to be marked 11 The critical edition and commentary of Lescarbot’s Muses appeared only in 2014: Lescarbot Marc, Poésies et opuscules sur la Nouvelle-France, ed. M.-C. Pioffet – I. Lachance (Montreal: 2014). While much of the Jesuit writing on New France has been more widely available for some time, academic study of the material remains ‘un point aveugle de l’histoire littéraire et culturelle québécoise’ (Cottier J.-F., “Écrits latins en Nouvelle-France (1608–1763): premier état de la question”, Tangence 92 (2010) 9–26 (9)). Le Brun’s Franciad has no modern edition. 12 Lescarbot spent a year between 1606–1607 at the French settlement of Port-Royal (presentday Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia, Canada). A recent monograph on Lescarbot and his experience in New France is Pfeiffer T., Marc Lescarbot: pionnier de la Nouvelle-France (Paris: 2012). 13 Sommervogel C., Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus, 11 vols. (Paris: 1890–1932) IV, 1629– 1632, is the standard on Le Brun’s life and his career as professor of rhetoric at La Flèche. The lack of any record of Le Brun in New France is confirmed in O’Brien P., “‘Si potes exemplo moveri, non propriore potes’: Emotional Reciprocity in Laurent Le Brun’s Nova Gallia”, in Haskell Y. – Garrod R., Changing Hearts: Performing Jesuit Emotions between Europe, Asia and the Americas (Leiden: 2019) 147–166 (n. 3).

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by the imminence of the natural world’,14 critics interested in thematic readings of the region’s literature have returned time and again to the special place of natural motifs in Canadian writing. To mention but the most high-profile literary figure involved in this Canadian eco-criticism, Margaret Atwood’s 1972 Survival deals in depth with her country’s relationship to the natural world as part of her concept of the ‘victim’ in Canadian writing.15 And her 1995 critical work Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature took one of the most popular guises of the environmental theme in her country’s tradition for closer study.16 However, if the literary representation of natural landscapes and their meaning has become a productive and deep-rooted interest in Canadian literary studies, equally deep-rooted is the relative neglect of early Latin and French literature in modern thematic study of the Canadian literary tradition. Having outlined this study’s selected source material and its place, it will now be helpful to situate briefly this contribution inside its wider thematic discussion: The two classics of eco-criticism devoted chiefly to the North American sphere, Marx’s The Machine in the Garden and Buell’s The Environmental Imagination, outline in considerable depth the critical apparatus of the “pastoral”.17 This concept is a reading-tool which shares its name, but is not identical with the genre familiar from classical literature and the later tradition.18 In discussing the results of their readings of early modern literature on the ‘New World’ through this lens – most memorably perhaps in Marx’s evaluation of the American landscape in Shakespeare’s Tempest19 – they identify two principle literary ideas employed in describing encounters with the natural world across the Atlantic: Buell’s chapter title New World Dreams and Environmental Actualities nicely captures these ambiguous and conflicting ideas of a new world as an Arcadia, a ‘lovely garden’, but also as a ‘hideous

14 Frye N., “Conclusion”, in Klink C.F., Literary History of Canada (Toronto: 1965; reprint Toronto: 1971) 821–49; 213–251 (247). 15 Atwood M., Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto: 1972) 45–68 for natural theme. 16 Atwood M., Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (Oxford: 1995). 17 Marx L., The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: 1964; reprint 2000); Buell L., The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA – London: 1995). A concise formulation of Marx’s concept of the pastoral, its transferal to the Americas and its impact can be found on 3–5. In Buell see 31–36. 18 For a statement of the “pastoral’s” use as a reading tool see Gifford T., Pastoral (London – New York: 1999). 19 Marx, The Machine in the Garden 34–72.

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wilderness’.20 In essence, the very same ideas can be observed and are productive in early literature about Canada, as could well be expected:21 Studies focussed on particular early modern responses to the Canadian landscape have identified portrayals of the land either as hostile or as paradisiacal as the predominant characterisations of the land they find in their material.22 But rather than stopping at the point where Marx, Buell and some of this later scholarship frequently has, at the conclusion that ‘altogether, both Arcadian and dystopian imagery might best be reckoned a stockpile of prefabricated imagery subject to deployment […] according to need’,23 this study hopes now to go a step further in providing evidence for the increasingly widespread idea that it was the precisely blend of these images that predominantly served the European imagination of French North America in literary discourse.24 Further, I will posit that it was the very combination of these apparently opposed and ambiguous representations of the natural landscape, carefully and skilfully managed by writers according to well-practiced poetic tradition, which has the most hermeneutic force in our works. 2

Marc Lescarbot’s A-dieu à la Nouvelle-France

Marc Lescarbot’s Histoire de la Nouvelle-France offers a history of early French exploration of the Americas alongside an account of Lescarbot’s experiences of 20 Buell, The Environmental Imagination 53–82; quoted phrases from Marx, The Machine in the Garden 43–44. 21 See Buell, The Environmental Imagination 60 for the similar presence of horror and “Arcadian” feeling in Canadian literature as in British America. 22 For the region’s predominant hostility in Jesuit writing see e.g. Blackburn C., Harvest of Souls: The Jesuit Missions and Colonialism in North America 1632–1650 (Montreal, QC – London – Ithaca, NY: 2000) 42: ‘The Jesuits characterized the land they had come to in North America as a wilderness – a place that was barren, abandoned and frequently hostile’. For the predominantly optimistic representation of the region in secular writers see e.g. Berry L., “The Delights of Nature in This New World: A Seventeenth Century Canadian View of the Environment”, in in Warkentin G. – Podruchny C., Decentring the Renaissance. Canada and Europe in Multidisciplinary Perspective 1500–1700 (Toronto: 2001) 223–235 (228): ‘Sometimes, in their eagerness to encourage investors they [colonial promoters] portrayed parts of Canada as almost a terrestrial paradise’. 23 Buell, The Environmental Imagination 60. 24 This perhaps more refined view of the topic can be found already in Goddard, “Canada in Seventeenth-Century Jesuit Thought: Backwater or Opportunity” and more recently in Pioffet M.-C., “La Nouvelle-France dans l’imaginaire jésuite: terra doloris ou Jérusalem celeste?”, in Bernier M.A. – Donato C. – Lüsebrink H.-J. (eds.), Jesuit Accounts of the Colonial Americas (Toronto: 2014) 326–343.

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colonial life at the French settlement of Port-Royal, just off the Bay of Fundy.25 The accompanying collection of poetry, Les Muses de la Nouvelle-France, contains nearly two thousand verses inspired by the author’s time there. The collection included one of North America’s first theatrical productions, the Théâtre de Neptune, an epyllion and a number of lyrical pieces, designed for the most part to promote interest in la Nouvelle-France among readers at home. While images of the natural environment certainly play a role in a number of Les Muses’ poems, Lescarbot’s A-dieu à la Nouvelle-France represents the author’s most sustained engagement with the theme of the natural world in his collection. In the poem’s 428 verses the author paints numerous images of Port-Royal’s natural surroundings (e.g. 25–72; 347–357), he presents catalogues of the area’s natural resources including the varieties of fish and sea creatures (77–128) to be found there, as well as its land animals (141–157) and birds (158– 228). The landscape’s fields, gardens, agricultural potential and fertility are praised at length (239–292; 395–411), alongside its mineral wealth (385–394) and the abundancy of the hemp plant (412–422), for example.26 While in the A-dieu à la Nouvelle-France, then, Lescarbot primarily expresses his frustration at having to leave the colony and voices ‘a final, almost desperate attempt to ‘sell’ Port-Royal to his fellow Frenchmen’ in the descriptive and eulogistic mode dominating the piece,27 the work also models itself in numerous details on Virgil’s Georgics and the ancient poem’s early modern reception.28 In turning now to more detailed discussion of passages from Lescarbot’s A-dieu à la Nouvelle-France we will consider precisely how his representation of the landscape according to his literary models serves to guide interpretation of his poem.

25 For this work’s bibliographic details see n. 8 above. 26 The poem’s title (A-dieu à la Nouvelle-France) and text, including its hyphenated forms, ligatures and early modern orthography, quoted in this essay follow that given in the modern edition of Lescarbot’s poetry on New France (Lescarbot, Poésies et opuscules ed. Pioffet – Lachance). The following passages cited from the text follow Pioffet and Lachance’s edition of the Les Muses. Our poem appears on pp. 99–120. 27 For this assessment of the poem see Westra H., “Farewell to Canada: Marc Lescarbot’s A-dieu à La Nouvelle-France (1607). Essay & Translation”, Numéro Cinq (December 2015). Available online: http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2015/12/11/farewell-to-canada-marc -lescarbots-a-dieu-a-la-nouvelle-france-1607-essay-translation-haijo-westra/. 28 For a reading of the poem within the Renaissance and early modern tradition of georgic and didactic poetry see Barton W.M., “The Georgics off the Canadian Coast: Marc Lescarbot’s A-dieu à la Nouvelle-France (1609) and the Virgilian Tradition”, in Freer N. – Xinyue B. (eds.), Reflections and New Perspectives on Virgil’s Georgics (London: 2019) 155–163.

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Already the natural landscape around Port-Royal that Lescarbot describes after the poem’s more formalised opening sequence makes the quasiparadisiacal and “Arcadian” landscape imagery of his poem very clear: Adieu donc beaux coteaux & montagnes aussi, Qui d’un double rempar ceignez ce Port ici. Adieu vallons herbus que le flot de Neptune Va baignant largement deux fois à chaque lune, Et au gibier aussi, qui pour trouver pâture Y vient de tous cotez tant qu’il y a verdure. Adieu mon doux plaisir fonteines & ruisseaux, Qui les vaux & les monts arrousez de vos eaux. Pourray-je t’oublier belle ile forètiere Riche honneur de ce lieu & de cette riviere? Je prise de ta soeur les aimables beautés, Mais je prise encor plus tes singularités. Lescarbot, A-dieu à la Nouvelle-France 25–36

Farewell, thus, beautiful coasts and mountains as well Which, with a double rampart, gird this harbor here. Farewell grassy glens which Neptune’s flood Bathes generously, twice with every moon, And to the game as well, which in order to find pasture Comes hither from all sides, there is so much vegetation. Farewell my sweet pleasure, springs and brooks Which water the valleys and the mountains with your moisture. How can I forget you, beautiful forested isle Rich ornament of this place and its basin? I prize all the sweet beauties of your sister Yet I prize even more your outstanding features.29 Here, alongside the very typical imagery of the long bucolic tradition in Europe,30 we also hear a poetic depiction of the actual landscape around the 29 30

For the English I have used the clear, accurate and easily accessible translation in Westra, “Farewell to Canada” (December 2015). Additions in chevrons allowing a more natural English text are Westra’s own. For another very typical locus amoenus scene see also lines 47–52: ‘Mais parmi tes beautés j’admire un ruisselet/ Qui foule doucement l’herbage nouvelet/ D’un vallon que se baisse au creux de ta poitrine,/ Precipitant son cours dedans l’onde marine./ Ruisselet qui cent fois de ses eaux m’a tenté,/ Sa grace me forçant lui prèter le côté’, ‘But amidst your beauties I admire a little stream/ Which presses gently the fresh herbage/ Of a little valley

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attempted colony at Port-Royal: The Annapolis basin, a sub-basin of the Bay of Fundy, is indeed surrounded by the low North and South mountain ranges which makes for a calm natural harbour, and the well-watered Annapolis valley provides for a predominantly agricultural economy still today. Lescarbot also mentions the distinctive island of the basin, known by locals today as Goat Island, which he also describes at some length in the chapters of his Histoire.31 At the opening of the piece, then, we are presented with a somewhat traditional, idealised background landscape, nonetheless anchored in reality, which provides a setting for the remainder of the poem’s narrative. Alongside detailed descriptions of other parts of the natural world in this part of New France, which are similarly idealised – we hear of the area’s incredible spontaneous fertility, for example: ‘Se trouvent largement produits par la Nature/ Framboises, fraises, pois, sans aucune culture’, ‘One finds in great measure products of Nature/ Raspberries, strawberries, peas, without any cultivation’ (65–66) – the agricultural landscape is brought time and again before the reader’s eyes to underline the regions beauty: Ayant à noz labeurs fait selon noz désirs, Et iceux terminé de dix mille plaisirs. Car la terre ici n’est telle qu’un fol l’estime, Elle y est plantureuse à cil qui sçait l’escrime Du plaisant jardinage & du labeur des champs. Lescarbot, A-dieu à la Nouvelle-France 179–183

Having made our labours commensurate with our desires And having completed them with ten thousand pleasures. For the earth here is not as a fool would guess, she produces copiously for him who has experience Of the pleasures of gardening and the labour of the fields. And again at 240–246: Je dis encore Adieu à vous beaux jardinages, Qui nous avez cet an repeu de vos herbages, Voire aussi soulagé nôtre necessité Plus que l’art de Pæon n’a fait nôtre santé. that descends in the hollow of your breast/ Plunging its course into the waves of the sea:/ Little stream that has tempted me a hundred times with its waters,/ Its charm forcing me to lie down beside it.’ 31 Lescarbot, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France 440.

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Vous nous avez rendu certes en abondance Le fruit de noz labeurs selon notre semence. I say Farewell once more to your beautiful gardens That have nourished us with your medicinal herbs, Nay also relieved our need more than the art of Paean have kept us healthy. You have certainly given back to us in abundance The fruit of our labours in accordance with our sowing. Indeed, the poem closes with a clear statement of the author’s image of New France as an “Arcadian”, rural retreat for his countrymen: Puisse-je voir bien-tot cette chose arriver, Et le François soigneux à tes champs cultiver, Arriere des soucis d’une peineuse vie, Loin des bruits du commun, & de la piperie.

Lescarbot, A-dieu à la Nouvelle-France 425–428

May I see that thing arrive soon, And careful Frenchmen cultivate your fields, Away from the cares of a life of hardship Far from the noise of the common crowd, and from deceit. Lescarbot’s use of an idealized beautiful, rich and peaceful natural landscape in this piece is easy to comprehend: He himself had left France after a legal case with which he was involved in Paris during his career as a lawyer had taken a bad turn.32 Moreover, from his Histoire and the other poems in Les Muses, it quickly becomes clear that the author was a true supporter of his kingdom’s colonial expansion. He was disappointed that his superior, Pierre Dugua de Mons’ (1558–1628), ‘privilège du Roi’ for settling the land had been retracted, along with the funding for the project. His extraordinarily positive engagement with the natural landscape in these moments of his poem bidding farewell to the region thus represents an expression of his efforts to promote the continued development of France’s involvement with the region and an appeal to readers at home.

32 Lescarbot references his motivations for leaving France for the New World in his Histoire (502).

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While this is the overwhelming impression a reader gains of New France’s natural landscape in the piece, it would be a mistake to ignore Lescarbot’s repeated treatments of the region’s less attractive features, which introduce a palpable ambiguity to the natural landscape in the piece. Our author describes, for example, the Île-St.-Croix (known today as Dochet Island), ‘la terre que a receuë notre France/ Quand elle vint ici faire sa demeurance (Lescarbot, A-dieu à la Nouvelle-France 361–362) ‘the land that received our France/ When she first came to establish herself here’. In 1604, under the leadership of Dugua de Mons and Samuel de Champlain, France had attempted to settle on the island but with disastrous results. After a harsh winter froze the river in which the island sits, more than half of the small colony’s men died: Ile, je te saluë, ile de Saincte Croix, Ile premier sejour de noz pauvres François, Qui souffrirent chez toy des choses vrayment dures Lescarbot, A-dieu à la Nouvelle-France 363–365

Island, I salute you, Isle of Saint Croix (Dochet Island), Island that was the first dwelling place of our poor French Who suffered major hardships while dwelling with you.33 Lescarbot also references repeatedly the harsh conditions of the North Atlantic: We hear already in line 6 of the ‘les assaux … des flots irritez’, ‘the assaults of raging waves’ and later, similarly, of ‘les flots épouvantables/ Du profond Ocean’, ‘the fearful swells/ of the deep ocean’ (Lescarbot, A-dieu à la NouvelleFrance 358–359) among other examples.34 Indeed, he makes clear the undesirable effect of this landscape’s relationship with the northern sea for those already settled on the land: […] en ces côtes ci est ordinaire l’Ouest, Puis, souvent cette mer est de brumes couverte Qui des hommes peu cauts cause l’extreme perte. Lescarbot, A-dieu à la Nouvelle-France 347–350

33 Lescarbot and the settlers of 1606–1607 visited the island to see the remains of the attempted settlement there. He records his experiences and the French history of island in his Histoire 437–539. In the poem Lescarbot overlooks the attempted French settlements at Charlesbourg-Royal in 1541 by Jacques Cartier, at Sable Island in 1598 by Troilus de La Roche de Mesgouez (1540–1606), and at Tadoussac, Quebec in 1600 by François Gravé Du Pont (1560–c. 1629), which had all similarly failed. 34 Further examples appear at Lescarbot, A-dieu à la Nouvelle-France 21 and 380 inter alia.

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[…] on these coasts the West wind is prevalent moreover, this sea is often covered by fog Which causes the total loss of incautious men. And though Lescarbot had praised the region’s exciting fertility, as we have seen, in the sections of his poem that present an idealized image of the landscape, he nonetheless stresses the potential menace of this fecundity if uncontrolled and uses vivid anthropomorphic language in his description of the maize plant’s prolific growth: Qui croira que le blé que l’on appelle d’Inde En cette saison-ci si hautement se guinde Qu’il semble estre porté d’insupportable orgueil Pour se rendre, hautain, aux arbrisseaux pareil? Lescarbot, A-dieu à la Nouvelle-France 253–56

Who will believe that the so-called Indian corn Rises up so high in this season That it seems to be carried by insufferable pride To make itself, haughty, resemble a woodland? This image leads him to a clear statement of the landscape’s need for a cultivating human (European) hand, fitting for his apparent poetic goal of voicing a final ‘sell’ to his fellow Frenchmen at home:35 Hé que sera-ce donc s’il arrive jamais (Ce qu’il est de besoin qu’on face desormais) Que la terre ici soit un petit mignardée, Et par humain travail quelquefois amendée?

Lescarbot, A-dieu à la Nouvelle-France 247–50

So what does it matter if it ever happens (And which it necessarily will do in the future) That the soil here needs to be made more appealing And improved sometimes by human labour?

35 For the idea of the A-dieu as an attempt to ‘sell’ the French colonial efforts see Westra, “Farewell to Canada”.

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After turning now to the Franciad of Jesuit poet Laurent Le Brun, the role of this ambiguity evident in Lescarbot’s (and Le Brun’s) landscapes in our interpretation of their poetry will be considered comparatively by way of conclusion. 3

Laurent Lebrun’s Franciad

Jesuit father Laurent Le Brun first published his Franciad under the title Nova Gallia Delphino in 1639.36 The two books of elegies addressed to the Dauphin (Louis XIV, 1638–1715) and French potentates from the mouth of the goddess Nova Gallia were initially composed for recital at the Jesuit Collège de La Flèche in celebration of the Dauphin’s long-awaited birth in 1638.37 In his verse epistles modelled explicitly on Ovid, Le Brun has Nova Gallia presents a detailed image of her country, its peoples, landscapes and weather, along with its related problems and difficulties in calling out for the civilising aid of France. In the place of the exiled poet pleading his case to his audience in Rome, as in Ovid’s Tristia and Epistolae ex Ponto, in the first book of the Franciad Nova Gallia now pleads her case to the Dauphin in order to be saved. The second book sees the goddess address a series of French figures – her “heroes” – on the model of Ovid’s Heriodes. Just over thirty years after Lescarbot’s stay at Port-Royal, the Franciad came at a time of confidence in the missions in Canada.38 While we have no evidence that Le Brun ever made it to the missions himself, he would have been able to rely on the Order’s Relations from his brothers in New France alongside other accounts for his knowledge about the New World.39 All the same, 36 For the history of the text’s publication see O’Brien, “La Franciade de Le Brun” 42–48 and n. 9 above. For the scanty information available on Le Brun’s life see Somervogel C., Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus, 11 vols. (Brussels: 1890–1932) 4: 1629–1632. 37 On the recitation of the work at this event see Rochemonteix C. de, Un college de jésuites aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: Le Collège Henri IV de la Flèche, 4 vols. (Le Mans: 1889) 3: 217. 38 O’Brien, “La Franciade de Le Brun” 38. 39 For the similarities and differences in Le Brun’s approach to his material in comparison with the Relations from New France see O’Brien “‘Si potes exemplo moveri, non propriore potes’” 151–152. Examples of sources about Canada published and widely circulated before Le Brun’s Franciad include, of course, Lescarbot, L’Histoire de la Nouvelle France, but also Champlain Samuel de, Les voyages de la Nouuelle France occidentale, dicte Canada, faits par le sr. de Champlain Xainctongeois, capitaine pour le roy en la marine du Ponant, & toutes les descouuertes qu’il a faites en ce païs depuis l’an 1603 iusques en l’an 1629 (Paris, Claude Collet: 1632) as well as Sagard Gabriel O.M.R., Histoire du Canada et voyages que les freres mineurs recollects y ont faicts pour la conversion des infidelles (Paris, Claude Sonnius:

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on reading the piece it soon becomes evident to the reader that the Franciad contains only distant echoes of the poet’s source material and that he rather develops a series of literary images of New France and its peoples out of the more generalised knowledge circulating about the area and the requirements of the generic tradition in which he is writing. As Peter O’Brien has nicely put it in his most recent study on the piece, “Le Brun’s appeal comes from a deliberately fragmented, ambiguous voice; a performance of the Other coached by Ovid’s heroines and Claudian’s national goddesses, rather than an objectifying report.”40 In turning now to consideration of this “deliberately […] ambiguous voice” in Le Brun’s engagements with the natural landscape in la Nouvelle-France in particular I hope to bolster O’Brien’s very accurate appreciation of the piece, while demonstrating that Le Brun’s carefully crafted ambiguity in the poem – though very different in character to that just identified in Lescarbot’s poetry – performs a similar role in his work’s hermeneutic. The titles of the seven elegies of the Franciad’s book one, more descriptive than the second in which the goddess addresses individual nobles for their help in the poems’ titles, offer a clear indication of the atmosphere Le Brun wishes to create in Franciad. The role that the natural landscape has to play in this dark and foreboding poetic image of New France is made particularly clear, for example, in pieces three (Difficultas itinerum in sylvis Canadensibus, ‘The Difficulties of travel in the Canadian Forests’), four (Nix et frigus Canadense, ‘The Snow and the Canadian Cold)’ and five (Domus et umbra sylvarum Canadensium, ‘The Houses and Darkness of the Canadian Forests’) of this first book. Straightaway, them, we meet a very different Canadian landscape to that we have just seen in Lescarbot’s A-dieu. Le Brun rejects entirely our former author’s neat, “Arcadian” imagery, complete with locus amoenus and Golden Age fertility. In the first book’s third elegy, we instead have an endless abyss of forest placed before our eyes: Mille bis aeterna protenditur arbore leucas, Umbrosus totus, nec cerealis ager.41 Le Brun, Franciad 1.III.5–6

40 41

1636). The potential influence of these works on Le Brun’s poetry has yet to be researched in any depth. O’Brien, “‘Si potes exemplo moveri, non propriore potes’” 151. In what follows I cite from the 1653 edition of the work: Le Brun Laurent, Franciados Libri duo, in Laurentii Le Brun Nannetensis e Societate Iesu Ecclesiastes Salmonis paraphrase poetica explicates (Paris, Sébastian Cramoisy: 1653) 199–249. Subsequent poetic references indicate the book, elegy and line numbers of the passages cited. Where the prose epilogue to the Franciad is cited below, references are to the page number with the 1653 volume.

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The entire shadowy place stretches out for two thousand leagues With endless trees and it is not a field fit for crop. The sunny scenes and delicate moisture of Lescarbot’s Port-Royal are replaced with torrential downpours and frozen water: Aeterni horrificant brumae intractabilis imbres, Marmoreoque rigent vincta fluenta gelu. Sunt et inaccessi Phoebo Phoebeque recessus, Suntque sepulcrales in mea tecta nives. Le Brun, Franciad 1.III. 11–14

The endless rains of the intractable winter are terrible, And the rivers, overcome with ice as hard as marble, stiffen. Dark corners are unreached by either the sun or the moon, Sepulchral snows are on top of my roofs. Visitors to the region find not a quiet life away from the toils of Paris and its deceits as they did in Lescarbot’s Port-Royal, rather the landscape itself deceives the weary traveller time and again in Le Brun: Haud secus implexo revolubilis orbe viator It, redit, emensum saepe remensus iter, Fallaces praeter dubiis erroribus orbes, Vallibus hinc premitur, montibus inde tumet. Le Brun, Franciad 1.III.46–49

No differently the returning traveller comes and goes in an entwining circle, Often going back over the road already travelled, Here he is forced beyond the deceptive circles into valleys By doubtful wanderings and there he panics among the mountains. Indeed, in the opening lines of his fifth elegy to the Dauphin Le Brun goes as far as to directly invert the ‘quiet’ that Lescarbot had found in the region when he has Nova Gallia describe the dark shadow of her woodland home, Creditur esse quies, sed labor umbra mea est, ‘My shade is supposed to bring peace, but it brings in fact hardship’ (Le Brun, Franciad 1.V.2). Canada’s cold, which is mentioned in Lescarbot but quickly excused,42 is described extensively in Le Brun’s fourth elegy, and in the gloomiest terms: 42 Lescarbot, A-dieu 267–274.

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Nix infra durata pedes, et spina fatigat, Desuper intectum densa pruina caput. Cuncta regent, cuncta albescunt, dubiumque relinquunt Num mage dura gelu, num magis alba nive. Le Brun, Franciad 1.IV. 19–22

Below, the hard snow and brambles harass one’s feet; From above, the dense frost torments one’s uncovered head. Everything is frozen solid, everything grows pale, and it all leaves behind Any doubt as to whether it’s harder than ice or whiter than snow. Further, while in our French author’s poetic landscape the region’s relationship to the sea was celebrated in its provision of access to plentiful fish supplies (69–108), in idealized views of the bay’s scenery (49–50; 114–119) and, indeed, in acting as the means of transport for the French colonists (427–429), in Le Brun’s frozen north these ideas of the Atlantic are turned on their head: In pontem pontus glaciali fornice cessit Et lacus a rigidis stat solidatus aquis Mentitur durum concreta fronte metallum Nereus et rigido ferrea terga vado. The sea gives way to a bridge with a frozen vault And the lake stands firm in its stiffened waters. Nereus plays the part of a hard quarry with his frozen brow And to have an unyielding surface with a solid stream. And the natural landscape’s extraordinary fertility, praised in the highest terms in our French author is now, in Le Brun, vividly denied: Poscitur aethra pecus, sed inops pecus aethra recusat, Terra rogatur opem, terra recusat opem. Pensilis ingrata vix haeret in arbore fructus, Quae macra ieiunis prandia venter amat. Sola sed infami fructu vepreta redundant, Sylvaque glande ferax exsuperante pluit. Le Brun, Franciad 1.II. 83–88

One can beg the heavens for a flock, but the powerless heavens refuse it, One can ask the earth for produce, but the earth refuses it.

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Any hanging fruit scarcely clings to its ungrateful tree, A meagre meal which the starving stomach desires. Only the thorn bushes overflow with their notorious ‘fruit’, And the brutal forest rains down excessive amounts of horse chestnut. Overall, then, the reader of Le Brun’s Franciad is initially struck by his overwhelmingly grotesque and ugly images of la Nouvelle-France and above all the atmospheric and sinister images of the region’s landscapes in the work’s first book. This, as we have seen, stands in polar opposition to Lescarbot’s representation of the same themes. Just as was the case in the A-dieu à la NouvelleFrance, Le Brun’s treatment of the landscape is carefully fitted to his poetic purpose: the goddess Nova Gallia sings these elegies in hope of the civilizing aid of France. The more desperate a picture she is able to paint of herself in these verse epistles, then, the more urgent her call for help and more effective the impact she hopes to make on her readers.43 In Father Le Brun’s allegory, the wilder a picture he is able to paint of the Dauphin’s empire across the Atlantic, the more pressing a need he hopes to be made felt among his country’s leaders for his brothers’ missions, which after numerous false starts had gained a firm foothold in north America under Paul Lejeune S.J. (1591–1664) and Jean de Brébeuf S.J. (1593–1649) in the years just before the Franciad saw the press for the first time. On the literary level, too, Le Brun’s depiction of a dark, bleak and hopeless landscape across the Atlantic is fitting for the tradition of poetic exile literature in which he is writing. Ancient poet Ovid’s descriptions of his banishment to Tomis are often equally grim and have the parallel intention of convincing the Emperor Augustus to help the poet and allow him back to Rome.44 Just as in Lescarbot, however, a reading of Le Brun’s Franciad which perceives only one aspect of the Canadian landscape misses out on significant moments of ambiguity that our author introduces into his representation of natural scenery. The turn towards a more optimistic engagement with the landscape begins already towards the end of the Franciad’s first book.45 After 43

Nova Gallia describes herself directly in the darkest terms at various moments throughout the work, e.g. Le Brun, Franciad 1.I.1–4; III.1–4; V.4–7. 44 For a two recent résumés of Ovid’s principal representation of the landscape in Tomis and its context within Augustan politics see McGowan M.M., Ovid in Exile: Power and Poetic Redress in the Tristia and Epistulae Ex Ponto (Leiden – Boston: 2009) 208–211 and Pieper C., “Polyvalent Tomi: Ovid’s Landscape of Relegation and the Romanization of the Black Sea Region”, in McInerney J. – Sluiter I. (eds.), Valuing Landscape in Classical Antiquity (Leiden – Boston: 2016) 408–430 (408–409). 45 O’Brien helpfully highlights this first “glimmer of a golden age” in “‘Si potes exemplo moveri, non propriore potes’” 158.

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rejecting absolute malignance in a memorable line at the pinnacle of this turn,46 Nova Gallia begins to recount some of the more positive aspects of her natural environment, first those which might appeal just to her: Pisa fabaeque meo rident, tibi spreta, palato, Dulcis et esca mea, quae sit amara tibi. Le Brun, Franciad 1.VI.101–102

Peas and beans delight my palate, but they are spurned by you [the French], And my favourite dishes taste bitter to you. And then those which are recognized widely in the European literary tradition as pleasant: Sibilat undoso vocalis sylva susurro, Factaque de volucrum voce diserta sonat. Vernantes texunt umbracula frondea rami, Muscosusque venit mensa superba lapis. Le Brun, Franciad 2.VI.105–109

The tuneful forest whistles with a fluid whisper, And eloquent song from the bird’s voice resounds. Budding branches weave leafy shade, And the mossy stone serves as an excellent table. This praise of the New French landscape extends in the elegies of the Franciad’s book two to the use of further standard topoi from pastoral poetry (in poem 2.II.3 Nova Gallia carves the Dauphin’s name into a tree, for example) and the insistent commendation of her natural resources for the benefit of France.47 At a high moment of this traditionally pastoral representation of her formally dark and desolate forests, Nova Gallia even imagines the Dauphin himself taking delicate shade in her woods:

46 Usque malum nihil est, sua sunt et commoda damnis, ‘Nothing is completely evil, even losses have their benefits.’ Le Brun, Franciad, I.VI.97. 47 At Le Brun, Franciad 2.III.29–30 Nova Gallia carves the Dauphin’s name into her tree trunks. For an outline and analysis of Nova Gallia’s “Arcadian” praise of her natural environment particularly in the context of Ovidian reception see O’Brien, “‘Si potes exemplo moveri, non propriore potes’” 161–162. The locus classicus for pastoral name carving is Virgil, Eclogues X.52–54.

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Illa tibi virides praebit frondea cunas Arboreosque lares, umbriferosque thoros. Le Brun, Franciad 2.IV.41–42

She [the leafy forest] offers you verdant cradles, Shelter among the trees, and shady cushions. And by the end of the second book, the now peaceful and pleasant landscape becomes productive agricultural land with the potential to yield valuable crop: Insitus excisa coalescet in arbore ramus, Mox fruticeta vepres, mox nemus hortus erit. Cedent et platani, quibus est pro fructibus umbra, Dispositoque ferax ordine pomus erit. Le Brun, Franciad 2.VI.25–28

The branch grafted into the felled tree will establish itself, Soon the bramble patched will become shrub-plots, soon the wood a garden. The planetrees, which cast shadow over crop, will recede, And with order thus imposed, the fruit tree will bear produce. In the work’s epilogue, addressed again to the infant Dauphin directly, the goddess Nova Gallia brings together her elegies’ key themes, among them a number of her more positive engagements with her landscape that appear throughout the work. In an earlier part of this epilogue, she describes the time, place and context of the Dauphin’s birth in order to draw comparisons between her own condition and his. The ‘Sun King’s’ birth at the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, around twenty kilometres from Paris and famous in his time, as now, for its rural setting and extensive gardens allows Le Brun to reveal a different side to his depiction of Nova Gallia’s forests:48 Non in urbe nasceris, quia nulli potestati tuae muri, nulla moenia; sed rura, ut desertas regiones non despicias, sed prope sylvam ut sylvae incolas agnoscas. Le Brun, Franciad 245–6

48

The gardens of the Châteux became paradigmatic for the country’s formal tradition and several of André Mollet’s plans for their design were published in the standard work for agriculture and gardening in seventeenth century France, Serres Olivier de, Le Théâtre d’agriculture et mesnage des champs (Iamet Métayer, Paris: 1600).

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You were not born in the city, since there are no walls, no fortifications for your power; rather you were born in the countryside so you do not look down on uninhabited places, and near the woods, so you acknowledge forest dwellers. The Dauphin’s birth in the quiet, rural setting of Saint-Germain-en-Laye thus allows him to appreciate the freedom possible in the vast Canadian forests – depicted elsewhere in the Franciad as horrifying, as we have seen – and to understand the value of the humble people who live there. And if Nova Gallia’s depiction of the Dauphin’s birth in the ideal rura and among the sylvae of France brings to mind more traditional pastoral imagery, the corresponding description of her own condition at the time of her discovery is, as in the work’s second book, no longer wild and barren but rather more innocent and bucolic, albeit adjusted to her Canadian setting: Antea fragili cortice fluvii littus legebamus, oceanum veriti; hactenus agris otium permissimus. Le Brun, Franciad 244

I previously used to coast along the shores of the river in a delicate tree bark (canoe); at that time I allowed my fields leisure. Moreover, the vast north American landscapes of forest and waterways from the Saint Lawrence to the Great Lakes, described with awe and fear early-on in the work, are now depicted in genuinely positive terms and fitting for a King: Hic tibi (quod nullibi reperias) dulcescit mare, quia pueris placent dulcia; lacus noster fluvii nomen habet a dulcedine, illius vastitas aequoris nomen meretur. Denique regionem respice, cui nomen datum est Galliae. Le Brun, Franciad 248

Here, the sea turns sweet for you (something you will find nowhere else), since young boys enjoy sweet things; my lake has even got its name from its sweetness. Indeed, the immensity of its waters deserves a name. Remember, then, this region, which has been given the name of France.49

49

Lake Huron was referred to by early explorers as La mer douce. This name is recorded, for example, in the manuscript [Nicholas Louis S.J.], Codex canadensis (c.1700), Gilcrease Museum, Archive accession no. 4726.7.

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We hear, then, in this final sentence a concise summary of Nova Gallia’s entreaty to the future King, and of Le Brun’s plea to his envisaged readers, the potentates of seventeenth century France. We also see Nova Gallia’s depiction of her natural landscapes inverted: From the horror of her dense forest, bristling cold, infertility and unreadiness for agriculture in book one, we have witnessed the arrival of a poetic springtime at the end of the Franciad’s book one and its development into an almost uncompromisingly positive pastoral vision of the Canadian landscape in book two. This literary representation, adjusted to Lawrentian realities, is maintained in Le Brun’s epilogue to the Dauphin where he ends by reminding the boy that seventeenth-century Canada was also France. 4

Conclusion

Despite the significant differences between Lescarbot and Le Brun’s poetic forms, language, experience with la Nouvelle-France, their personal and professional backgrounds and particularly, as has been our focus here, the natural landscapes they imagined in their works, their ultimate ends are surprisingly similar:50 At a time of a sudden lack of conviction among French royalty about the value of their colonial enterprises, Lescarbot wrote a poem in which the Canadian landscape is represented as rich, beautiful and almost perfect, in a last-ditch attempt to defend his colonial efforts. Thirty years later, at a time of renewed interest and energy in la Nouvelle France, Father Le Brun had the goddess of the region desperately request from her prince at home further help and support against an initial background of cold, wilderness and fear, which slowly develops into a much more positive landscape when the promise of help is understood. Another striking similarity between the two authors’ representation of the natural landscape in the works that we have considered here, however, is their introduction of a tangible element of ambiguity into their poetry, which at first glance destabilises somewhat the apparent literary ends of these works that we have just described. Indeed, it is this very ambiguity, I want to suggest, that makes the true hermeutic significance of our authors’ landscapes evident on two interconnected levels: 50 The surprise here is in the method of literary expression chosen for these ends. That Church and national aims went hand in hand in seventeenth century France has been underlined in Melzer S., “The Role of Culture and Art in France’s Colonial Strategy of the Seventeenth Century” in Bernier M.A. – Donato C. – Lüsebrink H.-J. (eds.), Jesuit Accounts of the Colonial Americas (Toronto: 2014) 169–185.

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The first of these, for the early modern reader of our texts, would be the representation of the natural world in line with the generic traditions within which our authors were situating their works. In literary terms, the meaning of the images of the natural landscape in a work would be appraised, and would take their meaning first and foremost with reference to the genre or literary tradition to which it belonged. To begin with the most straightforward, Le Brun’s poetic models have been identified as primarily Ovid’s works from the Black Sea for the Franciad’s first book and his Heroides for the second. As a model for Le Brun’s first book, the ancient author expresses his despair (and occasionally wonder) at his cold, barren and barbarous exile and advocates his return to Rome by pleading his worth to the Emperor. While the landscape around Getic town of Tomis could easily be rejected by Ovid, then, who saw himself (initially) as a foreigner and worthy of his place back in Rome, the personified Nova Gallia, including her natural environment, is at once the fictive author of the letters and the figure whose pardon and ultimate worth must be demonstrated before the King. Following this already ambiguous framework Nova Gallia next takes the place of the neglected heroine in the work’s second book. Here, moments of literary engagement with the natural world common to both the Roman love elegy and the bucolic tradition shift Canada’s landscape into a far more positive light. In Le Brun’s Ovidus Christianus Nova Gallia represents at once both Ovid and Tomis in her imitation of the ancient author’s Tristia and Epistolae ex Ponto, and simultaneously the neglected lover and scene of the lover’s conflation of the blossoming natural world with his/her own emotions in her imitation of the Heriodes.51 The ambiguity we thus find in her natural landscapes fits faultlessly then inside the interpretive frameworks a reader would expect. Turning to Lescarbot’s poem, though less straightforwardly set within a particular generic structure, it also draws heavily on the early modern reception of Virgil’s Georgics, as I have argued elsewhere.52 In his Georgics, the ancient poet had heaped praise on the wonderous beauty and fertility of the natural world, and especially of his homeland, Augustan Italy.53 But fittingly for a didactic work based on agriculture, natura after the 51

On the role of various landscapes in the narrative of Ovid’s Heriodes on the example of the collection’s poems 6 and 12 see Flanders B. “‘Omne patens’: Reading Narrative Space in Ovid’s Heroides”, Hermathena 193, Places, Spaces, and Monuments in the Poetry of the First Century BC (2012) 57–76. For the example of the role of a pastoral literary landscape and its function in Heroides 4 see Bolton C.M., “Gendered Spaces in Ovid’s Heroides”, The Classical World 102. 3 (2009) 273–290 (278–280). 52 Barton “The Georgics off the Canadian Coast”. 53 The Georgics’ laudes Italiae (II.136–176) and laus ruris (II.245–540) are the loci classici for this approach to the natural world in the text.

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first Golden Age was always better for Virgil when guided by a human hand.54 Indeed, human hands in the time of Augustus might put the glories of another Golden Age under the emperor within reach. So in Lescarbot, the natural landscapes of la Nouvelle France are wonderful, their scenery amazing and their soils fecund, yet Canada in its current state is not yet perfect. Only with the continued attention of mankind (here, the French) might the conditions of a Golden Age return. The second of these levels of meaning for which the note of ambiguity guides a reader’s interpretation of our works is, as readers will now perhaps have remarked, a direct emphasis of our authors’ arguments in their works: If, for Lescarbot, la Nouvelle France is already an Arcadian paradise, as the majority of his lines in our first reading appeared to indicate, why should the Old France send any further settlers to work the land, without the indication of elements of the landscape which require improvement? Similarly for Le Brun, what in the bleak, torrid and desperate landscapes of his first book’s Nova Gallia should attract the sympathy (or energy) from potentates in France, without addressing the potential benefits of the region as a whole? In both cases, the ambiguity introduced to the texts by our authors, while they at first glance appear contradictory or weak at best, thus in fact shore up the poets’ rhetorical positions. In his influential discussion of Canadian literature’s engagement with the natural world mentioned at the beginning of this paper, Northrop Frye identified the two traditions of landscape imagery which his contemporary Leo Marx had also seen in early American writing.55 As we have seen, again, Lawrence Buell more recently reconfirmed the importance of these two “pastorals” for the beginning of this North American tradition. But in his summary of specifically vernacular Canadian writing, Frye appears to go one tantalising step further: The two aspects of the pastoral tradition we have been tracing are not inconsistent with each other; rather they are complementary.56 While the paragraphs that follow this sentence in Frye’s Conclusion seem to drift away from the clarity of its assertion, its accuracy when applied to the early examples of Lescarbot and Le Brun is nonetheless striking. If Frye, in his 54 Virgil famously puts cultivated nature above wild fertility at Georgics II.35–37. 55 Frye, “Conclusion” 246, ‘At one pole of experience there is a fusion of human life and the life in nature; at the opposite pole is the identity of the sinister and terrible elements in nature with the death-wish in man.’ 56 Frye, “Conclusion” 246.

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work as Canadian literary historian, rarely looked back to the early French literature produced in the country (and even more rarely to contemporary Latin works composed about the region from France) for the seeds of the literary representation of the natural landscape he finds in blossom in later literature, his interpretations of this tradition’s flowers is nevertheless remarkably precise: Lescarbot and Le Brun’s literary representations of the Canadian landscape in their poetry demonstrates a notable and productive ambiguity when compared to each other – both authors achieved their literary goals with very different primary depictions of the natural environment in la Nouvelle-France. The ambiguity they then also introduced into the landscapes of their own respective works (Lescarbot the shadows into his Port-Royal Arcadia, and Le Brun the light into his initial forest dystopia) in fact complemented the aims of their writing and completed the hermeneutic circle for readers interpreting their works. Bibliography Atwood M., Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto: 1972). Atwood M., Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (Oxford: 1995). Barton W.M., “The Georgics off the Canadian Coast: Marc Lescarbot’s A-dieu à la Nouvelle-France (1609) and the Virgilian Tradition”, in Freer N. – Xinyue B. (eds.), Reflections and New Perspectives on Virgil’s Georgics (London: 2019) 155–163. Berry L., “The Delights of Nature in This New World: A Seventeenth Century Canadian View of the Environment”, in in Warkentin G. – Podruchny C. (eds.), Decentring the Renaissance. Canada and Europe in Multidisciplinary Perspective 1500–1700 (Toronto: 2001) 223–235. Biron M. – Dumont F. – Nardout-Lafarge É., Histoire de la littérature québécoise (Montreal, QC: 2007). Blackburn C., Harvest of Souls: The Jesuit Missions and Colonialism in North America 1632–1650 (Montreal, QC – London – Ithaca, NY: 2000). Blodgett E.D., “Reports from la Nouvelle-France: the Jesuit Relations, Marie de l’Incarnation and Élisabeth Bégon”, in Howells C.A. – Kröller E.-M. (eds.), The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature (Cambridge: 2009) 29–46. Buell L., The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA – London: 1995). Cartier J., Brief recit, et succincte narration, de la nauigation faicte es ysles de Canada, Hochelage et Saguenay et autres, auec particulieres meurs, langaige et cerimonies des habitans d’icelles: fort delectable à veoir (Paris, Ponce Roffet dict Faucher et Anthoine le Clerc frères: 1545).

LANDSCAPE DESCRIPTION IN TWO EARLY MODERN POEMS ON NEW FRANCE 285 Champlain Samuel de, Les voyages de la Nouuelle France occidentale, dicte Canada, faits par le sr. de Champlain Xainctongeois, capitaine pour le roy en la marine du Ponant, & toutes les descouuertes qu’il a faites en ce païs depuis l’an 1603 iusques en l’an 1629 (Paris, Claude Collet: 1632). Chinard G., L’Amerique et le rêve exotique dans la littérature française au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: 1913). Cottier J.-F., “Écrits latins en Nouvelle-France (1608–1763): premier état de la question”, Tangence 92 (2010) 9–26. Flanders B. “‘Omne patens’: Reading Narrative Space in Ovid’s Heroides”, Hermathena 193 (2012) 57–76. Frye N., “Conclusion”, in Klink C.F., Literary History of Canada (Toronto: 1965; reprint Toronto: 1971) 213–251; 821–849. Gifford T., Pastoral (London – New York: 1999). Goddard P.A., “Canada in Seventeenth-Century Jesuit Thought: Backwater or Opportunity” in Warkentin G. – Podruchny C. (eds.), Decentring the Renaissance. Canada and Europe in Multidisciplinary Perspective 1500–1700 (Toronto: 2001) 186–199. Laflèche G., “Literature on New France”, in Nischik R.M. (ed.), History of Literature in Canada: English-Canadian and French-Canadian (Rochester, NY: 2008) 48–66. Le Brun Laurent, Nova Gallia Delphino (Paris, Jean Camusat: 1639). Le Brun Laurent, Franciados libri II, in Laurentus Le Brun Nannetensis […] Ecclesiastes Salmonis paraphrasi poetica explicatus (Rouen, Jean Le Boullenger: 1650) 199–245; idem (Paris, Sebastian Cramoisy: 1653) 199–249. Le Brun Laurent, De Ponto, sive Canadensi barbarie et epistolae Heriodum, in Virgilius Christianus (Paris, Simeon Piget: 1661) 455–502. Lehmann H., “Die Physiognomie der Landschaft”, Studium Generale 3.4/5 (1950) 182–195. Lescarbot Marc, L’Histoire de la Nouvelle-France contenant les navigations, découvertes, & habitations faites par les François és Indes Occidentales et Nouvelle-France souz l’avœu et autorité de noz Rois Tres-Chrétiens et les diverses fortunes d’iceux en l’execution de ces choses, depuis cents ans jusques à hui (Paris, Jean Millot: 1609); idem (Paris, Jean Millot: 1611). Lescarbot Marc, L’Histoire de la Nouvelle-France contenant les navigations, découvertes, & habitations faites par les François és Indes Occidentales et Nouvelle-France souz l’avœu et autorité de noz Rois Tres-Chrétiens et les diverses fortunes d’iceux en l’execution de ces choses, depuis cents ans jusques à hui. En quoy est comprise l’histoire morale, naturele & geographicques des provinces cy décrites: avec les tables et figures necessaires (Paris, Adrian Perier: 1617). Lescarbot Marc, Les Muses de la Nouvelle-France (Paris, Adrian Perier: 1618).

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Lescarbot Marc, Poésies et opuscules sur la Nouvelle-France, ed. M.-C. Pioffet – I. Lachance (Montreal: 2014). Marx L., The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: 1964; reprint 2000). McGowan M.M., Ovid in Exile: Power and Poetic Redress in the Tristia and Epistulae Ex Ponto (Leiden – Boston: 2009). Melzer S., “The Role of Culture and Art in France’s Colonial Strategy of the Seventeenth Century” in Bernier M.A. – Donato C. – Lüsebrink H.-J. (eds.), Jesuit Accounts of the Colonial Americas (Toronto: 2014) 169–185. Montaigne Michel de, Les Essais ed. J. Balsamo – C. Magnien-Simonin – M. Magnien (Paris: 2007). [Nicholas Louis S.J.], Codex canadensis (c.1700), Gilcrease Museum, MS Archive accession no. 4726.7. O’Brien P., “La Franciade de Le Brun: Poétique ovidienne de l’exil en Nouvelle France”, Tangence 99 (2012) 38–60. O’Brien P., “‘Si potes exemplo moveri, non propriore potes’: Emotional Reciprocity in Laurent Le Brun’s Nova Gallia”, in Haskell Y. – Garrod R., Changing Hearts: Performing Jesuit Emotions between Europe, Asia and the Americas (Leiden: 2019) 147–166. Pfeiffer T., Marc Lescarbot: pionnier de la Nouvelle-France (Paris: 2012). Pieper C., “Polyvalent Tomi: Ovid’s Landscape of Relegation and the Romanization of the Black Sea Region”, in McInerney J. – Sluiter I. (eds.), Valuing Landscape in Classical Antiquity. (Leiden – Boston: 2016) 408–430. Pioffet M.-C., “La Nouvelle-France dans l’imaginaire jésuite: terra doloris ou Jérusalem celeste?”, in Bernier M.A. – Donato C. – Lüsebrink H.-J. (eds.), Jesuit Accounts of the Colonial Americas (Toronto: 2014) 326–343. Rochemonteix C. de, Un college de jésuites aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: Le Collège Henri IV de la Flèche, 4 vols. (Le Mans: 1889). Sagard Gabriel O.M.R., Histoire du Canada et voyages que les freres mineurs recollects y ont faicts pour la conversion des infidelles (Paris, Claude Sonnius: 1636). Serres Olivier de, Le Théâtre d’agriculture et mesnage des champs (Iamet Métayer, Paris: 1600). Simmel G., “Philosophie der Landschaft”, in Kramme R. – Rammstedt A. (eds.), Georg Simmel. Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1909–1918 (Frankfurt: 2001) 471–482. Sommervogel C., Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus, 11 vols. (Paris: 1890–1932). Vallières M., “Québec (ville)”, in Graves B. (ed.), l’Encyclopédie Canadienne (Historica Canada: 2018). Weber H.-K., Die Literarische Landschaft. Zur Geschichte ihrer Entdeckung von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Berlin – New York: 2010).

LANDSCAPE DESCRIPTION IN TWO EARLY MODERN POEMS ON NEW FRANCE 287 Westra H., “Farewell to Canada: Marc Lescarbot’s A-dieu à La Nouvelle-France (1607). Essay & Translation”, Numéro Cinq (December 2015). Available online: http:// numerocinqmagazine.com/2015/12/11/farewell-to-canada-marc-lescarbots-a-dieu -a-la-nouvelle-france-1607-essay-translation-haijo-westra/.

part 3 Constructions of Artificial Landscapes: Gardens, Villegiatura, Ruins

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chapter 10

Hermeneutics and the Early Modern Garden: Ingenuity, Sociability, Education Denis Ribouillault 1

Historiography

The question of meaning in landscape architecture and gardens has benefited considerably from the iconological approach developed for art history by Aby Warburg and Erwin Panofsky. The most important contributions were produced by students of Panofsky, notably David Coffin, who published his monograph on the Villa d’Este at Tivoli in 1960, and Elizabeth Blair McDougall, who wrote her dissertation on the Villa Mattei in Rome. Coffin taught and inspired a new generation of scholars such as Claudia Lazzaro for Italian Renaissance gardens and Jan de Jongh for early modern Dutch gardens. Italian and German scholars (Eugenio Battisti, Marcello Fagiolo, Maria Luisa Madonna, Detlef Heikamp, Karl Schwager, among others) also embraced the iconological approach, studying the garden within a broader cultural and literary context bringing to the fore the question of its meaning.1 The idea that the garden was designed with a specific programme became a central idea. David Coffin showed convincingly that the design of the Villa d’Este gardens rested on the figure of Hercules and his Choice at the Crossroads: ‘The gardens […] present the theme of the choice of Hercules between Voluptas, represented by the Grotto of Venus, and Virtue, exemplified by the Grotto of Diana. It is possible even that the general layout of the gardens may have been conditioned by this subject. Hercules’s choice was symbolized by the Pythagorean Y, since, after pursuing a straight uneventful path of life, a youth when he came of age had to choose between

1 On the historiography of gardens, especially early modern Italian gardens, see Coffin D.R., “The Study of the History of the Italian Garden until the First Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium”, in Conan M. (ed.), Perspectives on Garden Histories (Washington, D.C.: 1999) 27–36; Beneš M., “Recent Developments and Perspectives in the Historiography of Italian Gardens”, in ibid. 37–76; ibidem, “Methodological Changes in the Study of Italian Gardens from the 1970s to the 1990s: A Personal Itinerary”, in Beneš M. – Lee M.G. (eds.), Clio in the Italian Garden. Twenty-First-Century Studies in Historical Methods and Theoretical Perspectives (Washington, D.C.: 2011) 17–54.

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the diverging paths of Virtue or Vice as Hercules did’.2 This narrative culminated in the fresco decoration of the villa, with the Banquet of the Gods and the Apotheosis of Hercules painted on the ceilings of the main reception rooms.3 Such narratives were, so to speak, ‘activated’ by the visitors’ own movements within the garden. For MacDougall, ‘The gardens after the 1520’s consisted of a series of successive spaces, isolated from each other physically and visually. They could only be experienced through movement, and the relationship between spectator and garden became active rather than passive. […] it might be termed a form of narrative with continuity provided by the spectator confronting different experiences in time succession’.4 In the same vein, Claudia Lazzaro provided a reading of the gardens of Villa Lante at Bagnaia based on the mythical history of the relationship between nature and art. The visitor, moving through a specific itinerary, metaphorically travels from the informal landscape of the Golden Age evoked in the barco to the landscape of the Age of Jupiter suggested by the formal parterres in front of the main palazzina. But the order of progression could be reversed, she argues, ‘from park to garden, nature is transformed into art; from garden to park, art with greater subtlety counterfeits her competitor, nature’.5 These interpretations are not without problems, however, and alternative readings have been proposed that are legitimate, too. Marcello Fagiolo and Maria Luisa Madonna disagree with Coffin’s moral reading of the garden at Tivoli, stressing the fact that the Pythagorean Y he identifies as the defining ‘moment’ in the garden’s narrative leads to several other grottoes. Furthermore, they argue that Diana and Venus here are both positive deities, thus undermining the oppositional nature of the Herculean landscape metaphor.6 In contrast with Lazzaro’s argument, Carla Benocci provided a religious interpretation

2 Coffin D., The Villa d’Este at Tivoli (Princeton: 1960) 82. 3 Following Coffin, Villa d’Este; see Conan M., “Landscape Metaphors and Metamorphosis of Time”, in idem (ed.), Landscape Design and the Experience of Motion (Washington, D.C.: 2003) 287–317; Ribouillault D., “Le Salone de la Villa d’Este à Tivoli: un théâtre des jardins et du territoire”, Studiolo 3 (2005) 65–94; and idem, “Toward an Archaeology of the Gaze: The Perception and Function of Garden Views in Italian Renaissance Villas”, in Beneš – Lee (eds.), Clio in the Italian Garden 203–232, esp. 213–217. 4 MacDougall E.B., “Ars Hortulorum: Sixteenth Century Garden Iconography and Literary Theory in Italy”, in Coffin D. (ed.), The Italian Garden (Washington D.C.: 1972) 37–59, here 46. 5 Lazzaro-Bruno C., “The Villa Lante at Bagnaia: An Allegory of Art and Nature”, The Art Bulletin 59.4 (1977) 553–560, here 560. 6 Barisi I. – Fagiolo M. – Madonna M.L., Villa d’Este (Rome: 2003) 86–90.

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of the garden of Bagnaia, based on the image of the gridiron of San Lorenzo evoked by the design of the main lower parterre of the formal giardino.7 Thus, some gardens have become interpretative playgrounds or perhaps battlegrounds for garden iconologists. For instance, more than any other, the now famous Sacro Bosco at Bomarzo has been the subject of countless interpretations. Many of them are extremely valuable and have helped clarified one or several specific aspects of this fascinating place, but none is regarded as the definite answer to its many puzzles. Scholars have posited that its main interest lies precisely in the indeterminate nature of its meaning, calling for an hermeneutical effort on the part of the visitor. Marcello Fagiolo called Bomarzo ‘La villa delle contradizioni’ and Anne Bélanger wrote a whole book on this interpretative challenge, entitled Les incertitudes de la lecture.8 Luke Morgan’s recent study of the garden stresses quite rightly in conclusion that ‘the inherent openness of the garden precludes the possibility of interpretative closure or definitiveness’. Invoking Umberto Eco’s idea of the open work of art, gardens, he writes, ‘enable multiple and varying (even contradictory) experiences and interpretations. […] the search for a text that explains the sequence and meaning of the wood in detail may be futile. Rather, meaning should probably be conceived as constantly reconstructed by the individual visitor who is a collaborator in the wood’s signification’.9 We have here, I believe, a good example of the ‘hermeneutic circle’ dear to Heidegger, Gadamer and Ricoeur.10 Whereas this kind of statement has the important virtue of recalling the sensual and playful dimension of the garden versus its intellectual side – certainly overemphasized by the iconological approach11 – the fact remains that such 7 Benocci C., Villa Lante a Bagnaia: tra Cinquecento e Seicento; la chiesa in forma di villa (Viterbo: 2010). 8 Fagiolo M., “Bomarzo, la villa delle contraddizioni”, in Vezzosi A. (ed.), Il Giardino d’Europa: Pratolino come modello nella cultura europea (Milan: 1986) 69–70; and Bélanger A., Bomarzo ou les incertitudes de la lecture: figure de la meraviglia dans un jardin maniériste du XVIe siècle (Paris: 2007), esp. 107–111. 9 Morgan L., “Living Rocks and Petrified Giants in Vicino Orsini’s Sacro Bosco”, Architectural Theory Review 20.1 (2015) 7–29, esp. 21–22; and Eco U., The Open Work, trans. A. Cangogni (Cambridge, MA: 1989). 10 Grondin J., “The Hermeneutical Circle”, in Keane N. – Lawn C. (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Hermeneutics (2016), https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118529812.ch34 [accessed 5 March 2019]. 11 See, for instance, Treib M. (ed.), Meaning in Landscape Architecture & Gardens: Four Essays, Four Commentaries (London – New York: 2011), essays by Jane Gillette, Laurie Olin, Marc Treib and Susan Herrington; also see my review of the book in Les Carnets du paysage 23 (automne 2012) 231–233.

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a conclusion can be disappointing to garden historians. In short, should we stop interpreting?12 Have all interpretations the same value? Evidently not, lest we risk licensing the one I recently encountered, which asks with apparent seriousness why the gardens of Versailles were designed as a secret portrait of Mickey Mouse [Fig. 10.1].13 How then should we enter the ‘hermeneutic circle’ in the right way, to borrow Heidegger’s famous phrase? How can we develop ‘authentic’ and more accurate projects of understanding? I will here insist, albeit very briefly, on three points which form the subtitle of this essay: ingenuity, sociability and education. Each seems to me to represent a fruitful direction for future research. 2

Ingenuity

First, one should look more broadly at how understanding, discourse and interpretation were produced or performed during the early modern period. The strength of Anne Bélanger’s book, for instance, is to introduce within the equation the concept of meraviglia as defined by the Renaissance philosopher Francesco Patrizi in his Della poetica (1586), where Longinus’s On the Sublime is discussed extensively.14 According to Patrizi, meraviglia is obtained by means of a combination of words and images that are logically incompatible with each other, and by presenting the impossible under an appearance of verisimilitude and coherence. The dialectic tension by such a combination of opposites provokes the beholder’s astonishment and marvel. Bélanger indicates that the small leaning house found within the garden is a typical example of 12 Contributions to the subject of garden hermeneutics in English and French include Francis M. – Hester R.T. (eds.), The Meaning of Gardens. Idea, Place and Action (Cambridge, MA – London: 1990); Ross S., What Gardens Mean (Chicago: 1998); Nys P., Le jardin exploré: une herméneutique du lieu (Besançon: 1999); Hunt J.D., Greater Perfections. The Practice of Garden Theory (London – Philadelphia: 2000); idem, The Afterlife of Gardens (London – Philadelphia: 2004); idem, “Stourhead Revisited and the Pursuit of Meaning in Gardens”, Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes 26.4 (2006) 328– 341; and Chomarat-Ruiz C., “Le sens des jardins: une question embarrassante”, Projets de paysage 6 (2011), https://www.projetsdepaysage.fr/_le_sens_des_jardins_une_question _embarrassante_ [accessed 12 June 2019]. 13 Mortimer L., Miqué ou les oreilles de Dieu (Montorgueil: 1993); and idem, “Les jardins du château de Versailles. Un paysage”, Inter 70 (1998) 12–15. Although one can detect a measure of irony à la Duchamp concerning this artist’s ‘discovery’, such sensational piece of news has, of course, been largely diffused on the internet; see https://youtu.be/ 7QhD4aB1Zno [accessed 28 June 2019]. 14 Patrizi Francesco, Della poetica (Ferrara, V. Baldini: 1586).

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figure 10.1

Plan of the gardens of Versailles revealing the face of Mickey Mouse. Front cover of Lafcadio Mortimer, Miqué ou les oreilles de Dieu, Montorgueil, Collection Pansémiotique, 1993 Photo: BNF/Gallica

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figure 10.2 Sphinx, Sacro Bosco, Bomarzo, ca. 1560–1584 Photo: Wikimedia Commons

this. ‘On its external wall the visitor reads the inscription ‘while resting, the soul grows wiser’, but the house is visibly tilted and provokes the visitor’s vertigo more than allowing him to rest’.15 At Bomarzo, the figure of the sphinx is another telling example of the hermeneutic game to which the garden visitor was invited to participate [Fig. 10.2]. Originally placed as a pair near the casa pendente or leaning house, one of the sphinxes is associated with an inscription that addresses the visitor directly: ‘You who enter here, put your mind to it part by part, and tell me if these many wonders were made by trickery or by art [“tu ch’entri qua pon mente / parte a parte / et dimmi poi se tante / maraviglie / sien fatte per inganno / o pur per arte”]’. For Pierio Valeriano writing in his Hieroglyphica (1556), the Sphinx is a symbol of the secret. It recalls that higher truths should be made enigmatic in order to preserve them from being understood by the vulgar. It also stands for acuteness and subtlety of mind, since nothing secret or hidden cannot be 15 I quote from the review of the book by Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto, “Bomarzo ou les incertitudes de la lecture: Figure de la meraviglia dans un jardin maniériste du XVIe siècle (review)”, Renaissance Quarterly 61.4 (2008) 1261–1262.

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discovered by human ingenuity.16 Before the Council of Trent, such ideas were particularly important for princes, who indulged in the emblematic and esoteric games so crucial for understanding the garden of Bomarzo. The capacity to unveil the true meaning of an image, an object or a place was seen as a clear manifestation of power. This is expressed, for instance, by Giambattista della Porta in his treatise on natural magic: ‘very high things, worthy of great princes, we had it veiled with some light artifice, for instance reporting the words, we have deleted some, especially those that could hurt and bring a curse to someone, but not so much obscured that an ingenious mind cannot discover them and use them, nor so clearly that every ignorant and vulgar person could understand them’.17 Closely associated with the idea of meraviglia or wonder, the notion of ingenuity or ingegno, also defined in English as ‘wit’, is thus especially useful when trying to uncover the social dimension of the participatory hermeneutic practice that took place in early modern gardens.18 Besides enigmatic images, the depiction of ingenious hydraulic devices and other curiosities in the garden room of a villa was also considered appropriate. Paolo Cortesi wrote in his De cardinalatu that they ‘sharpen[ed] the intelligence and […] foster[ed] the cultivation of the mind’. He writes: ‘[…] the more subtle the mathematical principle with which a picture accords, the more learned [that picture] must be thought to be, as in the case of something pictured in the manner of a hydraulic or cthesibian machine, in which is found a more subtle method of reasoning […].19 A century later, a letter by the diplomat and poet Fulvio Testi 16 Valeriano Giovan Pietro Pierio, Les hiéroglyphiques de Ian-Pierre Valerian (Lyon, Paul Frellon: 1615) 75. The book, already finished in the 1520s, was first published in 1556. 17 Porta Giambattista della, Della magia naturale libri XX (Naples, Gio. Iacomo Carlino – Costantino Vitale: 1611 [lat. ed. 1589]), preface: ‘[…] le cose altissime, e degne di grandissimi Principi, l’habbiam velate con qualche leggiero artificio, come trasponendo le parole, togliendone alcune, e massime in quelle cose che potevano portar danno, e maleficio al prossimo, ma non talmente oscurata, ch’un ingegnoso non la possa scoprire, e servirsene, ne tanto chiaramente, ch’ogni ignorante, e vil huomo le possa intendere’. On secrecy and power, see further Morel P., “Secret, hermétisme et pouvoir d’État dans l’art médicéen de la fin du XVIe siècle”, in Dujardin P. (ed.), Le secret (Lyon: 1987) 31–62. 18 I have developed some of the ideas in this section in “Ingenuity in the Garden. From the Poetics of Grafting to Divine Mathematics”, in Oosterhoff R. – Marcaida J.R. – Marr A. (eds.) Ingenuity in the Making: Matter and Technique in Early Modern Europe (Pittsburgh: forthcoming). 19 For the full passage from which this excerpt comes, see D’Amico J.F. – Weil-Garris K., “The Renaissance Cardinal’s Ideal Palace: A Chapter from Paolo Cortesi’s De Cardinalatu”, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 35 (1980) 95–96: ‘Atque idem fere est aestiuorum tricliniorum describendorum modus, in quo genere eo est pictura putanda litteratior quo subtiliori mathematica ratione constat, ut siquid modo spectetur hydraulica aut

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describing the experience of his visit to the Medici gardens at Pratolino shows that the display of wit had become a tool of magnificence: The number of marvels confuses the intellect and the abundance of subjects deprives the mind of concepts and speech. The entrance [at the bottom of the garden] is open on one plane, but instantly the perspective of the palace presents itself to the eyes, [this palace] being so high that it seems that it has its foundation in the sky. One climbs to it through alleys shaded by very old trees, and there are four platforms to catch one’s breath. But even during these successive breaks, the eye cannot stay idle, because the quantity of statues, fountains, and objects always new drain the eyes and exhaust the spirit (‘affaticano lo sguardo e stancano l’ingegno’).20 For Testi, the overabundance of ingenious devices and works of art displayed in the garden provokes a kind of vertigo, both physical and intellectual. For a professional courtier like him, such hyperbolic insistence on the limitations of body, sight and mind of the garden visitor also functions as a way of praising the garden’s owner, whose privileged vision from above, in the almost ‘heavenly’ palace, is akin to that of an omniscient god. We are not far here from the ecstatic experience of a Longinian sublime evoked by the philosopher Francesco de’ Vieri in his rich and complex exegesis of the garden, the Discorsi delle maravigliose opere di Pratolino, & d’Amore, published in 1586: ‘in Pratolino […] there are so many stupendous artifices in occult places that he who would see them all together would enter into a state of ecstasy’.21

cthesibica machinatione pictum in quo ratio subtilior considerandi sit. […] Eodemque modo in hoc genere aenigmatum apologorumque descriptio probatur qua ingenium interpretando acuitur fitque mens litterata descriptio eruditior’. The question of the interpretation of pictures is again addressed in a passage regarding chapel decoration; see ibid. 92–93 and 113. 20 Letter to Cesare d’Este, 17 October 1620, in Testi Fulvio, Lettere (1609–1633), ed. M.L. Doglio (Bari: 1967) letter 28, 22: ‘Il numero delle maraviglie confonde l’intelletto e l’abbondanza de’ suggetti fa sterile la mente di concetti e di parole. L’entrata di lui è posta in piano, ma di subbito si rappresenta all’occhio la prospettiva del palagio il quale sta così in alto che par quasi ch’egli abbia i fondamenti nell’aria. A questo si sale per alcune strade ombrose d’antichissime piante e quattro sono i piani ove si può trar fiato. Ma né in questi alternati riposi l’occhio sa stare ozioso imperocché la quantità delle statue e delle fontane con oggetti sempre nuovi affaticano lo sguardo e stancano l’ingegno’. 21 Vieri Francesco de’, Discorsi delle Maravigliose Opere di Pratolino e d’Amore (Florence, Giorgio Marescotti: 1586) 64: ‘In Pratolino … sono tanti e tanti artifizii stupendi in luoghi occulti, che chi gli vedessi tutti insieme se n’andrebbe in estasi’.

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Sociability

The process of giving meaning to and in a garden is generally addressed in the literature as if the garden visitor were alone, a sort of promeneur solitaire ‘à la Rousseau’. But, contrary to the almost narcissistic introspection characteristic of the Rêveries, we know that early modern gardens were more often than not visited by groups of people, exchanging views, sharing knowledge, discussing and debating. For instance, Agostino Del Riccio recalls that the complex hydraulic devices and automata in the great aristocratic gardens of Florence, Bagnaia, Caprarola and Rome attracted ‘many virtuous men, youths as well as women and young girls’, who, when leaving the gardens, often discussed among themselves the wonders they had seen (‘[…] et quando escono de’ giardini di quelli, sovente ragionano fra loro’).22 Ragionare here means ‘reasoning’, producing a discourse that is not closed and predetermined. It indicates a process, a dialogue – where, one should insist, women and girls play their full part – that also defines the whole tradition of villa literature. Cicero initiated this tradition of so-called villa dialogues (the Renaissance equivalent would be Ragionamenti) whereby the villa and its garden are essentially places for the cultivation of the mind, beneficial to theoretical debates and especially important for politicians in charge of the affairs of the State.23 For Cicero, looking back at the Greek Academies and their gardens, villas were places to stimulate philosophical thinking and poetic imagination. This idea will continue to inform garden culture well beyond the Renaissance.24 Looking at sociability and mobilizing the central concept of conversazione thus complicate the picture David Coffin drew some decades ago regarding the accessibility of gardens in the Italian Renaissance.25 Coffin studied inscribed plaques addressed to a general audience welcoming visitors and prescribing 22

Detlef Heikamp, “Agostino del Riccio, Del giardino di un re”, in Ragionieri G. (ed.), Il giardino storico italiano: Problemi di indagine, fonti letterarie e storiche (Florence, Leo S. Olschki: 1981) 94–95: ‘Io son ito più volte considerando che molti virtuosi huomini e giovani, altre[sì] donne attempate et donzelle che vanno a vedere i giardini de’ signori Duchi, Regi et tutti, purché si dilettino di certe piacevolezze e strumenti […] là dove vanno tutti i popoli a vederli et con gran maraviglia son considerati, et quando escono de’ giardini di quelli, sovente ragionano fra loro […]’. 23 Agache S., “La villa comme image de soi”, in Galand-Hallyn P. – Lévy C. (eds.), La villa et l’univers familial dans l’antiquité et à la Renaissance (Paris: 2008) 15–44, here 36–38. 24 See further Ribouillault D., “Hortus academicus: les académies de la Renaissance et le jardin”, in Jakob M. (ed.), Des jardins et des livres, exh. cat., Bodmer Foundation (Geneva: 2018) 23–34. 25 See Coffin D., “The ‘Lex Hortorum’ and Access to Gardens of Latium during the Renaissance”, The Journal of Garden History 2.3 (1982) 201–232; also in his Gardens and Gardening in Papal Rome (Princeton: 1990), chap. 14, 244–257.

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behavior in some important Roman gardens such as the Villa Giulia or Villa Medici. Although visitors could visit the gardens freely on occasion, these leges hortorum, literally ‘laws of the gardens’, should not be taken at face value, however. Not everybody could enter aristocratic gardens, and recent research indicates that, often, the owners of the gardens themselves or specific members of the households – generally a secretary or majordomo – were in charge of guiding visits through the gardens. In this light, the romantic idea of a free subject giving meaning to the garden without any guidance appears more and more anachronistic. At the end of his description of the Villa Giulia in Rome, addressed to the humanist Marco Benavides, Bartolomeo Ammannati reveals that guides were paid by the owner: ‘the great good nature and generosity of the most distinguished signore Baldovino, brother and heir [of Julius III] […] makes any thing of beauty that I have described to you possible, and draws one’s attention to it, by means of men there whom he pays’.26 The presence of guides is also attested for the famous gardens of Cardinal Rodolfo Pio da Carpi, who possessed one of the most impressive collections of ancient statues in Renaissance Rome. The description by two French travelers to the gardens at Pratolino in 1588, Discours viatiques qui décrivent une visite à Pratolino, also mentions the presence of a guide, quite likely the custodian of the villa, although the description mentions him as the châtelain. Clearly, he was not intellectually equipped to reveal to the two foreigners the meaning of all the marvels in the gardens. Several passages reveal the difficulty they experienced in orientating themselves or identifying the subjects of the fountains. The famous Apenine by Giambologna is described as a great and big savage (‘un grand et gros sauvage’), and the Syrinx in the Grotto of Pan is wrongly identified as Daphne.27 In baroque Rome, we see the professionalization of this activity progressively taking place. The majordomo and court poet of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, Lelio Guidiccioni, reportedly guided visitors through the indoor and outdoor spaces of the Villa Borghese, whose collections he helped substantially to assemble and which 26 Stenhouse W., “Visitors, Display, and Reception in the Antiquity Collections of LateRenaissance Rome”, Renaissance Quarterly 58.2 (2005) 397–434: 409; quoted in Falk T., “Studien zur Topographie und Geschichte der Villa Giulia in Rom”, Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 13 (1971) 102–178, here 173: ‘[…] la somma cortesia e bontà dell’ Ill.mo signor Baldovino fratello et erede […] fa fare, e monstrare, da gli huomini, che per questo vi sono salariati, quanto di bello vi ho descritto’. 27 Discours viatiques de Paris à Rome et de Rome à Naples et Sicile (1588–1589), ms. Aix-en-Provence, Bibliothèque Méjanes, Ms. 222 R 424, fols. 31v–35v; edited and annotated in Brunon H., Pratolino: art des jardins et imaginaire de la nature dans l’Italie de la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle, PhD diss., Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne, 2001 [digital edition accessible online (2008)] 798–803.

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he compares to the Hesperides.28 Because of his poetic skill and talent as an orator, he was invited in March 1628 to welcome Grand duke Ferdinando II de’ Medici and his brother Carlo, and to illustrate ‘signas ac tabulas pictas, quibus ea villa referta est’.29 Guidiccioni belonged to a time when the display of wit and connoisseurship had become increasingly significant within society, all the more in the gardens of powerful aristocrats and cardinals. Gusto, an appreciation of proper beauty conducive to a harmonious relationship with God, became a new token of nobility, as Marc Fumaroli and others have shown.30 A real competition ensued, which was already palpable in elite circles during the second half of the sixteenth century. In a letter of 1563, written by Annibal Caro to the nobleman Torquato Conti, concerning the design of the gardens of the Villa Catena at Poli, the humanist clearly states that his inventions (stravaganze) were intended to outwit those of the Sacro Bosco at Bomarzo.31 Patrons themselves were eager to display their wit within an appropriate circle of powerful friends and letterati. In 1624, Cardinal Del Monte received Cardinal de’ Medici and other Florentine noblemen in his Roman garden on the banks of the Tiber: ‘Cardinal Del Monte held a banquet yesterday morning in his garden near Ripetta, […] with great splendor, and copious delicate seasonal food, courses with ice [statues?], celebratory ornaments, and most exquisite statues; and besides entertaining them with music and song by the foremost virtuosi in Rome, provided them with great gusto by showing them his distilleries, geometric devices, and many other curiosities in which His Lordship delights greatly’.32 Fulvio Testi, whom we already met in the gardens at Pratolino, described the various activities that took place during a sojourn at Tivoli hosted by Cardinal Alessandro d’Este in 1620. They included prayers, discourses, study, reading, games, poetic invention, musical concerts and of course walks through the gardens. During his stay, Testi seems to have appreciated in particular the ingenuity of the hydraulic fountains and the floral sundial that once occupied a parterre in the lower part of the garden.33 28 Ehrlich T., Landscape and Identity in Early Modern Rome (Cambridge: 2002) 41–42; see Guidiccioni Lelio, Rime (Rome, Manelfo Manelfi: 1637) 244. 29 De Rossi Gian Vittorio [I.N. Erythreus], Pinacotheca altera (Cologne, Jodocus Kalkovius: 1645) 127–130, here 128. 30 Fumaroli M., L’âge de l’éloquence, rhétorique et “res literaria” de la Renaissance au seuil de l’époque classique (Geneva: 1980; reprint ed. 2002). 31 Ribouillault, Ingenuity in the Garden. 32 For this passage and other examples, see Dell’Antonio A., Listening as Spiritual Practice in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley – Los Angeles – London: 2011) 38–44. 33 Testi Fulvio, L’Arsinda overo La descendenza de’ Ser.mi Prencipi d’Este (Venice, Francesco Baba: 1652) 5. See also Pacifici V., “Luigi d’Este, chap. VIII. Villa d’Este”, Atti e memorie della Società tiburtina di storia e d’arte 17 (1937) 154–180, here 159.

