The Artist as Murderer: An Enduring Legend from Ancient Greece to the Modern Day 1476683956, 9781476683959

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The Artist as Murderer

The Artist as Murderer An Enduring Legend from Ancient Greece to the Modern Day

Norman E. Land

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina

Norman E. Land died September 19, 2021, after delivering the final draft of this manuscript to the publisher

ISBN (print) ­978-1-4766-8395-9 ISBN (ebook) ­978-1-4766-4860-6 Library of Congress and British Library cataloguing data are available

Library of Congress Control Number xxxxxxxxxx © 2023 Estate of Norman E. Land. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Engraving of the Greek painter Parrhasius by William Humphrys, 1848 (Library of Congress) Printed in the United States of America

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com

“A painter paints a picture with the same feeling as that with which a criminal commits a crime.” Edgar Degas (1834–1917)





For my students

vii

Acknowledgments Over the years spent writing this book, several friends and colleagues have shown an interest in it. I am most grateful to my friend, the late Andrew Thomas Ladis (1949–2007), formerly Franklin Professor of Art History in the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia, for his kindness and encouragement. As his other friends will agree, he was an inspiration and an example to follow not only as an accomplished scholar and writer, but also (and most importantly) as a human being. To the late Laurie Schneider Adams (1941–2015) I owe another special debt of gratitude. She was an uncommonly generous, perceptive, and supportive person. Paul Barolsky, Commonwealth Professor, McIntire Department of Art, University of Virginia, and William E. Wallace, Barbara Murphy Bryant Distinguished Professor of Art History, Department of Art History and Archaeology, Washington University in Saint Louis, were very helpful in the early stages of this project. Each of them is an expert in every aspect of the life and works of Michelangelo, and each generously shared his vast knowledge and insight with me. I am grateful to them for their generosity. I also wish to thank the University of Missouri–Columbia for granting me research leave to work on this book in the academic year 2014–2015. I am also grateful to Professor Michael Yonan, University of California–Davis. He was kind enough to read and to comment on the earliest draft of the book. Over the last decades or so several undergraduate students have asked questions about the subject of the book and offered comments on the material. They helped me to see many things I had overlooked, and their remarks caused me to rethink the significance of some of the material. I owe them a great deal. I could not have brought this book to completion without the unfailing support of my son, William Parker, and my daughter, Sarah Elizabeth. Their love, encouragement and sense of humor have been of tremendous help. To them I shall be forever grateful. viii

Table of Contents Acknowledgments

viii

Preface

1

  1.  Introduction: The Artist as Murderer

5

  2.  The Image of Parrhasius

12

  4.  The Afterlife of Seneca’s Tale

28

  6.  Michelangelo Murders a Model

46

  8.  The Tale Retold

59

  3.  Parrhasius and the Olynthian Slave   5.  Tormented Models   7.  Carpenter’s Tale

  9.  Variations on the Tale

19 38 53 62

10.  Professional Opinions

68

12.  A Legend of a Sculptor

80

11.  A Turkish Spy on Giotto

72

13.  Parrhasius in Love

84

15.  “The Man in Purple”

93

14.  The Return of Parrhasius

89

16.  Socrates and Parrhasius

100

18.  Criminal Artists

114

17.  The Return of Michelangelo 19.  Death and Detachment

20.  Afterword: Art and Life ix

104 121 124



Table of Contents

Appendix A: Giovanni Paolo Marana, “A Turkish Spy on Giotto”

129

Appendix B: Adelbert von Chamisso, “The Crucifix: An Artist’s Legend”

133

Appendix C: Nathaniel Parker Willis, “Parrhasius”

138

Appendix D: Espy W.H. Williams, “Parrhasius; or, Thriftless Ambition”

142

Appendix E: Pierre Louÿs, “The Man in Purple”

151

Notes

167

Bibliography

181

Index

191

x

Preface This book presents for the first time a concise history of a brief story (or outline thereof), which, as far as anyone knows, first appeared in the first half of the ­fi rst-century ce in the Controversiae of Roman rhetorician, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, better known as the elder Seneca (ca. 54 bce–ca. 40 ce). As the story goes, the ­fourth-century bce Greek painter, Parrhasius (or Parrhasios), lacking sympathy for the suffering of his male model (an old man who was the artist’s slave), murdered him, because the artist wished to benefit his art, particularly to strengthen its lifelike representation of nature. In the Renaissance, and afterwards in Europe and America, the tale inspired structurally similar and more elaborate stories about several ­well-known artists, including Giotto di Bondone (1266/7– 1337), Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Guido Reni (1575–1642), and Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), as well as a few less ­well-known and anonymous artists. Two widely popular ­n ineteenth-century American plays are based on the paradigmatic tale, and elements of its plot have appeared in poems, short stories, novels, and films. The comments made by painters, art historians, art critics, tourists, educators, writers on religion, and anatomists on the original tale, as well as on its variations, are also part of this history. The stories about an artist murdering his model indirectly address an understanding of the relationship between art and life, or art and nature. In most of these tales the artist seeks a lifelike imitation of nature and like Parrhasius, he is willing to kill, or at least to torture, a living being in order to create the semblance of a living being, particularly his or her posture and facial expression. Driven by ambition, the artist seeks success, fame, and a type of immortality through his art. In a few other tales, the act of painting or of making sculpture is presented as a kind of sacrifice. The artist’s model, who emblematically stands for impermanent nature, must die so that art may live, so that a truth other 1

Preface than the literal and a beauty other than the natural may be made to endure. In short, quotidian nature dies so that it may be resurrected in the paradise of art. In this view, artistic achievement redeems the artist’s murderous cruelty and his crime. There is also a continuing parallel between artists who kill their models and scientists, especially anatomists, who dissect animals and humans to gain a greater knowledge of nature. Broadly speaking, this book examines the image of the artist as cruel and murderous, an image that is contrary to traditional, deeply held beliefs about artists. One belief is that artists love their models. Another belief is that the artist’s love of nature in general can be corrupted by a quest for scientific knowledge and by an arrogant and careless desire for artistic and professional success.

Previous Literature Several books deal with the historical image of the artist, the most useful among them being Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment, first published in Vienna in 1934, by Ernst Kris (1900–1957), an art historian and psychoanalyst, and Otto Kurz (1908–1975), an art historian. Kris and Kurz briefly discuss some of the primary material, which is more extensively examined in the present book. The same is true of Nigel Spivey’s Enduring Creation (2001), which is an admirable study of representations of pain. Paul Barolsky, who has written extensively about art literature, has recently made an important contribution to our understanding of the image of the artist in his Michelangelo’s Nose (2007). Barolsky, who only briefly discusses the tale of Michelangelo and his model, makes no reference to Parrhasius. Most recently (2016), Andreas Plackinger has briefly discussed the story in the general context of violence as a figure of thought in Michelangelo’s aesthetic discourse.1 There are a few important older studies of stories inspired by Seneca’s original. For example, Giovanni Papini, in his Michelangelo in the Life of His Era (1949), was the first to survey (although briefly and incompletely) the story of Michelangelo murdering a model. In a scholarly article (1995) the French scholar Michel Delon surveys from a different perspective a small portion of the material presented in the present work, particularly several stories about Michelangelo. In another important study (1996), Helen Morales addresses the subject 2



Preface

of torture in relation to Parrhasius and “the limits of art.” A few years ago, in his The Envy of Daedalus (2013), Marcello Barbanera very briefly discusses the story of Parrhasius in relation to the topos of the artist as murderer. For the sake of comparison, I also briefly present Daedalus as a murderer who is motivated by envy and jealousy. Although I am indebted to the publications of the ­above-mentioned scholars and of others, I have approached the subject from a different vantage.

Methodology The methodology I have employed in the presentation of the stories at hand might be described as analytical narrative, but I prefer to think of this study as a tale of a tale, for it offers a detailed but concise history of a single story with attention to those who, in repeating, criticizing, reusing, and reshaping the story, contributed to that history. Because the focus is on a single, paradigmatic tale, the history is at times somewhat repetitive, and I humbly beg the reader’s forbearance.

Appendices I have included as appendices a few ­l ittle-known poems and short stories. All but two of them are about Parrhasius. Although the exceptions are about Giotto and an anonymous sculptor, they are each indebted to the ancient prototypical tale. These sources are ­out-of-print, ­out-of-copyright, and not easily gathered in one place.

References to Works of Art Because the subject of this book is the artist’s relation to his model and not directly about works of art, I have not included any illustrations. Rather, for each known work of art, when possible, I have provided a footnote in which I give the work’s current location. Many of the other works mentioned are untraceable.

3

Preface

A Note on Dates Where possible, I have given the birth and death dates for most historical figures (except living ones) mentioned in the text. If those dates do not appear in parentheses after the first mention of the person, I was not able to discover them.

4

1

Introduction: The Artist as Murderer The image or literary legend of painters and sculptors, as it is generally represented in the writings of ancient and Renaissance authors, is complex. Accomplished painters and sculptors are sometimes said to be “divine,” or nearly so. For example, some ancient artists associated themselves with a particular god, and inasmuch as Renaissance artists created the illusion of a “new nature” in their works, they were likened to God in the book of Genesis. Sometimes Renaissance artists were also linked to mythical beings, such as Daedalus, Narcissus and Pygmalion. Many artists are represented as socially elevated, wealthy and on intimate terms with emperors, kings, queens, popes, princes, princesses and powerful politicians, and they count poets, scholars, philosophers, lawyers, doctors and other learned men and women among their friends. Some artists were admired for their ability to deceive or otherwise outwit fools and presumptuous people, including patrons and critics. An artist’s keen sense of humor and verbal talents, particularly an aptitude for witty rejoinders, are also important components of the image. Often personal qualities, such as modesty, diligence and honesty, are presented as indispensable to the artist’s rise from the lower reaches of society to elevated success. Numerous artists are depicted as lovers, and their mistresses and wives often serve as models for their paintings and sculptures. Some artists are said to possess a profound appreciation of natural beauty, especially feminine beauty. In this regard, love drives some artists to create works of art, and their completed works are often referred to as their children. There is also a dark or shadow side to this otherwise bright, collective image. A few, minor, male artists are depicted as ­simple-minded fools, others as tricksters and still others as drunkards.1 Several master artists, because they were “born under Saturn,” are said to be moody, 5



The Artist as Murderer

temperamental and melancholic.2 Others are described as jealous, envious, greedy, or mercilessly competitive. Some artists are portrayed as lazy and lacking in diligence, while others are presented as hostile, and still others are depicted as downright violent. For example, some are said to have committed murder, and a few actually did so.

Daedalus and Talus The first known story in which an artist commits murder appears in Greek mythology, particularly in the myth of Daedalus, who famously designed a labyrinth at Knossos on the island of Crete. In addition to being an excellent architect, he was believed to be the inventor of images, and he made sculptures, some of which are said to have moved autonomously. ­First-century B.C. Greek historian, Diodorus Siculus reports that Daedalus’s skill at representing nature was so great some people believed his lifelike figures could see and walk.3 Daedalus was the teacher of his ­t welve-year-old nephew, Talus (or Talos), who was the first to invent the potter’s wheel, the saw, and a pair of compasses. In Diodorus’ version of the myth, Uncle Daedalus, who is afraid that Talus’s ingenuity might eventually surpass his own, kills his youthful nephew. When they are alone on the roof of the Acropolis in Athens, the uncle pushes his potential rival to his death. Caught in the act of burying Talus’s body, Daedalus is brought before the Areopagus, a court for deciding cases involving homicide, where he is condemned to death for his crime. He avoids punishment, however, by fleeing Athens before he can be executed.4

Andrea del Castagno and Domenico Veneziano Later authors knew of the myth of Daedalus and Talus and used some of its features in their tales about artists. For example, the myth is the prototype for a Renaissance story about two ­fi fteenth-century painters living in Florence. In the second edition of his Lives of the Artists, the artist, architect, and art historian Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) recounts how the diabolical Florentine painter Andrea del Castagno (c. 1419–1457) murdered his “friend,” Venetian painter Domenico Veneziano (ca. 1410–1461), who was at the time living in Florence. In this tale, Andrea, who painted in tempera (pigments mixed with egg yolks), 6



1. Introduction: The Artist as Murderer

is envious of the praise Domenico receives for his talents as an artist and for his knowledge of how to paint in oils. One day as Domenico is returning from a social gathering, Andrea attacks his perceived rival in the street. He uses some pieces of lead to hit Domenico first in the stomach, smashing his lute (symbol of love and harmony), and then over the head, killing him. Later, after Andrea has returned unnoticed to his studio, he hears of Domenico’s death and, feigning horror and grief, rushes out into the street where he takes the lifeless body of his “brother” in his arms and loudly laments his death. Like Daedalus, Andrea avoids punishment for his crime. No one suspects that he is responsible for Domenico’s murder, and he never would have been discovered had he not confessed to the crime on his deathbed.5 As has been long recognized, Vasari’s tale is not historically true, for Domenico died four years after Andrea’s demise. Rather, as Andrew Ladis so aptly remarked, the tale is “a parable about the moral conflict between ­s elf-interest and love,” and it is a reminder of how powerful envy, rivalry and personal ambition can be, even between friends.6

Alexandre de Berneval The myth of Daedalus and Talus was also known in northern Europe. For example, the story informs several ­fi fteenth-century legends reported in ­s eventeenth-century France, Germany, and Scotland. These tales are about a master artist or craftsman who murders an apprentice. Such a tale appears in 1662 in a book by the French historian Dom François de Pommeraye (1617–1687).7 In this tale a master mason, Alexandre de Berneval (died 1441), is in charge of making two ­rose-windows at the Abbey of Saint Owen, near Rouen in Normandy. Alexandre took charge of executing the window in the abbey’s south transept and made his apprentice responsible for the window in the north transept. “According to tradition,” writes Pommeraye, Alexandre “murdered his apprentice out of envy,” because the youth had surpassed him in the execution of the rose window in the north transept. Pommeraye explains that Alexandre “paid the penalty of his crime,” which was death by hanging. Nevertheless, “the monks, out of gratitude for his skill, interred his body within the church, to which he had contributed so much ornamentation.”8 In short, the monks posthumously rewarded Alexandre in spite of his crime. 7



The Artist as Murderer

Scotland Thomas Kirk (1650–1706) offers another story that reflects the myth of Daedalus and Talus. In his diary of a tour in Scotland, which was written in 1677 but not published until 1832, Kirk briefly recounts a story about the “Apprentice Column” located in the Rosslyn Chapel (founded in 1446) near Edinburgh. As Kirk tells the legend: When the anonymous master builder was given an exquisite model for a column he was to carve, he “went abroad to see good patterns, but before his return his apprentice had built one pillar.” On his return, the master kills the apprentice because he has outperformed his mentor. Kirk explains that during his visit to Scotland a guide pointed out to him and his friends “the head of the apprentice [represented] on the wall with a gash in the forehead, and his master’s head opposite to him.”9 As Kirk seems to imply, portraits of master and pupil—murderer and victim— perpetually gaze at one another across the chapel. Nearly a century later, the tale was still circulating. In a newspaper article dated 1761, Robert Forbes (1708–1775), Anglican Bishop of Caithness and of Ross, reported a more detailed version of the tale told by Kirk. Forbes reprinted the text of his article in a pamphlet of 1774: The Master Mason having received from the Founder a model of a pillar [i.e., a column] of exquisite workmanship and design, hesitated to carry it out until he had gone to Rome or some other foreign part to see the original. He went abroad and in his absence an apprentice having dreamt that he had finished the pillar, at once set to work and carried out the design [seen in his dream] as it now stands, a perfect marvel of workmanship. The Master Mason on his return, seeing the pillar completed, instead of being delighted at the success of his pupil, was so stung with envy that he asked who dared to do it in his absence. On being told that it was his apprentice, he was so inflamed with rage and passion that he struck him with a mallet, killed him on the spot and paid the penalty for his rash and cruel act.10

Forbes adds “that the head of the apprentice, with a head wound, was added among the other carvings [in the chapel], as was the image of his grieving mother.” A figure of “the murderous mason was also added to the carvings, forcing him to gaze out on the apprentice’s masterpiece.”11 Again, the master’s punishment is perpetual. His carved image is doomed to gaze at the offending column, the very object that drove him to kill his apprentice in a fit of rage. A similar legend surrounds a ­f ourteenth-century window in the eastern end of Saint Mary’s Abbey at Melrose in Roxburghshire, 8



1. Introduction: The Artist as Murderer

Scotland. As this story goes, the master, seeing the accomplishment of his apprentice, knew he could not match such fine work and grew jealous. In a fit of rage, brought on by despair, the master killed the young man.12

Germany Versions of the story also appear in Germany; for example, at Stendal, a town west of Berlin, the citizens “employed an architect of repute to build them one new gate, and entrusted the erection of a second [gate] to his principal pupil.”13 In this case, too, the aspiring youth proved the better craftsman, and was slain by the master architect. At the village of Gross Moringen, near Stendal, the legend is “that an assistant ­bell-caster was stabbed by his master because he succeeded in casting a bell after the latter had failed in the attempt.”14 Unsurprisingly, in the story of Daedalus and Talus and in those inspired by it, the mental states of apprentice and master at the time of the murder are significantly different. Daedalus is calculating. He is afraid that Talus will surpass him and kills his nephew before the youth can do so. In killing his nephew Daedalus acted out of jealousy and fear of being surpassed and diminished. His desire to maintain his success and the admiration of others seem also to have been a factor in his crime. In the later stories, the apprentice outperforms his master, who flies into a murderous rage. When presented with a task, the apprentices seize the opportunity to display their skill and genius; there is no hint that they see themselves as rivals to their masters. The older, established artisans, however, see the apprentice as a rival, as someone who has surpassed him and in so doing has revealed his inadequacies. The master is jealous of his pupil’s skill, and envious of his accomplishment. He is fearful of losing his superior status and perhaps his livelihood.

Daniele Crespi There also exist numerous tales about artists who resort to violence for a reason other than envy and professional jealousy: they kill or abuse a model for the sake of a lifelike representation of nature. One such story appeared in 1931 in Emporium, a monthly journal of art and culture based in Bergamo, Italy. In that journal the Italian art historian 9



The Artist as Murderer

Giorgio Nicodemi (1891–1968) published an article about the Milanese painter Daniele Crespi (1598–1630). According to Nicodemi, in 1629, when Crespi was painting some frescoes on the walls and ceiling of the church in the monastery of Garegnano near Milan, the artist was forced to flee the scene to avoid investigation by local officials. The authorities wanted to bring the painter before the law because the police had been told that Crespi stabbed a friend to death. Allegedly the artist wanted his friend’s corpse to serve as a model for a figure of the dead Christ lying in the tomb.15 Nicodemi does not cite a source for the story about Crespi. Perhaps he repeats a local legend. In any case, he unequivocally denies that the story is historically true.16 Nicodemi is certainly correct to say that Crespi never murdered his friend, for (as he observes) the allegation is almost identical to one made against Michelangelo, who, probably well after his death, was falsely accused of killing a model as he painted a Crucifixion of Christ.

Parrhasius and Michelangelo As Nicodemi does not notice, the tale about Crespi is also similar to the elder Seneca’s story in his Controversiae about the Greek artist Parrhasius mentioned earlier.17 In this brief narrative Parrhasius, like Crespi, kills a male model to benefit his art. As the story goes, the artist, while painting a picture of a vulture (some say an eagle) devouring the liver of the Greek god Prometheus, had a slave man tortured and killed so that the artist could observe and imitate his model as he died in agony. Seneca asks, as a topic for legal discussion or debate, if the artist’s heartless killing of his model harmed the Athenian polity. In another, possibly later, version of the tale Seneca is more specific; he asks if Parrhasius and his painting harmed the Athenian religion.18 In the Renaissance and after, retelling this prototypical story about Parrhasius, some writers moved away from Seneca’s original concern with the possible impact of the painter’s cruel deed on the reputation of the Athenian people and their religion. Instead of a topic for debate, the tale came to be seen as an example of a perennial conflict or tension between art and life, or art and morality, particularly among artists. In this regard, the authors of a recent book on ethics and the visual arts, citing a modern version of the story of Parrhasius and his model, ask, but do not answer, the question: “Are there any conditions under which art justifies loss of human life?”19 In effect, the authors ask the ­ages-old 10



1. Introduction: The Artist as Murderer

question about ends and means: Does the end justify the means? In the case of Parrhasius, we may ask: “Does a beautiful or powerful work of art justify the murder of a model?” Other authors have understood the tale of Michelangelo killing a model, which is based in Seneca’s story of Parrhasius and his enslaved model, as a metaphor for the significance of the artistic process. In this view, even though Michelangelo’s model dies, he lives on in the artist’s painted figure. In other words, the artist in painting the mortal model gives him a kind of immortality. The artist also fulfills his own ambition for fame, achieving in the event a qualified immortality for himself: his work will endure for a long while as a testimony to his genius and skill as a painter. Likewise, Seneca’s story suggests that art transforms fleeting nature into eternal beauty and subtly implies a belief that the beauty of the work of art justifies the death of Parrhasius’s model. Perhaps most profoundly, the stories about Parrhasius and Michelangelo have been understood to be about unbridled ambition or the heedless quest for fame and glory. Each artist’s selfish desire for success and fame makes him capable of torturing and killing his model, who personifies Nature. Parrhasius, Michelangelo, Crespi, and others cruelly exploit nature as a means of ­self-promotion, and thus stand in stark contrast to those artists who are motivated not by ambition, but by love for their models, who in addition to being humans, also personify Nature in general. These loving artists represent the belief that love inspires art, or as an old Dutch saying has it, Liefde baart kunst (“Love brings forth art”).