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Thus, the hermeneutic activity that took place in the garden under the aegis of the patron very likely consisted of intellectual interaction and ‘shared experience’, strongly influenced by the Platonic and Ciceronian ideals of the ancient academies. 4

Education

Alessandro d’Este, by promoting this ideal, only continued the tradition established there by his predecessor, Cardinal Ippolito. Upon the death of Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, in 1572, the Tiburtine villa was appropriately described as ‘an accademia, a cenacolo, a teatro del mondo’.34 Yet it is not easy to imagine the precise nature of the interactions that took place in the gardens, and very little historical documentation seems to have survived. In 1569, Pirro Ligorio, the architect of the gardens, sent a series of sixteen drawings to Cardinal Ippolito on the life of the eponymous hero Hippolytus. The drawings were to be used to create a cycle of tapestries to adorn the walls of Villa d’Este. One of the scenes is relevant for our purpose: the education of Hippolytus [Fig. 10.3]. Pittheus shows his grandson Hippolytus two statues representing Diana and Pallas, clearly with an educational and moral purpose. Ligorio writes: ‘The painting depicts Pittheus explaining the significance of the image of Pallas and Diana, and showing [to Hippolytus] how virtue and the liberal arts are of great use to man, especially when they are accompanied by the attributes of Diana, hunting, chastity and honest repute, which were very dear to Hippolytus; and this is the sum of the morality of the painting’.35 The image, though not set in the gardens, offers a plausible framework for imagining how statues and objects were understood within a garden setting, that is, with reference to a strong pedagogical and moral framework in praise of the patron’s virtue. Like the images that anchored the ars praedicandi, images in the villa functioned as exempla that called up topical issues, imprinting them forcefully in the memory, as Lina Bolzoni has demonstrated in her analysis of Ligorio’s drawing.36 34 Ribouillault, Le Salone de la Villa d’Este. 35 Quoted in Koering J., “La visite programmée. Le rôle de l’orateur dans la réception des grands décors”, in Hochmann M. et al. (eds.), Programme et invention dans l’art de la Renaissance (Paris – Rome: 2008) 353–370, here 354: ‘Ordunque il presente quadro mostra come Pytheo dichiarò che cosa sia la imagine di Pallade e Diana, et l’aperse come la virtù, le arti liberali sono che grandemente giovano al huomo: et massimamente quando sono accompagnate con le cose di Diana che sono la caccia et la castità et la honesta fama la quale fu a Hippolyto di supremo giovamento, et questa è la somma de la moralità de la pittura […]’. On the series, see Coffin, The Villa d’Este, 72–75. 36 Koering, La visite programmée, 354; see Bolzoni L., La Stanza della memoria. Modelli letterari e iconografici nell’età della stampa (Turin: 1995) 235. On the ars praedicandi, about

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figure 10.3

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Pirro Ligorio, The Education of Hippolytus, in Life of Hippolytus / Virbius, fol. 6r, ca. 1568. Pen and brown ink, with brown and gray wash, over black chalk, on paper, 32.4 × 22.2 cm, New York, The Morgan Library and Museum, inv. 2006.22 Photo: The Morgan Library and Museum

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The pedagogical and moralistic function of images seems to have gained strength after the Council of Trent. By the mid-sixteenth century, writers on art were becoming increasingly critical of complex meanings in works of art. In 1550, Vasari lamented that no one was capable of understanding Giorgione’s fresco on the façade of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice: ‘Giorgione thought of nothing else than painting figures after his own fantasy in order to exhibit his talent; and, in truth, there are no historical scenes which have any special order or which represent the deeds of any distinguished person, either ancient or modern; and, as for me, I have never understood his figures, nor have I ever, in spite of all my questions, found anyone who did […]’.37 Perhaps as a result of the Venice-Florence rivalry, the Venetian Lodovico Dolce would go on to say the same thing about Michelangelo’s inventions,38 whilst Gabriele Paleotti wrote an entire chapter on the subject of ‘obscure paintings’ in his treatise on sacred art.39 This is true for gardens, too. After the Council of Trent, highly complex and enigmatic subjects generally based on the exegesis of ancient mythology were progressively replaced by more didactic programmes with strict moral intentions. A good example of this is the Casino of Pius IV in the Vatican Garden, where the hieroglyphic programme devised by Pirro Ligorio for the outer walls, the courtyard and the fountains of the Casino, based on the exegesis of ancient texts, gave way to the Christian programme of the inner rooms. This shift followed a similar one in the intellectual activities of the Accademia delle notti vaticane, which held their meetings on the premises under the aegis of Carlo Borromeo. As Marc Fumaroli states: ‘After 1563, his [Carlo Borromeo’s] ordination, and the closing of the Council of Trent, the Academy’s themes changed: discourses did not have Cicero, Livy or Lucretius as their subjects anymore, but rather, the Beatitudes and the Theological Virtues’.40

which there is an immense bibliography, see, for instance, Howard P., “Painters and the Visual Arts of Preaching: the ‘exemplum’ of the Fifteenth Century Frescoes in the Sistine Chapel”, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 13 (2010) 33–77. 37 Vasari G., Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori. Le Opere di Giorgio Vasari [Florence, 1568], vol. IV, ed. G. Milanesi (Florence, 1906). 96: ‘[…] non pensò se non a farvi figure a sua fantasia per mostrar l’arte; chè nel vero non si ritrova storie che abbino ordine o che rappresentino I fatti di nessuna persona segnalata o antica o moderna; ed io per me non l’ho mai intese, nè anche, per dimanda che si sia fatta, ho trovato chi l’intenda’. Also see Koering, La visite programmée, as cited in note 35 supra. 38 Ibidem; see Dolce L., Dialogo della pittura, intitulato l’Aretino [Venezia: 1557], in Barocchi P. (ed.), Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento (Rome – Bari: 1960) I 191. 39 See book II, chap. 33 of Paleotti G., Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images (1582), trans. W. McCuaig (Los Angeles: 2012) 251–254. 40 Fumaroli, L’âge de l’éloquence 136 (my translation).

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In the garden of the Jesuit noviciate of Sant’Andrea del Quirinale, novices took pilgrims around the garden and the Church of San Vitale to teach them the principles of the faith [Fig. 10.4]. Everything within the garden – statues, monuments, wall paintings, flowers and trees, even a sundial – could be used for exegetical lessons, in precise application of the four levels of Scriptural Exegesis: literal, tropological, allegorical and anagogical.41 Louis Richeome makes this abundantly clear in La peinture spirituelle, a work that has rightly been described as a ‘virtual guided tour’ of the garden and the buildings surrounding it. Richeome writes: I called it Spiritual Painting, as she is prince of various spiritual images (Tableaux) of Grace and nature, which are to be seen in this house; those, and by means of those, speaking to the novices, I try to help all these to be useful to their eyes and simple hearts, and to become gloriously great in the face of God, and wise in a Christian manner in their youth, teaching them through my small industry the way to philosophise well without great difficulty, and the art to recognise and admire God in all His works […].42 A similar pattern can be observed for non-religious gardens. The erudite Jesuit Emmanuele Tesauro, who became the preceptor to the young princes of the Savoy family, devised an ambitious programme for the garden of the Castel of Racconigi near Turin, remodelled around 1649–1650 by the architect Carlo Morello. The programme is presented in Tesauro’s most famous work Il Cannocchiale aristotelico, undeniably one if not the most important work on the concept of ingenuity and metaphor produced in baroque Italy.43 Tesauro explains that prince Tommaso wanted every corner of the rectangular parterres of the garden to be ornamented by some ‘mysterious statues’ set on their pedestals, for a total of 61. Tesauro’s idea for the programme derives from his observation that the garden, blooming with springtime flowers, looks like the 41 Richeome clearly applies this exegetical method for paintings in Tableaux sacrez des figures mystiques du tres-auguste sacrifice et sacrement de l’Eucharistie (Paris, Laurent Sonnius: 1609 [1st ed. 1601]). See further Lestringant F., “La promenade au jardin ou la peinture spirituelle du Père Richeome”, in Guillerm J.P. (ed.), Récits / tableaux (Lille: 1994) 81–102, here 85. 42 Richeome Louis, S.J., La peinture spirituelle ou L’art d’admirer aimer et louer Dieu en toutes ses œuvres, et tirer de toutes profit salutere (Lyon, P. Rigaud: 1611); translated in Witte A.A., The Artful Hermitage: The Palazzetto Farnese as a Counter-Reformation Diaeta (Rome: 2008) 102 et sq. 43 On Tesauro, ingenuity and metaphor, see especially Hersant Y. (trans. – ed.), La Métaphore baroque: d’Aristote à Tesauro. Extraits du ‘Cannocchiale aristotelico’ et autres textes (Paris: 2001).

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Attributed to Matthias Greuter, The Garden of the Jesuit Noviciate of Sant’Andrea al Quirinale, Rome, in Louis Richeome, Peinture spirituelle […], (Lyon, Pierre Rigaud: 1611) Photo: Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon

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sky bright with stars. His programme was intended to give form ( forma) to this simple metaphor in a grandiose scheme. The statues represented the seven planets, the twelve signs of the zodiac, 21 stars of the boreal hemisphere and 21 stars of the austral hemisphere. Each of the 61 statues was thus incorporated into an emblem, with an accompanying epigram that explains the mythological story of said planet or star and, finally, provides a moral reading as a useful tool for the conduct of a man’s life.44 The entire catalogue of 61 statues follows, with their respective mottos and moralistic poems. Tesauro concludes, ‘whoever walked in the garden could see heaven on earth (‘chiunque passeggiasse per il Giardino, potesse vedere il Cielo in terra’)’. In another book he stressed the educational purpose of such a programme: ‘By walking along in the garden the princes contemplate celestial astronomy and human philosophy and they do not so much pick flowers as philosophical and moral lessons (‘documenta’)’.45 Tesauro’s use of the word forma in the Cannocchiale is important here and is rooted in the Aristotelian concept of form (also designated as the Soul), the essential and universal idea of a thing, as opposed to materia (or Body), which is its physical manifestation. For Tesauro, as for Richeome, statues in the gardens are the material, visible images necessary to gain sensory access to the invisible and immaterial forms which they serve to represent.46 A possible source of influence for Tesauro’s programme is the famous treatise Flora overo cultura dei fiori, published in 1638 by a fellow Jesuit scholar, Giovan Battista Ferrari, in which elaborate geometrical compartments are repeatedly compared to celestial paradises.47 Whereas for Ferrari this metaphor exemplified the deep connection between macrocosm and microcosm and the influence of astral bodies on the natural world, Tesauro insists on the educational and moral dimension of his astronomical garden, which provided the princes with an occasion not only for delight but also for learning and thinking, 44 Tesauro Emanuele, S.J., Il cannocchiale aristotelico (Turin, Zavatta: 1670) 710–711. 45 The programme with the inscriptions is also reported in Tesauro Emanuele, Inscriptiones (Turin, Typis Bartholomæi Zapatæ: 1670) 585–605, here 585): ‘[…] ut in uno Viridario Caelestem simul Astronomiam, & humanam Philosophiam, deambulantes Principes contemplentur, nec tam flores legant, quàm documenta’. 46 Loach J.D., “Le jardin céleste de Racconigi. La conception et l’usage d’un jardin d’apparence laïque de la Contre-Réforme”, in Flore au paradis. Emblématique et vie religieuse aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles, Glasgow Emblem Studies 9 (Geneva: 2004) 37–48, esp. 47; and eadem, “Body and Soul. A Transfer of Theological Terminology into the Aesthetic Realm”, Emblematica 12 (2002) 31–60. 47 Ferrari Giovan Battista, S.J., Flora overo cultura dei Fiori (Rome, Antonio Facciotti: 1638). See Kuwakino K., L’architetto sapiente. Giardino, teatro, città come schemi mnemonici tra il XVI e il XVII secolo (Florence: 2011), chap. 4, “Il ‘paradiso celeste’ nel giardino italiano”, 131–164.

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delectare et docere. The promenade in the garden became a lesson for the conduct of human affairs.48 This moral dimension, which is essentially a political one, was also present in the labyrinth of Versailles, built only a few years later by Le Nôtre after an idea by Charles Perrault (1664–1677) [Fig. 10.5]. Painted statues based on Aesop’s fables were illustrated by moral poems by Isaac de Benserade and were to serve for the education of the young dauphin. Taken as a whole, the labyrinth constituted a map of morality divided into different provinces.49 As Gérard Sabatier has noted, the whole garden at Versailles and not just the labyrinth was conceived as a pedagogical tool: ‘The garden of Versailles became a pretext and support for a lesson in classical culture (mythology and ancient history), but also a lesson in Stoic and heroic morale in front of the statues. Now it is the park as a whole that fulfils the function of applied pedagogy, previously only assumed by the labyrinth’.50 Scholars have argued that Jean de la Fontaine’s famous Fables, also based on Aesop and conceived as an educational manual for the young Dauphin, had their origins in the garden of Vaux-le-Vicomte. Its entire poetic structure is based on garden aesthetics, that is, on a design that stimulates conversation, wherein, as one promenades, the relation between order and chance is articulated.51 Built in 1679, the labyrinth in the gardens of Chantilly, attributed to Pierre Desgots, contained inscriptions with riddles in Latin and French to test the intelligence of visitors.52 Aesop’s fables was a standard text for teaching Latin in grammar schools. It was appreciated as a teaching tool for children but also for adults. Preachers often used them as ethical exempla in sermons; humanists drew inspiration 48 On princely education during the baroque period, see especially Mormiche P., Devenir prince: l’école du pouvoir en France, XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris: 2013); and Edouard S., Les devoirs du prince. L’éducation princière à la Renaissance (Paris: 2014). 49 See Conan M. (ed.), Le labyrinthe de Versailles (1677), présenté par Charles Perrault, avec des gravures de Sébastien Le Clerc (Paris: 1981); Conan M., “The Conundrum of Le Nôtre’s Labyrinthe”, in Hunt J.D. (ed.), Garden History: Issues, Approaches, Methods (Washington, D.C.: 1992) 119–150; idem, “Landscape Metaphors and Metamorphosis of Time” 295–297; and Maisonnier E. (ed.), Le labyrinthe de Versailles: du mythe au jeu (Paris: 2013). 50 Sabatier G., Versailles ou la figure du roi (Paris: 1999) 531 (my translation). On garden labyrinths, in particular see Brunon H., Le jardin comme labyrinthe du monde: métamorphoses d’un imaginaire de la Renaissance à nos jours (Paris: 2008), esp. 81–85. 51 See the fundamental essay by Alain-Marie Bassy, “Les Fables de La Fontaine et le labyrinthe de Versailles”, Revue française d’histoire du livre 12 (juillet–septembre 1976) 367– 426; and Dandrey P., “Un jardin de mémoire. Modèles et structures du recueil des Fables”, Le Fablier 9 (1997) 57–65. 52 Garnier-Pelle N., André Le Nôtre and the Gardens at Chantilly in the 17th and 18th Centuries (Paris: 2013) 126–137.

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figure 10.5

Sébastien Leclerc, Plan of the Labyrinth of Versailles, from Charles Perrault and Isaac de Benserade, Labyrinthe de Versailles (Paris, L’Imprimerie Royale: 1677). Etching, 21.5 × 14.7 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. 31.77.30 Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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from them ‘to stimulate introspection about the self, the laws of nature, the politics of power, or the rule of law’; and simple folks surely appreciated their simplicity, whereas princes viewed them ‘as repositories of ancient philosophy in more palatable form – a speculum principis that could help them rule wisely’.53 In his Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images, Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti praised Aesop’s Fables as ‘charming, honest, and highly effective at making an impression on minds with delight, especially those of young people, by applying the modes and manners of animals to the custom and natures of humans’.54 In sixteenth-century Italy, several iconographic cycles were based on Aesop’s fables and were appreciated because they stimulated intellectual conversation and represented a new ideal of Christian rulership. Giuliano da Sangallo decorated the step-ends of the staircase of Palazzo Gondi in Florence (ca. 1490–1501) with illustrations of the Fables.55 In 1531, for the dining room of the Palace of Trent, Dosso Dossi painted ten lunettes representing the Fables in expansive landscapes.56 In the giardino segreto of the Palazzo del Te in Mantua, a stucco and fresco ensemble of Aesop’s fables (ca. 1531–1534) was conceived by Giulio Romano for Federico II Gonzaga.57 The depiction of Aesop’s fables in the frescoes by Jacopo Zucchi of the so-called studiolo of Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici in his garden at the Villa Medici in Rome (1577) can give us a clue of the ways in which his garden was similarly envisioned, i.e., as a place for intellectual curiosity and moral enlightenment [Fig. 10.6]. The ceiling of the adjacent room is painted with a trompe l’œil pergola with the most extraordinary collection of birds and animals.58 We may surmise that the discrete episodes of Aesop’s Fables in the studiolo’s grotesques added a moral and historical layer to this collection of natural history, and a conceptual framework to experience

53 54

55 56 57 58

I cite excerpts from Pellecchia L., “From Aesop’s Fables to the Kalila Wa-Dimna: Giuliano da Sangallo’s Staircase in the Gondi Palace in Florence”, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 14/15 (2011) 137–207, here 151–152 (with further bibliography). Paleotti, Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images 288. He then refers to the emblematic literature inspired by Aesop: ‘Others, in imitation of Aesop, have composed and imagined fables and discourses of animals for themselves, all of them directed, however, to virtuous living, which are still read, not without profit and delight’. Pellecchia, From Aesop’s Fables to the Kalila Wa-Dimna. Fiorenza G., “Fables, Ruins, and the ‘bell’imperfetto’ in the Art of Dossi Dossi”, MLN 119.1 (2004) 271–298. Signorini R., L’appartamento della Grotta nella villa del Te (Mantua: 2013); and idem, “Le favole di Esopo nel ‘giardino secreto’ della villa del Te”, Quaderni di Palazzo Te 8 (1988) 21–36. Morel P., Le Parnasse astrologique: les décors peints pour le cardinal Ferdinand de Médicis, in La Villa Médicis, vol. III (Rome: 1991) 45–88.

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figure 10.6

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Jacopo Zucchi, The Fox and the Crow (Aesop’s Fables), detail from the Studiolo of Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici in the gardens of the Villa Medici, Rome, 1577, fresco Photo: Wikimedia Commons

the garden as a whole. Behind these programmes lies a courtly culture of conversation and interpretation and the fundamental rhetorical tradition of the ‘art of memory’, based on the disposition of imagines and loci.59 The educational dimension of early modern gardens also largely explains their military iconography, as well as the presence of forms and techniques that were immediately relevant for soldiers and future military leaders.60 In the Villa Manin at Passariano, in Northern Italy, an eighteenth-century estate clearly inspired by French models, the central axis of the villa and its garden, 59 Kuwakino, L’architetto sapiente, op. cit.; Mosser M. – Nys P. (eds.), Le jardin, art et lieu de mémoire (Besançon: 1995). 60 Among an increasingly large bibliography, see Prost P., “Jardin et fortification, un art partagé du terrain”, in Farhat G. (ed.), André Le Nôtre. Fragments d’un paysage culturel. Institutions, arts, sciences et techniques (Sceaux: 2006) 214–219. See also Mariage T., L’Univers de Le Nostre (Sprimont: 1990) 51–54; and Mukerji C., Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge: 1997).

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projecting far into the territory, was bordered by a series of fascinating works of art [Fig. 10.7]. Two towers, in which the cosmological systems of Copernicus and Tycho Brahe were represented, opened the sequence.61 In the garden, visitors would then encounter two models of fortresses, four floral sundials as well as artificial hills, a theatre, a labyrinth, a menagerie, a bird’s cage and many other marvels whose function was both to delight and instruct.62 Such grandiose programmes had a clearly didactic purpose. In Rome, similar floral fortresses were built in the garden of the Palazzo Spada: ‘flowers with sections representing the six fortresses to be found in Italy: Casale, Palmanova, Ferrara, Forte Urbano, Parma, and Castel Sant’Angelo’.63 They recalled the keen interest of the Spada family in mathematics and military architecture. A much larger mock-fortress had been built in 1650 in the gardens of the Palais Cardinal (later Palais Royal) in Paris for the edification of the young king Louis XIV. It figures in an engraving by Israël Sylvestre and impressed John Evelyn upon his visit to the garden on September 15th, 1651: ‘I took a walk in the King’s gardens […]. In another part is a complete fort, made with bastions, graft, half-moons, ravelins, and furnished with great guns cast on purpose to instruct the King in fortification’.64 In one of the most popular treatises on princely education of the seventeenth century, Idea de un principe politico christiano: rapresentada en cien empresas by Diego de Saavedra Fajardo (1640), an emblem dedicated to the art of war shows a garden shaped like a pentagonal fortress, with the motto ‘Deleitando ensena’ [It delights and instructs] [Fig. 10.8]. The text explains: 61 The model here is probably the Château of Marly in France, where Louis XIV had the famous Globes of Coronelli installed in two pavilions of the garden in 1704. The three systems of Ptolemy, Copernic, and Tycho Brahe were also exposed. See Paris L., Essai historique sur la Bibliothèque du Roi: aujourd’hui bibliothèque impériale (Paris: 1856) 117. On the astronomical aspect of this programme, see further Cevolin M.V., “Astronomia e astrologia nell’Olimpo dei Manin”, Quaderni dell’Accademia 4 (2000) 17–25. 62 Puppi L., “‘Fortunam virtus vincere sola potesi’: l’Olimpo dei Manin a Passariano”, in La letteratura e i giardini (Florence: 1987), Archivum Romanicum 1–207, 395–409; Frank M., Virtù e fortuna. Il mecenatismo e le committenze artistiche della famiglia Manin tra Friuli e Venezia nel XVII e XVIII secolo (Venice: 1996); Venuto F., La villa di Passariano. Dimora e destino dei nobili Manin (Passariano di Codroipo [Udine]: 2001) 167–259; and Frank M., “Appunti sulla questione del giardiniere francese di villa Manin a Passariano”, in Frattolin M.P. (ed.), Artisti in viaggio 1600–1750. Presenze foreste in Friuli Venezia Giulia (Venice: 2005) 335–352. I thank Martina Frank for drawing my attention to this garden. 63 Neppi L., Palazzo Spada (Rome: 1975) 136–137. The description of the garden is by Bernardino’s brother, Virgilio Spada. 64 Sylvestre Israël, Veuë du fort Royal fait en l’année 1650 dans le Jardin du Palais Cardinal pour le divertissement du Roy, 1651, engraving, 250 × 131 mm, BNF, Paris, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ ark:/12148/btv1b8404210c. The image is also reprinted in Zeiller M., Topographia Galliae (Frankfurt am Main: 1655) 133. See The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. W. Bray, 2 vols. (New York – London: [c. 1901]) I 266.

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figure 10.7

Plan of the Gardens of the Villa Manin at Passariano, ca. 1720–1730 (photomontage after Palazzo degli Ecc[ellentissi]mi N.N. H.H. Conti Manini, nel Locco di Perseriano nel Friuli, Eighteenth century, Udine, Biblioteca Civica, Fondo Manin). Photo: After Francesca Venuto, La villa di Passariano. Dimora e destino dei nobili Manin, Passariano di Codroipo (Udine), Associazione fra le pro loco del Friuli Venezia Giulia, 2001

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Deleitando ensena [it delights and instructs], emblem in Diego de Saavedra Fajardo, Idea principis christiano, politici, centum symbolis expressa (Bruxelles, Ioannes Mommartius, suis et Francisci Vivieni sumptibus: 1649) 31, symbola politica, symbolum V Photo: Wikimedia Commons

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‘Tis withal necessary that he learn Fortification, and accordingly for Instructions sake may raise Forts of Clay, or some such material, with all sorts of Trenches, Breast-works, Pallisadoes [sic.], Bastions, Half Moons, and other things necessary for the Defence of them; then he may Assault and play upon them with little Artillery made for that purpose. But to fix those Figures of Fortification more firmly in his Memory, ‘t would be for his advantage to have the like artificially contrived in Gardens, cut in Myrtle, or any other Greens, as you see in the present Emblem.65 Mathematics (especially Euclidian geometry with applications in ballistics and fortification) were essential for the military leader, and gardens were frequently used as teaching laboratories to learn its main principles. As Volker Remmert has recently observed, ‘music and acoustical effects, fountains and sundials, geometrical forms, automata and many other things derived from the mathematical sciences that could be found in early modern gardens would naturally be treated in a thorough and encyclopaedic course of the mathematical sciences’.66 The frontispieces of several baroque treatises on mathematical curiosities show an ideal hortus mathematicus, often with the shape of a military fortress [Fig. 10.9]. Botany of course could be taught in gardens. The botanical gardens that developed from the sixteenth century onwards, many of which were directly attached to universities, were used to teach students of medicine about plants.67 Geography, which was also bound up with war, could likewise be studied within gardens developed with the same pedagogical and political intentions. Already in the sixteenth century, the Villa d’Este at Tivoli was conceived as a representation of the surrounding Tiburtine territory.68 Extraordinary projects took this idea further: a plan for the Tuileries garden in Paris, offered to the Queen of France in 1616, suggested that the whole world could be mapped 65 The book was first published in Spanish in 1640 and was reedited and translated many times. Here I quote the English edition The Royal Politician Represented in One Hundred Emblems, ed. – trans. J. Astry (London, M. Gylliflower – L. Meredith: 1700) 36. 66 Remmert V., “The Art of Garden and Landscape Design and the Mathematical Sciences in the Early Modern Period”, in Fischer H. et al. (eds.), Gardens, Knowledge and the Sciences in the Early Modern Period (Basel: 2016) 9–28 (here 20). 67 Capeletti E.M. – Ubrizsy A., “Didactics in a Botanic Garden. Garden Plans and Botanical Education in the ‘horto medicinale’ of Padua in the 16th Century”, in Anagnostou S. (ed.), A Passion for Plants. Materia Medica and Botany in Scientific Networks from the 16th to the 18th Centuries, Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Pharmazie 95 (Stuttgart: 2011) 79–92. 68 Ribouillault, Le Salone de la Villa d’Este.

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Mario Bettini, Apiariorum philosophiae mathematicae […] (Venetiis, Baleonius: 1655). Augsburg, Staats- und Stadtbibliothek, call number 2 Math 12 Photo: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek

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figure 10.10 Franc-Antoine de la Porte, Jardinage de façon nouvelle dédié à très haute et très illustre princesse Marie de Médicis (Paris: 1616). Engraving, 41 × 35 cm, BNF, Paris Photo: BNF

within its enclosure [Fig. 10.10]. A somewhat similar concept was developed in Jean François, S.J.’s Science de la géographie, published in 1652, and again a century later, in 1753, in the Baron de Bouis’s Le parterre géographique et historique ou nouvelle méthode d’enseigner la géographie et l’histoire, addressed to the Dauphin and other noble youths. In these works, too, it is suggested that parterres and entire gardens could be designed as maps to facilitate the memorization of geographical and historical knowledge.69 69

See further Besse J.-M., Face au monde: Atlas, jardins, géoramas (Paris: 2003).

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The garden thus appears not only as a marvellous spectacle but also as a key pedagogical support for the young aristocracy, a place where learning was made easier and more delightful. Its form and content were intimately linked to the scholarly curriculum considered necessary for princely education, including mathematics, geography, astronomy, rhetoric, poetry, ancient history and heraldry. When the English virtuoso John Evelyn recommended, in agreement with Francis Bacon, that ‘Every one [is] to cultivate his own garden’, he was clearly referring to the promotion of knowledge.70 Even drawing – useful to military leaders in times of war but whose chief purpose was to shape the aesthetic taste of the aristocracy and teach future leaders how best to use their eyes – could take place in the garden. The beautiful etching of the young Prince Cosimo III de’ Medici drawing in the garden of Villa Medici, under the tutelage of his drawing master, Stefano della Bella, is a good illustration of this [Fig. 10.11].71 At Racconigi, the young prince Emanuele Filiberto also drew several ornamental parterres for the garden dated around 1650, that is, exactly during the period when Tesauro must have been consulted regarding its iconographical programme.72 Under the guidance of the painter Hubert Robert, Louis XIV himself enjoyed producing designs for his garden at Rambouillet, as we learn from a note dated November 17th, 1784: ‘The King is increasingly satisfied by his acquisition; he oversees and leads the improvements and embellishment of his domain himself. I have seen the plan prepared and drawn by His Majesty very diligently; to execute his plan, He entrusted Mr Robert, the painter, who has just been nominated Draftsman of the King’s Gardens’.73

70

Remmert, “The Art of Garden and Landscape Design and the Mathematical Sciences” 20; and Ribouillault, “Hortus academicus”. 71 Le Corné A., Stefano della Bella et Le Vase Médicis: dessin et éducation artistique au XVIIe siècle, M.A. thesis, Université de Montréal, 2018. 72 Gabrieli N., Racconigi (Turin: 1972) 236: “Disegni diversi fatti dal Ser.mo sig. e Principe [Emanuele Filiberto, Principe di Carignano] mentre era giovine”, ca. 1650. 73 Petit de Bachaumont Louis, Mémoires secrets pour servir à l’histoire de la république des lettres en France depuis 1762 jusqu’à nos jours […], t. 27 (London, John Adamson: 1786) 37–38: ‘Le roi est satisfait de plus en plus de son acquisition; il s’occupe des améliorations & embellissements de ce château, il suit & dirige lui-même le travail. […] J’en ai vu le plan dressé & levé par Sa Majesté très-promptement; elle l’a confié pour l’exécution à M. Robert, le peintre, qui vient d’être nommé dessinateur des jardins du roi’. See further, Wick G. – Catala S., Hubert Robert et la fabrique des jardins, exh. cat., Château de la Roche-Guyon (Paris: 2017), esp. 13–23, 72–73.

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Stefano della Bella, The Young Duke Cosimo III drawing in the Garden of Villa Medici, 1656, etching from Six grandes vues, dont quatre de Rome et deux de la Campagne romaine, 31.1 × 27.7 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. 2012.136.535.1 Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Conclusion

Rather than calling the search for meaning in gardens an exercise in futility, as some recent scholarship has done, claiming that ‘what passes for meaning […] is really just one pleasant distraction after another’,74 a fruitful hermeneutic approach requires a broader interdisciplinary methodology that more precisely contextualises the construction of a garden within its appropriate intellectual culture. As John Dixon Hunt has reminded us, garden experience depends on ‘habits of mind’: the more we know about these habits, the more we will be able to avoid anachronism in our attempts to understand the functions of early modern gardens.75 In this essay, I have singled out three elements that I believe played a central role in the culture of such gardens: ingenuity, which presupposes a hermeneutic performance on the part of the garden’s designer and visitors; sociability, because gardens were a site of exchange and conversazione, and, finally, education. Exploration of these topics will not lead to the discovery of one single meaning for any of the gardens under discussion, nor does it preclude the possibility that meaning changes with time.76 Rather, it helps us realize that, in early modern gardens, interpretation was expected and encouraged. It formed an essential part of garden culture and strongly impacted garden design. Although the historical hermeneutics of gardens is paved with difficulties for the historian, to forget this fact may have dire consequences for the ways in which historical gardens are reconstructed, restored and understood today.77 Bibliography Agache S., “La villa comme image de soi”, in Galand-Hallyn P. – Lévy C. (eds.), La villa et l’univers familial dans l’antiquité et à la Renaissance (Paris: 2008) 15–44. Barisi I. – Fagiolo M. – Madonna M.L., Villa d’Este (Rome: 2003). Bassy A.M. “Les Fables de La Fontaine et le labyrinthe de Versailles”, Revue française d’histoire du livre 12 (juillet–septembre 1976) 367–426.

74 Gilette J., “Can Gardens Mean? (2005)”, in Meaning in Landscape Architecture & Gardens 134–165 (161). 75 Hunt, “Stourhead Revisited & the Pursuit of Meaning in Gardens” 338. 76 See the essential contribution of John Dixon Hunt on this topic in The Afterlife of Gardens. 77 I refer to my review of Meaning in Landscape Architecture & Gardens, in Les Carnets du paysage 23 (automne 2012) 228–229.

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Bélanger A., Bomarzo ou les incertitudes de la lecture: figure de la meraviglia dans un jardin maniériste du XVIe siècle (Paris: 2007). Beneš M., “Methodological Changes in the Study of Italian Gardens from the 1970s to the 1990s: A Personal Itinerary”, in Beneš M. – Lee M.G. (eds.), Clio in the Italian Garden. Twenty-First-Century Studies in Historical Methods and Theoretical Perspectives (Washington, D.C.: 2011) 17–54. Beneš M., “Recent Developments and Perspectives in the Historiography of Italian Gardens”, in Conan M. (ed.), Perspectives on Garden Histories (Washington, D.C.: 1999) 37–76. Benocci C., Villa Lante a Bagnaia: tra Cinquecento e Seicento; la chiesa in forma di villa (Viterbo: 2010). Besse J.-M., Face au monde: Atlas, jardins, géoramas (Paris: 2003). Brunon H., Le jardin comme labyrinthe du monde: métamorphoses d’un imaginaire de la Renaissance à nos jours (Paris: 2008). Brunon H., Pratolino: art des jardins et imaginaire de la nature dans l’Italie de la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle, PhD diss., Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne, 2001. Bolzoni L., La Stanza delle memoria. Modelli letterari e iconografici nell’età della stampa (Turin: 1995). Capeletti E.M. – Ubrizsy A., “Didactics in a Botanic Garden. Garden Plans and Botanical Education in the ‘horto medicinale’ of Padua in the 16th Century”, in Anagnostou S. (ed.), A Passion for Plants. Materia Medica and Botany in Scientific Networks from the 16th to the 18th Centuries, Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Pharmazie 95 (Stuttgart: 2011) 79–92. Cevolin M.V., “Astronomia e astrologia nell’Olimpo dei Manin”, Quaderni dell’Accademia 4 (2000) 17–25. Chomarat-Ruiz C., “Le sens des jardins: une question embarrassante”, Projets de paysage 6 (2011), https://www.projetsdepaysage.fr/_le_sens_des_jardins_une_question _embarrassante_ [accessed 12 June 2019]. Coffin D., Gardens and Gardening in Papal Rome (Princeton: 1990). Coffin D., “The ‘Lex Hortorum’ and Access to Gardens of Latium during the Renaissance”, The Journal of Garden History 2.3 (1982) 201–232. Coffin D., “The Study of the History of the Italian Garden until the First Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium”, in Conan M. (ed.), Perspectives on Garden Histories (Washington, D.C.: 1999) 27–36. Coffin D., The Villa d’Este at Tivoli (Princeton: 1960). Conan M., “The Conundrum of Le Nôtre’s Labyrinthe”, in Hunt J.D. (ed.), Garden History: Issues, Approaches, Methods (Washington, D.C.: 1992) 119–150. Conan M. (ed.), Le labyrinthe de Versailles (1677), présenté par Charles Perrault, avec des gravures de Sébastien Le Clerc (Paris: 1981).

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Chapter 11

The Politics of Space of the Burgundian Garden Margaret Goehring In 1425, Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy (1396–1467) withdrew to his estate at Hesdin in Artois to prepare for a quixotic face-to-face duel against Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, who had claimed Holland, Hainaut and Zeeland on behalf of his wife, the Countess of Hainaut. Philip retired each morning to ‘certains lieux et places secrettes’ within the park to train, thus acting out the ideal of the late medieval chivalric knight, albeit an ideal that was now cast in uniquely Burgundian terms as a spiritual and material steward of the state itself.*,1 Created by Robert II, count of Artois at the end of the 13th century, the enclosed park at Hesdin had long been the site of spectacular gatherings of nobility and royalty.2 The French composer and poet Guillaume de Machaut was in attendance at one of these events, and he commemorated the park in his poetry, using it as the ideal stage and metonymy for courtly identity.3 Hesdin had some of the oldest rabbit warrens, heronries, and managed herds of fallow and red deer in Northern Europe.4 Over the years, the estate’s amenities included * I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to the editors of this volume for organizing the colloquium out of which this paper was developed and for their most valuable feedback. I would also like to thank Elizabeth Schirmer and Anne Margreet As-Vijvers who provided invaluable feedback on earlier drafts. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own, as are any errors therein. 1 Le Févre Jean, Chroniques, trans. F. Morand, 2 vols. (Paris: 1881) 106–107; Vaughan R., Philip the Good: The Apogee of Burgundy (Woodbridge – Rochester: 2002) 38–39; Tronzo, W., Petrarch’s Two Gardens: Landscape and the Image of Movement (New York: 2014), 121. 2 Richard J.-M., Inventaire-Sommaire des archives départementales antérieures à 1790: Pas-deCalais, Series A, 2 vols. (Arras: 1878–1887) I: 84–85; Documents parisiens du règne de Philippe VI de Valois (1328–1350): Extraits des Registres de la Chancellerie de France, Viard J. (ed.), 2 vols. (Paris: 1899) I: 226; Vale M., The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe, 1270–1380 (Oxford: 2001) 229. 3 Machaut set the Remède de Fortune in Hesdin, and while the setting of the Dit dou Lyon is not specified, the description and poet’s movements through the landscape closely reflect Hesdin’s topography; on the latter, see Goehring M., “Artifice and Ornament in the Dit dou Lyon Garden miniature” in Earp, L. – Hartt, J. (eds.), An Illuminated Manuscript of the ‘Collected Works’ of Guillaume de Machaut (BnF, ms. fr. 1586): A Vocabulary for Exegesis (forthcoming). On the role that the garden plays in Machaut’s work, see Huot S., From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Cornell, 1987) ch. 8. 4 An enclosed game-park (parc à gibier) is first documented at Hesdin in the 11th century, but its precise location is not known. The literature on the 13th-century park is vast; see

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004440401_012

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rose bowers, meadows, banqueting houses, galleries, menageries and fabulous automata, although to what extent these were actually situated within the enclosed game park and which were in the adjacent forest is unclear.5 Some of these amenities were famously represented in a no longer extant painting (or tapestry), which is known today only through later copies [Fig. 11.1]. The image depicts a courtly event, likely a wedding that occurred in 1431, underscoring the connection between Hesdin and the “jardin d’amour” rooted in chivalric romance.6 Under the Burgundian dukes, the estate and its park achieved near mythical fame, continuing to be invoked in encomiums and poetry well into the sixteenth century.7 However, in the fifteenth century, a shift occurred. Rather than used primarily as a site of noble performance and leisure, Philip the Good transformed Hesdin into a manifestation of his personal authority. Over the course of 1463– 1464, the duke hosted several rulers and embassies, including King Christian I of Denmark and the Holy Roman Emperor. Among the most significant events were the negotiations that were held there between Philip, Louis XI of France and Edward IV of England to end hostilities between them. The site had been chosen specifically to impress.8 Court chronicler Georges Chastellain described the visit and the reactions of the English visitors to the park’s marvellous

5

6 7 8

Charageat M., “Le Parc d’Hesdin: Ses origines arabes. Son influence sur les miniatures de l’Épître d’Othéa” Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de l’art français (1950) 94–106; Van Buren A.H., “Reality and Literary Romance in the Park at Hesdin” in MacDougall E. (ed.), Medieval Gardens (Washington DC: 1986) 117–134; Cusenier P.L., “Le parc des comtes d’Artois à Vieil Hesdin: essai de reconstruction du site” in Baudoux-Rousseau L. – Giry-Deloison C. (eds.), Le Jardin dans les Anciens Pays-Bas, (Arras: 2002) 71–86 ; Dowling, A., “Landscape of Luxuries: Mahaut d’Artois’s (1302–1329) Management and Use of the Park at Hesdin” in Classen, A. (ed.), Rural Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: The Spatial Turn in Premodern Studies (Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture 9) (Berlin: 2012) 367–388; Farmer S., “Aristocratic Power and the ‘Natural’ Landscape: The Garden Park at Hesdin, ca. 1291–1302” Speculum 88 (2013) 644–680. It is not clear whether the rabbit warrens, some of the pleasure pavilions and houses (i.e. the ‘maison Dédalus’), and even the automata were located inside or outside of the enclosed park, or whether the Hesdin Forest was a separate entity; see Duceppe-Lamarre F., “Le Parc à Gibier d’Hesdin. Mises au Point et Nouvelles Orientations de Recherches” Revue du Nord 343 (2001) 175–184. Van Buren A.H., “Un jardin d’amour de Philippe le Bon au parc de Hesdin: Le rôle de Van Eyck dans une commande ducale” Revue du Louvre 35 (1985) 185–192. For a partial list of contemporary references to Hesdin, see Queruel D. “Le Jardin d’Hesdin et les Jardins de la Cour de Bourgogne” in Le Jardin Médiéval Colloque à l’Abbaye de SaintArnoult, Monastère des Arts les 3 et 4 septembre 1988 (Warlius: 1990) 109–114. Hesdin’s park was already well known to the English. At the end of the 1450s, Hesdin was used as proof of France’s superiority over England in Le débat des hérauts d’armes de France et d’Angleterre, thought to have been written by Charles d’Orléans and known primarily

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figure 11.1 Anonymous, Fête Champêtre at the Court of Philip the Good of Burgundy (Dijon: Musée des Beaux Arts inv. No. 3981) © Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon

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features, including its exquisite fountains (‘les plus belles de jamais’), feasting tables set with a ‘surabondance’ under lovely historic galleries and pavilions (‘belles galleries et maisonnements … à ce de tout vieil temps’), a house that rotated on four wheels so as to turn in the desired direction (‘une maison la plus propre des autres, que le duc avoit fait faire propre pour luy, qui se tournoit sur quatre roues vers tous endroits du ciel où on vouloit’), and a forest, more beautiful and grander (‘nul si bel, ne de si haute’) than the English guests had ever seen.9 The visitors would also have seen the celebrated devices that Colard de Voleur had devised at the behest of the duke thirty years earlier, including a bridge that spurted water up ladies’ skirts, automata that cuffed visitors and sprayed them with soot or flour when a knob was pulled on the floor above, a wooden hermit that spoke, windows with wooden figures that sprayed visitors, a bridge that collapsed throwing people into water, another room where the already soaked guests fell through the floor into a pile of feathers, and a book of ballads that sprayed people with water or soot when they tried to read it.10 The most spectacular element was a chamber in the gallery with murals depicting Jason and the Golden Fleece that were accompanied by thunder, lightning and rain that spouted from a capstone carved as angels in the vaulted wood ceiling. William Caxton described it in a publication from 1477: in remembraunce of Medea of her connyng & science he [Philip the Good of Burgundy] had do make in the sayde chamber by subtil engyn that when he wolde it shuld seme that it lightend & then thondre, snowed & rayne. All within the sade chamber as ofte types & when it shuld please him. Which was al made for his singular pleasir.11 Leaving aside fascinating questions as to how these amenities, especially the more humiliating devices, were used during the diplomatic process, the function of Hesdin had clearly changed. No longer simply spaces that staged noble identity and chivalric behaviour rooted in literary tropes, it was now designed through English copies as the result of John Coke’s rebuttal of the mid-16th century; see Le Débat des Hérauts d’Armes de France et d’Angleterre, trans. L. Pannier (Paris: 1877) 6. 9 Chastellain Georges, Oeuvres, Kervyn de Lettenhove J. (ed.), 8 vols. (Paris: 1863–1867) IV: 381–382. 10 De Laborde L., Les Ducs de Bourgogne: Études sur les Lettres, les Arts et l’Industrie pendant le XVe Siècle, 3 vols. (Paris: 1849–1852) I: 268; Franke B., “Gesellschaftsspiele mit Automaten—“Merveilles” in Hesdin”, Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft, 24 (1997) 135–158; Tronzo, Petrarch’s Two Gardens ch. 3; Truitt E.R., Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (Philadelphia: 2015) 122–137. 11 Caxton William, The Prologues and Epilogues, ed. W.-J.-B. Crotch (London: 1923) 33. It is not known when he actually wrote these words.

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to focus unity and loyalty on the duke’s personal identity and to display his authority and control. As Caxton’s phrasing stresses (e.g. ‘when it shuld please him’ and ‘for his singular pleasir’), the duke’s ability to decide who should be subjected to the humiliation of the “engyns” was crucial to the display of his authority.12 Hesdin had become part of the apparatus of Burgundian policy and displays of magnificence aimed at fulfilling Philip the Good’s political ambition to become a prince in his own right.13 It is difficult to reconcile descriptions of Hesdin and the activities that took place there under Philip the Good with how medieval pleasure gardens tend to be portrayed in scholarship. A common teleology posits the medieval garden’s enclosure for healing, contemplation or amorous dalliance, against the expansive views of the humanist renaissance (formal) garden that embodies political harmony replete with cosmic significance.14 Underlying this viewpoint is the assumption that medieval gardens are distinct spaces from other forms of elite landscapes. However, the example of Hesdin, and the problem in distinguishing the relationship of its enclosed park to the rest of the estate and the surrounding landscape, belies such a supposition. Second, scholars have tended to rely solely on the the iconography of the garden as being the source of its meaning, rather than considering the activities that took place within the garden and how these could shape its meaning. As Michael Conan has pointed out, rather than being a passive mirror of cultural change, garden spaces trigger ritualized performances within them.15 Such landscapes both frame and produce the horizon of expectations of the participants within. When Philip the Good retired to Hesdin to train for his duel with the duke of Gloucester, he was framing his performance within long-established literary tropes, but

12

Truitt points out that the misery inflicted by these devices—as opposed to the way that late medieval romance had traditionally portrayed automata as models of courtly behavior—were crucial to the maintenance of ritual under Philip the Good; idem, Medieval Robots 132–135. 13 Armstrong C.A.J., England, France and Burgundy in the Fifteenth Century (London: 1983) 213–236. 14 I.e. Turner T., European Gardens: History, Philosophy and Design (London - New York: Routledge, 2011) 218, 222; Aben, R. – de Wit, S., The Enclosed Garden: History and Development of the Hortus Conclusus and its Reintroduction into the Present-day Urban Landscape (Rotterdam: 2001) 83–86; McIntosh, C., Gardens of the Gods: Myth, Magic and Meaning (London: 2005) ch. 4; Comito, T., The Idea of the Garden in the Renaissance (New Brunswick: 1978). 15 Conan, M., “The Significance of Bodily Engagement with Nature” in idem (ed.), Performance and Appropriation: Profane Rituals in Gardens and Landscapes (Dumbarton Oaks: 2007) 3–16.

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giving them new political agency, an agency that the estate of Hesdin in and of itself materially embodied as a metonymy of Burgundian state management.16 Medieval accounts rarely differentiated between gardens and other types of designed landscapes.17 The term “jardin” (hortus) and its cognates simply referred to enclosed natural spaces, and could therefore describe a large variety of landscape features: including enclosed meadows, vineyards, allées, large pleasure parks, as well as spaces that included one or more of such elements.18 There certainly existed a specialized vocabulary to describe specific types of garden – such as “vergier” (pleasure garden with fruit trees) or “préau” (meadow) – but these designations could be polyvalent.19 Finally, even aesthetic gardens could contribute to the economic functioning of the household.20 With a more expansive understanding of what a garden is, and a consideration of the hermeneutics of how such spaces engendered certain types of performance, a more nuanced view of garden history emerges that shows a complex interweaving of the garden as site, stage and space, with the imago of the garden as metaphor and symbol. Using Valois-Burgundian gardens as case studies, it becomes apparent that the Burgundian dukes were deeply aware of the range of symbolic associations that could be made with the garden – not just literary and religious, but historiographic, and political as well. They exploited this as a means to present a more coherent sense of rulership, using their gardens as visual metaphors to support their princely identities and ambitions, and as frames for staging and regulating the ritualized activities within them. In short, they transformed the garden from an ornamentum of nobility into an emblem of rulership.21 16

Beck C. – Beck P. – Duceppe-Lamarre F., “Les parcs et jardins des ducs de Bourgogne au XIVe siècles” in Renoux A. (ed.), (Aux marches du palais: Qu’est-ce qu’un palais médiéval? Données historiques et archéologiques. Actes du VIIe Congres internationale archéologie médiévale, Le Mans-Mayenne, 9–11 Septembre 1999 (Le Mans : 2001) 111. 17 This point has been most forcefully argued by Creighton O., Castles and Landscapes (series: The Archaeology of Medieval Europe 1100–1600) (London – New York: 2002) and Idem, Designs upon the Land: Elite Landscapes of the Middle Ages (Woodbridge – Rochester: 2009). 18 It is equally difficult to pin down a consistent definition of a ‘parc’; see Beck C. – Casset M., “Les Parcs en France du Nord (XIIIe–XV e siècles)”, in Cocula A.-M. – Combet M. (eds.), Le Château et la nature: actes des rencontres d’archéologie et d’histoire en Périgord les 24, 25 t 26 septembre 2004 (Pessac:) 119. 19 Gesbert E., “Les jardins au Moyen Âge: du XIe au début du XIVe siècle” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 184 (2003) 381–408. 20 Farmer, “Aristocratic Power”; Dowling, “Landscape of Luxuries”. 21 “Emblem” here does not refer to the kinds of imagery found in later sixteenth and seventeenth century emblem books, but rather in a more generic sense of representing an abstract concept.

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Garden as Ornamentum

As an aestheticized facsimile of nature and reflection of divine order, the princely garden was uniquely suited in conferring grace and dignity upon its owners. As with all ornament, it amplified the significance of that to which it was attached. Parallel to the category of ornamentum in medieval church inventories that list those liturgical furnishings required for the proper conduct of Mass, the late medieval noble garden was a quintessential secular ornamentum of nobility. The Neapolitan humanist Giovanni Pontano made this connection in his 1498 treatise, ‘De splendore’. Splendour, he argued, was primarily concerned with ‘the ornament of the household, the care of the person and with furnishings’, as opposed to “magnificence”, which he regarded as being more public and enduring.22 He argued that the splendid man should have ‘gardens in which one can promenade and arrange banquets when needed. These gardens should have exotic and rare plants, disposed with art and with the requisite care’.23 This advice had already been realized over one hundred years earlier by Margaret of Flanders (1350–1405) at the Château de Rouvres, for which she had created a “jardin de Monseigneur” and a slightly smaller “jardin de Madam” that were divided by a brook lined with willow trees and a meadow where the duke and duchess sometimes dined during the summer months.24 The duke’s garden contained a menagerie that included a leopard on which the ducal children could ride, while the duchess’s garden was planted with roses and lavender. The latter could well have been a highly luxurious kind of tender aromatic lavender, such as Lavandula stoechas, which were only newly appearing in northern Europe.25 This hypothesis is supported by the fact that the ducal accounts indicate that cuttings of these plants were considered worthy of gifting to King Charles VI of France.26 The garden became particularly enmeshed with Valois royal and ducal identity. This can be seen, for example, in the private enclosed royal garden at the 22 Welch E., “Public Magnificence and Private Display Giovanni Pontano’s ‘De splendore’ (1498) and the Domestic Arts” Journal of Design History 15/4 (2002) 211–221. 23 Welch, “Public Magnificence and Private Display” 216. 24 Picard, “Les Jardins du Chateau de Rouvres”; de Winter, “Castles and Town Residences” 104; Beck C. – Beck P. – Duceppe-Lamarre F., “Les parcs et jardins des ducs de Bourgogne” 103–104. 25 The pollen of l. stoechas has been found in the cess pits of the ducal residence in Bruges dating back to the late 14th century; Deforce K., “Pollen analysis of 15th century cesspits from the palace of the dukes of Burgundy in Bruges (Belgium): Evidence for the use of honey from the western Mediterranean” Journal of Archaeological Science 37 (2010) 337–342. 26 De Winter, “Castles and Town Residences” 104.

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Palais-de-la-Cité, initially created by Philip IV of France (1285–1314), which was represented in the June miniature of the Très Riches Heures, over a century later.27 Towering over the royal palace in the miniature are the conical towers of the Hôtel de Nesle, Jean de Berry’s Paris residence, which in turn is dwarfed by the spire of Ste. Chapelle. By conflating this view of the Palais-de-la-Cité with the duke’s palace, an emphasis is made on the duke’s political influence and power at a particularly fraught time in French politics. The Hôtel de Nesle had been given to the duke by the newly crowned Charles VI of France in 1380, who was then 12 years old and particularly reliant on the advice of his uncles. Not only did this become the Duke de Berry’s principal “court”, but he also saw to it that meetings of the king’s council and Exchequer were also occasionally held there as well.28 However, by the time this miniature was painted, during the Armagnac-Burgundian conflict, the Hôtel de Nesle had been attacked by revolting Parisians, who barred the duke from entering in 1411. It wasn’t until after the Burgundian faction left Paris that Jean de Berry was able to return, when he was made “capitaine” of Paris in August of 1413. This miniature serves to reafiirm in spatial terms Jean de Berry’s special proximity to the king and his influence by showcasing the normally private and hidden garden’s visual accessibility to the duke. Whereas the Palais-de-la-Cité was the administrative centre of the realm, the principle royal residence was the Hôtel de Saint-Pol, which Charles V of France significantly expanded in the 1360s, and making it a preferred site for royal feasts and receptions.29 This complex, dominating what is now the quartier du Marais, contained various gardens and numerous hôtels (de Sens, du Petit-Muces, de Saint-Maur, etc.) that are commemorated in the street names of the area. The complex also contained numerous galleries and gardens, including a “préau de la Cerisaye” (a meadow planted with cherry trees), a large meadow with a “fountaine au lion”, designated gardens for the dauphin and the queen, and a grand “jardin du roi” that was planted with lavender and other herbs and which was surrounded by walls that were ornamented with the

27 Chantilly: Musée Condé ms. 65. 28 Cordier, H., “Annales de l’Hôtel de Nesle” Mémoires de l’Institut national de France t.41 (1920) 54; Rapin, T., “Les résidences de Jean de Berry à Paris et ses environs entre 1380 et 1416” in Présence royale et aristocratique dans l’Est parisien à la fin du Moyen âge, 6e Colloque historique des bords de Marne (22 septembre 2007) (Le Perreux-sur-Marne, 2008), 45–70. 29 Including the visit of the Holy Roman Emperor in January, 1378, which is famously described and illustrated in the Grandes Chroniques de France (Paris: Bibliothèque National de France ms. fr. 2813).

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fleur-de-lis, marking the site as royal.30 The gardens also contained a menagerie complete with lions and a fish pond. The emphasis on landscape continued in the murals of the queen’s apartments, which depicted ‘un grand forêt’ filled with trees and shrubs, including apples, pears, cherries and plums, all covered with fruit and intertwined with lilies, clematis (“flambes”) and roses among which children played and ate.31 Christine de Pisan noted that Charles V walked daily in his gardens at the Hôtel de Saint Pol, to which he had access from his private apartments.32 It was in this garden that Christine de Pisan tells us he spent time with his family, received gifts from diverse countries, or inspected silks and jewels presented by favoured merchants, underscoring the connection between the garden and the continued performance of princely status.33 Part of Christine de Pisan’s historiographic agenda in discussing the king’s leisure time was to enforce his image as an ideal ruler: il me semble utile de raconter comment il avait organisé dans les moindres détails sa journée, afin que cela serve d’exemple de règle de vie à tous ceux qui pourront hériter d’un empire, d’un royaume ou d’un grand domaine princier.34 [it seems to me useful to recount how he had organized his day down to the smallest details, so that it might serve as an example of a rule of life to all those who could inherit an empire, a kingdom or a great princely domain]. She goes on to explicitly link an ordered life with both the king’s health and a healthy polity.35 In other words, ordo becomes a model of and condition for effective ruling: Political science, supreme among the arts, teaches man to govern himself, his family and subjects and all other matters according to a just and 30 31

Bournon F., Hôtel Royal de Saint-Pol à Paris (Paris: 1880) 46–58 Ibid, 45. Hundreds of these same plants would later be planted in the gardens at the order of Charles VI. 32 de Pizan Christine, Le Livre des faits et Bonnes Moeurs du roi Charles V le Sage, Hicks, E. – Moreau, T. (trans.), (Paris: 1997), I:16, 67–70. 33 Idem, Livre des faits, I:16, 70. 34 Idem, Le Livre des faits I:16, 68; Deveaux J., “De la biographie au miroir du prince: le Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V de Christine de Pizan” Le Moyen Âge t. CXVI/3–4 (2010) 591–604. 35 Brauer M., “Politics or Leisure? A Day in the Life of King Charles V of France (1364–80)” Medieval History Journal 18/1 (2015) 46–63.

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appropriate order. Likewise, it is to be the discipline and the instruction to govern kingdoms and empires.36 The importance of the pleasure garden to this rigid schedule was probably rooted, in part, to the close association of gardens and health, as articulated by Albertus Magnus, Bartholomeus Anglicus, and others.37 In his highly popular and influential agricultural treatise, the liber ruralium commodorum of ca. 1304–1309, which was translated into French at the behest of Charles V in 1371, Piero de’ Crescenzi described the royal garden as being a place where “the king will not only take pleasure, but sometimes, after he has performed serious and obligatory business, he can be renewed in it, glorifying God on high, who is the origin and cause of all good and legitimate delights.”38 The ordo of nature in the garden, the ordo of the spaces of the palace, and the ordo of time all contributed to the ordo of the ideal ruler. The Burgundian dukes would go even further in linking their gardens to their personal identities, spending considerable sums developing their estates, eclipsing the expenditures of the French kings in the fifteenth century. Some scholars have even interpreted these expenditures as displays of proto-state management.39 Reflecting Charles V’s use of royal armorials in the garden of Saint Pol, Margaret of Flanders marked the gardens of Château de Germolles as a space of Valois ducal identity. This work was accomplished between 1381, when her husband Philip the Bold first acquired the property, and 1390 when the ducal couple hosted Charles VI of France there. She spent over 19,000 francs in what appears to have been a program of framing the ducal couple’s identity as Good Shepherds.40 In addition to improving the estate by planting orchards and vineyards bearing both wine and table grapes, and building new facilities for raising sheep and cattle and for making cheese, she had the interior of the chateau decorated with the most up-to-date styles, painting the walls with various emblems, including one with 180 sheep.41 These were augmented 36 37

Brauer, “Politics or Leisure?” 60. Meyvaert P., “The Medieval Monastic Garden” in E. MacDougall (ed.), Medieval Gardens. Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture No. IX (Washington, DC: 1986), 42– 45; Rawcliffe C., “Delectable Sightes and Fragrant Smelles”: Gardens and Health in Late Medieval and Early Modern England” Garden History 36/1 (2008) 3–21. 38 Bauman J., “Tradition and Transformation: The Pleasure Garden in Piero de’ Crescenzi’s Liber ruralium commodorum” Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes 22/2 (2002) 103. 39 Beck – Beck – Duceppe-Lamarre, “Les parcs et jardins des ducs de Bourgogne” 111. 40 Beck – Beck – Duceppe-Lamarre, “Les parcs et jardins des ducs de Bourgogne” 104–105; de Winter, “Castles and Town Residences” 105–112. 41 Remnants are still visible in what had been a room for the use of Margaret of Bavaria, Countess of Nevers, with the initials “P” and “M” interspersed with gilded thistles,

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by hangings and tapestries with shepherding imagery. The decorative program culminated with a payment in 1396 to Claus Sluter for a pair of sculpted portraits of the ducal couple that were displayed under a gilded elm tree and surrounded by sheep, completing the connotation of the secular Good Shepherds. These emblematic themes were carried over into jewels and other precious metalwork owned by Margaret of Flanders, including: a chain with thirteen lambs and twelve pairs of the initial Y (perhaps in reference to her husband’s motto ‘Y me tarde’); a gold box with the enamelled initials P and M and a sheep; a golden layette with the initials P and M and a lamb; a second layette, in silver, with a lamb; and a dog collar with enamelled sheep ornamentation.42 The gardens of the Hôtel d’Artois, the Burgundian dukes’ principal residence in Paris, were also important to the staging of ducal identity and power. As with Hesdin, the garden’s traditional association with love no doubt informed its choice as the site of a wedding feast for a court favourite in 1394.43 In 1409, fearful of retaliation from the Armagnacs after the assassination of Louis d’Orléans, and to celebrate being granted the guardianship of the dauphin, John the Fearless constructed a new residence and tower at the top of which he located his private chambers. Enforcing this defiant message of Burgundian power, the ceiling of the tower’s grand stairway was carved in the form of a great tree intertwined with his ducal and personal emblems, a motif that borrowed from royal iconography, as discussed below. Philip the Good utilized the estate as a stage in 1461 (after an absence of three decades) in a magnificent display that eclipsed even that of the new French king whose coronation he was celebrating. Contemporary chroniclers noted how Parisians lined up to witness this extravagant demonstration of wealth and power: the entire façade of the palace was covered with magnificent tapestries depicting the histories of Gideon and of Alexander the Great, while a massive tent of cloth of gold was erected in the courtyard, which had been transformed into a temporary garden. The pavilion was also hung with the coats of arms of the duchies, counties and lordships over which Philip ruled, providing yet another display of Burgundian domination over the Parisian landscape.44 daisies (marguerites) and roses; see Degrigny C. et al, “Technical Study of Germolles’ Wall Paintings: The Input of Imaging Techniques” Virtual Archaeology Review 7.15 (2016) 1–8. 42 Prochno-Schinkel R., “Schmuck in Burgund, Flandern und Frankreich unter den ValoisHerzögen” Das Mittelalter 21/2 (2016) 443–444. 43 Beck – Beck – Duceppe-Lamarre, “Les parcs et jardins des ducs de Bourgogne” 106. 44 Paravicini W., “Le temps retrouvé? Philippe le Bon à Paris en 1461” Beihefte der Francia 64 (2007) 414, 422; Chipps Smith J. “Portable Propaganda – Tapestries as Princely Metaphors at the Courts of Philip the Good and Charles the Bold” Art Journal 48/2 (1989) 125. It is possible that when Jean de Berry built a massive temporary pavilion in the courtyard of the

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The increasing emphasis on using the garden to proclaim personal identity coincided with the disappearance of gardens within urban areas, particularly in the Low Countries, due to the growing congestion of the city, and to the increasing separation of the court from the urban sphere.45 Also contributing to these shifts were changes to the social practice of nobility – la vivre noblement – within the Burgundian regions. Regulated by oral customary law and social perception, ‘la vivre noblement’ required one to live nobly, through the exercise of feats of arms and horsemanship, the presentation of appropriate dress and mannerisms, and the conspicuous display of one’s estate.46 Indeed, several court cases attest to the fact that one could lose one’s noble status if one didn’t live according to that rank or take advantage of its privileges.47 “La vivre noblement” became a defining feature of Burgundian rule, and the visibility of one’s estate concurrently became greater. As a result, gardens became all the more valuable as emblems of power, particularly within cities. These shifts are also reflected in contemporary manuscript painting. Around 1500, Flemish artists began to conflate the traditional labour of March (pruning of vineyards or digging spring soil) with the traditional labour of April (a nobleman enjoying the spring landscape) to show aristocratic men and women directing laborers in their gardens [Fig. 11.2].48 This distinctly Hôtel de Nesle for the wedding feast of his daughter on 24 June 1400, the courtyard was also decorated as a temporary garden; see Cordier “Annales de l’Hôtel de Nesle” 61–62. 45 Scheller R.W., “Tuin en stad in de late Middeleeuwen” in Struip R.E.V. – Vellekoop C. (eds.), Tuinen in de Middeleeuwen (Hilversum: 1992) 227–245; Vale, The Princely Court 199. Buylaert F., “‘La Noblesse Urbaine’ à Bruges (1363–1563). Naissance d’un nouveau groupe social?” in Dutour T. (ed.), Les nobles et la ville dans l’espace francophone (XIIe– XVIe siècles) (Paris: 2010) 250–254; Stein R., Magnanimous Dukes and Rising States: The Unification of the Burgundian Netherlands 1380–1480 (Oxford: 2017) 117–127; Dumolyn J., “Nobles, Patricians and Officers: The Making of a Regional Political Elite in Late Medieval Flanders” Journal of Social History (Winter 2006) 431–452. 46 The literature on ‘vivre noblement’ is vast; for the Low Countries, see Kaminsky H., “Estate, Nobility, and the Exhibition of Estate in the Later Middle Ages” Speculum 68 (1993) 684–709; De Clerq W. – Dumolyn J. – Haemers J., “ ‘Vivre Noblement’: Material Culture and Elite Identity in Late Medieval Flanders” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 38:1 (Summer, 2007) 1–31; Buylaert F. – de Clerq W. – DuMolyn J. “Sumptuary legislation, material culture and the semiotics of ‘vivre noblement’ in the county of Flanders (14th– 16th centuries)” Social History, 36/4 (2011) 393–417; Van Steensel A., “Noble Identity and Culture: Recent Historiography on the Nobility in the Medieval Low Countries” (I–III), History Compass, 12/3 (2014) 263–299. 47 Kaminsky, “Estate, Nobility and the Exhibition” 694. 48 Da Costa Hours (New York City: Morgan Library M.399, fol. 4v); Book of Hours (Munich CLM 23638, fol. 4v); Hennessy Hours (Brussels: Royal Library ms. II 158, fol. 3v); Mayer van den Bergh Breviary (Antwerp: Mayer van den Bergh Museum, fol. 2v); Rothschild Hours (British Library ms. Add. 35313, fol. 2); Spinola Hours (Los Angeles: Getty Museum

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Simon Bening (workshop), March, The Golf Book, c. 1530. Illuminated manuscript, 130 × 95 mm (London: British Library ms. Add. 24098, fol. 20 v) © The British Library Board

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proprietary emphasis in the landscape was accompanied by a revival of agricultural and estate management literature in the second half of the fifteenth century and the first half of the sixteenth century.49 In addition to the interest in classical texts (especially Virgil), Piero de Crescenzi’s agricultural treatise mentioned above was hugely popular, surviving in numerous manuscript copies and printed editions, most of which date between 1486 and 1540.50 Treatises by contemporary theorists, such as Nicole de Mesnil, were also largely based on Crescenzi.51 It is perhaps not coincidental that some of the most luxurious manuscript exemplars of such treatises were commissioned or owned by patrons from the same circle as the private devotional books with the new calendar iconography.52 By embedding the contemporary aristocratic garden into the divinely ordained ordo of liturgical time within private devotional books, even greater weight was given to the association of these spaces with noble identity, power and control.

49

50

51 52

ms. IX 18, fol. 2v); March (London: British Library ms. Add. 18855); Breviary of Eleanor of Portugal (New York City: Morgan Library M. 52, fol. 3). There are additional examples outside of this iconographic tradition, including an unusual example of a gentlewoman directing a female gardener for the month of April in a Brussels Prayerbook of c. 1530 (Walters Art Museum, ms. 425, fol. 4) This shift would become amplified with the arrival of the Très Riches Heures in the Netherlands by 1515 when it inspired calendar cycles painted by Gerard Horenbout, most famously, in the Grimani Breviary. Oschinsky D., “Medieval Treatises on Estate Management” The Economic History Review New Series 8/3 (1956) 296–309; Fussell G.E. “The Classical Tradition in West-European Farming: The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries” The Agricultural History Review 17/1 (1969) 1–8; Beutler C. “Un chapitre de la sensibilité collective: la littérature Agricole en Europe Continentale au XVIe siècle” Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 28e année, no. 5 (1973) 1280–1301. For the list of extant manuscripts and editions of Crescenzi, see Naïs H., “Le Rusticon: Notes sur la Traduction Française du Traité d’Agriculture de Pierre de Crescens” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 19/1 (1957) 103–132. For the impact of Crescenzi on medieval gardens, see Calkins R.G., ‘Piero de’ Crescenzi and the Medieval Garden’, in MacDougall E. (ed.), Medieval Gardens (Washington DC: 1986), 157–70; Bauman “Tradition and Transformation” 99–141. de Mesnil Nicole, La manière d’enter les arbres (Lyon, Jean Dupré: [ca. 1498–1490]) and (Paris, Guy Marchant: [ca. 1490–1492]). Luxurious illuminated copies of Crescenzi associated with the Burgundian court and its circle include New York: Morgan Library m. 232 (contains the ducal arms); Paris: Bibliothèque Arsenal ms. 5064 (owned by Anthony of Burgundy); British Library Royal 14 E Vi (for Edward IV of England); British Library ms. Add. 19720 for an unknown patron, but which contains an inscription linking the book to the de Montrichard family of the Franche-Comté, who were allied to the dukes of Burgundy.

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The Coudenberg: A Princely Garden

The gardens and park of the Coudenberg would become one of the most powerful visualizations of princely rulership. This twelfth-century fortified estate originally held by the counts of Leuven and Brussels and the dukes of Brabant, came into the possession of Philip the Good in 1430 for whom it became a favourite residence after 1450.53 Besides substantially expanding and updating the palace itself, Philip added to the estate’s celebrated hunting park, which was called the ‘warrande’.54 This park was enclosed by the existing thirteenthcentury town walls and the newer city walls that were constructed in the following century. It was also adjacent to the Soignes Forest, providing easy access to this favourite hunting site that occupied much of the landscape south-east of Brussels. Philip’s expansion of the ‘warrande’ included the addition of a menagerie with boar, lions, ostriches, and bears, as well as a ‘vergier’ with nearly 1,000 fruit trees. An enclosed garden, called the ‘labyrinthe’, for the private use of the duke and his family, contained a four-storey wooden pavilion and painted wooden galleries in a space that was planted with various flowers and aromatic herbs and featured fountains supplied by a man-made pond called the ‘Clutinc’.55 Other amenities included vineyards, various enclosed gardens and meadows, a ‘jeu de paume’ or ball court, and the ‘Clutinc’ was stocked with carp, swans and peacocks. Philip also added a tournament field that became the exclusive arena for noble jousts, replacing the civic spaces that had been the traditional sites of such tournaments, further separating the nobility from the urban setting and focusing attention instead on the park.56 The pond’s frozen surface was also apparently used for melees, as with the grand duel between young noblemen on ice-skates that was staged for the visit of Bohemian nobleman, Jarislav Lev of Rozmital, when he visited in the winter of 1465.57

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55 56 57

In 1260 a document mentions both a castellum and a ducal manor there; see Heymans V. – Cnockaert L. – Honoré F. (eds.), Le Palais du Coudenberg à Bruxelles: du château médiéval au site archéologique (Brussels: 2014) ch. 3. Saintenoy P., Les Arts et les Artistes à la cour de Bruxelles: Le Palais des ducs de Bourgogne sur le Coudenberg à Bruxelles du règne d’Antoine de Bourgogne à celui de Charles-Quint (Académie Royale de Belgique Classe des Beaux-Arts Mémoires, 2nd ser. V) (Brussels: 1934) 16; Heymans – Cnockaert – Honoré (eds.), Le Palais du Coudenberg 192–193. Heymans – Cnockaert – Honoré (eds.), Le Palais du Coudenberg 194. It is not clear if the ‘labyrinthe’ was actually a maze, or simply a series of paths through allées covered by woven or inosculated tree branches. Brown A., “Urban Jousts in the Later Middle Ages: The White Bear of Bruges” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, t. 78, fasc. 2 (2000) 315–330. Heymans – Cnockaert – Honoré (eds.), Le Palais du Coudenberg, 229.

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As Brussels’ status as a capital was solidified, the Coudenberg attracted the Netherlandish nobility to construct their urban palaces nearby. One of the most magnificent of these was the Hôtel Hoogstraten, owned by Antoine de Lalaing, first count of Hoogstraten and Culemborg, who held several high offices at court, including chamberlain to both Philip IV ‘the Fair’ of Burgundy and Emperor Charles V. In 1517, he began construction of a long gallery to connect two parts of the existing manor that overlooked an enclosed garden and was used to display the family’s treasures and tapestries. The wall surrounding the garden was outfitted with a walkway that allowed the count stunning views of the Clutinc and the ‘warrande’. The backdrop of the ‘warrande’ visible through the gallery’s windows and from the garden would have underscored de Lalaing’s privileged access to the ducal residence, much in the same way Jean de Berry celebrated his access to the Palais-de-la-Cité a century earlier in the Très Riches Heures. A similar example can be found in a devotional painting of the Fifteen Mysteries and the Virgin of the Rosary from around 1520, which also showcases the ‘warrande’ of the Coudenberg, pointing to a complex intertwining of elite access, politics, religion and status.58 Attributed to Goswijn van der Weyden, the bottom panel shows the Virgin of the Rosary standing in an enclosed garden over the back wall of which a view of the Coudenberg is visible. She is venerated by a donor, a king, a bishop, a pope and Saint Dominic [Fig. 11.3].59 The topography suggests the artist used a model based on a view from the terrace over the enclosed jeu de paume or tennis court at the rear gate of the palace.60 Although the identity of the donor is not known, it must have been a member of the court to have allowed for such access. One suggestion is Philip of Cleves, lord of Ravenstein (ca. 1459–1527), whose Brussels residence was next to the Hôtel Hoogstraten. Philip’s father, Adolf of Cleves (1425–1492), had ceded part of his property for the building of a Dominican convent founded by Isabella of Portugal, and it was here that Philip built a chapel intending to use it as a mausoleum for himself and his wife.61 While the painting was meant to show Philip’s devotion to the Virgin, the choice of such a specific setting was clearly propagandistic, equating the Habsburg seat with paradise and underscoring the patron’s close connection to it. 58 New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art inv. 1987.290.3a-p. 59 Three other figures of knights who menace the donor may be a reference to a popular legend concerning the rosary; see Bauman G., “A Rosary Picture with a View of the Park of the Ducal Palace in Brussels, Possibly by Goswijn van der Weyden” Metropolitan Museum Journal 24 (1989) 135–51. 60 Ibidem, 144. 61 Ibidem, 145.

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Goswijn van der Weyden, attr. Fifteen Mysteries and the Virgin of the Rosary, c. 1520. Oil on panel, detail: 25.1 × 53.3 cm (New York City: The Metropolitan Museum of Art No. 1987.290.3a-p) © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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The Coudenberg’s magnificence and status was augmented under Philip the Fair and his wife, Joanna of Castile, for whom it was a preferred residence when in the Low Countries. It was also a favourite of Emperor Charles V, who made extensive alterations to both the palace and the grounds between 1515 and 1531. Albrecht Dürer recorded this landscape in a sketch dated 1520 in a view nearly identical to the Fifteen Mysteries and Virgin of the Rosary, albeit from a different vantage point.62 Taken from an upper level window from the palace, the sketch shows the jousting field, the Clutinc vineyards and an enclosed garden with parterre beds. The patron of the Virgin of the Rosary was not the only one to liken this park to paradise, for in his journal, Dürer noted, ‘Out behind the royal palace in Brussels I have seen the fountains, labyrinth, and game park. I have never seen more amusing things, things more pleasing to me – like a paradise’, reflecting the sentiment in the devotional painting discussed above.63 Other amenities that were added or restored during this period included replanting of the ‘labyrinthe’ – now called ‘la Feuillée’ – anchored by the recently renovated and decorated pavilion, which can be seen in a cartoon for a tapestry from around 1531 from a series celebrating imperial hunts, known as the Chasses de Maximilien.64 This pavilion, the presence of which is recorded as early as 1414, was remodelled at the orders of Charles V in 1517 into an elaborate structure elevated on eighteen stone columns, and decorated with his armorials and various statues, including four lions, St. Andrew and other historical figures, as well as groups of gilded apples.65 At the centre of the garden was a fountain of Venus in a triumphal chariot that was drawn by centaurs. This section of the park was particularly admired by Cardinal Louis d’Aragon, who visited in 1517, as recorded in the travel journal kept by his chaplain Antonio de Beatis: A cote du palais se trouve un grand parc avec des cerfs, des chevreuils et d’autres animaux, et un jardin composé d’un très grand labyrinthe avec de nombreuses chambres et des passages de plus de deux pieds de larges et douze empans de haut, qui sont voutes et étroitement lies par

62 Vienna: Akademie der bildenden Künste, HZ 2475; see Anzelewsky F., “À propos de la topographie de Bruxelles et du quai de l’Escaut à Anvers de Dürer” Bulletin des Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique 6 (1957) 87–107. 63 Bauman, “A Rosary Picture with a View of the Park” 143. 64 Leiden University Library PK-T-2047; image can be accessed at http://hdl.handle.net/ 1887.1/item:1276354 (accessed 15 July 2019); another complete set of cartoons survive at the Louvre; Balis A., et al, Les Chasses de Maximilien (Paris: 1993). 65 Heymans – Cnockaert – Honoré (eds.), Le Palais du Coudenberg 193–196.