11

2

The Image of Parrhasius An understanding of Seneca’s representation of Parrhasius’s character and his motivation for killing his model requires an examination of his literary image as presented by several other Ancient writers. As far as we know, the literary image or legend of Parrhasius as an artist originates in a collection of dialogues, the Memorabilia of the ­fourth-century bce Greek historian, Xenophon, who was a student of Greek philosopher Socrates (ca. 469–399 bce). Other importance sources are the Natural History of Gaius Plinius Secundus, better known as the elder Pliny (ce 23–79), and the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus of Naucratis (flourished ca. 300 ce). Also relevant in this regard is a poem by a certain Glaucus, an obscure writer appearing in The Greek Anthology, which is a collection of poems and epigrams dating from the ­seventh-century bce to around ce 1000.

Xenophon In Memorabilia, Xenophon records probably a fictional conversation between Socrates and Parrhasius.1 While visiting the artist’s workshop, Socrates, asking a series of questions, defines the art of painting as the representation of “things that one sees,” and further holds that using colors, painters represent “hollows and heights, darkness and light, hard and soft, rough and smooth, young bodies and old.” Parrhasius agrees, and Socrates further establishes that in representing ideal beauty, painters choose the most beautiful parts of several models in order to make a single, beautiful figure. Here Socrates foreshadows a famous tale, later told by the Roman philosopher and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 bce) and others, about the ­fi fth-century bce Greek painter Zeuxis. The artist, when charged with painting a picture of Helen of Troy for a temple at Croton, assembled five maidens. Zeuxis then chose the most beautiful features of each of the presumably nude women 12



2. The Image of Parrhasius

and combined them to make a single, perfectly beautiful figure of Helen.2 After Parrhasius answers Socrates’s question concerning the artist’s method for creating ideal beauty, the philosopher further asks if painters do not also strive for a perfect representation of the moods and passions of the human mind or soul. Parrhasius replies that because human feelings have no shape or color, they are not visible and therefore cannot be depicted. Nevertheless, Socrates replies, people look at each other in a friendly or unfriendly way. This time Parrhasius agrees. Socrates wonders if one or the other of these feelings can be represented in the expression of a painted figure, and Parrhasius affirms that they can. Socrates next asks the artist if he believes people who care about the joy and sorrow of their friends wear the same expression as those who do not. The sight of good fortune, Parrhasius responds, will make a person’s face appear happy and the sight of misfortune will make it seem downcast. Near the end of the conversation, Socrates says, “dignity and freedom, meanness and slavishness, insolence and vulgarity—all show themselves both in the face and in the gestures of still and moving subjects,” and the painter answers, “True.” Parrhasius also agrees with Socrates that an artist can represent in a figure the qualities he has just named. Lastly, Socrates asks which is the more pleasing to see, a figure with a “fine, good and admirable character,” or a figure with a “base, bad and odious” character? In response, the painter ambiguously answers that there is “really no comparison,” perhaps implying that a figure exhibiting a good character is the more pleasing to see. According to Xenophon, during a visit to the sculptor Cleiton, Socrates expanded upon and clarified the issues he had already raised in his conversation with Parrhasius. He again speaks of beauty, the imitation of visible things, and expression, but this time in relation to a model. He admires the beauty of Cleiton’s figures and asks him how he arrives at the illusion of life in them. Because the sculptor is slow to answer, Socrates suggests that the illusion results from the faithful representation of “living models.” Cleiton agrees. Socrates further maintains (in the form of a question) that by accurately representing the different parts of the body as they are affected by the pose, the sculptor achieves a convincing representation. Again, Cleiton agrees, and Socrates asks if a viewer does not find “some pleasure also to see represented [in a sculpture] the feelings of people in action?” Socrates goes on to observe that the sculptor “should represent the expression of warriors as threatening, and the faces of victors should be made to look joyful.” Once again 13



The Artist as Murderer

Cleiton agrees, and Socrates ends the conversation with the observation that “the sculptor ought to make his works correspond to the type of character represented.”3 For Xenophon’s Socrates the arts of painting and sculpture are a mixture or synthesis of, on the one hand, the depiction of perfect beauty, and on the other, the careful and skillful representation of nature. In addition to representing in detail the physical body of a model, artists also depict the passions or emotions of his or her soul. ­Literal-minded Parrhasius at first disagrees with Socrates. As an artist, he seems indifferent to human emotions and facial expressions. He believes that because emotions are not objects and therefore have no lines or colors, they cannot be represented. Socrates convinces Parrhasius and Cleiton of just the opposite: Artists depict the expression of moods and feelings that inform the faces and bodily postures of the human beings who are their models.

Pliny the Elder According to the elder Pliny in his Natural History, Parrhasius was personable and ­e ven-tempered. He always sang or whistled while he worked and seems to have considered himself a virtuous man. He proclaimed his virtue in the inscriptions he wrote on some of his paintings.4 Echoing Xenophon, Pliny praises Parrhasius as the first painter with the ability to depict lively and expressive faces. For example, Pliny says that in Parrhasius’s Demos, an allegorical representation of the people of Athens, the artist depicted figures that were “at once fickle, choleric, unjust, and versatile.” He also represented the “attributes of implacability and clemency, compassion and pride, loftiness and humility, fierceness and timidity,” all qualities of the Athenian people. Parrhasius, Pliny continues, depicted ideal beauty and was a keen observer of things in nature. He was the first painter to make ­well-proportioned figures; the first to give elegance to the representation of hair; and the first to give gracefulness to depictions of the mouth. Another of Parrhasius’s strengths in representing visible things was his skill in drawing the outlines or contours of his figures. According to Pliny, Parrhasius was able to draw the contours of a figure or object with such roundness its unseen portion was suggested to the viewer. In other words, he was able to draw the visible side of a figure with such an illusion of three dimensions, it evoked in the mind of the viewer the side not seen. As an 14



2. The Image of Parrhasius

artist, Parrhasius’s weakness was his inability to draw properly the interior portions or surfaces of figures and objects. Parrhasius was also skillful at imitating in a lively fashion the colors of nature. For example, he so convincingly represented a man running in a race, the figure appeared to be sweating. In another picture, the artist represented a runner taking off his armor in so lifelike a manner that viewers thought they could hear the figure trying to catch his breath. Pliny illustrates Parrhasius’s skill in depicting nature with a story about a contest between him and another ­fi fth-century bce Greek painter, Zeuxis. For the contest, the latter made a painting in which he represented grapes in so lifelike a manner that when he pulled back the curtain covering the picture, some birds flew down to peck at the fruit. Proud of his accomplishment, Zeuxis turned to Parrhasius and asked him to remove the cloth covering his picture only to find that his rival had so convincingly depicted the curtain Zeuxis thought it was a natural object, not a painted one. Discovering his mistake, Zeuxis admitted he had been outdone, for he had deceived mere birds, whereas Parrhasius had deceived him, an artist. In this story, Pliny calls attention not only to Parrhasius’s skill as an imitator of natural objects but also to his intelligence, for he anticipated Zeuxis’s initial response to the painted curtain. Another of Pliny’s stories about Parrhasius reveals the artist’s sense of humor, which is the least significant feature of his image. Once while on the island of Samos, having entered a contest with a less gifted painter named Timanthes, Parrhasius painted a picture of Ajax combating Odysseus for Achilles’s weapons, a struggle that Ajax lost. When Parrhasius lost the contest to Timanthes, his outraged friends offered their condolences, but the painter remained calm, saying that he did not care that he had lost, but that he was sorry for Ajax, who in the same contest had been twice defeated by his adversaries. In other words, Parrhasius painted a figure of Ajax losing to Odysseus, whose figure also lost the contest with Timanthes.5 According to Pliny, great success and fame caused Parrhasius to grow insolent, arrogant and immodest. He boasted that he was “the foremost artist in all of Greece.” He even claimed to have reached the “limits” of art. Pliny’s contemporary, the Roman rhetorician Quintilian (ca. 35–ca. 100 ce) seems to support the artist’s assessment of himself: Parrhasius, Quintilian writes, “was so exact in every particular, that he is looked upon, even to this day, as the lawgiver of painters, because the paintings of gods and heroes, such as he has left behind him, are 15



The Artist as Murderer

held as so many models, which they [painters] make it a rule to follow invariably.”6 Parrhasius also bragged of his divine origins and association with the gods. For instance, he proclaimed himself a descendent of Apollo, the sun god.7 He also claimed that as he was painting a figure of Hercules, the god appeared to him in a dream. An inscription on the painting read: “Here you may see the god as he often stood before Parrhasius in his sleep by night.”8 Parrhasius liked to dress up as the god Hermes (Mercury), and even used himself as a model for a figure of the god, but, in order to avoid the accusation of impropriety, he did not sign the painting with his own name. In a slightly different description of Parrhasius’s Hermes, the Greek rhetorician and philosopher Themistius (317–390 ce) writes that Parrhasius painted a ­self-portrait and placed it in the temple of Hermes, but called the picture a representation of the god to avoid the accusation of arrogance.9 Again, in this characterization Parrhasius links his likeness to that of a god.

Athenaeus of Naucratis Greek rhetorician Athenaeus of Naucratis writes that Parrhasius “always wore a purple robe, and a golden crown on his head.”10 The artist also wore a white turban and for support would lean on a cane ornamented with frets of gold. Even the ties of his sandals had gold clasps. Parrhasius, Athenaeus says, was a likeable and ­e ven-tempered man, who, as Pliny also mentions, sang while he painted.11 Even though the contented artist lived a life of luxury, one that was beyond what might be expected of a painter, Parrhasius insisted that he was a virtuous man. He even declared his luxury and virtue in the inscriptions he wrote on his works: Parrhasius, a most luxurious man, And yet a follower of purest virtue, Painted this work.12

Here Parrhasius implies that in spite of his great success and a life of luxury, he is, nevertheless, virtuous. It seems that not everyone agreed. An anonymous person, who was offended by the inscription, wrote beside it, “worthy of a stick,” possibly because he or she did not believe the artist was a virtuous man, or perhaps it was a response to the painting as a whole. 16



2. The Image of Parrhasius

In another similar inscription, according to Athenaeus, the painter made not only the usual claim about his luxury and virtue, he also identified his place of birth and the name of his father. He claims, too, that he is the best artist in all of Greece. Parrhasius, a most luxurious man, And yet a follower of purest virtue, Painted this work: a worthy citizen Of noble Ephesus. His father’s name Was Evenor, and he, his lawful son, Was the first artist in the whole of Greece.

Athenaeus mentions another inscription in which Parrhasius again bragged of his accomplishments as a painter. He claimed to have discovered the “limits” or perfection of his art, a perfection that no other painter would be able to surpass. That clear [and] plain limits of this noble art Have been discovered by my hand, and proved. And now the boundary which none can surpass Is well defined, though nothing that men can do Will ever wholly escape blame or envy.

Though Parrhasius was generally considered to be a ­level-headed man, Athenaeus, echoing Pliny, says that the artist at least once spoke as if he were a charlatan. Athenaeus explains that as Parrhasius was painting a figure of Hercules at the Greek town of Lindos, the god appeared to him in a dream. In this case he inscribed the picture as follows: Here you may see the god as oft he stood Before Parrhasius in his sleep by night.

Because of his wealth, Parrhasius’ life was filled with pleasure. Indeed, he called himself “a lover of pleasure.” The claim is somewhat vague, but some of his pleasure seems to have been sexual in nature. The ­second-century ce Roman writer Claudius Aelianus, generally known as Aelian, says he sometimes made salacious pictures, one of which represented the archigallus, or high priest, of the cult of the mother goddess Cybele.13 The Roman historian Gaius Seutonius Tranquillus, better known as Seutonius (ca. 70–ca. 130 ce), refers to another such painting by Parrhasius, in which a figure of the mythological huntress Atalanta “pleasured” her lover, Meleager.14

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The Artist as Murderer

Glaucus on a Portrait by Parrhasius In The Greek Anthology, a poet known only as Glaucus of Nicopolis responds to Parrhasius’s portrait of the mythical Philoctetes, leader of the seven ships to Troy. According to one version of the myth, when a snake bites Philoctetes in the foot, causing a malodorous wound and crippling him with pain, his companions abandon him on the island of Lemnos. Glaucus implies that Parrhasius’s painting was an outstanding example of the artist’s ability in imagining invisible beings and in representing emotions and facial expressions. The poet writes: Parrhasius painted this, Philoctetes’ likeness, after verily seeing the ­long-suffering hero from Trachis. For in his [Philoctetes’s] dry eyes there lurks a mute tear, and the wearing pain dwells inside. O best of painters, great is thy skill, but it was time to give rest from his pains to the ­much-tried man.15

Glaucus emphasizes Parrhasius’s ability to see or to imagine his mythical subject. He also calls attention to the artist’s skill in depicting Philoctetes’s painful expression, an expression that endures in the painting. According to Glaucus, the artist should not have painted the portrait, for the subject’s wound eventually healed, and he was no longer in pain. Now the picture prolongs Philoctetes’s agony, as if the portrait bears a magical relation to its subject; as if the image of Philoctetes is not merely a representation; as if Philoctetes lives in Parrhasius’s paint. As we shall see, the idea that the subject of a work of art, in this case Philoctetes, lives in his painted image will become an important one in later discussions of Parrhasius and his art.

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3

Parrhasius and the Olynthian Slave Pliny’s older contemporary, the elder Seneca, is the only known source for the tale of Parrhasius and an Olynthian slave who, like Philoctetes, endures great pain. In his collection of exemplary legal questions, his Controversiae, Seneca offers a topic that might be argued or discussed in a court of law: Laesae rei publicae sit actio. Parrhasius pictor Atheniensis, cum Philippus captiuos Olynthios uenderet, emit unum ex iis senem; perduxit Athenas; torsit et ad exemplar eius pinxit Promethea. Olynthius in tormentis perit. ille tabulam in templo Mineruae posuit. accusatur rei publicae laesae.

This declamation has been translated as follows: An action may lie for harming the state. The Athenian painter Parrhasius purchased an old man from among the captives from Olynthus put up for sale by Philip, and took him to Athens. He tortured him, and using him as a model, painted a [picture of] Prometheus. The Olynthian died under the torture. Parrhasius put the picture in the temple of Minerva; he is accused of harming the state.1

Parrhasius’s picture hung in the Temple of Minerva on the Acropolis at Athens, which was erected in the ­fi fth-century bce.2 The story refers to King Philip II of Macedonia (382–336 bce) and his siege of Olynthus in 349. The city, which had been Philip’s ally, changed its allegiance to Athens for political reasons. Philip captured Olynthus in 348 bce, razed it to the ground and sold its citizens into slavery. The subject of Parrhasius’s picture, which, if it was ever actually painted, no longer exists, is the punishment of the mythical god Prometheus, who fashioned human beings out of earth, and so favored his creations that he stole fire from the supreme Greek god, Zeus, to give to them. The ­eighth-century bce Greek poet Hesiod writes that Zeus was 19



The Artist as Murderer

angered by the gift and had Prometheus bound with chains to a rock in the mountains of Caucasus.3 According to Greek rhetorician Lucian of Samosata (born around 120 ce), Prometheus was nailed to a cross and then chained to the rock.4 Zeus also ordered that each day an eagle (other sources say a vulture) would eat Prometheus’s liver. At night the organ would regenerate as much as the bird had consumed, only to have the eagle eat it once again the next day. Eventually Hercules rescued Prometheus from his plight. Seneca offers the tale, not as a true story, but as a hypothetical, legal question: Did Parrhasius commit a crime against the people of Athens? Because Seneca focuses on Parrhasius’s treatment of the slave, he implies that the possible harm to the city is related to the artist’s torture of his model and to the slave’s consequent death. The issue, however, is more complex than it at first appears, for shortly after their defeat, the Olynthians were granted Athenian citizenship and thus were free. Although Pliny says that Parrhasius was a native of Ephesus, Seneca identifies him as a citizen of Athens. His birth place is significant, as German archaeologist Andreas Rumpf (1890–1966) explained: “if an Athenian bought one of Philip’s prisoners, he was not buying a slave, but freeing a ­fellow-citizen; if he killed him, it was not killing a slave, but murder.”5 In these circumstances the dedication of Parrhasius’s picture in the Parthenon was a sacrilege. Because Seneca presents Parrhasius as an Athenian, he implies that the artist ignored the need to liberate his slave and proceeded with his work, or that the Olynthians were freed after he completed his painting. Seneca is not definite on the point.

The Case Against Parrhasius Following the brief, probably fictitious tale, Seneca recounts a selection of comments by several declaimers who make various objections to Parrhasius’s cruel behavior (Controversiae, 10.5.1–28). One objection involves the comparison of the artist and Philip. Parrhasius is like Philip because both men tormented and killed Olynthians. Other orators assert that the artist is worse than the tyrant in his treatment of the slave, for the king merely sold him. Another speaker says that Philip might have mistakenly believed that because Parrhasius was an Athenian, the slave was in noble hands. The artist need not have tortured the slave because his circumstances already tormented him, making him fit to serve as a model for the artist’s figure of Prometheus. 20



3. Parrhasius and the Olynthian Slave

Another recurring theme of the commentary is the imitation of visible nature, a topic that Xenophon’s Socrates discussed with Parrhasius in Memorabilia.6 The painter simulates the conditions of Prometheus’s torture so that he may accurately and convincingly portray his figure. As one declaimer, Argentarius, exclaims, the artist did not merely depict the god; he transformed his model into a Prometheus.7 In effect, as the speakers point out, if all artists followed the example of Parrhasius in painting a shipwreck, they would drown men in order to observe their expressions; or if the artists wished to depict a battle scene, they would stage a war to the same purpose. The implication is that Parrhasius, unlike other artists, lacks imagination. For example, Fulvius Sparsus refers to the Greek sculptor Phidias (active c. 465–425 bce), who never saw the god Zeus, yet represented him thundering.8 Likewise, Sparsus says, the goddess of wisdom, Athena/Minerva, never literally stood before the sculptor. Nonetheless, he was able to represent her as she appeared before his mind’s eye. An objection made by other declaimers also has to do with the gods. Parrhasius should never have chosen to paint the torment of Prometheus, and he should not have abused one of god’s creations (i.e., a man); nor should he have represented one of the god’s gifts to humans (i.e., fire), which he used to torture the slave. Instead, the artist should have depicted Prometheus creating people out of earth and distributing fire to them. At first this seems an irrelevant commentary, until we recall that both Parrhasius and Prometheus create human beings out of the materials of the earth. Prometheus uses earth to create living beings, and Parrhasius makes the semblance of the same beings with paint, which originates in natural elements. Parrhasius, the declaimer seems to imply, is like cruel Zeus who had Prometheus tormented. The artist should have been aware of his own likeness to Prometheus and painted the god creating humans instead. Another important dimension to the declaimer’s remark is that Parrhasius chose his subject matter. He was not commissioned for a painting to be placed in the Parthenon. Rather, he painted a challenging subject with the hope that his picture would be accepted for placement in the temple, and it was. He achieved his ambition: his painting was deemed worthy for such a holy place, where many would see it. One declaimer observes that Parrhasius’s picture hangs in the Parthenon, the very building in which the Athenians and the Olynthians recently had signed a treaty. Because of the picture’s subject matter and the circumstances of its creation, it is a sacrilege and should never have 21



The Artist as Murderer

been given to the temple, which people shun as if it were King Philip’s military camp. According to a declaimer named Pausanias, the painting is so repugnant people avoid the temple because of its presence there.9 Even those who enter the temple purify themselves upon leaving; that is to say, they feel as though they have been spiritually polluted by Parrhasius’s picture and are in need of cleansing. The elder Arellius Fuscus regrets that the artist “placed the cross [crucem] of an old Olynthian” among the altars of the temple, and Roman rhetorician Marcus Porcius Latro (died 4 bce) sarcastically claims that Parrhasius should have placed the painting on the Altar of Mercy (or Pity) in the Athenian Agora.10 This altar was dedicated to the spirit Eleos, who personified the virtues pity, mercy, clemency, and compassion. In other words, if Parrhasius had chosen the Altar of Mercy as the preferred destination of his painting, he might have felt pity on his model and not killed him. Or Latro might mean that the Altar of Mercy would have required a less horrific subject matter, and Parrhasius would not have felt the need to harm his model.

In Defense of Parrhasius Following his report of the first selection of comments, Seneca says that he is disappointed that so many declaimers treat the story as an opportunity for making accusations rather than for argument (Controversia).11 They also should have presented a defense of Parrhasius. Seneca then remarks on the arguments of several orators who defend the artist. His longest and most elaborate account is of the declamation made by Gallio.12 From a legal perspective, Gallio asserts, Parrhasius did not harm Athens and its citizens. If someone kills an Athenian senator, he will be charged with murder, not with harming the city. Also, Athenians are well known as merciful people, and their reputation cannot be damaged by the act of a single man. Again, if Parrhasius refused to return the slave to Olynthus, he harmed the people of that city, not the Athenians. Stealing from the temple harms the city, but putting a picture there does not. Furthermore, if in placing his picture in the temple Parrhasius harmed the city, then the priests who accepted the picture are guilty of the same offense. As far as subject matter is concerned, Parrhasius did no wrong, for in the past the temple has contained pictures representing the infidelities of the gods and Hercules murdering his children. 22



3. Parrhasius and the Olynthian Slave

Gallio further argues that because Parrhasius was an artist, he should receive special consideration. He was “ignorant of practical matters” and cannot be accused of harming the city because he did what he was allowed to do. Athenians should honor the right of war: The Olynthian, who was not a citizen of Athens until the decree making him so passed, was a spoil of war and therefore legally belonged to the artist. Whether morally right or wrong, Parrhasius legally tortured and killed his model. Latro offers very different defenses of Parrhasius. The artist did not kill his model; the old man was already close to death. If Parrhasius illegally tortured his slave for gain, then he should pay the penalty for that crime. Latro, echoing the Roman poet Horace (65–8 bce), also maintains that a painter has the license to paint anything he wishes.13 Painters, Latro continues, are like practitioners of the other arts, such as physicians, who “have laid bare the vital organs in order to investigate the secret potential of a disease; today the limbs of cadavers are opened up so that the position of sinews and joints can be ascertained.” Latro refers to the dissection of human corpses. For him, Parrhasius is like an anatomist in search of knowledge. Romanius Hispo, a ­fi rst-century ce Roman rhetor, holds that Parrhasius was an ignorant “painter, shut up inside his studio, with no idea of the law [concerning slavery] in his head except the unsophisticated notion that everything is permitted between master and slave.” 14 He also implies that the presence of fire, steel, and torture in the artist’s studio makes him like Philip. Other speakers focus directly on the artist and the model. Pompeius Silo suggests that Parrhasius went to the market with the purpose of buying a slave whom he could use as a model and therefore chose a “particularly cheap and useless man.” Albucius argues that Philip saw that the old captive wished for death and for that reason put him up for sale.15 The younger Arellius Fuscus proposed that the artist bought the slave for some other purpose, but when he saw that the captive was frail and wished to die, he decided to use him as a model for his painting. Another declaimer said that Parrhasius bought the slave from among the guilty Olynthians (that is, those who betrayed their city), a proposition Seneca finds “intolerable.”16 Sparsus offered this epigram on Parrhasius’s painting: “And wherever he needs blood, he uses human blood.” Sparsus seems to refer to a reddish color used by artists, cinnabaris, often called “dragon’s blood.”17 Thus, according to him, when Parrhasius needed a particular color for his picture, he used the blood of his slave instead. The implication is 23



The Artist as Murderer

that the painter used human blood to depict Prometheus’s blood. As Seneca adds, Sparsus speaks the impossible. Spyridion, whom Seneca calls a “lunatic,” seems to have demeaned Parrhasius’s ability as an imitator of nature.18 The declaimer explained that vultures swooped down on the artist’s picture as it hung in the Parthenon. Seneca explains that Spyridion was inspired by a story (told by Pliny) about one of Zeuxis’s paintings, in which the artist depicted a boy holding grapes.19 The fruit was so convincingly represented birds flew down to peck it. A bystander remarked that had the boy been a good likeness, the birds would have been afraid to swoop down at the picture. Consequently, Zeuxis erased the grapes from his painting, keeping what was best in it, not what was most like nature. Spyridion’s declamation seems to imply that Parrhasius’s success at creating a likeness that fooled some vultures was an indication that he had not achieved the best part of painting, which presumably is the representation of beautiful figures. Or Spyridion might mean that the figure of Prometheus was not sufficiently lifelike to keep the vultures away.

Additional Details Seneca’s comments on and analysis of the declamations add several details to the primary story. One orator says the old slave is exhausted but distinguished, has sunken eyes and was sad even before Parrhasius bought him. He had already walked among the ashes of charred Olynthus and had lost his home, wife and children. The instruments of his torture were fire, whips, and steel (presumably a reference to chains or a knife or both). Several speakers hint that Parrhasius’s painting contained a figure of Zeus and that it was an allegory of Philip’s defeat of Olynthus: the figure of Zeus represented Philip, and Prometheus stood for the Olynthians. The implication is that Parrhasius tortures his model so that he can paint a picture pleasing to Philip. He also strives to make a painting that will be admired for its aesthetic value, one worthy of the Temple of Athena, where ironically it would have been viewed in the company of Phidias’s enormous statue of the goddess of wisdom. Some of the speakers imagine fragments of dialogue spoken by the model and by Parrhasius. For example, when a boy is brought forward as a possible model for his figure, Parrhasius dismisses him, saying, “He isn’t yet capable of groaning as much as I need for Prometheus.” 20 Another speaker imagines that Parrhasius said to the torturers: “Stretch 24



3. Parrhasius and the Olynthian Slave

him [the enslaved man] like that, flog him like that, keep his present expression just so, or I’ll make a model of you.”21 Yet another speaker imagines the slave calling out, “Athenians, if I have done no wrong, come to my help, and if I have done wrong, give me back to Philip.” Most cruelly, Parrhasius instructs the torturer to lay him “on the fire: he hasn’t yet given me the ­Prometheus-look.”22 In adding details to the initial story, the comments offered by the declaimers and reported by Seneca expand it somewhat. Philip II of Macedonia defeated the city of Olynthus and sold its inhabitants into slavery. Parrhasius bought a sad and weak old man from among the captives for sale and took him back to Athens. Even after the Olynthians were made Athenian citizens and set free, the artist, possibly out of ignorance, kept his old man and used him as a model for his painting of Prometheus. Parrhasius had the Olynthian slave bound and slowly tortured to death with fire and “steel” to achieve the appropriate posture, gesture, and facial expression for his figure of the tormented god. During the ordeal, the artist converses with those around him and the enslaved model speaks aloud. Ultimately the local priests accepted Parrhasius’s painting and placed it in the Parthenon. Because of the circumstances in which the artist produced the painting, some devotees of the goddess Athena avoid the temple, while others who enter there feel sullied by Parrhasius’s picture and purify themselves upon leaving.

Parrhasius’s Cruelty In response to Seneca’s question about the effect of Parrhasius’s actions on the state, some orators can find no reason to condemn the artist, while others raise the issue of cruelty. They also respond to the artist as artist. In torturing and killing his model, Parrhasius, absorbed by his art, is detached not only from his model but also from the gods; thus, he transgresses the moral limits of art. As he represents Prometheus, Parrhasius torments and destroys one of Prometheus’s own creations, a fellow human being. Art, the orators imply, is not merely about beauty and the skillful representation of nature; the artist also has a responsibility to his model and to the gods, particularly in this case to Zeus, Prometheus, and Athena. No matter how aesthetically excellent Parrhasius’s painting might be, because it was made in immoral circumstances it is a morally bad work of art and should not have been placed in the Parthenon. The implication is that a work of art in some 25



The Artist as Murderer

sense reflects its creator. In effect, Parrhasius’s painting embodies or reflects his character. Art, Seneca indirectly establishes, has two related dimensions, one imitative and aesthetic and the other religious and moral. Parrhasius is a great artist, but he is also a heartless murderer. He is a cruel monster who cares more about his art than he does about life itself. He is willing to take the old man’s life for the sake of his painting and its success. Seneca’s story about Parrhasius, which is unique in ancient literature, recalls not only Pliny’s presentation of the artist, but also other writings about him. Seneca surely knew of Xenophon’s account of Socrates’s visit to Parrhasius’s studio and of Glaucus’s epigram, for the artist’s representation of facial expression is central to all three authors. Xenophon’s Socrates convinces Parrhasius that artists can represent human emotions by means of gestures and facial expressions; Glaucus underscores Philoctetes’s painful expression in Parrhasius’s picture of him; and Seneca’s brief tale revolves around the artist’s need for a model who will make the precise expression and pose he requires for his figure of bound and tormented Prometheus.

Perillus and the Bronze Bull Seneca’s story shares some features with a tale told by Diodorus Siculus and repeated by Lucian about the ­s ixth-century bce Greek sculptor Perillus of Athens and his bronze bull.23 As the story goes, the artist gave the Sicilian tyrant Phalaris (ca. 570–ca. 549 bce) a brazen bull, which had small pipes in its nostrils and a door in its side. A grateful Phalaris gives Perillus gifts and orders that the bull be dedicated to the god Apollo and placed in his temple. After Phalaris has accepted the sculpture, the artist reveals it to be an instrument of torture. He opens the door in the bull’s side, explaining that if ever his patron wants to punish a man, he can imprison him in the bull and light a fire underneath it. He further explains that the screams of the tormented soul, traveling through the pipes in the bull’s nose, will make a sound similar to the bellowing of a living animal. Perillus has misjudged Phalaris’s character, for the ruler, disgusted by the loathsome contrivance, tricks the artist into entering the bull. He then has the door closed after Perillus and a fire lighted so that, as Lucian says, he will receive “his [just] desserts by thus having the enjoyment of his own ingenuity.”24 When Perillus has been overcome by the heat, he is pulled ­half-alive from the 26



3. Parrhasius and the Olynthian Slave

bull, so as not to pollute and desecrate it, and thrown down a cliff to his death. Perillus loses his life because he is willing for a fellow human being to die for a trivial entertainment, the sound of the victim’s voice transformed into the bellowing of the bronze bull. Pliny in his Natural History also notices the story of Perillus and the bronze bull. Like Seneca, he implies that a work of art reflects the character of its creator. He accuses Perillus of debasing sculpture, which Giorgio Vasari will later proclaim the highest of the human arts. His works are preserved, Pliny explains, so that the hands that made them may be despised.25 Like Parrhasius, Perillus is willing for a human being to be tormented for the sake of a convincingly lifelike representation of nature. Perillus seems incapable of foreseeing that his inhumanity will render his bull displeasing to the gods and Phalaris, and thus unfit to be placed in the temple of Apollo. Like Parrhasius, Perillus crosses the moral boundary between life and art. He is punished, not for murder, but for his immoral character and for debasing his art, by devising a sculpture, a work of religious art that, nevertheless, can be used to torture or kill a man. According to Pliny, Perillus’ bronze bull reminds its viewers to hate the artist who made it.

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The Afterlife of Seneca’s Tale The story of Parrhasius and the Olynthian slave appeared in manuscript copies of Seneca’s Controversiae during the Medieval period, and by the late ­fi fteenth-century printed editions were available throughout Europe. The first edition of the full text was printed in Venice in 1490. Later, the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) edited several early editions published at Basel, among them, one in 1515 and another in 1529. Interestingly, in these editions, which do not distinguish between the works of the elder Seneca and those of his son, the Stoic philosopher known as the younger Seneca (ca. 4 bce– 65 ce), the story of Parrhasius and the slave appears twice, once in a text titled Controversiae and again in a text titled Declamationum. In the former the question at issue is not whether Parrhasius harmed the Athenian polity, but whether he harmed religion (“laesae religionis sit actio”), an issue that is implicit in Seneca’s commentaries.1 In 1603 the Flemish Jesuit priest André Schott (1552–1629), also known as Andreas Schottus, edited the first definitive edition of the Controversiae, which appeared in Heidelberg.2 There have been numerous subsequent editions and translations.

Denials As Seneca’s work became more widely known in the seventeenthcentury, scholars began publicly to deny the veracity of the tale of Parrhasius and the Olynthian slave. One of the first to do so is the French literary critic Paul Thomas de Girac (died 1663) in a book published in 1660.3 Another is the Florentine nobleman Carlo Roberto Dati (1619– 1676), who was a follower of the astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). In his Lives of the Ancient Painters (1667) Dati gives careful attention to 28



4. The Afterlife of Seneca’s Tale

Seneca’s Controversiae concerning Parrhasius. He not only recounts the tale, he summarizes the ancient author’s comments on it, and in a note to his summary insists that the tale is not true.4 De Girac and Dati seem to express the ­t hen-prevalent opinion about the veracity of Seneca’s tale. In 1719, the English painter, art theorist, and critic Jonathan Richardson the Elder (1667–1745) says there is much doubt about the truth of the story of Parrhasius. “It is said,” Richardson continues, “he fastened a slave he had bought to a machine, and then tormented him to death, and whilst he was dying, painted the Prometheus he made for the temple of Minerva at Athens.”5 Richardson’s reference to “a machine,” which in this context means “device” or “contrivance,” is obscure, but might allude to a cross. The English poet and biographer William Hayley (1745–1820) agrees with Richardson. In his An Essay on Painting (London, 1778), consisting of two letters in verse addressed to the English painter George Romney (1734–1802), Hayley, echoing Pliny, mentions the ancient painter: Correct Parrhasius first to rich design Gave nice proportion, and the melting line, Whose soft extremes from observation fly, And with ideal distance cheat the eye.6

In a note to these lines of praise, Hayley explains that the “ingenious” Dati had already questioned the veracity of the infamous story about Parrhasius and the slave.7 Likewise, in his history of Italian painting (1796), the Italian art historian Luigi Lanzi (1732–1810), citing Dati, says the story is perhaps false.8 Apparently, admirers of Pliny’s Parrhasius thought it necessary to defend the artist’s reputation. Late eighteenth- and early ­n ineteenth-century French artists and writers, such as the painter ­Jacques-Nicolas Paillot de Montabert (1771– 1849), were also skeptical of the truth of Seneca’s tale.9 Around the same time, the art critic ­Pierre-Alexandre Coupin (1780–1841) recounts Seneca’s story, pointing out that Parrhasius “was accused of offending the majesty of the republic.” Coupin, who also doubts the veracity of the tale, misleadingly says that Seneca “reports the public debates” that arose between the painter and his accusers.10 In London, the Keeper of the National Gallery, Ralph Nicholson Wornum (1812–1877), echoing the opinion of others before him, proclaims the tale to be “highly improbable” and “most likely either error or fiction.” He supports his opinion with the fact that the story is chronologically impossible. Philip captured Olynthus “in the second year of 29



The Artist as Murderer

the 108th Olympiad, or 347 B.C. […] nearly half a century after the latest accounts we have of Parrhasius, who was the contemporary of Zeuxis, and a painter of celebrity already in the lifetime of Socrates, who died 399 B.C.” As the author also correctly observes, the story appears only in Seneca’s Controversiae.11 The widely admired Scottish archaeologist, Alexander S. Murray (1841–1904), recalls the tale of Parrhasius and the Olynthian slave on at least three occasions. In an essay on Greek painters, he points out that a similar story about Michelangelo was repeated “under a slightly altered form.”12 Even though Murray believes Parrhasius’s painting existed, he offers two reasons for denying the veracity of the tale: “no Athenian citizen would have ventured to challenge one of the most rigorous laws of the state by torturing a ­f ree-born Greek,” and Parrhasius, “being apparently at the height of his fame in the time of Socrates, could scarcely have continued his artistic activity, not to say produced one of his most celebrated works, after the capture of Olynthus.”13 About ten years later, in his history of Greek sculpture, Murray once again acknowledged that the story is probably not true and reiterates that “there need be no doubt of the existence of the painting, and the expression of physical pain which it conveyed.”14 A decade later, Murray again retains his belief that Seneca refers to an actual painting, which “must have been an extremely clever study of a man under physical torture.” If there were no painting, Murray reasons, “the story would not have got about.” 15 In other words, as Murray seems to imply, the powerful mimesis of Parrhasius’s painting caused people to believe the tale to be literally true. Or perhaps Murray intended to say that people accepted and perpetuated the fiction because it seemed appropriate to the wonderful power of the artist’s painting. During the nineteenth century, Seneca’s tale also appeared in books about the general history of art written by American writers. For example, historian and charter trustee of Vassar College, Benson J. Lossing (1813–1891), in his history of the fine arts says that Parrhasius’s fame “is tarnished by an atrocious act.” The artist, “wishing to represent Prometheus in his agony, enchained to the rock, put a helot or slave to the most cruel torture, and finally, death, that he might have a living model!”16 Similarly, the French critic and translator, Louis Viardot (1800–1883) relates Seneca’s story in his general history of painting: Parrhasius “selected a very old man from among the captives that Philip of Macedon had brought home from Olynthus, and crucified him, in order to see the true expression of pain, as a model for his Prometheus 30



4. The Afterlife of Seneca’s Tale

Chained.” Like other authors, Viardot questions the veracity of the tale on historical grounds. Even if the story is true, he says, it does not refer to the ­fourth-century bce Greek painter, who impossibly would have been 120 years old when Philip conquered Olynthus.17 In her book on the old masters, published in 1870, French author Céline Fallet (born 1829) also questioned the veracity of the tale of Parrhasius and the slave, but on other grounds. Noting the artist’s inordinate pride, she nevertheless asserts that he is “unjustly accused,” for “proofs are needed for such a story.” She prefers “to believe that Parrhasius was indebted to his talent with which he rendered the sufferings of Prometheus, rather than to the sight of tortures inflicted upon his slave.”18 Like Murray, Fallet seems to have believed that Parrhasius’s Prometheus actually existed and endured at least long enough for Seneca to see it.

The Pursuit of Knowledge Even though Seneca’s tale was from the early seventeenth century onwards generally considered to be either false reportage or a fable, some authors seem to have believed it true and often repeated it independently of Seneca and his text. In so doing they drew attention to the moral dimension of the tale. Among the first to do so is Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy. Burton, who does not mention Seneca, offers a slight variation on the original story, expanding a bit on the original, making the latter’s implications more explicit. Parrhasius, a painter of Athens, amongst those Olynthian captives Philip of Macedon brought home to sell, bought one very old man; and when he had him at Athens, put him to extreme torture and torment, the better by his example to express the pains and passions of his Prometheus, whom he was then about to paint.19

Burton declares himself to be no Parrhasius, and his human subjects are not like the Olynthian slave, for he is not “so barbarous, inhuman, curious, or cruel” that he tortures people in order to write about their melancholy. Burton seeks knowledge about melancholy, but not at the expense of his subjects. There is a slight but significant difference between his understanding of Parrhasius’s relation to his model and that represented by Seneca. Generally, the latter presents the artist 31



The Artist as Murderer

as an imitator of nature, one who seeks to produce in his model a convincingly lifelike expression for his representation of Prometheus. In comparing himself to Parrhasius, Burton implies that the artist sought knowledge; he tortures his model to know how he expresses his pain. In 1845, an anonymous author writing in The Medical Times and speaking of the purpose of that English journal also uses the story as a cautionary tale. The author says that Parrhasius beat and otherwise tortured his model so that “he might, from the agony and writhing of the sufferer, the better express the figure and features of a Prometheus, he was about to paint.” The intention of The Medical Times is “the exact opposite of the wicked old painter’s towards his slave.” The authors of the journal do not wish to use their infirm readers to better represent illnesses and medicines. Rather, they wish to depict “the miseries which people have voluntarily entailed upon themselves, to the end that, by these examples, and the suggestions of our own judgment, we may the better obviate the continuance and propagation of injurious practices.” 20 Like Burton, the authors distance themselves from Parrhasius: they will not selfishly exploit the infirmities of their readers merely to further their own knowledge or for profit; rather, they will use that knowledge for the public good.

Parrhasius and Vivisection Several ­n ineteenth-century authors saw Parrhasius as an immoral artist who sought a specific kind of scientific knowledge. George Tarenne, an obscure French writer who published a book in 1808 on the medicinal qualities of snails, seems to be the first in print to associate Parrhasius and the vivisection of human beings, a practice the author condemns. Tarenne speaks of the famous Greek physician and anatomist Herophilus (c. 330–260 bce), who is said to have dissected more than seven hundred living criminals, both men and women. According to Tarenne’s confused account, Parrhasius, “wishing to paint a Prometheus Torn by the Vulture, purchased an old Corinthian [sic], whom he subjected to this horrible torture [vivisection], after he had opened his belly a little.”21 Tarenne implies that Parrhasius made an incision in the body of his model in imitation of the wound caused by the vulture as it pecked at Prometheus’s side. A few years later another Frenchman, ­Jacques-Barthélemy Salgues (1760–1830), again recalling Herophilus, repeats Tarenne’s accusation 32



4. The Afterlife of Seneca’s Tale

almost verbatim. Unlike Tarenne, however, Salgues specifies that Parrhasius made the “crucial” incision in the right hypochondrium, or upper abdomen, where the liver is located, of the “old Corinthian.” 22 Both authors believed that Parrhasius is like Herophilus to the extent that they each sought knowledge of human anatomy. In this respect the authors might have been inspired, at least in part, by Latro’s loose association of Parrhasius and physicians as reported by Seneca.23 In 1835, the Austrian anatomist Josef Hyrtl (1810–1894) refers to mere rumors about Parrhasius tormenting living humans. 24 Just before the middle of the century, however, the British medical doctor, Alfred Lochée (1811–1890) again linked Parrhasius and vivisection. Like Tarenne and Salgues, Lochée, perhaps alluding to Herophilus, explains that the ancients gained a thorough knowledge of human anatomy in part through the practice of “Anatomia Vivorum.” That is to say, they cruelly dissected the bodies of living criminals. He also refers to the atrocious conditions of slaves in ancient Rome, citing as an example the story of Parrhasius, which Lochée gets verbatim from Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. Lochée hopes that “for the honour of human nature […] the example set by the torturer of this ‘very old man’ [Lochée’s emphasis] was not followed by the students of other professions,” that is, anatomists. In any case, the Romans, “with all their vaunted civilization,” were not civilized enough to use their knowledge of the human body for the benefit of society; specifically, they established no “public asylums for the sick and needy.” 25 For Lochée, Parrhasius, a Greek, not only is a cruel individual, he also personifies a heartless, pagan society.

Albert Leffingwell In 1908, American physician Albert Tracy Leffingwell (1845–1916) refers to Parrhasius in his The Vivisection Controversy. According to Leffingwell, “Seneca tells us that when Parrhasius, the greatest of Grecian artists, was painting his [Prometheus], he caused a captured prisoner of war to be tortured to death in his studio, that he might copy from nature the expression of agony.” Then, imagining that he is looking down into the face of Parrhasius’s model, Leffingwell invents lines that two renowned scientists were willing to repeat. One is Italian surgeon and anthropologist Paolo Mantegazza (1831–1910), who studied the stimulating effects of cocoa; the other is Mauritian physician 33



The Artist as Murderer

­C harles-Édouard ­Brown-Séquard (1817–1894), who used guinea pigs in his research. According to Leffingwell, either scientist might find it appropriate to recite the following lines: Pity thee? So I do; I pity the dumb victim at the altar. But doth the robed priest for his pity falter? I’d rack thee though I knew A thousand lives were perishing in thine; What were ten thousand to a fame like mine?

Leffington rejects the belief that “the only function of science is to discover and reveal the hidden facts of existence—to sift the Knowable from the Unknown.” 26 Science, in short, should be concerned with morality, just as Parrhasius should have been.