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les branchages de buissons, avec une frondaison arbre ressemblant au noisetier, mais en plus lisse et brillant, ce qui est du plus bel effet […] [Next to the palace one found a large park with red deer and roe and other animals, and a garden composed of a large labyrinth with numerous chambers and passageways more than two feet wide and 12 palms high, which are vaulted by the closely linked branches of bushes, with a tree-like foliage resembling hazel, but more smooth and shiny, which is a most beautiful effect …].66 Over the course of the sixteenth century, the Coudenberg palace and its ‘warrande’ became more than a manifestation of wealth and magnificence; it also ultimately became a symbol of the Burgundian state and Hapsburg rule, particularly after Mary of Hungary was permanently installed there after 1531. Artists would focus on the park in representations of the palace and of the city of Brussels, particularly during the reigns of the Archdukes Albert and Isabella, who fostered the Coudenberg as the nexus for a cohesive and collective image of unified rulership.67 However, the close association of the Coudenberg park to BurgundianHapsburg rule had already begun to be made manifest in several works of art beginning over a century earlier. The earliest extant view of the Coudenberg is believed to be the presentation miniature by Jean Hennecart in a copy of Instruction d’un jeune prince, written either by Guillebert or Hugh de Lannoy originally for Philip the Good, which was made for Charles the Bold around 1470 [Fig. 11.4].68 The miniature, which represents the purported author Foliant de Yonnal presenting his text to Rudolf of Denmark, is presented in the guise of Charles the Bold receiving the text as he stands before the parterre garden. Placing presentation scenes in the sites of Valois rulership had been long-established by this point, although the prominence of the garden 66

Heymans – Cnockaert – Honoré (eds.), Le Palais du Coudenberg 192. A similar description of “La Feuillée” was made by Don Calvete de Estrella in 1549; see Gregg R., City Views in the Habsburg and Medici Courts: Depictions of Rhetoric and Rule in the Sixteenth Century (Leiden – Boston: 2019) 88, fn. 120. 67 Muñoz J.-E.-H., “A Key Tool for a New Dynasty: The Use of Royal Sites in the Habsburg Netherlands by the Archdukes Albert and Isabella” The Court Historian, 23/1 (2018) 13–26. I would like to express my appreciation to Stijn Bussels for alerting me to this scholar’s work. See also De Rock J., The Image of the City in Early Netherlandish Painting (1400–1550) (Turnhout: 2019) esp. 208–212. 68 Paris: Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal ms. 5104, fol. 14; Schandel P. “Jean Hennecart, premier peintre du jardin du Coudenberg” Revue de l’art, 139 (2003) 37–50.

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figure 11.4

Jean Hennecart, Foliant de Yonnal presents his book to Rudolf of Denmark, in Guillebert or Hugh de Lannoy (attr.), Instruction d’un jeune prince, c. 1470, manuscript illumination (Paris: Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal ms. 5104, fol. 14 r) © BnF

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is new, pointing to the growing importance of the Coudenberg to Burgundian ducal identity.69 The setting resembles many of the calendar miniatures discussed above in its bucolic emphasis, with little acknowledgment of the broader environmental context in which the Coudenberg was actually situated. By 1500, however, this emphasis changes in a presentation miniature in a copy of Johannes de Vico’s Chronicon, made for Philip the Fair, which can be attributed to a Brussels illuminator now dubbed the Master of the Matthias Gradual.70 The palace and gardens are embedded into a setting identifiable as Brussels through the representation of the collegiate church of St. Gudule, which is visible in the background.71 However, the landscape is actually quite generic, showing no other identifiable monuments, nor indeed, any hint of the actual urban context. The city has been entirely effaced. A particularly powerful example of the ‘warrande’ being used to make a political statement can be seen in the Zierikzee Triptych, which was commissioned for the judicial chambers of the ‘Vierschaar’ in Zeeland before 1506 [Fig. 11.5].72 The triptych, now disassembled, comprised of a Last Judgment with portrait wings of Philip the Fair and Joanna of Castile, on the versos of which are Saints Livinus and Martin respectively. The duke, wearing state armour showing the arms of Burgundy and Castile, holds the raised sword of Justice representing his role as an earthly parallel to Christ.73 He stands in front of the thirteenth-century defensive walls over which the recently completed towers of St. Michael and St. Gudule are just visible. Nearby is the gate that divided the tournament field from the vineyards. The duchess stands in front of the Clutinc pond and the “labyrinthe”, with its elaborate multi-story wooden pavilion. The specificity of the setting now proclaims the Coudenberg as the site of Phillip’s unified rulership of the Low Countries and of Spain as symbolized by the armorials he wears, a potent message within the judicial chambers 69

Buettner B., “Past Presents: New Year’s Gifts at the Valois Courts, ca. 1400” The Art Bulletin 83 (2001) 598–625. 70 Vienna: Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Cod. 325, fol. 4; Nagy, E., “Bécs, Buda, Brüsszel? A Mátyás-Graduale flamand miniátorának vándorlási” Ars Hungarica 44 (2018), 261–286; see also idem, “On the Creation of the Gradual of King Nattias” Acta Historiae Artium 57 (2016), 23–82. 71 Onghena M.J., De Ikonografie van Philips de Schone (Academie Royale de Belgique Classe des Beaux-Arts, Memoires X, fasc. 5) (Brussels: 1959) 177. 72 Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, inv. 2405, 2406, and 4168; Van de Kerckhof V. – Bussers H. – Bücken V. (eds.), Le Peintre et l’arpenteur: Images de Bruxelles et de l’ancien duché de Brabant, Musée royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique (Brussels: 2000) 68. 73 On the motif of Phillip’s raised sword, see Woods-Marsden J., “The Sword in Titian’s Portraits of Emperor Charles V” Artibus et Historiae 34/67 (2013) 201–2018.

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figure 11.5

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Master of the Life of Joseph, Portraits of Philip the Fair and Joanna of Castile from the Zierikzee Triptych, c. 1505–1506. Oil on panel, @ 125 × 47 cm each (Brussels: Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium inv. 2405, 2406) © Royal Museum of Fine Arts Belgium [RMFAB], Brussels/photo: RMFAB

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of Zeeland. Again, like the miniatures discussed above, there is no hint of the rest of the urban setting. This same strategy of unifying space and rulership is also found in the Chasses de Maximilien tapestries thought to have been designed by Bernard Van Orley around 1531, but copied at various times thereafter well into the 17th century.74 The series represents the months as various stages of the hunt set within the Coudenberg and sites in the adjacent Soignes Forest. The month of March particularly focuses on the Coudenberg from the vantage point of the ‘warrande’ looking West toward the centre of the city. While the towers of the stadhuis and St. Nicholas dominate the skyline, they are dwarfed by the palace itself. This emphasis of the urbs politas, the political centre of Brussels, versus the urbs civitas, the civic realm of Brussels’ citizens, would remain a predominant feature in Habsburg propaganda.75 Although the original patron of this set is not known, the dating and subject matter suggest someone closely associated to the court, perhaps Charles V himself.76 The series unifies the various sites of Habsburg rulership in the imperial ritual of the hunt, as established by Maximilian, which now continues through Charles V, Mary of Hungary and Ferdinand I, in a celebration of Habsburg genealogy. This strategy of using Habsburg sites to represent a view of unified and cohesive rulership would later provide a model for the Archdukes Albert and Isabella.77 3

The Garden as Political Propaganda

The Coudenberg’s utility as visual manifestation of Habsburg rule was due in part to the increasingly important role that the enclosed garden played in Valois and Burgundian political propaganda. The motif of the garden became enmeshed with the cult of the fleur-de-lis, the ancient emblem of the French kings. The fluidity of the symbolism of the fleur-de-lis allowed for a range of associations to support the argument of the uniquely divine character of 74

Standen E.A., European Post-medieval Tapestries and Related Hangings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2 vols. (New York: 1985), I:308–315. There is an additional iconographically unrelated tapestry that also shows the Coudenberg in the Museum of the National Bank of Belgium. This shows Charles V and Mary of Hungary as Solomon and Sheba, and was woven in the Brussels atelier of Jan de Buck in the second half of the sixteenth century. An iconographically similar set probably from the same period (no longer extant) was also donated to the Novara Cathedral in 1653; see Forti Grazzini N. “On the Tapestries in Seventeenth-Century Milan: Some New Findings”, in Campbell T. – Cleland E. (eds.), Tapestry in the Baroque: New Aspects of Production and Patronage (New York: 2010) 157. 75 Gregg, City Views in the Habsburg and Medici Courts 91. 76 Standen, European Post Medieval Tapestries 315, fn. 27. 77 Balis, Les Chasses de Maximilien 123; Muñoz, “A Key Tool for a New Dynasty.

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French kingship.78 The concept of the “Garden of France”, which first appears in the fourteenth century in the Roman de Fauvel, had become ubiquitous by the middle of the fifteenth century, and was often conflated with the “Tree of France”, an equally enduring emblem, as seen in John the Fearless’ tower at the Hôtel d’Artois. Besides signifying France and the French people, the garden was also used as a way to praise royalty.79 When the ten-year old Henry VI of England entered Paris in 1431, the Fountain of the Innocents was transformed into a wooded park (‘bois plantée’) complete with live holly and juniper, hunting dogs and a stag covered with the arms of England and France.80 This complex tableau combined space and narrative to invoke the popular legend of King Dagobert and the white stag, now brought to life in the capital, which was associated with French kingship and the divine right to rule. This tableau emphasized the English king’s French genealogy as grandson to Charles VI of France, whose personal emblem had been a white stag, and therefore his rightful claim to the French throne. An even more explicit link between the “Garden of France” and French royal identity can be seen in the frontispieces for two manuscripts of Guillaume de Nangis’ Chronique Abrégée, both of which were created in Troyes ca. 1470–1480.81 Although the two frontispieces are not identical, they share the same basic composition of eight kings of France seated within an enclosed garden arranged symmetrically around a triple-flowered white lily and the shield of France supported by angels [Fig. 11.6]. This immensely popular text, of which at least thirty illuminated manuscripts survive, was particularly associated with Valois and Valois-Burgundian patronage. However, by the third

78

Beaune C., The Birth of an Ideology: Myths and Symbols of Nation in Late-Medieval France, trans. S.-R. Huston (Berkeley: 1991) 292–298. 79 As, for example, at the Entries of Charles VIII in Rouen (1485) and Vienna (1490); see Duport D., Le Jardin et la Nature: Ordre et variété dans la littérature de la Renaissance (Geneva: 2002), 229–237. 80 Blanc W., “‘Alors sailly un serf’: une chasse royale en plein Paris, le 2 décembre 1431” in Fabry-Tehranchi I. – Russakoff A. (eds.), l’Humain et l’Animal dans la France médiévale (XIIe–XVe s.) (Faux Titre 397) (Leiden: 2014) 179–192. 81 Paris: Bibliothèque National de France ms. Fr. 2598 and Walters Art Museum W. 306; Hindman S. – Spiegel G.-M., “The Fleur-de-lis Frontispieces to Guillaume de Nangis’s Chronique Abrégée: Political Iconography in Late Fifteenth-Century France” Viator 12 (1981) 381–408. While Hindman located these manuscripts to Paris, François Avril has attributed this miniature to the Master of the Pierre Michault of Guyot II le Peley, and noted that the Baltimore manuscript was also made in Troyes, but that both artists were familiar with contemporary illumination in Paris, particularly in the circle of the Cöetivity Master; see Avril F. – Hermant M. – Bibolet F., Très Riches Heures de Champagne: L’enluminure en Champagne à la fin du Moyen Âge (Paris: 2007) 146–147.

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figure 11.6

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Anonymous Parisian illuminator, frontispiece for Guillaume de Nangis, Chronique Abrégée, c. 1470, manuscript illumination (Bibliothèque Nationale de France ms. Fr. 2598, fol. 1 r) © BnF

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quarter of the fifteenth century, it was also disseminated among the bourgeois with loyalist leanings, as in the case with the copy now in Paris.82 The concept of the Royal Garden was also exploited by the Burgundians, and was also conflated with the iconography of the Royal Tree. At the wedding of Philip the Good and Isabella of Portugal in 1430, a large golden tree was set into a lovely garden (‘ung arbre bien branchu, doré moult richement en ung moult bel et riche préau’) in the centre of the hall of the ducal palace in Bruges.83 From its branches hung the shields of the Burgundian nobility and of the duke. Recalling the great tree under which Sluter’s portraits of Philip the Bold and Margaret of Flanders were set within an enclosed meadow at Germolles, as well as the tree carved into the tower of John the Fearless at the Hôtel d’Artois in Paris, this display has been interpreted as a manifestation of Burgundian identity as a ‘state-in-the-making’.84 The motif would reappear again at the wedding feast of Charles the Bold and Margaret of York in 1468, where the hall was transformed into a Burgundian vergier consisting of thirty trees covered in a variety of fruits, greenery and flowers displayed the coats of arms of Charles’s territories hanging from their golden branches.85 The allegorical garden is also found among the tributes made to Charles the Bold at his death in 1477 in an anonymous text, L’arbre de Bourgonne sus la mort de duc Charles. Here, the duke is described as the tree that was nourished by the garden, the house and the court of Burgundy: […] très fructueux et opulent vignoble de Bourgonne nourissoit ung gros arbre d’admirable altitude, fort adorné de precieuses vertus, par lesquelles non seulement le jardin, mais la maison, le court et tout l’héritage et furent grandement famés […]86 (…the very fruitful and opulent vineyard of Burgundy nourished a large tree of admirable height, adorned with precious virtues by which not

82

The armorials, which hang on the wall of the garden, belong to the Molé family of Troyes; it is likely then that the manuscript was made for Jean Molé, a city magistrate whose family was deeply committed to the French throne; see Wyant C.J., Civic Patronage in Late Medieval Troyes, 1380–1520 (Ph.D. dissertation, University of St. Andrews: 2012), 50. 83 As described by Jean Lefèvre; see Stroo C., “De boom als teken van de Bourgondische heerschappij” in Baert B. – Fraeters V. (eds.), Aan de vruchten kent men de boom: de boom in tekst en beeld en de middeleeuwse Nederlanden, (Leuven: 2002) 191. 84 Stroo, “De boom als teken” 192. 85 Ibidem, 199. 86 Transcribed in Ibidem, 200.

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only the garden, but the house, the court and all the heritage were greatly famed …). The garden could also be used to refer to specific parts of the Burgundian realm. A fourteenth-century poem by Boudewijn van der Lore, “De maghet van Ghend” utilized the motif of the garden as part of a eulogy arguing for Ghent’s special status at a time when it was in battle against Louis de Male, Count of Flanders. In the poem, the Virgin of Ghent sits in a ‘prieel’ (arbour) symbolizing Ghent’s marketplace, joined by Ghent’s patron saints in protecting the city.87 The motif was revived when the city received Philip the Good on April 23, 1458, but this time to emphasize Philip’s authority over the city. Among the numerous tableaux vivants that were staged was one located by the Walpoort (Bruges Gate) consisting of a meadow on a raised stage that was bedecked with greenery and flowers, in the centre of which sat a young girl dressed in white garments.88 Three youths carrying shields with the ducal arms, those of the city of Ghent, and verses from the Song of Songs, completed the spectacle. This overwrought allegory offering the city, represented by the Maiden of Ghent, to her bridegroom, the duke, was meant to appease Philip after the devastating Battle of Gavere four years earlier that had ended the Ghent Revolt. Given Ghent’s fraught history with its Burgundian overlords, the ambiguity of this symbolism may well have been on the minds of the city magistrates when they paid Hugo van der Goes for a painting of the “Virgin of Ghent” on the occasion of Charles the Bold’s Joyous Entry of 1472, which occurred not long after yet another failed city revolt.89 The “Virgin of Ghent” would continue to be a central emblem for the city well into the modern period.90 For the most part, however, the garden was used as a device to exemplify unified Burgundian rule. At the Entry of Joanna of Castile in Brussels in 1496 on the occasion of her wedding to Philip the Fair, a tableau depicting the ‘Dream 87 Reynaert J., “Boudewijn van der Leure en zijn ‘Maghet van Ghend’ Jaarboek de Fonteine (1980–1981) 109–130. 88 Serrure C.P. – Blommaert PH. (eds.), Kronyk van Vlaenderen, 2 vols. (Ghent: 1839–1840) 2: 217; Chipps Smith J. “Venit nobis pacificus Dominus: Philip the Good’s Triumphal Entry into Ghent in 1458” in Wisch B. – Munshower S.S. (eds.), All the World’s a Stage …” Art and Pageantry in the Renaissance and Baroque (Papers in Art History from the Pennsylvania State University VI) (Pennsylvania: 1990) 259. 89 See Arnade P., “Secular Charisma, Sacred Power: Rites of Rebellion in the Ghent Entry of 1467” Handelingen der Maatschappij Voor Geschiedenis en Outheidkunde te Gent (1991) 69–94. 90 On the history of the “Virgin of Ghent” and the armorials for the city, see de Zutter J., Het Wappen van Gent (Ghent: 1990). This iconography also reappears in the ‘Hollandstuin’ emblem that was particularly popular during the Dutch Revolt; see Van Winter J., “De Hollandse Tuin” Nederlands kunsthistorisch jaarboek 8 (1957) 29–121.

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of Paris’ included an enclosed garden complete with trees and a fountain in front of which the three nude goddesses were presented on what appears to have been a moving stage.91 According to an illuminated manuscript thought to have been presented by the city to the duchess recording the event, this symbolized the three gifts that Joanna brought to Philip.92 The ‘Dream of Paris’ held great resonance at the Burgundian court, in part due to the mythology of Burgundy’s foundation after the Trojan War, and partly due to its popularity in didactic literature as a moral lesson to princes to value all the goddesses’ gifts equally.93 As Anne-Marie Legaré has noted, these lessons were adapted at this Joyous Entry in a particularly gendered way to specifically comment on the role of the new duchess. In this case, the tableau symbolized the three gifts that the goddesses held only imperfectly through separation were now reunited in the person of Joanna of Castile as an ideal and universal princess.94 The enclosed garden setting was not simply ornamental, but was an active component of the allegory’s symbolism as a veritable Burgundian hortus conclusus, a theme that was popular at the Burgundian-Hapsburg court as already seen in the Virgin of the Rosary panel and the Zierikzee triptych. It is possible that a similar meaning may inform the unusual placement of Maximilian of Austria kneeling in prayer before St. Sebastian within an enclosed garden in a Flemish courtyard in the “Older” Prayerbook of Maximillian I of Austria, painted before 1486.95 The “Burgundian Garden” certainly makes an appearance in the Weisskunig – a fictionalized allegorical autobiography by Maximilian of Austria the last entry for which is dated 1514 – as the site where the eponymous hero studies his betrothed’s language and is acculturated to Burgundian splendour.96 91

92

93 94 95 96

The fountain was an important motif that is found in late medieval versions of this story including Guido Colonna and Raoul le Fèvre; see Legaré, A-M., “Joanna of Castile’s Entry into Brussels: Viragos, Wise and Virtuous Women” in Virtue Ethics for Women 1200–1500, Green, K – Mews, C.J. (eds.) (Dordrecht – Heidelberg – London – New York: 2011), 184. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin: Kupferstichkabinett inv. 78.D.5; Herrmann M., Forschungen zur deutschen Theatergeschichte des Mittelalters und der Renaissance (Berlin: 1914), 365– 400; Blockmans W. – Donckers E., “Self-Representation of Court and City in Flanders and Brabant in the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries” in Blockmans W. – Donckers E. (eds.), Showing Status: Representation of Social Position in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout: 1999) 94–96. For a transcription of the legend, see Legaré A.-M., “L’Entrée de Jeanne de Castille à Bruxelles: Un Programme Iconographique au Féminin” in Eichberger D. – Legaré A.-M. – Hüsken W. (eds.), Women at the Burgundian Court: Presence and Influence/ Femmes à la cour de Bourgogne: Présence et influence, (Turnhout: 2011) 52, n.41. Legaré, “L’Entrée de Jeanne de Castille” 52–53; ibidem, “Joanna of Castile’s Entry” 184–185. Ibidem, “L’Entrée de Jeanne de Castille” 52–53. Vienna: Österreichische Nationalbibliothek cod. Vindob. 1907, fol. 61v. Santing C. “I Never Promised you a Rosegarden: De Hofcultuur van Maximiliaan I en de Bourgondische Nederlanden” Amsterdamer Beiträge zur Älteren Germanistik 47 (1997) 143–174.

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It was at this time that a frontispiece with a variation of the de Nangis “Garden of France” iconography was made, in the famous “Mechelen Choirbook” made at the behest of Emperor Maximilian in 1515 for the future Charles V.97 In the large miniature at the beginning of the manuscript, the future emperor is depicted sitting in an enclosed garden on a throne under a baldachin surmounted with the imperial arms and emblems of spiritual and terrestrial power – respectively, lilies and a sword – accompanied by his siblings as well as representatives from the three estates. The iconography and style of the miniatures in this manuscript have been attributed to the Master of the Baudeloo Missal, an artist who was particularly patronized by the Burgundian-Habsburg court.98 As with the Chronique abrigée frontispieces, this scene is rooted in Marian iconography, including the Virgo inter Virgines, the hortus conclusus, and the Holy Kinship (trinubium), as a way to connote divinely-ordained rule.99 This association is supported by the banderols in the Mechelen miniature, one of which reads: sub umbra alarum tuarum protege nos, a slight variation of Psalm 16:8 (Protect me under the shadow of thy wings), alluding to the protective power of the imperial eagle over Charles’ head.100 This message of hope for Charles’ continued rule in the Burgundian Netherlands is paralleled by the music the miniature accompanies, the Kyrie from Matthaeus Pipelare’s Missa fors seulement, which is based on a well-known French chanson. The opening words for the latter are noted in red in the tenor part: ‘Fors seulement l’atente que je de 97 Mechelen, Archief en Stadsbibliotheek MS s.s., fol. 1v; see https://www.regionalebeeldbank.be/beeldbank/1191993 (accessed October 2, 2020). There has been some debate as to the identity of the enthroned ruler, although the consensus now is that it represents Charles rather than his grandfather, Maximilian, who is represented later in the manuscript (fol. 16v). The manuscript appears to have been left behind in Mechelen when Charles V went to Spain in 1517. For a full discussion of this, see Bousmar É., “Maximilien d’Autriche ou le jeune Carles Quint? Enluminure et Politique dans le Livre de Choeur de Malines (1515)” in Delsalle P. – Docquier G. – Marchandisse A. – Schnerb B. (eds.) Pour la Singuliere Affection qu’avons a luy: Études Bourguignonnes Offertes à Jean-Marie Cauchies (Burgundica XXIV) (Turnhout: 2017) 43–52. 98 As-Vijvers A.-M., “Illuminations’ / ‘De verluchting” in Burn D.J. – Meconi H. (eds.), The Mechelen Choirbook: A Treasure from the Scriptorium of Petrus Alamire / Het Mechelse koorboek: een schat uit het scriptorium van Petrus Alamire, (Leuven Library of Music in Facsimile 2) (Antwerp: forthcoming). I am grateful to Anne-Margreet As-Vijvers for sharing this research with me in advance of its publication. 99 For the use of Marian iconography, particularly its connections to the Immaculate Conception and its political significance in music manuscripts made for the Habsburg court, see Blackburn B., “Messages in Miniatures: Pictorial Programme and Theological Implications in the Alamire Choirbooks” in Boucckaert, B. – Schreurs, E. (eds.), The Burgundian-Habsburg Court Complex of Music Manuscripts (1500–1535) and the Workshop of Petrus Alamire, Colloquium Proceedings, Leuven, 1999 (Louvain: 2003) 161–184. 100 Bousmar, “Maximilien d’Autriche ou le jeune Carles Quint?”47–48.

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meure, [En mon las coeur, nul espoir ne demeure]’ (For only in expectation that I will die, in my weary heart no hope remains). Building on the interpretation offered by Eric Bousmar, this programme combining image, text and music expresses the wish for Charles to remain in the hortus conclusus of the Netherlands where he may be protected and supported by the estates, and the fear that he will leave them for Spain. The “ Burgundian Garden” was also particularly prominent in the 1515 Entry of Charles V into Bruges, as recorded by court historian Remy de Puys in an illuminated manuscript that was probably presented to Charles, and later used as a model for a published edition with 33 woodcuts produced in Paris by Gilles de Gourmont.101 A rhyming account in Dutch was also published in Antwerp later the same year, likely written by Jan van Scheerere, a well-known Bruges rederijker who was responsible for planning and organizing the tableaux vivants sponsored by the city.102 Out of the twenty-eight tableaux, four were set within enclosed gardens, while meadows, trellises and fountains appeared in several others, indicating that by this point, the garden had become fully established as a political metaphor. The eleven tableaux staged by the city of Bruges supported a general programme extolling Bruges’ historic greatness and its current decline, and the wish that the future emperor would again restore her economic power.103 The first of these depicted the enclosed forest of Flanders in which reenactments of the legendary foundation of Bruges and Joshua dividing Israel appeared [Fig. 11.7]. Unfortunately, it is not known whether the forest was a painted backdrop or whether it was actually staged, so it is not clear to what extent the tableau actually transformed the urban setting. While the miniature and woodcut suggest it was painted scenery, Remy de Puys implies it was staged, for he states “ung gorgias echarfault sur le quell estoit une forest moult proprement”

101 Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Cod. 2591; De Puys Remy, La Triumphante et solennelle entrée faicte sur le nouvel et joyeux advènement de très hault, très puissant et très excellent prince Monsieur Charles, prince des Hespaignes […] en la ville de Bruges, l’an 1515, le XVIIIe jour d’avril après Pasques […] (Paris, Gilles de Gourmont: c. 1515). The entire book is available digitally at https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1521561n (Accessed 17 July 2019). There is some disagreement as to whether Remy de Puys was ordered by the court or the city in writing this; Kavaler E.M., “Power and Performance: the Bruges Mantelpiece to Charles V”, Nederlands Kunsthistoriek Jaarboek 67 (2017) 226. 102 Mareel S., “Jan de Scheeres Triumphe ghedaen te brugghe ter intreye van caerle: Tekseditie met inleading en aantekeningen” Jaarboek de Fonteine 55 (2005) 79–143. 103 Kavaler, “Power and Performance” 226.

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Remy de Puys, Liedric and Ganymede/Joshua: La Triumphante et solennelle entrée faicte sur le nouvel et joyeux advènement de très hault, très puissant et très excellent prince Monsieur Charles, prince des Hespaignes […] en la ville de Bruges, l’an 1515, le XVIIIe jour d’avril après Pasques […] (Paris, Gilles de Gourmont: c. 1515), fol. 8r © Source gallica.bnf.fr / BnF

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(an elegant stage on which was a very realistic forest).104 Remy De Puys goes on to interpret the juxtaposition of Liedric’s donation of Bruges to Ganymedes as being parallel to Joshua’s divinely-ordained division of the Promised Land among the nine tribes of Israel. In his description, De Scheere clarified that the setting represented the forest of Flanders that could not be traversed without injury prior to the Liedric’s stewardship, the wise management of which is alluded to in the wattle fencing and gates.105 The historiography of Bruges – it’s very landscape – was thus vividly recreated and brought to life, pointing again to the city’s special status and identity. In contrast, the tableaux staged by the foreign merchants focused on their hopes that Charles V would foster the economic ties between Bruges and the other nations. To this end, the Italian merchants erected a fountain set within an enclosed meadow topped with the nude figures of the Three Graces from whose breasts sprinkled (‘arosoit’) on-lookers.106 Although he admired this for its beauty and artifice, Remy did not venture to interpret it; however, he did explain a similar fountain erected by the Spanish merchants that was topped by a statue of Cupid from whose arrows wine poured forth (fol. 22v). This he regarded as representing the hope of the Castilian merchants for abundance and flow of all goods (‘fluéce de tous biens’) under the Emperor’s virtuous reign, an interpretation supported and augmented by the verdant meadow setting.107 While the city of Bruges had emphasized the city’s special status in their tableaux, the Spanish merchants’ second tableau virtually effaced this status by transforming the urban environment into a garden symbolizing the Habsburg realms, and which was explicitly associated with Charles V’s person. This tableau showed Orpheus with his harp – an homage to the young prince’s well-known musical talents – sitting within a ‘jardin de plaisance verdoiant et bien peuple de tous arbres, fleurs et violettes’ [a pleasure garden, verdant and well populated with all trees, flowers and violets], accompanied by exotic animals and wild men [Fig. 11.8].108 As Remy interpreted the scene: Je croy que par ce joly vergier ilz veulle[n]t rep[re]senter le regne et les pays de jeune prince flourissant en tous biens, honneurs et vertueuse delectations. Au mylieu desquelz ilz ont située sa personne comme l’araigne siet en ses roitz, pour estre plus prochaine de ses subjectz afin de mieux 104 105 106 107 108

de Puys, La Triumphante et solennelle entrée fol. 8v. Mareel, “Jan de Scheere’s Triumphe” 98. de Puys, La Triumphante et solennelle entrée fol. 29r. Ibidem, fol. 23r. Ibidem, fol. 25v.

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Remy de Puys, Emperor Charles V as Orpheus: La Triumphante et solennelle entrée faicte sur le nouvel et joyeux advènement de très hault, très puissant et très excellent prince Monsieur Charles, prince des Hespaignes […] en la ville de Bruges, l’an 1515, le XVIIIe jour d’avril après Pasques […] (Paris, Gilles de Gourmont: c. 1515), fol. 25r © Source gallica.bnf.fr / BnF

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et plus legierme[n]t survenir aux extremes de toutes pars ou besoing sera. Et au surplus si doucement accorder l’instrument de sa conduyte, c’est à dire l’institution de son regne en perfaicte co[n]sonance et melodieuse armonye de touttes excellentes vertus que pour generalement attraire prochains et loingtains a la suyte et fervent desir de son hault bruyt et glorieux renom. Ce que jadis il advi[en]t au tres saige filz de David. Et de freche memoire au bon duc Philippes de Bourgoigne, bisaieul du jeune prince, a l’onneur et doctrine du quel doivent principalement tourner les exemples domesticques de ses bons parens qui luy sont et par raison doivent estre a jamais ung poignant aguillon pour stimuler le vif de son hault couraige a toute excellente de royale perfection109 [I believe that by this lovely garden they wished to represent the reign and the countries of the young prince flourishing in all goods, honours and virtuous delights. The setting where they situated his person like a spider sitting in its web, so as to be closer to his subjects [and] to more easily survey the extremes of all the parts [of his state] or as will be needed. And, moreover, so sweetly tuned the instrument of his conduct, that is to say the institution of his reign, in perfect consonance and melodious harmony of all excellent virtues, that all both near and far are attracted in fervent desire of his most high and glorious renown. As what once had happened to the very wise son of David, and the good duke Philip of Burgundy of recent memory, great-grandfather of the young prince, whose honour and example he must mainly turn to the domestic examples of his good parents, which are and for good reason must ever be a poignant prick to him to stimulate the spirit of his noble character to all excellence of royal perfection.] The Spanish merchants had drawn on a long tradition of comparing Orpheus to King David (as well as to Christ himself), a tradition that had been enriched in the later Middle Ages when Orpheus took on secular and courtly values.110 With this rich heritage of symbolic associations, a triangulation is thus made between King David, Orpheus and Charles V as divinely inspired musicians. Furthermore, by referencing King David within a genealogical context for Charles V a parallel is drawn to the “Son of David” through 109 Ibidem, fol. 25v. A slightly different transcription and translation of this text can be found in Tammen B., “A Feast of the Arts: Joanna of Castile in Brussels, 1496” Early Music History 30 (2011) 231–232. 110 Friedman J.B., Orpheus in the Middle Ages (Syracuse: 2000) ch. 5.

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typological association. The young emperor is the terrestrial Good Shepherd of the Habsburg Garden, bringing to fruition the ambitions of his great-greatgreat grandparents at Germolles, 125 years earlier. Gardens are places of relaxation and respite, but they are also imbued with the politics of space, both within their borders and in relation to their surrounding environments. As idealized representations of nature and representations of a particular vision of the world, gardens speak. At a time when the nobility was fractured and concerned primarily with localized interests, the garden provided cohesion to the performance and display of ‘la vivre noblement’. As Valois, Burgundian, and Habsburg rulers aspired to create the vision of a unified state, they designed their gardens accordingly. These politics of space complicate the simplistic binary of the medieval enclosed garden and the renaissance open garden. Hesdin proclaimed power through its exclusivity, its fame reaching far beyond its environs in chronicles, encomiums and ekphrasis. The visibility of the enclosed Coudenberg park, particularly in painting and prints, on the other hand, became a visible manifestation the hierarchical relationship of the court to the city and a unifying symbol of Habsburg rule, paving the way for the absolutist landscapes of the next era. Bibliography Anzelewsky F., “À propos de la topographie de Bruxelles et du quai de l’Escaut à Anvers de Dürer”, Bulletin des Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique 6 (1957) 87–107. Armstrong C.A.J., England, France and Burgundy in the Fifteenth Century (London: 1983). Arnade P., “Secular Charisma, Sacred Power: Rites of Rebellion in the Ghent Entry of 1467”, Handelingen der Maatschappij Voor Geschiedenis en Oudheidkunde te Gent (1991) 69–94. As-Vijvers A.-M., “Illuminations’ / ‘De verluchting”, in Burn D.J. – Meconi H. (eds.), The Mechelen Choirbook: A Treasure from the Scriptorium of Petrus Alamire / Het Mechelse koorboek: een schat uit het scriptorium van Petrus Alamire, (Leuven Library of Music in Facsimile 2) (Antwerp: forthcoming). Avril F. – Hermant M. – Bibolet F., Très Riches Heures de Champagne: L’enluminure en Champagne à la fin du Moyen Âge (Paris: 2007). Balis A. et al., Les Chasses de Maximilien (Paris: 1993). Bauman G., “A Rosary Picture with a View of the Park of the Ducal Palace in Brussels, Possibly by Goswijn van der Weyden”, Metropolitan Museum Journal 24 (1989) 135–51.

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Tronzo, W., Petrarch’s Two Gardens: Landscape and the Image of Movement (New York: 2014). Truitt E.R., Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art (Philadelphia: 2015). Turner T., European Gardens: History, Philosophy and Design (London – New York: 2011). Vale M., The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe, 1270–1380 (Oxford: 2001). Van Buren A.H., “Un jardin d’amour de Philippe le Bon au parc de Hesdin: Le rôle de Van Eyck dans une commande ducale”, Revue du Louvre 35 (1985) 185–192. Van de Kerckhof V. – Bussers H. – Bücken V. (eds.), Le Peintre et l’arpenteur: Images de Bruxelles et de l’ancien duché de Brabant, Musée royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique (Brussels: 2000). Van Steensel A., “Noble Identity and Culture: Recent Historiography on the Nobility in the Medieval Low Countries” (I–III), History Compass, 12.3 (2014) 263–299. Van Winter J., “De Hollandse tuin”, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 8 (1957) 29–121. Vaughan R., Philip the Good: The Apogee of Burgundy (Woodbridge – Rochester: 2002). Viard J. (ed.), Documents parisiens du règne de Philippe VI de Valois (1328–1350): Extraits des Registres de la Chancellerie de France, 2 vols. (Paris: 1899). Welch E., “Public Magnificence and Private Display Giovanni Pontano’s ‘De splendore’ (1498) and the Domestic Arts”, Journal of Design History 15.4 (2002) 211–221. Wyant C.J., Civic Patronage in Late Medieval Troyes, 1380–1520 (Ph.D. dissertation, University of St. Andrews: 2012).

chapter 12

The Stratigraphy of Poetic Landscape at the Esquiline Villa Sarah McPhee At the end of his brief biography of Giovanni Battista Falda, published in 1701, Lazzaro Cotta includes a list of the Italian etcher’s principal works.1 At number XXI he writes, ‘Villa dell’Eminentissimo Cardinal Nerli, su gli Esquilini, per la qual opera hebbe più visite da Sua Emin. due gran medaglie d’oro, un’horologio, e cento Ducati’. (Villa of the most eminent Cardinal Nerli on the Esquiline for which work [the artist] received many visits from his eminence, two large gold medals, a clock, and one hundred ducats.)2 Giovanni Battista Falda, who made the image of Nerli’s villa, was the finest topographical etcher in Rome in the seventeenth century. In the final years of his career he made etchings of the famous villas of papal Rome, among them the Quirinal Palace and gardens, the Villas Medici, Montalto, and Ludovisi. Referred to as ‘Gli Esperidi Romani’ (the Roman Hesperides), these views show the properties in plan/view and perspective [Figs. 12.1 and 12.2].3 They include precious information on fountains, plantings, and villa structures and are considered the culmination of Falda’s brief career. His great map of Rome was made at roughly the same time, and was published in 1676 [Fig. 12.3].4 Etched on twelve plates, 1 I should like to acknowledge Eric Varner, expert on the monuments and topography of ancient Rome, for reading drafts of this essay and for offering advice. I am also grateful to Fiamma Arditi for help with translation and to Vincent Buonanno for providing images of Falda prints in his collection. 2 Cotta Lazzaro Agostino, Mvseo novarese formato da Lazaro Agostino Cotta d’Ameno […] e di­ viso in quattro stanze con quattro indici (Milano, Per gli heredi Ghisolfi: 1701) 295. 3 The frontispiece of Li Giardini di Roma, published by Giovanni Giacomo De Rossi, refers to the collection as “Gli Esperidi Romani” with a dedication to Livio Odescalchi. Early editions refer to him as the ‘Duca di Ceri’, a position conferred on him by his uncle Pope Innocent XI in 1676; later editions of the frontispiece refer to him as ‘principe’, an honor bestowed on him by the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I in 1689. The surviving copper plate in the Calcografia Nazionale bears the date 1683, probably the year of the privilege, hence the series was first issued between 1676 and 1683. See Bevilacqua M., “Cartografia e immagini urbane. Giovanni Battista Falda e Cornelis Meyer nella Roma di Innocenzo XI”, in Bösel R. – Ippolito A.M. – Spiriti A. – Strinati C. – Visceglia M.A. (eds.), Innocenzo XI Odescalchi: Papa, politico, commit­ tente, (Rome: 2014) 290. 4 Falda Giovanni Battista, Nuova pianta et alzata della città di Roma con tutte le strade piazze et edificii (Rome, Giovanni Giacomo De Rossi: 1676, etching and engraving, 61 × 61¾ in. (155 × © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004440401_013

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figure 12.1

Giovanni Battista Falda, View of the Papal Garden on the Quirinal Hill. Etching, 23.5 × 41.27 cm. From Li Giardini di Roma (Rome, Giovanni Giacomo De Rossi: ca. 1676–1683). Collection of Vincent J. Buonanno (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by Digital Production Services, Brown University Library, Providence, RI)

figure 12.2

Giovanni Battista Falda, Plan of the Papal Garden on the Quirinal Hill. Etching, 26.04 × 41.27 cm. From Li Giardini di Roma (Rome, Giovanni Giacomo De Rossi: ca. 1676–1683). Collection of Vincent J. Buonanno (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by Digital Production Services, Brown University Library, Providence, RI)

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Giovanni Battista Falda, Nuova pianta et alzata della città di Roma con tutte le strade piazze et edificii (Rome, Giovanni Giacomo De Rossi: 1676). Etching and engraving, 155 × 157 cm. Collection of Vincent J. Buonanno (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by Digital Production Services, Brown University Library, Providence, RI)

the map measures about 5 × 5 feet when assembled. In the eastern portion of Falda’s map, directly above the Colosseum on the Esquiline Hill, Falda includes a bird’s eye view of the triangular perimeter of Nerli’s property [Fig. 12.4]. The land unfolds to the east of the Via Merulana between Santa Maria Maggiore and the Lateran, bounded by San Matteo in Merulana to the south and the church of S. Vito beside the Arch of Gallienus to the east. On the map, 157 cm). On Falda’s map, see McPhee S., “Falda’s Map as a Work of Art”, The Art Bulletin 101.2 (2019) 7–28, with earlier bibliography.

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Giovanni Battista Falda, Nuova pianta et alzata della città di Roma con tutte le strade piazze et edificii (Rome, Giovanni Giacomo De Rossi: 1676). Etching and engraving, 155 × 157 cm. Detail of Cardinal Nerli’s Garden. Collection of Vincent J. Buonanno (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by Digital Production Services, Brown University Library, Providence, RI)

the area is inscribed: “GIARD[INO] DEL CARD[INAL] NERLI”. A villa structure with a walled garden is visible, set within a larger garden suggested by parterres, but not a lot more. The image of the villa that Falda made for Nerli, listed by his biographer, has been lost. It does not appear among Falda’s works in the Illustrated Bartsch or in any other compendium. What was this image Falda created and why was it worth multiple visits from the cardinal, two large gold medals, a clock, and one hundred ducats? Cardinal Nerli is mentioned by name by Falda’s biographer, along with Cardinal Imperiali, Cardinal Camillo Massimo, and Queen Christina of Sweden.5 He appears in a portrait made by the Flemish painter Jacob Ferdinand Voet in 1673 [Fig. 12.5]. Nerli was born in 1636 and died in 1708 at the age of 72.6 Voet’s portrait shows him at age thirty-seven – the year he was made a cardinal. It is through the biography of this man, his inventory after death and above all the ekphrastic poetry that survives him that we are able to conjure his garden on the Esquiline Hill in Rome.

5 Cotta, Mvseo novarese 293, 295. 6 Tabacchi S., s.v., “Nerli, Francesco, iunior”, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 78 (2013).

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Jacob Ferdinand Voet, Cardinal Francesco Nerli (1636–1708), 1673. Oil on canvas, 130 × 92.5 cm. Dedication on the letter “A […] E.mo et R.mo Sig. Cardinale Nerli/Roma” Public domain. Image © Wikimedia Commons

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First, the man. Francesco Nerli was born in Rome into an aristocratic Florentine family.7 His uncle, Francesco senior, preceded him as a cardinal and his father was private treasurer to the pope. Francesco junior, as he was known, was made cardinal by Pope Clement X. He served the Altieri pope as nuncio to Poland, Germany and France, later becoming Secretary of State alongside Paluzzo Altieri. The diarist Francesco Valesio describes Nerli as a man of the finest manners and great literary accomplishment but notes that he was a hypochondriac with a very active imagination – ‘di genio fantastico’.8 Nerli was an amateur poet, an antiquarian, a collector of paintings, tapestries, medals, and optical instruments. He assembled an extensive library, and left his estate to the Ospedale dei Pazzi, a hospital for the demented.9 The inventory made after his death fills over four hundred pages in a volume in the Archivio di Stato and begins with his eleven horses, all listed individually, by name.10 The Esquiline Villa was beloved by Nerli. Manuscript volumes of his own poetry survive with pages of verse dedicated to the villa.11 The print of the villa made by Giovanni Battista Falda was a prize among his possessions. According to the inventory, in a room full of maps – geographies of the world – Falda’s image of the villa hung framed on the wall.12 The copper plate itself was kept nearby in a room overlooking the garden in a special box made of poplar wood; the notary recorded that it weighed twenty pounds.13 There were drawers filled with telescopes of varying lengths, and a balcony from which a cavaletto or tripod could be used to support them when sighting.14 The cardinal was 7

8 9

10 11 12 13 14

On Cardinal Francesco Nerli the younger see DBI, as cited above, with earlier bibliography, esp. Trasselli F., “‘Scritture e monumenti’, testimonianze per la biografia e materiali per la storia della biblioteca romana del cardinale Francesco Nerli”, Rivista Cistercense 24 (2007) 5–109. More recently, see Molino I., “Il cardinale Francesco Nerli (1636–1708). Collezionismo tra Roma e Parigi”, Storia dell’arte 137/138 (2014) 144–162. Valesio F., Diario di Roma, ed. G. Scano, vol. II (Milan: 1977) 535 [23 February 1703]. Francesco Nerli’s will can be found in Rome at the Archivio di S. Maria della Pietà (ASMP, sezione A, serie 20, unità 3); a copy of his inventory is also located there (ASMP, sezione A, serie 70, unità 3), as well as at the Archivio di Stato di Roma (ASR), Trenta Notai Capitolini, Ufficio 11, vol. 296, ff. 239r–276v. ASR, Trenta Notai Capitolini, Ufficio 11, vol. 296, fol. 263v. On the Nerli library see Trasselli, “‘Scritture e monumenti’”. ASR, Trenta Notai Capitolini, Ufficio 11, vol. 296, fol. 379v: ‘un quadro con disegno della villa in carta cornice d’orata longo palmi tre largo due e mezzo in circa’. ASR, Trenta Notai Capitolini, Ufficio 11, vol. 296, fol. 398v: ‘una stampa di rame dove vi è Intagliata la pianta della Villa di S.E. ch. me. di peso libre venti usata dentro una scatola d’albuccio’. ASR, Trenta Notai Capitolini, Ufficio 11, vol. 296, fol. 391r: ‘un cavaletto da occhialone di legno bianco con piede tornito’; f. 394v: ‘Un credenzone d’albuccio tinto a noce […] con dentro un occhialone coperto di carta pecora verde et oro [...] altro occhialone coperto con la med.ma carta [...] altro occhialoncino’.

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interested in the revelations provided by lenses and seems to have trained his scopes on the garden. A copy of Falda’s print, the sole example I am aware of, has recently come to light at the Getty Research Institute, among manuscripts surviving from the English Jesuit college, St. Stanislaus, Beaumont [Fig. 12.6].15 The print is large and exquisitely detailed; it measures 19 ½ inches high by 27 inches wide. It is signed by Falda on a structure in the middle foreground and is dated 1677. Falda’s print shows Nerli’s property as if seen from the bell tower of S. Maria Maggiore, the highest point within the walls of Rome.16 He suggests the plunging perspective afforded by looking straight downward from the bell tower into the foreground with the wedge-shaped property tilting upward toward the horizon and S. Giovanni in Laterano, allowing us, as we lift our eyes, to survey the whole villa landscape. As with his great map and garden views, we can stroll the allées with our eyes, pausing on fountains, pergolas, parterres, and orchards, aqueducts, temples and arches. In the seventeenth century, the Esquiline was dotted with patrician villas – the Altieri, Montalto, Palombara, Giustiniani, Orsini, but it was also littered with the vestiges of the ancient world. The temple of Minerva Medica is visible in the distance along the Aurelian walls. Nearer by, along the left side of the print, is a fragment of the Acqua Claudia and the hulking remains of the Castellum of the Acqua Marcia where the Trophies of Marius were found. At the edge of the villa proper stands 15

The print is part of an album containing roughly 85 prints and 12 drawings today in the Getty Research Institute Special Collections, ID/Accession Number 92-A79 890145*. The catalogue notes indicate that the volume was once the property of S. Stanislao dei Polacchi in Rome. This information is mistaken. The identification seems to have been based on the book plate, which identifies the volume as ‘E Bibl. Coll. Sti. Stanislai, Beaumont’. In fact, St. Stanislaus College, Beaumont was a Catholic public school founded in 1861 and located in Old Windsor, Berkshire, England, in buildings that had once been a part of a Beaumont family estate. The school was dedicated to the Jesuit Saint Stanislaus Kostka and not to Poland’s patron saint, Stanislaus Szczepanowski of Krakow for whom the church in Rome is named. My thanks to Louise Rice for reminding me of the two Saints Stanislaus. On the college see: The History of St. Stanislaus’ College, Beaumont: A Record of Fifty Years, 1861–1911 (Old Windsor: 1911; and Caparrini B.R., “The Relations of Beaumont College (Old Windsor, England) with the British Monarchy (1861–1908)”, The Catholic Historical Review 98.4 (2012) 703–725. For the collection and sale of books from Catholic religious houses in the British Isles to libraries in the United States see: Kiessling N.K., “James Molloy and Sales of Recusant Books to the United States”, The Catholic Historical Review 102.3 (2016) 545–580. The print was first published by Molino, “Il cardinale Francesco Nerli” 152, fig. 8, in the context of an article on Nerli as collector. Molino does not consider the print per se, nor does she comment on its provenance. 16 Novelli I. (ed.), Atlante di Roma, trans. C. Hefer – D. Kerr (Venice: 1991) 110, gives the ground-level elevation of S. Maria Maggiore as 54.09 meters, and numerous guidebooks provide a height of 75 meters for the campanile (Rome’s tallest). My thanks to John Pinto for this information.

figure 12.6

Giovanni Battista Falda, Cardinal Nerli’s villa, 1677. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (890145) Public Domain. Image © Getty Research Institute

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the Arch of Gallienus, hard by the ancient church of S. Vito. Falda places Nerli’s villa in the immediate foreground of the print, the cordonata leading to its entrance at dead center and on axis with the cardinal’s arms above. While ancient monuments form an arc at left, cradling the north side of the property, a ruler-straight Via Merulana bisects the right half of the print, defining the western edge of the garden and leading the viewer from Santa Maria Maggiore to S. Giovanni in Laterano. Two thirds of the way along this route the tiny church of San Matteo in Merulana appears, set back from the road. The church defined the southern limit of Nerli’s wedge-shaped property. San Matteo was one of the ancient titular churches of Rome and Nerli was its cardinal protector. Falda anchors the image with densely drawn trees in the immediate foreground set high above the land. Among them, at left, aristocratic hunters load muskets, hold falcons, rest in the shade, and examine the view while calling to hounds; at right, more modest folk survey the fields, sketch the prospect, and set off with spades to work below. Nerli acquired the property in the 1670s and spent the next thirty years cultivating and adorning it.17 With time the villa became increasingly identified with the cardinal and the layers or stratigraphy of this landscape were revealed in both word and image. The villa is celebrated in a poem, published in 1704, that is so specific in its allusions, both to the cardinal and his garden, that it is clear that the poet, Giovanni Battista Ancona de Amadori, knew Nerli well and seems to have had Falda’s etching of the garden before him as he wrote.18 The poet invites the reader to conjure a mental image of the land, embellishing Falda’s landscape and placing it in the realm of history and myth. The poem takes the form of an ode and is entitled: “La Flora Esquilina villa amenissima dell’Eminentissimo e Reverendissimo Sig. Cardinale Francesco Nerli” (The Esquiline Flora, the most pleasant villa of the most eminent and reverend Cardinal Nerli). As Amadori notes on the opening page, the land over which Nerli’s garden spread was contiguous with the famous gardens that belonged, in antiquity, to Caius Maecenas, that friend of Caesar Augustus who lends his name, even today, to patronage, especially of literature and the arts.19 17 I am currently preparing an article on the history of the Nerli garden. 18 Ancona de Amadori Giovanni Battista, La Flora Esquilina villa amenissima dell’Eminen­ tissimo e Reverendissimo Sig. Cardinale Francesco Nerli (Rome, Bernabò: 1704). https://books.google.com/books?id=49Sfv7HfZkUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=inauthor: %22Giovanni+Battista+Ancona+Amadori+(m.+1744)%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi Q3LiKzYrkAhWMdd8KHSs-CvMQ6AEwAHoECAAQAg#v=onepage&q&f=false. 19 Ibidem 9: “La Flora Esquilina contigua à gli antichi, e famosi orti di Mecenate”.

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A detail from Rodolfo Lanciani’s Forma Urbis Romae, spells out the relationship, locating Nerli’s villa with red letters at center: ‘Orto Cesi D’Acquasparta poi Nerli poi Villa Caserta’, and the ‘Horti Maecenatis’, or ‘Villa of Maecenas’ with black letters below [Fig. 12.7].20 The poem is dedicated to the ashes of Queen Christina of Sweden, who died in 1689. Christina was famous above all for abdicating the Protestant throne of Sweden, converting to Catholicism, and moving, in 1655, to Rome. There she was known for the scientific and literary academies she founded, interests shared with Nerli and Amadori.21 During her lifetime, Falda had also worked for Queen Christina, making prints.22 In his dedicatory introduction, Amadori specifically refers to Christina as his Clio – his muse of history – and invokes the association of the cardinal and the queen and their shared interest in poetry.23 As the artist and antiquarian Pietro Santi Bartoli recorded, it was on Nerli’s property that nine statues were unearthed, among them four muses that made their way into the Queen’s collection [Fig. 12.8].24 Today, with later

20 Lanciani R.A., Forma Urbis Romae (1901), plate 23. See [Dg 155-4930/4 gr raro, XXIII – Horti Maecenatiani] http://dlib.biblhertz.it/Dg155-4930-4#page/23/mode/1up. For the most recent study of the region see Häuber C., The Eastern Part of the Mons Oppius in Rome: the Sanctuary of Isis et Serapis in Regio III, the Temples of Minerva Medica, Fortuna Virgo and Dea Syria, and the Horti of Maecenas, with contributions by E. Gautier di Confiengo and D. Velestino. 22. Suppl. Bullettino della Commissione Archeologica comunale di Roma (Rome: 2014). For Häuber’s maps of the region see: http://www.rom.geographie.uni -muenchen.de/maps/maps2.html. 21 The literature on Queen Christina of Sweden is vast. For a brief invocation of Christina’s Roman academies see: Stephan R., “A Note on Christina and her Academies”, in von Platen M. (ed.), Queen Christina of Sweden. Documents and Studies, (Stockholm: 1966) 365–371; and Fogelberg Rota S., “Organizzazione e attività poetica dell’Accademia Reale di Cristina di Svezia”, in Rossana M.C. – Fogelberg Rota S. (eds.), Letteratura, arte e musica alla corte romana di Cristina di Svezia, Atti del Convegno di Studi, (Rome: 2005) 129–150. 22 Cotta, Mvseo novarese 295. 23 Ancona de Amadori, La Flora Esquilina 6: ‘Da sì prodigioso Spettacolo mi fù somministrato Motivo di accomunare con le medesime la Sorte della mia Clio, la quale, essendo io ambizioso di rendere in qualche parte riguardevole, mi disposi fregiarla con questi Fogli, ne’ quali hò preteso descrivere il delizioso Ritiro, & amenissima Villa dell’Eminentissimo Sig. Cardinal Nerli[…]’. 24 Bartoli Pietro Santi, as transcribed in Fea C., Miscellanea filologica critica e antiquaria dell’avocato Carlo Fea I (Rome: 1790) ccxxvii. 23: ‘Monte Esquilino. Nell’orto del duca di Acquasparta, oggi del cardinal Nerli, furono trovate in pochissimo sito nove statue: tra queste alcune Muse, le quali ebbe la regina di Svezia (a), ed altre il cardinal Francesco Barberini’. The statue of Clio in Queen Christina’s collection was recorded in an etching by Francesco Aquila.

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Map of Rome. From Rodolfo Amedeo Lanciani, Forma Urbis Romae (Rome, 1901), plate 23. Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Rome, Dg 155-4930/4 gr raro. Detail of the Esquiline region Public domain. Image © Bibliotheca Hertziana

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eighteenth-century restorations they are on view at the Prado.25 The ground beneath the villa was thus the realm of the muses both literally and figuratively; and sets the tone for the ten-page poem that follows in which Amadori weaves back and forth from the ancient world to the Christian, invoking the long and illustrious history of the place. Although the poem is dedicated to the dead queen, its hero is the poet’s friend, Cardinal Nerli. Amadori begins by comparing the villa to the wider world. It is in competition with the heavens. It is the wide compass of the globe, distilled in Nerli’s earthly paradise.26 Moving back in time, excavating a layer, we are told that here in Maecenas’s gardens was the tower where disgraceful Nero, accompanied by the sound of the lyre, watched with a happy eye while Rome was transformed into smoking fire.27 In fact, the Esquiline gardens of Maecenas were nearby the golden house of Nero, and Suetonius describes the emperor ‘viewing the conflagration from the tower of Maecenas and exulting, as he said, in “the beauty of the flames”’.28 In his reconstruction of the ancient city, published in 1561, Pirro Ligorio includes the multi-level tower of Maecenas, prominently labeled, in close proximity to the site of Nerli’s villa [Fig. 12.9]. Having established the macrocosm and the microcosm of the landscape, Amadori adds a clever reference both to the land and to the etcher who has depicted it. He writes: Quivi la Falda amena Estolle à grande Eroe vasto Recinto, Che in odorosa Scena D’Esperia accoglie ogni bel pregio auvinto.29

25 The sculptures in question are Museo del Prado, inv. Nos. E 37, E 38, E 40, and E 68. See https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/the-muse-clio/69dbadbaf992-450f-8e07-d8e4f9bd204b?searchid=9e6de99d-19d9-238f-2762-09e7a18dc083. On the history of the Esquiline muses and Queen Christina see most recently, Häuber, The Eastern Part of the Mons Oppius in Rome 524–530, figs. 13, 14, with earlier bibliography. My thanks to Eric Varner for suggesting I consult this text. 26 Ancona de Amadori, La Flora Esquilina 9–10. 27 Ibidem 10: ‘Hor là, dove la fronte/Ergea superba eccelsa Torre à l’Etra,/In cui d’incendio à l’Onte/Arder l’Ilio Latina al suon di Cetra/Scorgea con lieto Ciglio,/L’empio Neron, nè il fero sguardo arretra,/Fin che non vide in quel fatal periglio,/Fatta Rogo fumante arder già doma/Da Fiamma Coronata estinta Roma’. 28 Suetonius, in Rolfe J.C. (trans.), Lives of the Caesars (Nero 38.2) II (Cambridge, Mass.: 1914) 150–151. 29 Ancona de Amadori, La Flora Esquilina 11.

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Francesco Aquila, Clio, 1704. Etching. From Raccolta di statue antiche e moderne (Rome, Domenico De Rossi: 1704), plate cxii. Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Rome, Do 105-3040/a gr raro Public domain. Image © Bibliotheca Hertziana

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Pirro Ligorio, Tower of Maecenas. Woodcut. From Effigies antiquae Romae ex vestigiis aedificiorum ruinis testimonio veterum auctorum fide: numismatum monumentis, aeneis, plumbaeis, saxeis, tiglinisque (Rome, Apud Caroli Losi: 1773 [orig. Michele and Francesco Tramezzino, 1561]), plate 2. Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, G6714 .R7 L53 1773 FOLIO Public domain. Image © Emory University Digital Library Publications Program

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figure 12.10 Giovanni Battista Falda, Cardinal Nerli’s villa, 1677. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (890145). Detail from the lower right side with author and date Public Domain. Image © Getty Research Institute

‘Here the pleasant Falda,’ in Italian a layer or stratum of land, ‘celebrates for the great hero the vast enclosure that in perfumed scene of Hesperides welcomes every good value’. The hero of the poem is Nerli and the ‘pleasant Falda’ is a double entendre playing on the name of the etcher and the perfumed Hesperides or mythical garden he has rendered for us here. Falda includes his name and the date on the wall of a small garden structure at the base of the image, and further to the right a self-portrait of the etcher at work [Fig. 12.10]. The poet goes on: Veggio in ampio sentier, trà erboso incarco Frondoso Areopago ergersi in Arco.30 I see in the wide path with its grassy entourage Leafy Areopagus rising in an arch. 30 Ibidem 11.

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The Areopagus, a famous rock outcropping in Athens, appears frequently in the poetry of Nerli and Amadori and seems to refer metaphorically to the property as a whole and here, specifically, to the arch of Gallienus anchoring the northern edge of the garden.31 Gallienus was a third-century Roman emperor. According to the Historia Augusta, he served as an archon or magistrate in Greece, and wanted to be included among the members of the Areopagus, which also referred to the Athenian council of magistrates that met there.32 Amadori’s ‘Leafy Areopagus rising in an arch’ would seem to be the ruined portal in the ancient Severan walls of Rome, later an arch named for Gallienus. On the third page of the poem, we meet our guide. And here I paraphrase: From the shady recess a man appeared of magisterial beauty. His great knowledge and honest merit shining on his forehead. He beckons to the poet and speaks: If the beautiful, august enclosure of Francesco calls you with noble desire to see it, come with me and I will point out to you the wonders of this earthly paradise. I am Maecenas, [and] even if I have succumbed to the frozen cold of death, I linger here in spirit, and even from the tomb I admire the values of the hero.33 Nerli is the hero of the poem and our guide the ancient Maecenas. The stanza goes on: If the just God throws me into the blind horror of the Stygian caverns, Still my heart longs, among the eternal flames, to rest for a few moments from my damnation, in these blessed shades.34 31 For Nerli’s own poetry on the Esquiline villa see Biblioteca Vittorio Emanuele (BVE), Rome, ms. Sess. 407. In poem 117 (f. 126), he refers to his land as an ‘august Areopagus’ (Nel Areopago augusto […]), and in poem 96 (f. 105r), he writes: ‘Qui di Galieno, anzi di Vito l’arco/E del Tempio Esquilin’ l’inclita mole,/E in Merulana il titol, ch’io rimarco’. (Here is the arch of Galienus, or Vito/and the illustrious pile of the Esquiline Temple [Minerva Medica]/And in Merulana the title, that I observe.) 32 Historia Augusta III (Gall. 11.5–7), trans. D. Magie (Cambridge, Mass.: 1932) 38–39. 33 Ancona de Amadori, La Flora Esquilina 11: ‘Se di Francesco il bel Recinto augusto/Nobil desio à vagheggiar ti chiama?/Meco ne vieni, e additerotti appieno,/Stupori immensi in questo Cielo ameno./Mecenate son’io,/Benche di Morte al freddo gel soccomba,/Vago è lo spirto mio/Pregi ammirar d’Eroi fin da la Tomba’. 34 Ibidem 11. ‘Trà le Stigie Caverne/Se il giusto Dio, nel cieco Orror mi piomba,/Pure anela il mio Cor trà fiamme Eterne/D’haver tregua talor qualche momento/In queste Ombre beate al rio tormento’.

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Giovanni Battista Falda, Cardinal Nerli’s villa, 1677. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (890145). Detail of the cardinal walking his garden paths Public Domain. Image © Getty Research Institute

Maecenas, long dead, still lingers on his lands, admiring his Christian descendant Nerli and longing to worship the Just God. Maecenas laments the fact that to him the great mystery of the Trinity was unknown and he goes on to observe in a further reference to prints and printing: Hor qui vedrai sovente Il pio Signor per queste Vie fiorite Ad erudir la Mente Solitario stampare Orme romite.35 Now here you will often see The pious signor [Nerli] on these flowering roads To educate his mind Alone, imprinting his solitary footsteps. The ‘orme romite’ or hermit’s footsteps of Francesco refer to his namesake, Saint Francis, who often withdrew to his romitorio or hermitage. Falda shows us the cardinal treading his garden path and imprinting the soil [Fig. 12.11].

35 Ibidem 12.

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Maecenas has realized that there is but one God and that he who is denied this knowledge is in pain. The poet goes on describing the garden: the wavy sapphire of water springing from fountains with murmuring sound, the beautiful golden apples set among grassy banks, flowering armies, perfumed pomp, bushes enameled with roses. Nerli has refrained from adding ancient statues to his paths, the poet tells us, for he prefers his treasures not to be without their leaves. Instead he has shimmering fish in silvery water and ‘if you can pull your thoughts from the flowers before you, you can look at the ruined remains of ancient Rome’. E se toglie il pensier da i fior, ch’hà inanzi Mira di Roma i lacerati Avanzi.36 But the poem heats up as we enter the villa itself, with a last reference to Falda and to print. Mà dentro al Regio Tetto Novi stupori alto splendor comparte. But inside the royal roof [the villa] further splendid amazements are shared. Ecco l’Orbe ristretto, Ch’Egli contempla effigiato in carte.37 Here [Nerli] contemplates the world in miniature ‘Effigiato in carte’, portrayed on paper. In rooms overlooking the garden, he studies Europe and ‘the spacious paths through it’. He follows the river Vistola in Poland, and the river Onde descending the Alps, the Istro or lower Danube, and the Seine. From there they flow on to the Tiber and ‘one sees them change to the color purple [as they enter Rome] with the beautiful sudor, or sweat, of Faith’.38

36 Ibidem 14. 37 Ibidem. 38 Ibidem: ‘indi Sul Tebro vede/Cambiargli in Ostro i bei sudor la Fede’.

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There are rooms of portraits ‘hanging majesties, animated shades’ of august monarchs and crowned popes, and tapestries in profusion.39 The poet writes of Nerli’s ancestors found in the tapestries: Babylonian silks the wonder of Assyrian threads sent from Asia shine more happily there among silken treasures, [with] acts to be admired Of his undefeated lineage.40 We are told to: Look at the great ancestors in warlike bands Advancing in the field of battle with [enemy] armies in defeat. Whence along the beautiful Arno high trophies are erected to them, And here their ornaments Eternity impresses.41 In topographical echo of Suetonius, writing on the Esquiline, he speaks of the golden roof of Nero’s house, of the turning ceiling open to the spheres, gilded tricks and soft cushions sewn with pearls. But ‘our hero does not emulate the Tyrants, he reposes, rather than on feathers, at the foot of the crucified god’.42 Nerli is not allowed his meditation, for the poet tells us that the ancient Gods have homicidal intentions and have been plotting his early demise. Fame’s trumpet sounds and Clotho appears with her cruel and untrustworthy stare. One of the three Fates, it is Clotho who spins the thread of the life of a man, deciding when he is born and when he dies. She has plucked at the familial threads of the tapestries and is transforming Nerli’s from gold to a beautiful vermilion. A pitched struggle ensues, twisted portents, sanguinous events. The face of Jesus appears, but Clotho will not fly away. Obstinate in her massacre, she threads her arrow, pulls back her bow. 39 Ibidem. Nerli’s inventory lists scores of portraits, and tapestries of Hercules, animals, hunting scenes, and poetry. See ASR, Trenta Notai Capitolini, Ufficio 11, vol. 296, f. 344v, 352r, 367v–368r (tapestries); f. 377v, 415v, 416v (portraits). 40 Ancona de Amadori, La Flora Esquilina 15: ‘Babiloniche Sete/Stupor d’Assirie Spole Asia tramande,/Splendono quà più liete/Trà serici Tesori Opre ammirande:/Di sua Prosapia invitta’. 41 Ibidem 15: ‘Mira i grand’ Avi in frà guerriere Bande/In Campo fulminar Schiera sconfitta,/ Onde il bel Arno alti Trofei gl’eresse,/E qui à lor Fregi Eternità gl’impresse’. 42 Ibidem 15: ‘Schiva l’Eroe ad emular Tiranni,/Egli i riposi suoi, più ch’a le piume/Anela a’ Piè del Crocifisso Nume’.

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The poet intones: Look at the mortal ordeal Astonish the Tiber, and freeze the waves And to the horrid fear With dreadful voices the banks scream The pale Vatican cries, trembles, agitated and confounded Only the heavens exult with strange wreaths The pitiless God prepares his grand palm That he sends to the world, and gives in return to the heavens that soul.43 All seems to be lost, Clotho is intent on sending her fatal dart. The Tiber torments itself, the sun turns its rays to watch. But an old man with wings appears. Stop, he says, cruel Cloto, what are you doing? I am Time, and I regulate the days of the grand hero and his fatal hour […] Look at the contorted path of the golden thread, its incomplete ornaments Cloto cannot truncate with her wishes The illustrious works and worthy deeds [our hero] has before him Sovereign Fate wishes him to accomplish more […] So go be cruel far from us [Cloto] Act against plebian threads, not against those of heroes.44 Clotho hurries off to shadowy exile and the roses return to the cheeks of Francesco. In the final stanza Maecenas sends the reader on his way, ceding to Apollo with his eternal cycle of movement, the honor of unveiling greater

43 Ibidem 17: ‘Mira il mortal Cimento,/Stupido il Tebro, e ne gelaron l’Onde,/E al orrido spavento/Di funesti ululati urlan le Sponde,/Pallido il Vaticano/Piange, freme agitato, e si confonde:/Solo il Cielo n’esulta, e Serto strano./Prepara al empio Nume à sua gran Palma,/ Ch’invola al Mondo, e dona al Ciel quell’Alma’. 44 Ibidem: ‘Ferma, disse, crudel Cloto/che fai?/Il Tempo io son,/che al grande Eroe immortale/Regolo i giorni, e l’Ora sua fatale./Folle sù l’aureo stame/Mira i rotorti, e non compiti fregi;/Non può Cloto à sue brame/L’Opre troncar d’illustri Fatti egregi:/Ei dal Fato sovrano/Più lustri avanza à immortalar suoi Pregi;/Hor tu confusa in Suol remoto, e strano/Vanne ad incrudelir lungi da Noi/Contro Stami plebei, e non d’Eroi’.

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amazements, observing that: ‘They say his flight is rapid; he dissolves among flowering trees’.45 Meanwhile, Maecenas, the suffering pagan, longs: ‘So that I with a sigh, stunned and alone, turn to that horror that is invading and exclaim: Could I but have a shadow [be a shade] among these laurels’.46 In the summer of 1704 Francesco Nerli nearly died of a terrible illness.47 Among his own poems is one on returning to the Esquiline villa while still suffering. Nerli writes that his languid state is ‘viva morte’ or ‘living death’ and wishes the thread of his life to be cut short.48 When he was restored to health, the pope appointed Nerli Archpriest of the Basilica of Saint Peters and Prefect of the Congregation of the Fabbrica. Amadori’s poem was published shortly thereafter. The broad recognition the poem received and the centrality of its metaphors to the literary and intellectual circles of which Nerli was a part are evident in his patronage in later years. Among the maps published by Giovanni Giacomo De Rossi in his Mercurio Geografico are two dedicated to Nerli, copies of which hung on the villa walls.49 One shows the lands belonging to St. Peter’s, another the Kingdom of Navarre [Fig. 12.12]. In the dedication of the map of Navarre, the publisher, De Rossi, praises the accomplishments of the cardinal in the Republic of Letters, his reverence, wisdom, and piety, calling him ‘Mecenate più sincero dell’antico’ (Maecenas most sincere of antiquity) [Fig. 12.13]. Nerli’s earthly paradise was visited by princes, popes, and queens. The cardinal himself chose to be buried in his titular church, S. Matteo in Merulana, at the edge of his garden. While Falda died a year after he made this print, the poet Amadori immortalized both his friend the cardinal and the earthly paradise of his Falda amena in verse.

45 Ibidem 18: ‘Si disse, e ratto il Volo/Egli disciolse in trà fioriti Albori’. 46 Ibidem: ‘Ond’Io con un sospir, stupido, e solo;/Rivolto esclamo à quell’Orror, che ingombra,/Potessi io haver frà questi Allori un’Ombra’. 47 Tabacchi, “Nerli, Francesco, iunior”. 48 BVE, ms. Sess. 407, f. 105r: ‘Vorrei fosser lor fila ancor più corte, / Ch’il mio languido stato è viva morte’. 49 ASR, Trenta Notai Capitolini, Ufficio 11, vol. 296, f. 439v: “Altra carta simile intitolata Patrimonio di S. Pietro senza bastoni”.

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figure 12.12 Giacomo Cantelli, Il Regno di Navarra, 1690. 58 × 44 cm. From G.G. De Rossi (ed.), Mercurio Geografico overo Guida Geografica in tutte le parti del Mondo (Rome, Giovanni Giacomo De Rossi: 1690). The David Rumsey Collection, www.davidrumsey.com Public Domain. Image © David Rumsey Map Collection

The Stratigraphy of Poetic Landscape at the Esquiline Villa

figure 12.13 Giacomo Cantelli, Il Regno di Navarra, 1690. 58 × 44 cm. From G.G. De Rossi (ed.), Mercurio Geografico overo Guida Geografica in tutte le parti del Mondo (Rome, Giovanni Giacomo De Rossi: 1690). The David Rumsey Collection, www.davidrumsey.com. Detail of the dedicatory cartouche Public Domain. Image © David Rumsey Map Collection

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Bibliography Ancona de Amadori G.B., La Flora Esquilina villa amenissima dell’Eminentissimo e Reverendissimo Sig. Cardinale Francesco Nerli (Rome, Bernabò: 1704). Bevilacqua M., “Cartografia e immagini urbane. Giovanni Battista Falda e Cornelis Meyer nella Roma di Innocenzo XI”, in Bösel R. – Ippolito A.M. – Spiriti A. – Strinati C. – Visceglia M.A. (eds.), Innocenzo XI Odescalchi: Papa, politico, commit­ tente, (Rome: 2014). Caparrini B.R., “The Relations of Beaumont College (Old Windsor, England) with the British Monarchy (1861–1908)”, The Catholic Historical Review 98.4 (2012) 703–725. Cotta Lazzaro Agostino, Mvseo novarese formato da Lazaro Agostino Cotta d’Ameno […] e diviso in quattro stanze con quattro indici (Milano, Per gli heredi Ghisolfi: 1701). Fogelberg Rota S., “Organizzazione e attività poetica dell’Accademia Reale di Cristina di Svezia”, in Rossana M.C. – Fogelberg Rota S. (eds.), Letteratura, arte e musica alla corte romana di Cristina di Svezia, Atti del Convegno di Studi, (Rome: 2005) 129–150. Häuber C., The Eastern Part of the Mons Oppius in Rome: the Sanctuary of Isis et Serapis in Regio III, the Temples of Minerva Medica, Fortuna Virgo and Dea Syria, and the Horti of Maecenas, with contributions by E. Gautier di Confiengo and D. Velestino. 22. Suppl. Bullettino della Commissione Archeologica comunale di Roma (Rome: 2014). Kiessling N.K., “James Molloy and Sales of Recusant Books to the United States”, The Catholic Historical Review 102.3 (2016) 545–580. Lanciani R.A., Forma Urbis Romae (1901). McPhee S., “Falda’s Map as a Work of Art”, The Art Bulletin 101.2 (2019) 7–28. Molino I., “Il cardinale Francesco Nerli (1636–1708). Collezionismo tra Roma e Parigi”, Storia dell’arte 137/138 (2014) 144–162. Novelli I. (ed.), Atlante di Roma, trans. C. Hefer – D. Kerr (Venice: 1991). Stephan R., “A Note on Christina and her Academies”, in Queen Christina of Sweden. Documents and Studies, von Platen M. (ed), (Stockholm: 1966) 365–371. Tabacchi S., “Nerli, Francesco, iunior” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 78 (2013). The History of St. Stanislaus’ College, Beaumont: A Record of Fifty Years, 1861–1911. Old Windsor: Beaumont Review, 1911. Trasselli F., “‘Scritture e monumenti’, testimonianze per la biografia e materiali per la storia della biblioteca romana del cardinale Francesco Nerli”, Rivista Cistercense 24 (2007) 5–109. Valesio F., Diario di Roma, ed. G. Scano, 2 vols., (Milan: 1977).