Art, Religion and Morality Several ­n ineteenth-century authors recount Seneca’s tale within the context of religion and spirituality. In 1854, in an unsigned article in an American journal devoted to the rhetoric of preaching, a Presbyterian minister, probably the Southerner Robert Lewis Dabney (1820– 1898), alludes to preachers who do not believe what they preach and care only about “­self-display” and their “own rhetorical fame.” Listening to such a preacher, a member of a congregation might think that the speaker “must have almost the heart of a fiend, to be capable of vanity and selfish artifice, in the presence of truths so sacred and dire.” At this point the author recalls Seneca’s tale: Parrhasius tortured his model “to death beside his easel; in order that he might transfer to his canvas the traits of the last struggle, in their native reality.”27 As we hear the story, the author says, our hearts are sickened by Parrhasius’s “devilish ambition.” He then draws a rather dramatic parallel between Parrhasius and Presbyterian ministers; both are ambitious. Like ambitious, ­s elf-regarding preachers, the artist “steels his soul against the cry of agony, and coolly wrings out the life of a helpless and harmless fellow man, to win fame for himself, by throwing into his ­m aster-piece the lineaments of a living death!”28 Dabney seems to echo a relatively long poem titled “Parrhasius” (to be discussed later), which was published in 1831 by the New England publisher and poet Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806–1867). Willis had used Seneca’s story of Parrhasius and his model as the basis for his poem (see Appendix C). 34



4. The Afterlife of Seneca’s Tale

In his Elements of Art Criticism (1867), which is dedicated to the wealthy art collector William Wilson (1798–1888), George Whitefield Samson (1819–1896), fifth president of Columbian College (now George Washington University), bases his presentation of Parrhasius in the writings of Pliny and Quintilian. Samson first describes the artist’s accomplishments, then follows with an account of the “faults” in his character: “Like too many men of genius Parrhasius gave way to degrading appetites and unmanly passions.” In other words, the artist painted “lewd Sportive pieces” on small panels. This “diseased sensual appetite” caused an “inhuman passion” in the artist’s soul. In Parrhasius, “the voice of humanity” was drowned by a “­fiend-like craving for fame.” At the end of his discussion of the painter Samson quotes the version of Seneca’s tale of the Olynthian slave that ends, “he is accused of having thus defamed religion.”29 For Samson, Parrhasius’s transgressions—his descent into lust, his cravings for fame and his murder of an enslaved model—were affronts to morality and religion, and thus, by implication, to the body politic and all of humanity. An influential ­n ineteenth-century Catholic American writer, A.J. Faust, in an article of 1882, also examined the tale of Parrhasius in a specifically religious context. He identifies Parrhasius as “the painter, who had an aged Olynthian captive crucified that he might catch from nature the expression of physical agony.” Faust, who believes the story to be a “myth,” links Parrhasius’s paganism and his cruelty; the first set the stage for the latter: “The brutalizing power of a faith which sees no life beyond this, the beginning and the end of man’s destiny, is portrayed in the ghastly legend which Seneca has recorded of one of the greatest paintings of antiquity, the ‘Prometheus Chained.’”30 The author seems not to have understood that Parrhasius’s Prometheus Chained might not have existed, that the story of its creation might be a fiction. Poet and fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford, George Augustus Simcox (1841–1905), in his survey of Latin literature (1883), briefly discusses Seneca’s Controversiae concerning Parrhasius. The ancient author, Simcox suggests, offers three ways in which the artist harmed the Athenians, one of which is the “sacrilege” of placing his picture in the Parthenon. The other two possible offenses might have been either the “disgrace” that comes to a city where torture and murder for the sake of art is possible, or the artist’s “contempt for the decree which gave Olynthians equal rights at Athens.”31 Simcox subtly connects the polity and religion; a crime against religion is a crime against the state. Catherine Josephine Wigginton Barton was a portrait painter 35



The Artist as Murderer

and writer who was born in Boone County, Missouri, in 1857, and later lived in Kansas City. She was also a contributing ­co-editor of a locally published journal of Christian metaphysics titled The Life. In one contribution to that journal (1906), she speaks of Parrhasius from a metaphysical perspective. The story of the contest between Parrhasius and Zeuxis, Barton explains, establishes that ancient painters “gave their talents exclusively to the imitation of material forms [Barton’s emphasis],” ignoring “the true spirit back of every manifest thing.” Parrhasius, in other words, was concerned only with the “symbol” and not with the symbolized, that is, “the true Substance” operating throughout nature. Because of his vanity and the neglect of the “soul of his work,” he was capable of purchasing and killing the Olynthian slave. Barton says of the artist’s crime: “Wonderful how the infinite could filter through his [Parrhasius’s] fingers upon the canvas, while he failed to utilize the light in himself, while yet he kept the symbol paramount.” The story of Parrhasius leads Barton to observe that an artist “lifts humanity as he himself rises by the ascension of his own ideas.”32 The work of a materialistic painter, such as Parrhasius, cannot inspire an appreciation of “the true Substance” embodied in the alleged beauty of his art. Parrhasius was an important artist for another American writer, Albert E. Waffle (1846–1927), a doctor of divinity and pastor of the First Baptist Church in Albion, New York. In his book on the kingdom of God If Christ Were King (1912), and particularly in the chapter on civilization, Waffle discusses the relation between art and morality. He asserts that the ­t hen-popular notion of “art for art’s sake” is meaningless. Art exists not for itself but for human beings, and it should produce pleasure in the “hearts and minds” of those who view it. The pursuit of pleasure as an end in itself, Waffle continues, is dangerous because it “tends to make people selfish, hard, and indifferent to moral restraints.” Generally speaking, as Waffle warns, “artists of all kinds are deficient in moral character.” Art must be subordinate to the building of character; it should not “awaken lust, the love of combat, ­blood-thirstiness, or any malign passion.” Waffle also believes that we “can pay too high a price for works of art.” The beautiful and imposing buildings of Egypt, Assyria, and India were built with the “sweat and blood” of forced labor, and the workers often died of exhaustion “simply to gratify the ambition or the sentiment of a heartless ruler.” There is also the example of Parrhasius, who killed an Olynthian slave so that he would have a suitable model for his Prometheus Bound. Modern artists, Waffle continues, no longer torture 36



4. The Afterlife of Seneca’s Tale

and kill their models, “but they would befoul the soul of all those who look upon their works.” Modern palaces and art galleries have not been built with forced labor, but they are often “purchased by the toil and suffering of the poor,” bought with “the souls of men and the rights of men.” Waffle ends with the assertion that works of art “must always be kept subordinate to the higher interests of man.”33

Parrhasius’s Vanity Over the course of the nineteenth century Seneca’s story was often anthologized, sometimes with a comment from the editor. For example, the New England dentist Shearjashub Spooner (1809–1859) included the tale of Parrhasius and the Olynthian “captive,” which, he says, is “doubtless a fiction,” in his popular collection of anecdotes and stories about artists and architects: “Seneca relates that Parrhasius, when about to paint a picture of Prometheus Chained, crucified an old Olynthian captive, to serve as a model, that he might be able to portray correctly the agonies of Prometheus while the Vulture preyed upon his vitals.”34 Immediately after the tale Spooner gives a brief description of “the vanity of Parrhasius”: This great artist was well aware of his powers, but the applause which he received, added to a naturally vain and conceited disposition, so completely carried him away, that Pliny terms him “the most insolent and the most arrogant of artists.” He assumed the title of The Elegant, styled himself the Prince of Painters, wrote an epigram upon himself, in which he proclaimed his birth, and declared that he had carried the art to perfection. He clothed himself in purple, and wore a wreath of gold on his head; and when he appeared on public occasions, particularly at the Olympic games, he changed his robes several times a day. He went so far as to pretend that he was descended from Apollo, one of whose surnames was Parrhasius, and even to dedicate his own portrait as Mercury in a temple, and thus received the adoration of the multitude.35

Spooner implies that Parrhasius’s treatment of his slave is directly related to his vanity and arrogance. An artist of better character, he hints, would not have tortured and killed a model, and he would not have stolen the worship due to Mercury for himself.

37

5

Tormented Models Seemingly Vasari is the first modern author to publish stories that are structurally similar to Seneca’s paradigmatic tale about Parrhasius and the Olynthian slaved. One story appears in his account of the Veronese painter Francesco Bonsignori (ca. 1455–1519), who worked in Mantua after 1487. In this variation on the original tale, a patron, rather than an artist, torments the model, again for the sake of a lifelike imitation of nature.

Francesco Bonsignori As the story goes, Francesco is diligently imitating “many things” from life for a figure in a painting representing the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (died ca. 288 ce).1 According to legend, archers riddled the body of the bound saint with arrows on the command of Roman Emperor Diocletian (ca. 240–312 bce). One day the marquis of Mantua, while visiting Francesco in his studio, advises the artist to employ a “beautiful body” as a model in painting the figure of the saint. Francesco replies: “I am imitating a porter with a beautiful physique, whom I bind in my own way to make the work like nature.” The marquis objects that the limbs of Francesco’s figure are not true to life because they do not seem to be strained by force or fear; the appearance of the arms and legs of a living man about to be riddled with arrows would be different. The marquis then promises to show Francesco what he should do to make his figure perfect. The next time Francesco binds his model’s arms and legs, he is secretly to summon the marquis. On the following day, the marquis, having been summoned, without warning rushes into the artist’s studio carrying a crossbow loaded with an arrow, the instrument of Sebastian’s martyrdom, and screaming at the bound porter, “Traitor, you are dead! You are bound as I would have you.” The terrified model, 38



5. Tormented Models

fearing for his life, begins furiously to struggle against the restraining ropes. Turning to the painter, the marquis says, “Now he is posed as he should be: the rest is up to you.”2 In this story, Bonsignori is like Parrhasius inasmuch as he attempts to recreate aspects of the original circumstances of the subject of his painting, which seems to have been standard practice at the time. At the very least, he binds his model just as Saint Sebastian might have been bound. The marquis is also like Parrhasius to the extent that he torments a model to produce an expression suitable for the figure of the martyred saint. He forces the model to become like the saint, just as Parrhasius forced his model to become like Prometheus. Bonsignori is not responsible for the ill treatment of his model and seemingly is not ambitious for fame; rather, the marquis, who is socially superior to both painter and porter, is concerned about the inadequately lifelike portrayal of nature in the artist’s painting and initiates the torment of the model.

Gentile Bellini and the Turkish Sultan The Venetian art historian and painter Carlo Ridolfi (1594–1658) tells a structurally similar tale about the Venetian painter Gentile Bellini (ca. 1429–1507), brother of the more talented Giovanni Bellini (ca. 1431/6–1516). The story, which appears in Ridolfi’s The Marvels of Art (1648), is about a journey Gentile actually made in 1479–1481 at the request of the Venetian government. The Ottoman sultan Mehmed II (1432–1481) asked the Venetians to send a “good painter” to him in Constantinople, and they sent Gentile. 3 Ridolfi explains that among the paintings he produced for the sultan was a representation of a now untraceable head of Saint John the Baptist, whom the Turks revered as a prophet. In the Gospel of Matthew (14:1–12) and the Gospel of Mark (6:14–29), Saint John is decapitated on the order of Herod Antipas (21 bce–39 ce).4 Gentile shows his painting to Mehmed, and the sultan, after praising the artist’s diligence in representing nature, points to an error in the depiction of the saint’s head: the figure’s neck projects too far from the head. When Bellini seems unconvinced, the sultan, wishing to make the artist see his point, calls for an enslaved man to be brought to him and, in effect, reenacts the execution of Saint John. The sultan summarily orders the beheading of the slave in order to show to Gentile how the human neck shrinks when severed from the shoulders. 39



The Artist as Murderer

Mehmed’s barbarism intimidated the painter, and he sought every means possible to take leave of the sultan, uncertain as to whether or not a similar “whim” might one day befall him.5 In this instance the sultan, a man of supreme social standing, provides a model for the artist to follow in representing a severed head. The implication is that the sultan expects the artist to correct his error. Ridolfi, however, says neither that Gentile did so, nor that he learned anything useful to his art from the horrifying event.6 In these stories about Bonsignori and Gentile Bellini, the torment of the model has its source in the patron’s demand for a lifelike imitation of nature. For the marquis of Mantua and the Turkish sultan, as for Parrhasius, a correct and therefore convincing representation of nature is of overriding importance for the aesthetic enjoyment and appreciation of art, particularly paintings. The marquis is willing to terrify an unsuspecting porter out of his wits in order to supply the artist with a pose and expression appropriate to his subject matter, and on a whim the sultan is willing to kill a slave (but nevertheless a man) to provide the painter with a model for his representation of a figure’s head.

Leonardo Da Vinci Vasari also tells a tale in which an artist kills his model. The story appears in his vita of Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519). Unlike Parrhasius, Leonardo does not take the life of a human being; rather he kills insects and small animals for the sake of his art. As the story goes, Leonardo agreed to decorate an escutcheon or buckler for his father. He wished to terrify a viewer to produce the same stupefying “effect as the head of the Medusa,” a mythological female monster whose head was covered with snakes instead of hair. In order to produce horror in the mind of the viewer of his painting, Leonardo decides to represent a dragon coming out of a cave. In a room no one but he enters, he collects “crawling reptiles, green lizards, crickets, snakes, butterflies, locusts, bats, and other strange species of this kind.” He selects features of each kind of creature for his representation of the dragon, a selection process that is a travesty of a practice employed by the ­fi fth-century bce Greek painter Zeuxis, who would unite the beautiful parts of human bodies to make a perfect whole. Leonardo’s painting is a success. The dragon is so convincingly lifelike that when the artist’s father first sees it, he is horrified and quickly 40



5. Tormented Models

turns to leave the room in which the picture stands. “Out of the great love he felt for his profession,” Vasari says of Leonardo, “he did not smell the overpowering stench that arose from the dead animals.” 7 Even though Leonardo—who, ironically, in Vasari’s vita buys captive birds only to set them free—uses models that are not human, and he sacrifices the creatures for the sake of an overwhelmingly lifelike illusion, which he uses to terrify viewers, he is so possessed by his art that he is oblivious to the stench of the rotten carcasses of the animals that lie dead around him.

Jacopo Sansovino and Pippo del Fabbro In another story, Vasari writes of an artist who cruelly treats a human model. In his vita of the Florentine sculptor Jacopo Sansovino (1486–1570), Vasari says that a wealthy patron named Giovanni Bartolino commissioned Jacopo to depict in marble a figure of Bacchus, the Roman god of wine and revelry.8 As part of the process of making the Bacchus, Jacopo carelessly has his model, an assistant named Pippo del Fabbro, pose naked, with his head bare, for most of a winter’s day. Because he stood for long hours exposed to frigid air, poor Pippo, a promising young artist, went mad and, completely nude, began to strike the pose of Jacopo’s Bacchus from the ­chimney-top in the pouring rain. Vasari says that Pippo died a few years later.9 Jacopo did not murder Pippo, but Vasari implies that he was indirectly responsible for his model’s death, for he was more concerned about his art and about pleasing a patron than he was about Pippo’s physical and mental ­well-being. In certain respects, Vasari’s Parrhasian story about Pippo recalls a tale of the mythological figure of Pygmalion. In the Metamorphoses of Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso, better known as Ovid (43 bce to 17 ce), Pygmalion, a sculptor, when failing to find a suitable companion, carved a female figure in ivory and grew to adore the finished sculpture. Venus, seeing his love for the figure and taking pity on him, transformed it into a living, breathing woman. Vasari says that Pippo, who seemingly wanted to please Jacopo, would sometimes wrap himself in a large, wet cloth, the folds of which he had carefully arranged, and would stand for hours as if he were “a model [made] of clay.” Jacopo transforms cold, dead marble into a lifelike figure of Bacchus; Pippo tries to transform his own warm, living flesh into lifeless clay. In effect, Jacopo’s love of art caused his insane assistant to transform himself 41



The Artist as Murderer

into a sculpture, acting out a symbolic death that parallels his actual demise.10 Pippo makes himself that which Jacopo values most, a work of art.

Bernini as Saint Lawrence Domenico Bernini (1657–1723), in his biography of his father Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), tells another inventive tale that echoes Seneca’s account of Parrhasius. In this variation on the paradigm, however, the artist uses himself as a model. As the story goes, when he was fifteen years old, Gian Lorenzo, out of devotion to Saint Lawrence (ca. 225–ca. 258), a Roman deacon and martyr who was grilled alive, decides to make a sculpture of his namesake.11 Wishing to give a convincingly lifelike expression to his figure, the youthful Bernini places one of his thighs over some burning coals, a gesture that recalls Parrhasius’s order to burn his model with fire. Having produced in himself the effect of martyrdom by fire, Gian Lorenzo drew the expression of pain and sorrow on his face as reflected in a mirror, the same expression that he later used for the face of his marble figure. Domenico approvingly compares his father to the ­sixth-century bce Roman soldier, Gaius Mucius Scaevola, who mistakenly killed the secretary of the Etruscan king Lars Porsena, who was at war with Rome.12 After his capture and a threat from the king to roast him alive, Mucius held his left hand in a fire because, as Domenico says, he had made an error. Unlike Mucius, Gian Lorenzo did not err; rather he did something worthy of praise. When Pietro Bernini (1562–1629), Gian Lorenzo’s father, who was also a sculptor, “arrived home and saw his son in that act of martyrdom,” he understood the reason for the ­s elf-torment. Pietro saw immediately that his son had “so great a desire for virtue that to attain it, he portrayed in himself the torment of a true Saint Lawrence.” 13 In other words, a love of virtue motivates the artist to reenact the saint’s martyrdom. Wishing to portray Lawrence, Gian Lorenzo, in effect, harms himself in order to become the saint. To achieve his artistic end, he torments his model, who is himself, and this act of ­self-torment is not morally reprehensible, because it is in the service of not only art, but also of virtue. As Domenico must have known, there is an element of narcissism in this tale, for Gian Lorenzo directly depicts not nature, but his own image reflected in a mirror. 42



5. Tormented Models

Caravaggio The Sicilian painter and author Francesco Susinno (ca. 1665–ca. 1739) records another story about the cruelty of a famous artist toward his models. In his Lives of the Painters of Messina (1724), at the time known only in manuscript, Susinno describes the making of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s (1571–1610) Raising of Lazarus, in which the figures of Mary Magdalene and Martha look on as a young man holds in his arms the dead body of their brother Lazarus.14 As Susinno explains, Caravaggio, who lived for a short while in Messina, obtained the wonderful verisimilitude of Lazarus’s body by having a putrid cadaver dug up so that he could imitate it. When the porters (“facchini”) who held the corpse for Caravaggio to paint objected to supporting a fetid, decomposing body in their arms and wanted to abandon the task, the artist grew furious, as was his habit, and threatened to kill them with a dagger. The hapless porters acquiesce to Caravaggio’s demand, but the stench of the decomposed body was so great that they almost died, “like those miserable people condemned by the Roman Emperor Maxentius [A.D. ca. 283–312] to die bound to a corpse.” One of Caravaggio’s models is a disinterred corpse, which almost kills the models who are holding it. Susinno adds that he would not have believed such barbarism was possible had he not read Seneca’s tale of Parrhasius and the slave.15 Caravaggio, however, does not kill anyone; rather, just as Jesus brought Lazarus’s corpse back to like, Caravaggio raises an anonymous cadaver from among the dead in order to make a lifelike representation of Lazarus. In short, Caravaggio is to the ­corpse-model as Jesus is to the dead Lazarus.

A Model for Milo Another story about the cruel treatment of a model appears in a widely popular book by Sholto and Reuben Percy, titled The Percy Anecdotes. As the story goes, “a modern French painter” decides to make a picture of the most dramatic event in the life of the ­sixth-century bce Greek wrestler Milo (or Milon) of Croton. The story goes that when Milo accidentally catches his hand in the trunk of a tree, a pack of roving wolves attack and kill him. Centuries later the anonymous French painter meets a muscular porter, who is a “colossal figure” with 43



The Artist as Murderer

“vigorous muscles.” The artist offers the man a gold coin (“Louis d’or”) to model for him, explaining that he must have his hands tied to an iron ring so that the artist can represent as faithfully as possible both Milo and the trunk of the tree to which his hands were attached when he was attacked by the wild beasts. The porter accepts the offer and follows the artist to his studio where the model undresses and allows his hands to be tied to a ring in the tree. The artist asks the porter to imagine a lion advancing toward him and to pretend he is attempting to escape the animal. The porter tries his best, but he makes “too many grimaces,” and there is “nothing natural in his frightful contortions.” Even after the artist gives him more instructions, the model cannot strike a satisfactory pose or make an acceptable facial expression. At last the artist takes another tack. He looses a vicious mastiff on the model. Suddenly, as the huge dog bites him, the porter’s gesture and expression satisfy the artist, and he begins to draw what he sees. When the artist has completed his task, he ends the torture and releases the model, who accepts additional monetary reward for the cruel manner in which he has been treated.16 Again, this story is about an artist’s overriding devotion to his art, and particularly to the lifelike imitation of nature, but the painter, unlike Parrhasius, does not premeditate the model’s death; indeed, at first he does not intend to harm the porter. Only after the model is unable to make a satisfactory expression does the artist set the dog on him. Echoing some of the declamations on Seneca’s story of Parrhasius, the tale illustrates a contrast between imagination and nature: the model cannot use his imagination to achieve the desired expression, and the artist, who cannot adequately imagine his subject matter, requires a living model and turns to nature for help. Like Parrhasius and Bonsignori’s patron in Vasari’s story, the anonymous artist recreates to an extent the original circumstances of the subject of his painting.