Chapter 13

Poussin’s Allegory of Ruins Andrew Hui In the autumn of 1640, before Nicolas Poussin left Rome for Paris, he painted a Landscape with Saint Matthew and a Landscape with Saint John on Patmos [Figs. 13.1–13.2].*,1 Intended as pendants, they are carefully composed in what would become the painter’s signature repoussoir landscape: serene blue skies with wispy clouds, a cityscape in the distant background, framed by mirroring masses of towering trees and unified by a waterway meandering through zones of recession. In the foreground the evangelists are absorbed in the activity of writing: Matthew in deep conversation with the angel and John with his back turned against the eagle, holding a codex in his left hand. Both evangelists appear perfectly immersed in the landscape as well as isolated from it: sheaves of writing and a harvest-gold robe are the only elements grounding them to the earth. Various stages of architectural formation and deformation appear: Saint Matthew features a ruined monumental structure in the background, while Saint John is more complex; there is a distant city with minor details at left, and a more brightly lit city scene in the centre middle ground, with an obelisk, terra-cotta roofs, Corinthian columns, and the entablature of what may be a temple; a retaining wall in the centre-right foreground divides the two elevations. In both, architectural fragments – the elemental building blocks of classical buildings – appear prominently in the foreground. So: why ruins? In the classical tradition of the Renaissance, ruins function as loci for reflection, retrieval, reconstruction, return, repetition and resurrection. The Renaissance was, as I have argued elsewhere, the ruin-naissance, the birth of the ruin as aesthetic and empirical objects of contemplation and study.2

* I thank the organizers of the volume, Karl Enenkel and Walter S. Melion for their invitation to contribute to this volume, and to the conference participants for all their insightful questions and comments. I am grateful too for the invaluable editorial assistance of Troy Tower. 1 The works were acquired by Giovanni Maria Roscioli (1609–1644), secretary to the Barberini pope, Urban VIII. See catalogue entry in Rosenberg P. – Christiansen K., Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions (New York: 2008) 210–212. For a portrait of this world, see Gross H., Rome in the Age of Enlightenment: The Post-Tridentine Syndrome and the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: 1990) especially 310–365. 2 See Hui A., Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature (New York: 2017).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004440401_014

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Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with Saint John on Patmos, painted 1640. Oil on canvas, 100.3 × 136.4 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago CREATIVE COMMONS ZERO

In Saint Matthew and Saint John, Poussin fuses two genres – the millenniaold iconography of the evangelists, visible in Maarten van Heemskerck’s Saint Luke Painting the Virgin and Child (1532), Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s Inspiration of Saint Matthew (1602) or Diego Velázquez’s Saint John the Evangelist on the Island of Patmos (1618–1619), and the Renaissance invention of ruins in the paintings of artists such as Hermannus Posthumus, Claude Lorrain or Jean Lemaire – into a singular vision that unifies antique history, biblical revelation and natural landscape. These two paintings thus offer a unique opportunity for us to think about the topic of our volume, the visual and textual hermeneutics of landscape, seen through the aperture of scriptural production amidst a field of ruins. What is paradoxical in Poussin’s ruins of antiquity is that they are less a site of rupture, catastrophe and loss, and more scenes imbued with the sense of balance, clarity and order. Indeed, this harmony of spatial lucidity is achieved

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Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with Saint Matthew, painted 1640. Oil on canvas, 99 × 135 cm. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie IMAGE © STAATLICHE MUSEEN ZU BERLIN, GEMÄLDEGALERIE

through the orderly composition of fragments.3 What surrounds the evangelists, we notice, are the basic blocks of building, all reduced to their pure materiality and essential forms: smooth cylindrical columns with hollow centres, weathered rectilinear blocks, chipped foundation stones. Some are slanted rather haphazardly, as if struck by a meteorite, while others are upright and dignified, as if placed there on purpose. A large cruciform block towers over 3 For general history, see Mérot A., Du paysage en peinture dans l’Occident moderne (Paris, 2009). On the function and development of landscape in the seventeenth century, see Ginzburg S., “La nascita del paesaggio ‘classicista’ di Nicolas Poussin”, in Cappelletti F. (ed.), Archivi dello sguardo. Origini e momenti della pittura di paesaggio in Italia (Florence: 2006) 284–322; and Lagerlöf M.R., Ideal Landscape: Annibale Carracci, Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain (New Haven: 1900). On pictorial order, see Puttfarken T., The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting 1400–1800 (New Haven: 2000) especially 229–244.

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John, casting a shadow that encroaches on his feet – indeed, it creates the darkest zone in the painting, a negative space of pure potentiality. Cracks appear on the surface of the pedestal, but it remains eminently reusable. What was its function? Was it for a fallen idol? A rostrum for a preacher? Or might it perhaps serve as a pedestal for a statute of Christ or a saint? These fragments are usually read as embodiments of the tragedy of classical culture and the triumphal coming of Christianity that renders the pagan temples and monuments of the past obsolete.4 Such a reading is, I think, not incorrect but insufficient. I believe there is a deeper hermeneutics at play: namely, Poussin moves beyond simple moralisation and pedantic antiquarianism into a more complex visual and scriptural allegory. Certainly, the carved stones and marbles return to their place of origins, the quarry of the earth, but the landscape does not function as a mere receptacle for the waste of antiquity, the excrescence of a defunct civilization, but rather as a repository for reuse. In Poussin’s vision, the locus of geological natality also becomes a storehouse of fragments that are endlessly mobile and adaptable for future construction. That is, these fragmentary commodities are not only the detritus of the superannuated pagan past that can be all too easily rejected and abandoned but, through the discourse of architectural typology and biblical typology, ruins are also absorbed into a material and metaphysical allegory. 4 Though these two paintings are relatively well known (but less celebrated than later works), they are usually analysed only cursorily: see Grautoff O., Nicolas Poussin: sein Werk und sein Leben, 2 vol., (Munich – Leipzig: 1914) 1:252; Friedlaender W., Nicolas Poussin: A New Approach (New York: 1964) 70, 73 and 170; Blunt A., The Paintings of Nicolas Poussin: A Critical Catalogue (London: 1966) 59–60; Blunt A., Nicolas Poussin (Washington, DC: 1967) 248 and 272–274; Barroero L., “Nuove acquisizioni per la cronologia di Poussin”, Bolletino d’arte 64.4 (1979) 69–74, 71; Wild D., Nicolas Poussin, 2 vols. (Zurich: 1980); Wright C., Poussin: A Catalogue Raissonné (London: 1985) 101–102; Bätschmann O., Nicolas Poussin: Dialectics of Painting (London: 1990) 123–125; Carrier D., Poussin’s Paintings: A Study in Art-Historical Methodology (University Park, PA: 1993) 136, 183 and 205; Fumaroli M., L’école du silence: Le sentiment des images au XVIIe siècle (Paris: 1994) 122; Thuillier J., Nicolas Poussin (Paris: 1994) 257; McTighe S., Nicolas Poussin’s Landscape Allegories (Cambridge: 1996); Ginzburg S., “Il paesaggio ideale”, in Ottani Cavina, A. (ed.), La pittura di paesaggio in Italia, 3 vols. (Milan: 2003–2005) 183–197; Rosenberg P. – Mandrella D., Gesamtverzeichnis französische Gemälde des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts in deutschen Sammlungen (Bonn: 2005) 152; Sauerländer W., “Noch einmal Poussins Landschaften: ein Versuch über Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der ikonologischen Interpretation”, Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst 56 (2005) 107–137, 108–109; Rosenberg – Christiansen, Poussin 210–212; Lodispoto T.S., Poussin et le classicisme (Florence: 2008) 196–199; Mérot, Du paysage 112–114; and Milovanovic N. – Szanto M., Poussin et Dieu (Paris: 2015) 420–421. Surprisingly, Saint John is not discussed at all in Boxall I., Patmos in the Reception History of the Apocalypse (Oxford: 2013).

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In terms of architectural typology, we can read these fragments as the elements of spoliation, the widespread Roman practice of recycling old materials in the construction of new buildings. Over the centuries, many churches in Rome were founded on the site of pagan temples, and were built from materials plundered from ancient monuments.5 Indeed, the economy of Roman architecture is deeply palimpsestic, as has been universally recognized. The doyen of modern Roman archaeology, Rodolfo Lanciani, already realized this in 1899 when he wrote, ‘[t]here is no edifice in Rome dating from the fifteenth century the erection of which did not simultaneously carry with it the destruction or the mutilation of some ancient structure’.6 Through appropriation, blocks of columns, capitals, marble revetments are used as elements to edify the architecture of the Christian church physically and metaphysically. Biblical typology is the exegetical method for understanding the relationship between the Old and New Testaments. In the New Testament, there is the incessant, intense and self-conscious intertextual practice of citing passages from the Hebrew prophets in order to validate Jesus as the true Messiah. Most often, these passages employ architectural metaphors. In Matthew 21:42, Jesus himself cites Psalms 118:22: ‘Lapidem quem reprobaverunt aedificantes, hic factus est in caput anguli’ (The stone that the builders rejected / has become the cornerstone). He was referring, of course, to himself.7 Poussin, I posit, is making the theological point that Christ and antiquity are the membra disjecta of Christianity: as Jesus will be the cornerstone of the new Church, so too will pagan temples become the site of Christian churches, their constituent parts dislocated and incorporated into new places of worship. My primary argument is thus that, analogous to Matthew and John employing the fragments of the Old Testament as textual spolia to help construct their new scripture, Poussin articulates a visual biblical commentary in which fragments of ancient architecture are appropriated as spolia to adorn the new edifice of Christianity.

5 See Schuddeboom F.L., “The Conversion of Temples in Rome”, Journal of Late Antiquity 10.1 (2017) 166–186. 6 Lanciani R., The Destruction of Ancient Rome: A Sketch of the History of the Monuments, ed. F.W. Kelsey (New York: 1899) 206. 7 All biblical translations follow The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments: New Revised Standard Version (New York: 1989).

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The Ruin-naissance

Living at the height of baroque Rome, Poussin was heir to a tradition of ruinmania that had been ubiquitous for at least two centuries. The Renaissance marks the birth of ruins as objects of study, contemplation and emulation. The discourse of Roman ruins coincides with a renewed interest in the classical past: architects from Leon Battista Alberti to Sebastiano Serlio to Andrea Palladio used ancient buildings as models for their own edifices; antiquarians such as Ciriaco d’Ancona and Pirro Ligorio systematically collected ancient architectural remains; philologists such as Poggio Bracciolini and Flavio Biondo sought to understand the past through inscriptions on buildings; cartographers such as Leonardo Bufalini and Antonio Tempesta measured and imagined the city through new graphic modes of representations; artists illustrated the desolate urban views as exercises in spatial and historical perspective.8 In recognizing the ruin as a ruin, the humanist saw antiquity as antiquity, as something distant and lost but yet recoverable through the tools of archaeology and philology. Ruins thus became a metaphor of this rupture as well as a means for reviving the past. In sum, as ways to think philosophically, philologically, theologically and empirically about the passage of time, the work of memory and the flux of cultural change, ruins operate at the intersection of the allegorical and the material. Michel de Montaigne, in “De la vanité”, embodies a generation of humanist thinking on the power of places when he asks: Est-ce par nature ou par erreur de fantaisie [que] la vue des places, que nous savons avoir été hantées et habitées par personnes desquelles la 8 Important source materials are collected in Müntz E., Les arts à la cour des papes aux XVe et XVIe siècle, 4 vols. (Paris: 1898); Valentini R. – Zucchetti G. (eds.), Codice topografico della città di Roma, 4 vols. (Rome: 1953); and D’Onofrio C. (ed.), Visitiamo Roma nel Quattrocento: La città degli umanisti (Rome: 1989). Important – but by no means exhaustive – secondary works include Settis S. (ed.), Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana, 3 vols. (Turin: 1984–1986), esp. vol. 1; Barkan L., Unearthing the Past: Archeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven: 1999); McGowan M.M., Visions of Rome in Late Renaissance France (New Haven: 2000); Forero-Mendoza S., Le temps des ruines: l’éveil de la conscience historique à la Renaissance (Seyssel: 2002); Dacos N., Roma quanta fuit ou l’invention du paysage de ruines (Paris – Brussels: 2004); Dacos N., Voyage à Rome: les artistes européens au XVIe siècle (Brussels: 2012); Christian K.W., Empire without End: Antiquities Collections in Renaissance Rome, c. 1350–1527 (New Haven: 2010); Karmon D., The Ruin of the Eternal City: Antiquity and Preservation in Renaissance Rome (Oxford: 2011); Maier J., Rome Measured and Imagined: Early Modern Maps of the Eternal City (Chicago: 2015); and Tschudi V.P., Baroque Antiquity: Archaeological Imagination in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: 2017).

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mémoire est en recommandation, nous émeut aucunement plus qu’ouïr le récit [de] leurs faits ou lire leurs écrits. Tanta vis admonitionis inest in locis. Et id quidem in hac urbe infinitum: quacumque enim ingredimur in aliquam historiam vestigium ponimus […]. Et puis cette même Romme que nous voyons, mérite qu’on l’aime. Confédérée de si longtemps, et part tant de titres à notre couronne: Seule ville, commune, et universelle […] . Sa ruine même est glorieuse et enflée, Laudandis preciosior ruinis. Is it by nature or by an error of the imagination that the sight of the places we know were frequented and inhabited by people whose memory is held in honor, somehow stirs us more than hearing the story of their deeds or reading their writings? Such is the power of places to call up memories’ [Cicero, De finibus 5.1.2]. And in this city this is infinite; for wherever we walk we set our foot on history [Cicero, De finibus 5.2.5]. […] And then, this very Rome that we behold deserves our love, allied for so long and by so many claims to our crown: the only common and universal city. […] Her very ruin is glorious and stately: More precious for her memorable ruins. [Sidonius Apollinaris].9 By citing ancient authors, Montaigne performs a double move of establishing both the physical locus as well as the textual locus as sources of authority – they mutually reinforce each other. The Montaigne-Cicero-Sidonius matrix (to which we might now add Poussin) perhaps provides the clearest articulation of their shared hermeneutics of landscape. Whereas at the apex Rome was crammed with the magnificent monuments dedicated to its own glory, Renaissance humanist recognized how much had been lost and how fragile the material Eternal City really was. It’s precisely the conversion of cityscape into landscape that signifies for Poussin the ruinous condition of the formerly populous, densely built capital. What was once a bustling market-place is now a pasture, what was once imperial palaces is now a overgrown field of toppled stones. For a place as overdetermined as Rome, a humanist never encounters the city for the first time: it is always already mediated by tissues of associations, texts memorized and forgotten, images absorbed and expelled and reproduced, whose sources are as diffused as its multitudinous destinations. The ruins of Rome mean the transformation of a cityscape into a landscape. 9 Montaigne, Michel de, Essais, eds. E. Naya – D. Reguig – A. Tarrête, 3 vols. (Paris: 2009) 308– 309 (italics original). For the translation, see Montaigne, Michel de, The Complete Essays, trans. D.M. Frame (Stanford: 1958) 763 (italics original).

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Some two generations after Montaigne, ruin-mania continued unabated. Historical veracity remained important, for it gave Counter-Reformation Catholics ammunition against the Protestants to prove the legitimacy of their authority. Cesare Baronio’s twelve-volume Annales ecclesiastici, published over two decades (1588–1607), used the methods pioneered by Renaissance humanists to demonstrate the unbroken continuity of the Church rites and rituals from early Christianity to the present.10 Antonio Bosio’s Roma sotterranea (1632) examined the dark underbelly of the city and the Roman catacombs, and inspired restoration of churches such as Santa Bibiana and San Crisogono. Writers on artistic theory and practice, such as Giovanni Andrea Gilio da Fabriano and Gabriele Paleotti, stressed the importance of accuracy in depictions of sacred history.11 Because of these intellectual energies, Christian antiquities – objects, exhumed bodies and spaces – emerged in a new light. Papal families and Roman nobility actively – and often competitively – excavated the martyrs’ tombs, revived long forgotten symbols and processions and published newly discovered patristic texts. The empirical sciences were thus allied with ecclesiastical apologetics and political advancement.12 Poussin was at the pulsing centre of these activities. As Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Demspey have convincing demonstrated, when the painter was in the learned antiquarian circle of Cassiano dal Pozzo: ‘he almost obsessively attempted to recreate the historical Roman world of early Christianity exactly as it must have appeared’.13 Cassiano’s grand project – his Museo Cartaceo – attempted to document all surviving material objects from Roman antiquity, including Latin inscriptions found on buildings, tombstones, altars, votive monuments, the Nile mosaic from Palestrina (which Poussin studied and incorporated into his Rest on the Flight to Egypt), mosaics from the Basilica of Junius Bassus and later finds such as the so-called Harbour Landscape (found in 1668) and artefacts from the Tomb of the Nasonii (1674). This encyclopaedic 10

See Machielsen J., “An Aspiring Saint and His Work: Cesare Baronio and the Success and Failure of the Annales ecclesiastici (1588–1607)”, Erudition and the Republic of Letters 2.3 (2017) 233–287. 11 See Gilio, Giovanni Andrea, Due dialoghi […] de le parti Morali, e Civili appartenenti à Letterati Cortigiani, & ad ogni gentil’huomo, e […] degli erorri de’ Pittori (Camerino, Antonio Gioioso: 1564); and Paleotti Gabriele, Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane, in P. Barocchi (ed.), Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento fra manerisimo e controforma, 3 vols. (Bari: 1960–1962). 12 An important source here will be Di Manno T., Christian Archaeology in Rome: The Early Church Reborn and New Empiricism of the Sacred, 1592–1644 (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley in progress). 13 Cropper E. – Dempsey C., Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting (Princeton: 1996) 110.

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figure 13.3

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Jean Lemaire, Artists Sketching among Antique Ruins, painted ca. 1630. Oil on canvas, 97.8 × 73 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London Image © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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figure 13.4

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Sebastiano Serlio (engraver and designer). Woodcut illustration, ca. 1545. Frontispiece of the Italian Libro primo d’architettura; Il secondo libro d’architettura di perspectiva (Venice, Sessa: 1560). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York public domain

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work gathered gems, coins, gaming pieces, vessels and tableware, oil lamps, weights and measures, keys, weapons, military equipment, rings, musical instruments, burial urns, altars, tripods, figurines, statues, reliefs, in every possible material from terra cotta and bone to tin, lead, bronze, silver, gold, marble and semi-precious stones, and, not least, featured Rome’s inexhaustible monumental antiquities. A painting now at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Artist Sketching Among Ruins [Fig. 13.3], once thought to have been painted by Poussin but now attributed to Lemaire, illustrates the activities of an antiquarian. Here the study of ancient monuments is not a solitary but a social enterprise: the men are busily sketching, measuring, studying the ancient monuments that tower over them. The painting embodies the lapidary phrase ‘Roma quanta fuit, ipsa ruina docet’ (How Rome once was, ruined Rome herself teaches’). Made prominent in the frontispiece of the third book of Serlio’s 1537 Tutte l’opere d’architettura, et prospetiva [Fig. 13.4], the motto underscores the continuity and rupture between time past and time present, the evidentiary power of the ruin and the coextension between Rome’s former (imaginary) totality and now (actual) dissolution. In medieval thought the ruin has the power to teach – docere – but only as a moral lesson on the vanity of all things, while for the early humanists the ruin teaches because it has real empirical value: it demonstrates the achievements of a past age, and how knowledge can be recovered through diligent study. 2

Materials and Metaphysics

What then did the ruins teach Poussin? In the 1630s, his biographers record that ‘with his brother, Gaspard Dughet, Poussin began to develop an interest in landscape around this period; they both explored the Roman Campagna along with Lorrain, making sketches out of doors’.14 An anecdote records that Un giorno […] mentre passeggiava nella campagna di Roma con uno straniero, questi gli chiese qualche antichità da portare in ricordo. Poussin si abbassò, raccolse nell’erba un pugno di terra con pezzetti di porfido e di marmo e, dandogliela: – Portate questa, signore, per il vostro gabinetto d’antichità e dite: ecco Roma antica. 14

Brigstocke H., “Poussin, Nicolas (b. Les Andelys, Normandy, June 1594; d. Rome, Nov. 19, 1665)”, 3rd ed., in Grove Art Online (Oxford: 2006), doi.org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054 .article.T069093.

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They found him one day visiting some ruins of Rome in the countryside in the company of the stranger who wanted very much to bring back to his home country some rare antiques. Nicolas told him: ‘I want to give you the most beautiful piece of antiquity that you would ever wish for’. From the grass and soil and gravel he collected in his hand some small pieces of porphyry and marble that was almost pulverized, and said: ‘here, Monsieur, bring this to your museum, and say, this is ancient Rome’.15 This then is Poussin’s ruin lesson: the ‘small pieces of porphyry and marble’ that occupy the foreground of the Landscapes with Saint Matthew and Saint John represent the antiquarian and the allegorical. The ‘most beautiful piece of antiquity’ that Poussin depicts emphasizes their materiality of artefacts qua artefacts that are at the same time absorbed into an expansive metaphysics. In short, there is equal attention to both the materiality and the metaphysics of the stones. (Again, notice how precisely rendered the carved stones are – they are ready to be deployed at a moment’s notice as materials for a newly repristinated church or new bishop’s palace.) In establishing the pagan past as the anticipatory vector of the Christian future, allegory thus enables the conception of pagan and sacred history as unified, thereby repairing the friction between them. In short, Poussin’s allegory subsumes everything – even ruins and the landscapes that subsume them – within its architectonic system. When we situate the Saint Matthew and Saint John within Poussin’s oeuvre, they mark what Anthony Blunt long ago described as the transition from the ‘heroic’ to the ‘ideal’ mode, from a significantly baroque, operatic style of historical and biblical paintings to a more restrained, quieter style of landscape that depicts classical mythology.16 In his earlier paintings, Poussin takes as conceptual model for his cityscape Serlio’s Secondo libro di prospetiva [Fig. 13.5], which prescribed different backdrops for the different genres of tragedy, comedy and satire.17 In The Plague at Ashdod [Fig. 13.6], for example, the ably proportioned 15

Bellori, Giovanni Pietro, Le vite de’ pittori, scultori e architetti moderni, ed. Evelina Borea, Torino, Einaudi, 2009, Vol. II, 456. 16 See Blunt A., “The Heroic and the Ideal Landscapes in the Work of Nicolas Poussin”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 7 (1944) 154–168. On Poussin’s early career, see Olson T., Poussin and France (New Haven: 2002); and Unglaub J.W., Poussin and the Poetics of Painting: Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso (Cambridge: 2006). 17 See Frommel C.L., “Poussin e l’archittetura”, in Bonfait O. – Frommel C.L. – Hochmann M. – Schütze S. (eds.), Poussin et Rome. Actes du colloque à l’Académie de France à Rome et à la Bibliotheca Hertziana, 16-18 novembre 1994 (Paris: 1996) 119–134, 130. Also of interest is

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figure 13.5

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Sebastiano Serlio (engraver and designer), Cityscape. Woodcut illustration, ca. 1545. Libro primo d’architettura[;] Il secondo libro d’architettura di perspectiva (Venice, Sessa: 1560). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York public domain

structures with Corinthian columns, august and grand, are the tragic counterpoints to the writhing bodies and human tumult in the foreground. Poussin stages history as theatrical spectacle – a scene of an urban environment with perfect perspectival order in dramatic contrast to the chaos of the dead and dying.18 When we arrive at his later ‘Arcadian’ landscapes, nature replaces the

18

Siguret F., L’œil surpris. Perception et représentation dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle, 2nd ed. (Paris: 1993) 161–171. Bellori describes the representation of action: ‘Si rappresenta l’attione della piazza della Città; dal lato destrugge si veggono due colonne del tempio con l’arca sopra un basamento di marmo, dal sinistro sono infraposti altri edifice, e vi é una scala … Nel mezzo apresi, e si allontana la veduta di una strada, che termina in una piramide, essendo la Città di Azoto vicino all’Egitto’. See Bellori, Giovanni Pietro, Le vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti moderni (Bologna: 2006) 415–416.

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Nicolas Poussin, Plague of Ashdod, painted 1628–1630. Oil on canvas, 148 × 198 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Mathieu Rabeau

city as the setting. In Gathering the Ashes of Phocion [Fig. 13.7], the precisely rendered classical structures and meticulous layers of perspectival depth are in equipoise with the lush trees and vegetation that surrounds them, thereby dissolving the boundaries between the pastoral and the urban. This painting is representative of how Poussin’s late landscapes achieve, in the words of Andrew Butterfield, an “extraordinary amplitude of the world and sky […]. The deep magnitude and the measured clarity of the space in these paintings are fundamental for the sense they give that one is looking into some kind of ideal world.”19 In them, the continuity of space that runs from the foreground to the farthest distance is achieved by a careful, harmonious layering of architecture and nature. Within each section of the painting, Poussin carefully provides a 19 Butterfield, A. “The Magical Painting of Poussin,” review of Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions, New York Review of Books, April 17, 2008. https://www.nybooks.com/ articles/2008/04/17/the-magical-painting-of-poussin/

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Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion, painted in 1648. Oil on canvas, 116.5 × 178.5 cm. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool Courtesy National Museums Liverpool

series of elements – the diminished humans, the towering trees, placid waterways, lush vegetations, neo-classical temples, palaces, residences, and so on – that taken together deepens the recession of space into a richly multi-layered scene. In Poussin’s landscape, God’s art – nature – is in perfect harmony with the human art of architecture.20 20

Gillian Rose, in a meditation in Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: 1996) 25–26, is haunted by the wife of the Athenian general Phocion and her ‘an act of perfect love’ juxtaposed with the ‘unjust nature of the city […] represented in the classical architecture of the buildings. […] The magnificent, gleaming, classical buildings, which frame and focus this political act, convey no malignant foreboding, but are perfect displays of the architectural orders: they do not and cannot in themselves stand for the unjust city or for intrinsically unjust law. On the contrary, they present the rational order which throws into relief the specific act of injustice perpetrated by the current representatives of the city – an act which takes place outside the boundary wall of the built city. […] In Poussin’s painting, this transcendent but mournable justice is configured, its absence given presence, in the architectural perspective which frames and focuses the enacted justice of the two women. To see the built forms themselves as ciphers of the unjust city has political consequences: it perpetuates endless dying and endless tyranny, and it ruins the possibility of political action’.

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Architectural and Theological Typology

In the Scriptures, ruins run like a red thread. From the Tower of Babel to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah to the plagues of Egypt to the prophetic lamentations over the fall of Jerusalem to the apocalyptic visions of catastrophe in the Book of Revelations, ruins are a symptom of the friction between human striving and divine judgement. Promises of the destruction of the earth are frequent. In Isaiah 24:1–12, the prophet says: Ecce Dominus dissipabit terram: et nudabit eam, et affliget faciem ejus, et disperget habitatores ejus. […] Attrita est civitas vanitatis, clausa est omnis domus, nullo introeunte. […] Relicta est in urbe solitudo, et calamitas opprimet portas. Now the Lord is about to lay waste the earth and make it desolate, / and he will twist its surface and scatter its inhabitants. / […] / The city of chaos is broken down, / every house is shut up so that no one can enter. / […] / Desolation is left the city, / the gates are battered into ruins. In the Gospel of Matthew, there is a dialectic between Jesus who has fulfilled what was written in the prophets and all the things they prophesied. He strategically cites Old Testament prophets to demonstrate that through Jesus, the long-anticipated restoration of Israel has begun. At the beginning of his ministry Jesus declares: Nolite putare quoniam veni solvere legem aut prophetas: non veni solvere, sed adimplere. Amen quippe dico vobis, donec transeat caelum et terra, jota unum aut unus apex non praeteribit a lege, donec omnia fiant. Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfil. For truly, I tell you until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Matthew 5:17–18

Again and again – to be precise, fourteen times – Matthew repeats this rhetorical and prophetic topos: ‘[h]oc autem totum factum est, ut adimpleretur [plērōthē] quod dictum est a Domino per prophetam dicentem’ (all this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet). The Greek pleroma refers to filling up or expanding, reaching fullness or perfection.

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But fulfilment is also destruction and evacuation. Jesus frequently refers to himself as a temple: ‘[s]olvite templum hoc, et in tribus diebus excitabo illud solvite’ ([d]estroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up) [ John 2:19]. In Matthew 24.1–2, we read: Egressus Jesus de templo, ibat. Et accesserunt discipuli ejus, ut ostenderent ei aedificationes templi. Ipse autem respondens dixit illis: Videtis haec omnia? amen dico vobis, non relinquetur hic lapis super lapidem, qui non destruatur. As Jesus came out of the temple and was going away, his disciples came to point out to him the buildings of the temple. Then he asked them, ‘You see all these, do you not? Truly I tell you, not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down. This is a prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem and of the end times: the fulfilment (pleroma) of prophecy comes upon through the emptying (kenosis) of both the body of architecture and the body of Christ. Throughout the New Testament, moreover, the Messiah is frequently described as a discarded stone. In the 1 Peter 2:4–7, the disciple writes: Ad quem accedentes lapidem vivum, ab hominibus quidem reprobatum, a Deo autem electum, et honorificatum: et ipsi tamquam lapides vivi superaedificamini, domus spiritualis, sacerdotium sanctum, offerre spirituales hostias, acceptabiles Deo per Jesum Christum. Propter quod continet Scriptura: Ecce pono in Sion lapidem summum angularem, electum, pretiosum: et qui crediderit in eum, non confundetur. Vobis igitur honor credentibus: non credentibus autem lapis, quem reprobaverunt aedificantes: hic factus est in caput anguli. Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. For it stands in scripture: ‘See, I am laying in Zion a stone, a cornerstone chosen and precious; and whoever believes in him will not be put to shame’. To you then who believe, he is precious; but for those who do not believe, ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the very head of the corner’.

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As an epistle of encouragement to the various churches in Asia Minor, Peter in this exhortation gathers a tight nexus of intertextual references to advocate for a theology of spiritual architecture.21 Biblical scholars note that this passage represents one of the largest collections of Old Testament images in the New Testament, as well as the largest group of ‘stone testimonia’.22 Christ is compared to the stone that the Jewish people reject, which then becomes the cornerstone for Christians. By picking choice ‘stones’ of Hebrew scripture to adorn the inspired text of Christian writ, Peter constructs a biblical typology: as Jesus appointed the author (Petrus) himself to be the rock (petram) of his church in Matthew 16:18, so Peter urges members of the congregation to be like stones, united into a glorious whole through their shared faith. It now becomes clear that Poussin uses his material stones as the physical analogues to these scriptural metaphors. This is how the painter is able to make the theological point that Christ and antiquity are the membra disjecta of Christianity. Here we have a dialectical hermeneutics of word and things, scripture and architecture, working in tandem. Might not the scattered stones that surround Poussin’s Matthew and John be the rejected petra that will one day be the cornerstone of St. Peter’s? Poussin’s paintings thus function as visual commentary on Scripture. In his biography, André Félibien, court historian to Louis XIV, recounts how in Poussin’s works one finds the truth beautifully and appropriately ornamented in a way that is true to the representation, for the artist succeeds in pleasing the eye with details that are not only attractive but also theologically instructive.23 In other words, biblical painting, insofar as it serves as the repository of sacred history, functions par excellence as a tool of moral persuasion. This definition was common enough in baroque and neoclassical art, but it owes its elegant formulation to Agostino Mascardi’s Dell’arte historica, printed in Rome in 1636. Mascardi followed the Tridentine Church’s doctrine of representing history as a means of religious instruction through exempla. The historian can and should borrow from rhetoric in the interests of a higher truth, even at the expense of literal truth. As Anthony Blunt demonstrated and Genevieve Warwick has amplified, Mascardi’s ideas were influential in the Barberini court. Poussin himself read and annotated the Arte historica.24

21 See Psalms 117:2; Isaiah 26:16; Matthew 21:42–44; Luke 20:17–18; and John 2:19–22. 22 See Lea T., “How Peter Learned the Old Testament”, Southwestern Journal of Theology 22 (1980) 96–102, 97; and Moule C.F.D., “Some Reflections on the ‘Stone’ Testimonia in Relation to the Name Peter”, New Testament Studies 2 (1955–1956) 55–58, 57. 23 Félibien, Andre, “Vie de Poussin: 1685” in Germer S. (ed.), Vies de Poussin (Paris: 1994) 153–265, 249. 24 Warwick G., “Poussin and the Arts of History”, Word & Image 12.4 (1996) 333–348.

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In his “Observations on Painting”, Poussin writes that a painter must use his ingegno to awaken wonder in the souls of his viewers. The architectural ruins in Saint Matthew and Saint John perform one such trope. Poussin in effect literalizes Augustine’s metaphor in De doctrina christiana: Just as the Egyptians had not only idols and graven images which the people of Israel detested and avoided, so also they had vases and ornaments of gold and silver and clothing which the Israelites took with them secretly when they fled, as if to put them to a better use.25 As the Old Testament ‘prefigured’ the New, so did the marble of classical culture analogically pave the way for Christianity.26 As Gregory the Great says, ‘The Catholic Church receives the New Testament in such a way that it does not reject the Old. She venerates the Old Testament in such a way that she is ever perceiving the spirit of the New Testament even in the fleshly sacrifices’.27 Some thousand years later, in the seventeenth century, Blaise Pascal follows almost exactly this exegetical model: ‘Jesus Christ, with whom the two Testaments are concerned: the Old as its hope, the New as its model, and both as their center’.28 As does, I think, Poussin. There is no doubt that Poussin thought deeply about theology: over three quarters of his paintings portray religious subjects.29 In this instance, biblical typology provided the basis for his aesthetics of spolia. The architectural fragments function as material and metaphorical translatio – a transfer from one place to another, as well as one discourse (pagan) to another (Christian). Indeed, even the most casual student of Rome would recognize that architectural remains from old temples and pagan monuments found new life in ecclesiastical buildings. Spoliation forms a metalanguage that perpetuates the past (tradition), dissolving its original state, and transforming it by conferring a higher, more spiritual meaning (transcendence).30 I believe this is what is 25 Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, trans. Robertson D. W., Jr. (Indianapolis: 1958), 75 (2.40.60). 26 See the classic work “Figura” in Auerbach E., Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach: Time, History, Literature, ed. J.I. Porter trans. J.O. Newman (Princeton: 2014) 65–113. 27 Cited in Lubac H. de, Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture, trans. M. Sebanc and E.M. Macierowski (Grand Rapids – Edinburgh: 1998) 1:244. 28 Pascal Blaise, Pensées, eds. G. Ferreyrolles and P. Sellier (Paris: 1976). 29 See in general Milovanovic – Szanto, Poussin. 30 On spolia, see Settis S., “Continuità, distanze, conoscenza: Tre usi dell’antico”, in Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana, 3 vols. (Turin: 1984–1986) 3:373–486; Hansen M.F., The Eloquence of Appropriation (Rome: 2003). See also Greenhalgh M., Marble Past, Monumental Present (Leiden: 2009); Kinney D., “Spolia: Damnatio and Renovatio Memoriae”, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 42 (1997) 117–148; and Brilliant R. – Kinney D. (eds.),

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figure 13.8

Nicolas Poussin, The Triumph of David, painted 1630–1639. Oil on canvas, 118.4 × 148.3 cm. Dulwich Picture Gallery, London Image © Trustees of Dulwich Picture Gallery

happening to the fragments in the corners of both The Plague at Ashdod and The Triumph of David, both drawn from the Old Testament, as illustrations of the titanic struggle between the Israelites and the Philistines. In the bottom left corners of both paintings--in The Plague at Ashdod, a damaged column base, in The Triumph of David, the corrugated dentil blocks [Fig. 13.8] – fragments broken from neoclassical Philistine temples are rendered defunct by the Israelites. Their idols proven false, they too will be made eventually into ornaments in the temple of the new Christian religion, so that a consecrated house of God can become the spatial realm within which the sundry materials of the saeculum are united into the soaring edifice of faith. 4

The Obelisk as Spolia

Now, one unique case of spolia – and a constant element in Poussin’s paintings – is the obelisk, visible in Saint John. Though it is a common enough motif in Reuse Value: Spolia and Appropriation in Art and Architecture from Constantine to Sherrie Levine (Farnham: 2011).

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seventeenth-century paintings, it is anything but merely decorative here. Its totemic stature is saturated with millennia of meaning.31 Seemingly fixed and stubbornly resistant to deracination, the obelisk is in fact an endlessly mobile monument, tracing the course of translatio imperii, representing the rise and decline and rebirth of religion, technology, magic, but most of all the succession of empires. For the Egyptians, the obelisk embodied the sacred mandate of the pharaoh’s powers. In ancient Rome, the obelisk represented her ascendance as an imperium: both Augustus Caesar and Caligula brought them to the city. In the Renaissance, they were a symbol of the pagan mysteries that have been absorbed into the Roman Catholic Church. Both Sixtus V and Alexander VII had obelisks raised. In 1586, Sixtus ordered Domenico Fontana move one from the Circus Nero to the centre of Piazza San Pietro, a spectacle of engineering that required some eight hundred workers and one hundred forty horses.32 (He also ordered the demolition of much of the Baths of Diocletian, the Septizonium of Septimius Severus, the Claudian aquaducts, and a large part of the Patriarchum, the former papal residence on the Lateran, the site of oratories, chapels and mosaics.) In 1589, Sixtus wrote to Fontana: you are authorized to excavate, seize, and remove from any place you think it expedient, columns, marbles, travertine, and any other material necessary for the building and ornamentation of the chapel […] and it is our will that no one shall interfere with you in the execution of our commands.33 The inscription on the base of the Vatican obelisk reads: CHRISTVS VINCIT CHRISTVS REGNAT CHRISTVS IMPERAT CHRISTVS AB OMNI MALO PLEBEM SVAM DEFENDAT

31 32 33

See in general Curran B. – Grafton A. – Long P.O. – Weiss B., Obelisk: A History (Cambridge, MA: 2009) 34–101. See Long P.O., Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome (Chicago – London: 2018) 189–218. For the translation, see Lanciani, Destruction, 241–242.

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figure 13.9

Nicolas Poussin, Rest on the Flight into Egypt, painted 1655. Oil on canvas, 105 × 145 cm, Hermitage, St. Petersburg Image © Hermitage Museum/Bridgeman Art

For a pope as ambitious as Sixtus, the triumphant Roman Church must be as powerful and as universal as the Roman Empire at its height. As obelisks punctuated and pierced the urban space of Rome, they served as an allegory of the Church Triumphant, victorious over pagan religions. Obelisks, as it turns out, also punctuate and pierce the visual space of Poussin’s imaginary. They chart, as it were, the slow unfolding of the life of Christ through Poussin’s own traversal of biblical history. Some fifteen years after the Matthew and John pendants, around 1664, Poussin painted The Rest on the Flight into Egypt [Fig. 13.9], which features two obelisks. (Poussin wrote a letter explaining that he wanted to illustrate accurately the clothing of the Egyptian priests – taken from ‘l’istoire naturelle et morale d’Egipte et d’Etiopie’ (the natural and moral history of Egypt and Ethiopia) in the mosaic floor of the ancient Temple of Fortune at Palestrina.34 The obelisk also appears in his 1629 Massacre of the Innocents [Fig. 13.10], where it serves as the fixed object in a visual field swirling 34

Jouanny C. (ed.), Correspondance de Nicolas Poussin (Paris: 1911), 449. For the translation, see Joyce H., “Grasping at Shadows: Ancient Paintings in Renaissance and Baroque Rome”, Art Bulletin 74.2 (1992) 219–246, 233. See Dempsey C.G., “Poussin and Egypt”, Art Bulletin 45.2 (1963) 109–119; and Bull M., “Notes on Poussin’s Egypt”, Burlington Magazine 118 (1999) 537–541. In general, see Curran B.A., The Egyptian Renaissance: The Afterlife of Ancient Egypt in Early Modern Italy (Chicago, 2007).

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figure 13.10 Nicolas Poussin, Massacre of the Innocents, painted ca. 1625– 1629. Oil on canvas, 118 × 179 cm. Musée Condé, Chantilly Photo © Josse / Bridgeman Images

with violent human gestures. Here and elsewhere, we see biblical and architectural typology at work: the events of Jesus’s life are understood through the Hebrew scriptures, and the architecture of Egypt is absorbed into a classical type that is both ideal and historical. Obelisks also performed an important visual function as a focal point or, better, vanishing point of the perspectival system, as seen in the Plague at Ashdod. This was prescribed by Serlio’s scenography. If the invention of perspective meant that vision was de-theologized, as Erwin Panofsky has powerfully and famously argued, a triumph of human vision in objectifying the sense of the real, the once pagan obelisk, in turn, as the focus of the vanishing point, is re-theologized.35 The tip of the obelisk is the ultimate proportional diminution of forms receding into space, and its reappropriation here – once with a sphere on its tip, and now topped by a cross – imbues it with a sense of Christian victory. The obelisk in the literal background represents a collapse of time and space, a foreshortening of the spectacle of history. In sum, the obelisk 35

Panofsky E., Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. C.S. Wood (New York: 1996).

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becomes both a metaphor and a rule for the displacement of the pagan monument and the construction of providential historicity. 5

Introspection: The Writer and the Painter

By way of conclusion, I would like to think more fully about the relevance Landscape with Saint Matthew and Landscape with Saint John to the topic of the volume: the hermeneutics of place. Two hermeneutics are at work: one visual and the other textual. For a painter as erudite as Poussin, one must activate both types of interpretation. As the trees, water and sky are the earthly signs of God the creator, so are the words of Scripture the signs of God’s gift of grace. So, too, are ruins the sign of human striving for some sort of permanence on earth. The dialectic between landscape and ruins dramatizes the continuous relationship between human artifice and divine nature. The architecture in the landscape, whether intact or in ruins, and the writings of the evangelists, are both technologies of survival. In the Bible the etiology of the first building – the Tower of Babel – is catastrophic. But unlike the Greeks, the Hebrews did not record the story of the invention of writing. In Judaism, the Torah is the portable Temple, and the three Abrahamic traditions are known as the religions of the book.36 In transcribing divine authority, the evangelists signal the transformation of oral revelation into textual legibility. Their writing offers a supplement to the Christ who no longer walks on earth. If Poussin’s philosophical purpose in his late paintings was to explore the God-given order and harmony of nature, he knew full well this could happen only through meditation on ruins, catastrophe and violence. The Saint Matthew and Saint John are imbued with a plangent, valedictory feeling, poised between the catastrophes of history and the anticipation of the inevitable eschaton to come. Yet the evangelists seem to be writing as if in a postapocalyptic calm, even while prophesizing the last things to come. The landscapes provide the space – and the ruins provide the catalysts as well as the clearing – for contemplation to commence. What I mean by this is that if we survey the arc of Poussin’s career, Saint Matthew and Saint John function as an inflection point. In his later paintings, the allegorical method remains, but turns from the archaeological (in the Seven Sacraments) to the realm of myth (in Becalmed Landscape and its pendant Landscape with a Storm). His earlier histories are all active, busy with 36

See Peters F.E., The Voice, the Word, the Books: The Sacred Scripture of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims (Princeton: 2007).

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figure 13.11

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Nicolas Poussin, Et in Arcadia ego, painted c. 1637–1638. Oil on canvas, 87 × 120 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris Image © Musée du Louvre / RMN / Angèle Dequier

human striving, his later landscapes all contemplation, the human element diminished in scale and significance. Becalmed Landscape and Landscape with a Storm illustrate not a story but rather a mood. Poussin achieved this mood not only through the harmonious ordering of space and light and darkness, but also through the integration of architecture and nature into a unified pictorial vision. As Panofsky deftly demonstrated in a celebrated essay, the enigmatic inscription that the shepherds are attempting to decipher in Et in Arcadia ego [Fig. 13.11], painted about two years before the two landscapes, is meant to be a kind of memento mori.37 We might respond by saying that whereas Et in arcadia ego represents the unredeemed tragedy of antiquity or the universality of death, in the two evangelists’ landscapes the message is more about finding redemption in and out of the tragedy of ruins. Whereas Et in Arcadia ego offers 37

Panofsky E., “On the Conception of Transience in Poussin and Watteau”, in Klibansky R. – Patton H.J. (eds.), Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer (Oxford: 1936) 223–254; which is heavily revised in Panofsky E., Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City: 1995) 295–320.

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us the enigma of reading an inscription, the two biblical landscapes offer us instead the revelation of writing, of the very activity of inscribing as a process. When we view the paintings, we discover that what John and Matthew write on their scrolls is hidden from us. Yet their meaning is plainly intelligible to every Christian, since they are, after all, the Gospels. In making sense of Poussin’s paintings, hermeneutics thereby becomes a textual and visual activity: just as we are absorbed into the painting, so too are John and Matthew absorbed in their activity of writing. Anticipating Michael Fried’s acclaimed insight about absorption and theatricality in eighteenth-century French painting, Poussin provides a case of absorption, the human figure engrossed in an activity, as if in denial of an audience, yet fully aware that they are writing to every Christian in the ages to come.38 Louis Marin astutely observed in his late, unfinished Sublime Poussin that ‘the plan – the ichnography, the outline on the ground […] is the proper ruin, proper to the ruin in which the rational design, the ordered structure, is revealed to the archaeologist’s eye’.39 In any ruin, the original meaning has been evacuated; the temple no longer shelters a pagan god or is a site of cult worship. Having been emptied of its semantic meaning, a temple becomes a pure shell of typology, and its skeleton can thus be re-invested with new meaning. This is the force of allegory. Even so, at the end of time, architecture itself will dissolve: ‘Et templum non vidi in ea: Dominus enim Deus omnipotens templum illius est, et Agnus’ (I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb’ [Revelation 21:22]. Everything will disappear and be remade. As Isaiah 65:17 prophesies: ‘Ecce enim ego creo caelos novos, et terram novam; et non erunt in memoria priora, et non ascendent super cor’ (Behold, I am about to create a new heaven and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind). In his last words to his disciples (Matthew 19:28), Jesus tells them of the future time of regeneration, palingenesis. Similarly, in Revelation 21:5, God sits on his throne and declares: ‘Ecce nova facio omnia’ (See I am 38 Fried M., Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: 1988) 43: ‘on examination it turns out that subjects involving absorptive states and activities are present in abundance in earlier painting, and that in the work of some of the greatest seventeenth-century masters in particular – Caravaggio, Domenichino […], Poussin, Le Sueur, Georges de La Tour, Velázquez, Zurbarán, Vermeer […] – those states and activities are rendered with an intensity and a persuasiveness never subsequently surpassed’. 39 Marin L., Sublime Poussin, trans. C. Porter (Stanford: 1999) 143. For a critical reevaluation of Marin, see Saint N., “Legacies of ‘Sublime Poussin’: Louis Marin’s Plea for Poussin as a Painter”, Early Modern French Studies 38.1 (2016) 59–73.

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making all things new). Through the allegory of ruins, we see old fragments made into new temples. Ruins, texts and landscape demand interpretation: the decipherment of signs and blank spaces, absence and presence in letters and stones, voice and silence, nature and art. Ruins and texts thus absorb the attention of viewers, drawing them into aesthetic and spiritual contemplation. In a letter Poussin writes: ‘la peinture n’est autre qu’une idée des choses incorporelles, et que si elle montres les corps elle en représente seulement l’ordre, et le mode selon lequel les choses se composent, et qu’elle est plus attentive à l’idée du beau qu’à toute autre’ (painting is nothing else but an idea of incorporeal things, even though it shows bodies, for it only represents the order and the mode of the species of things and it is more intent upon the idea of beauty than all others).40 In these two landscape paintings, he shows the idea of incorporeal things through the beautiful bodies of ruins amidst a landscape of nature. Bibliography Auerbach E., Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach: Time, History, Literature, ed. J.I. Porter, trans. J.O. Newman (Princeton: 2014) 65–113. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, trans. Robertson D. W., Jr. (Indianapolis: 1958). Barkan L., Unearthing the Past: Archeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven: 1999). Barroero L., “Nuove acquisizioni per la cronologia di Poussin”, Bolletino d’arte 64.4 (1979) 69–74. Bätschmann O., Nicolas Poussin: Dialectics of Painting (London: 1990). Bellori, Giovanni Pietro, Le vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti moderni (Bologna: 2006). Bellori, Giovanni Pietro, “Vie de Poussin: 1672”, trans. N. Blamoutier, in Germer S. (ed.), Vies de Poussin (Paris: 1994) 37–116. Blunt A., “The Heroic and the Ideal Landscapes in the Work of Nicolas Poussin”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 7 (1944) 154–168. Blunt A., Nicolas Poussin (Washington, DC: 1967). Blunt A., The Paintings of Nicolas Poussin: A Critical Catalogue (London: 1966). Boxall I., Patmos in the Reception History of the Apocalypse (Oxford: 2013). Brigstocke H., “Poussin, Nicolas (b Les Andelys, Normandy, June 1594; d Rome, Nov 19, 1665)”, 3rd ed., in Grove Art Online (Oxford: 2006), doi.org/10.1093/gao/ 9781884446054.article.T069093.

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Brilliant R. – Kinney D (eds.), Reuse Value: Spolia and Appropriation in Art and Architecture from Constantine to Sherrie Levine (Farnham: 2011). Bull M., “Notes on Poussin’s Egypt”, Burlington Magazine 118 (1999) 537–541. Butterfield, A. “The Magical Painting of Poussin”, review of Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions, New York Review of Books, April 17, 2008, https://www.nybooks .com/articles/2008/04/17/the-magical-painting-of-poussin/ Carrier D., Poussin’s Paintings: A Study in Art-Historical Methodology (University Park, PA: 1993). Christian K.W., Empire without End: Antiquities Collections in Renaissance Rome, c. 1350–1527 (New Haven: 2010). Cropper E. – Dempsey C., Nicolas Poussin: Friendship and the Love of Painting (Princeton: 1996). Curran B.A., The Egyptian Renaissance: The Afterlife of Ancient Egypt in Early Modern Italy (Chicago, 2007). Curran B.A. – Grafton A. – Long P.O. – Weiss B., Obelisk: A History (Cambridge, MA: 2009). Dacos N., Roma quanta fuit ou l’invention du paysage de ruines (Paris – Brussels: 2004). Dacos N., Voyage à Rome: les artistes européens au XVIe siècle (Brussels: 2012). Dempsey C.G., “Poussin and Egypt”, Art Bulletin 45.2 (1963) 109–119. D’Onofrio C. (ed.), Visitiamo Roma nel Quattrocento: La città degli umanisti (Rome: 1989). Félibien, Andre, “Vie de Poussin: 1685”, in Germer S. (ed.), Vies de Poussin (Paris: 1994) 153–265. Forero-Mendoza S., Le temps des ruines: l’éveil de la conscience historique à la Renaissance (Seyssel: 2002). Fried M., Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, University of Chicago Press ed. (Chicago: 1988). Friedlaender W., Nicolas Poussin: A New Approach (New York: 1964). Frommel C.L., “Poussin e l’archittetura”, in Bonfait O. – Frommel C.L. – Hochmann M. – Schütze S. (eds.), Poussin et Rome. Actes du colloque à l’Académie de France à Rome et à la Bibliotheca Hertziana, 16–18 novembre 1994 (Paris – Rome: 1996) 119–134. Fumaroli M., L’école du silence: Le sentiment des images au XVIIe siècle (Paris: 1994). Gilio, Giovanni Andrea, Due dialoghi […] de le parti Morali, e Civili appartenenti à Letterati Cortigiani, & ad ogni gentil’huomo, e […] degli erorri de’ Pittori (Camerino, Antonio Gioioso: 1564). Ginzburg S., “La nascita del paesaggio ‘classicista’ di Nicolas Poussin”, in Cappelletti F. (ed.), Archivi dello sguardo. Origini e momenti della pittura di paesaggio in Italia (Florence: 2006) 284–322.

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Ginzburg S., “Il paesaggio ideale”, in Ottani Cavina, A. (ed.), La pittura di paesaggio in Italia, 3 vols. (Milan: 2003–2005) 188–89. Grautoff O., Nicolas Poussin: sein Werk und sein Leben, 2 vol., (Munich – Leipzig: 1914). Greenhalgh M., Marble Past, Monumental Present (Leiden: 2009). Gross H., Rome in the Age of Enlightenment: The Post-Tridentine Syndrome and the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: 1990). Hansen M.F., The Eloquence of Appropriation (Rome: 2003). The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments: New Revised Standard Version (New York: 1989). Hui A., Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature (New York: 2017). Jouanny C. (ed.), Correspondance de Nicolas Poussin (Paris: 1911). Joyce H., “Grasping at Shadows: Ancient Paintings in Renaissance and Baroque Rome”, Art Bulletin 74.2 (1992) 219–246. Karmon D., The Ruin of the Eternal City: Antiquity and Preservation in Renaissance Rome (Oxford: 2011). Kinney D., “Introduction”, in Brilliant R. – Kinney D (eds.), Reuse Value: Spolia and Appropriation in Art and Architecture from Constantine to Sherrie Levine (Farnham: 2011) 1–12. Kinney D., “Spolia: Damnatio and Renovatio Memoriae”, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 42 (1997) 117–148. Lagerlöf M.R., Ideal Landscape: Annibale Carracci, Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain (New Haven: 1900). Lanciani R., The Destruction of Ancient Rome: A Sketch of the History of the Monuments, ed. F.W. Kelsey (New York: 1899). Lea T., “How Peter Learned the Old Testament”, Southwestern Journal of Theology 22 (1980) 96–102. Lodispoto T.S., Poussin et le classicisme (Florence: 2008). Long P.O., Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome (Chicago – London: 2018). Lubac H. de, Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture, trans. M. Sebanc and E.M. Macierowski (Grand Rapids – Edinburgh: 1998). Machielsen J., “An Aspiring Saint and His Work: Cesare Baronio and the Success and Failure of the Annales ecclesiastici (1588–1607)”, Erudition and the Republic of Letters 2.3 (2017) 233–287. Maier J., Rome Measured and Imagined: Early Modern Maps of the Eternal City (Chicago: 2015). Marin L., Sublime Poussin, trans. C. Porter (Stanford: 1999). McGowan M.M., Visions of Rome in Late Renaissance France (New Haven: 2000).

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McTighe S., Nicolas Poussin’s Landscape Allegories (Cambridge: 1996). Mérot A., Du paysage en peinture dans l’Occident moderne (Paris: 2009). Milovanovic N. – Szanto M., Poussin et Dieu (Paris: 2015). Montaigne, Michel de, The Complete Essays, trans. D.M. Frame (Stanford: 1958). Montaigne, Michel de, Essais, eds. E. Naya – D. Reguig – A. Tarrête, 3 vols. (Paris: 2009). Moule C.F.D., “Some Reflections on the ‘Stone’ Testimonia in Relation to the Name Peter”, New Testament Studies 2 (1955–1956) 55–58. Müntz E., Les arts à la cour des papes aux XVe et XVIe siècle, 4 vols. (Paris: 1898). Olson T., Poussin and France (New Haven: 2002). Paleotti Gabriele, Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane, in Barocchi P. (ed.), Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento fra manerisimo e controforma, 3 vols. (Bari: 1960–1962). Panofsky E., Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City: 1995). Panofsky E., “On the Conception of Transience in Poussin and Watteau”, in Klibansky R. – Patton H.J. (eds.), Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer (Oxford: 1936) 223–254. Panofsky E., Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. C.S. Wood (New York: 1996). Pascal Blaise, Pensées, eds. G. Ferreyrolles and P. Sellier (Paris: 1976). Peters F.E., The Voice, the Word, the Books: The Sacred Scripture of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims (Princeton: 2007). Poussin, Nicolas, Lettres et propos sur l’art, ed. A. Blunt (Paris, 1964). Puttfarken T., The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting 1400–1800 (New Haven: 2000). Rose G., Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: 1996). Rosenberg P. – Christiansen K., Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions (New York: 2008). Rosenberg P. – Mandrella D., Gesamtverzeichnis französische Gemälde des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts in deutschen Sammlungen (Bonn: 2005). Saint N., “Legacies of ‘Sublime Poussin’: Louis Marin’s Plea for Poussin as a Painter”, Early Modern French Studies 38.1 (2016) 59–73. Sauerländer W., “Noch einmal Poussins Landschaften: ein Versuch über Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der ikonologischen Interpretation”, Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst 56 (2005) 107–137. Schuddeboom F.L., “The Conversion of Temples in Rome”, Journal of Late Antiquity 10.1 (2017) 166–186. Settis S., “Continuità, distanze, conoscenza: Tre usi dell’antico”, in Settis S. (ed.), Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana, 3 vols. (Turin: 1984–1986) 3:373–486. Settis S. (ed.), Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana, 3 vols. (Turin: 1984–1986). Siguret F., L’œil surpris. Perception et représentation dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle, 2nd ed. (Paris: 1993). Thuillier J., Nicolas Poussin (Paris: 1994).

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Tschudi V.P., Baroque Antiquity: Archaeological Imagination in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: 2017). Unglaub J.W., Poussin and the Poetics of Painting: Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso (Cambridge: 2006). Valentini R. – Zucchetti G. (eds.), Codice topografico della città di Roma, 4 vols. (Rome: 1953). Warwick G., “Poussin and the Arts of History”, Word & Image 12.4 (1996) 333–348. Wild D., Nicolas Poussin, 2 vols. (Zurich: 1980). Wright C., Poussin: A Catalogue Raissonné (London: 1985).

chapter 14

‘False Art’s Insolent Address’: The Enchanted Garden in Early Modern Literature and Landscape Design Luke Morgan In a letter of 1551, the humanist Annibale Caro recommended a number of potential subjects for a garden grotto under a mountain, including: ‘shepherds singing, nymphs dancing, satyrs, fauns, and other wild fantasies; or, because the place is subterranean, Vulcan at his forge, scenes of mining, searches for precious stones, a rape of Proserpina, the union of Aeneas and Dido, Ulysses blinding Polyphemus’.1 In his opinion, however, the most appropriate subject was a ‘menagerie of [the enchantress] Circe, who transforms men into beasts of all kinds’. Caro’s suggestion recalls the literary tradition of the enchanted garden, best known from the works of Italian poets such as Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso.2 In Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1532), the enchantress Alcina, a sixteenthcentury descendent of Circe, transforms her ex-lovers into trees, stones, fountains, springs, and beasts.3 The enchantress of Tasso’s La Gerusalemme liberata (1581), Armida, has similar powers. As she warns the knights when they first encounter her in Canto 10: ‘My whim determines which of you, laid low, / lose in eternal chains his gracious sky, / which will turn bird, and which take root below / to sprout in earth’s womb, or to petrify / into a rock, or melt into a spring, / or, shaggy-browed, become some beastly thing’ (recalling the ‘petrified’ rock-cut figures of the Sacro Bosco in Bomarzo, which Tasso probably visited with his father Bernardo as a young man) [Fig. 14.1].4 1 See Lazzaro C., The Italian Renaissance Garden: From the Conventions of Planting, Design, and Ornament to the Grand Gardens of Sixteenth-Century Italy (New Haven: 1990) 150, for a discussion of Caro’s suggestions for grottoes. 2 For the classical prototypes of the false paradise in early modern literature, see Guest C.L., The Understanding of Ornament in the Italian Renaissance (Leiden – Boston: 2016) 254–259. 3 Ariosto Ludovico, Orlando Furioso, trans. Guido Waldman (Oxford: 2008) 56. 4 Tasso Torquato, The Liberation of Jerusalem, trans. M. Wickert (Oxford: 2009) 196. The enchanted forest in Canto 18 of The Liberation of Jerusalem may be especially indebted to Tasso’s knowledge of the Sacro Bosco. Rinaldo is sent into the wood ‘to meet / the false and treacherous phantoms where they hide. / Monsters and giants you (I know) shall beat / if no more foolish whim turns you aside’, which strongly evokes the idiosyncratic milieu of Orsini’s

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004440401_015

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Reclining female figure, Sacro Bosco, Bomarzo Photo: Luke Morgan

The theme also appears in English Renaissance literature. The sorceress Acrasia’s ‘Bower of Bliss’ in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590), is indebted to the enchanted islands of Alcina and Armida (as well as that of Acratia in Giangiorgio Trissino’s L’Italia liberata dai Goti (1547–48)).5 After Guyon destroys the Bower (in Book II), the beasts of Acrasia’s artificial realm are, as in Orlando furioso, revealed to be her ex-lovers. One had previously been a hog, directly recalling Circe’s transformation of Odysseus’s men into pigs on the island of Aeaea.6 Gardens are depicted in these poems as honey-traps, designed to seduce and emasculate visitors. They are sites where, as Tasso writes: ‘magic art here

wood with its colossal rock-cut statuary. See, among others, Henneberg J.V., “Bomarzo: The Extravagant Garden of Pier Francesco Orsini”, in Italian Quarterly 11.42 (1967) 11. 5 Michael Leslie has suggested that Trissino provided Spenser’s main source for the Bower of Bliss. See Leslie M., “Spenser, Sidney, and the Renaissance Garden”, English Literary Renaissance 22.1 (Winter 1992) 25. 6 Spenser Edmund, The Faerie Queene, ed. T.P. Roche (London: 1987) 382. See Homer, The Odyssey, trans. E.V. Rieu (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1946) 162.

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wields / a power so great that even Nature yields’.7 In each case, the enchantress constructs the illusion of a locus amoenus (pleasant place), which is eventually revealed to be a locus horridus (fearful place).8 Unusually, in Trissino’s poem, locus amoenus and locus horridus are simultaneously present. The witch Acratia’s inaccessible bower at the heart of the locus amoenus provides an explicit image of her corruption and of the falsity of the surrounding landscape. Trissino describes it as: ‘a ghastly forest, / Where there is livid grass which sends forth / The smell of asafoetida and sulphur’.9 Although Caro’s recommendation of ‘a menagerie of Circe’ is for a hypothetical project, his ideas are not unprecedented in landscape design. The fifteenth-century garden at Hesdin in Artois, for example, was dedicated to the sorceress Medea.10 At Bernardo Vecchietti’s villa, Il Riposo (constructed from 1571 to 1574), near Florence, there was a sculpture by Giambologna depicting the Fata (witch or fairy) Morgana who is portrayed in Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato (1495), as an evil, grotto-dwelling sorceress [Fig. 14.2].11 Another example is provided by Nonsuch Palace in Surrey where John, Lord Lumley laid out one of the earliest Italianate gardens of the English Renaissance (1570s). In 1599, a visitor, the Czech baron Zdenkonius Brtnicensis von Waldstein, described the Grove of Diana in the ‘Vale of Gargaphy’ at Nonsuch, where there was a sculptural tableau of Diana and Actaeon.12 In this scene from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the goddess fulfilled the same role as the enchantresses of sixteenth-century literature, causing the transformed Actaeon in a nearby Latin inscription (transcribed by Waldstein) to ‘demand against the unjust one my proper flesh’.13 7 Tasso, Liberation 271. 8 On the locus horridus and Renaissance gardens, see Brunon H., “Du Songe de Poliphile à la Grande Grotte de Boboli: La dualité dramatique du paysage”, Polia: Revue de l’art des jardins 2 (Autumn 2004) 7. 9 Translated in Giamatti A.B. The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (Princeton: 1966) 177. 10 See Davis N., “Desire, Nature, and Automata in the Bower of Bliss”, in Hyman W.B. (ed.), The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature (Farnham: 2011) 170. On Medea and other witches, see Lorenzi L., Witches: Exploring the Iconography of the Sorceress and Enchantress, trans. U. Creagh (Florence: 2006). On Hesdin, see Hagopian van Buren A., “Reality and Literary Romance in the Park of Hesdin”, in MacDougall E.B. (ed.), Medieval Gardens (Washington, D.C.: 1986) 115–134. 11 For the villa and Giambologna’s sculpture, see Bury M. “Giambologna’s Fata Morgana Rediscovered”, Apollo 131.336 (Feb. 1990) 96–100. 12 Waldstein Z.B., The Diary of Baron Waldstein, A Traveller in Elizabethan England, trans. G.W. Groos. (London: 1981) 161. 13 See Biddle M., “The Gardens of Nonsuch: Sources and Dating”, Garden History 27.1 (1999) 173, 178; see also Diary of Baron Waldstein 160–165.

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figure 14.2 Giambologna, Fata Morgana, private collection Photo: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS / PUBLIC DOMAIN

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These examples suggest that the literary image of the enchanted garden may provide a neglected, or at least insufficiently explored, framework for understanding the experience of the real gardens of villas and country houses.14 The late sixteenth century itself provides a precedent for this approach. In his writings on Ariosto and Tasso, Galileo Galilei compared the former’s descriptions of Armida’s ‘false’ bower and Logistilla’s paradisiacal hanging garden (the latter also from Orlando furioso) with, respectively, Bernardo Buontalenti’s late sixteenth-century design for the garden of the Villa Medici (now Demidoff) in Pratolino and the earlier garden by Niccolò Tribolo at the Villa Medici in Castello.15 (Galileo much preferred Castello.) More recently, Elisabeth Blair MacDougall has turned to sixteenth-century literary theory to interpret the iconography of Italian gardens and Michael Leslie has drawn attention to the fact that the fictional gardens of the Italian and English poets have rarely been compared with real gardens.16 In his classic study, ‘Spenser, Sidney and the Renaissance Garden’ (1992), Leslie argues that ‘the literary gardens of the English Renaissance depend upon and direct us to contemporary gardening, as well as the literary tradition of the locus amoenus normally adduced’.17 This is an important observation, and one that remains true if reversed, especially given that real gardens (in Italy as well as England) are themselves often exclusively interpreted as simplistic expressions of the theme of the locus amoenus. On the basis of these points, the aim of this chapter is to explore the relationship between the idea of the enchanted garden in literature and the experience of real gardens in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It will be argued that by paying attention to the ways in which the literary image of the garden is constructed, and its contribution to narrative and meaning, a greater understanding of the frameworks that governed the reception and experience of real gardens may emerge.

14 This chapter focuses on ornamental gardens conceived as works of art, many of which depict literary themes and images. It is not concerned with other types of garden (for example, botanic gardens or gardens of simples). 15 See Pizzorusso C., “Galileo in the Garden: Observations on the Sculptural Furnishings of Florentine Gardens between the Sixteenth and the Seventeenth Centuries”, in Luchinat C.A. (ed.), The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence (New Haven: 2002) 113. 16 MacDougall E.B., Fountains, Statues and Flowers: Studies in Italian Gardens of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Washington, D.C.: 1993) 89–111. 17 Leslie, “Spenser, Sidney” 5.

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The Garden as a False Paradise from Ariosto to Spenser

Alcina’s garden in Orlando furioso is, like Circe’s, located on an island. (Ariosto may have been inspired by the Belvedere in Ferrara – a garden island which lay just outside the city’s walls in the river Po.18) The knight Ruggiero initially sees the island from above, astride his hippogryph. There seemed to him to be ‘no lovelier, no happier land than this’.19 There are ‘well-tilled plains and neat hills, limpid waters, shady banks and soft meadows, / enticing thickets of cool laurel, of palms and loveliest myrtle, of cedar and orange trees whose fruit and blossoms were disposed in sundry harmonious ways … melodious nightingales … a temperate breeze’ as well as flowers and various animals. These characteristics conform closely to Ernst Robert Curtius’s fundamental definition of the literary conventions governing the locus amoenus in Latin and subsequent European literatures: ‘It is … a beautiful, shaded natural site. Its minimum ingredients comprise a tree (or several trees), a meadow, and a spring or brook. Birdsong and flowers may be added. The most elaborate examples also add a breeze’.20 As soon as he lands on the island, however, Ruggiero is made aware that all this is an illusion. The unfortunate Astolfo, who has become a speaking myrtle bush, informs him that Alcina ‘to prevent their spreading about the world the story of her wanton ways’ transforms her lovers, ‘planting them here and there in the fertile soil, changing one into a fir tree, another into an olive, another into a palm or cedar, or into the guise in which you see me on this verdant bank; yet others the proud enchantress changes into liquid springs, or into beasts, just as it suits her’.21 The landscape is, in other words, literally composed of Alcina’s ex-lovers who, in submitting to the illusion, lose their humanity and become part of the illusion themselves.22 At once, the ‘happy land’ is revealed as a locus horridus, and Alcina as a perverse designer, manipulating ‘natural’ materials in order to compose her garden. There are echoes here of the Tuscan poetic tradition of the landscape as the ‘product of tragic love and metamorphosis’ which begins with Giovanni Boccaccio’s Ninfale fiesolano (c. 1344–45) and includes Lorenzo de’ Medici’s

18 See Leoni G., “Christ the Gardener and the Chain of Symbols: The Gardens around the Walls of Sixteenth-Century Ferrara”, in Hunt J.D. (ed.), The Italian Garden: Art, Design and Culture (Cambridge: 1996) 61–64. 19 Ariosto, Orlando 52. 20 Curtius E.R., European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: 1990) 195. 21 Ariosto, Orlando 56. 22 See Giamatti, Earthly Paradise 145, for this point about Alcina’s ex-lovers’ dehumanisation.

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figure 14.3 Giambologna, Appennino, 1579. Villa Medici (now Demidoff), Pratolino Photo: Luke Morgan

Ambra (c. 1491–92).23 Una Roman d’Elia has recently associated these texts with Giambologna’s colossal figure of Appennino [Fig. 14.3] in the Medici garden at Pratolino, by way of an anonymous eclogue written in celebration of the villa. In the eclogue, two shepherds – Pratolino and Mugnone – fall in love with a nymph, who rejects both of them, causing Mugnone to shed so many tears that he becomes a river and Pratolino to wait for so long in hope that he becomes ‘the rocky site of the villa itself’. If the description of the metamorphosis of the shepherd in the eclogue is a deliberate allusion to Giambologna’s colossus, which is depicted as half mountain and half man, then one of the ways in which the designed landscape of Pratolino should be understood is as the realisation of a local literary topos. Armida’s ‘sumptuous lakeside bower’ is also located on an island. Tasso places it on a mountaintop amidst snowdrifts, its flowers and grass demonstrating

23 D’Elia E.R., “Giambologna’s Giant and the Cinquecento Villa Garden as a Landscape of Suffering”, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 31.1 (2011) 17.

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that art (enchantment) has prevailed over nature.24 His description of Armida’s garden, once Carlo and Ubaldo – on their mission to rescue Rinaldo – have penetrated the labyrinth, is a textbook example of a locus amoenus. There are ‘shady dells’, ‘still ponds and crystal fountains’, ‘bright varied blooms’, ‘a breeze whereby the sorceress moves the air’, and ‘charming birds’ which ‘intone in tuneful counterpoint’.25 Among the obstacles that prevent easy access to Armida’s garden, including wild animals and monsters, a deadly, poisonous ‘laughing fountain’, and ‘perfidious damsels’, is a labyrinth. Tasso writes that: ‘A garden lies amidst this daunting maze / whose every leaf breathes Love upon that ground. / Embowered there in fresh and verdant grass / you’ll find the knight reclining with his lass [Rinaldo, who is under the sway of Armida]’. This layout is not as fanciful as might first appear. The garden of the island of Cythera in Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), the book that in many ways marks the beginning of the development of the Italian Renaissance garden is, like Armida’s, circular as was the Hortus Sphaericus in the botanical garden in Padua.26 The labyrinth has a precedent in Filarete’s Trattato di Architettura (1464) in which a palace is located at the centre of a labyrinth.27 Indeed, Armida’s garden resembles actual Renaissance gardens more closely than Alcina’s, which Ariosto only really sketches. Not only is it ornamented with fountains, mounts, and caves, or grottoes, ‘deathless fruit’ that recall the contemporary gardener’s objective of a ver perpetuum (perpetual spring) through orangeries and other means, and ‘broideries’ (designs or knots perhaps), but among the birds there is one, ‘with multicoloured plumes and purple beak, / who moves his tongue in fluent wise and guides / its sounds in language like the one we speak. / So artfully he sings, his speech provides / a prodigy, exotic and unique’.28 This prodigious creature recalls the mechanical birds, or automata, of the early modern garden (it is certainly the artificial creation of Armida). 24 Tasso, Liberation 270. 25 Tasso, Liberation 287–288. 26 See Segre A. “Untangling the Knot: Garden Design in Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili”, Word & Image 14.1–2 (Jan.–June 1998) 84, where she notes that the circular design may have been deliberately intended by Colonna to indicate that the garden is enchanted. 27 See Filarete, Filarete’s Treatise on Architecture, Being the Treatise by Antonio di Piero Averlino, known as Filarete, trans. John R. Spencer, 2 vols. (New Haven – London: 1965) fol. 121r. 28 Tasso, Liberation 288.

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There were lifelike mechanical birds in cages in the garden in Hesdin, for example, that ‘hissed and spat at passersby’.29 Michel de Montaigne also noticed them at the Villa d’Este in Tivoli in 1581. In his treatise, Les Raisons des forces mouvantes (1615; 2nd rev. ed. 1624), Salomon de Caus provides detailed instructions and diagrams demonstrating how to construct them [Fig. 14.4]. By the end of the sixteenth century, mechanical birds had become so commonplace that Thomas Nashe made them the centrepiece of his fictional account of Italian gardens. In The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), Nashe describes the garden of an Italian merchant in which artificial birds (‘bodies without souls’) occupy the boughs of a ‘conspiracy of pine trees’. The mechanical illusion is so convincing that ‘every man there present renounced conjectures of art and said it was done by enchantment’.30 Nashe thus explicitly associates the automaton with enchantment, which implies the negative connotations that sometimes adhered to these inventions, especially in England (an unexplored topic in landscape history). For the sake of an example: when John Dee made a flying mechanical scarab which he demonstrated on stage during a performance of Aristophanes’s Pax, he was accused of black magic – a charge that he never lived down – despite the mathematical basis of his inventions.31 We again encounter Curtius’s ‘minimum ingredients’ in Book II of The Faerie Queene, when Guyon and the Palmer arrive at the enchantress Acrasia’s Bower of Bliss: ‘The painted flowres, the trees vpshooting hye, / The dales for shade, the hilles for breathing space, / The trembling groues, the Christall running by …’32 The perfect climate of the Bower, which is never afflicted with ‘storme nor frost … Nor scorching heat, nor cold intemperate’, like the perpetual spring of Armida’s garden, again recalls the orangeries and other climate-controlled environments of contemporary garden design (an example is provided by the orangery of de Caus’s Hortus Palatinus in Heidelberg).33 These landscape elements had become, by Spenser’s period, conventions of the genre. Leslie has compared the Bower of Bliss with Italian and Italianate gardens such as Nonsuch and Kenilworth in England.34 He argues that Acrasia’s bower 29 See Hyman W.B., “‘Mathematical Experiments of Long Silver Pipes’: The Early Modern Figure of the Mechanical Bird”, in Hyman W.B. (ed.), The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature (Farnham: 2011) 148. 30 Nashe Thomas, The Unfortunate Traveller, in Salzman P. (ed.), An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction, (Oxford: 1987) 272. 31 Hyman, “‘Mathematical Experiments’” 150. 32 Spenser, Faerie Queene 375. 33 Spenser, Faerie Queene 373. 34 Leslie, “Spenser, Sydney” 5. In a recent essay, Christine Coch has followed Leslie’s lead in studying real gardens so as to illuminate Spenser’s literary one. See Coch C., “The Trials of Art: Testing Temperance in the Bower of Bliss and Diana’s Grove at Nonsuch”,

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Salomon de Caus, Problem 23, from Book I, Les Raisons des forces mouvantes (Paris, Charles Sevetre: 1624) Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington, D.C.

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possesses all the features of a Roman Renaissance garden – groves, privy gardens, arbours, cabinets, banqueting houses and a palace or villa nearby. According to him, the moral choice that Guyon faces is also present in real gardens of the period: ‘As at Nonsuch, there is a challenge for the onlooker at the heart of this [Acrasia’s] garden, at the end of that physical and spiritual journey to penetrate to its mysterious center’.35 By the late sixteenth century, therefore, with Spenser, the fictional and the factual begin to explicitly coincide. Whereas it can only really be said that Ariosto’s enchanted garden approximates, in the most general way and according to the conventions of the locus amoenus, an ideal Renaissance garden, Spenser’s Bower of Bliss was partly modelled on actual examples. In each of these fictional gardens, from Ariosto to Spenser, the seductive but false appearance of the enchantress’s bower is both ‘an allegory for a self-deluding frame of mind’, and an analogue for the figure of the enchantress herself.36 It is notable that the sorceress at the heart of the illusion is frequently portrayed as if she was an artwork rather than a person. Ariosto describes Alcina as ‘so beautifully modelled, no painter, however much he applied himself, could have achieved anything more perfect’.37 According to Tasso, Armida winds ‘the curls of her fine strands [of hair] with sprays / of flowers, like enamel worked on gold …’38 These descriptive passages serve to underline the central fact of both the enchantress and her garden – that they are works of art, rather than nature. In Armida’s garden: ‘All seems art made by Nature, everywhere / miming what mimes her but herself to please’.39 Acrasia’s Bower of Bliss is, likewise, a place where ‘natures worke by art can imitate’.40 The suppression or mimicry of nature in each garden is a sign of its depravity. Art is, in other words, a negative principle – a synonym for veneficial magic, which in every case causes the self-deluded hero, emasculated by desire, to languish in what Tasso evocatively describes as a ‘drunken dream / of pampered ease in pleasure’s paradise’.41 In the next two sections, some of the implications of this view of art for the experience of real gardens will be considered.