Messerschmidt As late as the nineteenth century, apparently artists were still thought capable of physically tormenting their models. As we are told, the German sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736–1783), who spent most of his career in Austria, allegedly tormented a model, or potential model. The Hungarian politician, Ferencz Aurelius Pulszky (1814–1897), without citing a source, refers in his memoirs to the 44



5. Tormented Models

allegation against Messerschmidt. The artist, who was making a sculpture of the Crucifixion of Christ, wished to see an expression of mortal fear on the face of a Jewish merchant and threatened to kill the man to achieve his goal.17 Clearly, Pulszky reports a fiction based in Seneca’s tale of Parrhasius and the Olynthian slave, a fiction in which the artist is far less calculating than his Ancient counterpart.

45

6

Michelangelo Murders a Model Parrhasius was not the only ancient artist to be accused of murdering a model; so were Apelles, Zeuxis and Polygnotus. None of these accusations originate in antiquity; rather they seem to have first appeared in the eighteenth century and to be the result of confusion or ignorance. For example, in a note to his 1776 French translation of Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s (1717–1768) History of Ancient Art (ca. 1764), Gottfried Sellius (ca. 1704–1767), after mentioning Seneca’s story of Parrhasius, remarks, without citing a specific source, that “the same thing is said of Apelles.” 1 About a century later French historian and art critic Henri Houssaye (1848–1911) again notes that the accusation is imputed to Apelles. Houssaye also says that according to a report, the ­fi fth-century bce Greek painter Polygnotus, when painting a Prometheus, “applied torture to a slave in order to study and imitate” his sad face.2 In a letter from Parma dated 1777, Neapolitan writer Carlo Gastone della Torre di Rezzonico (1742–1796) says that Zeuxis was accused of killing his model. Specifically, he mentions a story of “the inhumanity of Zeuxis towards an Olynthian slave.”3 Interestingly, Sellius, Houssaye, and Gastone all link the accusations they had heard about Apelles, Zeuxis, and Polygnotus with a story about Michelangelo.

Michelangelo and a Porter Michelangelo is the subject of the oldest and most widely circulated story of a modern artist murdering a human model. Unsurprisingly, the earliest printed reference to the tale appears in an edition of Seneca’s Controversiae, that of André Schott, published in Paris in 1607. The story of Parrahasius and the Olynthian model causes Schott to note that Michelangelo, “sculptor and architect,” the “Apelles of our age,” 46



6. Michelangelo Murders a Model

is falsely accused of affixing a servant to a cross and allowing him to expire so that he could make a lifelike image of his subject.4 The first known appearance of an extended representation of Michelangelo as a murderer is not a false rumor or a tale, but a poem by an anonymous, seemingly Italian author. The poem, known only in manuscript, was written probably in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. The title of the poem serves as an introduction: Michelangelo, pingendo dal naturale un Crocifisso, pone in croce un facchino al quale dà la morte; questi, così morendo, parla. Ambi siam Crocifissi, e Cristo ed io, e sono i traditor Giuda e Michele: un apostolo a lui la morte ordio; a me toglie la vita Angiol crudele. Ambi sgorghiam dal sen vermiglio un rio, onde sparge il pennel sangue fedele se Gesù muore ad eternarsi in Dio io muoro ad eternarlo in su la tela. Ambi un angiolo habbiam perchè n’assista: l’uno alle pene il Redentor conforta l’altro con nuovi crucci ognor m’attrista. Ambi in croce lasciam la spoglia morta; ma l’uccisor di Cristo infamia acquista e il carnefice mio gloria riporta. Michelangelo, painting a Crucifixion from nature, places a porter on a cross and puts him to death; he, thus expiring, speaks. Together we are crucified, Christ and I, and they are traitors, Judas and Michele: one of His apostles arranged His death; and cruel Angelo takes life from me. We each gush from our vermilion chest a stream, whence the brush spreads the faithful blood; and as Jesus dies to eternal life in God, I die to make him eternal in this canvas. We each have an attending angel: one comforts the sufferings of the Savior, the other with new strokes forever saddens me. Together on the Cross, we leave our mortal remains; And while the murderer of Christ acquires shame, my murderer glory gains.5

There are several parallels between the content of the poem and Seneca’s account of Parrhasius and the enslaved model. Each artist kills his model, and just as the ancient artist depicted the god Prometheus, 47



The Artist as Murderer

giver of life to humanity, Michelangelo portrays Christ, a person of the Christian godhead, the Trinity. One of Seneca’s declaimers observes that Parrhasius transformed his model into a Prometheus; so, too, does Michelangelo transform the porter into a Christ. The poem also echoes Sparsus’ epigram concerning Parrhasius’s painting in which the former associates blood and paint. Just as blood flows from the model’s side, Michelangelo, using his brush, “spreads the faithful blood” in the side of the depicted Christ.6 That Michelangelo paints a Crucifixion of Christ recalls the elder Arellius Fuscus, who in Seneca’s Controversiae held that Parrhasius depicted Prometheus on a cross (“crucem”). Both Prometheus and Christ have a bloody wound in the side, one caused by a vulture, the other by a lance. Lastly, Michelangelo, the poem implies, is an ambitious artist; he seeks glory or fame for himself and his painting. Likewise, Parrhasius strives to create a picture worthy of a place in the Temple of Athena. In spite of the similarities, the significance of the poem differs dramatically from that of Seneca’s tale. Michelangelo crucifies his model, but there is no suggestion that he did so to obtain a specific expression. The intention of each author is different, too. Seneca is concerned about the possible harm Parrhasius has done to Athens in general, including its religion. The poem seems to be about the relation among art, death and fame or “glory.” In the poem the crucified model compares himself to the representation of the crucified Christ in Michelangelo’s painting. He then compares himself and Michelangelo to Jesus and Judas Iscariot, respectively. The model also implies a type of resurrection. Even though he dies at the hands of Michelangelo, his depicted flesh lives on in the picture. The model brings a kind of eternal life to Michelangelo as an artist but also to himself through the image of Christ. Ironically, Michelangelo depicts a comforting angel attending the painted figure of the suffering Christ, while the model’s angel (i.e., Michelangelo), indifferent to human suffering, crucifies him. With the strokes of his brush, detached Michelangelo depicts his sad victim in an enduring image on the canvas and just as the painted Christ dies on the cross, so too does the living model die on his cross. Unlike Judas, a traitor whose life ended in suicide and shame, Michelangelo gains glory through his art. In other words, the model’s death and his resurrection in the painting are the means by which Michelangelo achieves everlasting admiration and fame. Significantly, there is no mention of punishing the artist for causing the death of his model; apparently, he is free in his glory. 48



6. Michelangelo Murders a Model

The poem presents Michelangelo in several guises. He is a painter and an executioner. He is also like Judas, whose likeness implies that he betrays the model and by extension all of nature. In crucifying his model, Michelangelo, in effect, is also like the soldiers who killed Christ. The model, then, posing for a figure of the crucified Christ, becomes like the historical Christ on the Cross, and his death may be understood as a sacrifice for the sake of art. The poet seems to imply a deep metaphorical meaning, which is that acts of creation can require a terrible sacrifice and an absolute indifference to natural, particularly human, life. The transformation of nature into art requires the death of nature, so that it may be resurrected as art. The fleeting and ephemeral acquire an eternal existence in art. In short, life serves art, and art immortalizes life. The idea that a painting or other representation is a kind of eternal paradise was not new in the anonymous poem. Already in his Dialogue on Love (1542), the ­sixteenth-century Paduan scholar and writer, Sperone Speroni (1500–1588) had observed that the works of Titian, particularly his portraits, “have in them a non so che of divinity so that just as Heaven is the paradise of souls, so it seems that in his [Titian’s] colors God has placed the paradise of our bodies; not painted, but made holy and glorified by his hands.” 7 The souls of Titian’s models go to Heaven, but their bodies are resurrected in the artist’s colors, in his paint. When writing about Michelangelo’s Moses on the tomb of Pope Julius II in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome, Vasari, too, associates art and resurrection. God, he writes, working through the hands of the artist, “deigned to assemble together and prepare his [Moses’s] body for the Resurrection before that of any other.”8 God uses Michelangelo to transform dead stone into the resurrected prophet; Moses’s body is resurrected and made eternal in stone.

The Model as Porter Unlike Parrhasius’s model, Michelangelo’s victim is not an old slave; rather he is a facchino, or porter, a circumstance that seems especially relevant. Even though the author of the poem might have recalled the facchino in Vasari’s tale of Francesco Bonsignori, both the poem and Vasari’s story point to the fact that porters, who lifted and carried things for a living, and other muscular men were in demand as models. The English miniaturist, Edward Norgate (1581–1650), who was a 49



The Artist as Murderer

friend to King Charles I of England (1600–1649) and to the art collector Thomas Howard, 2nd Earl of Arundel (1585–1646), provides a glimpse of how a porter might have served as a model. In his manuscript titled Miniatura or the Art of Limning (1648–1649), Norgate describes a drawing room in the art academy in Rome, “where in the middle, a hired Long sided Porter or such like is to be set, stand or hang naked sometimes in a [single] posture for two or three howres [sic]. This fellow is surrounded by a number of Painters, who make him their Model, and drawe him as he appeares to everyone. By this practice they pretend to greate skill in the naked Anatomy, and Muscles of the Body, and other eminences appearing in the Life.”9 Norgate, who understands that artists learn a great deal about human anatomy from observing naked bodies, seems to hint that he has sympathy for the models. For the sake of art, they are paid to stand, sit, or be suspended naked, and like poor Pippo del Fabbro in Vasari’s tale, they must hold a single pose for hours on end. Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens in his essay on the imitation of ancient sculpture, which was first published by the French artist and art theorist Roger de Piles (1637–1709) in his The Principles of Painting (1708), offers further insight into why porters “or such like” were in demand as models. Rubens, who believed that the ancients were physically larger and in better shape than his contemporaries, laments the decline in the size of the modern physique, a decline, he says, that is largely due to a lack of exercise. There are exceptions to the general state of affairs: “For the arms, legs, neck, shoulders, and whatever works in the body, are assisted by exercise and nourish’d with juice drawn into them by heat, and thus increase exceedingly both in strength and size; as appears from the backs of porters, the arms of prize fighters, the legs of dancers, and almost the whole body of watermen.”10 Modern muscular male models, Rubens implies, are closer to the ancients and therefore closer to anatomical perfection. The anonymous poet seems to have identified Michelangelo’s victim as a porter in order to signal that the artist used a physically ­well-developed man as his model. Such a model would have been in keeping with the classically beautiful and idealized muscularity of Michelangelo’s male figures. In identifying the model as a porter, the poet might also have intended another dimension to the poem. Unlike Parrhasius, Michelangelo does not own his model, but he is socially and personally superior to him. The model’s occupation is a sign of his relatively low social standing; thus, the poem strongly implies that 50



6. Michelangelo Murders a Model

Michelangelo, while painting a picture of Christ, used his superior social and intellectual station to exploit his muscular model for personal gain, the achievement of “glory.” The author of the anonymous poem had read Seneca’s story of Parrhasius and perhaps also Lucian’s reference to the crucifixion of Prometheus. Surely the poet also knew the existing literature about Michelangelo, for his poem is in keeping with the complex literary image of the artist at the time. Although some authors, especially Vasari, represent him in a positive light, Michelangelo’s literary image also contains a dark or romantic side. In some writings he appears introverted, melancholic, irritable and prone to anger. For example, in his brief vita of the young artist, historian, and biographer Paolo Giovio (1483–1552) noticed a shadow side to Michelangelo’s character. Acknowledging his subject’s elevated genius and his perfect art, Giovio also calls him “rude and uncivilized.”11 About twenty years later an anonymous writer, the ­s o-called Anonimo Gaddiano (aka Anonimo Magliabechiano), records a tale that exemplifies Michelangelo’s alleged incivility and anger. One day, Leonardo da Vinci, out walking with a companion, passes a large bench next to the Palazzo Spini near the church of Santa Trinita in Florence. A group of gentlemen have gathered there to discuss some lines from Dante Alighieri’s (1265–1321) Divine Comedy. Seeing Leonardo, they ask him to clarify the passage for them. At that very moment Michelangelo, walking alone, happens to pass by, and Leonardo responds to the gentlemen, “Michelangelo here will explain the passage to you.” Michelangelo, believing that Leonardo speaks in jest, angrily replies, “You explain it; you who designed a horse to be cast in bronze, and could not cast it, and because of your shame abandoned it.” Michelangelo then turns his back on everyone and departs, leaving an embarrassed and blushing Leonardo behind.12 Solitary, overly sensitive Michelangelo, believing he is the butt of a joke, rudely and scornfully calls attention to Leonardo’s inability to cast an enormous equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza (1401–1466), Duke of Milan. Leonardo made a clay model for the horse but abandoned the project before casting it in bronze. In addition to calling attention to Michelangelo’s “rude” behavior, Giovio also accuses him of lacking generosity in his domestic life and says that the artist is unwilling to teach his art to others.13 Both Ascanio Condivi (ca. 1520–1574), in his Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti (1553), and Vasari say that some people viewed the artist’s lonely life and ­a nti-social behavior as outlandish and peculiar.14 This view 51



The Artist as Murderer

is echoed in the “Roman Dialogues” (1548) of the Portuguese painter, Francisco de Holanda (1517–1584), who has a figure of Michelangelo speak of those who say that eminent painters (like himself) are not only “strange, harsh, and unbearable,” but also “fantastic and capricious.”15 The figure of Michelangelo in the Dialogues (1545) of Florentine politician and dramatist, Donato Giannotti (1492–1573), is also to a certain degree ­a nti-social. When asked to dinner, Michelangelo replies that he would rather be left alone: “I do not promise you yet that I shall come.” When asked why he will not attend the gathering, Michelangelo, who in real life preferred solitude, replies, “When I find myself in these companies, as I would be if I dined with you, I celebrate too much, and I do not want to be too festive.” Michelangelo also reminds his friends that we live in a world of tears.16 Michelangelo’s solitude and its effect on others are also the subjects of a story told by the Milanese painter and art theorist Gian Paolo Lomazzo (1538–1600) in his Idea of the Temple of Painting (1590). One day, according to Lomazzo, solitary Michelangelo happened to come upon gregarious Raphael (1483–1520). Because many people accompanied the latter, Michelangelo remarked that he thought he had met the police captain. To which Raphael responded that he thought he had encountered the public executioner, who, as Lomazzo explains, “always goes about alone, just as Michelangelo did.”17 No doubt some of Michelangelo’s contemporaries would have agreed with the representation of him as an ­a nti-social person, and some might have recalled a famous saying of the younger Seneca to the effect that there has never been a great man of genius who was not somewhat demented.18 There are also accusations that Michelangelo placed his art before his religion. In a letter of 1545, the poet and playwright, Pietro Aretino (1492–1556), in response to a drawing after Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (1536–1541) in the Sistine Chapel, says the artist cared more about art than he did about his faith.19 Around the same time, an anonymous diarist made a similar accusation. Referring to a copy of Michelangelo’s early Pietà (1498–1499), the original of which is now in Saint Peter’s, Rome, as a “Lutheran caprice,” the author calls the artist an “inventor of filths” and exclaims that he cares more for art than he does for religious devotion.20 In effect, for this anonymous accuser and for Aretino, Michelangelo’s ­single-minded devotion to art at the expense of religion makes him like Parrhasius. The anonymous poem about Michelangelo and the crucified porter implies such a likeness, too. 52

7

Carpenter’s Tale The story implied in the poem about Michelangelo murdering his model endured for centuries, perhaps in part because, as we have seen, some artists, including famous ones, were extremely violent. Among the first to perpetuate the story of the murder in print is the English poet, playwright, and convert to the Church of England, Richard D. Carpenter (ca. 1607–1670?), about whom little is known beyond what he tells us on the ­t itle-page of his anti–Catholic treatise, Experience, Historie, and Divinitie (1641). There he identifies himself as “vicar of Poling, a small and obscure village by the ­sea-side neare to Arundel in Sussex.” He also explains that after studying at Eton College and Cambridge University, he was ordained by “the hands of the pope’s substitute” in Rome. The pope sent him “into England to pervert Souls,” and he did so for “the space of a yeare and upwards,” after which “by the special favour of God,” he returned to “the faire church of Christ in England.” 1 Carpenter’s vacillations in matters religious (he later returned to Roman Catholicism) seem to lie behind the characterization of him by the English antiquarian, Anthony Wood (1632–1695): “Those that knew him have often told me that he was an impudent, fantastical man, that changed his mind with his cloaths, and that for his juggles and tricks in matters of religion, he was esteemed a theological mountebank.”2

Art as Deception In one portion of his book, Carpenter speaks out against the deceptive nature of art in a manner that not only reflects Plato’s ideas about mimesis, 3 but also is typical of contemporary ­a nti-papists and iconoclasts. He says that, after he became an Anglican, he was delighted when on first entering Protestant churches, he saw people listen to and participate in the “divine Service.” Poor Roman Catholics, he asserts, 53



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do not understand the service and seldom hear sermons. They are like “beasts,” for they go to church in order to please the senses with music and singing, and their priests willfully deceive them.4 Carpenter goes on to cite several examples of the visual and verbal deceptions, which, he alleges, are perpetuated by the Catholic clergy. One instance of verbal deception occurred on the death of a priest in England. According to a false rumor circulated among Catholics in Spain, Carpenter explains, the priest’s body was cut into quarters, and those parts were hung beside slabs of venison so that the English judge in charge could “most unhumanely” compare the one with the other.5 According to Carpenter, Spanish Catholics falsely accused English Protestants of quartering a Catholic priest and of hanging the several parts of his body beside slabs of slain deer so that they could compare human flesh with the animal remains. As another example of the deception practiced by unscrupulous papists, Carpenter describes “an old manuscript, wrought excellently with gold and painting,” which contains a prayer by the English Benedictine monk and historian known as the Venerable Bede (673– 735). The prayer, Carpenter explains, is based in “the seven words, or speeches of Christ hanging from the Crosse.”6 Carpenter seems to refer to an illuminated manuscript containing Bede’s prayer, which is organized around the seven last sentences Christ spoke while on the Cross: “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34); “Today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43); “Behold your son: behold your mother” (John 19:26); “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” (Mark 15:34); “I thirst” (John 19:28); “It is finished” (John 19:30); and “Into your hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46). Carpenter does not give a reason for saying the manuscript and its contents are deceptive. Perhaps he wished merely to belittle Bede, who was a revered Roman Catholic. Or perhaps Carpenter alludes to the lingering belief, which no doubt he would have viewed as a papist superstition, that decorum requires the use of expensive materials in the depiction of a saint or other holy subject. Or he might simply mean that the manuscript’s “paintings,” or illuminations were deceptively lifelike representations of nature. Carpenter also describes a ­s tained-glass window he supposedly saw in a church in Holland. The window showed a bishop standing between a representation of the crucified Christ and a figure of the lactating Virgin Mary. The image of the “ignorant” bishop contained a scroll issuing from the figure’s mouth on which was an inscription: 54



7. Carpenter’s Tale

“I know not to which of these two to turne my selfe.” 7 The figure of the bishop, in other words, cannot decide whether he should direct his worship toward Christ or the Virgin. How can the faithful flock, Carpenter wonders, thrive under such a leader?

Michelangelo and Murder Seemingly responding to the false rumor about the butchered corpse of a priest spread by Spanish Catholics, and uniting the themes of death, crucifixion, and deception, Carpenter also describes the circumstances in which Michelangelo painted a figure of Christ on the cross. Michael Angelo, a Painter of Rome, having enticed a young man into his house, under the smooth pretence of drawing a picture by the sight of him: bound him to a great woodden Crosse, and having stabbed him to the heart with a ­Pen-knife, in imitation of Parrhasius that had tortured an old captive in the like cause; drew Christ hanging, and dying upon the Crosse, after his [the model’s] resemblance; & yet escaped without punishment. And this picture, because it sets forth Christ dying, as if the picture itself were dying, and with a shew of motion in every part; and because it gives the death of Christ to the life; is had in great veneration amongst them [i.e., Catholics in Rome].8

According to Carpenter, ­smooth-talking Michelangelo duped a young man into posing for him. He then stabbed the youth in the heart with a penknife for the purpose of creating a lifelike picture that deceived its viewers twice over. The mention of ­pen-knives, which were used to sharpen quills for writing, implies that Michelangelo killed his model with an object he had close at hand. Or perhaps, Carpenter had heard of Michelangelo’s accomplishments as a poet and included the penknife as a sign of that occupation. For Carpenter Michelangelo’s painting not only represents the figure of the dying Christ in a ­l ife-like manner, it also serves the papists’ intention of merely pleasing the senses of the faithful as if they were beasts. In this regard Carpenter warns his readers to be careful, for, he says, “Arts are wondrous things; they do new things, they will make new things, change old things, doe all things. If you be not very wise, and wary, they will deceive you, with excuses, glosses, pretenses, professions, expressions, accusations. And he that suffers himself to be deceived by another is his foole.”9 The deception generally inherent in 55



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art and specifically in Michelangelo’s picture is not only artistic; it also has moral and sectarian dimensions. In stressing the lifelike appearance of the dying Christ in Michelangelo’s picture, Carpenter echoes some widely influential lines from Dante’s Divine Comedy. In Canto XII of Purgatory, the figure of Dante gazes with fixed attention at various stone carvings in the pavement along which he and a figure of Roman poet Virgil (70–19 bce) walk. The carvings represent, among other figures, the slain Holofernes and Saul, first king of Israel, who died by suicide with his own sword. Dante, marveling at the liveliness of the scenes, asks Virgil about the person who created such lifelike art: What master artist with his brush or pen could reproduce these shapes and shadings here? Such art must overwhelm the subtlest mind! The dead seemed dead, the living seemed alive […].10

Within the context of the poem, the implicit answer to Dante’s question is that God is the master artist; it was He who made these works of art. The question has little to do with attributing the carvings to a particular artist; rather, it is above all a means of praising the liveliness of the art of Purgatory. Though mere representations, images found there are true to life: dead figures seem dead, and living figures seem to live. Dante’s response to and evaluation of the verisimilitude of the images in terms of the contrast between “the living” and “the dead” became a topos, or theme, of Renaissance art criticism and theory, a topos that Carpenter also employs where he writes that Michelangelo’s picture “gives the death of Christ to the life.”11 Carpenter indirectly condemns Dante, a Catholic poet, and all Catholics for praising artistic illusion or deception.

Michelangelo’s Picture If Carpenter refers to an actual “picture” by Michelangelo, he does not identify it. Possibly he had read in Condivi’s vita of Michelangelo the description of a composition, which, around 1541, the artist gave to his friend and fellow poet, Vittoria Colonna (1492–1547), the Marchesa of Pescara. According to Condivi, who varies the Dantean topos, Michelangelo made, also, for love of her, a design of a Christ upon the cross, not in the semblance of one dead, as commonly is in use; but in divine act, with his

56



7. Carpenter’s Tale countenance raised to the Father, and seeming to say, ‘Eli! Eli!’ And in this he is portrayed, not as a body bereft of life and about to fall, but as one still living, who endures and writhes in bitter supplication.12

Condivi mistakenly claims that Michelangelo’s drawing was unusual because it departed from conventional representations of the crucified Christ.13 In them, Michelangelo’s tormented figure of Christ seems to be dead or near death, while he speaks one of His seven last sentences as He expires. Carpenter probably had not seen the drawing often identified as the one Michelangelo made for Colonna, but he might well have seen any one of several paintings or possibly a print, based in Michelangelo’s design.14 Where Carpenter pointedly says that Michelangelo killed his model in “imitation of Parrhasius,” he not only condemns the artist but also implies that he imitated the ancient painter. Each murdered a model for the sake of his art, and neither the priests of the Parthenon nor the Catholic clergy hold the offending artist responsible for his action. In Seneca, there is the claim that Parrhasius’s treatment of his enslaved model parallels Philip’s devastation of Olynthus. Likewise, Carpenter seems to imply that Michelangelo is like the Catholic clergy inasmuch as he deceives both his model and the viewers of his painting. Like the priests in Seneca’s story, the Roman Catholics are guilty of venerating a picture made morally repugnant by an artist’s treatment of his model. Because Carpenter underscores the lively verisimilitude of Michelangelo’s style, he hints that the artist imitated Parrhasius in another respect, too. Parrhasius, as we have seen, won a contest with Zeuxis because his lifelike painting duped a human being, while Zeuxis fooled a mere bird. Michelangelo, then, is like Parrhasius because, as Carpenter says, he paints figures “to the life.” His vivid representation of the dying Christ fools ignorant Catholics into believing they see life itself.15 As Carpenter implies, faithful Catholics are like the birds that flocked to Zeuxis’s deceptive image; they are ­simple-minded, easily fooled birdbrains. In Carpenter’s story, Michelangelo is also like Perillus, for he is not only indifferent to human suffering, but also is willing to take human life for the sake of a lifelike imitation of nature. Furthermore, like his predecessor, cruel Michelangelo deserves to have his works despised. In effect, Carpenter indirectly accuses the pope and other church officials of not imitating the Sicilian tyrant, Phalaris; the pope should have condemned Michelangelo to death for making a work of art that involved the torture and the demise of a human being. 57



The Artist as Murderer

Responding to the notion that an artist of genius, even if he is a murderer, should be excused for his crime, Protestant Carpenter warns his readers that typically Catholic Michelangelo considered his art, particularly the lifelike representation of nature, more important than the life of his model, and, in a sense, more important than nature itself. Michelangelo and those who ignored his crime are morally reprehensible, and he and his art should be despised. In other words, no matter how accomplished an artist Michelangelo might have been, he was a son of Adam, and his rich imagination and great skill in representing nature should not have elevated him above the law. He should not have gotten away with murder. Both Carpenter and the anonymous author of the poem about Michelangelo and the porter represent the artist as a murderer, but the intention of each author is different. The poet’s attack on the artist is personal; he accuses him of being a Judas who seeks glory at the expense of the lowly porter, his model. At a deeper level he alludes to artistic creation as the transformation of life into art and to the necessary death of nature, which is resurrected in Michelangelo’s picture. Protestant Carpenter’s accusation against Catholic Michelangelo and, by extension, the Roman clergy is a political and religious attack, which includes a general condemnation of the deceptive representation of nature.

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The Tale Retold Edward Young (1683–1765), an English author best known for his long poem Night Thoughts (1742), apparently never saw any of the paintings associated with the story of Michelangelo and his model. Still, in 1714 Young published a poetic version of the tale, giving it the title “Verses Occasioned by that Famous Piece of the Crucifixion Done by Michael Angelo.” Whilst his Redeemer on his canvass dies, Stabb’d at his feet his brother weltering lies: The daring artist, cruelly serene, Views the pale cheek and the distorted mien; He drains off life by drops, and, deaf to cries, Examines every spirit as it flies: He studies torment, dives in mortal woe, To rouse up every pang repeats his blow; Each rising agony, each dreadful grace, Yet warm transplanting to his Saviour’s face. Oh glorious theft! O nobly wicked draught! With its full charge of death each feature fraught, Such wondrous force the magick colours boast, From his own skill he starts, in horror lost.1

Young begins his poem with the irony of the situation. Michelangelo is painting a dying Christ on his canvas, while at his feet a fellow child of God lies writhing in pain. Oblivious to the significance of his subject matter, “cruelly serene” and detached, he studies the expression of his model. Repeating his blows to “his brother,” stirring up his agony, Michelangelo, as a ­stand-in for the executioner, so effectively transfers what he sees to his representation of the face of the crucified Christ that each of the figure’s features has “its full charge of death.” At the end of the poem, gazing at what his skill has wrought with “magick colours,” Michelangelo shrinks in horror. Young presents an artist who is at first so absorbed by the artistic task before him that he heartlessly disregards the suffering of his fellow man. Then, having successfully completed 59



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his work, he recoils at his skillful representation of the death of his model. In a later republication of Young’s poem, an anonymous note claims that Michelangelo legally “obtained leave to treat a malefactor, condemned to be broke upon the wheel, as he pleased for this purpose. The man being extended, this wonderful artist directed that he should be stabbed in such parts of the body as he apprehended would occasion the most excruciating torture, that he might represent the agonies of death in the most natural manner.”2 In this instance, Michelangelo’s model is said to be a criminal who already has been condemned to death on the ­breaking-wheel. The artist, employing his knowledge of anatomy, orders the man to be stabbed in those parts of his body that will maximize the pain and produce the most natural expression. Michelangelo, in effect, becomes the condemned man’s (legal) executioner. The model is both a condemned criminal and a victim of the artist’s cruelty.

The Marquis de Sade and Pushkin The tale of Michelangelo and his murdered model takes on yet another significance near the close of the eighteenth century. In his novel Justine (1791), Donatien Alphonse François, the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), has a character named Rodin plan to murder his daughter in order to advance objective or scientific knowledge of female virginity. The father justifies his odious intention by rhetorically and perversely asking if Michelangelo felt remorse for crucifying a young man when he wanted to depict from nature a figure of the tormented Christ. The answer is that the artist felt no remorse; in an attitude of complete detachment, he simply copied “the boy,” his model, in the throes of an agonizing death for the sake of his art. In the advancement of art and science, such means are “absolutely essential,” and “the evil in permitting them dwindles to insignificance.”3 For de Sade, the importance of the fable is not so much that Michelangelo murdered a man for the sake of his art, as it is that the artist lacked remorse: He had no conscience and was therefore free of sympathy for a fellow human being. For the first time, Michelangelo is explicitly presented and ostensibly admired as an amoral artist. He is like a scientist objectively pursuing scientific knowledge regardless of the consequences. By the early nineteenth century, the favola of Michelangelo’s crime 60



8. The Tale Retold

had circulated beyond western Europe to Russia. At the end of a verse play (1831) about the famous composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) and a less ­well-known musician Antonio Salieri (1750– 1825), the poet Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) has the latter, who has been accused of murdering the former, exclaim, So villainy and genius are two things That never go together? That’s not true; Think but of Buonarroti…. Or was that A tale of the dull, stupid crowd—and he Who built the Vatican was not a murderer?4

In Pushkin’s lines Michelangelo is an example of an artist who is capable of both “villainy and genius.” The response is to deny the accusation, which is merely a tale perpetuated by “the dull, stupid crowd.” Salieri’s monologue signals that before the middle of the nineteenth century Michelangelo once again had been found innocent of the alleged murder of his model.

Sir Peter Paul Rubens In 1797, around the time when de Sade and Pushkin wrote about Michelangelo, the theologian and historian, Aimé Guillon de Montléon (1758–1842), wrote a book about his native city of Lyon. In it, he tells a tale about Peter Paul Rubens’s “renown” (but now untraceable) painting representing Christ on the cross with a figure of Mary Magdalene at His feet. In this tale, the artist convinces “a man of the people” to allow himself to be attached to a cross so that he might serve as a model for the figure in the painting. Once the man is in place, Rubens stabs him with a knife and quickly takes his brush to represent, with all the truth to nature possible, the last breaths of the crucified model. In defense of Rubens, Guillon de Montléon argues that the tale is not true. The figure of Christ in the painting, he says, expresses “the love and tranquility of a savior freely expiring for humankind,” not the “rage and dismay” of a man “struggling against his torture and furious at his assassin.”5 As Guillon de Montléon implies, Rubens is like the Michelangelo of those who believed he was a great and moral artist.6 Whether the author invented the story about Rubens or simply repeats a tale he had heard cannot be determined. 61

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Variations on the Tale As has been noticed already, in 1607 André Schott expresses his skepticism about the veracity of the tale of Michelangelo and his model.1 Commenting on the story of Parrhasius and the Olynthian model, Schott briefly alludes to a similar calumny made against “Michelangelo, a Florentine, the Apelles of our age,” who is said to have killed his model to paint a lifelike figure of Christ on the Cross.2 Several decades later in 1660, another denial appears in a book by the French author Paul Thomas de Girac. He finds it unlikely that the artist would “stab a man he had attached to a cross” for the sake of his painting.3 Carlo Roberto Dati, an historian of art, also questioned the veracity of the story. In his Lives of the Ancient Painters, Dati says, “There is absolutely no truth in the voices that claim Michelangelo Buonarroti put a man on a cross and left him there to die so that he might vividly depict the image of the Crucified Saviour.”4 Significantly, in Dati’s version of the story, Michelangelo differs from the figure in Carpenter’s tale, for he is a less active participant in his model’s death. Dati does not say that Michelangelo stabbed his victim, as do Carpenter and de Girac. Rather, Dati, like the author of the anonymous poem mentioned earlier, says that the artist left his crucified model on the cross to die. In any case, the tenor of Dati’s denial suggests that the tale, which evidently existed in more than one version, was then widely believed.

True and False Certainly, the tale had gained wide currency. In 1676 a Lutheran minister living in Augsburg, Theophilus Spizelius (1639–1691), also known as Gottlieb Spitzel, leaves open the possibility that Michelangelo’s “horrible crime” is true, although he seems to believe that it is.5 62



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In southern Italy, Pompeo Sarnelli (1649–1724), bishop of the town of Bisceglie north of Bari on the Adriatic Sea, writes in his Ecclesiastical Letters (1686) that he heard a monk repeat in a sermon from the pulpit the tale of Michelangelo and his model.6 Sarnelli seems to be the first author to associate the tale with a specific (now untraceable) work of art, a “famous” Crucifixion by Michelangelo in the Carthusian monastery of Saint Martin in Naples.7 “They say,” Sarnelli writes, that the artist “murdered the porter” in order to represent his figure from nature. The mention of the “porter” suggests that Sarnelli might have heard (or perhaps read) the version of the story found in the anonymous poem mentioned earlier. Around a century later, in his adaptation of Condivi’s biography of Michelangelo (1783), an obscure writer, the Abbé Hauchecorne, briefly recounts the story before asking if the artist really needed such a model. The author, who associates the story with Michelangelo’s Crucifix of 1492 in the church of Santo Spirito, Florence, also wonders if there are any painters or sculptors who have not been charged with the “ridiculous imputation.”8 The gentleman gardener Antoine Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville (1680–1765) mentions Michelangelo’s “immense” study of anatomy before responding to the false claim that he killed a model in order to better represent Christ dying on a cross. Michelangelo, d’Argenville says, was too religious to do such a thing.9

Tourists and Other Observers After his tour of Italy in 1687–1688, the Huguenot refugee and writer who lived in London, François Maximilien Misson (1650–1722), published an account of his journey, which was soon translated from the original French into English, German, and Dutch. Misson is the first to link the tale of Michelangelo and his model to two works of art, an untraceable Crucifixion in Naples, which he describes as a small painting on wood, and another (now untraceable) panel of the same subject then in the Palazzo Borghese in Rome. “They say,” Misson reports of the Crucifixion in Naples, that Michelangelo made it “after nature from a peasant (‘paisan’), whom the painter crucified for the task.” Misson calls the story a fable, but adds that in the monastery the tale “passes for truth.” He also observes that the figure of Christ holds its head perfectly upright in a manner that is inconsistent with “the posture of a man dying on a cross.”10 Of the Crucifixion in Rome, Misson says the locals 63



The Artist as Murderer

assure him that it is “the famous original by Michelangelo,” and he again refers to the tale of murder as “pure fable.”11 In Misson’s version of the story, the model is no longer a porter or, as Carpenter wrote, a “young man,” but is nevertheless a man of low social standing, a peasant. One of Misson’s contemporaries, an obscure Italian writer, Pietro Rossini, locates a Crucifixion attributed to Michelangelo in the fourth of twelve rooms he describes in the Palazzo Borghese in his guide to Rome (1693). The figure was “made, as one says, from nature.” Michelangelo “bound a porter, his friend [‘compare’], to the cross” and afterwards wounded him for the expression he made as he was dying.12 Rossini is the first to write that Michelangelo killed his model specifically for the sake of a particular expression. He is also the only author to say that the model was Michelangelo’s friend. This detail makes the artist seem to be a near equal of the model and thus perhaps even more despicable than previously thought. Between 1720 and 1722, another English writer, a physician, Edward Wright (died 1750), made a tour of France and Italy with the astronomer, George Parker, second Earl of Macclesfield (1697–1764). During his trip, Wright heard the story of Michelangelo’s murdered model linked to each of four works in three cities. He mentions the Crucifixion in Naples, the one in the Borghese Palace in Rome, and a (now untraceable) painting in Florence.13 In Rome, he also saw in the church of San Giovanni in Laterano a (now untraceable) Crucifixion by Michelangelo, “said to be that of which they tell the famous story.” 14 Speaking of the painting in Naples, Wright rejects the tale that Michelangelo stabbed “the Fellow that was his model, in order more justly to express the Agonies of a dying Man.” He finds it unbelievable that the artist was seeking the expression that would arise “from the last Looks of a poor Fellow so gull’d out of his Life,” and adds that “one would hardly suppose such a one to have gone out of the World praying for his Murderer.”15 Wright seems to mean that Michelangelo’s model, having realized that he had been duped would hardly have a prayerful expression on his face as he died, and he would not have uttered, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).

Johann Georg Keyssler On his journey through Italy, the German archaeologist Johann Georg Keyssler (1693–1743) more closely described three of the works 64



9. Variations on the Tale

attributed to Michelangelo and mentioned by Wright. Adding a gruesome new detail to the legend, Keyssler says that the figure in the Crucifixion in the Palazzo Borghese in Rome is “copied” from a model, whom Michelangelo “is said to have fastened to a cross and afterwards to have beaten on the head till he died.”16 The implication is that Michelangelo smashed his model’s head in order to obtain an appropriate expression for his painting. Local inhabitants claim, Keyssler continues, that this Crucifixion is the original work, even though the Carthusian monks in Naples make the same claim for their painting. For Keyssler, one work is as good an original as the other. He also observes that there is nothing exceptional about the painting in Rome: In it “the countenance of the Virgin Mary and St. John, and even of our Saviour on the cross, have little expression in them; and Christ’s head, contrary to all probability, is quite erect as he expires.”17 Like Wright before him, Keyssler rejects the truth of the story of Michelangelo and his model on aesthetic grounds. For Keyssler, the Crucifixion in Naples, “said to be done” by Michelangelo, was also unremarkable. In a manner similar to the painting in Rome, the head of Christ is shown “quite upright, instead of being reclined like that of a dying person.” Keyssler also supposes that the story of Parrhasius “may possibly have given rise to this groundless charge against Michael Angelo who was a man of no bad morals, and cannot be supposed to have been guilty of such a piece of barbarity.” Certainly, if Michelangelo had murdered his model, he would have represented him “to greater advantage.”18 In short, for Keyssler, Michelangelo’s virtuous character and the low aesthetic quality of the painting belie the fable. Keyssler locates the painting in Florence in the monastery at San Marco in a room that formerly belonged to the fiery Dominican monk and political activist Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498) who was tortured and burned at the stake at the order of the Borgia Pope Alexander VI (1431–1503). The monks told the author that the image “was painted from a dying man, whom the artist himself had barbarously crucified, that he might be better able to express the agonies of a person expiring in that torture.” Like others before him, Keyssler thinks the story has “very much the air of a fable.” Compared to the works in Naples and Rome, the Florentine painting is “far better executed, and more agreeable to nature”—that is to say, it is more lifelike. The head, Keyssler explains, “inclines on one side; whereas in the pictures at Rome and Naples, it is stiff and upright.”19 65



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Other Authors In a book of anecdotes about art and artists, the prolific French man of letters ­P ierre-Jean-Baptiste Nougaret (1742–1823) says that according to some authors, Michelangelo wanting “to put all of his art into the representation of a Christ,” hired a “man of the people to serve him as a model.” The artist then attached the man to a cross and pierced him in the side. If one believes the inventors of this story, Nougaret says, Michelangelo represented the model’s expression as he died. People repeat this “fable” because, Nougaret explains, of the strong lifelikeness of the artist’s Christ, which seems to have been painted after nature.20 The French playwright and poet, ­A ntoine-Marin Lemierre (1733– 1793), in his poem on painting, rejects the “absurd” notion that in order to achieve greater truthfulness to nature in his Crucifixion, Michelangelo stabbed a model on a cross, as if an unhappy death in the convulsions of rage would be suitable for the representation of a God who has resigned himself to death.21 In a letter of 1777, another poet, Carlo Gastone della Torre di Rezzonico (1742–1796), “for many reasons” also rejects the accusation against Michelangelo. Chief among those reasons is the fact that neither Vasari, nor the Italian art historian Filippo Baldinucci (1624–1696), nor any other early biographer of the artist refers to it. The author adds that some people in England believe the tale, referring perhaps to Carpenter, or to English Protestants in general.22 Another ­e ighteenth-century writer, the French astronomer ­Joseph-Jérôme Le François de Lalande (1732–1807) saw the Crucifixion in Naples in 1786 and mentions the legend that Michelangelo “crucified a man to serve as his model.” This manner of praising the painting with a story, de Lalande adds, has passed from mouth to mouth and is reported in many books.23 Significantly, for de Lalande the story is not a condemnation of Michelangelo; rather, it a form of criticism, and specifically a means of praising the power of his imitation and the liveliness of his picture. Two years later, in his Description of the City of Naples (1788– 1789), the Italian historian Giuseppe Sigismondo (1739–1826) writes that Michelangelo’s Crucifixion has given rise to the “favola,” or fable that the artist “placed one of his domestics on the Cross” and mortally wounded him to observe him die. The figure in the painting was then created from the expiring model. 24 Sigismondo’s version of the tale maintains the convention of making Michelangelo’s model low on the social scale. This time, however, he is neither a porter, nor a criminal, 66



9. Variations on the Tale

nor a friend, nor an anonymous young man, nor a peasant; he is one of the artist’s servants. Now the murder has become less impersonal; it is a domestic affair. The story was still circulating in the early nineteenth century when ­Stéphanie-Félicité Ducrest de ­Saint-Aubin (1746–1830), the Comtesse de Genlis, summed up an informed opinion concerning the veracity of the tale of Michelangelo and his model. The evening before our departure [from Naples], we went to visit the celebrated chartreuse of Saint Martin, which no woman is permitted to enter. The Duchess of Chartres, however, had license from the pope to enter with all of her attendants. In this monastery is to be seen the famous crucifixion of Michael Angelo, of which the wonderful truth of expression has given rise to a story which has been seriously repeated, that Michael Angelo had the barbarity to paint it from a man whom he had caused to be secretly crucified in his ­painting-room—a calumny as absurd as atrocious, which at first may have arisen from the exaggeration of his eulogists, and afterwards passed into a popular story; but which the whole life of the artist and the impossibility of the fact conspire to disprove.25

Inexplicably, the Comtesse praises the “wonderful truth of expression” in the figures of the Crucifixion. Nevertheless, she reports a new dimension to the tale. Michelangelo “secretly” murders the model, as if he has premeditated his crime and wishes to evade prosecution for it. Interestingly, the Comtesse believes that Michelangelo’s admirers in ­over-praising the painting gave rise to the absurd story that he crucified a model. Like Keyssler and others, she insinuates that Michelangelo’s virtuous life and pious character disprove the veracity of the tale. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, an anonymous editorialist in an English journal came to a similar conclusion. The tale is about either “Michael Angelo or Caravaggio”; the writer is not sure which painter. Like other artists of their time and before, they took part in discussions about “the natural proprieties of the crucifixion.” Michelangelo or Caravaggio “is said to have stabbed a model on the cross, with a view to arrive, in some sort, at the realities of the subject.” No matter the evidence “brought forward to substantiate such an allegation, the act is utterly inconsonant with the profound views of the great Florentine artist,” that is to say, with the views of Michelangelo.26

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Professional Opinions Writers were not the only people to offer their opinions concerning the tale of Michelangelo and his model. Several professional artists, particularly painters, offered their insights of the subject, too. They also discuss several, unfortunately untraceable, paintings that might have been Michelangelo’s original work.