35 36 37 38 39 40 41

in Oram W.A. – Prescott A.L. – Roch, Jr. T.P. (eds.), Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual XX (New York: 2005) 49–76. Leslie, “Spenser, Sydney” 19. Giamatti, Earthly Paradise 258. Ariosto, Orlando 61. Tasso, Liberation 290. Tasso, Liberation 287. Spenser, Faerie Queene 371. Tasso, Liberation 291. Unlike natural or mathematical magic, veneficial magic (black magic or sorcery) works against nature. See Hyman, “‘Mathematical experiments’” 149–150.

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The ‘Three Natures’ and Grafting

Ostensibly, at least, the literary image of the enchanted garden as a place of artifice and deception contrasts with the sixteenth-century concept of the garden as a terza natura (third nature), about which much has been made in modern landscape history.42 In a well-known letter of 26 July 1543, the philologist Claudio Tolomei discussed a fountain in the garden of Agapito Bellomo, near the Trevi Fountain in Rome: The ingenious skill, newly rediscovered to make fountains, such as used to be found in Rome, where art was so blended with nature that one could not discern whether the fountains were the product of the former or the latter. Thus some appeared to be a naturalistic artifice while others seemed an artifice of nature. In these times they endeavor to make a fountain appear made by nature itself, not by accident, but with a masterful artistry.43 Bartolomeo Taegio makes a similar point in his dialogue, La Villa (1559). One of the speakers, Vitauro, observes: ‘Here are without end the ingenious grafts that show with great wonder to the world the industry of a wise gardener, who by incorporating art with nature brings forth from both a third nature, which causes the fruits to be more flavorful here than elsewhere’.44 Both writers consider art to be the equal partner of nature, rather than a competitor (still less an agent of corruption and pollution). Tolomei notes how the mixing (mescolando) of art and nature produces works in which the respective share of each cannot be determined. Taegio makes a similar point about the practice of grafting. Later in La Villa, however, another speaker, Partenio, challenges Vitauro, stating that he ‘cannot praise an art that teaches to offend nature and to make many bad effects’.45 He goes on to ask: ‘Doesn’t it 42

The first modern author to assert the importance of the concept of the ‘three natures’ was Alessandro Tagliolini. See Tagliolini A., “Girolamo Firenzuola e il giardino nelle fonti della metà del Cinquecento”, in Ragionieri G. (ed.), Il giardino storico italiano (Florence: 1981) 302–03. Key subsequent discussions include, Lazzaro, Renaissance Garden 9–10; Hunt J.D., “Paragone in Paradise: Translating the Garden”, Comparative Criticism 18 (1996) 56–59; and several of the essays in the forthcoming volume, Tchikine A. (ed.), Creating a “Third Nature”: Gardens and Constructions of Landscape in the Italian Renaissance (Philadelphia: forthcoming 2021). 43 Macdougall, Fountains, Statues, and Flowers 57. 44 Taegio B., La Villa, ed. and trans. T.E. Beck (Philadelphia, 2011) 58–59. 45 Taegio, La Villa 146–147.

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[grafting] show us many monstrous fabrications of plants, strange grafts, and metamorphoses of trees […] How have we learned the crossing of horses with she–asses, and wolves with female dogs, how are mules and wolf–dogs born contrary to nature, if not by this art?’46 Partenio’s reservations about the legitimacy of using the art of grafting to interfere with what he regards as nature’s self-determined course, leading to ‘monstrous fabrications’, echo those of Ariosto, Tasso and Spenser. The use of grafting as a negative metaphor has a long history in literature, best known perhaps from Perdita’s repudiation of ‘nature’s bastards’ in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.47 Although in La Villa, Vitauro reassures Partenio that the gardener’s art is a legitimate one (in a passage, incidentally, that echoes Giambattista della Porta’s work on natural magic48), since its effects are natural, these kinds of statements imply suspicions about the morality of art’s interventions, broadly conceived, that are comparable to those foregrounded in the poetic tradition of the garden as a false paradise. In other words, in a representative text about the villa and its landscape from the mid sixteenth century, the two possibilities – of art’s intervention as positive and as negative – are both present. In later English writings on this theme, the negative connotations of grafting are emphasized. Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘The Mower Against Gardens’ (1650) is indicative. Marvell criticizes the artificiality of contemporary pleasure gardens, brought into being by ‘Luxurious man, to bring his vice in use, / Did after him the world seduce, / And from the fields the flowers and plants allure, / Where nature was most plain and pure’.49 He describes the enclosure of a garden (a square) and the preparation of the soil, which ‘stupified’ the plants as they ‘fed’. ‘Strange perfumes’ were used to ‘taint’ the roses, and rare 46 Taegio, La Villa 146–147. For some suggestive comments about the broader implications of grafting as a metaphor, see Denis Ribouillault’s forthcoming essay, ‘Ingenuity in the Garden: From the Poetics of Grafting to Divine Mathematics’ and Campbell S.J., “Naturalism and the Venetian ‘Poesia’: Grafting, Metaphor and Embodiment in Giorgione, Titian, and the Campagnolas”, in Nagel A. – Pericolo L. (eds.), Subject as Aporia in Early Modern Art (Farnham: 2010) 115–142. I am grateful to Denis for allowing me to read his essay before publication. 47 Shakespeare William, The Winter’s Tale, ed. Frances E. Dolan (New York: 1999) 67. Rebecca Bushnell observes that: ‘In Shakespeare’s history plays, grafting is used as a negative metaphor for the mixing of classes and social transformation, whether the bastard scion is being grafted on a royal stock or a better plant on a wild one’. Bushnell R., Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens (Ithaca – London: 2003) 149. 48 See Bushnell, Green Desire 142. 49 For the poem, see Marvell Andrew, The Works of Andrew Marvell Esq., vol. 1 (London: 1726) 99–101.

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foreign plants were sought in ‘another world’. Fountains and grottoes, likewise, impose on the ‘sweet fields [which] do lie forgot’. The practice of grafting (‘forbidden mixtures’) does not escape Marvell’s critical eye: No plant now knew the stock from which it came; He grafts upon the wild the tame: That th’uncertain and adulterate fruit Might put the palate in dispute. Marvell’s poem belongs to an English tradition of thought in which the interventions of art are regarded as an artificial imposition on nature, an expression of the hubris of ‘luxurious man’, and as dangerous examples of falsehood. In many of these texts, the gardener’s practice of grafting is a prime example of art interfering with nature to deleterious effect.50 The most sophisticated expression of this viewpoint is Spenser’s The Faerie Queene in which art is associated with the veneficial magic of the enchantress Acrasia. As will be suggested in the next section, real gardens were also understood in this way, especially in England. 3

Automata and Veneficial Magic

The automata of the literary false paradise and their counterparts in the pleasure gardens of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries provide a second case study of contemporaneous anxieties about the interventions of art. Nashe’s claim in The Unfortunate Traveller that the mechanical birds of an Italian garden presented such a convincing illusion of life that ‘every man there present renounced conjectures of art and said it was done by enchantment’ has already been mentioned. Here, art, in the early modern sense of techne, is superseded and the only possible explanation for these ‘bodies without souls, and sweet-resembled substances without sense’ is the application of magic.51 The assumption that automata, mechanical figures, engines, and other devices were the creations of conjurers in league with the Devil was not uncommon in Elizabethan England. In his Inventions or devises (1578), for example, 50 During the period, there were, of course, other views about grafting. The Aristotelian John Case, for example, celebrates the remarkable results that can ensue from the practice. See Schmitt C.B., John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England (Kingston – Montreal: 1983) 197–198. 51 Nashe, Unfortunate Traveller 328.

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William Bourne compared his designs for automata to the ‘brasen head’ of Roger Bacon and other ‘strange works that the world hath marvayled at’.52 He felt it necessary to make clear, however, that although his inventions may seem to operate ‘by Inchantment’, their motion is in fact accomplished ‘by wheeles, as you may see by clockes’.53 ‘Brasen’ (brass) or oracular heads are among the most frequently discussed automata of the medieval and early modern periods.54 The original version of this story seems to have first appeared in Matteo Corsini’s Rosaio della Vita (1373).55 Corsini relates how the thirteenth-century Dominican monk and reputed magician Albertus Magnus constructed a colossal artificial head out of bronze, which could speak. Another friar, who in later versions of the story came to be identified as Albertus Magnus’s pupil Thomas Aquinas, subsequently destroyed the head. Alexander Marr has drawn attention to the fact that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was disagreement about what motivated Aquinas’s act. The Italian art theorist Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo believed that piety was the chief motive. According to him, Aquinas ‘thought it [the head] the Deuil’. The French scholar and librarian Gabriel Naudé, however, attributed Aquinas’s destruction of the head to his exasperation with its interminable speech. In the 1640s, the philosopher and Bishop of Chester John Wilkins proposed another reason: Aquinas destroyed the head, which it had taken his master thirty years to construct, out of spite.56 These varied responses to the story show, as Marr argues, that there was no firm consensus about the connotations of automata as late as the seventeenth century. For some, they were the work of the devil and of black magic whereas for others they were ridiculous, hubristic playthings of little merit or purpose. Bourne’s reference to the ‘brasen head’ of Roger Bacon recalls the bestknown Elizabethan version of the story: Robert Greene’s comedy Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c. 1588–92) [Fig. 14.5]. Greene casts the Franciscan philosopher Roger Bacon (c. 1219–92) as a necromancer, as did other sixteenth-century writers (on the basis of legend rather than evidence). In the play, Bacon spends 52

Quoted in Wolfe J., Humanism, Machinery and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge – New York: 2004) 63. 53 Wolfe, Humanism, Machinery 63. 54 See Kang M., “Wonders of Mathematical Magic: Lists of Automata in the Transition from Magic to Science, 1533–1662”, Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 33 (2002) 113–39, for a study of recurring motifs in the literature of automata. 55 Kang, “Wonders of Mathematical Magic” 127. 56 I am relying here on Marr A., “Understanding Automata in the Late Renaissance”, Journal de la Renaissance 2 (2004) 205.

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Frontispiece: Robert Greene, The Honorable Historie of Frier Bacon, and Frier Bongay (London, Elizabeth Allde: 1630) Photo: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS / PUBLIC DOMAIN

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seven years constructing his brazen head only to fall asleep at the crucial moment of speech. Bacon’s clownish assistant Miles is, however, present to hear the cryptic utterance: ‘Time is’, ‘Time was’, ‘Time is past’. As Greene’s stage direction specifies, the head is then abruptly destroyed by a hand holding a hammer amidst flashes of lightning.57 Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay is both a satirical critique of contemporary scholars, and their claims to possess esoteric knowledge, and an excursus on the limits of that knowledge.58 Bacon’s main motive for the construction of the oracular head is self-glorification. One of his colleagues, Clement, confirms that this is the case when he rapturously proclaims: ‘if thy [Bacon] work these miracles, / England and Europe shall admire thy fame, / And Oxford shall in characters of brass / And statues such as were built up in Rome / Eternize Friar Bacon for his art’.59 Bacon’s hubris is indicated by the automaton’s eventual pronouncements, which may seem gnomic but are, in fact, self-evident to the point of meaninglessness. The destruction of the head, presumably by divine force, is suggestive of the dangers of the attempt to compete with nature through necromancy.60 Dee was precisely the kind of learned scholar pilloried by Greene in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. To reiterate: he was himself accused of black magic after a performance of Aristophanes’s Pax in which his mechanical scarab flew across the stage – probably the first instance of an automaton in the English theatre.61 In response to his critics, Dee claimed in his The Mathematicall Praeface to the Elements of Geometrie of Euclid of Megara (1570), that his studies were intended solely for the glorification of God: 57 Greene Robert, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, ed. J.A. Lavin (London: 1969) 72–73. 58 See LaGrandeur K., “The Talking Brass Head as a Symbol of Dangerous Knowledge in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and in Alphonsus King of Aragon”, English Studies 80.5 (October 1999) 408–22, for the play as a critique of contemporary scholars and scholarship. 59 Greene, Friar Bacon 14. 60 Greene makes it clear that Bacon’s automaton is the product of necromancy. See Todd Andrew Borlik’s comment that: ‘Rather than allude to mechanistic theories outlined in Hero of Alexandria’s Pneumatica (accessible in a Latin translation in 1575), Bacon invokes “nigromantic charms” and “the enchanting forces of pf the devil” (xi.15, 18) to awaken the idol. From such passages, audience members acquainted with the terminology would most likely infer that Bacon plans to make the head speak by encasing a dead spirit inside it, the method employed by the Egyptian priests in the Asclepius (90). Bacon’s servant Miles also nudges us in this direction by murmuring “here’s some of your master’s hobgoblins abroad” (xi.52) just before the idol utters its first words’. Borlik T.A., “‘More than Art’: Clockwork Automata, the Extemporizing Actor, and the Brazen Head in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay”, in Hyman W.B. (ed.) The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature (Ashgate, 2011) 134. 61 For this point, see Hyman, ‘“Mathematical Experiments”’ 150.

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And for these, and such like marveilous Actes and Feates, Naturally, Mathematically, and Mechanically, wrought and contrived: ought any honest Student, and Modest Christian Philosopher, be counted, & called a Conjurer? Shall the folly of Idiotes, and the Mallice of the Scornfull, so much prevaile, that He, who seeketh no worldly gaine or glory at their handes: But onely, of God, the threasor of heavenly wisedome, & knowledge of pure veritie: Shall he (I say) in the meanse space, be robbed and spoiled of his honest name and fame? He that seketh (by S. Paules advertisement) in the Creatures properties, and wonderfull vertues, to finde juste cause, to glorifie the Æternall, and Almightie Creator by: Shall that man, be (in hugger mugger) condemned, as a Companion of the Helhoundes, and a Caller, and a Conjurer of wicked and damned Spirites?62 Dee is at pains to assert the mathematical basis of his inventions, which corresponds to the distinctions of other writers such as, for example, the editor and poet Robert Allot. In England’s Parnassus (1600), Allot writes that there are three types of magic: the natural ‘In which by hearbes and stones they will / Worke wondrous things, and worthy fame’, the mathematical ‘Where Magicke works by nature so, / That brazen heads make speake it shall, / Of woods, birds, bodies, flie and go’, and the veneficial, which ‘Is named, for by it they make / The shape of bodies chang’d in flight / And their forms on them to take’.63 Certainly, by the late sixteenth century, automata were increasingly understood, at least by the educated, as works of mathematics but, as is well known, the line between science and magic remained, in this period, indistinct. Moreover, as Greene’s play suggests, connotations of veneficial or black magic continued to adhere to automata and – in different contexts – other examples of scientific and technological experimentation, all of which depended on mathematical proficiency. Indeed, mathematics itself, along with related or derivative disciplines, was often regarded as a form of magic. John Aubrey later noted that the astrologer, the mathematician and the conjurer were all regarded as one and the same in that era.64 Automata were frequently encountered in gardens, from fifteenth-century Hesdin to Theobalds (Hertfordshire) in the seventeenth century.65 Montaigne 62 Quoted in Kang, “Wonders of Mathematical Magic” 128. 63 Quoted in Hyman, ‘“Mathematical Experiments”’ 149. 64 Thomas K., Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (London: 1971) 362. 65 Linda M. Strauss’s point about the liminality of the historical sites (including gardens), of automata is worth noting here: ‘The sites in which automata have historically been located – tombs, temples, theaters, magician’s stages, fairs, gardens, laboratories, and

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was fascinated by them. In his journal of his visit to Italy in 1580–81, he commented on the mechanical birds in the garden of the Villa d’Este in Tivoli: In another place you hear the song of birds, which are little bronze flutes that you see at regals; they give a sound like those little earthenware pots full of water that little children blow into by the spout, this by an artifice like that of an organ; and then by other springs they set in motion an owl, which, appearing at the top of the rock, makes this harmony cease instantly, for the birds are frightened by his presence; and then he leaves the place to them again.66 Robert Dallington, in his Survey of the Great Dukes State of Tuscany (1605), similarly praised Pratolino for ‘the exquisite and rare inuention of Water-workes, wherein it is excellent, and thought to exceede Tiuoli’.67 In most cases, however, these devices have been paid scant attention. Modern historians have tended to view them as inconsequential and even as rather puerile giochi or scherzi. This assumption ignores the sophisticated technology of the mechanisms of the garden, which often has an experimental character, and suppresses the multiple cultural meanings and connotations of automata in other locations. If an artificial scarab, made to fly across the stage, could provoke such anxiety about the motives and investments of its maker, why should similar suspicions not enter the mind of the garden visitor confronted with, for example, a life-like mechanical owl or a fully automated narrative scene?68

labyrinths – are all liminal not simply because they exist at the margins of everyday existence, but also because they exist at the boundaries between two or more worlds or states of being. Tomb and labyrinths, for instance, occupy the boundary between life and death, and along with temples and theaters, mark the place where the divine and the secular meet. Gardens and laboratories lie at the boundary between the natural and the artificial, or between what is wild and free and what is controlled.’. Strauss L.M., “Reflections in a mechanical mirror: Automata as doubles and as tools”, Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present 10 (1996) 179–207, 194. 66 Montaigne Michel de, The Complete Works of Montaigne: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters, trans. D.M. Frame (Stanford: 1989) 963. 67 Dallington Sir Robert, A Survey of the Great Dukes State of Tuscany. In the Yeare of Our Lord 1596 (London, Edward Blount: 1605) 12. 68 Several examples of mechanical birds and automated narrative scenes are illustrated and described in Caus Salomon de, Les Raisons des forces mouvantes avec diverses machines tant utilles que plaisantes ausquelles sont adjoints plusieurs desseings de grotes et fontaines (Frankfurt, Jan Norton: 1615).

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Yet again, Renaissance poetry provides an alternative framework for tracing some of the potential implications of the automaton in the garden. Several scholars have suggested that the Bower of Bliss in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is not only the false creation of Acrasia’s magic arts but is also populated by automata.69 Jonathan Sawday has, for example, identified the bathing damsels of the Bower as automata, and Lynsey McCulloch has even argued that Acrasia herself is a machine.70 Leslie has, likewise, compared the sweetly singing birds of the Bower to ‘Roman gardens [that] contained similarly deceptive birds, such as the owls at Tivoli, which were in fact automata operated hydraulically’.71 Most recently, Nick Davis has argued that ‘Acrasia’s garden seems to be a technically elaborate plaisance, generically similar to the complex at Hesdin or, in hyperbolic literary conception, the simulated Eden which the narrator hero of Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller visits when in Rome …’72 Indeed, it could be argued that Nashe’s description of the mechanical birds as ‘bodies without souls’ also applies to the unfortunate transformed victims of, not only Acrasia, but also Alcina and Armida. In each case, the enchantress’s lovers are dehumanised through their transformation into flora, fauna and fountains. Lacking souls and literally objectified, they resemble automata in their repetitive mechanistic movements. Other figures of the Bower explicitly exhibit the characteristics of automata. For the sake of an example: Davis has drawn attention to ‘Pleasure’s Porter’, who stands, beckoning, at the entrance to the garden, and offers visitors a bowl of wine as they draw near. This ‘foe of life’ is unperturbed and, in fact, does not even react when Guyon overthrows his bowl and breaks his staff.73 Instead, ‘his sole capacity seems to be for limited and repeated motion’.74 It might be added to Davis’s interpretation that ‘Pleasure’s Porter’ recalls a familiar automated type, encountered in actual early modern gardens: that of 69 On ‘living sculptures’ in general, see Barkin L., “‘Living Sculptures’: Ovid, Michelangelo, and The Winter’s Tale”, English Literary History 48 (1981) 639–667. For detailed study of the theme, see Stoichită V., The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock, trans. A. Anderson (Chicago: 2008). 70 Sawday J., Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (London: 2007) 200; McCulloch L., “Antique Myth, Early Modern Mechanism: The Secret History of Spenser’s Iron Man”, in Hyman W.B. (ed.), The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature (Farnham: 2011) 69. According to McCulloch: ‘Acrasia is one of many animated statues in The Faerie Queene’. 71 Leslie, “Spenser, Sidney” 17–18. 72 Davis, “Desire, Nature, and Automata” 171. 73 Spenser, Faerie Queene 373. 74 Davis, “Desire, Nature, and Automata” 176.

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the mechanical servant. In a drawing of 1601, Giovanni Guerra depicted a late sixteenth-century example of this figure in one of the grottoes of the ground floor of the Villa Medici in Pratolino, perpetually pouring water from a pitcher [Fig. 14.6]. Another example, with two mechanical servants (one of which is based on the Pratolino figure), appears in de Caus’s design for a grotto (1620) for the Hortus Palatinus in Heidelberg.75 If, as seems likely, Spenser drew on his knowledge of contemporary, especially Italianate, landscape design for his evocation of the Bower of Bliss, including their mechanized figures and tableaux, then The Faerie Queene is suggestive of how some viewers may have responded to automata in landscape settings. The garden of Spenser’s poem symbolizes ‘evil masquerading as the good’.76 Its artificiality, the product of Acrasia’s veneficial magic, is designed to seduce and entrap. Spenser’s view of the relationship between art and nature in this parody of an Italian garden could not be more different to Tolomei’s or Taegio’s. Unlike the Italians, for many English writers the mirroring or suppression of nature in the pleasure garden is indicative of moral danger or even bankruptcy. Instead of a benign collaboration, Spenser envisages art competing with and undermining nature, polluting, corrupting and superseding the natural appearance and identity of things. The insistently negative role of art within this landscape is emphasized by the fact that, in contrast to Tasso’s garden in which everything is artificial, the natural and the artificial coexist in Acrasia’s Bower.77 In a description of vines, for example, the luscious (real) fruit of which are nonetheless compared to emeralds and rubies, there were also artificial grapes of ‘burnisht gold, / So made by art, to beautifie the rest …’78 As Guyon penetrates deeper into the garden the boundary between the real and the artificial, which is still present when he encounters the vines, is gradually erased. The function of the landscape in this process is to emblematize or externalize the inner condition of Acrasia’s victims – to serve as a metaphor for her powers of seduction, leading to the total suppression of morality and rationality. As Bartlett Giamatti puts it: ‘we are being seduced by the landscape, and 75 See Caus Salomon de, Le Jardin Palatin. Hortus Palatinus (Paris: 1981) 26. De Caus’s description of the two figures is as follows: ‘Il y a aussi deux figures de pierres grades, comme le naturel: l’une representant vn Jeune homme, qui verse de l’eau pour lauer la main quand l’on voudra manger dans ladite grote: & l’autre est vn qui tient comme vn panier plat, pour mettre des verres’. 76 Giamatti, Earthly Paradise 237. 77 See Giamatti, Earthly Paradise 274–275, for this point. 78 Spenser, Faerie Queene 374.

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Giovanni Guerra, Dining Grotto, Pratolino Albertina 37214, Vienna

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at the same time shown through the landscape the false state of mind where the distinction between good and evil is potentially obliterated. To go into the Bower of Bliss is to lose one’s power of reason. To lose the power of reason is to become a beast, which is, of course, the literal fate of so many of Acrasia’s lovers’.79 This is also the condition of the automaton – a ‘body without a soul’ or a machine without a mind. The Bower of Bliss is a literary creation, albeit one that draws on the conventions of Italian gardens. In the comments of late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century English writers, the literary image of the garden as a place of seductive illusions and dangerous falsehoods becomes the explicit basis of a moralising critique of actual Italian Renaissance gardens and the Italianate style then making its way in England. For example, in his ‘Hortus Mertonensis’ (1620), John Earle compares the garden of Merton College in Oxford to the ‘godless gardens’ of the Italians.80 In contrast, he writes of the Merton garden that: Simplicity alone will please And needs not false Daedalian trees, Where plants turned double snare the gaze And tricks the wanderer amaze […] How can wild beasts your groves enhance Or horned monsters twist from plants? No plant here is to letters forced, Nor doctored flowerlet is endorsed With blazon, or the name of king, Nor grass inscribed with anything. Not squares or circles are your beds, Nor need your flowers hide their heads By false art’s insolent address, Or from their perished state confess The artifice that all might guess.81 Earle’s references to ‘false Daedalian trees’ and ‘tricks the wanderer amaze’ imply that he has the automata, giochi d’acqua and other hydraulic devices of late sixteenth-century Italian garden design in mind. Daedalus was, of course 79 Giamatti, Earthly Paradise 271. 80 The translation from the Latin is by W. McCuaig and D. Chambers. For the text, see Chambers D., “‘Hortus Mertonensis’: John Earle’s Garden Poem of 1620”, The Journal of Garden History 2.2 (1982) 125. 81 Chambers, “‘Hortus Mertonensis’” 125.

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an inventor, and Earle may here be alluding to the labyrinth that he designed for King Minos on Crete. Another level of reference may, in addition, be intended: in the early sixteenth century, Tribolo installed pipes in a tree of the garden of the Villa Medici in Castello (near Florence), so that water would spout and trickle from the branches.82 Similar mechanical or ‘Daedalian’ trees could be found at Pratolino and in Naples.83 A literary version of the motif also appears in Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller. In the Italian garden that Jack Wilton visits, there was a ‘conspiracy of pine trees’, with ‘long silver pipes secretly inrinded in the entrails of the boughs’ on which the mechanical birds (those ‘bodies without souls’) perched. Earle makes very clear his antipathy towards what he regards as ‘false art’s insolent address’, which encompasses mechanical ‘tricks’, topiary (‘horned monsters’) as well as heraldic and geometric plantings. In contrast, in the garden of Merton College ‘nature’s hand is evident / And artless pleasure innocent; / Blest by the genius of this spot’.84 Not unlike Spenser or, later in the century, Marvell, in Earle’s view, art is an agent of falsity and duplicity in the garden. A poem by Robert Southwell, ‘Love’s Garden Grief’ (1597), is equally critical of contemporary garden fashion and taste. In fact, Southwell’s garden comprises a point-by-point refutation of the established conventions of the Italianate (and Elizabethan) garden. It also conforms closely, yet again, to Curtius’s classic definition of the locus amoenus, but only to deny each of the established conventions of the topos. For example: the ‘palace’ adjoining the garden is, in fact, ‘a prison that allureth’; the hedges are composed of ‘thorns of envy / and stakes of strife’; the alleys are ‘gravel’d with jealousy’; the arbours ‘breed rough fits of raging madness’; the garden beds are ‘sown with seeds of all iniquity / and poisoning weeds’; perched on the trees (‘dismal plants of pining corrosives’) are birds that, instead of singing delightfully, ‘Of screeching note affrighteth’.85 In the poem’s last stanza, the true identity of the gardener responsible for this locus horridus is revealed: Your coolest summer gales are scalding sighings, Your showers are tears; Your sweetest smell the stench of sinful living, 82 See Giorgio Vasari’s biography of Tribolo in Le Opere di Giorgio Vasari con nuove annotazioni e commenti di Gaetano Milanese, vol. 6 (Florence: 1998) 55–99. 83 See Tchikine A. “Giochi d’acqua: Water Effects in Renaissance and Baroque Italy”, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 30 (2010) 64, for the details. 84 Chambers, ‘“Hortus Mertonensis’” 125. 85 Southwell Robert, The Poetical Works of the Rev. Robert Southwell, ed. W.B. Turnbull (London: 1856) 77–78.

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Your favours fears; Your gard’ner Satan, all you reap is misery, Your gain remorse and loss of all felicity. Southwell’s poem amounts to an impassioned critique of contemporary garden design with an explicit Christian inflection. It presents a comparatively simplistic vision of the Italianate garden as a false paradise. Yet behind it lies the literary tradition of the enchanted garden, presided over by a Circean seductress, that this chapter has traced from Ariosto to Spenser and that itself originates in Italy. Indeed, some English writers of this period go so far as to identify Italy itself with Circe. Roger Ascham, for example, indicted all things Italian as nothing less than ‘the inchantementes of Circes, brought out of Italie, to marre mens maners in England’ (The Scholemaster (1570)).86 His comments recall those of Arthur Golding in his 1567 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses into English (which Shakespeare knew): ‘What else are Circe’s witchcrafts and enchauntments than the vyle / And filthy pleasures of the flesh which doo our soules defile?’87 This anxiety about corporeal pleasure which must come at the expense of the rational and moral faculties lies at the heart of the motif of the enchanted garden, receiving perhaps its most sophisticated expression in The Faerie Queene. Ascham’s and Golding’s scorn is also, of course, diametrically opposed to Caro’s mid sixteenth-century enthusiasm for Circe as a grotto subject. 4

Conclusion: The Garden as the Scene of Death

This chapter has argued that the idea of the enchanted garden in early modern literature – a false paradise under the spell of an enchantress – provides an alternative framework for the reconstruction of the experience of real gardens in the same period. Some key aspects of sixteenth-century landscape design may be best understood with reference to the characterisation of gardens within contemporary poetry. Examples include the relationship between the Appennino in Pratolino and the literary tradition of the landscape as unrequited lover (recalling Alcina, the perverse designer of the garden of Ariosto’s 86 Quoted in Woolfson J., “Thomas Hoby, William Thomas, and Mid-Tudor Travel to Italy”, in Pincombe M. – Shrank C. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485–1603 (Oxford – New York: 2009) 412. 87 Yarnall, J., Transformations of Circe: The History of an Enchantress (Urbana – Chicago: 1994) 109.

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Orlando furioso); and the potential relevance to the historical experience of gardens of the negative connotations of grafting and automata. Fortuitously, these examples of what Earle memorably called ‘false art’s insolent address’ – the gardener’s practice of grafting and the mathematician (or conjurer’s) construction of an automaton – are juxtaposed in the anonymous prose text, The Famous Historie of Fryer Bacon, that is the principal source of Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. In the earlier (sixteenth-century) version of the story, Miles mocks the first cryptic pronouncement of Bacon’s automated brazen head, that ‘Time is’, in the following terms: Time is for some to plante, Time is for some to sowe, Time is for some to graft, The horne, as some does know.88 Todd Andrew Borlik has pointed out that this is an ‘obvious burlesque’ of King Solomon’s statement in Chapter III of Ecclesiastes: ‘To every thing there is a season and a time … a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted … That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past’.89 According to Borlik, the passage in The Famous Historie and the vision of Ecclesiastes both emphasise the ‘contingency of earthly existence’, an idea that arguably remains vestigially present in the strange three part utterance of the brazen head of Greene’s play. For Borlik, what is implied by these texts is ‘the necessity of responding in a way that automata cannot: by improvising’.90 That may be so, but the emphasis on temporality in the Biblical text, The Famous Historie, and Greene’s play, implies another important dimension or, rather, condition, of automata – their status as what Nashe called ‘bodies without souls’. The automaton in the garden is a soulless, dead thing that only gives the impression of life; its animation is what renders it uncanny and potentially disturbing. It is, to use an expression from the present, an early modern zombie, a manifestation of the undead, given the semblance of life through esoteric knowledge, be it mathematical or necromantic. This point is illustrated unusually literally by Giovanni Fontana’s fifteenth-century design for an automaton depicting the resurrection of the dead [Fig. 14.7]. As the drawing

88 89 90

Quoted in Borlik, ‘ “More than Art” ’ 141. Quoted in Borlik, ‘ “More than Art” ’ 141. Borlik, ‘ “More than Art” ’ 142.

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Giovanni Fontana, “The Artificial Resurrection of the Dead”. From Giovanni Fontana, Bellicorum instrumentorum liber, Cod. Icon. 242, 1420–1440 Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich

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shows, a mechanised circular wheel consigns a skeletal figure to the underworld before raising it to the surface again. Death and reanimation have been latent themes of almost all the examples that this chapter has touched upon, from poetry to gardens, and from grafting to automata. Armida, in Tasso’s La Gerusalemme liberata, threatened to ‘petrify’ the knights into rocks or ‘melt’ them into springs. This power of transformation, leading to dehumanisation (a state of perpetually suspended death), is also wielded by the enchantresses of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. The link between this established poetic tradition and actual gardens of the late Renaissance is suggested by the eclogue celebrating the Villa Medici and its garden in Pratolino, in which the site’s namesake, the shepherd Pratolino, is transformed into rocks as he waits for his beloved and just as his compatriot Mugnone, piangere come una fontana, eventually becomes a river. Or, there is the example of the descriptive passages in Ariosto and Tasso in which the enchantress is explicitly compared with art. ‘No painter’, Ariosto writes of Alcina’s seductive beauty, ‘could have achieved anything more perfect’. It is intriguing that Giorgio Vasari used similar terms in his praise of the so-called ‘Labyrinth’ of the earlier Villa Medici in Castello, which he approvingly writes could have been ‘produced by the brush’.91 In both cases, artifice is compared with artifice rather than nature. More pertinently, perhaps, Alcina appears in Ariosto’s description as an automaton or an animate doll, even as a mechanical figure, devoid of humanity and by extension life. This is, yet again, Nashe’s meaning in his characterisation of the mechanical birds of an Italian garden as ‘bodies without souls’. In some cases, especially in England towards the end of the period under discussion, gardens are explicitly associated with death and decay. In Southwell’s poem, ‘Love’s Garden Grief’, the gardener turns out to be Satan himself. This anti-locus amoenus also has its early modern Italian equivalents. Lorenzo Lotto’s burlesque epic Il Malmantile Racquistato (published posthumously in 1676), includes a fictional description of a landscape in which the urns and obelisks have been replaced with gibbets and pillories and the statues have become mummies ‘restored’ with severed heads – a locus horridus if ever there was one.92 Death is, of course, always present in the group of paintings dealing with the theme of Et in Arcadia Ego by Guercino and Nicolas Poussin.93 91 Vasari, Opere di Giorgio Vasari 74. 92 See the discussion of Lotto’s text in Scott J., Salvator Rosa: His Life and Times (New Haven – London: 1995) 50. (The text was written under the pseudonym Perlone Zipole, which is an anagram of Lorenzo Lippi.) 93 The classic essay on the theme is Panofsky E., “Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition”, in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1955) 340–367.

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Importantly, some gardens of the late sixteenth century also have explicit funerary connotations. The Sacro Bosco, which Tasso probably knew, may have been – on one level – a monument to Giulia Farnese, the deceased wife of Pierfrancesco ‘Vicino’ Orsini who created the wood in Bomarzo.94 The ‘petrified’ giants and monsters of Orsini’s creation join an artificially ruined “Etruscan” tomb and a tomba da fossa that make direct reference to the remains of the ancient Etruscan mausoleums and necropolises of the surrounding area.95 The ultimate implication of ‘false art’s insolent address’ in literature and landscape design is, therefore, death. The seductive interventions of art, whether they be the transformations of living bodies into insensate objects by the malevolent enchantresses of poetry, the ‘monstrous fabrications’ of the practice of grafting, the soulless, self-moving automata of the mathematicians (or, as was popularly believed, the necromancers), and, as several English commentators thought, any landscape in which nature is willfully suppressed by art, produce places of ‘artifice, sterility, death’ as C.S. Lewis famously wrote of Acrasia’s Bower of Bliss.96 Bibliography Ariosto Ludovico, Orlando Furioso, trans. Guido Waldman (Oxford: 2008). Barkin L., “‘Living Sculptures’: Ovid, Michelangelo, and The Winter’s Tale”, English Literary History 48 (1981) 639–667. Biddle M., “The Gardens of Nonsuch: Sources and Dating”, Garden History 27.1 (1999) 168–180.

See also Marin L., “Panofsky and Poussin in Arcadia”, in Sublime Poussin, trans. Porter C. (Stanford: 1999). For some of the implications of the theme for later garden design, see Morgan L., “Guercino’s Et in Arcadia Ego and Eighteenth-Century Landscape Design”, in Marshall D.R. (ed.), The Italians in Australia: Studies in Renaissance and Baroque Art (Florence: 2004) 191–196. 94 In his dedication of his edition of Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia (Venice, 1578), to Orsini, Francesco Sansovino describes ‘the theatre, the lake and the temple dedicated to the happy memory of the most illustrious Lady Giulia Farnese, your former consort’ of the Sacro Bosco. See Bury J.B., “The Reputation of Bomarzo”, Journal of Garden History 3.2 (1983) 108. 95 On the relationship of the Sacro Bosco to the Etruscan structures of the surrounding area, see Oleson J.P., “A Reproduction of an Etruscan Tomb in the Parco dei Mostri at Bomarzo”, The Art Bulletin 57.3 (Sept. 1975) 410–417, and Coty K., “A Dream of Etruria: The Sacro Bosco of Bomarzo and the Alternate Antiquity of Alto Lazio” (M.A. dissertation, University of Maryland: 2013). 96 Lewis C.S., The Allegory of Love (Oxford: 1938) 326.

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Borlik T.A., “‘More than Art’: Clockwork Automata, the Extemporizing Actor, and the Brazen Head in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay”, in Hyman W.B. (ed.) The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature (Ashgate, 2011) 129–144. Brunon H., “Du Songe de Poliphile à la Grande Grotte de Boboli: La dualité dramatique du paysage”, Polia: Revue de l’art des jardins 2 (Autumn 2004) 7–26. Bury J.B., “The Reputation of Bomarzo”, Journal of Garden History 3.2 (1983) 108–112. Bury M., “Giambologna’s Fata Morgana Rediscovered”, Apollo 131.336 (Feb. 1990) 96–100. Bushnell R., Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens (Ithaca – London: 2003). Campbell S.J., “Naturalism and the Venetian ‘Poesia’: Grafting, Metaphor and Embodiment in Giorgione, Titian, and the Campagnolas”, in Nagel A. – Pericolo L. (eds.), Subject as Aporia in Early Modern Art (Farnham: 2010) 115–142. Caus Salomon de. Le Jardin Palatin. Hortus Palatinus (Paris: 1981). Caus Salomon de. Les Raisons des forces mouvantes avec diverses machines tant utilles que plaisantes ausquelles sont adjoints plusieurs desseings de grotes et fontaines (Frankfurt, Jan Norton, 1615). Chambers D., “‘Hortus Mertonensis’: John Earle’s Garden Poem of 1620”, The Journal of Garden History 2.2 (1982) 117–132. Coch C., “The Trials of Art: Testing Temperance in the Bower of Bliss and Diana’s Grove at Nonsuch”, in Oram W.A. – Prescott A.L. – Roch Jr. T.P. (eds.), Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual XX (New York: 2005) 49–76. Coty K., “A Dream of Etruria: The Sacro Bosco of Bomarzo and the Alternate Antiquity of Alto Lazio” (M.A. dissertation, University of Maryland: 2013). Curtius E.R., European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: 1990). Dallington Sir Robert, A Survey of the Great Dukes State of Tuscany. In the Yeare of Our Lord 1596 (London, Edward Blount: 1605). Davis N., “Desire, Nature, and Automata in the Bower of Bliss”, in Hyman W.B. (ed.), The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature (Farnham: 2011) 163–179. D’Elia U.R., “Giambologna’s Giant and the Cinquecento Villa Garden as a Landscape of Suffering”, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 31.1 (2011) 1–25. Filarete Filarete’s Treatise on Architecture, Being the Treatise by Antonio di Piero Averlino, known as Filarete, trans. John R. Spencer, 2 vols. (New Haven – London: 1965). Giamatti A.B., The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (Princeton: 1966). Greene Robert, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, ed. J.A. Lavin (London: 1969). Guest C.L. The Understanding of Ornament in the Italian Renaissance (Leiden – Boston: 2016). Hagopian van Buren A. “Reality and Literary Romance in the Park of Hesdin”, in MacDougall E.B. (ed.), Medieval Gardens (Washington, D.C.: 1986) 115–134. Henneberg J.V., “Bomarzo: The Extravagant Garden of Pier Francesco Orsini”, in Italian Quarterly 11.42 (1967) 43–55.

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Homer, The Odyssey, trans. E.V. Rieu (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1946). Hunt J.D., “Paragone in Paradise: Translating the Garden”, Comparative Criticism 18 (1996) 55–70. Hyman W.B., “‘Mathematical Experiments of Long Silver Pipes’: The Early Modern Figure of the Mechanical Bird”, in Hyman W.B. (ed.), The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature (Farnham: 2011) 145–161. Kang M., “Wonders of Mathematical Magic: Lists of Automata in the Transition from Magic to Science, 1533–1662”, Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 33 (2002) 113–139. LaGrandeur K., “The Talking Brass Head as a Symbol of Dangerous Knowledge in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and in Alphonsus King of Aragon”, English Studies 80.5 (October 1999) 408–422. Lazzaro C., The Italian Renaissance Garden: From the Conventions of Planting, Design, and Ornament to the Grand Gardens of Sixteenth-Century Italy (New Haven: 1990). Leoni G., “Christ the Gardener and the Chain of Symbols: The Gardens around the Walls of Sixteenth-Century Ferrara”, in Hunt J.D. (ed.), The Italian Garden: Art, Design and Culture (Cambridge: 1996) 60–92. Leslie M., “Spenser, Sidney, and the Renaissance Garden”, English Literary Renaissance 22.1 (Winter 1992) 3–36. Lewis C.S., The Allegory of Love (Oxford: 1938). Lorenzi L., Witches: Exploring the Iconography of the Sorceress and Enchantress, trans. U. Creagh (Florence: 2006). MacDougall E.B., Fountains, Statues and Flowers: Studies in Italian Gardens of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Washington, D.C.: 1993). Marin L., “Panofsky and Poussin in Arcadia”, in Sublime Poussin, trans. Porter, C. (Stanford: 1999). Marr A. “Understanding Automata in the Late Renaissance”, Journal de la Renaissance 2 (2004) 205–222. Marvell Andrew. The Works of Andrew Marvell Esq., vol. 1 (London: 1726). McCulloch L., “Antique Myth, Early Modern Mechanism: The Secret History of Spenser’s Iron Man”, in Hyman W.B. (ed.), The Automaton in English Renaissance Literature (Farnham: 2011) 61–76. Montaigne Michel de. The Complete Works of Montaigne: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters, trans. D.M. Frame (Stanford: 1989). Morgan L., “Guercino’s Et in Arcadia Ego and Eighteenth-Century Landscape Design”, in Marshall D.R. (ed.), The Italians in Australia: Studies in Renaissance and Baroque Art (Florence: 2004) 191–196. Nashe Thomas. The Unfortunate Traveller, in Salzman P. (ed.), An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction, (Oxford: 1987) 205–310.

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Oleson J.P. “A Reproduction of an Etruscan Tomb in the Parco dei Mostri at Bomarzo”, The Art Bulletin 57.3 (Sept. 1975) 410–417. Panofsky E. “Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition”, in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1955) 340–367. Pizzorusso C. “Galileo in the Garden: Observations on the Sculptural Furnishings of Florentine Gardens between the Sixteenth and the Seventeenth Centuries”, in Luchinat C.A. (ed.), The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence (New Haven: 2002) 113–121. Sawday J., Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (London: 2007). Schmitt C.B., John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England (Kingston – Montreal: 1983). Scott J., Salvator Rosa: His Life and Times (New Haven – London: 1995). Segre A., “Untangling the Knot: Garden Design in Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili”, Word & Image 14.1–2 (Jan.–June 1998) 82–108. Shakespeare William, The Winter’s Tale, ed. Frances E. Dolan (New York: 1999). Southwell Robert., The Poetical Works of the Rev. Robert Southwell, ed. W.B. Turnbull (London: 1856). Spenser Edmund., The Faerie Queene, ed. T.P. Roche (London: 1987). Stoichita V., The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock, trans. A. Anderson (Chicago: 2008). Strauss L.M., “Reflections in a mechanical mirror: Automata as doubles and as tools”, Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present 10 (1996) 179–207. Taegio Bartolomeo. La Villa, ed. and trans. T.E. Beck (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Tagliolini A., “Girolamo Firenzuola e il giardino nelle fonti della metà del Cinquecento”, in Ragionieri G. (ed.), Il giardino storico italiano (Florence: 1981) 295–303. Tasso Torquato., The Liberation of Jerusalem, trans. M. Wickert (Oxford: 2009). Tchikine A. (ed.), Creating a “Third Nature”: Gardens and Constructions of Landscape in the Italian Renaissance (Philadelphia: forthcoming 2021). Tchikine A., “Giochi d’acqua: Water Effects in Renaissance and Baroque Italy”, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 30 (2010) 57–76. Thomas K., Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (London: 1971). Vasari Giorgio. Le Opere di Giorgio Vasari con nuove annotazioni e commenti di Gaetano Milanese, vol. 6 (Florence: 1998). Waldstein Z.B., The Diary of Baron Waldstein, A Traveller in Elizabethan England, trans. G.W. Groos. (London: 1981).

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Wolfe J., Humanism, Machinery and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge – New York: 2004). Woolfson J., “Thomas Hoby, William Thomas, and Mid-Tudor Travel to Italy”, in Pincombe M. – Shrank C. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485–1603 (Oxford – New York: 2009) 404–417. Yarnall J., Transformations of Circe: The History of an Enchantress (Urbana – Chicago: 1994).

part 4 Constructions of Imaginary Landscapes

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chapter 15

Narrative Vitality and the Forest in the Furioso Troy Tower Since the publication of the third and final edition of the Orlando furioso (Orlando in Fury) in 1532, Ludovico Ariosto’s superlative chivalric romance has consistently inspired analysis through metaphor, in part because the narrator offers numerous metaphors for his activity – singing, weaving, sailing, sculpting – that betray a complex and varied understanding of the task of poetic composition.1 In 1554, the great author Giovan Battista Giraldi likened Ariosto to a ‘[c]amaleonte, che […] di quella cosa prende il colore, alla quale si appoggia’ (‘chameleon […] as it takes on the color of that thing against which it leans’)2 and some decades later Galileo Galelei famously celebrated the poem as ‘una galleria regia, ornata di cento statue antiche de’ più celebri scultori, con infinite storie intere, e le migliori, di pittori illustri, con un numero grande di vasi, di cristalli, d’agate, di lapislazari e d’altre gioie’ (‘a royal gallery, adorned with one hundred ancient statues of the most celebrated sculptors, with an infinite number of complete stories, and the very best of the most famous painters, with a great number of vases; crystal, agate, lapis lazuli and other gems’).3 Over the centuries, artists and critics alike have multiplied these metaphors in their attempts to investigate the true character of the Furioso, which appears ever to elude readers in much the same way that the princess Angelica – caricatured in David Lodge’s 1984 campus novel Small World4 – remains in ‘perpetua fuga’ 1 This study elaborates ideas first put forth in Tower T., Natura narrans: Landscape as Literature in Early Modern Italy (Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 2017) 135–198. Many thanks to Walter Melion, Karl Enenkel, Annie McEwen and Linnea Harwell for organizing the Lovis Corinth Colloquium in March 2019 at Emory University, where this elaboration received expert feedback. 2 Giraldi’s letter, printed in an untitled pamphlet now at the British Museum (inventory 11826.d.42), is quoted in Weinberg B., A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Chicago: 1961) 2:959; see also Weinberg, History 1:433. The translation is Bernard Weinberg’s. 3 Galilei Galileo, Opere, gen. ed. A. Favaro, 20 vols. (Florence: 1890–1909) 9:69. For the translation see Reeves E., “Galileo, Oracle: On the History of Early Modern Science”, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 18.1 (2015) 7–22, 8–9. The passage belongs to Galileo’s Considerazioni al Tasso, composed between 1589 and 1609; for the dating see Favaro A., “Avvertimento”, in Galilei Galileo, Opere, ed. A. Favaro, 20 vols. (Florence: 1890–1909) 9:7–27, 9:12–13. 4 Lodge D., Small World: An Academic Romance (London: 1984).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004440401_016

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(‘perpetual flight’) from the protagonists who long to possess and violate her.5 In a 1960 poem, Jorge Luis Borges traces the ‘[e]scoria de los sueños’ (‘residue of dreams’) from which the dusty vastness of the poem is ‘tejida’ (‘woven’),6 while Jim Jarmusch’s 1989 anthology film Mystery Train derives the plot of its second act – and the basis of its narratological homage to Ariosto – from the haphazard encounters of a traveller toting the recognizable Garzanti edition of the Furioso, the sidewalks and lobbies of Memphis, Tennessee, articulating a neo-Western adaptation of Ariosto’s productive forests.7 When these metaphorical readings are considered alongside the countless poetic spinoffs and sequels, visual and theatrical adaptations and centuries of sustained literary criticism, talking about the Furioso can resemble playing the devilish game of tennis depicted in Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quijote, the novel that constitutes perhaps the greatest artistic meditation on Ariosto’s poetry: in place of tennis balls, the devils in this vision hit a new derivative book with every volley, destroying them ‘menudea[dos]’ (‘in constant succession’) to the frustration of both winner and loser.8 Those surveying this vast interpretive history may be similarly frustrated by the infinitely multiplied Furioso, the poem that in its capacity to refer itself so variously appears to acknowledge the ‘enchaînement infini’ (‘infinite chain’) of mediating signs that twentiethcentury semiologists like Jacques Derrida would observe within the discourse of literary criticism.9 These readers may consequently question the proposal of an additional external metaphor for the poem: that of a narrative ecology, a system of literary elements that in combination exhibit vitality, directionality and the deprioritisation of any one party, be it the reader, the narrator or a character. But such a metaphor can in fact reclaim the elusive and heterogeneous self-presentation of the Furioso as a central feature of its artistry and may also help align influential twentieth-century criticism of the poem with more recent ecological approaches to literature that enable a deeper 5 The description of Angelica is Attilio Momigliano’s; see Momigliano A., Saggio su l’« Orlando Furioso », 3rd ed. (Bari: 1946) 349. All unattributed translations are the author’s. 6 See the poem Ariosto y los Árabes (Ariosto and the Arabs) and Eric McHenry’s translation in Borges J.L., Selected Poems, ed. A. Coleman (New York: 1999) 122–127, 124–125. 7 See Jarmusch J. (writer and dir.), Mystery Train (Los Angeles: 1989; DVD, New York: 2010) 0:40:39–1:09:36. 8 See chapter 2.70 in Cervantes Saavedra Miguel de, Don Quijote de La Mancha: edición del Instituto Cervantes (1605, 1615, 2015), gen. ed. F. Rico (Madrid: 2015) 1306. The translation is John Ormsby’s; see Cervantes Saavedra Miguel de, Don Quixote: The Ormsby Translation, Revised, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism, trans. J. Ormsby, eds. J.R. Jones – K. Douglas (New York: 1981) 811. 9 Derrida J., De la grammatologie (Paris: 1967) 226. For the translation see Derrida J., Of Grammatology, 40th Anniversary ed., trans. G.C. Spivak (Baltimore: 2016) 171.

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investigation into Ariosto’s meditation on narrative composition. The metaphor may not also prove entirely external, since at decisive positions in the poem the forest settings promote an understanding of the ecological dynamism of narrative systems. While the term ‘ecology’ would circulate in English-language biological research only after 1866,10 the concept of an interrelated, evolving network of organisms in responsive environments has ancient roots – for example, in the Hellenistic myth of Atlantis11 – and its application to literary studies is made explicit already in mid-sixteenth-century Italy. Indeed, the potential for literature to create a world within itself is announced on the title page of Francesco Alunno’s successful 1548 dictionary, La fabrica del mondo (The Making of Worlds), though the preface prescribes strict connotative limits: alcuni nel primo incontro di questa opera, senza haverne forse letto di quella piu oltre, offesi dalla grandezza del titolo, hanno detto, che non è alcuno si ardito, che si possa dar vanto di fare alcuna fabbrica del mondo si perfetta, come quella, che fece il gran Padre, & creatore di tutte le cose. Alli quali per mia difensione rispondendo, pregherò ciascuno, che non voglia cosi tosto giudicare del Titolo, se prima non ha bene considerata tutta la continenza dell’opera. Percio che io ad imitatione di molti Greci, & Latini altersí, c’hanno intitolato le loro opere con nome di Cornucopia, di Casa, o di Favo di mele, di Pandette, di Biblioteca, o di altri nomi somiglianti, ho cosi nominata l’opera mia per essere la Fabbrica di Cosmo, nella quale non intendo di formar Stelle, Pianeti, ne Elementi, o diversità di paesi, & d’animali, ma si come nella fabbrica d’Iddio si trovano tutte le cose create, cosi nell’opera mia si leggono tutti i modi, & le varie proprietà di parlar di quelle (in their first encounter with this work, some people, offended by the grandiosity of the title and without having read further in it, have said that no work is so bold as one that boasts of fabricating a world as perfect as that made by our great Father, creator of all things. To which I reply in my defence: I will pray each of these readers not to judge the Title so quickly without first considering the entire contents of the work. Because, 10 Ernst Haeckel coined the German term “Oecologie” in an 1866 study; see Haeckel E., Generelle Morphologie der Organismen. Allgemeine Grundzüge der organischen FormenWissenschaft, mechanisch begründet durch die von Charles Darwin reformirte DescendenzTheorie, 2 vols. (Berlin: 1866) 2:286. 11 See Goldin O., “The Ecology of Critias and Platonic Metaphysics”, in Westra L. – Robinson T.M. (eds.), The Greeks and the Environment (Lanham: 1997) 73–80, 74–78.

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in imitation of the many Greeks and also Latins who entitled their works with names like Cornucopia, House, Honeycomb, Pandect, Library or other similar nouns, I have likewise named my work the Making of a Cosmos, in which I do not intend to form Stars or Planets nor Elements or various lands and animals but, just as all things ever created are found within God’s manufacture, so too are legible within my work all the ways and subtleties of speaking about these creations).12 Alunno’s cautious premise, granting literature only the potential for encyclopaedism, will pale following the theorisation of Torquato Tasso, the poet who would succeed Ariosto at the ducal court of Ferrara two generations later. In his treatise on narrative composition – the Discorsi dell’arte poetica (Discourses on the Art of Poetry), begun between 1562 and 1566 but only printed in 1587 – Tasso made explicit the comparison between a world and an interconnected, populated narrative: peroché, sì come in questo mirabile magisterio di Dio, che mondo si chiama, e ’l cielo si vede sparso o distinto di tanta varietà di stelle, e, discendendo poi giuso di mano in mano, l’aria e ’l mare pieni d’uccelli e di pesci, e la terra albergatrice di tanti animali così feroci come mansueti, nella quale e ruscelli e fonti e laghi e prati e campagne e selve e monti si trovano, e qui frutti e fiori, là ghiacci e nevi, qui abitazioni e culture, là solitudini e orrori; con tutto ciò uno è il mondo che tante e sì diverse cose nel suo grembo rinchiude, una la forma e l’essenza sua, uno il nodo dal quale sono le sue parti con discorde concordia insieme congiunte e collegate; e non mancando nulla in lui, nulla però vi è di soverchio o di non necessario; cosí parimente giudico, che da eccellente poeta (il quale non per altro divino è detto se non perché, al supremo Artefice nelle sue operazioni assomigliandosi, della sua divinità viene a participare) un poema formar si possa nel quale, quasi in un picciolo mondo, qui si leggano ordinanze d’esserciti, qui battaglie terrestri e navali, qui espugnazioni di città, scaramucce e duelli, qui giostre, qui descrizioni di fame e di sete, qui tempeste, qui incendii, qui prodigii; là si trovino concilii celesti e infernali, là si veggiano sedizioni, là discordie, là errori, là venture, là incanti, là opere 12 Alunno Francesco, “Alli saggi, et giudiciosi lettori”, in Francesco Alunno (ed.), La fabrica del mondo […] nella quale si contengono tutte le voci di Dante, del Petrarca, del Boccaccio, & d’altri buoni autori, con la dichiaratione di quelle, & con le sue interpretationi Latine, con le quali si ponno scrivendo isprimere tutti i concetti dell’huomo di qualunque cosa creata (Venice, Bascarini: 1548), fols. †4r–†5v, †4r.

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di crudeltà, di audacia, di cortesia, di generosità; là avvenimenti d’amore or felici, or infelici, or lieti, or compassionevoli; ma che nondimeno uno sia il poema che tanta varietà di materie contegna, una la forma e la favola sua, e che tutte queste cose siano di maniera composte che l’una l’altra riguardi, l’una a l’altra corrisponda, l’una dall’altra o necessariamente o verisimilmente dependa, sì che una sola parte o tolta via o mutata di sito, il tutto ruini ([i]n this marvelous domain of God that we call the world we see the sky sprinkled and adorned with so great a variety of stars; and, descending from realm to realm, we see the air and ocean full of birds and fish, and the earth a hospice to so many animals both wild and tame, and on earth streams and fountains and lakes and meadows and fields and forests and mountains, and here fruits and flowers, there ice and snow, here dwellings and farmlands, there wastelands and emptiness. Nonetheless, the earth, which encloses so many and diverse things in its bosom, is one; and its form and essence are one; and one, the knot by which it joins and binds its parts in discordant concord. While it lacks nothing, nothing in it is excessive and unnecessary. Just so, I think an excellent poet – who is called divine for no other reason except that by working like the supreme Artificer he comes to share in his divinity – can shape a poem in which, as in a little world, we read of mustering armies, land and sea battles, conquests of cities, skirmishes and duels, jousts, drought and starvation, tempests, fires, prodigies; and we find heavenly and hellish assemblies and see sedition, discord, wanderings, adventures, enchantments, cruelty, boldness, courtesy, kindness and love – sometimes happy, sometimes sad, sometimes joyous, sometimes pitiful. And still, the poem which contains such a variety of matter is one; its forms and its plots are one; and all these things are brought together in such a way that one thing shows consideration for another, one thing corresponds to another, and through either necessity or verisimilitude one thing depends on another in such a way that by removing a single part of by changing its place, we destroy the whole).13 13 Tasso Torquato, Discorsi dell’arte poetica e del poema eroico, ed. L. Poma (Bari: 1964) 36. For the translation, see Tasso Torquato, “Discourses on the Art of Poetry”, trans. L.F. Rhu, in Rhu L.F., The Genesis of Tasso’s Narrative Theory: English Translations of the Early Poetics and a Comparative Study of Their Significance (Detroit: 1993) 99–154, 130–131. For the dating of the Arte poetica, see Poma L., “Nota filologica”, in Tasso Torquato, Discorsi dell’arte poetica e del poema eroico, ed. L. Poma (Bari: 1964) 262–328, 262–268.

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It is no stretch to locate in Tasso’s Arte poetica, written roughly four centuries before Nelson Goodman would treat the power of any artistic expression to disclose a contextual ideological ‘world’ or network of symbolic functionality simply through its sheer coherence,14 a sincere admission of the similarities between literary works and world systems. It is consequently reasonable to assume that, just a few decades earlier, Ariosto, among the widest readers of his generation, would have imagined the terrain, biological diversity and geopolitical complexity of his boundless poem as having formed a similarly constructive world system. As with most writing of the time, Ariosto’s diegetic system is mostly inherited from characters, settings and plot cycles surviving from earlier works – chiefly Matteo Maria Boiardo’s late-fifteenth-century Inamoramento di Orlando (Orlando in Love), left unfinished before his death in 1494 – that in turn borrow from the earliest vernacular narratives, as Boiardo himself had married Arthurian eroticism and fantasy with Carolingian stylizations of heroes in historical plotlines.15 Ariosto’s every inheritance comes embedded with biological, familial and political determinants that will prescribe limitations into his diegetic system: to readers already familiar with Boiardo, for example, the protagonist Orlando would immediately connote his uncle Charlemagne, his legendary service in the war against the Umayyads – called ‘saraceni’ (‘Saracens’) in the poem – in Western Europe, his unbreakable sword Durindana and, most recently, his consuming passion for Angelica and enmity towards his cousin Rinaldo, a rival for her hand. Combine enough of these predetermined characters and familiar trajectories and ‘the story writes itself’, a facile truism that nonetheless belies a common understanding of the extra-authorial agency at work in narrative composition. Contemporary materialist theory advocates ‘the capacity of things […] not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own’16 and such capacities can also be fruitfully examined in fictional things, the diegetic elements of narrative worlds. The agency of the non-human things in the Furioso – horses, bulls, paths, carved trees, inviting meadows, randomness, moonlight – is explicitly and repeatedly named as the impetus for narrative activity and, once the prominent diegetic attention devoted to such overactive 14

See especially the fourth section of his 1975 essay “Words, Works, Worlds”, in Goodman N., Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: 1978) 7–17. Tasso’s comparison between worlds and the narrative poem is even more expansive in the third book of his revised version of this treatise, the Discorsi del poema eroico, published in 1594; see Tasso, Discorsi 139–140. 15 For the dating of Boiardo’s poem see Bruscagli R. “Introduzione”, in Boiardo Matteo Maria, Orlando innamorato, ed. R. Bruscagli, 2 vols. (Turin: 1995) 1:v–xxxiii, 1:v. 16 Bennett J., Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: 2010) viii.

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things is recognised as often overlapping with moments of narratological self-consciousness, these agencies invite interpretation as synecdoche for the system by which the narrative is composed. Readers may thus be primed to identify metaliterary import in the forests of the poem, the settings most generative of plot developments and very often the sites of narrative negotiation, through two interpretive strategies: locating the alignment of forest settings with narrative boundaries, such as those between episodes or at the edges of the poem as a whole, and reading the literal inscription of narrative verse into the trees and rocks in the titular episode at the dead centre of the poem. Offering the most self-evident metaliterary link between the forest and the poem itself, the central titular episode arises from the confluence of several ecological factors: the young Umayyad page Medoro is led by auspicious moonlight – and possibly ‘caso’ (‘chance’)17 – to the battlefield southeast of Paris where his commander was just slain.18 When he and his compatriot Cloridano arrive at the body, they are quickly ambushed by the Franks who ‘han tosto / preso ogni passo ondi si possa uscire’ (OF 18.191: ‘blocked all their escape-routes’). At the very edge of the battlefield – and at the closing boundary of a long canto – is the space of pure narrative potential: [e]ra a quel tempo ivi una selva antica, d’ombrose piante spessa e di virgulti, che, come labirinto, entro s’intrica di stretti calli e sol da bestie culti. Speran d’averla i duo pagan sì amica, ch’abbi a tenerli entro a’ suoi rami occulti (18.192: [i]n those days there was an ancient wood there, thickly planted with shady trees and shrubs; it formed a labyrinth of narrow paths and was frequented only by wild beasts. The two pagans hoped it would be friendly to them and conceal them in their branches).

17 Orlando furioso 18.185; citations of the poem will hereafter be given parenthetically and follow Remo Ceserani and Sergio Zatti’s edition, Ariosto Ludovico, Orlando furioso e cinque canti, eds. R. Ceserani – S. Zatti, 2 vols. (Turin: 1997). Guido Waldman’s prose translation is used here – see Ariosto Ludovico, Orlando Furioso, trans. G. Waldman (Oxford: 1974) – but readers should expect Charles Ross’s verse translation, still in preparation, to become the standard English-language reference: at a 2016 conference at Johns Hopkins, Ross delivered passages of his first canto to a standing ovation from many prominent contemporary Ariosto scholars. 18 On the location of the battlefield, see Doroszlaï A., Ptolémée et l’hippogriffe. La géographie de l’Arioste soumise à l’épreuve des cartes (Turin: 1998) 161–162.

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The setting Medoro enters at the start of the following canto conforms to one of the specific geological models that typify the forest settings of the Furioso and that always deprioritise topographical accuracy to exploit the potential to redirect or complicate narrative trajectories. As Ita Mac Carthy concludes in her survey of the geographic reception of the Furioso, realism in the poem is always ‘filter[ed] […] through the estranging lens of the fictional’19 and the principal interest of such estrangement, so overt in this defining central episode, is to communicate fascination with the multiple vitalities at work in the production of fiction. Scarred by ‘[i]l più intricato calle’ (OF 19.3: ‘the most overgrown paths’) making a ‘torta via’ (19.5: ‘tortuous trail’) to ‘torna[re] fra le spine a invilupparsi’ (19.3: ‘le[a]d […] into impenetrable thorns’) and rebounding every clop of enemy horses through the oak, pine, ash, elm and beech trees, the forest here appears as a classic locus horridus, which in the narrative ecology of the Furioso primarily exercises the function of transporting and collocating human protagonists motivated to exit its inhospitable terrain. Consequently, the treacherous paths bring Medoro back to the enemies (OF 19.5) who wound him and leave him for dead (19.13). The opposite function is exerted by a second model of forest setting, into which Medoro will soon be brought to heal once the fleeing Angelica ‘[g]li sopravenne a caso’ (OF 19.17: ‘came upon him’) and remembers having passed dittany shrub in a nearby locus amoenus, the stock image of an pastoral clearing that Ariosto cites by name with the adjective ‘amena’ (OF 19.22: ‘pleasant’).20 This environmental model displays its aesthetic and material value to draw in and detain travellers motivated by the biological needs of thirst and rest. While ‘[i]l merigge facea grato l’orezzo’ (OF 23.101: ‘[a] welcome breeze tempered the noontide’), the sunlight discloses un rivo che parea cristallo, ne le cui sponde un bel pratel fioria, di nativo color vago e dipinto, e di molti e belli arbori distinto 19 Mac Carthy I., “Ariosto the Traveler”, Modern Language Review 102.2 (2007) 397–409, 408–409. 20 The classical critique of this setting is in verses 14–18 of Ars poetica; see Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, revised ed., trans. and ed. H.R. Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: 1929) 450. The term appears in Isidore’s Etymologiarum libri XIV, 8, 33 as a geographical category and married with Horace’s description to become a generic fixture in European literature; see Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive originum libri, ed. W.M. Lindsay, 2 vols. (Oxford: 1911) 2:144. See also Curtius E.R., Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (Bern: 1948) 198–207.

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(OF 23.100: a stream which looked like crystal; a pleasant meadow bloomed on its banks, picked out with lovely pure colours and adorned with many beautiful trees). As befits the setting, Medoro heals and the two fall rapturously in love. They lodge at the farmhouse of a shepherd they meet looking for his lost steer and there they repeatedly consummate their new marriage and celebrate with copious graffiti that further thank the surrounding ‘[l]iete piante, verdi erbe, limpide acque, / spelunca opaca e di fredde ombre grata’ (OF 23.108: ‘[h]appy plants, verdant grass, limpid waters, dark, shadowy cave, pleasant and cool’) for housing their tryst. A few cantos later, Orlando will arrive at the same clearing, also at random, led there only by way of the ‘strano corso che tenne il cavallo / […] pel bosco senza via’ (OF 23.100: ‘wild […] course through the trackless wood’ that his ‘steed had pursued’). The clearing also strikes Orlando as suitable for resting but he finds the carved trees and chalked stones more alluring than anything endemic to the environment. He discerns Angelica’s hand in the writing, eventually concluding that the texts not only recount the couple’s elopement but also offer tangible proof of their encounter and sojourn in the clearing: that is, they not only tell the story of Angelica’s elopement – they are the story. Orlando’s attempts to destroy any trace of this story – trees, rocks, cottage, shepherd – locate his confrontation with the texture of the poem that has displaced him as its hero: ‘[t]agliò lo scritto e ’l sasso’ (OF 23.130: ‘he […] slashed at the words and the rock-face’). Angelica’s marriage to Medoro is the result of the destabilizing ecology that has moved the characters along throughout the poem – Medoro by the moonlight, Angelica by the forest path, Orlando by his horse – and its proof is literally inscribed into the rawest texture of the diegetic world, the bark of trees, with all its ancient connections to systems of writing. The narrative ecology is no longer designed to facilitate Orlando’s confident pursuit of Angelica or his commitment to the identity of protagonist endowed to him by Boiardo. It is this ecological incompatibility, not mere lovesickness, that causes the complete breakdown of his intellective capacities: if he can no longer understand Angelica with respect to himself – he who is preprogrammed to be Orlando innamorato, as Boiardo’s poem came to be called – and if a consensual sexual relationship with Angelica features a narrative role that can be filled by anyone at random, even a nearly dead page, then Orlando can no longer understand the world around him. The great dramatic irony is that his identification of the narrative against which he attempts to rebel in fact confirms the title and promise of the poem he is in, no longer the Orlando innamorato but now the Orlando furioso. By investigating the efforts to effect a perceived coterminality between the forest setting and the narrative

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as a whole that are legible beyond this central episode, readers may find the proposed synecdoche between the Furioso and its forest a consistent and, indeed, authentic representation of the poem that can be analysed alongside more overt metaliterary constructions.

…

The most immediate overlap between the formal delineation of episodes and protagonists’ entrances to and from the forest occurs not ten stanzas into the poem. In general, the first canto offers an extremely apt introduction to the capacity of the forest to generate action in the Furioso, often by engineering haphazard encounters of characters en route to destinations they rarely reach directly. But it also stages a literal introduction of the reader into the forest, for when Angelica flees the Bavarian encampment where she remains prisoner at a duel for her hand, the narrator – and, perforce, the reader – flee the scene as well, leaving behind the predictable intrigues of the courtly environment for the unpredictability of the forest: e quando bisognò [Angelica] le spalle diede, presaga che quel giorno esser rubella dovea Fortuna alla cristiana fede: entrò in un bosco, e ne la stretta via rincontrò un cavallier ch’a piè venìa (OF 1.10: when that [crucial moment] came, foreseeing that Fortune was that day to turn traitor to those of the Christian faith, she turned and fled. Entering a wood and following a narrow path she came upon a knight who was approaching on foot). For Natalino Sapegno, the couplet of this stanza constitutes ‘l’alzarsi del sipario’ (‘the rising of the curtain’) and surely the immediate spectacle of a horseless horseman, defining this forest too as a locus horridus, serves to inaugurate the hurried succession of run-ins that comprise this and every following canto.21 Like a list of dramatis personae, the introduction to the courtly duel in the first nine stanzas had merely crystallised the most essential political, familial and chemical determinants inherited from Boiardo, including the enchanted waters that compel Angelica to flee the very first person she encounters in the 21 Sapegno N. (ed.), Orlando Furioso, 2nd ed., by Ludovico Ariosto (Milan: 1962) 5.

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woods, Rinaldo, who is also drugged to pursue her.22 The first episode of the poem proper thus begins to unfold with the most typical of the scenarios that generate the action of the Furioso, a random encounter between characters whose pre-existing relationships – here, their contrary enchantments – determine their reaction and their consequent motion. The misdirection by paths and other environmental elements is an expedient used not only to unite characters with strong repulsions, as with Angelica and Rinaldo in the first canto, but also to waylay characters that would have otherwise proceeded unproblematically to their destination or object of desire, thereby allowing a story to take form. Soon after running into Rinaldo, Angelica’s unexpected encounter with the Spanish warrior Ferraù at a stream that her horse had chosen (OF 1.15) demands she flee both men, who had both sought her hand in Boiardo’s poem.23 The two knights pursue her on one horse, prioritizing the biological determinant of lust over the political determinant of enmity, but the forest again thwarts their singular trajectory. When ‘una strada in due si dipartiva’ (OF 1.22: ‘the road divided’) and the knights can discern no hoofprints in either direction, they entrust their navigation to the force that most often governs travel across the forest: ‘si messero ad arbitrio di fortuna, / Rinaldo a questa, il Saracino a quella’ (1.23: ‘they left the decision to Fate: Rinaldo took the one path, the Saracen the other’). Each instantiation of Fortuna, the Christian and the Islamic, corresponds to the two narrative paths that the knights follow individually but also aligns with the narrative thread: Ferraù’s path leads him back to the river where he spotted Angelica, enough misdirection to inspire him to transfer his energies from the hopeless pursuit of Angelica to the more realizable search for his helmet (OF 1.24), recalled by the reappearance there of the ghost of Angelica’s slain brother Argalia, another element of narrative vitality surviving from Boiardo’s unfinished poem. As Ferraù travels off, the narrator pans across the forest to follow Rinaldo ‘che da costui tenea diverse strade’ (OF 1.31: ‘following another route from Ferrau’s’), whose path leads him to his missing horse, the horse that will not respond to his call and will therefore set him on a new itinerary of following (1.32). As with Ferraù’s redirection by the ghost, the return of Rinaldo’s horse in the first canto allows for the redirection of his trajectory and, simultaneously, offers the narrator the opportunity to alternate storylines, which he seizes by fully incorporating the motion of his characters into the descriptions of his own narrative task: ‘[s]egue Rinaldo, e d’ira si distrugge: / ma seguitiamo 22 Boiardo first establishes the magic attractions in octaves 2.15.61–62; see Boiardo Matteo Maria, Orlando innamorato, ed. R. Bruscagli, 2 vols. (Turin: 1995). 23 See Boiardo, Orlando innamorato 1.2.7–8.

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Angelica che fugge’ (OF 1.32: ‘Rinaldo followed, consumed with anger. But let us pursue Angelica in her flight’). The directionality of the poem, mirrored in the repeated redirection of its characters, is characterised by similar directional jerks, which Italo Calvino in his 1975 radio commentary describes as ‘movimento a linee spezzate, a zig zag’ (‘movement in broken lines, in zigzags’).24 The breaks in linearity often signal the overlap between the diegetic and metanarrative plans, and the fork where Rinaldo and Ferraù meet offers an excellent example of not only the interest in mirroring narration with locomotion but also the alignment of narrative development with the potential productivity of Fortuna, the same invisible actor that Angelica ridiculed as she escaped from camp and that brings Medoro to the battlefield. And numerous compelling episodes in the poem are born from the redirecting force of purely random developments, often expressed with a verb of haphazard motion like incontrare (‘encounter’), giungere (‘meet’), sopraggiungere (‘happen on to’) or sopravvenire (‘come upon’).25 Fleeing Rinaldo and Ferraù, Angelica eventually comes to rest in a meadow, in ‘tenere erbette / ch’invitano a posar chi s’appresenta’ (OF 1.38: ‘[s]oft young grass [that] made an inviting bed for whoever ventured here’). Lured over by the locus amoenus – its narrative activity reinforced by actual grammatical agency – Angelica takes some rest but is soon joined by Sacripante, king of Circassia, who is also drawn to the setting by its relative safety and potential for solace. She overhears him cursing ‘Fortuna crudel, Fortuna ingrata’ (OF 1.44: ‘cruel enemy, Fortune!’) for his inability to track Angelica herself down but, as Fortuna would have it – again overlapping with the poem’s narrative design – ‘così quel ne viene a un’ora, a un punto, / ch’in mille anni o mai più non è raggiunto’ (1.48: ‘so in one hour he reached a point which otherwise would never have reached, not in a thousand years’). The directional agency exhibited by the forest and its invisible chance forces here prefigures later episodes engineered by other aspects of the terrain: the cowardly knight Pinabello exploits the topography of a mountain ridge to trap a rival (OF 2.69–76), the sorceress Alcina fabricates the appearance of an island to lure in her human prey (OF 6.37–38), a moonlit grotto in the mountains attracts Orlando to the precise location where the princess Isabella awaits rescue (OF 12.89–91). Rivers impose 24 The commentary was broadcast on 5 January 1975 and published in Terzoprogramma in what was technically the previous year’s volume; see Calvino I., “La struttura del « Furioso »”, Terzoprogramma 2–3 (1974) 51–58, 54. On narrative motion in the Furioso, see also Bernard J., “‘Ch’io nol lasci ne la penna’: Ariosto’s Discourses of Desire”, Italica 76.3 (1999) 291–313, 293–294. 25 For locomotion specifically ascribed to Fortuna or caso, see, for example, OF 12.5, 12.73, 23.10–18, 29.40, 29.58 and 36.63.