Jonathan Richardson, the Elder In 1719, the aforementioned English painter Jonathan Richardson the Elder (1667–1745) refers to “a story which passes very currently of this great master [Michelangelo], and that is, that he had a porter fixed as to a cross, and then stabbed him, that he might the better express the dying agonies of our Lord in a crucifix he was Painting.” Richardson says that he can “find no good ground for this slander,” adding that the story might be a “copy” of the one about Parrhasius.1 Richardson does not name a specific painting, but a few years later in a book he ­co-authored with his son, also named Jonathan (1694–1771), he wrote of a painting once in the Borghese in Rome and thought it to be by Michelangelo. He identifies the picture as “the famous Crucifix for which (as the story goes) the Porter was kill’d. ’Tis the same as that at St. John Lateran, only This has the St. John, and the Virgin, which That has not. This [one] is Less than the other; I believe the figures are about a Foot long, and not Good.” 2 Richardson seems to follow Wright in attributing the painting in San Giovanni in Laterano to Michelangelo. In any case, he means that the painting there was not as good as the one in the Palazzo Borghese. Significantly, no subsequent author mentions the painting once in San Giovanni in Laterano in this context. In the same book, Richardson, speaking again of the painting in 68



10. Professional Opinions

the Palazzo Borghese, recalls the tale of Michelangelo and his model but this time without mentioning the method of the murder: “’Tis so far from being probable, that a Man was Murther’d on purpose to make the Expressions Strong, and Just: that there is hardly any Expression at all either in the Face, or Body, but a Tame Ordinary figure.”3 If Michelangelo murdered a model to obtain a strong expression, then the expression of the figure in the Borghese painting should not be so bland. In short, the expression of the figure does not fit the circumstances of the story.

Jonathan Richardson, the Younger The younger Richardson also describes the panel in the Palazzo Borghese and two drawings of it: “My Father has two Old Drawings of this [Crucifixion in the Palazzo Borghese] with a little Variation [between them] (not Original). The Virgin, and St. John are no better than the rest; the Attitude, and Expression are Improper in the one, and Mean in the other.” He goes on to described the panel is “painted Laboriously as the Manner of this Master [Michelangelo], and in general of those of this time was, in Easil [sic] Pictures, especially Small ones, as This is.”4 Richardson seems to say that, with some variation, the two drawings are almost identical. The small panel, he explains, is painted in the style of Michelangelo and other masters of his time.

Francesco Susinno The previously mentioned Sicilian painter Francesco Susinno repeats a version of the tale about Michelangelo that departs dramatically from those reported so far. According to this fable, Michelangelo “used real nails to fix some poor man to a board and […] then pierced his heart with a lance in order to paint a Crucifixion.”5 Susinno’s mention of the nails and a lance implies a dimension of the fable that is in keeping with the image of the artist in the anonymous poem discussed earlier. If Michelangelo nailed his model to a cross and killed him with a lance, he was, in effect, like the soldiers who crucified Christ. The model, then, posing for a figure of the crucified Christ, becomes like the historical Christ on the Cross, and his death becomes a sacrifice for the sake of art. Possibly Susinno knew of the anonymous poem of the early seventeenth 69



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century discussed earlier, or he might have divined, as the poet had, a deep metaphorical meaning of the story, which is that the process of artistic creation is a type of crucifixion in which nature dies for the sake of art; the physical and quotidian is sacrificed to the spiritual and eternal. Unlike the anonymous poet, however, Susinno does not imply a resurrection of the model in the painting.

Anton Francesco Gori In an annotated edition of Condivi’s vita of Michelangelo (1746), the antiquarian and priest Anton Francesco Gori (1691–1757) emphatically repudiates the tale. In Gori’s recital of the legend, Michelangelo, who, he says, continually dissected human cadavers, murdered a porter not only to represent Christ in agony, but also to exhibit his skill and art. The tale, Gori asserts, is patently false and, citing Sarnelli, he refers to the “ignorant monk” who one day, without proof of the tale’s veracity, had the nerve to reveal it to the world from the pulpit. Gori seems mistakenly to think that the story originated with the monk and is appalled that Sarnelli, a learned writer, not only repeated the story, but also seemed to believe it. Gori is the first to associate the story with a [now untraceable] Crucifixion in the collection of “a certain [unnamed] gentleman” in London, which he had not seen.6 Possibly Gori refers to the one of the drawings mentioned earlier, the one owned by the elder Jonathan Richardson. An editor of Vasari’s Lives, Father Guglielmo della Valle (1746– 1805) rejects the “ridiculous fable” that Michelangelo in order to draw more correctly from nature kept a man posed on a cross so long that he died there. The story, he writes, has been rejected “by a hundred authors.” 7 Likewise, in the late eighteenth century, another priest and art historian, Luigi Lanzi, citing Carlo Dati, says that the tale about Michelangelo is certainly a fable.8

William Hayley The English author, William Hayley, in his poem An Essay on Painting, after repeating the opinion that Seneca’s story about Parrhasius is not true, recalls that Dati questions the veracity of a “similar falsehood concerning the great Michael Angelo.” According to Hayley, who also 70



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cites Gori’s note to Condivi’s vita of Michelangelo, the “falsehood” had its origin in a sermon by “an ignorant priest.”9 Around the same time Hayley published his poem, another English painter John Russell (ca. 1720–1763) encountered the legend when he visited the monastery at Naples: he heard that Michelangelo “stabb’d the man who was tied to a cross for his model, that he might the more naturally express a person in the agonies of death.” Russell complains that the priests, who feared the small picture might be stolen, had hung it so high on the wall that he could hardly see it. As a result, he explains, even if the story were true, he could not judge the effect of Michelangelo’s “barbarity.”10

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A Turkish Spy and Giotto Among the stories distantly inspired by the fable of Parrhasius and his model and more directly by the story about Michelangelo is one about Giotto di Bondone (1266/7–1337). In 1684, a poor but learned Genoese nobleman living in France, Giovanni Paolo Marana (1642– 1693), whose father was a goldsmith in Genoa, simultaneously published in Italian and in French the first part of a collection of letters supposedly written by an anonymous Turkish spy at the court of King Louis XIV (1638–1715). In reality Marana wrote the letters, which he claimed had been “translated from the Arabic.” As part of the book’s deception, Marana claims the letters are secret reports on the French royal court sent to the Turkish sultan. Later, an obscure writer named William Bradshaw translated and published additional volumes of the letters, which apparently were also written by Marana. Bradshaw’s translation into English is of the text in an “Italian manuscript” supposedly discovered between 1691 and 1694. In one of these letters (see Appendix A), addressed to a certain Dgnet Oglou and dated 1661, Marana has his fictive spy write about the artists he often meets and with whom he sometimes converses.1 Some of the artists, the spy writes, are “proud and stately, others fawning and abject: all of them are humorists.” They are “men of wit and sense, but very lewd and dissolute,” and they are merry fellows, full of buffoonery, who relieve the spy’s melancholy with their “smart repartees, jests and comical stories.” These “natural satirists” would bring “the most stiff and morose” hadji [a Muslim who has made a religious pilgrimage to Mecca], to laughter and merriment. They have a “smack of learning,” because men of their trade need to be good historians in order to represent, “without a pattern,” stories from ancient and modern times. Their paintings are convincing in their representation of life. After this general description of artists and their art, the spy illustrates 72



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their capricious character with two related stories, one about the Dutch painter Maarten van Heemskerck (1498–1574) and the other about Giotto. In his last will and testament Maarten, having no wife and no heirs, left all of his money for the dowries of the maidens of his native village, Heemskerck, with the proviso that the ­newly-married couples and their wedding guests dance on his grave. Since the artist’s death, the spy explains, the inhabitants of his village, who were once Roman Catholics, have now become Protestants. When the conversion occurred, the iconoclastic Protestants demolished all “images and Crosses wherever they found them.” The Catholics, as was their custom, had placed a cross at the head of each grave, and the Protestant villagers, having great respect for Maarten, allowed the cross marking his place of rest to stand.2

Giotto and His Model The story about Giotto preserves “a more cruel and inhuman caprice” than that of Maarten. Once when Giotto wished to “draw” a lifelike figure of Christ for a Crucifix he convinced a poor man to serve as his model. Giotto told the man that he must allow himself to be tied to a cross for an hour, after which time he would be set free and handsomely paid. Instead, as soon as he had tied the man to the cross, Giotto stabbed him to death and began making his design from the corpse. At the time, the spy explains, Giotto was considered the greatest painter in Italy, and because he used a dead model hanging from a cross, he made a superb picture. Giotto’s success, the spy implies, was due to his skill in the art of painting and the availability to him of an appropriate model to represent. Having finished his painting, Giotto showed it to the pope, who, duly impressed, praised “the exquisiteness of the features and limbs, the languishing pale deadness of the face, the unaffected sinking of the head.” Giotto had convincingly imitated “not only that privation of sense and motion which we call death, but also the very want of the least vital symptom.” “Every body knows,” the author adds, recalling Xenophon’s Socrates, “that it is a masterpiece to represent a passion or a thought well and naturally.” He continues, echoing Dante’s lines in Purgatory (XII, 60–61), “Much greater is it to describe the total absence of these interior faculties, so as to distinguish the figure of a dead man from one that is only asleep.”3 73



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The pope so liked the painter’s picture he wanted to put it above the altar of his chapel. Giotto suggested that because the pope greatly admired the picture, he might like to see the original rather than the copy. The pope, perhaps believing Giotto had imagined his figure, asked the artist what he meant by “the original”; did he mean Jesus Christ? Giotto explained that he would show the pope the model after whom he had drawn the figure, if beforehand the pope would absolve the artist from punishment. The pope promised the pardon, and Giotto took him to see the model. When they arrived at Giotto’s workplace, the artist, drawing back the curtain hanging in front of the dead man, “told the pope what he had done.” The pope, horrified by “so inhuman and barbarous an action,” rescinded his promise and threatened to execute the artist for his crime. Giotto asked that he be allowed to finish his picture before he was put to death, and the pope agreed. The pope stationed a guard to make sure Giotto could not escape and sent the picture to the artist. When the Crucifix arrived, Giotto dipped a brush in some “stuff” he had in his studio and began covering his picture with it, so that nothing remained visible. On seeing what Giotto had done, the pope became furious. He promised Giotto “the most cruel death that could be invented, unless he drew another [picture] just as good as the former.” The pope seems to have implied that to fulfill his purpose the artist had leave either to kill another model or to use the corpse already hanging in his studio. “If the least grace was missing,” the pope threatened the artist, “he would not pardon him; but if he could produce an exact parallel, he would not only give him his life, but an ample reward in money.” Giotto asked the pope to put the agreement in writing, and when the painter had it in hand, he “took a wet sponge, and wiped off all the [water soluble] varnish he had daubed on the picture, and the crucifix appeared the same in all respects as it was before.” The pope, who knew nothing of the arts, so admired Giotto’s ability to return his picture to its former state, that he pardoned the artist, absolved him of all sin, and ordered “his steward to cover the picture all over with gold [coins?], as a farther gratuity for the painter.” The author explains that Giotto’s Crucifix is said to be “the original by which the most famous crucifixes in Europe are drawn.” The spy, commenting on the story, observes that “the supposed murder of Jesus, the son of Mary is the source of all the Christians’ devotion,” and so Giotto’s Crucifix, an imitation of his murdered model, has made worship more “intense and fervent,” more so than all previous examples of the tragic representation of the Messiah. Painters are 74



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highly valued among Italians because they give form to the gods that “those infidels adore.” There should be no surprise, the narrator continues, that the pope treated Giotto’s crime as a venial (rather than a mortal) sin, especially because, as the pope believed, it was committed “to promote God’s glory.” After all, idolatry “supports the state and grandeur of the Roman court,” and the crafty priests represent “the holy city as a type of heaven.” The spy ends with praise to God that He has not allowed him and his friend Dgnet to be perverted by Catholicism. They remain good Muslims, faithful to “the Prophet, who was sent to exterminate idols.” Here Marana seems to imply a parallel between iconoclastic Protestants and good Muslims. Unlike Catholics, Protestants and Muslims do not worship idols. Marana certainly knew the story of Michelangelo killing his model and, in that respect, he seems to present Giotto as a forerunner of Carpenter’s Michelangelo. The implication is that the historical relation between the two artists is like that in Vasari’s Lives. Giotto and his Crucifix are precursors of Michelangelo and his Crucified Christ. The tale also echoes one of Vasari’s stories concerning the ­fourteenth-century Florentine painter Buonamico Buffalmacco (active 1315–1336). According to Vasari, Buffalmacco was having great difficulty collecting payment for a Virgin and Child he had painted in fresco for a peasant. To remedy the situation, Buffalmacco, using some watercolors, painted a little bear over the figure of the Child. When the peasant saw what the artist had done, he begged to have the Child repainted and agreed to pay Buffalmacco for all of his labor. Satisfied with the new arrangement, Buffalmacco took a wet sponge and easily removed the bear.4 Regarding the technical practices used by artist, Marana’s pope is as ­simple-minded and gullible as Vasari’s peasant. In Marana’s story, Giotto is like Michelangelo in Carpenter’s tale, for he verbally deceives a model before killing him with a knife for the sake of his art, but this time there is no dramatic tension between the artist’s cruelty and his talent. In other words, Giotto’s artistic skill and genius, though admired by the pope, do not save him from condemnation. Rather, he, an impious and cruel murderer, foreshadows de Sade’s mad scientist. He has no conscience, and, at least at first, no pardon for his crime is forthcoming. Surely, Marana knew, too, of Diodorus’ story about Perillus’s bull. Giotto is like Perillus because he announces his cruelty to his grateful patron, and the pope plays the part of Phalaris, condemning Giotto to death. In order to remedy the situation in his favor, Giotto, following 75



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the example of Buffalmacco, plays the trickster. He uses his wits, for which he had been praised and admired since the fourteenth century in stories about him by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), Franco Sacchetti (ca. 1332–ca. 1400), and others.5 Unlike Perillus, who was oblivious to the true nature of the circumstances in which he found himself, Giotto quickly imagines a scheme that saves him from execution. In the end the moral lassitude of the pope emerges, for he is more concerned to have Giotto’s beautiful and lifelike picture for his chapel than he is to carry out the justice he knows the artist deserves. He even handsomely rewards Giotto and absolves him of his crime. Marana subtly alludes to the idea that the model is Christlike. When Giotto offers to show the pope the original on which his figure was based, the pope believes that he means the crucified Christ. The artist is oblivious to any possible connection among his model, the subject of his painting, and the historical Christ and thus to the notion that crucifixion and resurrection are metaphors for the process of making art. As Giotto explains to the pope, he refers not to Christ, but to the model who posed for the His figure. Like Perillus and like de Sade’s remorseless scientist, Giotto is an artist without a soul. He is a cruel monster who is proud of his crime and displays the bloody body of his model to the pope. His instinct for ­self-preservation and his worldly cunning save him from certain death. That is to say, he relies for his salvation solely on personal qualities that are not directly relevant to artistic creation. As an artist he is not a ­demi-god; he is merely human.

Giotto and Vivisection Marana’s book went into several editions over the course of the eighteenth century, but the story of Giotto and his model soon began to appear independently of its original context. For instance, the French author Gilbert Charles Le Gendre, Marquis de ­Saint-Aubin-sur-Loire (1688–1746) repeats the story in his Treatise on Opinion (1733) as an example of cruelty.6 Le Gendre cites Marana’s book as his source, but George Tarenne, writing in 1808, does not seem to have known the origin of the tale. Tarenne, when discussing vivisection, recalls Giotto, the “Italian painter and architect.” According to the author, Giotto, wishing to represent a figure of Christ, engaged a poor man to allow himself to be bound to a cross for an hour. When the man was in place, Giotto 76



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stabbed him in order to produce the appropriate expression for the figure in his painting.7 A few years later, in 1813, Jacques Alexandre Salgues (1782–1857), repeats as an historical truth the accusation that Giotto killed his model. Giotto, he says, imitated Parrhasius’s cruelty. The “wild” Italian painter and architect, having proposed to paint a dying Christ, hired a poor man who allowed himself to be tied to a cross. Giotto then stabbed his model. 8 Tarenne and Salgues, who also believe that Parrhasius dissected the Olynthian slave, seem to have thought that in stabbing his model Giotto, too, dissected him. They associate Giotto’s cruelty with what they consider to be the inhumanity of those who perform vivisection. The tale of Giotto reappeared several times under the title “First Painting of the Crucifixion.” For example, in an essay on anachronism (1757), an anonymous author, without citing a source, addresses the assertion in Marana’s tale that Giotto’s painting was the first of its kind. Giotto, the author believes, was not born before 1170 and died in 1330. Thus, supposing that the artist was only fifteen or perhaps twenty years old when he made his painting, there are pictures of earlier subjects containing a crucifix. Giotto himself, the author explains, painted a (now untraceable) Saint Jerome, which contained a representation of a crucifix, even though the saint lived centuries before the artist.9 In other words, the author argues that Giotto did not invent the crucifix as an object of veneration; examples of the object existed even in the time of Saint Jerome (ca. 347–420), whom Giotto, he says, represented with one.10 A number of dictionaries and anthologies of anecdotes about artists also contain a version of the tale, which was at least twice misattributed to Horace Walpole (1717–1797) and his Some Anecdotes of Painting in England (1762).11 The editors of a widely popular anthology, the aforementioned The Percy Anecdotes, seem to take the horrifying story literally, for they believe that it reflects “the vices of a barbarous age.”12 James Elmes (1782–1862) merely repeats the story, but the English Independent minister John Thornton, the editor of another anthology of anecdotes, condemns not only Giotto, but also the pope. Echoing Carpenter, Thornton writes: “If the pope had been half as much attached to the moral virtues, as he was to the fine arts, nothing could have induced him to pardon so horrid a murderer, or turn his eye to the picture without a thrill of anguish.” 13 For Thornton, the circumstances in which a painting is made should affect the viewer’s perception of it.14 77



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Around the middle of the nineteenth century, yet another anthologist, physician Shearjashub Spooner, found the tale to be “a gross libel on the fair fame of Giotto.” Spooner says, possibly alluding to Marana, that the tale originated “with some witless wag, who thought nothing too horrible to impose upon the credulity of mankind,” and ends by pointing out that it is similar to a “fable of Parrhasius.”15 In 1883 and again in 1887 Clara Erskine Clement Waters (1834–1916) of Saint Louis, Missouri, included the story in her general history of art “for young people and students.”16 Soon thereafter the tale virtually disappeared as an object of general interest, but in the late twentieth century, it resurfaced in an anthology of anecdotes about artists compiled and edited by the English poet and art critic, Edward ­Lucie-Smith (born 1933).17

Guido Reni The story of Giotto and his model seems to have given rise to a tale about the Bolognese painter Guido Reni (1575–1642) and an untraceable Christ on the Cross. The previously mentioned American historian, Benson J. Lossing, who recounts the tale without citing a source, duly notes its resemblance to the one about Parrhasius told by Seneca, but does not mention the obvious similarity to Marana’s fable about Giotto. Guido, Lossing writes, had an order from the Pope to paint a crucifixion, and he hired a poor man to be suspended, but in an easy manner, upon the cross. But he found the model incomplete, because no appearance of death was there, so he seized a rapier, stabbed the man in the side, and during his ­death-struggle, completed this portion of the picture! The Pope condemned the artist to death, but granted his request to put a finishing touch upon the picture. Guido seized a pencil [a brush] filled with water colour, and made the picture a complete blot. The Pontiff was greatly exasperated at such a wanton destruction of so fine a specimen of art, but being very desirous to possess one like it, offered the artist his life and liberty if he would paint another picture like the mutilated one. A sponge and clean water soon restored the picture to its original beauty, and this horrid sacrifice to art was made without punishment.

According to Lossing, some people do not believe the story about Reni, “but it is generally believed,” he says.18 Lossing echoes the story of Giotto, but shortens it and significantly varies the details. At first Reni does not intend to murder his model. Only when the model does not produce the desired expression does the 78



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artist run him through with a rapier. The implication is that Reni murdered on the spur of the moment, out of either passion or mere exasperation; consequently, he seems slightly less ­cold-hearted and cruel than Marana’s Giotto. As in the story about Giotto, the pope seems to give the artist permission to kill another model in order to achieve the desired end, a powerfully beautiful picture. Another source for Lossing’s story might be the previously mentioned tale in the Percy Anecdotes about an anonymous French artist who set a dog on his model when he could not find the correct posture and expression for a figure of Greek wrestler Milo of Croton. Lossing also seems to have recalled the Marquis de Sade’s novel, The New Justine (1797). Just after referring to the tale of Michelangelo and his model, the author has a character observe: “everyone knows” that a model was whipped and ultimately killed by “Le Guide” when she served as a model for a Weeping Magdalen. 19 “Le Guide,” as many students of de Sade believe, refers to Guido Reni. Lossing’s story of Guido Reni as a murderer was still circulating as late as the middle of the twentieth century. The French Surrealist poet and ethnographer Michel Leiris (1901–1990) records in a journal that on Sunday, April 13, 1947, during a visit to London, he encountered a reference to the tale in unusual circumstances. Leiris notes that he observed a painter, who, using chalk, portrayed Christ on the cross on a pavement. On a nearby sign the artist proclaimed that he had no fear of crucifying “a model to obtain a more exact resemblance,” as Guido Reni had done.20 Leiris, an anthropologist, seems only to record what he saw. He does not question the veracity of the ­chalk-artist’s unfounded allegation.