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their own directionality and the winds of the oceans also defy the protagonists’ attempts to navigate directly but the forest is by far the environment that most clearly represents the potential to alter and perpetuate the narrative ecosystem and thus serves as a fitting and arguably deliberate foil for the Furioso itself. Sacripante rides with Angelica until they meet an unnamed knight, who easily knocks the king to the ground before hurrying off on ‘il camin dritto’ (OF 1.64: ‘the path which ran straight’). Sacripante’s unfortunate case or ‘caso’ (OF 1.65 and 1.71) is aggravated by the arrival of a messenger along the same path as the warrior, whom the page reveals was in fact Bradamante, the most renowned woman in the Frankish army. The first of several examples of what might be described as companion species – organisms that for Donna Haraway relate by constituting each other, ‘knowing the energy of each other and trusting the honesty and coherence of directional postures and responsive movements’26 – the messenger prefigures other orbits of attraction that move characters across the diegetic world and disperse information about each other, such as Orlando’s pursuit by his friend Brandimarte (OF 8.86), bound to him through comitatus and pursued in turn by his own lover Fiordiligi (8.89). Soon after Sacripante and Angelica set off again in the first canto, Rinaldo’s horse reappears, instinctively attracted to Angelica. ‘[R]ivolgendo a caso gli occhi’ (OF 1.77: ‘happen[ing] to look round’), Angelica again spots Rinaldo, the canto completing its introduction with a final chance encounter that returns her – and the reader – to the exact situation she sought to escape. While historicizing readers may read Angelica’s futile attempts at liberation a reflection of Ariosto’s disenchantment with an outmoded genre preferred by an oppressive and unsustainable courtly society, the episode and the canto as a whole can just as readily reveal his ambition to expose and develop the vitality of its diegetic elements – characters, settings, forces – at the expense of the development of a single, overarching storyline. Like Angelica, the reader must learn that itineraries through the Furioso will never be straightforward. The first canto is thus a thorough introduction to the ecology of poem as a whole, determined by political allegiances, familial and sexual social structures, animal navigation, the thwarting potential of Fortuna, the directional pull of roads both straight and forked, the lure of pleasant meadows, the chemical effect of enchanted rivers, the literal ghosts of Boiardo’s unfinished epic. Just as Angelica is invited to linger in the meadow, so too are readers invited to see the narrative activity of the forest as an effective synecdoche for the poem as a whole. The suggestion that the forest of the first canto represents the 26 See Haraway D., The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: 2003) 44.

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poem into which Angelica and the reader simultaneously begin their journeys finds confirmation in the last cantos of the poem, where the forest provides Ruggiero with his only opportunity to forestall the conclusion of his marital trajectory – and the poem – foretold in the poem’s fourth stanza. While every other protagonist is en route to Paris, Ruggiero stubbornly pursues a rivalry as a knight errant, even after having been named king of the Bulgarian Christians (OF 44.97–98) and having therefore furnished a fitting conclusion to the poem’s military preoccupations. Driven by rage rather than a specific itinerary, Ruggiero finds himself at an inn housing one of the Greek soldiers he and the Bulgarians had just vanquished, an encounter that leads to his imprisonment by the Greeks (OF 45.9–12) and ultimately his rescue by the son of the Greek emperor, Leone (45.43–49), who will sneak him out of prison to the matrimonial contest with Bradamante, where Ruggiero – like the readers – expects the fulfilment of his destiny. But as with all itineraries in the Furioso, this too is thwarted, as Leone’s very act of guiding Ruggiero out of prison in fact distances him from that conclusion: to repay his obligation Ruggiero must fight against Bradamante wearing Leone’s armour and credit him with the outcome or face execution. He fights and is declared her equal (OF 45.68– 81) but, faced with this devastating conclusion to the wedding narrative, flees to the one environment where the story can be kept from ending: the forest. Once there, he frees his horse Frontino (OF 45.92) to ensure that his passage across the forest is as difficult as possible, given the relationship between animal navigation and the forest already discussed. Reversing the dynamic by which Leone had guided him away from both prison, Ruggiero’s pitiable flight away from court – into the forest and thus back into the realm of the story – in fact brings him closer to his destiny, as his devotion to Bradamante even after three days without food, inspires pity from Leone, who then relinquishes his marriage claim (OF 46.42–44). With the accord established between the human protagonists, Frontino ‘v’era accorso ratto’ (OF 46.46: ‘galloped back’) after hearing Leone’s horse and Ruggiero, after being restored by a nursemaid living a half league from the site of their encounter (OF 46.47–48), finally sets course back to Paris for his long-awaited wedding. In episodes like these that seek to prevent closure, the forest offers a space for the narrative to stay afloat and Ruggiero’s lackadaisical adventures before the deferred conclusion of the poem renew for the forest the same pride of place that had aligned the official introduction of the poem with Angelica’s entrance into the woods. As in the first canto, the overlap of narrative and diegetic progression is marked by the synchronised motion of the character with the narrator, who follows Ruggiero out of the woods and into the poem’s inevitable conclusion, revealing a ‘concezione del tempo e dello spazio che rinnega

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la chiusa configurazione del cosmo tolemaico, e s’apre illimitata verso il passato e il futuro, così come verso una incalculabile pluralità di mondi’ (‘conceptualization of time and space that negates the closed configuration of the Ptolematic cosmos and opens without limitation onto the past and the future, as onto an incalculable number of worlds’).27 Perhaps the suggestion of infinite narrative potential afforded by the forest provides the sharpest contrast between Ariosto’s woods, which offer a refuge from closure to a poem that, again in Calvino’s words, ‘si rifiuta di finire’ (‘refuses to end’),28 and the woods in the Gerusalemme liberata ( Jerusalem Delivered) printed in 1581, a poem in which Tasso wholly rewrites the environment – in what Sergio Zatti calls a ‘conversione unheimlich della selva ariostesca’ (‘uncanny conversion of the Ariostean forest’) – using a teleological vocabulary that sees trees as wooden war machines and guarantees his Crusader protagonists’ inevitable victory.29 This extended reading of the initial and concluding episodes serves not only to introduce the particular dynamics of the diegetic ecology the Furioso constructs: a network of characters and environments determined to generate reactions and subjected to the directional and temporal disruptions of caso and Fortuna. This diegetic world is first presented to the reader as a forest, laying the foundation for a metaliterary reading of the forest as the prime motor of the narrative. As seen above, the central episode evidences another phase in this ecology of chance and determinism but amplifies the resonance between the forest and the narrative itself, carving it into the trees that will narrate – to Orlando and readers simultaneously – the story of Angelica and Medoro.

…

With the attention devoted to developing and representing the agency of spaces, dynamics and non-human organisms in the poem comes the consequent deprioritisation of the conventionally privileged participants in the narrative act: the protagonist, the reader and the narrator. The first canto has already exemplified the abrupt alternation in episodes that will characterise the poetics of the Furioso, the entrelacement that abandons characters at the most precarious situations, and the program of decentring is nowhere clearer

27 Calvino, “Struttura” 54. 28 Calvino, “Struttura” 51–52. 29 Zatti S., L’ombra del Tasso. Epica e romanzo nel Cinquecento (Milan: 1996) 22, italics original. On the teleology written into Tasso’s forest, see Cavallin J.-C., Poeta faber: Allegorie della materia, trans. A.M. Babbi (Verona: 2004) 39–85; and Tower, Natura 200–253.

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than in the narrator’s first metaphoric description of his task, at a pause during a highly dramatic moment at sea in the second canto: [o]r a poppa, or all’orza hann’il crudele, che mai non cessa, e vien più ognor crescendo: essi di qua di là con umil vele vansi aggirando, e l’alto mar scorrendo. Ma perché varie fila a varie tele uopo mi son, che tutte ordire intendo, lascio Rinaldo e l’agitata prua, e torno a dir di Bradamante sua ([t]he cruel Wind took them by the stern, then by the bows, never abating, but rather increasing in violence. Hither and thither they drifted, sails reefed in, and scoured the open seas. But as I have need of a number of warps and a variety of threads if I am to complete the whole of my tapestry, I shall leave Rinaldo and his pitching prow and return to the tale of his sister Bradamant).30 The reader is in the same position as Rinaldo and his crew: both are subject to the cruel alternations of the narrative threads, a design mirrored here in the uncaring motions of the wind and waves. Despite his claim to authorial intent here (‘intendo’), in the final canto of the poem the narrator will present himself in the same subjection to an indifferent narrative design, facing a similar shipwreck from disinterested gods: [o]r, se mi mostra la mia carta il vero, non è lontano a discoprirsi il porto; sì che nel lito i voti scioglier spero a chi nel mar per tanta via m’ha scorto; ove, o di non tornar col legno intero, o d’errar sempre, ebbi già il viso smorto. Ma mi par di veder, ma veggo certo, veggo la terra, e veggo il lito aperto (OF 46.1: [n]ow if my chart tells me true, the harbour will soon be in sight and I may hope to fulfil my vow ashore to One who has accompanied me on so long a voyage. Oh, how I had paled at the prospect of returning with 30 OF 2.30; for other weaving imagery see 13.80–81 and 22.3.

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but a crippled ship, or perhaps of wandering forever! But I think I see … yes, I do see land, I see the welcoming shore). Both tapestry and map, the Furioso offers a heterogeneous self-representation that consistently returns the same dynamic of displacement at the service of a demanding narrative vitality, figured alternately as a deity, as randomness or a metaphor for the artistic work that conveys inconvenient formal demands, like musical performance or sculpture.31 This narrative vitality has drawn attention from critics who themselves adopt further analogizations of the poem, recognised broadly as a ‘universe’.32 Among them, Calvino describes the ‘universo’ of the Furioso with several references to the agency of its narrative system: ‘potremmo ricorrere all’immagine d’un campo di forze, che continuamente genera al suo interno altri campi di forze’ (‘we could recur to the image of a forcefield, which continuously generates other forcefields within it’).33 Two decades later, Corrado Bologna will elaborate Calvino’s thoughts on the vitality of the subject matter by proposing l’immagine del Furioso come organismo vivente e insieme « macchina testuale », come grande contenitore-rielaboratore universale di parole idee immagini forme disegni d’altri testi, e sintetizzatore-trasformatore dell’intera tradizione epico-romanzesca medievale e quattrocentesca; ma anche come telaio su cui vengono ordite « varie fila » e « varie tela », in una prova di scrittura insieme fantastica e mediana che apre la porta […] a [Carlo Emilio] Gadda (che […] parlando del « caos del romanzo » e della necessità d’una costruzione digressiva della « trama », si richiamerà proprio all’Ariosto) (the image of the Furioso as a living organism and at the same time a ‘textual engine’, as the great universal container-developer of words ideas images forms designs from other texts and the great synthesizertransformer of the entire epic-romance tradition of the Middle Ages and the fifteenth century; but also as the canvas on which ‘a variety of threads’ and ‘a number of warps’ in a writing exercise at once fantastic and middling that sets the stage for Gadda (who, when speaking about the 31 For self-referential metaphors of music, see OF 7.19, 8.29 and 30.16–17; for sculpture, see 3.3–4. 32 See Calvino, “Struttura” 53; Quint D., “The Figure of Atlante: Ariosto and Boiardo’s Poem”, MLN 94.1 (1979) 77–91, 78; and Bologna C., La macchina del « Furioso ». Letture dell’« Orlando » e delle « Satire » (Milan: 1998) 51. 33 Calvino, “Struttura” 53.

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‘caos of the novel’ and the need for a digressive construction of ‘plot’, will refer to Ariosto himself).34 Extending Calvino and Bologna’s vision of a living, self-generating poem, the present study has aimed to refine the Furioso not only as a narrative ecology but also as a poem that advertises its own ecological character, shaped by the vitality of many diegetic elements within the poem. In a 1992 discussion of hermeneutic validity, Umberto Eco proposes a system of restrictions and energies internal to the text connecting the limited and often questionable camp of interpretations that presuppose a degree of authorial intent with the infinite camp of potentially tenuous interpretations by readers, a complex of limitations and possibilities he calls the intentio operis.35 Eco’s ‘medieval-sounding’ term finds neat narratological confirmation in Ariosto’s early modern narrative design, where the demands of the work are repeatedly identified as the cause of a poetic design unknown even to the author who can only intend (‘intendo’) to follow it: ‘si direbbe che il poeta, cominciando la sua narrazione, non conosca ancora il piano dell’intreccio che in seguito lo guiderà con puntuale premeditazione’ (‘one could say that the poet, beginning his narrative, does not yet know the plan of the intrigues that will then guide him with a timely premeditation’).36 As with the shipwreck metaphors bookending the poem, this advertisement often takes the form of the narrator’s explicit analogization. Beyond their potential for artistic re-elaboration, these heterogenous metaphors together communicate the displacement of the reader who expects straightforward satisfaction by what Daniel Javitch playfully terms the narrator’s cantus interruptus.37 Calvino uncovers the decentring that results from juxtaposing the tapestry and map in his 1972 novel Le città invisibili (Invisibile Cities), in a description of the fictional city of Eudossia that has not been heretofore identified as a critique of Ariosto: [a] Eudossia, che si estende in alto e in basso, con vicoli tortuosi, scale, angiporti, catapecchie, si conserva un tappeto in cui puoi contemplare la vera forma della città. A prima vista nulla sembra assomigliare meno 34 Bologna, Macchina x. 35 See Eco U., “Overinterpreting Texts”, in S. Collini (ed.), Interpretation and Overinterpretation (Cambridge: 1992) 45–66, 63–66. 36 Calvino, “Struttura” 54. The description of Eco’s phrase is Walter Stephens’s; see Stephens W., Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief, paperback ed. (Chicago: 2003) 28. 37 See Javitch D., “Cantus Interruptus in the Orlando Furioso”, MLN 95.1 (1980) 66–89, 70–71.

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a Eudossia che il disegno del tappeto, ordinato in figure simmetriche che ripetono i loro motivi lungo linee rette e circolari, intessuto di gugliate dai colori splendenti, l’alternarsi delle cui trame puoi seguire lungo tutto l’ordito. Ma se ti fermi a osservarlo con attenzione, ti persuadi che a ogni luogo del tappeto corrisponde un luogo della città e che tutte le cose contenute nella città sono comprese nel disegno, disposte secondo i loro veri rapporti, quali sfuggono al tuo occhio distratto dall’andirivieni dal brulichio dal pigia-pigia. Tutta la confusione di Eudossia, i ragli dei muli, le macchie di nerofumo, l’odore di pesce, è quanto appare nella prospettiva parziale che tu cogli; ma il tappeto prova che c’è un punto dal quale la città mostra le sue vere proporzioni, lo schema geometrico implicito in ogni suo minimo dettaglio. Perdersi ad Eudossia è facile: ma quando ti concentri a fissare il tappeto riconosci la strada che cercavi in un filo cremisi o indaco o amaranto che attraverso un lungo giro ti fa entrare in un recinto color porpora che è il tuo vero punto d’arrivo ([i]n Eudoxia, which spreads both upward and down, with winding alleys, steps, dead ends, hovels, a carpet is preserved in which you can observe the city’s true form. At first sight nothing seems to resemble Eudoxia less than the design of that carpet, laid out in symmetrical motives whose patterns are repeated along straight and circular lines, interwoven with brilliantly colored spires, in a repetition that can be followed throughout the whole woof. But if you pause and examine it carefully, you become convinced that each place in the carpet corresponds to a place in the city and all the things contained in the city are included in the design, arranged according to their true relationship, which escapes your eye distracted by the bustle, the throngs, the shoving. All of Eudoxia’s confusion, the mules’ braying, the lampblack stains, the fish smell is what is evident in the incomplete perspective you grasp; but the carpet proves that there is a point from which the city shows its true proportions, the geometrical scheme implicit in its every, tiniest detail. It is easy to get lost in Eudoxia: but when you concentrate and stare at the carpet, you recognize the street you were seeking in a crimson or indigo or magenta thread which, in a wide loop, brings you to the purple enclosure that is your real destination).38

38 The description of Eudossia is entitled ‘Le città e il cielo. 1’ (‘Cities and the sky. 1’); see Calvino I., Le città invisibili (Milan: 1993) 97–98. For the translation see Calvino I., Invisible Cities, trans. W. Weaver (New York: 1974) 96–97.

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Calvino’s sensitive manipulation of pronouns, here and throughout the novel, invites the reader into a world of confusion that can only be resolved by meditating on the navigational and representative possibilities of artistic expression, with all its back alleys and interpretive dead ends, and by concluding with the narrator that ‘la vera mappa dell’universo sia la città d’Eudossia così com’è, una macchia che dilaga senza forma, con vie tutte a zig-zag, case che franano una sull’altra nel polverone, incendi, urla nel buio’ (‘the true map of the universe is the city of Eudoxia, just as it is, a stain that spreads out shapelessly, with crooked streets, houses that crumble one upon the other amid clouds of dust, fires, screams in the darkness’). The dominant interest in the Città invisibili, as in the travel narratives of Marco Polo upon which Calvino bases his novel, is not in congratulating the reader with a straightforward chorography but an in investigating the elusive hidden logic of systems, be they cartographic, sociological or narrative, and the mention of ‘vie tutte a zig-zag’, the same shape that recurs in his radio commentary, unmistakably attributes the same interest to the Furioso. To complement the interest in narrative vitality made explicit by the narrator’s own intervention, this study has aimed to demonstrate the same displacement of reader, writer and character is advertised through the implicit – but arguably deliberate – identification of the poem as a forest ecology, an analogy that can move earlier critical analogies towards recent ecocritical theories that enable an understanding of the self-consciousness of the Furioso. Beyond its contribution to Italian studies, this reading may also contribute to a comprehensive critical understanding of metaliterature, above all by presenting categories of evidence for detecting and articulating a convincing metaliterary argument – for example, identifying overlaps between the metaliterary element at hand, the forest in this case, with narrative boundaries and movements. This reading of the Furioso as forest, moreover, can also form a tile in the history of a tradition that uses botanical vocabulary and imagery to name and describe the poetic work that contains it, stretching at least from Statius’s first-century Silvae (Woods) to Walt Whitman’s nineteenth-century Leaves of Grass and exhibiting particular strength in early modern Italian narrative.39

39

For the use of sylvan and other vegetative imagery for to effect metaliterary commentary by Italian writers from Bonagiunta Orbicciani of Lucca to Tasso, see Tower, Natura.

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chapter 16

Epic Salvation: Christ’s Descent into Hell and the Landscape of the Underworld in Neo-Latin Christian Epic Lukas Reddemann 1

Introduction

Time and again, epic poets pick up the Homeric and Virgilian tradition to send down one of their characters to the underworld: In the footsteps of Ulysses and Aeneas, heroes of epic poems are obliged to make their way through the realm of the dead to achieve their goals. This katabasis (Greek) or descensus (Latin) is not restricted to ancient or mythological epics at all: In the Alexandreis, a 12th-century epic about the deeds of Alexander the Great, Walter of Châtillon (ca. 1130–1200) integrates a descensus of personified Nature. Also Charlemagne, the protagonist of Ugolino Verino’s (1438–1516) Carlias, descends and explores the world of the deceased.1 Poetic interest in the underworld as place and landscape considerably increased in Late Medieval and Early Modern times after Dante’s Divine Comedy, completed in 1321. This development intersected with a revived popularity of Christian epic poetry during the 16th century.2 1 For the literary history of the katabasis as a narrative pattern see e.g. Tormey W., “The Journey within the Journey: Catabasis and Travel Narrative in Late Medieval and Early Modern Epic”, in Classen A. (ed.), Travel, Time, and Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time. Explorations of World Perceptions and Processes of Identity Formation, Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture 22 (Boston – Berlin: 2018) 585–621, esp. 585–592. Bauckham R., The Fate of the Dead. Studies on the Jewish and Christian Apocalypses, Supplements to Novum Testamentum 93 (Leiden – Boston – Cologne: 1998) 9–48 investigates the motif beyond the Greek, Roman and Christian tradition. For the epic tradition of the underworld and the descensus succeeding Homer and Virgil see Hardie P., The Last Trojan Hero. A Cultural History of Virgil’s Aeneid (London – New York: 2014) 21–49. For the descensus naturae in Walter’s Alexandreis (X, 31–107), see Korte P., Die antike Unterwelt im christlichen Mittelalter. Kommentierung – Dichtung – philosophischer Diskurs, Tradition – Reform – Innovation 16 (Frankfurt a.M. et al.: 2012) 219–236. For the descensus of Charlemagne in Verino’s Carlias (V, 459–VII, 793), see Thurn N., Kommentar zur Carlias des Ugolino Verino, Humanistische Bibliothek 2.33 (Munich: 2002) 289–292. 2 The most extensive study on Early Modern Christian epic is Czapla R.G., Das Bibelepos in der Frühen Neuzeit. Zur deutschen Geschichte einer europäischen Gattung, Frühe Neuzeit 165 (Berlin – Boston: 2013). Furthermore, see Springer C.P.E., “The Biblical Epic in Late Antiquity

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When it comes to Christ himself being the protagonist in Neo-Latin epic poetry, his descent is named Descensus ad inferos, the Harrowing of Hell. Apart from single references in the Bible and a line in the Apostle’s Creed, the narrative tradition of this episode is mainly based on the apocryphal Late Antique Gospel of Nicodemus: It tells the story of Christ’s soul going to the limbus after the crucifixion, a part of the Christian hell where the just of the Old Testament, beginning with Adam, are captured. They are situated in an intermediate state as they died as believers, but before Christ was born, and have since been awaiting salvation. By tearing down the gates of hell, relieving the patriarchs and leading them to the kingdom of Heaven, Jesus gains his ultimate victory over Satan before he finally resurrects.3 In the 16th century, the Harrowing of Hell attracted vital interest within theological theory, literary reception, and the visual arts.4 Dürer’s woodcut Christ in limbo is only one outstanding example for the latter [Fig. 16.1]. The great popularity of different kinds of Christian poetry at the beginning of the 16th century also led to an increase of Latin epics about the life and and the Early Modern Period: The Poetics of Tradition”, in von Martels Z. – Schmidt V.M. (eds.), Antiquity Renewed. Late Classical and Early Modern Themes, Groningen Studies in Cultural Change 4 (Leuven: 2003) 103–126. Faini M., “‘Heroic Martyrdom Unsung’. Some Reflections on the Tradition of Christian Epic in Renaissance Italy and the European Context”, Wolfenbütteler Renaissance-Mitteilungen 32 (2008–2010) 135–152 offers an investigation of the challenges of Christian Epic in the 16th and 17th centuries. 3 Cf. Berns J.J., “Höllenmeditation. Zur meditativen Funktion und mnemotechnischen Struktur barocker Höllenpoesie”, in Kurz G. (ed.), Meditation und Erinnerung in der Frühen Neuzeit, Formen der Erinnerung 2 (Göttingen: 2000) 141–173, here 141–142. Edition of the Greek and Latin versions in Evangelia apocrypha. Adhibitis plurimis codicibus Graecis et Latinis maximam partem nunc primum consultis atque ineditorum copia insignibus, ed. C. von Tischendorf (Leipzig: 1876), 210–432. For the Gospel of Nicodemus, the descensus ad inferos and its medieval reception, see Turner R.A., “Descendit ad inferos: Medieval Views on Christ’s Descent into Hell and the Salvation of the Ancient Just”, Journal of the History of Ideas 27.2 (1966) 173–194. Campbell J.J., “To Hell and Back: Latin Tradition and Literary Use of the ‘Descensus ad inferos’ in Old English”, Viator 13 (1982) 107–158; Haas A., “Descensus ad inferos. Höllenfahrten und Jenseitsvisionen im Mittelalter vor Dante”, in idem (ed.), Geistliches Mittelalter, Dokimion 8 (Freiburg: 1984) 161–171. For the biblical references to Christ’s presence in the underworld see Bauckham, The Fate of the Dead, 38–39 and Herzog M., Descensus ad inferos. Eine religionsphilosophische Untersuchung der Motive und Interpretationen mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der monographischen Literatur seit dem 16. Jahrhundert, Frankfurter Theologische Studien 53 (Frankfurt a.M.: 1997) 37–53. 4 Cf. Herzog, Descensus ad inferos, 22–24 and the introduction to Hessus’ Victoria Christi in Hessus Helius Eobanus, The Poetic Works of Helius Eobanus Hessus, ed. H. Vredeveld, 4 vols., vol III (Leiden – Boston: 2012) 443–444. For the descensus becoming one of the standard features of biblical epic during the Renaissance, see Lewalski B.K., Milton’s Brief Epic. The Genre, Meaning, and Art of Paradise Regained (Providence – London: 1966) 55–56.

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Albrecht Dürer, Christ in Limbo. Woodcut, 44.1 × 30.3 cm, part of the Great Passion, 1510

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especially the Passion of Jesus. Many of those works include the descensus ad inferos, some shorter epics were even entirely dedicated to it (see Appendix).5 Neo-Latin Christian epic poets were highly interested in rhetorically exploring the landscape of the underworld, where the events of the Harrowing of Hell take place. I will retrace these acts of exploration of landscape between the rhetorical tradition of place descriptions and the epic tradition of the underworld. In a second step, I will examine how hell and paradise work as antithetic landscapes in order to create proleptic effects on the narrative level. Lastly, I would like to cast light on how poetic underworlds are not restricted to a mere descriptive level, but are transformed in the course of Christ’s arrival and become dynamic agents of the narrative themselves. Given the great number of such works, the present study has to be restricted to only very few exemplary passages. 2

Enargeia and Descriptions of Places

In terms of classical rhetorical theories, epic depictions of the underworld present themselves under the form of place descriptions (loci descriptiones) striving toward a vivid presentation of the visual appearance of the place in question, or, technically speaking, the rhetorical quality of enargeia. This Greek term has been translated by Cicero into the Latin evidentia. Its notion is, for instance, developed in Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria.6 In the 16th and 17th centuries, readers might be acquainted with the concept particularly by rhetorical manuals such as Erasmus’ De duplici copia, verborum ac rerum. This work was published for the first time in 1512 and became one of the most widespread manuals of the 16th century.7 In the relevant chapter (II, 5), Erasmus describes enargeia as follows: 5 Due to the large number of such works, the Appendix gives an overview of relevant epics together with short titles after which the texts are quoted. Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic, 37–101 offers an instructive account of the history of the genre with regard to both Latin and vernacular works and with a focus on ‘brief epic’. 6 Cicero, Academica II (Lucullus), 17: ‘ἐναργείᾳ (ut Graeci, perspicuitatem aut evidentiam nos)’. Quintilian treats enargeia as one of the virtues of narration (virtutes narrationis) in Institutio oratoria, IV, 2, 61–71 and as element of the ornatus in VIII, 3, 61–71. See Scholz B.F., “Ekphrasis and Enargeia in Quintilian’s Intstitutionis oratoriae libri xii”, in Oesterreich P.L. – Sloane T.O. (edd.), Rhetorica movet. Studies in Historical and Modern Rhetoric in Honour of Heinrich F. Plett (Leiden – Boston – Cologne: 1999) 3–24. 7 On the work and its dissemination cf. Enenkel K.A.E., “Enargeia Fireworks: Jesuit Image Theory in Franciscus Neumayr’s Rhetorical Manual (Idea Rhetoricae, 1748) and His Tragedies”, in de Boer W. – Enenkel K.A.E. – Melion W.S. (eds.), Jesuit Image Theory,

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Ea utemur quoties vel amplificandi, vel ornandi, vel delectandi gratia rem non simpliciter exponemus, sed ceu coloribus expressam in tabula spectandam proponemus, ut nos depinxisse, non narrasse, lector spectasse, non legisse, videatur. We employ this whenever, for the sake of amplifying or decorating our passage, or giving pleasure to our readers, instead of setting out the subject in bare simplicity, we fill in the colours and set it up like a picture to look at, so that we seem to have painted the scene rather than described it, and the reader seems to have seen rather than read.8 Erasmus is in perfect accordance with ancient rhetorical theory and explains enargeia as a text’s ability to set something before its reader’s eyes. The metaphor of the reader as viewer and the poem as painting is well-trodden ground in ancient rhetoric and made its way into Early Modern debates on different forms of art, e.g. painting and poetry (ut pictura poesis).9 According to Erasmus, descriptions bearing enargeia may refer to an object (descriptio rei), a person (personae descriptio), a place (loci descriptio), or a time (temporis descriptio).10 Regarding loci descriptiones, Erasmus distinguishes between descriptions of real (topographiai) and fictional places (topothesiai).11 Most of the examples he gives for topothesiai originate from ancient epics, such Intersections 45 (Leiden – Boston: 2016) 146–185, esp. 148–158. Knott B.I., “Introduction”, in Erasmus Desiderius, De duplici copia verborum ac rerum commentarii duo, ed. B.I. Knott, ASD I, 6 (Amsterdam – New York: 1988) 7–19. Mack P., A History of Renaissance Rhetoric 1380–1620 (Oxford: 2011) 76–88. On enargeia / evidentia in De duplici copia, see Cave T., “‘Enargeia’: Erasmus and the Rhetoric of Presence in the Sixteenth Century”, L’Esprit Créateur 16.4 (1976) 5–19. Plett H.F., Enargeia in Classical Antiquity and the Early Modern Age. The Aesthetics of Evidence, International Studies in the History of Rhetoric 4 (Leiden – Boston: 2012) 23–28. Idem, “Evidentia. Zur Rhetorik der Präsenz in den artes der Frühen Neuzeit”, in Hintzen B. – Simons R. (edd.), Norm und Poesie. Zur expliziten und impliziten Poetik in der lateinischen Literatur der Frühen Neuzeit, Frühe Neuzeit 178 (Berlin – Boston: 2013) 255–273. 8 ASD I, 6, p. 202 Translation after Collected Works of Erasmus. Literary and Educational Writings, vol. II: De copia / De ratione studii, ed. C.R. Thompson (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 1978), here p. 577. 9 Cf. e.g. Aristotle, Poetics, 17 (πρὸ ὀμμάτων τιθέμενον), Rhetorics, III, 11 (πρὸ ὀμμάτων ποιεῖν) and Horace, Ars poetica, 361 (ut pictura poesis). For the visual and its metaphors in the literary theory of evidentia in Antiquity, see Graf F., “Ekphrasis: Die Entstehung der Gattung in der Antike”, in Böhm G. – Pfotenhauer H. (edd.), Beschreibungskunst – Kunstbeschreibung. Ekphrasis von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: 1995) 143–155, esp. 145–149. 10 Cf. ASD I, 6, 202–215. 11 Ibidem, 214.

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as the house of Somnus, god of sleep, or the palaces of Sol or Fama in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.12 He also explicitly names the description of the underworld (inferorum domus) in the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid. For Erasmus, epic texts serve as preferential source of examples for place descriptions possessing enargeia. Furthermore, regarding the rhetorical virtue in general apart from a certain kind of description, he states that poets, and foremost Homer, excel at it.13 For Erasmus, these various kinds of descriptions, including the topothesia, stand in the rhetorical tradition of ekphrasis.14 In Latin rhetorical theory, the term descriptio used by Erasmus serves as translation of the Greek ekphrasis, adopting all its implications and possible objects: Ancient rhetoricians used both terms in a broad sense focusing on the way a text describes creatures, events, times or places.15 Ekphrastic writing constitutes itself by its ability to ‘paint’ something before its reader’s eyes – to create enargeia –, not by a certain kind of object in question. This notion of ekphrasis / descriptio is neither exclusively Erasmian nor restricted to ancient rhetorical theory, but represents its common understanding in Early Modern rhetoric. Humanists such as Enea Silvio Piccolomini (Pope Pius II., 1405–1464) in one of his letters or Rudolf Agricola (1444–1485) in his manual De inventione dialectica (publ. 1515) assert that ekphrasis /descriptio producing enargeia can refer to virtually any object.16 12

House of Somnus: Ovid, Metamorphoses, XI, 592–615. Palace of Fama: XII, 39–63. Palace of Sol: II, 1–18. 13 ASD I, 6, 202: ‘Hac virtute praecellunt quum omnes poetae, tum praecipue Homerus’. 14 Studies on ekphrasis are numerous. For classical ekphrasis and the history of its notion, see e.g. Graf, “Ekphrasis” and Koelb J.H., The Poetics of Description. Imagined Places in European Literature (New York: 2006), esp. 19–42. 15 Graf, “Ekphrasis”, 144–145 and Schaefer C. – Rentsch S., “Ekphrasis. Anmerkungen zur Begriffsbestimmung in der neueren Forschung”, Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur 114.2 (2004) 132–165, here 133. 16 Piccolomini, Pontificis epistolarum liber, 104: ‘Prima causa est, quia multa et varia scire oportet eum, qui sit poeta. Namque cum bella gesta suum sit scribere, cum tempestates, cum tempora, cum locorum situs, cum personarum conditiones, cum maris stratus ante oculos hominum ponere habeat, cum virtutes laudare, vitiaque reprehendere debeat, quis non videt ad haec bene tractanda multis artibus opus esse’. Quoted after Aeneae Sylvii Piccolominei Senensis, qui post adeptum pontificatum Pius eius nominis secundus appelatus est, opera quae extant omnia […] (Basel, Heinrich Petri: 1551), here p. 599. Agricola, De inventione dialectica, II, 28: ‘Proximum est ei, qui diligenter cognitos habet locos, voletque ex eis invenire, parare facultatem sibi cuiuslibet rei per locos deducendae, quod vel idem est, vel simile illi, quod solebant qui docebant rhetoricem, inter praeexercitamenta ponere puerorum, quod Graece ἔκφρασις, latine a plerisque descriptio vocatur’. Quoted after Agricola Rudolf, Rodolphi Agricolae Phrisii de inventione dialectica libri omnes et integri et recogniti […] (Cologne, Johann Gymnich: 1539). On these passages in Piccolomini and Agricola see von Rosen V., “Die Enargeia des Gemäldes. Zu einem vergessenen Inhalt des

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More recent approaches, however, separate the notion of ekphrasis from that rhetorical tradition so that it is well established by now as technical term for a textual description of works of the visual arts or handcrafts.17 This terminological shift has several reasons, including the fact that the first manifest ekphrasis in European literature, the shield of Achilles in Homer’s Iliad, does indeed refer to a work of handcraft.18 When Leo Spitzer published his influential paper on John Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn in 1955, he permanently established a particular association between the term ekphrasis and descriptions of works of art.19 For our purpose, however, it is essential to differentiate between this more recent notion of the term and its broader rhetorical conception still valid in the 16th and 17th centuries. The topothesia as one category of the descriptio loci does in fact stand within the rhetorical tradition of ekphrastic writing, for the poetic technique of description focussing on the visual equally suits works of art and landscapes a reader should see. 3

Virgilian Underworlds

In epic poetry – Latin as well as vernacular – especially after Dante’s Divine Comedy, the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid constitutes one of the loci classici of the katabasis. Aeneas’ journey to the realm of the dead, where his late father Anchises presages the Romans’ glorious future, serves as a blueprint for Christ’s journey to the underworld and his glorious triumph over hell.20 The topothesia of the underworld is often placed at the very beginning of a descensus episode. We find a striking example for such passages in the Christiad by the Ut-pictura-poesis und seiner Relevanz für das cinquecenteske Bildkonzept”, Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 27 (2000) 171–208, here 181–182. For an overview of De inventione dialectica see Mack, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric 56–75. On Agricola’s notion of ekphrasis see Scholz, “Ekphrasis and Enargeia in Quintilian’s Intstitutionis oratoriae libri xii” 13. 17 Cf. Heffernan J.A.W., “Ekphrasis and Representation”, New Literary History 22.2 (1991) 297– 316. Idem, Museum of Words. The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashley (Chicago – London: 1993) traces ekphrasis precisely as ‘verbal representation of visual representation’ (ibidem, 3). Koelb, The Poetics of Description, 19–42. Schaefer – Rentsch, “Ekphrasis” 137–140. 18 Homer, Iliad, XVIII, 478–608. Cf. Graf, “Ekphrasis”, 151–152. 19 Spitzer L., “The ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ or Content vs. Metagrammar”, Comparative Literature 7.3 (1955) 203–225. For Spitzer’s impact see Heffernan, “Ekphrasis and Representation”, 297–298 and Schaefer – Rentsch, “Ekphrasis” 133. 20 For the adaptation of the ancient underworld in medieval Christian literature, see Korte, Die antike Unterwelt im christlichen Mittelalter. For the Early Modern Period, see e.g. Hardie, The Last Trojan Hero 38–49.

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Carthusian monk Robert Clarke (d. 1675) [Fig. 16.2]. Being one of the most extensive Latin Christian epics of the 16th and 17th centuries, the work comprises 17 books of which book 12 is fully dedicated to the descensus. Clarke’s poem was first published in 1670 and reprinted in 1708. Aside from Walthierer’s translation into German verse with introduction and brief commentary from 1853, this text still lacks extensive research.21 Clarke leaves no doubt that book 12 takes an eminent position within the structure of the entire poem as it begins with a proem (ll. 1–8) where he announces that he now turns to the underworld and proclaims Christ’s triumphal procession: The poet, inspired by divine resplendence, asks Christ for assistance in his poetic task.22 Indicating the subject matter of the poem as well as the invocation of an authoritative resource of poetic inspiration are standard features of epic proems, which commonly appear at the very beginning of the entire epic. Virgil, however, established the tradition of a second proem at an incisive point of the plot: When Aeneas and the Trojans finally arrive at the estuary of the Tiber in Italy,23 Virgil announces the wars and fights of the poem’s second half and invocates Erato to help him.24 The second proem in the Aeneid serves its textual organisation in two halves that differ in the places where things happen. While Aeneas, on his journey from Troy, travels around to different places in the Mediterranean sea in the ‘Odyssee-half’ (books 1–6), Latium and the estuary of the Tiber form the constant surrounding of the fights of the ‘Iliadic half’ (books 7–12). In order to refer to the Virgilian model of the internal proem, ‘nunc age’ at the beginning of the first line of book 12 of the Christiad recalls the beginning of Virgil’s internal proem in book 7 of the 21 Die Christiade von Robert Clarke, trans. A.C. Walthierer (Ingolstadt: 1853). He also republished the Latin text: Christiados libri XVII authore Roberto Clarko Cartusiano Anglo, ed. A.C. Walthierer (Ingolstadt: 1855). As far as I can see, the only study exceeding mere mention of the epic is Roling B., “Zwischen epischer Theologie und theologischer Epik. Die Versuchung Christi in der lateinischen Bibeldichtung von Iuvencus bis Robert Clarke”, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 40 (2006) 327–382, here 376–380. For Clarke’s place in the generic tradition see Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic, 95–96. For Clarke’s Christiad as a ‘Catholic riposte’ to Milton’s Paradise Lost see Young F., English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553–1829 (Farnham: 2013) 43–44. 22 Clarke, Christiad, XII, 1–8: ‘Nunc age Tartareas sedes, inamabile regnum / Luciferi, audaci tempus perstringere penna / victricemque animam Christi claramque sub ima / tellure egregii seriem referare triumphi. / Auspiciis haec, Christe, tuis, fideique serenis / afflati radiis tentamus. Adesse vocanti / te vati spes fida monet, facilesque daturum / successus et plena suos in carbasa ventos’. 23 Virgil, Aeneid, VII, 1–36. 24 Virgil, Aeneid, VII, 37–45. Cf. Horsfall N., Virgil, Aeneid 7. A Commentary (Leiden – Boston – Cologne: 2000) 67–76.

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Robert Clarke, Christiad (1670). Engraved title page

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Aeneid.25 Like Virgil’s, Clarke’s proem in book 12 directly reacts to Christ’s death and burial in books 10 and 11 as caesura in the plot as well as a fundamental change of scenery: Only in book 12 does he turn away from Christ’s earthly life to his descent to the underworld. The same applies to book 17, which deals with the ascension of Jesus in a final triumphal procession: Here, Clarke places another proem at the beginning, again affirming his divine inspiration and marking the turn to heaven as new scenery and Christ’s final depart from earth.26 Hence, the descensus in book 12 as well as the ascensio in book 17 come along with new proems and are therefore displayed as key positions within the plot. After the proem in book 12, Clarke gives a detailed description of the underworld as a whole (ll. 9–63), starting with its location: Oceani subter fluctus et vasta profundi Stagna, metalliferae subter pallentia terrae Antra, infelices auri argentique latebras, Est locus inferni celebris cognomine, opacis Aeternum squalens tenebris atque invius omni Astrorum telo et Phoebeae lampadis igni, Tristitiae fletusque domus. (ll. 9–15) Under the waves and wide waters of the deep ocean, under dark caves of the mineral soil, under baleful and hidden places of gold and silver, there is a famous place called ‘infernum’. The place all lies in eternal shadowy gloom, inaccessible for any ray of light sent out by the stars or Apollo’s fiery torch, the sun. Here is the home of gloom and lament. The underworld itself is located deep beneath the surface of the earth and the oceans. The place lies in absolute darkness, unlit by the light of the stars or the sun. Instead, the air is full of displeasing screaming and screeching.27 Although the underworld possesses wide space, it is tightly stuffed with the 25 Virgil, Aeneid, VII, 37: ‘Nunc age, qui reges, Erato, quae tempora, rerum’. Clarke, Christiad, XII, 1: ‘Nunc age Tartareas sedes, inamabile regnum’. For ‘nunc age’, see Horsfall, Aeneid 7, 69. 26 Clarke, Christiad, XVII, 1–14: ‘Fallor? An exorti divum mihi munere tactas / Lux penetrat divina fibras, vatemque stupentem / Afflarunt superi? Illabentis prodromus ardor / Numinis insueto languentem suscitat igne, / Inspirans coelestem animum mentemque caducas / Terrigenum exosam curas majoribus ausis / Solicitat, tentare alti penetralia mundi. / Mortalem excutiens sensum, super ardua coeli / Tollor et aethereae illustratus lumine flammae, / Aspicio, ut rutila venientem in nube salutet / Heroum numerosa cohors, regemque sequentes / Ordinibus, signis, radiis cultuque micantes, / Distinctaeque suis turmae, rapiantur in arces / Sidereas summique petant fastigia Olympi’. 27 Clarke, Christiad, XII, 15–17: ‘Suspiria, planctus, / stridorque et rabies et terribiles ululatus / hic sedem posuere suam’.

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souls of the dead.28 A wall made of metallic magnet stone, which only has a few holes spitting out either snake-like monsters or flames or mephitic dust, surrounds all this.29 Introducing the description of the underworld like this, Clarke follows typical conventions of the tradition of the epic topothesia. After the location of the place beneath earth and ocean, the description itself begins with ‘there is a famous place called ‘infernum’ (‘est locus inferni celebris cognomine’). The formula ‘there is a place – est locus’ is a common marker for the beginning of topographiai and topothesiai, not only in ancient, medieval and Neo Latin epic, but also in other poetic genres.30 Furthermore, Clarke populates his underworld with personified evils such as crimes, conspiracies and destructive desires: Vestibulum ante ipsum et primis in faucibus Orci, Innumerae scelerum facies, inimicaque divis Consilia et foedis circum volitantia pennis Somnia, lascivique simul stabulantur amores. (ll. 37–40) At the front entrance of the Orcus, numberless forms of crimes, conspiracies against the gods, dreams flitting around on nasty wings and lustful desires are housed together. 28 Clarke, Christiad, XII, 21–23: ‘Et tamen (heu! quae tanta animos dementia vertit!) / Carceris immanis spatium, latissima claustra, / Hospitibus sunt arcta suis numeroque laborant’. 29 Clarke, Christiad, XII, 24–35: ‘Quippe adamantaeis rupes Magnesia saxis / Corda trahens blandis in flammea claustra catenis, / Undique circumfusa, nigri latus omne Barathri / Circuit amplectens, nisi qua spiracula duris / Cautibus interjecta, viam erumpentibus Orco / Anguigenum turmis aut infelicibus umbris, / Corpore defunctis, aditus ac limina pandunt. / E quibus haec rapidas jaculantur in aethera fIammas / (Qualis sulphureis exundans Aetna favillis), / Ast alia ingratam supera ad convexa Mephitim / Exhalant late et vitales faucibus auras / Pestiferis foede inficiunt’. 30 Cf. Lausberg H., Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik. Eine Grundlegung der Literaturwissenschaft (Munich: 1973) 407. For other Neo-Latin examples of topothesiai of hell, see De Vallibus, Jhesuida, fol. 1v, Funck, Triumphus Christianus 111–125 and Horn, De resurrectione, 32–44. For examples from ancient poetry see the topography of Libya in Virgil, Aeneid, I, 159–169, Hesperia in Aeneid, I, 530–533 (=III, 163–166), the lake Amsanctus in Aeneid, VII, 563–571, the valleys of Ida in Ovid, Heroides, XVI, 53–56, the constellation of Scorpio in Ovid, Metamorphoses, II, 195–197. Examples from medieval epic comprise the topography of the German town Paderborn in the Carolingian epic Karolus magnus et Leo papa, 426–430 or the topothesia of the place where personified Nature and the virtues congregate in the Anticlaudianus, I, 55–106 by Alain de Lille (ca. 1125–1202). In his Parthenice Secunda (Catharinaria), Battista Mantovano uses the ‘est locus’-formula for the descriptions of Iuppiter’s court in Egypt (I, 77–83) or the topothesia of Paradise (III, 264–310).

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Given all those specifics about the visually approachable appearance of the landscape of the underworld, the reader can reconstruct the image of a very dark, inhospitable and dubious surrounding. Moreover, Clarke does his best to make his reader identify this landscape as the Virgilian underworld. Many single elements and traits of Clarke’s underworld have Virgilian antecedents. In the sixth book of the Aeneid, Virgil gives a description of the appearance of the underworld when Aeneas, under the guidance of the Sibyl of Cumae, gains entrance to it.31 First, we hear that Aeneas, just like Christ in Clarke’s Christiad, wanders through a landscape lacking light and colour; in a simile, Virgil compares the place to a path through woods in a dubious light.32 Virgil and Clarke both point at the general visual appearance at the beginning of their topothesiai: Total darkness overshadows their underworlds. Both authors’ descriptions also share elements such as flames, dust and screeching sounds.33 One of the most striking parallels is the population of the underworld with personified evils: While Clarke names crimes (scelerum facies), conspiracies against the gods (inimica divis consilia), dreams (somnia) and lustful desires (lascivi amores), Virgil’s list contains, among others, mourning, illness, old age, fear or poverty.34 Even if he names other personifications in particular, Clarkes makes clear that the evils inhabiting the underworld continue a Virgilian tradition: He copies the Virgilian line that opens this list of personifications, which is also remarked in a marginal note in the 1670 edition.35 With regard to the structure of the underworld, we likewise observe a striking analogy: After the general topothesia at the beginning of book 12, Clarke tells his reader that the underworld consists of four different parts reserved for different groups among the deceased (ll. 64–65): The most severe of those is inhabited by the worst criminals lacking any piousness, the eternal hell (65–69). The second can be identified as the Christian purgatory (70–74), whereas the third and fourth indicate two different areas of the limbus, namely the limbus puerorum (74–77) and the limbus patrum (78 sqq.), the former for unchristened children, the latter for the just of the Old Testament. The idea to divide different areas reserved for the souls depending on how they lived and died is a Virgilian one, most famously picked up in Dante’s Inferno. Aeneas comes along 31 Cf. Virgil, Aeneid, VI, 268–294. 32 Aeneid, VI, 268–272: ‘Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram / perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna: / quale per incertam lunam sub luce maligna / est iter in silvis, ubi caelum condidit umbra / Iuppiter, et rebus nox abstulit atra colorem’. 33 Cf. Aeneid, VI, 288. 296–300. 426–427. Christiad, XII, 16. 31–35. 34 Cf. Aeneid, VI, 273–281. 35 Aeneid, VI, 273: ‘vestibulum ante ipsum primisque in faucibus Orci’. Christiad, XII, 37: ‘Vestibulum ante ipsum et primis in faucibus Orci’.

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places for the unburied, children who died young, the innocent who were executed, suicides, victims of love, those who died on the battlefield, and those condemned to unending punishment in the Tartarus. On the other hand, there is the Elysium, the part of the underworld reserved for the blessed who lived a good life.36 With his different parts of the underworld for various groups of sinners, Clarke adapts the structure of the underworld presented in the sixth book of the Aeneid and adapts it to Christian eschatological concepts. This sort of combination of literary and visual signals to settle one landscape of the underworld within a certain tradition is typical for early modern Christian epics and their treatment of the descensus episode. To name one example among many, we can observe the same literary strategy in the Victoria Christi ab inferis by the German humanist Helius Eobanus Hessus, published in 1517.37 In this short epic, Hessus tells the story of Christ’s descent. When Christ, after having crushed through the gates of the underworld, reaches the part of hell where the biblical just are captured, Hessus inserts a short description of this part of the underworld named after the Virgilian Elysium (ll. 223–228): Est locus, Elysium veteres dixisse poetas crediderim, vel si qua fides est verior illis vestibulum ante domos caecas Acheruntis avari, antrum immane, patens, longo incomplebile tractu. Nulla dies, nullae aurae intus, crassissimus aer occupat et densis nebulis penetralia opacat. Ille locus sanctas animas manesque piorum continuit residi per tot iam saecula Christo. There is place – Elysium (or so I like to think) is what the ancient poets called it – or rather (to follow a more authentic tradition) an entrance hall that lies before the dark abodes of greedy Acheron, a vast cave that stretches out so wide and far in every direction that it can never be filled. No daylight, no glimmer of sky inside. Oppressively thick air occupies its depths and beglooms them with dense mists. That was the place that 36

The unburied (313–336), the lugentes campi (426–547) for children (426–429), executed (430–433), suicides (434–439), victims of love (440–476), those who died in war (477–547), Tartarus (548–627), Elysium (637–678). For the parts of the Virgilian underworld in book 6, see Norden E., P. Vergilius Maro. Aeneis Buch VI (Leipzig: 1903) 10–16 and Horsfall N., Virgil, Aeneid 6. A Commentary, 2 vols. (Berlin: 2013) xxvi. 37 For a sketch of Hessus’ works and biography see Enenkel K.A.E., Die Erfindung des Menschen. Die Autobiographik des frühneuzeitlichen Humanismus von Petrarca bis Lipsius (Berlin – New York: 2008) 432–434.

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held the holy spirits, the shades of the pious, in confinement for so many ages as they awaited the coming of Christ.38 Hessus, just like Clarke in his Christiad, uses the ‘est locus’-formula to refer to the epic tradition of topographia and topothesia and to stimulate his readers to view the following passage in the context of this tradition.39 Furthermore, vestibulum ante (225) imitates the same Virgilian line that Clarke also recalls to refer to the personified evils in the underworld of the sixth book of the Aeneid. Hessus also follows the Virgilian tradition to understand the Elysium as a particular area within the underworld just as former poets (veteres poetae) did, but, in contrast to Virgil’s version, his Elysium is not inhabited by the eternally blessed, but by the just of the Old Testament still awaiting salvation. With regard to its visual appearance, however, his landscape perfectly accords with the epic tradition of the underworld: He designs a place in absolute darkness, thick air and dense mist. These examples may illustrate that landscape acts as signpost within the tradition of epic poetry. Not only the descensus as characteristic act of an epic hero, but particularly the underworld as its visual setting regularly involve and refer to literary predecessors. The topothesia as structural element with its ekphrastic technique enables the poet to make landscape the object of his narrative and to create the rhetorical quality of enargeia. Single features of landscape mentioned in each topothesia such as light and visibility, monsters, personified evils, or thick air and dust make the underworld that Christ descents to a specifically Virgilian underworld. 4

Antithetic and Proleptic Landscapes

In Neo-Latin Christian epic, the landscape of the underworld is often set against counterparts. The most striking examples of them are descriptions of the paradisiac realms of heaven to which Christ eventually leads the rescued souls of the just. In this regard, landscape mirrors the contrast between heaven and hell and thus between captivity and eternal salvation. In order to point out the rhetorical effect of landscapes constituting counterparts to each other, we could refer to them as ‘antithetic landscapes’.

38 39

Here and hereafter, the Latin text and the English translation after Vredeveld, Poetic Works of Helius Eobanus Hessus, vol. III. Cf. Vredeveld, Poetic Works of Helius Eobanus Hessus, vol. III, 668.

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Another look at Eobanus Hessus’ Victoria Christi may illuminate this. In his version of the descensus, Jesus captivates and enchains Satan before finally leading the just to the Realms of Heaven.40 Here, Hessus inserts another topothesia (ll. 392–396; 401–409): Est locus Aurorae primo venientis ab ortu nobilis, a nostro tractu maris orbe remotus, immenso altivagam contingens vertice lunam, purus ab aereis nebulis, ubi maxima caeli porta patet, veterum si vera est pagina vatum […]. Caelestes habitant animae. Tenuissimus aer spirat et aeternos florum conservat honores. Sunt et perpetui soles. Est perpetuum ver. Vivida perpetuo nemoris viret umbra beati. Illic mille avium voces. Caelestia credas nectare labentes circumstrepere organa rivos. Summa voluptatum locus ille et deliciarum. Ex re nomen habet: toto Paradisus in orbe cognitus et culpa matris clarissimus Evae. There is a famed land in the East, where the dawn first breaks. Separated from our part of the world by an expanse of sea, untroubled by clouds in the air, it touches the high wandering moon with its immense peak. There the grand doorway of heaven stands open, if the writings of the ancient poets speak true […]. This is the home of the celestial spirits. A delicate breeze wafts about and preserves the unfading beauty of the flowers. The sun, too, shines always. It is forever spring. In the blessed groves the invigorating shade is always verdant. There birds sing out by the thousands. You might well think that celestial organs overspread the nectar-flowing brooks with music. This place is the sum of pleasures and delights. It is aptly named: all over the world it is familiar as Paradise, the site best known for the sin of mother Eve. The ‘est locus’-formula marks the beginning of another topothesia and stimulates the reader to set it in contrast to the first one. The description of Paradise presents itself like a list of opposites to the characteristics of the underworld:

40 Cf. Hessus, Victoria Christi, 364–386.

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Instead of eternal darkness, we hear of eternal sunlight and eternal spring.41 The air is not stifling and misty, but pure and clear breezes blow.42 This place is not only ‘the sum of pleasures and delights’, as Hessus calls it, but being the Christian Paradise well-known through the sin of Eve, this locus has a fixed place within salvation history. The landscapes of Hell and Paradise, tied to each other by their description in the form of a topothesia, mark the starting point and the destination of the captured just led by Christ and therefore mirror the act of salvation itself. Descriptions of paradise occur several times in Early Modern Christian epic.43 These passages allude regularly to Virgil’s Elysium in the sixth book of the Aeneid, the part of the underworld reserved for those who lived a commendable life. Those paradisiac landscapes, however, supply more than a simple and evident opposite to hell. While the descriptions of the underworld reference a typically epic tradition of place descriptions, this kind of paradise recalls characteristics of landscapes in bucolic poetry, the idyllic surrounding of shepherds in eclogues. Thus, landscape does not only address single texts or traditions, but, in a larger sense, locates itself within traditions of certain genres. This type of ideal, antithetic landscape is not necessarily described by the speaker, but can also be imagined by characters within the text, as is the case with the Christiad by Marco Girolamo Vida (1535). This work is one of the bestknown early Modern Christian epics at all and retells the life of Christ in six books.44 In Vida’s Christiad, the underworld as setting occurs twice: First during Satan’s speech to his cohort in the first book and finally when Vida narrates Christ’s descensus ad inferos in the sixth book. At the beginning of the epic, Christ travels to Jerusalem before his condemnation and crucifixion. Meanwhile, Satan gives a speech, warning the monsters of hell of Jesus’ imminent arrival.45 In his speech, Satan laments the miserable life in hell: God assigned this place to Satan and his cohort and claims heaven for himself in 41 The motif of eternal spring derives from the description of the golden Age in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (I, 107–108): ‘Ver erat aeternum, placidique tepentibus auris / mulcebant Zephyri natos sine semine flores’. 42 Cf. the verbal references between ‘tenuissimus aer’ (401) and ‘crassissimus aer’ (227) as well as ‘purus ab aereis nebulis’ (395) and ‘densis nebulis’ (228). 43 See, for instance, Funck, Triumphus Christianus 411–440. 44 For a modern critical edition with German translation and commentary, see Vida Marcus Hieronymus, Christias, ed. E. von Contzen et al., 2 vols. (Trier: 2013). For the history of editions of the Christiad, see ibidem, vol. I, 62–66. For an English translation, see Vida Marco Girolamo, Christiad, trans. J. Gardner, I Tatti Renaissance Library 39 (Cambridge – London: 2009). 45 Cf. Vida, Christiad, I, 167–223.

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order to ensure his own power. The lord of hell sets both places in contrast to each other by employing the dualism between darkness and light: ‘In place of stars and open air, he has given us this harsh desert and these dwellings that never see the sun.’46 Here, the antithetic landscapes of paradise and hell serve the composition of the poem and its plot: Vida creates a ring structure by mentioning the underworld in the first and the last book of the Christiad.47 With Satan entering the scene in the first book, the author establishes an antagonism that will eventually lead to the final combat in the sixth book.48 By imagining Christ arriving in the underworld, releasing the captured souls and casting out the cohorts monsters, Satan already foreshadows the outcome of this particular fight. It is not only Satan who, from his standpoint in hell, imagines the brighter side of the world: Immediately before Christ’s arrival in the underworld in the sixth book of the Christiad, the captives just encourage one another, hoping for quick salvation. They presage a glorious future in the shape of a new landscape (VI, 181–189): Iamque erit, ut, nostris promissum vocibus olim, laetitia exsiliant montes collesque resultent, pampineis vineti formosa cacumina sertis, quales creber agris aries oviumque minores subsiliunt foetus mollique in gramine ludunt, balatus matrum dum per iuga longa sequuntur. Ipsi iam fontes, ipsa et vaga flumina passim melle fluant, niveo passim vaga flumina lacte, lacte mero, et dulci distillent nectare rupes. And now it shall come to pass as was promised through our voices long ago, that the mountains leap for joy and the hills dance, with their lovely, vine-covered peaks! May they be like a ram in the fields or lambs that constantly skip and disport themselves in the meadows, as they follow the bleatings of their mother along the hilltops! Soon all the streams and 46 Vida, Christiad, I, 176–178: ‘Pro sideribus, pro luce serena / nobis senta situ loca, sole carentia tecta / reddidit’. English translation after Christiad trans. Gardner. Here and hereafter, the Latin text is taken from Christias ed. von Contzen et al., English translation after Christiad transl. Gardner. 47 Cf. Christias ed. von Contzen et al., vol. II, 21 and Di Cesare M.A., Vida’s Christiad and Vergilian Epic (New York – London: 1964) 245–246. 48 Christias ed. von Contzen et al., vol. II, 24 observe parallels between Satan’s speech in the Christiad and Turnus’ speech in the ninth book of Virgil’s Aeneid.

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all the meandering rivers will flow with honey and snow-white milk, with pure milk, and the rocks will exude sweet nectar. The just’s emphatic prophecy unites different traditions: First, mountains and hills skipping like lambs as well as milk and honey flowing are biblical motifs from the Old Testament in the context of God guiding the chosen people from Egypt to the Promised Land.49 Second, several aspects point to the description of the aurea aetas, the ideal Golden Age, in the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (I, 89–112): Ovid has rivers flowing with milk and nectar and honey seeping from an oak, whereas Vida’s rivers flow with the biblical honey and milk and rocks exude nectar.50 Furthermore, the use of the pronoun ipsi / ipsa (I, 187) underlines that the rivers generate those worthy things voluntarily and all by themselves. Vida hereby picks up a traditional image that nature produces food by itself without men’s efforts. This idea is very prominent in ancient descriptions of the Golden Ages and also referred to in Ovid.51 Third, natural elements such as hills, vineyards, meadows, lambs and rivers constitute a generic reference to bucolic poetry and the landscape it is typically settled within. The fundamental contrast between the antithetic landscapes goes along with a change of the literary genre represented by those landscapes. The heavenly paradise envisioned by the just does not only form a contrast to hell in terms of an antithetic landscape, but also has a distinct narrative function: The vision of paradise helps them to express their hopes and to set it against the underworld they currently find themselves in. Christ’s forthcoming arrival, however, as well as the allusion to the biblical prophecy of the Promised Land and the fact that they will be led to such a paradisiac place leads even further: The imagined landscape foreshadows the salvation the just will experience. In this regard, it cannot only be used as an antithetic counterpart to the landscape of the underworld, but also has a proleptic effect on the level of narrative.

49 Cf. Christias ed. von Contzen et al., vol. II, 366. For mountains skipping like lambs cf. Ps 114. The ‘land where milk and honey flows’ is one of the most common biblical paraphrases for the Promised Land, cf. Ex 3,8.17, 13,5, 33.3, Lv 20,24, Nm 13,27, 14,8, 16,14, Dt 6,3, 11,9, 26,9.15, 27,3, 31,20, Jos 5,6, Jr 11,5, 32,22, Ez 20,6.15 Bar 1,20 Job 20,17 Sir 46,8. 50 Vida refers to the motifs as well as to those particular lines through the doubled flumina, cf. Ovid, Metamorphoses, I, 111–112: ‘flumina iam lactis, iam flumina nectaris ibant, / flavaque de viridi stillabant ilice mella’. 51 Metamorphoses, I, 101–102: ‘ipsa quoque inmunis rastroque intacta nec ullis / saucia vomeribus per se dabat omnia tellus’.

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Transforming Hell

Like any other epic hero, Christ has the power and opportunity to descent to the realm of the dead. He is, however, capable of changing the landscape of the underworld and its elements by his divine power. Two aspects are already mentioned in the late-antique apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus and also appear as current elements of pictorial representations: Christ first breaking through the fortified metallic gates of the underworld, destroying them and, after that, illuminating the eternal darkness of the place.52 But while the Gospel recounts this only summarily in one sentence, early modern epic poets pick up those aspects very elaborately and dwell on the ways in which Christ radically alters elements of the landscape. They are not only interested in the topographical arrangement of landscape and its tradition, but also in its dynamics and alterations in the course of Christ’s arrival. The design of this particular episode in Marco Girolamo Vida’s Christiad, for instance, exemplifies how many early modern epic poets narrate it: They take Christ’s arrival as the very beginning of a fundamental change of landscape. Vida tells us that, when Christ strongly knocks against the gates, the earth quakes and the whole underworld starts to clang. Satan’s cohorts, consisting of monsters, shout, spit fire and enwrap everything in black dust. When the gates eventually burst, darkness and eternal night cease (ll. 212–215): Continuo patuere fores. procul ecce repente sponte sua absiliunt convulsi a cardine postes. Apparet confusa intus domus altaque circum atria, rarescunt tenebrae, et nox caeca recessit. At once the doors swung open and fell over their own accord, violently wrenched from their jambs. Now the interior, with its lofty halls, was dimly revealed. The shadows grew thinner and blind night receded. The divine light that Christ brings with him not only enlightens the underworld, but also casts out the evil part of its inhabitants. Vida describes in detail how it terrifies the monstrous creatures of Satan’s cohort and makes them flee (ll. 222–235). Just as Virgil compares the dubious shadows of the underworld to a path through woods, Vida uses two similes to refer to Christ’s light as a 52 Gospel of Nicodemus, part II, cap. V, 3: ‘Haec dicente David ad inferum supervenit in forma hominis dominus maiestatis, et aeternas tenebras illustravit et indissolubilia vincula disrupit’.

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shimmering diamond in a king’s chamber and to the monsters fleeing as savage people in the Alps watching the victorious Roman army and leaving their caves. Epic poets do not only underline the divine nature of Christ’s light (lux divina), but also the fact that it is a light the underworld never experienced before (lux insolita).53 Thus, in the presence of Christ, landscape becomes truly visible for the very first time: Vida, for instance, reports that darkness becomes less dense, night ceases, and the inner parts of the underworld ‘appear’ (apparet).54 Salvation history and the appearance of landscape intertwine again for the divine light serves as visible indication of Christ’s arrival and therefore of the just’s prayers answered. In his Carmen heroicum on Christ’s descent and resurrection, Erasmus explicitly states that ‘the holy people beheld the pure daylight for the first time after they waited so long for their prayers being answered […]. Their eyes saw the light they have wished for’.55 In terms of the changing visual appearance of landscape, epic poets regularly refer to the Virgilian underworld: When the Sibyl of Cumae guides Aeneas, they also come across the palace of Rhadamantys, the judge of the underworld. Aeneas sees its enormous, fortified gate with columns made of massive steel (solido adamante), ‘such that no human force, not even the gods of heaven have the strength to tear them down’.56 In early modern Christian epics, the gates to the underworld that Christ tears down often verbally imitate the doors of this particular palace. This, for instance, is the case in the Triumphus Christianus (1514) by the German humanist Matthias Funck or the already mentioned Victoria Christi by Helius Eobanus Hessus. Funck makes mention of doors of massive steel, Hessus of steel columns.57 The latter even names the Sibyl and Aeneas when he lists occasions when those doors stayed closed in spite of the presence of mythological heroes such as Hercules, Perithous or

53 54 55 56 57

For ‘lux divina’ see e.g. Vida, Christiad, VI, 199. 217. Clarke, Christiad, XII, 397. 406. For ‘lux insolita’ see Erasmus, Carmen heroicum, 72. 140–141. For the opposite of light and dark in Vida’s Christiad see Di Cesare, Vida’s Christiad and Vergilian Epic, 226–231. Vida, Christiad, VI, 214–215: ‘Apparet confusa intus domus altaque circum / atria, rarescunt tenebrae, et nox caeca recessit’. Erasmus, Carmen heroicum, 201–204: ‘Hic primum ille sacer populus dilata serenum / conspexit post vota diem, post nubila solem / laetus, et optatum viderunt lumina lumen’. Virgil, Aeneid, VI, 552–554: ‘Porta adversa ingens solidoque adamante columnae, / vis ut nulla virum, non ipsi exscindere bello / caelicolae valeant’. English translation after Horsfall, Aeneid 6. Funck, Triumphus Christianus, 78–79: ‘Impete cum vasto Christus solvique iubebat / aere gravi portas solidoque adamante ligatas’. Hessus, Victoria Christi, 184–186: ‘Stabat opaca, ingens, ferali tecta cupressu, / porta sub aereum quae proxima pertinet orbem, / quam ferrugineo fortes adamante columnae / obiicibus cohibent crebris’.

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Aeneas.58 He thereby identifies the Virgilian doors with the ones that Christ tears down. Here, the literary tradition of the underworld and the divine power capable of converting landscape intersect: Christ also changes the underworld by changing or even destroying its particularly Virgilian traces. But he does not only tear down the gates and enlightens the underworld, he is also able to transform other natural elements of landscape. One of the most compelling examples of this phenomenon is Macario Muzio’s De triumpho Christi, published in Venice in 1499.59 This early and rather short epic treats Christ’s victory over Satan and begins with the former’s descent. When he arrives in the underworld, we hear the following: Ille serenata per aperta silentia fronte ingressus, pigram nubem noctemque fugabat, ante oculos furvi pulsa caligine mundi, sternebant sese passimque aequata iacebant obvia, tum novies Stigiis circumflua campis cessit nigra palus regi lachrimasque remisit et tristes Cocytus aquas cursumque negavit. He enters the fields of silence with a cheerful face and disperses the black cloud and the night, ejecting the gloom of this louring world. Everything around him kneels plainly to his feet. Then, the black swamp around the river Styx with its nine courses yields to the king, ceases the flow of its tears, and even the river Cocytus runs dry and refuses its course. The implications of Christ’s arrival for the topography of the underworld are tremendous: Apart from enlightening the underworld, Christ makes the swamp around the Styx disappear; the Cocytus runs dry and refuses to run its regular course. There are several variations of this theme in different epics: whereas Macarius Mutius only names the Styx and the Cocytus, Matthias Funck in his Triumphus Christi from 1514 lists all five canonical rivers of the

58 Cf. Hessus, Victoria Christi, 184–200. 59 For a biographical sketch see Czapla, Das Bibelepos in der Frühen Neuzeit 130–136. For studies on the poem, see ibidem, 144–163 and Springer C.P.E., “Macarius Mutius’s De Triumpho Christi: Christian Epic Theory and Practice in the Late Quattrocento”, in Dalzell A. – Fantazzi C. – Schoeck R.J. (eds.), Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Torontonensis. Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies. Toronto 8 August to 13 August 1988 (New York: 1991) 739–746. For Muzio’s reflections on Christian epic in the preface see Faini, “Heroic Martyrdom Unsung” 139–140.

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underworld whose flow is interrupted by Christ’s arrival.60 In those texts, Christ lifts the eternal darkness, purifies the thick air, and transforms prominent features of the landscape, such as rivers and marches, causing them to change direction or to evaporate. This motif might remind a reader of Virgil’s and Ovid’s account of the katabasis of the singer Orpheus who, trying to lead his late wife Eurydike back from the dead, also temporarily stopped the natural course of things in the underworld. Singing his impressive lament, he made the inhabitants of Hades cry, and momentarily stopped wind from blowing.61 In contrast to Orpheus, however, Christ not only transforms the underworld permanently, but also rescues the souls trapped within it, and awaiting their promised salvation. 6

Concluding Remarks

In Neo-Latin Christian epic, landscape serves a particular purpose: It epitomizes Christ’s defeat of hell. And it does so in several regards. Epic poets make efforts to situate Christ and the underworld within the tradition of classical epic poetry. Therefore, they make use of ekphrastic topothesiai and embed particular elements of landscape pointing to the Virgilian underworld, adapted to Christian hell. Even within this literary tradition, however, Christ appears as the hero who transcends all other heroes, for in contrast to former epic protagonists, he truly manages to lead people back from the dead. Moreover, Christ is not only capable of temporarily changing single elements of nature, as Orpheus did, but completely transforms the landscape as a whole, changing its appearance. He casts out darkness and monsters, makes rivers cease to flow, demolishes gates, and replaces all this with a paradisiac landscape that pits heaven against hell. His divine might enables him to engineer this fundamental transformation that no ancient hero could ever achieve. Neo-Latin epic poets drew heavily on traditional depictions of the underworld since they could use them to develop this transcendent comparison between Christ and the former heroes he surpasses. Christ is seen to alter literary tradition itself, when he immobilizes the infernal rivers, one of the most characteristic 60

Namely Styx, Phlegeton, Lethe, Cocytus, Acheron, cf. Funck, Triumphus Christianus, 57– 66. Cf. also Erasmus, Carmen heroicum, 77–78: ‘stetit unda Stygis Phlegetontis et amnis, / Cocytique vagos tenuerunt flumina cursus’. In Gomez, Thalichristia, XXII, 267, rivers of black blood run dry: ‘rivique arescunt sanguinis atri’. 61 Cf. Virgil, Georgics, VI, 471–484. Ovid, Metamorphoses, X, 40–49. For Orpheus and Christus see Friedman J.B., Orpheus in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: 1970) 38–85 and Korte, Die antike Unterwelt im christlichen Mittelalter, 119–120.

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features of the poets’ hellscape. In demolishing the gates described by Virgil, he upends the most canonical topothesia of the underworld. Suppressing the most potent literary elements of the epic underworld goes hand in hand with transforming its landscape, and this is how the triumph of Christ over hell reaches its fullest expression.

Appendix: A Synopsis of Neo-Latin Christian Epics Containing Descensus Episodes, 15th to 17th Ct.

Books are indicated after the editio princeps. The full bibliographical reference is given after a short title by which each text is referred to in the main article: a) Epics in several books Mombrizio, De dominica passione (1499): Mombrizio Bonino, Bonini Mombritii Mediolanensis ad sanctissimum dominum dominum Sixtum quartum summum pontificem de dominica passione libri sex heroico carmine conscripti (Leipzig, Jacob Thanner: 1499). Reprint Leipzig, Wolfgang Stöckel: 1514. Indications after the exemplary Munich, BSB, 4 Inc. c.a. 1663. 6 bks., descensus and salvation of the just in bk. 6. Montmoret, Christis (before 1513): Montmoret Humbert de, Humberti Montismoretani poetae oratorisque clarissimi Christis complectens purissimam salvatoris nostri Iesu nativitatem praeclara dicta miracula passionem descensum ad inferos ascensionem ad nobilem virum dominum Iohannem Calvetum apud Montembrisonem electum regium haud poenitendum meum Mecoenatem (Lyon, Michel Parmentier: undated). 12 bks, descensus Christi at the beginning of bk. 12. Braun, Ancilla Calliopeae, 74 dates the publication to before 1513. Gómez, Thalichristia (1522): Gómez de Ciudad Real Álvar, Alvari Gomez Thalichristia ad beatissimum Hadrianum ex cardinali Dertosano Pontificem maximum (Alcalá de Henares, Arnao Guillén de Brocar: 1522). Second ed. Alcalá de Henares, Michael de Eguia: 1525. 25 bks., descensus in bk. 22. Rossetus, Christus (1534): Rossetus Petrus, Petri Rosseti poetae laureati Christus, nunc primum in lucem aeditus (Paris, Simon de Colines: 1534). Second ed. 1543. 3 bks., gathering of the cohorts of hell in the first part of bk. 3. Vida, Christiad (1535): Vida Marcus Hieronymus, Marci Hieronymi Vidae Cremonensis Albae Episcopi Christiados libri sex (Cremona, Lodovico Britannico: 1535). Revised edition in Vida Marcus Hieronymus, Marci Hieronymi Vidae Cremonensis Albae Episcopi Poemata omnia tam quae ad Christi veritatem pertinent quam ea quae haud plane disiunxit a fabula utraque seorsum ab alteris, 2 vols., vol. I (Cremona, Giovanni Muzio – Bernardo Locheta: 1550). For a list of the numerous reprints between 1536 and 1894, see Vida, Christiad, transl. Gardner, 441–442. Critical ed. Vida, Christias,

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ed. von Contzen et al., with German translation and commentary. For underworld episodes, see above. Donadei, De bello Christi (1614): Donadei Natale, De bello Christi operis ad Christianam pietatem, moresque adolescentium in scholis religiosissime informandos maxime saluberrimi Natalis Donadei philosophiae, et Med. Doct. Siculi Alcariensis libri duodecim (Messina, Pietro Brea: 1614). Second ed. Panormi 1720. 12 bks., descensus in bk. 11. Höppener, Torcular Dei-hominis (1614): Höppener Peter, Torcular dei-hominis, hoc est historia passionis redemptoris et salvatoris nostri Jesu Christi carmine heroico Virgiliano descripta (Rostock, M[oritz] Saxo: 1614). 3 bks. (actus), descensus and topothesia in bk. 3. Ross, Christiad (1638): Ross Alexander, Virgilii Evangelisantis Christiados libri XIII in quibus omnia quae de Domino nostro I. Christo in utroque testamento vel dicta vel praedicta sunt altisona divini Maronis tuba suavissime decantantur (London, Richard Thrale: 1638). Reprints Roterdam, Arnold Leers: 1653, Zurich, Bodmerianus: 1664, Leipzig, Samuel Benjamin Walther: 1733, Berlin: 1764. Clarke, Christiad (1670): Clarke Robert, Christiados sive de passione Domini libri 17 authore domino Roberto Clarke Cartusiano Anglo (Bruges, Lucas Kerchovius: 1670). Reprint Augsburg – Dillingen, Johann Caspar Bencard: 1708. b) Epics in one book / ‘Epyllia’ de Vallibus, Jhesuida (ca. 1473): Vallibus Hieronymus de, Jhesuida Hieronimi de Vallibus Paduani ad reverendum in Christo patrem et dominum dominum Petrum Donato regie urbis Padue presulem dignissimum dominum suum colendissimum (Augsburg, Günther Zainer: ca. 1473). Indications after the exemplary Munich, BSB, 4 Inc. s.a. 1902. For further editions, see Czapla, Das Bibelepos in der Frühen Neuzeit, 600–606. A short description of the underworld during the convocatio demonum a Plutone principi infernali, fols. 1v–2. Muzio, De triumpho Christi (1499): Muzio Macario, Macarius Mutius Camers de triumpho Christi (Venice, Franciscus Lucensis – Antonius Francisci: 1499). For further editions, see Czapla, Das Bibelepos in der Frühen Neuzeit, 709–713. Erasmus, Carmen heroicum (1499?): Erasmus Desiderius, Carmen heroicum de solemnitate paschali atque de tryumphali Christi resurgentis pompa et descensu eius ad inferos, ed. in ASD I, 7, 385–404 after Ms. Scriverius. Funck, Triumphus Christianus (1514): Funck Matthias, Triumphus Christianus Mathie Funck Haynoviensis (Frankfurt a.d. Oder, Iohannes Hanauius: 1514). Hessus, Victoria Christi (1517): Hessus Helius Eobanus, Victoria Christi ab inferis carmine heroico (Erfurt, Mattheus Maler: 1517). Second ed. as Hymnus paschalis Christi resurgentis, H. Eobano Hesso autore nuper inventus et editus in Schola Marpurgensi […] (Marburg, Christian Egenolph: 1542). Critical edition in The Poetic Works of Helius Eobanus Hessus, ed. H. Vredeveld, vol. III., 458–491.

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Spangenberg, Triumphus Christi heroicus (1539): Spangenberg Johann, Triumphus Christi heroicus, in Idem, Evangelia Dominicalia in versiculos extemporaliter versa (Wittenberg, Georg Rhau: 1539). Critical edition in The Poetic Works of Helius Eobanus Hessus, ed. H. Vredeveld, vol. III, 498–507. For further editions, see Czapla, Das Bibelepos in der Frühen Neuzeit, 714–715. Major, Ascensio Christi (1563): Major Johannes, In ascensionem Christi e terris in coelum carmen scriptum a Iohanne Maiore Ioachimo, Doctore (Wittenberg, Jacob Lucius: 1563). Hecheler, Historia passionis (1581): Hecheler Johannes, Historia passionis et mortis domini ac salvatoris nostri Iesu Christi heroico carmine ad nobilem, strenuum, virtute et eruditione praestantem virum D. Bernhardum a Kisleben (Helmstedt, Jacob Lucius: 1581). Vigewirt, De passione (1584): Vigewirt Nicolaus, Carmen heroicum de passione, morte et resurrectione Iesu Christi ad nobilissimum virum, generis antiquitate, pietate, integritate, sapientia, prudentia, atque omni virtutum genere clarissimum, Dn. Ioachimum a Beust […] (Wittenberg, Matthaeus Welack: 1581). Mynsinger, Resurrectio domini (1585): Mynsinger Heinrich Albert, Carmen in resurrectionem domini et servatoris nostri Iesu Christi scriptum per Henricum Albertum Mynsingerum a Frundeck (Helmstedt, Jacob Lucius: 1585). Horn, De resurrectione (1613): Horn Abraham, Carmen heroicum de resurrectione sacrosanctissima potentissimi illustrissimique monarchae et regis regum amplissimi domini salvatoris nostri Jesu Christi (Liegnitz, [Nicolaus] Sartorius: 1613). Berckelmann, Historia resurrectionis (1617): Berckelmann Theodor, Historia resurrectionis Domini nostri Iesu Christi, heroico carmine descripta, et reverendissimo atque illustrissimo principi ac domino Dn. Christiano postulato episcopo Halberstadensi, duci Brunsuicensi et Lunaeburgensi etc. gratulationis ergo inscripta a Theodoro Berckelmann (Helmstedt, Jacob Lucius: 1617).

Bibliography Agricola Rudolf, Rodolphi Agricolae Phrisii de inventione dialectica libri omnes et integri et recogniti […] (Cologne, Johann Gymnich: 1539). Bauckham R.B., The Fate of the Dead. Studies on the Jewish and Christian Apocalypses, Supplements to Novum Testamentum 93 (Leiden – Boston – Cologne: 1998). Berns J.J., “Höllenmeditation. Zur meditativen Funktion und mnemotechnischen Struktur barocker Höllenpoesie”, in Kurz G. (ed.), Meditation und Erinnerung in der Frühen Neuzeit, Formen der Erinnerung 2 (Göttingen: 2000) 141–173. Braun L., Ancilla Calliopeae. Ein Repertorium der Neulateinischen Epik Frankreichs, Mittellateinische Studien und Texte 38 (Leiden – Boston: 2007).

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Campbell J.J., “To Hell and Back: Latin Tradition and Literary Use of the ‘Descensus ad inferos’ in Old English”, Viator 13 (1982) 107–158. Cave T., “‘Enargeia’: Erasmus and the Rhetoric of Presence in the Sixteenth Century”, L’Esprit Créateur 16.4 (1976) 5–19. Clarke Robert, Die Christiade von Robert Clarke, trans. A.C. Walthierer (Ingolstadt: 1853). Clarke Robert, Christiados libri XVII authore Roberto Clarko Cartusiano Anglo, ed. A.C. Walthierer (Ingolstadt: 1855). Czapla R.G., Das Bibelepos in der Frühen Neuzeit. Zur deutschen Geschichte einer europäischen Gattung, Frühe Neuzeit 165 (Berlin – Boston: 2013). Di Cesare M.A., Vida’s Christiad and Vergilian Epic (New York – London: 1964). Enenkel K.A.E., Die Erfindung des Menschen. Die Autobiographik des frühneuzeitlichen Humanismus von Petrarca bis Lipsius (Berlin – New York: 2008). Enenkel K.A.E., “Enargeia Fireworks: Jesuit Image Theory in Franciscus Neumayr’s Rhetorical Manual (Idea Rhetoricae, 1748) and His Tragedies”, in de Boer W. – Enenkel K.A.E. – Melion W.S. (eds.), Jesuit Image Theory, Intersections 45 (Leiden – Boston: 2016) 146–185. Erasmus Desiderius, Collected Works of Erasmus. Literary and Educational Writings, vol. II: De copia / De ratione studii, ed. C.R. Thompson (Toronto – Buffalo – London: 1978). Erasmus Desiderius, De duplici copia verborum ac rerum commentarii duo, ed. B.I. Knott, ASD I, 6 (Amsterdam – New York: 1988). Evangelia apocrypha. Adhibitis plurimis codicibus Graecis et Latinis maximam partem nunc primum consultis atque ineditorum copia insignibus, ed. C. von Tischendorf (Leipzig: 1876). Faini M., “‘Heroic Martyrdom Unsung’. Some Reflections on the Tradition of Christian Epic in Renaissance Italy and the European Context”, Wolfenbütteler RenaissanceMitteilungen 32 (2008–2010) 135–152. Friedman J.B., Orpheus in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: 1970). Graf F., “Ekphrasis: Die Entstehung der Gattung in der Antike”, in Böhm G. – Pfotenhauer H. (edd.), Beschreibungskunst – Kunstbeschreibung. Ekphrasis von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: 1995) 143–155. Haas A., “Descensus ad inferos. Höllenfahrten und Jenseitsvisionen im Mittelalter vor Dante”, in idem (ed.), Geistliches Mittelalter, Dokimion 8 (Freiburg: 1984) 161–171. Hardie P., The Last Trojan Hero. A Cultural History of Virgil’s Aeneid (London – New York: 2014). Heffernan J.A.W., “Ekphrasis and Representation”, New Literary History 22.2 (1991) 297–316. Heffernan J.A.W., Museum of Words. The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashley (Chicago – London: 1993).

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Herzog M., Descensus ad inferos. Eine religionsphilosophische Untersuchung der Motive und Interpretationen mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der monographischen Literatur seit dem 16. Jahrhundert, Frankfurter Theologische Studien 53 (Frankfurt a.M.: 1997). Hessus Helius Eobanus, The Poetic Works of Helius Eobanus Hessus, ed. H. Vredeveld, 4 vols., vol III (Leiden – Boston: 2012). Horsfall N., Virgil, Aeneid 7. A Commentary (Leiden – Boston – Cologne: 2000). Horsfall N., Virgil, Aeneid 6. A Commentary, 2 vols. (Berlin: 2013). Koelb J.H., The Poetics of Description. Imagined Places in European Literature (New York: 2006). Korte P., Die antike Unterwelt im christlichen Mittelalter. Kommentierung – Dichtung – philosophischer Diskurs, Tradition – Reform – Innovation 16 (Frankfurt a.M. et al.: 2012). Lausberg H., Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik. Eine Grundlegung der Literaturwissenschaft (Munich: 1973). Lewalski B.K., Milton’s Brief Epic. The Genre, Meaning, and Art of Paradise Regained (Providence – London: 1966). Mack P., A History of Renaissance Rhetoric 1380–1620 (Oxford: 2011). Norden E., P. Vergilius Maro. Aeneis Buch VI (Leipzig: 1903). Piccolomini Enea Silvio, Aeneae Sylvii Piccolominei Senensis, qui post adeptum pontificatum Pius eius nominis secundus appelatus est, opera quae extant omnia […] (Basel, Heinrich Petri: 1551). Plett H.F., Enargeia in Classical Antiquity and the Early Modern Age. The Aesthetics of Evidence, International Studies in the History of Rhetoric 4 (Leiden – Boston: 2012). Plett H.F., “Evidentia. Zur Rhetorik der Präsenz in den artes der Frühen Neuzeit”, in Hintzen B. – Simons R. (edd.), Norm und Poesie. Zur expliziten und impliziten Poetik in der lateinischen Literatur der Frühen Neuzeit, Frühe Neuzeit 178 (Berlin – Boston: 2013) 255–273. Roling B., “Zwischen epischer Theologie und theologischer Epik. Die Versuchung Christi in der lateinischen Bibeldichtung von Iuvencus bis Robert Clarke”, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 40 (2006) 327–382. von Rosen V., “Die Enargeia des Gemäldes. Zu einem vergessenen Inhalt des Utpictura-poesis und seiner Relevanz für das cinquecenteske Bildkonzeot”, Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 27 (2000) 171–208. Schaefer C. – Rentsch S., “Ekphrasis. Anmerkungen zur Begriffsbestimmung in der neueren Forschung”, Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur 114.2 (2004) 132–165. Scholz B.F., “Ekphrasis and Enargeia in Quintilian’s Intstitutionis oratoriae libri xii”, in Oesterreich P.L. – Sloane T.O. (edd.), Rhetorica movet. Studies in Historical and

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Modern Rhetoric in Honour of Heinrich F. Plett (Leiden – Boston – Cologne: 1999) 3–24. Spitzer L., “The ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ or Content vs. Metagrammar”, Comparative Literature 7.3 (1955) 203–225. Springer C.P.E., “Macarius Mutius’s De Triumpho Christi: Christian Epic Theory and Practice in the Late Quattrocento”, in Dalzell A. – Fantazzi C. – Schoeck R.J. (eds.), Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Torontonensis. Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies. Toronto 8 August to 13 August 1988 (New York: 1991) 739–746. Springer C.P.E., “The Biblical Epic in Late Antiquity and the Early Modern Period: The Poetics of Tradition”, in von Martels Z. – Schmidt V.M. (eds.), Antiquity Renewed. Late Classical and Early Modern Themes, Groningen Studies in Cultural Change 4 (Leuven: 2003) 103–126. Thurn N., Kommentar zur Carlias des Ugolino Verino, Humanistische Bibliothek 2.33 (Munich: 2002). Tormey W., “The Journey within the Journey: Catabasis and Travel Narrative in Late Medieval and Early Modern Epic”, in Classen A. (ed.), Travel, Time, and Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time. Explorations of World Perceptions and Processes of Identity Formation, Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture 22 (Boston – Berlin: 2018) 585–621. Turner R.A., “Descendit ad inferos: Medieval Views on Christ’s Descent into Hell and the Salvation of the Ancient Just”, Journal of the History of Ideas 27.2 (1966) 173–194. Vida Marco Girolamo, Christiad, trans. J. Gardner, I Tatti Renaissance Library 39 (Cambridge – London: 2009). Vida Marco Girolamo, Christias, ed. E. von Contzen et al., 2 vols. (Trier: 2013). Young F., English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553–1829 (Farnham: 2013).

chapter 17

World Landscape as Visual Exegesis: Herri met de Bles’s Penitent Saint Jerome Michel Weemans Therefore the human mind is a high mountain to whose ascent we have ordered the heart Gerard Zerbolt van Zutphen, The Spiritual Ascents

⸪ Herri met de Bles’s Landscape with the Penitent Saint Jerome (Namur Museum) [Fig. 17.2] is a field of tensions whose poles are the infinite and the minute, the earthly and the celestial, external vision and internal vision.* The painter situated the hermit saint in a radiant, lushly green setting that evokes neither the Flemish countryside nor the hostile, solitary place populated only by scorpions, whither he retired to do penance, as described in his letters. The majestic mountains, the dense, well-watered forests, the blue sea stretching to the horizon, the verdant plants and jewel-like flowers, the wild animals lurking among the rocks or climbing the cliffs and peaks, the birds hovering in the sky, the boats sailing on the waters, the travelers journeying along the paths – everything captures the viewer’s attention, inviting her/his eyes to wander throughout the landscape. At the centre of this all, ostensibly turning away from sensual nature, the saint concentrates inwardly on Christ. [Fig. 17.1]. The long ascending path that scales the gigantic mountain, the landscape’s dominant feature, connects the platform where Jerome sits in meditation, to the celestial expanse of luminous sky overhead. How does one explain this conjunction or, better, contradiction between external and internal vision, between the spiritual eye of the saint locked on the cross, and the carnal eye of the beholder freely exploring the attractive landscape? How were contemporary viewers supposed to observe and interpret this vast landscape and its * I wish to express my heartfelt thanks to Walter Melion for his stimulating remarks and his invaluable assistance in the English translation of this text.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004440401_018

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Herri met de Bles, Landscape with penitent saint Jerome. Oil on wood, 75.7 × 105.8 cm. Namur, Musée des arts anciens du namurois. Detail, right part with penitent Jerome in prayer Image © Musée des arts anciens du namurois

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meticulously painted details? One answer is provided by the rare testimony of Cardinal Federico Borromeo, an avid collector of Flemish landscapes, and friend of the landscapists Paul Bril and Jan Brueghel: ‘The pleasure of looking at painted landscapes is as great as the pleasure of contemplating nature herself’, he says, while taking care to identify such pleasure as the starting point of more edifying ‘spiritual peregrinations’.1 What does Borromeo mean by ‘spiritual peregrination’? The expression refers to painted landscape as the basis for an optical and meditative journey, but it also refers to a type of devotion widespread in the sixteenth century, denoted by the terms ‘spiritual pilgrimage’ or ‘meditative pilgrimage’.2 Heir to the medieval genre of the Pilgrimage of Human Life, which characterizes each person’s lifespan as a pilgrimage wherethrough the soul searches for salvation, meditative journey treatises offered readers the opportunity to make a mental pilgrimage punctuated by moral instruction and devotional exercises marking 1 Borromeo Federico, Pro suis studiis (Ms. Ambr. G 310 inf., n. 8, 1628, fols. 252r–253r, quoted in Jones P., “Federico Borromeo as a Patron of Landscapes and Still Lifes: Christian Optimism in Italy ca. 1600”, The Art Bulletin 70.2 (1988) 262. Borromeo possessed two landscapes with the penitent St. Jerome, by Jan Brueghel and Paul Bril (Milano, Pinacotheca Ambrosiana). On the revival of interest in Herri met de Bles around 1600 and his influence on Paul Bril, Jan Brueghel, Josse de Momper, Kerstiaen Keuninck and Agedius Sadeler, see Gibson W., “The Man with the Little Owl: The Legacy of Herri Bles”, in Muller N.E. – Rosasco B.J. – Marrow J.H. (eds.), Herri met de Bles. Studies and Exploration of the World Landscape Tradition (Princeton: 1998) 131–142. 2 On the pilgrimage of life and spiritual pilgrimage in late Middle Ages and Early Modern culture, see Ladner G.B., “Homo viator: Medieval Ideas on Alienation and Order”, Speculum 41 (1967) 23–259; Wenzel S., “The pilgrimage of life as a late medieval genre”, Medieval Studies 35 (1973) 370–388; Solignac A., “Pèlerinage”, in Derville A. – Lamarche P. – Solignac A. (eds.) Dictionnaire de spiritualité (Paris: 1980) tome XII, vol. 1, col. 888; Botvinick M., “The Painting as Pilgrimage: Traces of a subtext in the Work of Campin and Contemporaries”, Art History 15 (1992) 1–18; Marin L., Philippe de Champaigne ou la présence cachée (Paris: 1995); Pomel F., Les voies de l’Au-delà et l’essor de l’allégorie au Moyen-Age (Paris: 2001); Pomel F. – Duval F. (eds.), Guillaume de Digulleville. Les pèlerinages allégoriques (Rennes: 2008); Guiderdoni A., “Figures de l’âme pèlerine. La méditation emblématique aux XVI° et XVII° siècles”, Rivista di storia e litteratura religiosa XLI.3 (2006) 696–724; Maupeu P., Pèlerins de vie humaine. Autobiographie et allégorie narrative, de Guillaume de Deguileville à Octovien de Saint-Gelais (Paris: 2009); Luttikhuisen H., “Still Walking: Spiritual Pilgrimage, Early Dutch Painting, and the Dynamics of Faith” in Blick S. – Gelfand L. (eds.), Push Me, Pull You: Imaginative and Emotional Interaction in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art (Leiden: 2011) 199–225; Julia D., Le Voyage aux saints. Les pèlerinages dans l’Occident moderne (xve-xviiie siècle) (Paris: 2016); Enenkel K.A.E. – Göttler C. (eds.), Solitudo. Spaces, Places and Times of Solitude in Late Medieval and Early Modern Cultures (Leiden – Boston: 2018); and Guiderdoni A., “Constructing the Imaginary Desert of the Soul in Emblematic Literature”, in Enenkel K.A.E. – Göttler C. (eds.), Solitudo. Spaces, Places and Times of Solitude in Late Medieval and Early Modern Cultures (Leiden – Boston: 2018) 208–241.

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stages in the soul’s journey toward God.3 The language is often strongly visual, and landscape metaphors abound: spiritual mountain, valley of tears, region of dissemblance, desert of the soul, garden of the soul. Structural metaphors of this sort also appear in the evocative titles of these treatises, many of which, such as Gerard Zerbolt van Zutphen’s The Spiritual Ascents,4 were reissued in the sixteenth century. They appear to have been foundational for landscapes such as Bles’s Saint Jerome. Bles’s Landscape with the Penitent Saint Jerome is an important milestone in the development of the Weltlandschaft (world landscape), the sixteenthcentury Flemish landscape type that most actively served to instrumentalize ‘visual piety’.5 This expression refers to the use of material images (paintings, engravings, sculptures, etc.) for devotion purposes, but it also connotes the meditative images fashioned interiorly by the imaginative faculty of devotees during their spiritual exercises.6 Sixteenth-century devotional manuals 3 On the ubiquity of metaphors of peregrinatio vitae and spiritual ascent in Netherlandish art, see Falkenburg R.L., Joachim Patinir: Landscape as an Image of the Pilgrimage of Life (Amsterdam – Philadelphia: 1988); Botvinick M., “The Painting as Pilgrimage: Traces of a subtext in the Work of Campin and Contemporaries”, Art History 15 (1992) 1–18; Heck C., L’échelle céleste. Une histoire de la quête du ciel (Paris: 1997); Falque I., Portraits de dévots, pratiques religieuses et expérience spirituelle dans la peinture des anciens Pays-Bas (1400–1550) (Ph.D. Dissertation, Université de Liège: 2010); Luttikhuisen H., “Still Walking: Spiritual Pilgrimage, Early Dutch Painting, and the Dynamics of Faith” in Blick S. – Gelfand L. (eds.) Push Me, Pull You: Imaginative and Emotional Interaction in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art (Leiden: 2011) 199–225; Weemans M., “Le paysage monde comme pérégrination spirituelle et exégèse visuelle” in Tapié A. – Weemans M. (eds.), Fables du paysage flamand, exhibition catalogue, Lille, Palais des Beaux-Arts (Paris: 2012); and Weemans M., Herri met de Bles. Les ruses du paysage au temps d’Érasme et de Bruegel (Paris: 2013). 4 Gerard Zerbolt van Zutphen’s The Spiritual Ascents (De spiritualibus ascensionibus), together with his Manual of Inner Reform (Tractacus devotus de reformacione virium anime), was among the most popular textbooks of the Modern Devotion, widely republished in the 16th century. See Zerbolt van Zutphen G., The Spiritual Ascents: A Devotional Treatise, trans. J.-P. Arthur (London: 1908); Zerbolt van Zutphen G., Manuel de la réforme intérieure. Tractacus devotus de reformacione virium anime. Édition critique et traduction par F J. Legrand (Turnhout: 2001); Zerbolt van Zutphen G., La montée du cœur. De spiritualibus ascensionibus. Édition critique et traduction par F.J. Legrand (Turnhout: 2006); and Zerbolt van Zutphen G., Geestelijke opklimmingen. Een gids voor de geestelijke weg uit de vroege Moderne Devotie ver­ taald, ingeleid en toegelicht door R.T.M. Van Dijk (Amsterdam: 2011). 5 For a discussion of the religious and exegetical dimension of the 16th-century Netherlandish world landscape, see Falkenburg R.L., Joachim Patinir: Landscape as an Image of the Pilgrimage of Life (Amsterdam – Philadelphia: 1988); and Ribouillault D. – Weemans M (eds.), Le paysage sacré. Le paysage comme exégèse dans l’Europe de la première modernité / Sacred Landscape: Landscape as Exegesis in Early Modern Europe (Florence: 2011) 9–21. 6 See Falkenburg R.L., The Fruit of Devotion: Mysticism and the imagery of love in Flemish paintings of the Virgin and Child, 1450–1550 (New York: 1994); Falkenburg R.L., “Hieronymus

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published in the wake of the devotio moderna made widely available the techniques of visualizing images internally and meditating them; widely accessible to a semi-religious and secular public, such exercises were seen as a way of achieving spiritual purification and inner reform. To understand the nature of the spiritual journey – the peregrinatio – that Flemish landscapes invite us to make, it is necessary to consider how external and internal images were seen as linked, how literary landscape metaphors were translated into painted landscapes. 1

The Spiritual Ascents A man came down from Jerusalem to Jericho. This expression describes in an allegorical sense the fall of the human race. […] To say that that man was in Jerusalem, means that he clearly distinguished and perceived with the pure eyes of the understanding and spiritually grasps God himself […]. You were in Jerusalem, you fell in Jericho. […] You were fully illuminated with an intelligible light and purified from any muddy concupiscence; now you are blinded by a cloud of ignorance.7

From the very first lines of his Manual of Internal Reform, which anticipates The Spiritual Ascents,8 Zerbolt sets out the dual themes – the heavenward Bosch’s Mass of St. Gregory and sacramental vision”, in Lentes T. – Gormans A. (eds.), Das Bild der Erscheinung. Die Gregorymesse in Mittelalter (Berlin: 2007); Krüger K. – Nova A. (eds.), Imagination und Wirklichkeit. Zum Verhältnis von mentalen une realen Bildern in der Kunst der frühen Neuzeit (Mainz: 2000); Melion W., The Art of Vision in Jerome Nadal’s “Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia”, Volume 1 of Jerome Nadal,“Annotations and Meditations on the Liturgical Gospels,” trans. Father F. Homann, S.J. (Philadelphia: 2003); Melion W., The Meditative Art: Studies in the Northern Devotional Print 1550–1625 (Philadelphia: 2009); Melion W. – Dekoninck R. – Guiderdoni A. (eds.), ‘Ut pictura meditatio’: The Meditative Image in Northern Art, 1500–1700, Proteus: Studies in Early Modern Identity Formation 4 (Turnhout: 2012); Melion W. – Clifton J. – Weemans M. (eds.), Imago Exegetica: Visual Images as Exegetical Instruments, 1400–1700, Intersections 33 (Leiden – Boston: 2014); Scribner R.W., “Popular Piety and Modes of Visual Perception in Late Medieval and Reformation Germany”, The Journal of Religion History 15 (1989) 448–469; Veelenturf K., Geen povere Schoonheid. Laat­­middeleeuwse kunst in verband met de Moderne Devotie (Nijmegen: 2000); and Waaijman K., “Beeld en beeldloosheid: een uitdaaging aan de devotie”, in Veelenturf K. (ed.), Geen povere Schoonheid. Laat-middeleeuwse kunst in verband met de Moderne Devotie (Nijmegen: 2000) 31–42. 7 Zerbolt, Manuel de réforme intérieure 95. 8 On the Dutch editions of Zerbolt’s two treatises in 15th and 16th centuries, see Zerbolt Manuel de réforme intérieure 83; Zerbolt, La montée du cœur 55–56; see also Engen J. van, Devotio

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pilgrimage and the visio Dei – that structure the entire work: together they refer to the Christian anthropology of vision, whereby humankind after the Fall wanders in the eschatological hope of returning to the heavenly Jerusalem and there seeing the vision of God ‘with the pure eye of understanding’. The descent from Jerusalem to Jericho, Zerbolt explains, signifies the original fall and expulsion from Paradise where man, having been created in the likeness of God, was privileged to see the Creator face-to-face; Jericho is the ‘place of inconstancy’ where humankind fell, losing control over the three powers of the soul – reason, memory and will. Zerbolt’s Manual proposes a method of progressive ‘reform’ of these faculties, which are like an inner mirror of divine harmony, wherein God’s likeness may be descried, a likeness that each person must restore through the daily practice of spiritual exercises.9 These meditative exercises follow calendrical rhythm of devotional and liturgical prayer, and are anchored in the fundamental process of ruminatio (rumination), involving the cultivation of patience and humility. The bipartition into two places, Jerusalem and Jericho, and the division into three phases corresponding to the reform of the three faculties, organize the book as a spiritual peregrination leading from blindness to vision.10 The combined themes of ascent and vision play the same structural role in The Spiritual Ascents (De spiritualibus ascensionibus), conceived as an arduous climb up a steep mountainside. Zerbolt describes in seventy chapters how humankind, created in the image and likeness (similitudo) of God, fell into a

moderna 56–58. On the dating of Zerbolt’s two books see Rooij J. van, Gerard Zerbolt van Zutphen 95; Gerrits, Inter Timorem et Spem 17; Aelst J. van, “Gerard Zerbolt et les débuts de la dévotion moderne. Introduction”, Zerbolt, Le manuel de réforme intérieure (Turnhout: 2001) 38; and Staubach N., “Gerard Zerbolt et son oeuvre. Introduction”, in La montée du cœur. De spiritualibus ascensionibus. Édition critique et traduction par F.J. Legrand (Turnhout: 2006) 18–19, Falque, Portaits de dévots 2011 258–259. 9 On Zerbolt van Zutphen, see Rooij J. van, Gerard Zerbolt van Zutphen, Leven en geschriften (Nijmegen: 1936); Gerrits G.-H., Inter Timorem Et Spem: A Study of the Theological Thought of Gerard Zerbolt of Zutphen (1367–1398) (Leiden: 1986); Staubach N., Kirchenreform von unten: Gerhard Zerbolt von Zutphen und die Brüder vom gemeinsamen Leben (Frankfurt a.M. 2004); Staubach, “Gerard Zerbolt et son oeuvre” 7–40; Aelst J. van, “Gerard Zerbolt et les débuts de la dévotion moderne” 7–42; Aelst J. van, “Bitter als Myrrh. Gerard Zerbolt’s Meditation on the Passion of Christ”, in Staubach (ed.), Kirchenreform von unten 306– 332; Dijk R.T. van, “Ascensiones in corde disponere. Spirituelle Umformung bei Gerhard Zerbolt von Zutphen”, in Staubach N. (ed.), Kirchenreform von unten 287–305; and Engen J. van, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life. The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Later Middle-Ages (Philadelphia: 2008). 10 On the influence of Bonaventure’s tripartite model on Zerbolt, see Rooij J. van, Gerard Zerbolt van Zutphen 6–16.

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state of sinful unlikeness (dissimilitudo), and must now strive to recover their original state of likeness: Once you were established on the high mountain of your natural and primordial dignity, but you willingly fell headlong into a certain low valley. You must therefore leave this valley and ascend once again the mountain whence you fell.11 Three spiritual ascents organize the entire book: the reader is advised to rebuild the heart into a ladder (scala spiritualis) whose summit touches the gateway of heaven; climbing this ladder entails striving to return to a pristine state of rectitude and spiritual discernment.12 Like the Manual of Inner Reform, The Spiritual Ascents begins with a meditation on the three stages of humanity’s fall from grace. The first results from original sin; the second from the growing distance between fallen humanity and prelapsarian rectitude, a gap wherein human nature become increasingly ‘muddied and spineless’;13 the third ensues when the person reaches ‘the distant region of unlikeness’ (regionem dissimilitudinis), the place where s/he wholly submits to the devil and lapses into mortal sin.14 This triple fall in turn calls for three ascents that climb in the opposite direction: the first responds to sins with repentance; the second purifies the heart through the exercise of fear, hope and charity; the third encourages the soul to struggle against vice and to draw closer to the love of God. Each ascent is accompanied by meditative exercises that assist the devout reader to progress in his journey gradually leading from Jericho to Jerusalem, from the valley of tears to the summit of the mountain, motivated by the desire for the beatific vision. Vision underlies the whole treatise, which is based both on the doctrine of the visio Dei and on a tripartite model of vision (physical vision, inner and imaginative vision, intellective and beatific vision) directed toward achieving divine contemplation.15 Zerbolt punctuates his text with injunctions to see (‘to 11 Zerbolt, The Spiritual Ascents 246. 12 Ibidem 248–249: ‘The intellect, in turn illuminated from above by the light of the face of God, knew fully by this natural and gracious illumination what it should do and what it should repudiate […] Through that fall […] Reason itself, made blind, erroneous, and obtuse, often holds the false for true and frequently involves itself in the useless and merely curious’. 13 Ibidem 250. 14 Ibidem 251: Chapter V: “Man’s Third Step Downward: Mortal Sin by which He Departs Furthest into the Region of Dissimilitude”. 15 On vision in Zerbolt’s treatises, see Dijk R.T. van, “Thematische meditatie en het beeld: visualiteit in ‘De spiritualibus ascensionibus’ van Gerard Zerbolt an Zutphen”, in Veelenturf (ed.), Geen povere Schoonheid 43–66; and Dijk R.T. van, “Toward Imageless Contemplation.

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observe’, ‘to stare’, ‘to extend the gaze’, ‘to remove the veil that obscures sight’, ‘to exchange our eye for a foreign eye that sees better than we’, etc.), and multiplies the terms for sight (videre, ecce, aspicere, respicere, speculari, intueri, etc.); his terminology applies equally to physical vision and to speculative vision, to leveling the gaze attentively and in a sustained way at the res (things) of nature or of God.16 The insistence on the act of beholding culminates in the chapters that encourage the devotee imaginatively to visualize episodes from the life of Christ, especially the Passion. The devotee is urged to see these scenes as if with her/his physical eyes, but Zerbolt’s treatise mainly anchors vision in the introspective imagination.17 At the end of the process of purification and ascent towards spiritual perfection, another way of seeing is discerned,18 but when Zerbolt talks about access to this ultimate kind of vision, he recognizes that it remains inaccessible here on earth and will be available only in the afterlife:19 But you should not think that we are able to climb any of these steps completely or perfectly in this life. […] For as long as we are in the body, we wander far from God.20 Zerbolt comes back several times to the notion of divine contemplation; for example, in chapter 26, after describing the ascent to perfection in charity, he invokes ‘the intelligence [which] rises above itself in the gaze of divine

16 17 18 19

20

Gerard Zerbolt van Zutphen as Guide for lectio divina”, in Bloomestijn H. – Caspers C. – Hofman R. (eds.), Spirituality Renewed. Studies on Significant Representatives of the Devotio Moderna (Leuven – Paris – Dudley MA: 2003) 3–28. See Dijk R.T. van, “Thematische meditatie en het beeld”. The treatise was written before the development of illustrated editions of meditative manuals and the codification of the use of images as complementary support for meditation. See ibidem 60. Zerbolt, The Spiritual Ascents 268: ‘Think, gather up your whole strength to consider, what joy will be to gaze forever on God in his essence, to look upon the great and only Trinity with the pure eye of the heart […] In that vision you will see all’. Zerbolt maintains the gap between the earthly vision and the essential vision of God, even when he mentions the original vision from which man benefited before the fall. See ibidem 247: ‘The Lord God, who created you in his image and likeness, once placed you in such a sublime dignity, on such a high mountain of natural gifts and spiritual graces, that unless you advance toward the essential vision of God, you will hardly be able to ascend at all. […] Behold how much good he bestowed upon you, on what a sublime peak he placed you. Your intellect was illuminated like your first parent, and although, as we believe, it did not see God in his essence, it nonetheless gazed upon him with the pure intuition of the mind and at the limits of contemplation’. Ibidem 286. I have modified the last part of the English translation, ‘we are alienated from God’, to stay closer to the Latin term ‘peregrinamur’ used by Zerbolt.

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contemplation, albeit in a mirror, [or] as in an enigma’.21 He therefore carefully distinguishes between divine contemplation that ensues at the end of this ascent – comprised by a vision of God ‘in mirror and enigma’, within the enigmatic mirror of the soul – from the eschatological face-to-face vision that will only come at the end of time. As a consequence of this unbridgeable gap, the treatise concludes with a sharp injunction to all those who have reached the summit of their upward journey: although they must now descend, this time ‘descent’ has a positive meaning, as Zerbolt explains by reference to the example of the ladder whereon Jacob saw angels ascending and descending, or to that of the saints who, ‘as long as they are pilgrims and subjected to the corrupting bodies, cannot rise continuously and without interruption’.22 The cyclical movement of ascent and descent, applicable even to the saints, is doubly useful since it insists on the humble character of the human condition, its oscillation between rising and falling, and motivates compassion toward one’s fellows:23 There are two such descents, the first by which man descends to himself, the second by which he descends to his neighbor. […] As you rise and descend, you embrace the two feet of Christ with Mary the sinner.24 Zerbolt ascribes less weight to the goal of mystical union with the divine; instead favouring the long, spiritual process of ascetic meditation and reform of the soul.25 The central motif of the aspiring gaze that strives to reach a distant goal is inseparable from the paradox it serves to reinforce: that of the incessant tension between ascent and descent, between the straight and the circuitous path, the strait way and the wide,26 and that of admitting the impossibility of reaching the goal in sight, even while insisting on the absolute necessity of such an attempt. Although spiritual ascent structures the treatise, peregrination upward takes the form less of a continuous vertical ascent than a circular movement alternating between ascent and descent.27 21

‘Intellectus sepe ultra se ascendit ad intuitum divine speculationis, licet per speculum in aenigmate’, Zerbolt, La montée du Coeur. De spiritualibus ascensionibus 198. 22 Ibidem Zerbolt, The Spiritual Ascents 307. 23 Ibidem 312. 24 Ibidem 308. 25 On the various viewpoints of Zerbolt’s specialists on this matter, see Falque Portraits de dévots 302. 26 On the opposition between original righteousness and curvature of humility in the celestial ladders, see Heck, L’échelle céleste 250. 27 On the movement of descent before and after the ascent, see Heck L’échelle céleste 226–260.

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The Book of Nature

In addition to inner contemplation, discussed in chapter 26, Zerbolt endorses another possible way of approaching God contemplatively, this time through outer vision: ‘If he goes abroad, discovery of the beauty of Creation inflames him with love of the Creator’.28 The articulation of two modes of divine contemplation is important because it underscores the complementary relation between external and internal vision, a relation that is less oppositional than continuous, as Jeffrey Hamburger has pointed out, and which underlies the speculative theory of vision that developed in the high Middle Ages and profoundly influenced the thinking of the Modern Devotion. The idea of speculation (with respect to which, chapter 26 of Zerbolt’s Spiritual Ascents is canonical) derives from the description of the visible world as a mirror of invisible divinity, in Romans 1:20; this passage was read together with 1 Corinthians 13:12, Paul’s description of vision as an enigmatic mirror that substitutes in this life for the face-to-face visio Dei of the life to come.29 In Christian thought, to speculate is to practice contemplation of the visible world as a means of understanding divine principles, to move from the visible to the invisible. In many treatises that use the term ‘mirror’ (speculum) in their titles, the creatures of the natural world are described as the traces of the Creator, indexically linked to his redemptive plan for the created world. Pauline speculation, as it was understood and interpreted by Christian authors of the Middle Ages, when the term became commonplace, occupies an intermediate position in a process leading from the natural to the supernatural, from the visible to the invisible.30 ‘As a process of mediation’, Hamburger points out, ‘speculation emphasizes the relationship between things, the way in which all creation can be read as a mirror reflecting its Creator, and in which man in return can find a way to his salvation’.31 The visible world is seen as a mirror of divinity; the pathway to reforming the soul and purifying vision, incumbent upon every believer to undertake, begins with the search for the traces, the vestiges of God in nature. Speculation, defined as a process, since it consists in linking the visible and the 28 Zerbolt, The Spiritual Ascents 260. 29 For the invisible things of him, that is, his eternal power and Godhead, are seen by the creation of the world, being considered in his works (Paul, Epistle to Romans 1:20). 30 See Hamburger J., “Speculations on Speculation. Vision and Perception in the Theory and Practice of Mystical Devotion”, in Haug W. – Schneider-Lastin W. (eds.), Deutsche Mystik im abendländischen Zusammenhang. Neu erschlossene Texte, neue methodische Ansätze, neue theoretische Konzepte (Tübingen: 2000) 353–407. See also Falkenburg R.L., “Matière à spéculation”, in Falkenburg – Weemans, Bruegel (Paris: 2018). 31 Ibidem 359.

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invisible, the exterior and the interior, presupposes a unified theory of vision in which the sensory occupies an important place in soul’s progress toward spiritual perfection. Such a theory of vision has consequences for anyone interested in the role of images in the spiritual process of meditation and contemplation, but if this theory is applicable to the painted landscape, mainly because the Pauline definition of vision also fueled another fundamental metaphor that directly relates to the vision of the divine: that of the Book of Nature. I cannot consider in detail here the complexity of this metaphor omnipresent in sixteenth-century Netherlandish culture. Instead I would like briefly to rehearse its implications for landscape painting.32 The idea of nature as a book written by the hand of God assumes that each particular creature is an instructive instrument conferred by the divine will for the purpose of teaching a spiritual or moral meaning, by recourse to mediating devices such as circumlocution, analogy, and enigma. The great liber creaturae (Book of Creation) is also the means whereby humanity is led to contemplate and praise the greatness of the Creator. In this respect, the panoptic Flemish ‘world landscape’ is the pictorial expression of the Christian idea of the great Book of Nature. The metaphor of the book led to the conception of natural things as signs, vestiges, ‘broken letters’ that must be deciphered, and one of the tools of this quest is systematic comparison of the two books – the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture – that offer themselves as two complementary paths to revelation. This idea, constantly taken up by the authors such as Zerbolt, justified the application of the exegetical method of the four senses, developed for reading Scripture, to creatures: lapidaries, herbaria and bestiaries thus follow the literal description of plants, stones and animals, by interpreting them according to their allegorical, tropological and anagogical senses. Beyond licensing a shared exegetical method, the metaphor also underwrote a spiritual therapeutic: the world, conceived as a place of divine revelation, was assimilated to the enterprise of restoring to its fallen human inhabitants their lost vision of God and likeness to him. This is why literary and visual works allude to the Book of Nature (from the Libri creaturae to the hexameral poems of

32 On the book of nature, see in particular Curtius E.R., La littérature européenne et le Moyen âge latin (Paris: 1956) 390–399; Harrison P., The Bible, Protestantism and the rise of natural science (Cambridge: 1998); Van Berkel K. – Vanderjagt A. (eds.), The Book of Nature in Early Modern and Modern History (Leuven: 2006); and Witte A., “The Power of Repetition: Christian Doctrine and the Visual Exegesis of Nature in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Painting”, in Ribouillault D. – Weemans M. (eds.), Le paysage sacré. Le paysage comme exégèse dans l’Europe de la première modernité /Sacred Landscape. Landscape as Exegesis in Early Modern Europe (Florence: 2011) 93–112.

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Herri met de Bles, Landscape with penitent saint Jerome. Oil on wood, 75.7 × 105.8 cm. Namur, Musée des arts anciens du namurois Image © Musée des arts anciens du namurois

the sixteenth century) also frequently associate the metaphor of the Book of Nature with those of the peregrinatio humana and the visio Dei.33 What should be remembered here is that this metaphor did not give rise to any fixed and universal grammar, either in texts or images; rather, it inspired a multiplicity of inventive interpretations. So, what might the two books have meant for a landscape painter? And what were the specific consequences of the Christian Book of Nature to landscape painting? Finally, how did this metaphor relate to the ones mentioned above? Bles’s Penitent Saint Jerome [Fig. 17.2] and a related landscape, the Preaching of John the Baptist. [Fig. 17.3], provide answers to all these questions. In Bles’s case, the necessary articulation of the two books resulted in the elaboration of a repertoire of recurring complementary natural motifs that were also linked to the religious protagonists through significant relationships of juxtaposition, polarity and symmetry. These motifs challenge the viewer to engage in close observation and interpretation. The hypothesis that landscape can function as visual exegesis implies that the 33

See Curtius, La littérature européenne 399.

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Herri met de Bles, Landscape with the preaching of John the Baptist. Oil on wood, 86 × 120.5 cm. Bruxelles, Musées royaux des beaux-arts Image © Musées royaux des beaux-arts

painting does not simply illustrate a story (hagiographical or biblical), but cues a visual interpretation of it.34 This idea further implies that the pictorial motifs must be seen as connected to the two books; but it also requires that particular attention be paid to those visual devices that call attention to the ‘hermeneutical gap’ that defines and licenses exegesis – the necessary transition from literal or historical meaning to spiritual meaning.35 3

Bles’s Penitent Saint Jerome

Bles’s Penitent Saint Jerome [Fig. 17.2] represents the episode of the saint’s retreat into the desert of Chalcis where he remained for four years, in order to 34

On landscape as visual exegesis, see Weemans M., Herri met de Bles. Les ruses du paysage au temps de Bruegel et d’Érasme (Paris: 2013). 35 See Dahan G., Lire la Bible au Moyen-Age: Essais d’herméneutique médiévale (Geneva: 2009) 20.

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purify his soul and draw closer to God.36 Facing the crucifix, he stands in the humble attitude of a person who ‘approaches naked the naked Christ’, the better to reform and conform himself to his model. This allusion to the imitatio Christi is accentuated by the symmetrical face-to-face encounter of the saint, his arms spread wide, with the cross.37 The skull, the hourglass and the voluptuous mantle at his feet, part of a cardinal’s regalia, are cast aside to testify to his rejection of the vanities of the world. Fixed on Christ, his eyes reflect the saint’s inner concentration, in contrast to the luminous, luxuriant and vast landscape [Fig. 17.1]. In addition to Jerome’s letters describing his experience in the Chalcis desert, an abundant devout literature dedicated to the saint was published in the Netherlands during the first half of the 16th century, including the Dutch translation of the Golden Legend and the stories of Jerome and other hermits’ lives which greatly elaborate upon the episode of penance in the desert, adding many fictional scenes.38 Jerome’s lion, for instance, which became docile after the saint pulled a thorn from its paw, comes from the expanded fable; and in the distance appears the tiny caravan of merchants who stole the donkey from the monastery guarded by the lion, and which he eventually found. Bles’s Penitent Saint Jerome takes up the compositional scheme of an Andachtsbild developed by Joachim Patinir, which combines a central hieratic figure with marginal narrative scenes inspired by popular eremitical and pilgrim texts, enriched, as R. Falkenburg has shown, by the underlying metaphors of the peregrinatio vitae (pilgrimage of life) and the double path.39 The Penitent Saint Jerome is a variant of this type of Y-landscape populated by characteristic 36 On Herri met de Bles’s Landscape with penitent Saint Jerome (Namur, musée des arts anciens du Namurois), see Serck L., Henri Bles Henri Bles et la peinture de paysage dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux avant Bruegel (Ph.D. Dissertation, Université catholique de Louvain: 1990) 1007–1011; Toussaint (éd.) Henri Bles 226–227; and Weemans, Herri met de Bles 40–44. 37 On this idea see Didi-Huberman G., Saint Georges et le dragon. Versions d’une légende (Paris: 1994) 90. 38 See in particular: Jacobus de Voragine, Passionael twinterstuc Dat men hiet die gulden legende, Antwerp, Henrick Eckert van Homberch, 1505; Vitas patrum ende is ghenoemt dat Vader boeck inhoudende die historien ende legende der heiliger vaderen, Leiden, Jan Seversz, 1511; Erasmus Desiderius, Ad Nepotianum sacerdotem de clericorum et sacerdotum officiis epistolae, Deventer, Albertus Pafraet, 1523; Jerome (saint), Hoc opere continentur ordine libri subscripti. Epistolae ad Heliodorum (Deventer, Jacobus de Breda: 1505); Aliqot familiares epistolae (Antwerpen, Willem Vorsterman: 1515); Boec van Jheronimus bloemen, 1522; Epistolae aliquot, argumentis, et scholiis illustratae (Antwerpen, Willem Vorsterman: 1533); Epistolae selectiores, argumentis et scholiis illustratae (Gent, Robertus Gualterotus – Erasmus van der Eecke: 1545). 39 See Falkenburg R.L., Joachim Patinir: Landscape as an Image of the Pilgrimage of Life (Amsterdam – Philadelphia: 1988).

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patterns of paths and pilgrims, but its novelty lies in the unprecedented monumentality of the central rock arch that dominates the entire landscape with its succession of openings and passages, paths and passengers. The saint in prayer is placed at the junction of this symbolic threshold motif and at the crossing of the path that forks at this place: the wider path descends at right toward a faraway port city full of the worldly activity rejected by the saint; the narrower, more difficult path at left leads to the summit of the mountain dominated by a vertiginous rocky needle. Bles amplifies and dramatizes the joint metaphors of the peregrinatio vitae and the double path that structured Patinir’s Landscapes with Saint Jerome, by giving primary importance to the difficult mountainous path. The huge rocky arch marks the starting point of the ascending path that branches off and becomes a tunnel at left, then passes by a cave-dwelling hermit warming himself at a fire, before resurfacing high above at the point where, bathed in light, a pilgrim appears [Fig. 17.4]. The silhouette of this stooped, cowled traveler, the symbolic motif of the fragile footbridge he is crossing and the cross toward which he is heading echo the figure and circumstances of St. Jerome. An additional step connects the cross to a ladder giving access to a brick archway inserted inside a natural arch open to the sky. Inside this ultimate archway overlooking the void, a tiny silhouette is bending down to welcome the traveler, at the level of the radiant teophany taking place in the sky [Fig. 17.5].40 Surrounded by angels sounding trumpets, the luminous appearance of God, Christ and the Virgin refers either to the apocryphal letter in which Jerome claimed to hear the trumpets of heavenly judgment, or to the letter to Eustachius, describing a visionary dream: ‘Suddenly I was carried up in spirit and led before the court of the Judge, and there the light was so intense, and those round about were so bright, that I cast my face to the ground and dared not look’.41 The trumpets of the Last Judgment together with the allusion to the Personal Judgment, suggest that the visio Dei, the final face-to-face meeting with God, is at hand. This celestial motif refers not only to Jerome’s retreat at Chalcis, but also functions as an exegetical motif (recurrent in many of Bles’s landscapes), which interacts with the morphology of the landscape and the theme of spiritual ascent. The motif – one might call it the ‘trope of ascent’ – taken up or, better, amplified by the landscape: the rocky foreground where the saint prays 40

On the traditional motif of the hand of angels or God stretching out to pull up the climber from the ladder’s topmost rung, see Heck, L’échelle céleste 82ff. Also see Zerbolt, The Spiritual Ascents 246: […] as you look up to the top, raise your arms on high to the Lord, who is leaning down over the highest rung of the ladder’. 41 Letter to Eustochium XXII, in Saint Jerome, Correspondance. Tome I: Lettres I–XXII, ed. – trans. J. Labourt (Paris: 1949) 328.

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Herri met de Bles, Landscape with penitent saint Jerome. Oil on wood, 75.7 × 105.8 cm. Namur, Musée des arts anciens du namurois. Detail, left part with spring and animals Image © Musée des arts anciens du namurois

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Herri met de Bles, Landscape with penitent saint Jerome. Oil on wood, 75.7 × 105.8 cm. Namur, Musée des arts anciens du namurois. Detail, upper right part with celestial radiance Image © Musée des arts anciens du namurois

gradually opens onto a series of natural promontories, formations themselves placed on rocky elevations, populated by figures of observers, pilgrims and animals, such as the goat balancing on a needle-like summit (perhaps an allusion to the visual acuity of the goat). These devices allude to the notion that Christian soul, even as it journeys through this life, indeed aspires above all to climb, to elevate itself.42 The rocky arch and the combined motifs of the pilgrim, the ladder and the door leading to the bright sky clearly evoke the idea of spiritual ascent, explicitly exemplified by the penitent Jerome. The rocky arch mediates between the celestial theophany and the saint leaning over his cross, and the landscape thus serves to visualize the tension between ascent (toward the visio Dei) and descent (in penitential humility), between external vision and internal vision. But, as in Zerbolt’s Spiritual Ascents, the fragile ladder and 42

Or as an emblem of the “Savior healing the spiritual blindness of souls”, or even of divine ‘omniseeing’, see Charbonneau-Lassey, Le bestiaire du Christ 191.

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the uppermost arcade open to the void indicate that ultimate union with the divine is difficult, if not impossible to achieve in this life: an impassable abyss separates the earthly path from the realm of the divine apparition. The combination of motifs at the top of the mountain clearly refers to the iconography of the scala caelestis and the porta coeli.43 Viewed through this lens, the smaller rocky arch at the summit of the craggy mountain marks the goal of a continuous journey, climbing continuously upward, and linking the holy penitent, the pilgrims and the theophany. Indeed, Bles’s landscape innovatively merges the iconography of the penitent Jerome and that of the spiritual ladder. By combining these and other metaphors, the painting invites an exegetical reading that construes Saint Jerome as an earthly pilgrim striving spiritually to ascend through humble practice of the virtues of the cross. The cross, the saint’s major attribute, is formally and symbolically connected along its vertical axis, to the heavenly radiance by way of the spectacular rocky arch that visually embodies the paradox of the by turns upward and downward movement of Christ’s life, the humiliations of the Passion, the glory of the Resurrection and Ascension. Many Christian authors assimilated the cross to the metaphor of the graduate ladder, as attributes of Christ who secured human salvation through the mysteries encapsulated by the tropes of descent and ascent. The painting’s integrated web of motifs – the saint leaning over the cross, the pathways, the ladder and the heavenly gateway – visualize the very words of Saint Jerome: ‘Christ climbed onto the cross to lift us up, and the cross is the ladder that Jacob saw’.44 The saint’s attributes symbolizing the rejection of the worldly vanities, his penitential attitude and gestures indicative of his close identification with Christ, his gaze disconnected entirely focused on the crucifix, not the world, the pathway leading circuitously from earth to sky, from earthly matter to divine revelation (the true goal of the saint’s spiritual exercises) – everything bears witness to Jerome’s effort (and the beholder’s) to cultivate an interior, contemplative vision of Christ. The landscape is both a mirror of nature and a mirror of the soul of its protagonist. The foreground of the landscape consists of another set of paired metaphors: the rocky, arid zone that fills the entire left half of the picture, with warm tonality [Fig. 17.4] is contrasting with the fertile zone full of blooming plants at 43 See Heck, L’échelle céleste. 44 Jerome, Tractatus in Psalmos XCI, CCSL 78 139, quoted by Heck, L’échelle céleste 182. The theme was formulated by many Christian authors, echoing Christ’s address to Nathaniel in John 1:51: “Very truly I tell you, you will see ‘heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending on’ the Son of Man”. See Heck, L’échelle céleste 50–51, 177–183. 119.

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the saint’s right. Meticulously painted purple and yellow foxgloves, ferns and Solomon’s seals punctuate the deep green expanse of vegetation [Fig. 17.6].45 Wild animals – deer, rabbits, a fox, a crane, and the lion – gather to drink from a rocky spring [Fig. 17.4]. The spring of living water, a perennial feature of Bles’s landscapes with propagators of the Gospel – in addition to Christ himself and Jerome, John the Baptist and John the Evangelist – refers to the biblical passages designating Christ the Word as a source of living water: ‘If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me, let him drink who believes in me. He thus designated the Spirit to be received by those who would believe in him’ ( John 7:37–39); ‘He who is thirsty, I will give him of the fountain of life, freely’ (Revelation 21:6). Typological exegesis connects the metaphor of the rocky spring of living water to the paradisiacal fountain of life and Moses striking the rock,46 as well as to the baptism of Christ and to the redemptive blood that flowed from the pierced heart of Jesus.47 In Bles’s landscape, however, Christological allegory is anchored less in typological analogy than in the association between the hagiographical narrative and the imagery of the Book of Nature, e.g., the deer quenching their thirst at the spring. In the bestiary tradition, the stag functions as an emblem of Christ (its particular through its close relationship to sources of water wherein it was thought to drown venomous serpents), and in the lives of the saints, the white deer was often seen as an allusion to the miraculous appearance of Christ to his votaries.48 Jerome himself interpreted the famous passage from Psalm 42 – ‘As a stag languishes after the living water, so my soul languishes towards you, my God. My soul is thirsty for God,

45 Bles’s carefully observed flowers look back to the tradition of Van Eyck, but by bringing together so great a variety flowers in one place, he reflects less a concern for botanical precision, as C. Gillet notes, than a desire to symbolize the presence of the Creator. See Gillet C., “Les plantes et leurs représentations dans les tableaux de Henri Bles conservés aux Musée des Arts Anciens du Namurois”, in Toussaint J. (ed.), Autour de Henri Bles. Actes du colloque (Namur: 2001) 129–137. 46 Prefigured in many passages form the Old Testament where God is defined as a spring of water, in particular Jeremiah 2, 13; Isaiah 12:3, 44:3, 49:10. 47 The starting point is St. Paul’s typological commentary in 1 Corinthians 10:1–4: ‘Our fathers […] were all baptized in Moses in the cloud and in the sea, they all ate the same spiritual food and they all drank the same spiritual drink, for they drank to a spiritual rock that followed them, and that rock was the Christ’. On this topic, see Weemans, Herri met de Bles 105–133. 48 On the legend of the stag swallowing and spitting water to drown the snake, interpreted as an allegory of the word that springs from the mouth of Christ, and on the legend of the appearance of Christ in the antlers of the stag, and on the corollary miracle of the white deer, see Charbonneau Lassay, Le bestiaire du Christ 245–248.

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Herri met de Bles, Landscape with penitent saint Jerome. Oil on wood, 75.7 × 105.8 cm. Namur, Musée des arts anciens du namurois. Detail, blooming plants at the saint’s right Image © Musée des arts anciens du namurois

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for the God of life’ – as the soul’s desire to unite itself to Christ, source of light and purification.49 The unusual presence of wild animals around the rocky spring was also meant to evoke the idea of the spiritual garden of the soul, dried up by sin and replenished anew by Christ.50 Authority exercised over animals, either by Christ himself or by anchorites, stands for the restoration of the paradisiacal garden of the soul: ‘When the man of humility approaches the wild beasts […] their wild nature is tamed […] because they smell from him the same fragrance as that of Adam before the fall’.51 The assembly of wild animals drinking at the spring near the penitent Jerome in Bles’s painting thus refers to the Edenic eschatology of the anchorite who controls wild beasts.52 Christian exegetes regularly described the mountain, the desert and paradise as both real places and common metaphors of the soul. By combining the metaphorical motifs of the desert and the lush garden, the mountain and the pilgrim, the rock and the spring, the solitary anchorite and the society of formerly wild, now tame animals, the painter invites us to interpret the landscape as more than an appealing view of nature, or an illustration of the desert of Chalcis. Landscape constitutes an external reflection of the interior life of the saint, and consequently, it is adduced as a model for the reformation of the soul. Another important detail unusual in pictures of the penitent Jerome is the juxtaposition of the element of water and the element of fire [Fig. 17.7]. The painter deviates from iconographic tradition by showing a hermit in his cave, reading from the light of an intense blaze. The flames illuminate the edges of the cave entrance: warmed by the fire, the hermit has interrupted his reading, to meditate. Hooded like the pilgrim crossing the bridge above, his white beard identifies him as the aged Jerome, who therefore appears twice in the painting. His identity seems to be confirmed by the proximity of the owl, a bestiary symbol of spiritual discernment that alludes to diffusion of the light of Scripture by the scholar-saint, renowned translator and exegete of the Bible.53 Nevertheless, by leaving room for doubt as to this person’s identity – anonymous pilgrim or eponymous saint – the painter invites us to see not simply as a portrayal 49 Jerome, In Ps. XLI, PL. 26, 949 B, quoted by Baudry G.-H., Le baptême et ses symboles (Paris: 2001) 130. 50 On this theme, see in particular Alexander D., Saints and Animals in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: 2008); and Decker J.R., The Technology of Salvation and the Art of Geertgen tot Sint Jans (London: 2009) 121–146. 51 See Goppelt L., Typos: The Typological Interpretation of the Old Testament in the New (1934) (Grand Rapids: 1982) 98. 52 See Alexander, Saints and Animals. 53 On Herri met de Bles’s owl, see Weemans, Herri met de Bles 49–56.

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Herri met de Bles, Landscape with penitent saint Jerome. Oil on wood, 75.7 × 105.8 cm. Namur, Musée des arts anciens du namurois. Detail, grotto with saint Jerome and the owl Image © Musée des arts anciens du namurois

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of Jerome, but also as a figure of the pilgrim, sc., a material embodiment of the inner pilgrimage of the saint. The intimate scene of the hermit in the cave would signify a stage, a second step, in the temporal peregrination of Jerome: viewed through this lens, the landscape, with its nooks, crannies, and subsidiary figures, can be seen to embody various milestones in the saint’s meditative journey toward Christ, whose luminous Gospel is symbolized by the fire.54 Fire owes its privilege of representing divine things to its property of ‘reaching’ upward (like Scripture which, properly read, bears the soul heavenward). The desire to unite with God is ignited like a fire when reading Scripture; similar imagery was applied to the lives of the Fathers. Another canonical Christian allegory describes wooden logs thrown into a fire to signify the progress of the soul, from meditation to contemplation: ‘The carnal heart is like a green wood still full of moisture and lust’, but the more the flame of spiritual love burns brightly, ‘the more the purified soul leaps towards contemplation’.55 ‘The more the soul throws the wood of self-knowledge into the fire, the more it unites itself to Christ’.56 The fire that consumes without destroying the soul thus purifies its substance, allowing man to recover the likeness of his original state. Its purifying function, associated with that of water, is affirmed in the Bible by John the Baptist who preached the baptism of water, and prophesied the baptism of the Messiah ‘in the Holy Spirit and in fire’.57 In the exegetical tradition codified by Jerome, baptism in spirit and flame signifies the purifying transformation of the soul though and the messianic mission of Christ who reopens Paradise.58 The painter invites us to meditate with the hermit in his cave, on the purifying properties of fire, on the immaterial presence it evokes, on the clarifying and transformative effects it shares with water and the divine 54 A sign of transcendence and divine presence, it accompanies divine theophanies; fire also manifests inner transformation in the Bible and the Fathers. See Gaillard J., “Feu”, in Derville A. – Lamarche P. – Solignac A. (eds.), Dictionnaire de spiritualité (Paris: 1980) tome V, vol. 1, col. 247. Christian authors also applied the image of fire to divine charity. Thus, for Jerome, the fire of which the prophet Zechariah speaks in the Old Testament means allegorically and by typology the rampart of the church or God himself who warms by charity all those who are inside, Jerome 1430 D, 1431 A.C, quoted by Bodin Y., Saint Jérôme et l’église (Paris: 1997) 27. 55 Sclafert C., “L’allégorie de la bûche enflammée dans Hugues de Saint-Victor et saint Jean de la Croix”, Revue d’Ascétique et de Mystique 33 (1957) 245. 56 Catherine de Sienne, quoted in Gaillard “Feu”, in Dictionnaire de spiritualité 247. 57 Cf. Matthew 3:11; Luke 3:16, e.g., ‘I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me comes one who is more powerful than I […]. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire’. 58 Jerome relies on Origen’s eschatological explanation; see Jerome, In Amos 3, PL25,1071, quoted in Gaillard, “Feu” Dictionnaire de spiritualité 247.

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word. What seems certain is that far from being fortuitous, the juxtaposition of the elements of water and fire, where a gap in the light-bathed rock signals the beginning of the upward path, amplifies and nourishes our meditation on the purifying dimension of the spiritual ascent. 4

The Preaching of John the Baptist

Among the seven landscapes with the penitent Jerome painted by Herri met de Bles, two variants of the painting from Namur should be mentioned, the first of which was recently purchased by the same museum. [Fig. 17.8] Painted in collaboration with Lambert van Noort, it incorporates the same landscape, though reduced along the sides by the vertical format, and largely hidden by the monumental figure of the saint. Jerome kneels beneath a large oak tree, its trunk wound by ivy. The powerful trunk, thrusting upward, extends the vertical axis of the saint’s athletic torso: together they symbolize Jerome’s robust virtue and elevation of soul. Bles draws a further parallel between the wood of the large cross and the green tree with its ivy-covered trunk: the evergreen vine, firmly attached to the tree trunk, functions as a conventional sign of unfailing attachment to Christ, the source of eternal life.59 The allegorical motif of the rocky arch silhouetted against the sky has thus been replaced by that of the tall oak tree entwined with ivy. Painted by Lambert van Noort, who collaborated with Herri met de Bles on several pictures, the figure of the saint turns to face the crucifix, conforming his body to that of Christ, his features and intent gaze suggesting both his absorption in the sacred effigy and his inner vision of the Savior. Lambert van Noort calls attention to the stone with which the saint mortifies his body in imitation of Christ on the cross, by affixing his monogram (LVN) on it. [Fig. 17.9] Next to it on the left are two cranes killing a toad and a snake, the emblems of Christian vigilance and the fight against vices and demons. On the other side, level with the saint’s gaze, a family of bears emerges from the dappled light of the forest: Christian bestiaries describe the bear as a symbol of life-enhancing faith that shapes the human soul.60 The bears also make an appearance in the other version of the Penitent Saint Jerome, but here, 59 On ivy symbolism, see Trapp J.B., “The Owl’s Ivy and the Poet’s Bays: An Enquiry into Poetic Garlands”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 21 (1958) 227–255; and Edwards M.D., “The Holly and the Ivy”, Bollettino del Museo Civico di Padova 76 (1987) 113–125. 60 Inspired by the bear known to be born without form, this one being given to him by his mother who licks it at birth. See Cordonnier R. – Heck C., Le bestiaire médiéval (Paris: 2011).

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Herri met de Bles and Lambert van Noort, Landscape with penitent saint Jerome. Oil on wood, 116.7 × 81.6 cm. Namur, Musée des arts anciens du namurois Image © Musée des arts anciens du namurois

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FPO figure 17.9

Herri met de Bles and Lambert van Noort, Landscape with penitent saint Jerome. Oil on wood, 116.7 × 81.6 cm. Namur, Musée des arts anciens du namurois. Detail, Saint Jerome’s hand and stone of penitence with the monogram “LVN” Image © Musée des arts anciens du namurois

placed on axis with the saint’s intense gaze at Christ, their allegorical significance as symbols of faithful conformation is enhanced. A second variant of the Namur landscape is Bles’s Preaching of John the Baptist in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels [Fig. 17.3].61 Bles’s studio typically reused identical motifs and figures, or even entire landscapes, not merely for technical or economic considerations but, more importantly, as exegetical instruments.62 Compared to the Penitent Saint Jerome, the Preaching of John the Baptist exemplifies a stricter form of visual exegesis in that it contains 61 Bles devoted no less than fifteen versions to this biblical episode. On Bles’s landscapes with the St. John Preaching, see Serck L., Henri Bles 402–540; and Weemans, Herri met de Bles 105–134. 62 Weemans, Herri met de Bles 7–56.

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a biblical episode. The picture’s exegetical meaning again grows out of the significant relationship between the protagonist of the sacred narrative and the elements of the book of nature. Bles visually explores a theme also developed by Erasmus – Pharisaism. Erasmus applies the term in his bitter criticism of religious superstition, condemnation of excessive devotion to saints and relics (especially by religious orders more devoted to rites and ceremonies than to their fellow Christians), and denunciation of clerical ambition and worldliness which stray from the Gospels: in short, Pharisaism stands for attachment to the letter at the expense of the spirit, for moral blindness in opposition to spiritual discernment. In his exegesis of the preaching of St. John, Erasmus pits the visionary harbinger of Christ against the Pharisees who refuse to recognize the Messiah, and he places particular emphasis on the tropological or moral meaning, and its application to pressing contemporary problems.63 In Bles’s painting, some of the listeners attend to the sermon (though as Erasmus points out, this is no guarantee of true inner faith), but emphasis also falls on the auditors who argue among themselves, instead of listening closely, and on those who by turning away signify their spiritual inattention, the ‘torpor’ that Erasmus construes as a refusal to see Christ truly. [Fig. 17.10] The opposition between spiritual blindness and inner vision is amplified by the presence of the blind man guided by a child at right, a recurring character in Bles’s landscapes, who amplifies the underlying theme of Pharisaism. [Fig. 17.11]64 In the Preaching of John the Baptist, the blind man is associated with a peasant women heading toward the city, away from the climbing path at which the saint emphatically points; the woman and the blind man, dressed in local costume, along with the landscape setting evocative of the Flemish countryside, underscore the tropological meaning of the biblical episode. The opposition between blindness and spiritual vision is also exemplified by John the Baptist’s own gaze and gesture. The saint’s unfocussed gaze alludes to the priority he places on inner spiritual vision, in contrast to those many audience members who remain spiritually blind. The landscape of the Brussels picture differs from that which appears in his many other versions of this subject, in which saint levels his index finger at Christ who stands, barely discernible, among the forest trees. His inconspicuous silhouette leads the viewer to reflect from firsthand experience on the difficulty that the historical witnesses of Christ had in ‘seeing’ him. In the 63 Ibidem 105–134. 64 He appears frequently in moralizing literature and contemporary rhetorical plays, where he indicates by metonymy the inability of the crowd to recognize Christ even though he is present. See Hellerstedt K.-J., “The Blind Man and his Guide in Netherlandish Painting”, Simiolus 13 (1983) 163–181.

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figure 17.10 Herri met de Bles, Landscape with the preaching of John the Baptist. Oil on wood, 86 × 120.5 cm., Bruxelles, Musées royaux des beaux-arts. Detail central part Image © Musées royaux des beaux-arts

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Herri met de Bles, Landscape with the preaching of John the Baptist. Oil on wood, 86 × 120.5 cm., Bruxelles, Musées royaux des beaux-arts. Detail blind man and his guide Image © Musées royaux des beaux-arts

Brussels picture, however, the absence of the tiny figure of Jesus calls for a different kind and degree of exegetical discernment on the spectator’s part. John the Baptist directs the viewer’s eyes toward exegetical tropes of displacement, divergence, detour. For example, as in the previous painting, there is the rocky spring where deer come to drink, a figure of Christ the fountainhead. Bles adds two complementary foreground scenes that warn the viewer to beware of Pharisaism, while also referring to the opposition between Law and Gospel.65 The former (signaled by the deer’s gaze) takes the allegorical form of a falcon 65 The opposition is expressed in the preacher’s violent words to the address of his audience, in Matthew 3:7; Luke 3, 7–10, e.g., ‘Races of vipers, who taught you to flee the anger to come? […] any tree that does not produce good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire’.

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seizing its prey on the rock from which the spring sprouts [Fig. 17.10]. The rapacious falcon relates to another foreground scene, this time positive: cranes prey upon the black frogs infesting the spring-fed pond. Here as elsewhere in Bles’s oeuvre, it is not isolated details but their juxtaposition – the deer and the snake, the cranes and the frogs, the raptor and its prey – and their position within the larger whole that justifies interpreting them as allusions to Christ’s victory over Pharisees and heretics, and the Gospel’s triumphant fulfillment of the Law. Visual exegesis, as will be apparent, relies both on minute details and on the overall composition, and here again, the monumental rock arch and the pilgrims beginning their ascent play an important role. In the aftermath of baptism, recalls Erasmus in his exegesis of John the Baptist’s sermon, the prophet invited his disciples to abandon him in order to follow Christ who had ‘passed by nearby’. This, Erasmus says, signifies by allegory the opposition of the Old Law, which is stationary, and the Gospel, which is dynamic. In Bles’s visual exegesis, this allegorical antithesis is translated into the opposition between the audience members who negatively epitomize ‘torpor’ and the pilgrims who exemplify the peregrinatio vitae (pilgrimage of life), which terminates in the visio Dei made possible by the coming of Christ, and in the light of the Gospel announced by the sermon of John the Baptist. 5

Conclusion

Herri met de Bles was known as the ‘master with the owl’ because he covertly signed his landscapes by hiding a tiny owl in them. According to his first biography, Karel van Mander, viewer’s made bets, competing to find the bird first. In the Penitent Saint Jerome in Namur, the presence of the owl in a rocky hollow above the cave where the saint appears a second time, creates an analogy between the bird of wisdom and the visionary saint, translator of Scripture [Fig. 17.7]. In the Preaching of John the Baptist in Brussels, the tiny detail (testing our faculty of discernment) of the owl attacked by birds stands for the confrontation of Pharisaic obscurity and evangelical light [Fig. 17.12].66 The painter’s emblematic bird is also emblematic of his project of painting: Arasse coined the term ‘emblem-detail’ for such devices ‘which locally condense the process of representation’.67 In Bles’s landscapes, the diminutive owl points to the central problem of vision: how to discern the presence of the Creator 66 On this motif, see Weemans, Herri met de Bles 52–53. 67 Arasse, Le Détail. Pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture 219.

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figure 17.12 Herri met de Bles, Landscape with the preaching of John the Baptist. Oil on wood, 86 × 120.5 cm., Bruxelles, Musées royaux des beaux-arts. Detail owl attacked by birds Image © Musées royaux des beaux-arts

within visible Creation; how to uncover the presence of divinity in those things wherein it lodges, awaiting discovery. The articulation (in the sense of setting an assembly of parts in motion) of the two books – that of Scripture and that of nature – is the movement that vivifies exegesis. In his famous defense of the exegetical value of images, Bede recalls that the Greek word for pictura is zoographia, which he interprets as ‘living scripture’.68 From patristic authors to Erasmus, exegesis was seen as a life-giving process, especially in relation to the ‘organic’ conception of the spiritual senses, and of their ability, if properly deployed to transform the very life 68 Venerable Bede, quoted in Kessler H.L., Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art 196.

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of the reader-viewer. Any exegesis implies a conversion process that acts in accordance with a double movement: the conversion of the meaning of text and/ or image corresponds to that of the reader-spectator. The Christian devotee is thereby strengthened in virtue, and transformed; in the exegetical tradition, the effort of reconciling the three spiritual senses and the three theological virtues, effects the transformation: the allegorical sense corresponds to faith, the tropological sense to charity, the anagogical sense to hope. Text and image are both transformed and transforming. Spiritual peregrination and visual exegesis meet in their common aim of reforming and restoring spiritual discernment. The ‘path of life’ through the condensed mirrors and enigmas of nature that appear in the guise of Flemish landscapes represents and also activates the slow and patient journey of the meditative and exegetical eye journeying toward the visio Dei. The idea of landscape as the place of a specifically exegetical figurability requires the beholder to taking stock of the incessant interplay of echoes, analogies and references between the elements of the two books. The Christian figura (figurative device, hermeneutic trope), inasmuch as any figura presupposes another, within a system of mutual reference, calls for the constant work of relating the elements, facts and characters visible in the exegetical image: the rocky spring relates to the stag, and deer drinking at the spring relates to the bright fire casting its light on the hermit, the path to his spiritual journey heavenward along the way of the cross, etc. In other words, the landscape trope of journeying links the scattered elements of the two books together, without assigning to them a stable and unambiguous meaning. One of the consequences of this continuous, sometimes labyrinthine figurative journey – a spiritual peregrination of sorts, through the solitary desert wherein sacred meanings await discovery – is the impossibility of thinking about the relational meaning the figurae in a form that is neither virtual nor uncertain: since God became distant from human faculties after the fall, and the face-to-face encounter with him is henceforth forestalled until the day of Final Judgment, access to the Lord in this life can be gained only by way of detours. Let us return, then, to the Penitent Saint Jerome, in search of a final exegetical ambiguity, one last detour into the figurability of landscape [Fig. 17.2]. Leaning over his crucifix, disconnected from the external landscape, concentrating inwardly on Christ, Jerome (like John the Baptist) is a figura Christi. The exegetical sense of term implies analogical displacement and referentiality. From the figurative and narrative point of view, the landscape is the place where the legendary story unfolds (the solitary hermitage, the monastery, and the situated episodes of the lion, the donkey and the caravan of thieves, etc.); from the figural and exegetical point of view, it is the place of virtual movement

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and visual semiosis.69 The landscape is not only the sum total of topographical features wherein and wherethrough the saint’s story play out, both in fact and figuratively; it is also a figure of the saint. Making this claim involves insisting on the status of the external landscape – its rocky, mountainous morphology, its multiple paths, thresholds and stages, its travelers and pilgrims, its flora and fauna – as a figure of the saint’s interiority or, better, of the inner process of spiritual ascent and reform that occupied Jerome during his retreat in the desert. But there is another way to see the landscape as a figure of the saint. This requires forgetting the traditional ground/figure opposition – the opposition between the landscape and the characters who populate it ( figures in a literal sense)70 – and looking instead at the steep contours of the mountain, and finding there the virtual figure of the holy hermit: the break in front of the footbridge evokes an eye, the rocky peak a pointed nose and the tree on the right the hermit’s beard. The angular profile of the saint turned toward the cross echoes his gigantic double materialized by the rocky mountain; the landscape-face turned toward the celestial apparition, since it jointly consists of a landscape qua landscape and a landscape qua face, amplifies once again the fundamental duality between external and internal vision, between journeying through a recognizable place and aspiring spiritually to climb toward Christ.71 Uncertain and unresolved, the ‘potential image’ requires the participation of the beholder if it is to appear; he must complete the inchoate image by appealing to his memory and imagination.72 Indeed, the iconography of Saint Jerome in the desert, both in the art of Italy and the North, proved particularly favorable to such ‘accidental’ images (which in fact owe nothing to chance). The famous letter to Eustachius, in which Jerome describes the hallucinations that plagued him, and then addresses his cave-hermitage, fearing that it might guess with what sensual he is constantly harassed, undoubtedly caught the attention of artists who placed the saint in a landscape whose rocks and plants metamorphose into images of his visionary torments. In the cases of Hieronymus Bosch, Albrecht Dürer, Joachim Patinir, 69

On the distinction figurative and figural see in particular Didi-Huberman G., Fra Angelico; Dumora, F., “Force de rêve. Rêve, figural et figurabilité”, in Dekoninck and Guiderdoni, Force de figure 13–19. 70 On the distinction figure/landscape and face/landscape (visage/paysage), see Prévost B., “Visage/paysage. Problème de peinture.” in Melion W. – Rothstein B. – Weemans M. (eds.), The Anthropomorphic Lens: Anthropomorphism, Microcosmism and Analogy in Early Modern Thought and Visual Arts (Leiden: 2014) 379–399. 71 However, in the Brussels Landscape with the Sermon of John the Baptist, the disjointed morphology of the rocky arch weakens anthropomorphic effect of the mountain. 72 See Gamboni D., Potential Images: Ambiguity and Indeterminacy in Modern Art (London: 2002).

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Jan Wellens de Cock, and Herri met de Bles, as I have shown elsewhere,73 the combined underlying themes of peregrinatio vitae, regio dissimilitudinis (realm of dissimilitude) and visio Dei, and the opposition between blindness and discernment, unlikeness and likeness, make it possible to understand the uncertain apparitions in the roots and rocks as allusions to the world of deceiving appearances, away from which the hermit saints turn to concentrate on the cross. In Bles’ Penitent Saint Jerome [Fig. 17.2], the visio Dei is not only represented; it is not only signified by the mountain connecting the saint to the celestial apparition; it must be experienced by navigating the detours and ambiguities bodied forth by the picture’s figurae. A gigantic and enigmatic mirror of the saint, the mountainous profile is a potential image that it is incumbent upon the spectator to discover: the conditions of viewing are staged as an enigma to be decoded. The potential anthropomorphic or teratomorphic images populating Bles’s exegetical landscapes aim to our gaze: they are the visual equivalents of the ‘stumbling blocks’ that dot the path of Scripture according to Origen: by this he meant the enigmas and obscurities upon whose meanings we stumble, in passing from the literal meaning to the diffracted spiritual meaning of the texts we read.74 The visual ambiguity that troubles the viewer’s gaze is fundamental to this type of landscape image wherein meaning is offered only flickeringly, by way of detours that solicit the imaginative and interpretative collaboration of the beholder. The potential image, in its abundance of meticulous and seductive details, its effects of polarity or juxtaposition, its signifying components taken from the two books, its interpretative gaps and iconographic novelties, jointly aims to provoke the viewer to look with a careful eye and to meditate by means of ‘visual rumination’.75 The pictorial landscape, comprising a ‘garden’ of nature that signifies the ‘garden’ of the saint’s soul,76 invites the peregrinator eye of the beholder to follow the example of the hermit ruminator, to purify his soul through a spiritual peregrination accomplished with the patience and humility required of any exegetical endeavour.

73 Weemans M., “Les visions de saint Jérôme” in J.-H. Martin (ed.), Une image peut en cacher une autre, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais (Paris: 2008) 50–54; Weemans, Herri met de Bles 171–202. 74 See Origen, Philocalie. Sur les Écritures, transl. by M. Harl (Paris: 1983) 91. 75 On this notion, see Rothstein B., “Looking the Part: Ruminative Viewing and the Imagination of Community in the Early Modern Low Countries,” Art History 31.1 (2008) 1–32. 76 On Karel Van Mander’s metaphor of the eye’s optical journey through painted landscape, see Melion W.S., Shaping the Netherlandish Canon. Karel van Mander Schilder-Boeck (Chicago: 1991) 9.

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Gerrits G.-H., Inter Timorem Et Spem: A Study of the Theological Thought of Gerard Zerbolt of Zutphen (1367–1398) (Leiden: 1986). Gibson W.S., “The Man with the Little Owl: The Legacy of Herri Bles”, in Muller N.E. – Rosasco B.J. – Marrow J.H. (eds.), Herri met de Bles. Studies and Exploration of the World Landscape Tradition (Princeton: 1998) 131–142. Gillet C., “Les plantes et leurs représentations dans les tableaux de Henri Bles conservés aux Musée des Arts Anciens du Namurois”, in J. Toussaint (ed.), Autour de Henri Bles, exhibition catalogue (Namur: 2000) 129–137. Goppelt L., Typos: The Typological Interpretation of the Old Testament in the New (1934) (Grand Rapids: 1982). Guiderdoni A., “Figures de l’âme pèlerine. La méditation emblématique aux XVI° et XVII° siècles”, Rivista di storia e litteratura religiosa XLI.3 (2006) 696–724. Guiderdoni A., “Constructing the Imaginary Desert of the Soul in Emblematic Literature”, in Enenkel K.A.E. – Göttler C. (eds.), Solitudo. Spaces, Places and Times of Solitude in Late Medieval and Early Modern Cultures (Leiden – Boston: 2018) 208–241. Hagen S., Allegorical Remembrance: A Study of the Pilgrimage of the Life of Man As a Medieval Treatise on Seeing and Remembering (Athens GA – London: 1990). Hamburger J., “Speculations on Speculation. Vision and Perception in the Theory and Practice of Mystical Devotion”, in Haug W. – Schneider-Lastin W. (eds.), Deutsche Mystik im abendländischen Zusammenhang. Neu erschlossene Texte, neue me­ thodische Ansätze, neue theoretische Konzepte (Tübingen: 2000) 353–407. Harrison P., The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: 1998). Heck C., L’échelle céleste. Une histoire de la quête du ciel (Paris: 1997). Hellerstedt K.-J., “The Blind Man and his Guide in Netherlandish Painting”, Simiolus 13 (1983) 163–181. Jerome (saint), Hoc opere continentur ordine libri subscripti. Epistolae ad Heliodorum (Deventer, Jacobus de Breda: 1505). Jerome (saint), Aliqot familiares epistolae (Antwerpen, Willem Vorsterman: 1515). Jerome (saint), Boec van Jheronimus bloemen (?: 1522). Jerome (saint), Epistolae aliquot, argumentis, et scholiis illustratae (Antwerpen, Willem Vorsterman: 1533). Jerome (saint), Epistolae selectiores, argumentis et scholiis illustratae (Gent, Robertus Gualterotus – Erasmus van der Eecke: 1545). Jerome (saint), Correspondance. Tome I: Lettres I–XXII. Texte établi et traduit par Jérôme Labourt (Paris: 1949). Jones P., “Federico Borromeo as a Patron of Landscapes and Still Lifes: Christian Optimism in Italy ca. 1600”, The Art Bulletin 70.2 (1988) 261–272. Julia D., Le Voyage aux saints. Les pèlerinages dans l’Occident moderne (xve–xviiie siècle) (Paris: 2016).

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Kessler H.L., Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art (Philadelphia: 2000). Krüger K. – Nova A. (eds.), Imagination und Wirklichkeit. Zum Verhältnis von mentalen une realen Bildern in der Kunst der frühen Neuzeit (Mainz: 2000). Ladner G.B., “Homo viator: Medieval Ideas on Alienation and Order”, Speculum 41 (1967) 23–259. Lentes T., “Inneres Auge, äußerer Blick und heilige Schau. Ein Diskussionsbeitrag zur visuellen Praxis in Frömmigkeit und Moraldidaxe des späten Mittelalters”, in Schreiner K. – Müntz M. (eds.), Frömmigkeit im Mittelalter. Politisch-soziale Kontexte, visuelle Praxis, körperliche Ausdrucksformen (Munich: 2002) 179–219. Luttikhuizen H., “Still Walking: Spiritual Pilgrimage, Early Dutch Painting, and the Dynamics of Faith” in Blick S. – Gelfand L. (eds.) Push Me, Pull You: Imaginative and Emotional Interaction in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art (Leiden: 2011) 199–225. Marin L., Philippe de Champaigne ou la présence cachée (Paris: 1995). Maupeu P., Pèlerins de vie humaine. Autobiographie et allégorie narrative, de Guillaume de Deguileville à Octovien de Saint-Gelais (Paris: 2009). Melion W., Shaping the Netherlandish Canon. Karel van Mander Schilder-Boeck (Chicago: 1991). Melion W., “Ad ductum itineris et dispositionem mansionum ostendendam: meditation, vocation, and sacred history in Abraham Ortelius’s ‘Parergon’”, Journal of the Walter Arts Gallery 57 (1999) 49–72. Melion W., The Art of Vision in Jerome Nadal’s “Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia”, Volume 1 of Jerome Nadal, “Annotations and Meditations on the Liturgical Gospels,” trans. Father F. Homann, S.J. (Philadelphia: 2003). Melion W., The Meditative Art: Studies in the Northern Devotional Print 1550–1625 (Philadelphia: 2009). Melion W., “‘Conspicitur prior usque fulgor’: On the Functions of Landscape in Benito Arias Montano’s Humanae salutis monumenta (1571)”, Emblematica 20 (2013) 1–62. Melion W. – Falkenburg R.L. – Richardson T. (eds.), Image & Imagination of the Religious Self in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Turnhout: 2008). Melion W. – Dekoninck R. – Guiderdoni A. (eds.), ‘Ut pictura meditatio’: The Meditative Image in Northern Art, 1500–1700, Proteus: Studies in Early Modern Identity Formation 4 (Turnhout: 2012). Melion W. – Clifton J. – Weemans M. (eds.), Imago Exegetica: Visual Images as Exegetical Instruments, 1400–1700, Intersections 33 (Leiden – Boston: 2014). Pomel F., Les voies de l’Au-delà et l’essor de l’allégorie au Moyen-Age (Paris: 2001). Pomel F. – Duval F. (eds.), Guillaume de Digulleville. Les pèlerinages allégoriques (Rennes: 2008). Ribouillault D. – Weemans M. (ed.), Le paysage sacré. Le paysage comme exégèse dans l’Europe de la première modernité / Sacred Landscape. Landscape as Exegesis in Early Modern Europe (Florence: 2011).

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Rooij J. van, Gerard Zerbolt van Zutphen, Leven en geschriften (Nijmegen: 1936). Rothstein B., “Looking the Part: Ruminative Viewing and the Imagination of Community in the Early Modern Low Countries,” Art History 31.1 (2008) 1–32. Sclafert C., “L’allégorie de la bûche enflammée dans Hugues de Saint-Victor et saint Jean de la Croix”, Revue d’Ascétique et de Mystique 33 (1957) 245. Scribner R.W., “Popular Piety and Modes of Visual Perception in Late Medieval and Reformation Germany”, The Journal of Religion History 15 (1989) 448–469. Serck L., Henri Bles et la peinture de paysage dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux avant Bruegel (Ph.D. Dissertation, Université catholique de Louvain: 1990). Solignac A., “Pèlerinage”, in Derville A. – Lamarche P. – Solignac A. (eds.) Dictionnaire de spiritualité (Paris: 1980) tome XII, vol. 1, col. 888. Spica A.-E., “Le pèlerinage spirituel: une archéologie alternative et une plastique particulière du roman dévot en France au xviie siècle”, Littératures classiques 3.79 (2012) 53–78. Staubach N., Kirchenreform von unten: Gerhard Zerbolt von Zutphen und die Brüder vom gemeinsamen Leben (Frankfurt a.M.: 2004). Staubach N., “Gerard Zerbolt et son oeuvre. Introduction”, La montée du cœur. De spiritualibus ascensionibus. Édition critique et traduction par F.J. Legrand (Turnhout: 2006) 7–40. Toussaint J. (ed.), Autour de Henri Bles, exhibition catalogue (Namur: 2000). Toussaint J. (ed.), Actes du colloque “Autour de Henri Bles”, Société archéologique de Namur (Namur: 2002). Trapp J.B., “The Owl’s Ivy and the Poet’s Bays: An Enquiry into Poetic Garlands”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 21 (1958) 227–255. Veelenturf K., Geen povere Schoonheid. Laat-middeleeuwse kunst in verband met de Moderne Devotie (Nijmegen: 2000). Vitas patrum ende is ghenoemt dat Vader boeck inhoudende die historien ende legende der heiliger vaderen, Leiden, Jan Seversz, 1511. Jacobus de Voragine, Passionael twinterstuc Dat men hiet die gulden legende, Antwerp, Henrick Eckert van Homberch, 1505. Waaijman K., “Beeld en beeldloosheid: een uitdaaging aan de devotie”, in Veelenturf K. (ed.) Geen povere Schoonheid. Laat-middeleeuwse kunst in verband met de Moderne Devotie (Nijmegen: 2000) 31–42. Weemans M., “Les visions de saint Jérôme” in J.-H. Martin (ed.), Une image peut en cacher une autre, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais (Paris: 2008) 50–54. Weemans M., “Le paysage monde comme pérégrination spirituelle et exégèse visuelle” in Tapié A. – Weemans M. (eds.), Fables du paysage flamand, exhibition catalogue, Lille, Palais des Beaux-Arts (Paris: 2012). Weemans M., Herri met de Bles. Les ruses du paysage au temps d’Érasme et de Bruegel (Paris: 2013).

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chapter 18

Cities of the Dead: Utopian Spaces, the Grotesque, and the Landscape of Violence in Early Modern France Kathleen Long 1

Introduction: Historical Background

The landscape of sixteenth century France must have been profoundly affected by the Wars of Religion, which passed through cities and regions time and time again between March 1562 and October of 1628.1 Several million people died in this period, whether in battles and massacres undertaken in the course of war, or from famine and disease that followed on the heels of the violence.2 Agricultural production dropped during this period of conflict, as crops and livestock were destroyed, and peasants unprotected by castle walls murdered or weakened by famine.3 The effects of these wars lasted many years after they ended, with cities and countryside alike reshaped by them: the walls of La Rochelle and other Protestant strongholds were razed, and new castles and fortresses built for the king, his royal governors and the royal army. Evidence of the wars might have been seen everywhere, but the monarchy tried to suppress representations of them. The overt policy of oubliance, a policy of deliberate forgetting of events that took place during these wars, masterfully analyzed in its cultural ramifications by Andrea Frisch,4 frequently produced the command that the events of the Wars should be treated as dead and buried. This injunction was first stated in the Edict of Amboise of 1563: Avons ordonné et ordonnons, entendons, voulons et nous plait, que toutes injures et offenses que l’iniquité du temps, et les occasions qui en sont survenues, ont pu faire naître entre nosdits sujets, et toutes 1 See Holt M., The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629 (Cambridge, UK: 2005), “Introduction”, 3–4, and “Epilogue: The Last War of Religion, 1610–1629”, 178–194. 2 Knecht R.J., The French Religious Wars, 1562–1598 (Oxford, UK: 2002) 91. Holt traces the economic consequences of the wars briefly in The French Wars of Religion 195–222. 3 Ibidem 203–204. 4 See Frisch A., Forgetting Differences: Tragedy, Historiography, and the French Wars of Religion (Edinburgh: 2015) 1–25.

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autres choses passées et causées de ces présents tumultes, demeureront éteintes, comme mortes, ensevelies et non advenues.5 We have ordered and order, intend, wish, and it pleases us, that all injuries and offenses that the iniquity of the times, and the events which have occurred, could have given rise to among our said subjects, and all other things that have happened and were caused by the present disorders, remain extinguished, as if dead, buried and never having happened. This symbolic call for the burial of the past seems to evoke the very alterations of the landscape that it seeks to cover over, alterations caused by massive losses of population in the battles and massacres that characterized the Wars. It is hard to imagine people forgetting these events, when the material signs of them persisted in the landscape, in ruined villages and scattered bones. This command not to speak of the Wars is echoed in the Edict of SaintGermain (1570) and is repeated in the Edicts of Boulogne (1573), Beaulieu (1576), and Bergerac (1577), as well as the Edict of Nantes in 1598. Yet the repeated peace edicts show that this injunction had little effect, and did not prevent further violence. This call to silence was also answered by a proliferation of publications that focus on violence, whether tragedies based on mythological tales, the distant past, or faraway lands, or more direct representations of these violent conflicts.6 2

Literary Landscapes of the French Wars of Religion

The landscape is a crucial element of some of the more prominent of these representations. In his epic about the religious wars, Les Tragiques, Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné represents the harmonious relationship between the landscape and the peasants who cultivate it. They work the land and make it more beautiful and fruitful, and the earth shelters them in return: […] les aimez laboureurs Ouvragent son beau sein de si belles couleurs, Font courir les ruisseaux dedans les verdes prees, Par les sauvages fleurs en esmail diaprees: 5 Stegmann A., Edits des Guerres de Religion (Paris: 1979) 35–36. Translation is my own. 6 See, for example, the collected volume edited by Biet C. et al., Théâtre de la cruauté et récits sanglants en France (XVIe–XVIIe siècle) (Paris: 2006).

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Ou par ordre et compas les jardins azurez Monstrent au ciel riant leurs carreaux mesurez, Les parterres tondus, et les droictes allees, Des droicturieres mains au cordeau sont reiglees, Ils sont peintres, brodeurs, et puis leurs grands tapis Noircissent de raisins, et jaunissent d’epics: Les ombreuses forests, leurs demeures plus franches, Esventent leurs sueurs, et les couvrent de branches.7 […] the beloved laborers/ ornament her beautiful breast with such lovely colors,/ Make brooks run through the green pastures,/ Through the wild flowers glistening like enamel:/ Or by order and compass the azure gardens/ Show their measured squares to the laughing sky,/ The mowed lawns and the straight allées,/ Are ruled by just hands and the guiding line,/ They are painters, embroiderers, and then their large carpets/ Darken with grapes, and become golden with grain:/ The shadowy forests, their freest domain,/ Cool their sweat and cover them with branches. This pastoral beauty gives way to war and massacre, and in a later book of Les Tragiques, “Les Fers”, rivers are choked with dead bodies.8 In the final book of his epic, “Jugement”, D’Aubigné evokes Ezekiel’s vision of the Valley of Dry Bones (Ezekiel 37:7–8), with its landscape of bones resurrecting into seething life: On void les os couverts de nerfs, les nerfs de peau, La teste de cheveux: on void à ce tombeau Percer en mille endroicts les arenes bouillantes De jambes, et de bras, et des testes grouillantes.9 One sees the bones covered with sinews, the sinews with skin,/ The head with hair: one sees in this tomb/ The boiling sands pierced in a thousand places/ By legs, and by arms, and by swarming heads.

7 D’Aubigné T.A., “Misères”, in Les Tragiques, ed. J.-R. Fanlo (Paris: 2003) 279–280 (verses 279– 90). All translations of Les Tragiques are my own. 8 For more on this, see my article, “Child in the Water: The Spectacle of Violence in Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné’s Les Tragiques”, in Simek N. – Zalloua Z. (eds.), Representations of Trauma in French and Francophone Literature, Dalhousie French Studies (Halifax, N.S.: 2007) 155–165. 9 D’Aubigné, Les Tragiques 766 (verses 609–612).

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D’Aubigné then turns from this vision, to one of Judgement Day, and the resurrection of all souls and their bodies: La terre ouvre son sein, du ventre des tombeaux Naissent des enterrez les visages nouveaux: Du pré, du bois, du champ, presque de toutes places, Sortent les corps nouveaux, et les nouvelles faces: Icy les fondements des chasteaux rehaussez Par les ressuscitans promptement sont percez; Icy un arbre sent des bras de sa racine Grouiller un chef vivant, sortir une poictrine: Là l’eau trouble bouillone, et puis s’esparpillant Sent en soy des cheveux, et un chef s’esveillant: Comme un nageur venant du profond de son plonge: Tous sortent de la mort, comme l’on sort d’un songe. Les corps par les tyrans autrefois deschirez Se sont en un moment en leurs corps asserrez.10 The earth opens her body, from the belly of the tombs/ Are born the new forms of the buried:/ From the pasture, the woods, the field, from almost everywhere,/ Arise new bodies and new faces:/ Here, the foundations of castles lifted up/ By those reborn are quickly broken:/ Here, a tree feels a living head stirring in the arms of its roots,/ And a chest rising up:/ There, the troubled water boils, and then scattering/ Feels hair, and then a forehead awakening within it:/ Just as a swimmer comes up from the depths of their dive:/ Everything arises from death, as one rises from a dream./ The bodies once torn by tyrants/ Feel their parts united in one instant. The buried bodies insistently resurface, are omnipresent in this landscape, and intertwined with it, momentarily neither fully human nor vegetal, liquid, or petrified. This is the moment where the memory of loss is revived and overcome, the landscape performing as both site and embodiment of past violence and present resurrection. This representation of the centrality of landscape in portrayals of both the violence of civil war and the suppression and resurrection of its memory is evoked in other works, some quite widely read in the early modern period. In his version of the Hamlet story, published in 1570, François de Belleforest introduces an odd supernatural element. Prince Amleth refuses to eat the food 10

Ibidem, 769–70 (verses 665–78).

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offered to him by the King of England, questioning why he would be asked to eat bread stained with human blood or meat that tastes of human corpses.11 The King, disturbed by this and other diabolical-seeming insights on the part of his guest, seeks to find out the nature of the field in which the wheat was grown, and learns that: Non loing de là estoit un champ tout chargé des ossements d’hommes occis jadis en quelque cruelle rencontre, veu le taz amoncellez qu’on y pouvoit encore apercevoir, et que pour estre la terre plus grasse et fertile à cause de l’humeur et gresse des mortz, on y semoit tous les ans le plus beau bled qu’on pouvoit choisir pour son service.12 Not far from there was a field full of the bones of men killed some time ago in some cruel battle, given the heaped-up pile that one could still see there, and since the earth was richer and more fertile because of the blood and fat of the dead, they planted every year the best wheat that they could choose for his service. According to literary and historical accounts of the period, the Wars of Religion left their indelible mark on the landscape. While peace edicts demanded that the population bury the past, bodies and bones must have been all too present in many parts of France. Belleforest’s images of piled-up bodies would have seemed very familiar, and not merely a thing of the distant past. 3

The Island of the Hermaphrodites: The Palace as Literary Landscape

Two more architecturally oriented works evoke these landscapes of the dead and resuscitated in their representations of palaces and cities. In their decorative details and narrative movements, they draw the reader into the beauty of a place, only to raise the specter of violence. In one case, the novel, The Island of Hermaphrodites,13 this specter is tamed once more, replaced by less violent imagery and gestures. In another, the Scenographiae, a series of architectural 11 Belleforest F. de, “Amleth”, in Le cinquiesme tome des histoires tragiques, ed. H.-T. Campangne (Geneva: 2013) 283: ‘le pain trempé avec le sang humain’. 12 Ibidem 287. Translation is my own. 13 L’Isle des hermaphrodites, a title ascribed to the work in its modern edition, as the original edition does not have a title.

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engravings by Hans Vredeman de Vries, violence seems hidden in the highly ornamented spaces, suggesting a lingering threat that lurks among the statues and columns of palaces. The Island of Hermaphrodites, a bestseller in its day, escaped the fires of Henri IV’s censors when it was published in 1605. It was read at the time and even today as a satire of the court of Henri de Valois,14 the French monarch who presided over more than two decades of religious conflict. This novel concerns the adventures of a man who is shipwrecked on the island and makes his way through the palace of the hermaphrodites. His movement through the palace, circling back several times to the first room he entered there, constitutes the narrative structure of the work. In the course of his tour, he sees scenes that he interprets as horrifically violent, when in fact they represent self-care, self-indulgence, and pleasures engaged in by the hermaphrodites. The sinister frame from which our storyteller views this new world is thus overlaid with a very different focus on beauty. But the violence continues to haunt this aesthetically pleasing space. The frame of this narration places it squarely in the realm of the religious wars: the narrator flees France, not wishing to soak his hands in the blood of his fellow men: Le nouveau monde nous a produit en ce nouveau siele tant de choses nouvelles, que la pluspart du monde ancien […] a mieux aymé chercher, au peril de mille vies, quelque nouvelle fortune, que se contenter de l’ancienne et vivre en repos et tranquillité […] mais, outre leur naturelle inclination, les continuels remuements advenus en l’Europe depuis tant d’années en ont encore persuadé plusieurs à quitter pour un temps leurs anciennes demeures, de peur de servir de personnages ou de spectateurs des sanglantes tragedies qui se sont jouëes sur ce grand theatre. Or entre ceux-cy, un de nos François qui n’avoit pas moins de valeur que de prudence, mais à qui une bonté naturelle avoit osté la puissance et la volonté

14

For the best assessment of the relationship between gender and power in this novel, see Reeser T.W., “Ruling the Hermaphrodites: Masculinity, Sovereignty, and National Identity in Political Discourse”, in Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture (Chapel Hill: 2006) 235–265. See also Leibacher-Ouvrad L., “Decadent Dandies and Dystopian Gender-Bending: Artus Thomas’s L’Isle des hermaphrodites (1605)”, Utopian Studies 11 (2000) 124–131. Gary Ferguson, on the other hand, sees the novel as much more ambiguous in its presentation of gender, in his chapter on “Androgynes, Hermaphrodites, and Courtesans: Women, Queer Nature, and (Queer?) Pleasures”, in Queer (Re)Readings in the French Renaissance: Homosexuality, Gender, Culture (Burlington, VT: 2008) 255–256.

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de tremper ses mains dans le sang des siens, fit eslection de courir plustost tout autre danger que de forcer en cela sa nature […]15 The new world has produced for us in this new age so many new things, that most of the old world […] has preferred to seek, at the peril of a thousand lives, some new fortune, rather than content themselves with the old one and live in rest and tranquility […] But, beyond their natural inclination, the continual upheavals that have taken place in Europe for so many years have persuaded many of them to leave their ancestral homes for some time, out of fear of serving as actors or spectators of the bloody tragedies that have played out on this great stage. So, among them, one of our French men, who had no less valor than wisdom, but from whom a natural kindness had removed the capacity and the will to soak his hands in the blood of his own kind, chose to risk any other danger than to force his nature in this regard […]. This narrative frame shifts perspective abruptly, from the accusation of pleasureseeking directed at those who leave Europe, to the recognition that this desire might arise from the spectacle of violence that has swept across Europe. The detail of the narrator’s aversion to blood seems to echo Amleth’s refusal of blood-soaked food in Belleforest’s story. In both cases, what seems normal to others induces horror in the main character, who is perceived as more noble and civilized than those who surround him. This will be a theme that recurs frequently in the novel, but with twists and turns that raise questions of what might seems normal, and what is out of place. This dissonance resurfaces when spectacles of violence become spectacles of pleasure, with a strange confounding of the two that leaves a menace lurking behind all the rich ornamentation and beautiful architecture of the palace, even as it seems to neutralize that menace. What the spectacles of The Island of Hermaphrodites suggest is that the amnesia called for by the ruling class is not yet, and perhaps never will be, complete. One can redirect the gaze to pleasurable sights, but the mind, occupied with visions of a horrific past, will continue to see them everywhere. The storyteller begins his journey back to France when he hears that an ‘invincible and very august monarch’16 has restored peace to the country, thus 15 L’Isle des Hermaphrodites, ed. C.-G. Dubois (Geneva: 1996) 53–54. The author of this work is unknown, but it has been ascribed to Artus Thomas; see L’Estoile P. de, Mémoires-Journaux 1574–1611, vol. 8 (Paris: 1982) 180. All translations of L’Isle des Hermaphrodites are my own. 16 Ibidem 54: ‘invincible et tres auguste Monarque’.

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allowing him to return with his conscience intact. On his way home, he finds himself shipwrecked with a few other men on a floating island: ‘nous veismes que la terre sur laquelle nous marchions estoit toute flotante, et qu’elle erroit vagabonde sur ce grand Ocean sans aucune stabilité’ (we saw the earth on which we walked was entirely floating, and that it wandered vagabond-like on this great Ocean, with no stability).17 The island wanders somewhere between the ‘new lands’ (‘terres nouvelles’) from which the storyteller is returning, and Europe. The shipwrecked men (only two have escaped with the pilot of the ship) seem to come immediately upon an impressive building, the only landmark they have noticed thus far on the island. This palace will stand in for the landscape for the rest of the narrative, with a number of indications that it is meant to serve this function throughout the tale. The first is when the palace is deemed to be a masterpiece of nature and an illusion at the same time, thus serving two mutually contradictory functions: […] nous nous mismes à contempler un edifice assez proche de nous, la beauté duquel ravit tellement nos esprits, que nous avions plustost opinion que ce fust une illusion qu’une chose veritable. Le marbre, le Jaspe, le Porphire, l’or, et la diversité des émaux estoit ce qu’il y avait du moindre; car l’architecture, la sculpture, et l’ordre que l’on y voyoit compassé en toutes ses parties, attiroit tellement l’esprit en admiration, que l’oeil, qui peut voir tant de choses en un instant, n’estoit pas assez suffisant pour comprendre tout le contenu de ce beau palais. Et comme la beauté est une chose qui attire ordinairement à soy ce qui en est, ce semble, le plus esloigné, oubliant nos lassitudes et les travaux que nous avions si longuement soufferts, nous fusmes tentez ou plustost forcez par la curiosité, de voir plus particulierement ce rare chef-d’oeuvre de la nature.18 […] we set about contemplating a building that was fairly close to us, the beauty of which so enraptured our spirits that we were more of the opinion that it was an illusion rather than a real thing. Marble, jasper, porphyry, gold, and the diversity of enamels was the least of it, for the architecture, the sculpture, and the order that one saw encompassed in all parts, drew the spirit so much into admiration that the eye, which can see so many things in an instant, was not sufficient to comprehend the contents of this beautiful palace. And since beauty is a thing which ordinarily draws to itself, it seems, that which is most distant, forgetting 17 Ibidem 56. 18 Ibidem 57.

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our exhaustion and the travails which we had so long suffered, we were tempted or rather forced by curiosity to observe more closely this rare masterpiece of nature. This ‘masterpiece of nature’ is composed of unrelenting artifice, thus establishing and complicating the relationship between nature and art. This work of art is also overwhelmingly and violently beautiful; unable to take it all in, the men are ‘ravis’, a term which combines pleasure and pain (meaning both ‘en extase’, ‘in ecstasy’, and ‘emportés par force’, ‘carried off by force’ – a euphemism for rape, according to the 1694 Dictionnaire de l’Académie française).19 While this beautiful space is presented as a relief from suffering, a distraction from a more violent world, it also seems to force itself upon them. The narrator approaches the palace: […] nous deux vers ce riche palais où nous arrivasmes en peu de temps, et trouvasmes de premier abord un long Perystile ou rang de colonnes Caryatides, lesquelles avoient pour chapiteau la teste d’une femme … au dessus de l’architrave duquel se voyoit une statue d’albastre, sortant le corps à demy hors d’une mer, qui estoit assez bien representée par diverses sortes de marbres et de porphires. Ceste statuë estoit autant bien proportionnee qu’il se pouvoit, laquelle tenoit en l’une de ses mains un rouleau où estoit escrit ce mot Planiandrion. A peine osions nous sortir de ce lieu, tant nous estions pleins de merveille d’y voir une si grande solitude, que nous n’avions encore rencontré personne depuis que nous estions entrez.20 […] and we two (went) towards this rich palace, where we arrived in a little while, and found first of all a long Peristyle or row of Caryatids, that had as their capitol a woman’s head. From there, we entered a large courtyard with pavement so lustrous and slippery that we could barely keep on our feet. Nonetheless, the desire to go further directed us, staggering as we went, towards the great staircase, in front of which there was a large landing surrounded by twelve columns, along with a grand doorway so superbly adorned, that it was impossible to look at it carefully without being dazzled: above the architrave of this doorway was seen an alabaster statue, with the body half coming out of the sea, which was fairly well 19 See the ARTFL project’s Dictionnaires d’autrefois Public Access Collection: https:// artflsrv03.uchicago.edu/philologic4/publicdicos/query?report=bibliography&head=ravi. 20 L’Isle 58.

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depicted by means of diverse sorts of marbles and porphyries. This statue was as well-proportioned as possible, and held in one of its hands a scroll on which was written the word Planiandrion (a woman’s diadem worn by a man) We barely dared to leave this place, as we were in awe to see such a great solitude, as we had not yet encountered a single person since we had entered there. The architectural plenitude, filled with simulacra of body parts, is counterbalanced by the complete lack of inhabitants in this place. Where have they gone? This absence of living beings, combined with the proliferation of pieces of bodies all around them, stages a more ominous scene. Bodies are everywhere, but none of them seems to be alive, although they do raise the question of what distinguishes life from death. When the narrator moves past this façade, he does encounter a crowd of people, all of them within the space of the palace.21 But in contrast to the marvelous works of art observed by the travelers, the artificiality of the human inhabitants is underscored once they have entered the palace: […]au milieu du lict on voyoit une statuë d’un homme à demy hors du lict, qui avoit un bonnet à peu pres fait de la forme de ceux des petits enfans nouveaux vestus … Le visage estoit si blanc, si luysant, et d’un rouge si esclatant, qu’on voyoit bien qu’il y avoit plus d’artifice que de nature; ce qui me faisoit aisément croire que ce n’estoit que peinture.22 […]in the middle of the bed there was visible a statue of a man, half out of the bed, that had a bonnet somewhat in the form of those that little children wear when they are first dressed […]. The face was so white, so lustrous, and of such a striking red, that one could readily see that there was more of artifice than of nature in it, which made me think readily that it was only a painting. Since, in the pages preceding this scene, the narrator has observed the hermaphrodites having their hair and make-up done, it is understandable that he does not see them as fully natural beings. The effect of this response is that the 21 22

Ibidem 59: ‘une merveilleusement grande multitude de gens qui alloient et venoient de tous costez’ (a marvelously large multitude of people who were coming and going from all sides). Ibidem 70–71.

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humans become interchangeable with statues, raising the question of whether the latter, in their marvelous naturalness, can stand in for human lives. As the narrator moves through the palace, the landscape also resurfaces in references that once more blur the distinction between natural landscape and architectural or sculptural construction. One example of this is when he returns to the first room he entered when he arrived at the palace.23 Here he finds that floor ‘toute jonchée de roses, giroflées et autres fleurs; mais c’estoit avec beaucoup d’espesseur, car on disoit que cela soulageoit fort les pieds de celuy qui estoit seigneur du lieu’ (covered with roses, stock flowers, and other flowers; but very thickly, as it was said that this soothed the feet of he who was the lord of the place).24 Here, the garden is brought inside, but only to be trampled for the comfort of the hermaphrodites’ delicate feet. The only skies that our narrator sees throughout the novel are the ‘ciels du lit’ (the bed canopies), which are decorated with scenes of gender transformation or ambiguity. There are hints of an outside world, or at least potential entrances and exits, which are only used at the beginning and end of the narrative. When the narrator enters a gallery, he sees a portico at the far end: ‘Au bout de ceste gallerie, il y avoit un porche de menuïserie fort mignonnement ouvragé, et soustenu par deux Satyres’ (At the end of this gallery, there was a portico very finely worked in wood, and supported by two Satyrs).25 The center portion of the novel contains a list of the laws of the land. The landscape is once more evoked in a punning discussion of forestry, that suggests the exploitation of the land for the extensive building projects of the period: ‘Quant ausdits Reformateurs et autres sous-officiers de nos affectionnez subjects, ils pourront émonder, esserrer ou élaguer lesdictes forests aux lieux qu’ils verront les plus commodes pour leur utilité’ (As for our said Reformers and other under-officers of our loving subjects, they can trim, shape, and prune said forests wherever they see those which are the most suited for their use).26 This passage continues to detail the commodification of the landscape, concluding with an exhortation to deforestation: ‘commandons ausdits gardes de leur permettre de prendre les plus beaux arbres et de meilleure fente’ (we command the forest rangers to allow them to take the most beautiful trees and

23

24 25 26

Ibidem 69: ‘l’Hermaphrodite, que j’avois esté plus curieux de voir habiller que pas un des autres, leur proposa d’aller voir celuy, en la chambre duquel j’avois entré premierement’ (the Hermaphrodite, whom I was more curious to see dressed than any of the others, proposed that they go see the one whose chamber I had entered first). Ibidem 70. Ibidem 76. Ibidem 103.

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easiest to split).27 These allusions to deforestation gesture towards the source of all of the beautiful woodwork in the palace and create a parallel between the human bodies evoked in the ornamental statuary, and the lost forests evoked by this woodwork. The banquet towards the end of the novel evokes landscape once more, this time a body of water: La nappe estoit d’un linge fort mignonnement damassé; mais d’autant qu’en ce pays là les choses qui sont en leur naturel, quelque degré de perfection qu’elles puissent avoir acquis, ne leur sont point agreables, si ells ne sont desguisées, elle avoit esté ployée d’une certain façon que cela ressembloit fort à quelque riviere ondoyante qu’un petit vent faict doucement souslever.28 (The tablecloth was made of a very gracefully damasked linen; but inasmuch as in this country things which are in their natural form, whatever degree of perfection they might have acquired, are not pleasing to them unless they are disguised, it had been folded in a certain manner that strongly resembled some undulating rippled by a light wind.) This image of the river is enhanced by the presence of a vessel in the form of a boat: ‘Tout au bout de la table, il y avoit un assez grand vaisseau d’argent doré et tout cizelé, faict en forme de nef’ (At the end of the table, there was a fairly large vessel of gilded silver, incised all over, made in the form of a boat).29 One side of this boat holds the hermaphrodites’ fans when they sit down to eat, and the other contains napkins, which they change constantly over the course of the meal. This allusion to the maritime reminds readers of how the narrator got to the island, and prepares us for his return to France. For, after he leaves the banquet and after he reads some anti-hermaphroditic pamphlets, the narrator decides both to leave the palace to walk in the garden surrounding it, and to return home. Suddenly, we have returned to the landscape that has been both effaced and evoked by the palace, and this return signals a return to the point of origin. The narrative complicates this move by ending at the moment when the narrator is depicted retelling his adventures to a French audience, who want to hear more. Returned to his native soil, he carries the other land with him, and it is clear that he has talked about it often, in an act 27 28 29

Ibidem 103. Ibidem 140. Ibidem 141.

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that demonstrates how that which is lost is never gone from us, but becomes an integral part of our self-construction. The narrative has come full circle by the end of the novel, having presented us with the sea, and then the stone of building, extracted from many parts of the world, as the list of marble, jasper, and porphyry would suggest, to the forests, and back to the sea. Phillip Usher, in his book on the Exterranean, has examined the large-scale extraction of resources for the various building projects of the early modern period, from empire-building to architecture.30 The landscape that The Island of Hermaphrodites presents us with is a highly manipulated one, constructed with great artifice, replacing the natural landscape that has been so altered over the course of the long sixteenth century in France. But this constructed landscape constantly gestures both to the natural landscape it stands in for, and to the violence committed against both nature and mankind. This mixed representation of the landscape also resonates somewhat problematically with the notions of appropriate settings for different genres. Barbara Uppenkamp discusses these settings in her discussion of the work of Hans Vredeman de Vries: Sebastiano Serlio explains perspective by showing the prospects of three stage designs. These three prospects were meant to correspond with the three genres of stage plays: the tragedy, the comedy, and the satire. The design for satire shows trees, caves, mountains and other rural motifs. The stage design for comedies is characterized by private dwellings with oriels, balconies, and windows that imitate ordinary architecture. The characteristics of the tragic scene are triumphal arches, obelisks, temples, and palaces, the use of classic forms throughout and a completely symmetrical layout.31 In Serlio’s discussion of stage sets, then, landscapes are associated with satire, and palaces are associated with tragedy. The Island of Hermaphrodites reveals detailed knowledge of architectural forms, thus suggesting that the play on genre and setting, with its mixture of landscape and architectural space, is meant to create a confusion between these two. [Fig. 18.1]

30 See in particular his chapter on ‘Geomedia’, in Exterranean: Extraction in the Humanist Anthropocene (New York: 2019) 115–132. 31 Uppenkamp B., “The Influence of Hans Vredeman de Vries on the Cityscape Constructed like a Picture”, in Lombaerde P. (ed.), Hans Vredeman de Vries and the Artes Mechanicae Revisited (Turnhout: 2005) 117–128, here, 117.

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Hans Vredeman de Vries, Scenographiae, plate 13 (Hollstein 43): Left, trees with two deer; right, palace courtyard with fountain, 1560. Engraving, 20.5 × 25.8 cm. Image at https:// www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search?q=Scenographiae&v=&s=&ii=3&p=1 Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Hans Vredeman de Vries: The Scenographiae32

The novel thus offers us a mixed portrait of mourning. The forests are decimated, but become beautiful structures. Lives are lost, but they inform the work of nation-building, and resurface as art, whether ornamental or more sepulchral in nature. The initial absence of inhabitants on the Island of Hermaphrodites also raises the question of whether these representations of body parts are simply architectural adornments, and whether they serve a different, perhaps more melancholy, purpose. 32 Vredeman de Vries Hans, Scenographiae, sive perspectivae, ut aedificia, hoc modo ad opticam excitata (Antwerp, Hieronymus Cock: 1560; second ed., 1563).

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The architectural engravings of Hans Vredeman de Vries, a Netherlandish artist and architect who was active during the period of the Wars of Religion in France, can shed some light on this possibility. The narration of The Island of Hermaphrodites seems to turn quite frequently to architectural ornamentation as a means of encountering the palace and its inhabitants, as we have seen above. Vredeman de Vries produced a large quantity of intriguing architectural works as well as perspective exercises, and the architectural engravings in particular often play on the juxtaposition of ornamentation and violence. His architectural drawings most often constitute impossible models for construction, and almost never represent an actual building; in this sense, they can be seen as utopian (in the sense of existing nowhere) buildings rather than any representation of the real, just as The Island of Hermaphrodites presents a utopian geographic space. Vredeman de Vries also produced a series of engravings focusing on landscape design, the Hortorum.33 These gardens are ‘associated in the captions with the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders’,34 and thus tightly conjoined with the artist’s architectural designs. Versions of these gardens reappear in Vredeman de Vries’s series, Theatrum vitae humanae,35 where architectural orders and landscapes that evolve from contained and controlled to chaotic are linked to the ages of man. The final image of this series, “Ruyne” (Ruin) depicts an old man confronted by Death in an apocalyptic landscape destroyed by fire and flood, with ruined buildings, broken columns (of every architectural order depicted in the other prints), and broken statues and dead bodies strewn indiscriminately over the landscape. These prints closely associate architectural constructions with the landscape, and human lives with artistic creations, serving as potential intertexts for L’Isle des hermaphrodites. These works also suggest that Vredeman de Vries thought of his architectural and landscape designs as integral parts of a comprehensive program of spatial ordering [Fig. 18.2]. The Scenographiae also intertwines landscape settings with interior views, calling into question the distinction between inside and outside, and suggesting that all of these settings are constructed. In the thirteenth engraving of the series [Fig. 18.1], the allée created by the trees in the left-hand, or forested, portion of the scene evokes the colonnades on the right and in other engravings in the series, which represent interiors. The stark division implied by the forest on the left and the construction on the right is blurred by the vegetation 33 Hortorum viridariorumque (Antwerp, Philip Galle: 1583). 34 Hollstein F.W.H., Hollstein’s Dutch & Flemish Etchings, Engravings, and Woodcuts, 1450– 1700. Volume XLVIII: Vredeman de Vries (Rotterdam: 1997) 122. 35 Vredeman de Vries Hans, Theatrum vitae humanae (Antwerp, Theodore Galle: 1577).

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Hans Vredeman de Vries, Theatrum Vitae Humanae, “Ruyne”, 1577. Engraving, 21.0 × 27.4 cm. Image at https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search/objects?q=Theatrum+vitae+humana e&p=1&ps=12&st=Objects&ii=4#/RP-P-1939-329,4 Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

covering the arbors on the right. In the eighteenth plate [Fig. 18.3], vegetal motifs among the grotesques are echoed by the landscapes seen through the windows on the left and right of the image. The perspectival lines lead us back into the distance, towards a building that seems to be outside of this long gallery. Light on the stairway in the left foreground seems to suggest that it leads outside as well, whereas stairways on the right lead to internal features, an alcove or some stairs. As in the novel, landscape is thus both external and internal to the architectural features, and the vast expanses of interior space represented take on the role of a landscape shaped by human hands [Fig. 18.3]. These interior scenes become the settings for evocations of violence and loss. While not necessarily representing any actual or potential construction, the architectural engravings evoke a wide range of different settings: courtyards, loggias, galleries, the naves of churches, and private rooms. They also play with perspective, in a way playing with our knowledge that perspective

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Hans Vredeman de Vries, Scenographiae, plate 18 (Hollstein 48): Interior of a hall, cross-vault decorated with grotesques, 1560. Engraving, 20.8 × 25.7 cm. Image at https:// www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search?q=Scenographiae&v=&s=&ii=3&p=1 Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

creates the illusion of a real scene, while in fact underscoring, as Christopher Heuer has so aptly put it, ‘painting’s incapacity to adequately represent something not there’.36 The perspective in the Scenographiae and in the later Variae architecturae formae37 often seems to lead into an infinite distance, with a repetition of architectural forms and elements that creates a sense of either recursive space or continual deferral, a sort of non-arrival at any point in the distance.

36 Heuer C., The City Rehearsed: Object, Architecture, and Print in the Worlds of Hans Vredeman de Vries (New York: 2009) 12. 37 Vredeman de Vries Hans, Variae architecturae formae (Antwerp, Theodore Galle: 1601).

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Vredeman de Vries’s architectural series, the Scenographiae, in particular deploy exaggerated and/or decentered perspective to draw viewers in and disorient them at the same time. These scenes are also largely empty of live human bodies, but body parts peek out of many locations (and the more you look, the more of them you see), sometimes looking at you looking at them. The effect of his work is thus both beautiful and terrifying. In the sixteenth plate of the Scenographiae, for example, the menacing figures (caryatids or herms?) in the foreground are echoed by similar figures in the background, and almost all of the columns evoke some portion of the human form. This image might remind us of the Peristyle or row of Caryatids mentioned at the beginning of The Island of Hermaphrodites, which lead the narrator to a statue, representing a hermaphroditic figure arising halfway out of a body of water. As we have seen, in the novel, these artistic works are presented as marvels of nature, thus creating confusion between human and statue, the natural and the artificial, landscape and architecture [Fig. 18.4]. 5

Bringing up the Dead: Changing the Landscape in The Island of Hermaphrodites and in the Work of Hans Vredeman de Vries

Meaning remains elusive in the works of Vredeman de Vries and in The Island of Hermaphrodites, in part because of these contradictory cues. Are the spaces created by these works there to be enjoyed, to remind us of past conflicts, or to offer a warning? In an era of violent political and religious upheaval, one in which the usual tragic figures (kings, princes, and generals) have no moral standing as they have become a threat to their own people, the usual architectural and social orders, along with the landscapes they inhabit, do not serve a straightforward exemplary purpose.38 Formerly didactic performances and scenes take on multiple, contradictory roles, both presenting social and architectural norms and subverting them. This subversion integrates desire as elicited by vision as a motivating force with a violent subtext that resuscitates the historical events that were supposed to have been long buried. It should come as no surprise that Vredeman de Vries designed an engraving of the massacres of the Roman Triumvirate, a favorite subject for artists told not to represent the Wars of Religion. It seems that this violence, and the calm scenes of pleasure that Vredeman de Vries also produced, are tightly conjoined, with the dead

38 For an analysis of the connections between architectural and social orders, see Uppenkamp, ‘The Influence of Hans Vredeman de Vries’ 117–18.

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Hans Vredeman de Vries, Scenographiae, plate 16 (Hollstein 46): Left, a loggia, the vault supported by satyr terms; right, view of a garden in front of a palace, 1560. Engraving, 20.8 × 25.6 cm. Image at https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search?q=Scenographiae&v =&s=&ii=3&p=1 Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

bodies and severed heads transformed into architectural grotesques and caryatids in the ‘peaceful’ images [Figs. 18.5 & 18.6]. Images from Vredeman de Vries’s Caryatidum series,39 evoke both Ovidian metamorphoses and the counter-metamorphoses imagined by Agrippa d’Aubigné in his account of the Day of Judgment, cited above. In this image, female forms are combined with strapwork and vegetation, with fish-like

39 Vredeman de Vries Hans, Caryatidum […] sive Athlantidum multiformium ad quemlibet Architecture ordinem accommodatarum centuria prima (Antwerp, Gerard de Jode: ca. 1565).

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figure 18.5

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Hans Vredeman de Vries, Scenographiae, plate 7 (Hollstein 37): Interior giving a view into a second room with chimney (centre) and a courtyard (right); with decorated chimney on the left, supported by male terms, 1560. Engraving, 21 × 26 cm. Image @ https://www .rijksmuseum.nl/en/search?q=Scenographiae&v=&s=&ii=3&p=1 Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

forms, with a wine-cup and vines, with a tree-trunk and roots, and finally with serpentine forms. These figures are clearly inspired by grotesques, which also combine human and animal or human and vegetal forms. Thus, the human is inextricably intertwined with nature in pleasing, but also disturbing, ways. The human form is represented as inseparable from the landscape that surrounds it, often to the point of being engulfed in other natural forms. As in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the human seems to be dissolved into the landscape, whether it is Daphne transformed into a tree, or the many women who become springs, streams, or fountains (Byblis, Cyane, Arethusa). But the Island of Hermaphrodites and the work of Hans Vredeman de Vries suggest that the dead are not gone, that our work of nation-building, supported

the Landscape of Violence in Early Modern France

figure 18.6

567

Hans Vredeman de Vries, Caryatidum, plate 7 (Hollstein 230): Six female terms, the left one encased in strapwork, the two on the right with spiraled legs, 1565? Engraving, 16.1 × 23.7 cm. Image at https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search#!?q=Caryatidum Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

by literary and artistic (particularly architectural) endeavors, is built on the foundations and ground saturated with bodies of the dead, who insistently return, demanding to be remembered, to be taken into account. What Belleforest suggests in his version of the tale of Hamlet is that these unacknowledged but exploited bodies poison the state constructed on their deaths. The beauty of an orderly nation is always ominous. The space evoked in our satirical novel is strikingly inconstant; as discussed above, it entangles nature and artifice. As the narrator moves through this space, it transforms itself to reveal different aspects of the palace to him, both instigating and reflecting his own transformation. The question that is left unresolved is whether this novel constitutes a working through of the trauma of religious conflict, or merely a reflection of the social, personal, and natural dissonances and disruptions caused by this conflict. The recursive aspect of the novel, as the narrator returns several times to the room by which he entered the palace, his repeated reactions of horror in the

568

figure 18.7

Long

Hans Vredeman de Vries, Scenographiae, plate 2 (Hollstein 32): Interior of a church, in the far background a statue on a pedestal, the pedestals of the columns decorated with moresques, 1560. Engraving, 21 × 25.6 cm. Image at https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search ?q=Scenographiae&v=&s=&ii=3&p=1 Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

face of the more benign practices of the hermaphrodites, and his apparent retelling of the story at the end of the novel, perpetually defers arrival at an understanding of the purpose of this narration. This deferral is reminiscent of the long perspectives in many of the engravings of the Scenographiae, which features galleries and rooms that stretch into the distance, sometimes seemingly without end. The sense of never getting where one is going, in a sense the non-arrival that precipitates the narration of The Island of Hermaphrodites, allows for both possibility and preclusion. There may be something down that corridor, in the next portion of the tale, but one might never know [Fig. 18.7]. This extended perspective, this perpetual deferral, is evoked by a gallery the narrator enters after expressing a desire to see more of the palace: ‘Ainsi

the Landscape of Violence in Early Modern France

569

passant plus outre nous entrames en une galerie assez large, et de moyenne longueur’ (Thus moving further along, we entered into a gallery that was fairly wide, and of medium length).40 This space seems to expand as he moves along, always extending further into the distance, and containing an infinite number of curiosities: ‘And so, continuing on my way, I saw an infinite number of rare things, which I would take too long to recount here in any detail, for the place was large […]’ (‘Ainsi continuant mon chemin je vis une infinité de choses rares, que je serois trop long à deduire icy particulierement, car le lieu estoit grand […]’).41 This space resembles an enormous cabinet of curiosities, that contains the world, or at least objects that represent travels through the world. Once again, the interior of the palace evokes exterior spaces, and even spaces very far away. The narrator continues to move through the palace until the very end, seeking to understand the country he has landed upon. There is a sense that he might end up somewhere, but in fact his movement is always a movement back: to the first room in the palace, to France, from whence he came. While Vredeman de Vries’s prints are more linear in nature, they also pose the question of whether the viewer can ever get to wherever the perspective seems to lead. Many of his seemingly endless corridors lead to doors or exits, but it is not clear whether they are closed or open, whether they might lead to a landscape outside or to yet more rooms. We are left with the question of whether these spaces and this narrative (of The Island of Hermaphrodites) offer us new possibilities, or force us to remain within the existing order. In the end, the novel opens out into a garden, and leads the narrator’s audience to perpetually consider the alternative possibilities that the island of hermaphrodites offers. The engravings, with their imposing architecture and their insistence on representing seemingly orderly architecture from an off-center perspective, both hold viewers in and keep them ill at ease. Neither seems comfortable with the status quo of civil conflict, but neither offers a definitive solution, suggesting merely that there may be a larger landscape outside of the structures of social order, not only buried bodies, but a world beyond what we see before us [Fig. 18.8].

40 L’Isle 75. 41 Ibidem 77.

570

figure 18.8

Long

Hans Vredeman de Vries, Scenographiae, plate 4 (Hollstein 34): View into a hall with columns of the Tuscan order placed on pedestals, 1560. Engraving, 21.1 × 25.5 cm. Image at https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search?q=Scenographiae&v=&s=&ii=3&p=1 Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Bibliography Belleforest F. de, Le cinquiesme tome des histoires tragiques, ed. H.-T. Campangne (Geneva: 2013). Biet C. et al., Théâtre de la cruauté et récits sanglants en France (XVIe–XVIIe siècle) (Paris: 2006). D’Aubigné T.A., Les Tragiques, ed. J.-R. Fanlo (Paris: 2003). Frisch A., Forgetting Differences: Tragedy, Historiography, and the French Wars of Religion (Edinburgh: 2015). Heuer C., The City Rehearsed: Object, Architecture, and Print in the Worlds of Hans Vredeman de Vries (New York: 2009).

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Hollstein F.W.H., Hollstein’s Dutch & Flemish Etchings, Engravings, and Woodcuts, 1450– 1700. Volumes XLVII and XLVIII: Vredeman de Vries (Rotterdam: 1997). Holt M., The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629 (Cambridge, UK: 2005). Knecht R.J., The French Religious Wars, 1562–1598 (Oxford, UK: 2002). Leibacher-Ouvrard L., “Decadent Dandies and Dystopian Gender-Bending: Artus Thomas’s L’Isle des hermaphrodites (1605)”, Utopian Studies 11 (2000) 124–131. L’Estoile P. de, Mémoires-Journaux 1574–1611 (Paris: 1982). L’Isle des Hermaphrodites, ed. C.-G. Dubois (Geneva: 1996). Long K.P., “Child in the Water: The Spectacle of Violence in Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné’s Les Tragiques”, in Simek N. – Zalloua Z. (eds.), Representations of Trauma in French and Francophone Literature, Dalhousie French Studies (Halifax, N.S.: 2007) 155–165. Reeser T.W., Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture (Chapel Hill: 2006). Uppenkamp B., “The Influence of Hans Vredeman de Vries on the Cityscape Constructed like a Picture”, in Lombaerde P. (ed.), Hans Vredeman de Vries and the Artes Mechanicae Revisited (Turnhout: 2005) 117–128. Usher P.J., Exterranean: Extraction in the Humanist Anthropocene (New York: 2019). Vredeman de Vries Hans, Caryatidum […] sive Athlantidum multiformium ad quemlibet Architecture ordinem accommodatarum centuria prima (Antwerp, Gerard de Jode: ca. 1565). Vredeman de Vries Hans, Hortorum viridariorumque (Antwerp, Philip Galle: 1583). Vredeman de Vries Hans, Scenographiae, sive perspectivae, ut aedificia, hoc modo ad opticam excitata (Antwerp, Hieronymus Cock: 1560; second ed., 1563). Vredeman de Vries Hans, Theatrum vitae humanae (Antwerp, Theodore Galle: 1577). Vredeman de Vries Hans, Variae architecturae formae (Antwerp, Theodoor Galle: 1601).

Index Nominum Aboab de Fonseca 245 Achilles 485 Adam 217, 480, 527 Adolph of Cleves 341 Aertsen, Pieter 203–204 Aesop 308–311 Agricola, Rudolf 70 n. 105, 484, 485 n. 16 Alain de Lille 489 n. 30 Albert VII (Archduke) 344, 348 Alberti, Leon Battista 171, 172 nn. 39–41, 173–174, 187, 396 Albertus Magnus 335, 436 Alciato, Andrea 125 Alexander VII (Pope, Fabio Chigi) 411 Alfonso of Aragon, Duke of Calabria 95 Allot, Robert 439 Altieri, Paluzzo, Cardinal 372 Alunno, Francesco 459–460 Alva, Duke of, Spanish Governor of the Netherlands 254 Ammannati, Bartolomeo 105, 300 Ancona de Amadori, Giovanni Battista  375–376, 378, 381 n. 30, 382, 383 n. 35, 384 nn. 36–38, 385 nn. 39–42, 386 n. 43–44, 387 Aneau, Barthélemy 125 Anslo, Gerbrand 245 Anthonisz., Cornelis 211 Anthony of Burgundy (bastard) 339 n. 52 Aquinas, Thomas 436 Ariosto, Ludovico 21, 422, 426–427, 429, 432, 434, 446, 449, 457–476 Aristophanes 430, 438 Aristotle 25, 174, 483 n. 9 Artus, Thomas 552 n. 14, 553 n. 15 Ascham, Roger 446 Aubrey, John 439 Augustine of Hippo, Saint 3, 158, 162–164, 409 Augustus, Roman emperor 55, 277, 283, 375, 411 Bacon, Roger 436, 438, 447 Baldassare di Santo Mango, baron of San Mango 92–93 Barlow, Francis 155

Baron de Bouis 317 Baronio, Cesare 398 Bartas, Guillaume du 171 n. 37 Bartholomeus Anglicus 169 Bartoli, Pietro Santi 376 Basinio Basini da Parma 100 Baudoin, Jean 155 Beatis, Antonio de 342 Beccadelli, Antonio 110, 116 Bede, Venerable 537 Bella, Stefano della 318–319 Bellaert, Jacob 169 Belleforest, François de 550–551, 553, 567 Bellomo, Agapito 433 Bembo Pietro, Cardinal 119 Ben Israel, Menasseh 244–245, 253 Benavides, Marco 300 Bencard, Johann Caspar (printer) 502 Benserade, Isaac de 308 Bening, Simon 182 Berkheyde, Gerrit 213 Berry, Jean of, Duke see Jean, Duke of Berry Biondo, Flavio 396 Blaeu, Joan 219 Bles, Herri met de 21, 140, 169, 174–176, 179, 507–540 Blondeel, Lancelot 135–136, 139 Boccaccio, Giovanni 108, 427 Boiardo, Matteo Maria 424, 462, 465–467, 469 Bol, Hans 4–5, 20, 23–79, 184 Bolswert, Boëtius à 198 Bonagiunta Orbicciani of Lucca 476 n. 39 Borghese, Scipione 300 Borromeo, Carlo, Cardinal 304 Borromeo, Federico, Cardinal 509 Bosch, Hieronymus 539 Bosio, Antonio 398 Bourne, William 436 Bracciolini, Poggio 396 Brahe, Tycho 312 Brea, Pietro (printer) 502 Brébeuf, Jean de, S.J. 277 Bril, Paul 509 Briot, Isaac 155 Britannico, Lodovico (printer) 501

574 Bruegel, Pieter (the Elder) 3, 5, 7, 20, 135, 139–140, 147, 158–189, 203, 226 Brueghel, Jan (the Elder) 509 Bufalini, Leonardo 396 Buontalenti, Bernardo 426 Caligula, Roman emperor 411 Calvin, John 178, 243, 253 Campagnola, Giulio 112, 180 Campano, Giannantonio 89 Camusat, Jean 263 n. 9 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da 392, 416 n. 38 Cardano, Gerolamo 178 Caro, Annibale 301, 422, 424, 446 Cartier, Jacques 261–262, 271 n. 33 Castelein, Matthijs de 25–27, 29 Caus, Salomon de 430, 440 n. 68, 442 Caxton, William 329–330 Cervantes, Miguel de 458 Champlain, Samuel de 261, 271, 273 n. 39 Charlemagne, Roman emperor 462, 479 Charles the Bold 344, 351–352 Charles V, Emperor 340 n. 54, 341, 343, 346 n. 73, 348, 354–359 Charles V, King of France 333–335 Charles VI, King of France 332–333, 334 n. 31, 335, 349 Charles VIII, King of France 349 n. 79 Chastellain, Georges 327, 329 n. 9 Chauveau, François 155 Christian I, King of Denmark 327 Christina, Queen of Sweden 370, 376, 378 n. 25 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 25–26, 27 n. 6, 162 n. 16,163 n. 21, 178, 299, 304, 397, 482 Ciriaco d’Ancona 396 Clarke, Robert 486, 488–492, 498 n. 53, 502 Clement X (Pope, Emilio Altieri) 372 Cleyn, Francis 155 Cock, Hieronymus 136–137, 139, 159, 162, 177 n. 53, 179, 180 n. 66, 184, 189, 560 n. 32 Cock, Matthijs 180 n. 66 Cöetivity Master 349 n. 81 Colard de Voleur 329 Colines, Simon de (printer) 501 Collaert, Adriaen 4–5, 23, 25, 29

Index Nominum Collet, Claude 273 n. 39 Colonna, Francesco 429 Colvius, Andre 252 Comenius, Jan Amos 246 Conti, Torquato 301 Coornhert, Dirck Volckertsz. 32, 69–79 Copernicus 312 Corbechon, Jean 169 Corrozet, Gilles 124, 130 Corsini, Matteo 436 Cortesi, Paolo 297 Cotta, Lazzaro 367, 370 n. 5, 376 n. 22 Coymans, Isaac 252 Cramoisy, Sébastian 274 n. 41 Crasso, Lucio 96 Crescenzi, Piero de’ 335, 339 Crispo, Giovanni Battista 94–95 d’Aubigné, Théodore Agrippa 548, 549–550, 565 Dagobert I 349 Dalem, Cornelis van 135, 138–139 Dallington, Robert, Sir 440, 446 Dante Alighieri 479, 485, 490 David, King of the Jews 163, 174, 175 n. 51, 176 Dee, John 430, 438–439 Del Monte, Francesco Maria, Cardinal 301 Dene, Eduard de 124, 128, 130, 135, 145, 150–152, 155 Desgots, Pierre 308 Diocletian, Roman emperor 411 Dionysius (Denys) the Carthusian 164, 187 Doetecum, Joannes van (I) 137 Doetecum, Lucas van 138 Dolce, Lodovico 304 Domenichino (Domenico Zampieri)  416 n. 38 Dominic, Saint 341 Donadei, Natale 502 Dossi, Dosso 310 Dughet, Gaspard 401 Dugua de Mons, Pierre 270–271 Dürer, Albrecht 174, 343, 480, 539 Dury, John 245, 246 n. 36, 252 Earle, John 444–445, 447 Edward IV, King of England 327, 339 n. 52

575

Index Nominum Egenolph, Christian (printer) 502 Eguia, Michael de (printer) 501 Eleanor of Portugal, Queen consort  339 n. 48 Erasmus, Desiderius, of Rotterdam 25, 31, 33, 53–68, 69 nn. 101–104, 90, 178, 243, 255 n. 60, 482–484, 498, 500 n. 60, 502, 520 n. 38, 533, 536–537 Este, Alessandro d’, Cardinal 301–302 Este, Ippolito d’, Cardinal 302 Evelyn, John 247–248, 312, 318 Eyck, Jan van 525 n. 45 Facius, Bartholomeus 171 n. 37 Falda, Giovanni Battista 367, 369, 370, 372, 373, 375, 376, 378, 381, 383, 384, 387 Farnese, Giulia 450 Félibien, André 408 Ferdinand I, Emperor 348 Ferdinando de’ Medici, Cardinal 301, 310 Ferdinando II de’ Medici (Grand Duke) 301 Ferrari, Giovan Battista, S.J. 307 Ficino, Marsilio 178 Filarete (Antonio di Pietro Averulino) 429 Filiberto, Emanuele, Prince of Carignano  318 Fontana, Domenico 411 Fontana, Giovanni 447 Francis of Assisi, Saint (Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone) 163, 383 Francisci, Antonius (printer) 502 Franco, Giovanno Battista 141–142, 144 François, Jean, S.J. 317 Frederick IV of Aragon, King of Naples 117 Funck, Matthias 489 n. 30, 494 n. 43, 498–499, 500 n. 60, 502 Galilei, Galileo 426, 457 Galle, Philips 33, 162 Gallienus, Roman emperor 369, 375, 382 Geer, Lawrence de 246 Geer, Louis de 246 Gessner, Conrad 125, 128 Gheeraerts, Marcus (the Elder) 124–125, 128, 130–136, 138–155 Giambologna 300, 424, 428 Giorgione 304 Gilio da Fabriano, Giovanni Andrea 398

Giraldi, Giovan Battista 457 Goes, Hugo van der 352 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 236 Golding, Arthur 446 Goltzius, Hendrick 5 Gómez de Ciudad Real, Álvar 501 Gourmont, Gilles de 355 Goyen, Jan van 21, 195, 197–198, 203–205 Graeff, Cornelis de 241–243, 246, 248, 254 Gravé, François (Du Pont) 271 n. 33 Greene, Robert 436, 438–439, 447 Gregory the Great, Pope 409 Grotius, Hugo 243–244, 247, 255–256 Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)  247 n. 40, 449, 450 n. 93 Guidiccioni, Lelio 300–301 Guillén de Brocar, Arnao (printer) 501 Gymnich, Johann (printer) 484 n. 16 Hanauius, Iohannes (printer) 502 Hecheler, Johannes 503 Heemskerck, Maarten van 392 Heinsius, Daniel 222 Hennecart, Jean 344 Henry VI, King of England 349 Hessus, Helius Eobanus 89, 480 n. 4, 491–494, 498, 499 n. 58, 502 Heyden, Jan van der 213 Hobbema, Meindert 196 Hieronymus de Vallibus 489 n. 30, 502 Hollar, Wenceslas 155 Homer 15 n. 18, 423 n. 6, 479 n. 1, 484–485 Hoogstraten, Frans van 250 Hoorne, Count of, Philip de Montmorency  254 Höppener, Peter 502 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus)  464 n. 20, 483 n. 9 Horenbout, Gerard 339 n. 48 Horn, Abraham 489 n. 30, 503 Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester 326, 330 Huygens, Constantijn 196, 219, 221–223, 225–228, 253 Huys, Pieter 140 Imperiali, Lorenzo, Cardinal 370 Innocentius VII, Pope 102

576 Ippolita Sforza, wife of Alfonso of Aragon  95 Isabella Clara Eugenia, Archduchess of Austria 344, 348 Isabella of Portugal, Duchess of Burgundy  341, 351 Isidore of Seville 464 n. 20 Jacob 515, 524 Jean, Duke of Berry 165, 333, 336 n. 44, 341 Jerome, Saint 507–540 Jesus 24, 32 n. 13, 33, 36 n. 17, 38–39, 41 n. 27, 42, 44 n. 33, 52, 55, 57–58, 60–63, 65–68, 69 n. 103, 74–76, 385, 395, 406–409, 413, 416, 480, 482, 488, 493, 494, 525, 535 Joanna of Castile 343, 346, 352–353, 359 n. 109 John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy 336, 349, 351 John, Lord Lumley 424 John, Saint 391–392, 394 n. 4, 402, 409–410, 414 Jonghelinck, Nicolaes 182–183, 189 n. 91 Junius Bassus 398 Junius, Franciscus 217, 222, 255 n. 61 Keats, John 95, 485 Kerchovius, Lucas (printer) 502 Keyser, Thomas de 241 La Fontaine, Jean de 155, 308 La Roche de Mesgouez, Troilus de (Marquis de La Roche-Mesgouez) 271 n. 33 La Tour, Georges de 416 n. 38 Lalaing, Antoine de 341 Lamoral, Count of Egmond 254 Lampsonius, Dominicus 177 Lannoy, Guillebert de 344–345 Lannoy, Hugh de 344 Laura (love of Petrarch) 101 Le Boullenger, Jean 263 n. 9 Le Brun, Laurent, S.J. 21, 263, 264 nn. 11, 13, 273–284 Le Clerc, Anthoine 261 n. 1 Le Nôtre, André 308 Le Sueur, Eustache 416 n. 38 Leers, Arnold (printer) 502

Index Nominum Leeuw, Ameldonc 245 Lejeune, Paul, S.J. 277 Lemaire, Jean 392, 401 Lescarbot, Marc 21, 262–263, 264 nn. 11–12, 266–275, 277, 281–284 L’Estoile, Pierre de 553 n. 15 Lev, Jarislav (of Rozmital) 340 Levi de Barrios, Daniel 245 Leyden, Lucas van 174 Ligorio, Pirro 302, 304, 378, 396 Limbourg Brothers (Herman, Paul, Johan)  165 Lipsius, Justus 177–178 Livinus, Saint 346 Locheta, Bernardo (printer) 501 Lomazzo, Giovanni Paolo 177 n. 57, 436 Lore, Boudewijn van der 352 Lorrain, Claude 392, 401 Lotto, Lorenzo 449 Louis of Aragon (Luigi d’Aragone), Cardinal  343 Louis XI, King of France 327 Louis XIV, King of France 273, 312, 318, 408 Lucensis, Franciscus (printer) 502 Lucius, Jacob (printer) 503 Luzzato, Simone 245 Machaut, Guillaume de 326 Maecenas 375–376, 378, 382–384, 386–387 Maio, Giuniano 96 Major, Johannes 503 Male, Louis de 352 Maler, Mattheus (printer) 502 Mander, Karel van 5, 8 n. 4, 9–12, 14 n. 16, 15–18, 19 n. 26, 131, 135, 145, 147, 154, 158, 179, 185–188, 189 nn. 87, 90, 206, 536, 540 n. 76 Mantovano, Battista 489 n. 30 Margaret of Bavaria 335 n. 41 Margaret of Flanders 332, 335–336, 351 Margaret of York 351 Martin, Saint 346 Marvell, Andrew 434–435, 445 Mary of Hungary 344, 348 Mascardi, Agostino 408 Masella di San Mango (Jacopo Sannazaro’s mother) 93–96 Massimo, Camillo, Cardinal 370

Index Nominum Master of the Baudeloo Missal 354 Master of the Getty Froissart 174 Master of the Matthias Gradual 346 Master of the Pierre Michault of Guyot II le Peley 349 n. 81 Master of the Small Landscapes 135, 139 Matthew, Saint 33, 391, 395, 406, 408, 412, 416 Mauritianus, Pamphilus 19 Maximilian I (Emperor) 343, 348, 353–354 Medici, Carlo de’ 301 Medici, Cosimo III de’, Prince 318–319 Medici, Lorenzo de’ 427–428 Mesnil, Nicole de 339 Métayer, Iamet 279 n. 48 Michelangelo Buonarroti 143, 177, 304 Millot, Jean 263 n. 8 Molé, Jean de 351 n. 82 Molijn, Pieter 21, 198, 201, 203 Mollet, André 279 n. 48 Mombrizio, Bonino 501 Montaigne, Michel de 178, 261, 262 n. 4, 396–398, 430, 439, 440 n. 66 Montezinos, Antonio 245 Montmoret, Humbert de 501 Morello, Carlo 305 Mormile, Iacobetto 96 Mussem, Jan van 25–27, 29 Muzio, Giovanni (printer) 501 Muzio, Macario 499, 502 Mynsinger, Heinrich Albert 503 Myle, Simon de 141–142 n. 31, 144 n.33 Nangis, Guillaume de 349, 354 Nashe, Thomas 430, 435, 441, 445, 447, 449 Naudé, Gabriel 436 Nerli, Francesco (junior), Cardinal 367, 369–370, 372–373, 375–376, 378, 381–385, 387 Nerli, Francesco (senior), Cardinal 372 Nero, Roman emperor  378, 385 Nicholas, Louis, S.J. 280 n. 49 Noort, Lambert van 530 Noski, Elias 223 Ogilby, Francis 155 Orley, Bernard van 181, 348 d’Orléans, Charles 327 n. 8

577 d’Orléans, Louis 336 Orobio da Castro, Isaac 245 Orsini, Pierfrancesco ‘Vicino’  422–423 n. 4, 450 Ortelius, Abraham 178 Ovid, Publius Ovidius Naso 14 nn. 14–15, 15 nn. 17–18, 113 n. 56, 273–274, 277, 282, 424, 441 n. 69, 446, 484, 489 n. 30, 494 n. 41, 496, 500, 566 Paleotti, Gabriele, Cardinal 304, 310, 398 Palladio, Andrea 396 Parmentier, Michel (printer) 501 Pascal, Blaise 409 Patinir, Joachim 140, 169, 179, 520–521, 539 Patrizi, Francesco 294 Paul, Apostle 516 n. 29, 525 n. 47 Pereyra, Abraham 244 Perier, Adrian 263 n. 8 Perrault, Charles 308 Petrarca, Francesco 89, 100–102, 108–109, 119 Petri, Heinrich (printer) 484 n. 16 Philip of Cleves 341 Philip the Bold 332, 335, 351 Philip the Fair, Duke of Burgundy 341, 343, 346, 351–353 Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy 164, 326–330, 336, 340, 351–352, 359 Philip IV, King of France 333 Piccolomini, Enea Silvio (Pope Pius II) 89, 171 n. 37, 484 Piget, Simeon 263 n. 9 Pino, Paolo 177 Pio da Carpi, Rodolfo 300 Pipelare, Matthaeus 354 Pizan, Christine de 334–335 Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus)  204 Pontano, Giovanni 89, 99–100, 102, 110–111, 332 Pool, Jurriaan 213, 221–222, 226–228 Porta, Giambattista della 297, 434 Posthumus, Hermannus 392 Potter, Paulus 196 Poullet, Jehan 261 n. 1 Poussin, Nicolas 391–417, 449 Pozzo, Cassiano dal 398

578 Pseudo-Cicero  25 Puys, Remy de 355–358 Quintilian, Marcus Fabius 25, 27 n. 6, 482, 485 n. 16 Rhau, Georg (printer) 503 Riccio, Agostino del 299 Richeome, Louis, S.J. 305–307 Robert II, Count of Artois 326 Robert, Hubert 318 Roffet, Ponce 261 n. 1 Romano, Giulio 310 Roscioli, Giovanni Maria 391 n. 1 Rossetus, Petrus 501 Ross, Alexander 502 Rossi, Giovanni Giacomo de 367 nn. 3–4, 368–370, 379, 381, 387–389 Ruisdael, Jacob van 21, 209–232, 234–256 Ruysdael, Salomon van 198, 203–205 Saavedra Fajardo, Diego de 312 Sadeler, Aegidius 23, 33, 48, 150 n. 39, 155 Saenredam, Pieter Jansz. 228 Sagard, Gabriel, O.M.R. 273 n. 39 Salomon, Bernard 124 Sangallo, Giuliano da 310 Sannazaro, Jacopo (Actius Sincerus) 11, 17, 20, 89–119 Santacroce, Girolamo 105 Sartorius, Nicolaus (printer) 503 Saxo, Moritz 502 Scheerere, Jan de 355 Schudt, Johann Jakob 247 Scève, Maurice 171 n. 37 Seneca the Younger, Lucius Annaeus 178 Serlio, Sebastiano 396, 401–402, 413, 559 Serres, Olivier de 279 n. 48 Shakespeare, William 265, 434, 446 Sidonius Apollinaris 397 Simon Marmion 167 Sixtus V, Pope 411–412 Sluter, Claus 336, 351 Smith, John 235 Smyters, Anthoni 150 Soarez, Cypriano, S.J. 25–26, 29 Sonnius, Claude 273 n. 39 Southwell, Robert 445–446, 449

Index Nominum Spangenberg, Johann 503 Spenser, Edmund 423, 426–427, 430, 432, 434–435, 441–442, 445–446, 449 Stanislaus Kostka, S.J., Saint 373 n. 15 Statius, Publius Papinius 476 Steinhöwel, Heinrich 147 Stöckel, Wolfgang (printer) 501 Stoop, Dirk 155 Suetonius (Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus)  378, 385 Sweerts, Hieronymus 214 Sylvestre, Israël 312 Taegio, Bartolomeo 433, 434 n. 46, 442 Taillasson, Jean Joseph 236 Tasso, Bernardo 422 Tasso, Torquato  21, 422–423, 424 n. 7, 426, 428–429, 432, 434, 442, 449–450, 460–462, 471, 476 n. 39 Tempesta, Antonio 396 Tesauro, Emmanuele, S.J. 305, 307, 318 Testi, Fulvio 297–298, 301 Thanner, Jacob (printer) 501 Thrale, Richard (printer) 502 Titian 141, 177, 180, 188 Tolomei, Claudio 433, 442 Tommaso di Savoia, Prince 305 Tons, Jan 181 Tribolo, Niccolò 426, 445 Trissino, Giangiorgio 423–424 Urban VIII, Pope 391 n. 1 Valeriano, Pierio 296, 297 n. 16 Valesio, Francesco 372 Valois, Henri de (Henri III, King of France)  552 Vasari, Giorgio 177, 304, 445 n. 82, 449 Vase, Pierre (or Cruche, or Eskrich) 125 Vecchietti, Bernardo 424 Velázquez, Diego Rodríguez de Silva y 392, 416 n. 38 Verdizotti, Giovan Mario 130 Verino, Ugolino 479 Vermeer, Johannes 416 n. 38 Vico, Johannes de 346 Vida, Marco Girolamo 494–498, 501 Vieri, Francesco de’ 298

Index Nominum Vigewirt, Nicolaus 503 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) 5, 18–20, 98, 107–110, 113–114, 116, 118–119, 267, 278 n. 47, 282–283, 339, 479 n. 1, 484–486, 488, 489 n. 30, 490, 491 n. 36, 492, 494, 495 n. 48, 497, 498 n. 56, 500–501 Visscher, Claes Jansz. 198 n. 5, 211 Vitruvius (Marcus Vitruvius Pollio) 172 Voet, Jacob Ferdinand 370 Volpi, Giovanni Antonio 94 Vondel, Joost van den 147, 217, 221, 241 Voragine, Jacobus of 520 n. 38 Vos, Jan 221 Vossius, Gerardus 222 Vredeman de Vries, Hans 21, 175, 177 n. 53, 179, 184, 552, 559–569 Vries, Dierick de 5 Vries, Frederick de 5

579 Waldstein, Zdenkonius Brtnicensis von 424 Walter of Châtillon 479 Walther, Samuel Benjamin (printer) 502 Welack, Mattheus (printer) 503 Wellens de Cock, Jan 540 Weyden, Goswijn van der 341 Wilkins, John (Bishop of Chester) 436 William I of Orange 254 William II of Orange 240, 254 William III of Orange 254 William of Ockham 165 Witt, Johann de, Grand Pensionary  240–242 Zainer, Günther (printer) 502 Zerbolt van Zutphen, Gerard 507, 510–517, 521 n. 40, 523 Zucchi, Jacopo 310 Zurbarán, Francisco de 416 n. 38