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A Legend of a Sculptor In addition to the tales about Giotto, Rubens, and Guido Reni, the fables about Parrhasius and Michelangelo inspired a number of stories about anonymous artists. The influential English bishop and ­c haplain-in-ordinary to King Charles I, the Reverend Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667), who late in life became ­v ice-chancellor of the University of Dublin, refers in his Ductor Dubitantium or The Rule of Conscience (1660) to a story about an unnamed artist who murders a model. Foreshadowing Edward Young’s poem on Michelangelo mentioned earlier, Taylor writes that an Italian painter who “was to depict a crucifix, hired a slave to be tied to a cross, that he might lively represent a body so hanging, and so extended, did afterward stab him to the heart, that he might see and perceive every posture and accent and little convulsion of a dying man.”1 Taylor, who understands a deep significance to the story, employs it to illustrate the point that even though the anonymous painter was morally wrong to kill his model, he was no less a painter, and his painting was artistically excellent. The “principles of art,” Taylor argues, cannot be corrupted by the evil of the artist. While Taylor might be correct, he ignores Seneca’s point that the circumstances in which a work of art is made can affect the viewer’s perception of it. No matter how skillful or powerful Parrhasius’s painting was, those who saw it in the Parthenon felt it had polluted their spirit. Likewise, Carpenter, who acknowledges Michelangelo’s skill in representing nature, finds the artist’s painting appalling because of the alleged circumstances in which he made it. Taylor insists that even a picture made in heinous circumstances can be artistically excellent and worthy of admiration, and, anyway, the art of painting as such is not corrupted. The issue continues to this day. In 2017, popular and influential American portrait painter and photographer Chuck Close was accused of sexual harassment (not murder), an accusation he has denied. As a 80



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result of the charges of misconduct, the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., decided to postpone a scheduled exhibition of Close’s works. Many museum officials, however, seem unwittingly to agree with Taylor. They argue that the quality of a work of art is not determined by the moral character of the artist. Morally corrupt artists can make excellent pictures.

Adelbert von Chamisso Taylor’s point seems to be confirmed in a poem by the early nineteenth-century French aristocrat and botanist, Louis Charles Adélaïde de Chamisso (1781–1838), who lived in Germany, where he took the name Adelbert von Chamisso. Best known for his novel Peter Schlemihl (1813), Chamisso’s “The Crucifix: An Artist’s Legend” (1830) has been long considered a literary classic and twice has been translated into English, first in 1892 and again in 1914 (see Appendix B).2 The tale begins with an anonymous, master sculptor contemplating a ­work-in-progress, a Crucifix in marble. Full of shame and ­self-contempt because he cannot make the cold stone come alive, he is especially dismayed by the expression of the figure of Christ. He has given ideal beauty and proportion to his figure but cannot make it live; it remains cold stone. A young sculptor, who unsuccessfully seeks beauty in his own works, enters the master’s studio. He marvels at the sculpture, but the master, in spite of the praise, feels he is being scorned. The student insists that he praises the sculpture and says he longs “to match the marvel” that he sees. As the student explains, he sees what is in the sculpture, while the master sees only “what should be there.” The master, observing the youth, realizes he would make the perfect model for his figure. The trusting young sculptor agrees to pose for the master, who first binds his model to a cross and then nails him to it. Amidst the wails of the crucified young man, the master calmly and silently works to capture his expression. He works with a “hideous joy upon his features,” his heart devoid of all human feeling. As the sculptor works into the night of the third day, his masterpiece comes to life, but his model overcome with agony and echoing Christ on the Cross, cries out, “My God, my God, hast Thou forsaken me?” before he dies. In the next part of the poem, the sculptor has found his way to the local church to kneel before the high altar and his Crucifix, which he has already placed there. Throwing himself to the ground and resting 81



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his head on the stone floor, he loudly weeps. The next morning, after the sculptor has left, the parishioners begin to fill the church. They see the sculptor’s marvelously lifelike Crucifix on the altar and cry out, “Christ have mercy!” as if the figure were alive. When they realize the master placed the Crucifix on the altar, they decide to honor him with a laurel crown. They walk in procession to his house, sounding drums and cymbals, but they cannot find him. Having moved to the master’s studio in search of him, the people find the corpse of the crucified model. In the third and final section of the poem, the master has been captured and brought to the very spot where he crucified his model. His face is radiant as he speaks to those who have gathered to witness his punishment: Weep not! No tears of pity flowed from me When to the cross the tender youth I bound— My heart of stone ignored his misery.

As the sculptor is bound and nailed to a cross, a “white peace” descends upon his foul soul, and he cries out in “one long atoning cry.” On the third day, as the sun begins to set, the master calls out “in joyful praise,” with his last breath, “My God, my God, Thou hast not forsaken me!” The very beginning of the poem hints at a mythic transformation in the sculptor. In imitation of Pygmalion, who, with the help of Venus, made a beautiful, living woman out of ivory, the sculptor attempts to transform cold, lifeless material into the semblance of living flesh. He grows aware that he is failing to reach his goal, and because of his frustration and desire for fame, he becomes like Parrhasius. There is also a hint of the myth of Daedalus in Chamisso’s poem, for the sculptor sacrifices not simply a model but a fellow artist, specifically, an aspiring young sculptor, who has at least the potential to surpass him as an artist. Later, like the figure of Michelangelo in Edward Young’s poem, Chamisso’s sculptor, having completed his work, seems stunned by his own cruelty. He leaves the corpse exposed in his studio to take his work to the church, where he kneels both to adore his accomplishment as an artist and to worship before the image of Christ he has created. In the end the sculptor seems to realize the horror of the artistic success he sought and gained through the crucifixion of his model. He seems to realize, too, that his success is a kind of cruel blessing, for he and his model achieve fame and immortality through his art. The model is on the cross for three days, after which time he is immortalized in the 82



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sculpture. He achieves, to use Sperone Speroni’s phrase, the “paradise of the body” in the sculptor’s Crucifix. The artist, too, is on a cross for three days, before he achieves another kind of immortality, everlasting fame and admiration, or “glory.” Both artist and model are like Christ, who was crucified and on the third day arose from the dead. The faithful, who take the place of the clergy in the tales of Michelangelo, Giotto, and Guido Reni and of the priests in Seneca’s story of Parrhasius, are important too. At first, they admire the Crucifix, which causes them reverently to cry out, “Christ have mercy,” and they prepare to honor the artist. Circumstances, however, change their perception of the work of art. After they have discovered the model’s corpse, the sculptor’s skill does not save him, and, unlike Giotto in Marana’s story, he does not resort to cunning to escape his inevitable fate. The people punish him for his crime, fittingly by crucifying him. They cause him symbolically to reenact both the murder of his model and the crucifixion of Christ, which is the subject of his sculpture. A slave to his muse, the artist allows art to become more important than life and morality; but the sober parishioners do not lose perspective; they know that life and morality are larger than even the very best works of art.

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Parrhasius in Love ­Nineteenth-century authors did not always portray Parrhasius as a heartless killer and cruel vivisectionist. For instance, he appears as a loving artist in two short stories that to a degree foreshadow subsequent representations of him as a murderer. In each story love is associated with artistic creation.

Parrhasius and Ianthe One story is based in an ancient account of a contest between Parrhasius and the Greek painter Zeuxis. In this tale of 1836 by an anonymous author, Parrhasius is married to a woman named Ianthe, the daughter of an Athenian merchant, Euphranor, who opposed the marital union. As the story opens, Parrhasius and his wife are destitute to the point of illness and certain death. Their only hope for survival is for Parrhasius to win an impending contest with one of his paintings. Euphranor sends a slave, Glasiano, to commission a portrait of himself from the painter, spitefully hoping that the artist will die with his ­f ather-in-law on his mind. As a gesture of reconciliation, Parrhasius portrays a forgiving Euphranor blessing a figure of his daughter. When the painting is delivered to him, the father rejects it and has Glasiano return it to the artist. While Parrhasius is out of the room, Glasiano secretly disfigures the portrait and rolls the painting up again before departing. On the day of the contest, Parrhasius unrolls the ­double-portrait of Euphranor and Ianthe, which, as everyone sees, is ruined. The artist asks for and is granted a second chance to prove his genius and skill: this time he shows the original, unblemished portrait to the judges and wins the contest: Glasiano, you see, unknowingly had defaced a copy of the original. Heartless Euphranor blames Glasiano for the outcome of 84



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the contest and orders him thrown from a cliff to a sea monster below. The slave frees himself and pulling Euphranor with him, jumps to the waiting demon and certain death. Ianthe, overcome by the horrible demise of her father, commits suicide. Now, honor, ambition, fame— even life itself—no longer have meaning for Parrhasius. Years later, the old painter dies as he gazes at the portrait of Euphranor and Ianthe.1

Parrhasius and Cassandra In 1838 Benson Lossing also published a short story about a loving Parrhasius. When the young painter, then living in Athens, asked for the hand of Cassandra, daughter of the renowned Greek painter Zeuxis, he is rudely rejected and returns home to Ephesus. Like Euphranor, Zeuxis is socially ambitious. He wants his daughter to marry Thearchus, an Athenian nobleman, but she refuses to do so because she loves Parrhasius. Now, four years later, the painter has returned to Athens for the Olympic games. Cassandra obtains a promise from her father: if Parrhasius can defeat him in a contest of paintings, Zeuxis will allow her to marry his rival. In due course, Zeuxis accepts a challenge from Parrhasius: each artist will paint a picture of fruit, and judges will choose the best picture. When Zeuxis unveils his paintings, birds fly down to peck at his convincingly lifelike grapes. The judges proclaim Zeuxis the victor and place a crown of laurel on his head. Then Parrhasius, who until now has been absent, arrives, and Zeuxis asks him to remove the curtain from his picture. Parrhasius fools his rival, for the curtain is only painted. The judges now proclaim him the victor, and duly crown him. Soon Thearchus arrives to offer a palm branch, symbol of peace and goodwill, to Cassandra. Eventually, Parrhasius, who wins Cassandra’s hand, becomes “the greatest painter of antiquity.”2

Thriftless Ambition The image of Parrhasius as a loving husband seems to have been known to the Southern businessman, poet, and playwright, William Hendricks Williams (1852–1909), whose nom de plume was Espy Williams. His dramatic poem in blank verse titled “Parrhasius: or Thriftless Ambition,” which was published in New Orleans in 1879 (see Appendix D), had also appeared as a ­one-act play in 1878. Later, the ­t hen-famous 85



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actor Robert Bruce Mantell (1854–1928), who purchased the stage rights to the play, produced three and four act versions.3 Williams’s poem was not critically acclaimed or widely popular, but the play was successfully staged in Kansas City, Memphis, New Orleans, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and elsewhere.4 The poem begins in Parrhasius’s studio where he is painting a picture, a Prometheus Bound. He has decided to torture and kill his model so that he will produce an appropriate expression for the figure of Prometheus. A friend named Theon tries to persuade him not to kill the slave and warns him against a certain kind of fame. An admirable and godly renown lies in “good deeds, charity, and love,” and Parrhasius should not seek the fame of Prometheus or Phaeton, each of whom defied the gods. The artist mockingly calls his friend a Socrates, but Theon soberly rejects the comparison; he is unworthy to be likened to such a good and noble man, a man whom the painter should follow as an admirable example of morality. Parrhasius says he has had enough of philosophers; he feels a delightful inspiration coursing through his veins and will not forsake his art. The gods, he believes, have sent the enslaved man with his ­P rometheus-like face to him. Theon rises to leave; he will not stay to watch Parrhasius “do a murder,” and the artist asks, […] what is one man’s life to that dear fame Which shall outlive the lives of centuries?

Parrhasius calls out to his servant Damon and asks about the physical condition of the slave: Has he been fed and given wine? Damon assures his master that the slave is strong and adds that the Olynthian complains about his fate. Parrhasius fears that a garrulous model might unsettle his nerves and orders Damon to cut out the model’s tongue, “deep, to the very root.” As Damon leaves, Parrhasius’s wife Lydia arrives on the scene and professes her love for the artist who has been the light of her life. She tells her husband that she had believed her father was dead, but now she knows that he is alive. She has seen him in the slave market, “bound like a dog.” She wanted immediately to embrace her father but feared she might be mistaken about the slave’s identity. So, she asked the merchant about him and realized beyond doubt that he is, in fact, her parent. Now she has come to Parrhasius to ask him for money to set her father free. The painter gives her the money and tells her to return at once to the slave market. He will not join her because, he says, he must work on his 86



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“masterpiece—the world’s great wonder!” Parrhasius’s decision not to accompany his wife to free her father already signals his absorption in his art and his burning desire for fame. Parrhasius summons Damon to ask if he has cut out the model’s tongue and if the Ethiopian torturers, who are also enslaved, are ready to work. He promises the enslaved men freedom if they will prolong the model’s agony until the painter has completed his picture. The artist then addresses the voiceless model: Old man, though thou shalt die this life, Live but a little thus, and thou shalt live To know no death, forever on my parchment! Think, what a glorious fame, in aftertime To thrill the souls of mute admiring men With the appalling thought, that that man lived! He was no dream! He was a real Prometheus!

Parrhasius, satisfied with the model’s expression of agony, begins to paint his picture. He is in a kind of ecstasy of creation as he encourages the torturers not to let the model die and proceeds until he has completed the picture, and the slave is dead. The torturers having fled in fear, Parrhasius “sinks into a seat, exhausted, laughing hysterically, and gazing triumphantly at his work.” Hearing Lydia’s return to the studio, Parrhasius quickly pulls a curtain around the dead body of his model to hide it from her. After he has admitted her, he speaks of his deep love for her and asks about her father. The merchant told Lydia that “an unknown friend” had already bought the old man, and she thinks that Parrhasius is that friend. Lydia asks to see her father; Parrhasius is aghast. Suddenly Lydia sees the painting and screams. She recognizes her father’s face and says that she heard a groan as she stood outside the door of the artist’s studio. She asks Parrhasius if the groan came from her father. She says she will find the murderer, but as she leaves, she sees the corpse and overcome with grief falls to the floor, dead. Parrhasius is overwrought: Lydia meant everything to him; he loved her more than fame, and now he has killed her. Theon enters and Parrhasius remembers his friend’s prophecy. Like previous authors, Williams imagines a monstrous Parrhasius. His representation of the artist mocks Socrates and, by implication, the moral and intellectual guidance his philosophy offers. Parrhasius also ignores the advice and warning of his friend Theon whose name means “god” in Greek. 5 His servant Damon is a malevolent demon, for he, too, is cold and heartless, especially in his willingness to carry 87



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out his master’s order to cut out the slave’s tongue. Williams also presents another side to Parrhasius’s character, his love for his wife Lydia, a warm and caring woman. In succumbing to his desire for perfection in his art and through it, an ­i ll-gotten fame, Parrhasius unintentionally kills Lydia whom he loved more than fame, and his ambition has killed the “glory” he sought. In effect, he commits a double murder; or he is a murderer and a killer. In willfully murdering the model, who is actually his wife’s father, he unwittingly causes her death. The image of the artist as a lover and the image of him as an ambitious murderer collide in Williams’ play.

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The Return of Parrhasius Since its first appearance, the story of Parrhasius and the Olynthian slave has never completely disappeared; it has remained available in Seneca’s Controversiae and in the writings of those authors who have repeated or alluded to it. Still, from the late eighteenth into the ­t wenty-first century, the story, which is often imaginatively retold, enjoyed a kind of revival. For example, the English historian, archaeologist and builder of Donnington Castle, James Pettit Andrews (ca. 1737–1797) included a version of the tale of Parrhasius in his book of anecdotes (1789). Andrews, who finds it “strange that a passion for the arts should more than once have been made a pretext for the most exquisite barbarity,” claims that the story of “Giotto and his dying Christ is within everyone’s reading,” but the story of Parrhasius, which “seems to have been Giotto’s model,” is not so well known. Thus, under the rubric “inhumanity,” Andrews retells Seneca’s story, inventing a few enlivening details. When Philip of Macedon had taken Olynthus, and had consigned the inhabitants to slavery, Parrhasius, who had resided in the Macedonian camp, walking among the ruins of the place, was struck with the exquisite expression of sorrow which agonized the features of an old captive, a man of some rank, whose children had been just torn from him, and exposed to public sale. He purchased him, immediately; carried him to Athens; and whilst he made the wretched Olynthian perish under every torment which art can inflict, he drew, from the writhings of his tortured frame, a Prometheus under the beak and talons of the vulture, which was allowed to be a masterpiece of art.1

Andrews remarks that the story is all the more horrible because Olynthus (and thus by implication the Olynthian model) was an ally of Athens, the very city in which Parrhasius carried out the torture of his model. He also notes that Parrhasius gave his painting to the Temple 89



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of Athena, and somewhat misleadingly says that Seneca “coolly” argues whether or not such a picture should have been received there. For several decades after the first publication of Andrews’s dramatic version of Seneca’s original story, it often reappeared, but without any mention of Andrews as the author.2 For instance, in 1796 John Lawrence (1753–1839) in his book on cruelty to horses, after referring to the ancient Greek vivisectionist Herophilus, repeats verbatim most of Andrews’s version of the story.3 Lawrence in other words associates Parrhasius and Herophilus with cruelty to animals. Again, in 1825 an anonymous author republished Andrews’s story in an anthology of accounts of crimes and other terrifying events. In this version, which differs only slightly from Andrews’s original, Parrhasius exhibits “a brutal ingenuity,” in devising torments for his model.4

Nathaniel Parker Willis The New England publisher and poet, Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806–1867), used Seneca’s story of Parrhasius and the Olynthian slaved as the basis for a relatively long poem titled “Parrhasius,” which was published in 1831 (see Appendix C), just a year after Chamisso published “The Crucifix.”5 The poem comprises three parts, each with its own mode: description, dramatic dialogue and moral comment, successively. As an introduction to the poem Willis quotes Robert Burton’s version of Seneca’s Controversiae from The Anatomy of Melancholy. The poem proper opens with a picturesque description of the slave market, which Willis situates in Athens.6 The “many domes of Athens” are “tipped” by the fire of the setting sun, and a slave, a “majestical old man,” stands alone in the rich, “yellow atmosphere.” A dog chews on a bone. A soldier strikes the slaved to keep him from falling asleep and threatens to torture his children. Enchained, the weary and “haughtily patient” Olynthian allows his mind to wander. He does not see Parrhasius, who stands at a nearby pillar, taking in the scene and the slave’s wounded and bloody body with “a painter’s eye.” Parrhasius, ever the detached artist, does not respond to the cruelty acted out before him; he sees only the atmosphere and light. The scene then abruptly shifts to Parrhasius’s studio, into which streams a “golden light.” Armor hangs on the walls, and the corners are filled with sculptures of various gods, namely Venus, Diana, and Jove. In the act of painting his picture of Prometheus, Parrhasius shouts, “Bring 90



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me the captive now!” The painter’s hands “feel skillful”; he is inspired. He orders his assistant, the actual torturer, to bind the model and to press the chains down into his flesh, opening his wounds again. The assistant seems to object to his task, and Parrhasius responds that the old man will not live long anyway. The model moans in pain, and the painter exclaims, if only “I could but paint a dying groan.” The slave asks for pity. Parrhasius refuses, saying he has pity for his model, but the priest who sacrifices at the altar does not allow himself pity for the victim to be sacrificed. Parrhasius compares himself to an ancient priest and implies that making art is a kind of worship. The old man urges the artist to remember the afterlife, but Parrhasius is a skeptic and pays no heed. When shortly before his death the model faints, Parrhasius orders his assistant to “rack him till he revives!” In the last part of the poem, the reader learns that “unreined ambition” ruled Parrhasius. Ambition turned his heart to ashes; ambition destroyed his spirit and left him bitter. Unchecked ambition vanquishes love, success, folly, quiet and failures of friendship, which are soon forgotten. If there is nothing beyond “feverish fame,” if there is no love, no truth, no fervor, we are “fools.” In Willis’s poem, Parrhasius, who gives up everything for fame, is a vain and heartless fool whose “thriftless” ambition as an artist makes him willing to sacrifice an old, dispirited man for the sake of his painting. Driven by ambition for fame and glory, Parrhasius is an artist who heedlessly seeks the perfect posture and facial expression for the figure in his painting.

Vivisection and More Like Seneca’s story about Parrhasius and Marana’s tale about Giotto, Willis’s poem became part of the controversy surrounding vivisection. The American physician and author John Janvier Black (1837–1909) cites “Parrhasius” in his book Forty Years in the Medical Profession (1900). Black argues that, unlike Willis’s painter, vivisectionists are innocent “of the motives urged on by insatiate ambition and pride” as suggested in these lines uttered by the artist in response to his dying model: Pity thee! so I do! I pity the dumb victim at the altar, But does the robed priest for his pity falter?

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Black holds that vivisectionists seek only to further scientific knowledge and, in doing so, to benefit mankind.7 An anonymous reviewer of Black’s book disagrees with the good doctor: “For our own part we think that the lines supposed to be uttered by Parrhasius [in Willis’s poem] exactly express the real sentiments of some vivisectors we could name.”8 Both authors refer to the dissection of living animals. Often anthologized as “Parrhasius and the Captive,” Willis’s poem gained wide currency in diverse social circles. For example, Henry Marlin Soper (1850–1911), a teacher and the proprietor of the Soper School of Oratory in Chicago, not only published the poem in an anthology, he also provided instructions for reading it: “This is a picture of inordinate ambition. It should be represented by a voice of cold indifference to human suffering. The flame of selfish passion is wild and frenzied.”9 Another educator, William Holmes McGuffey (1800–1873), president of Cincinnati College and later professor of philosophy at the University of Virginia, included an abridged version of Willis’s poem in several editions of his popular Fourth Eclectic Reader.10 President Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) knew the poem and once quoted several lines from of it as he and his wife rode with Willis.11 In his autobiography, the famous Bostonian thespian Henry Clay Barnabee (1833–1917) remembers acting out the part of Parrhasius as he regularly recited Willis’s poem in his youth.12 Likewise, as a young boy the popular evangelical preacher Billy Sunday (1862–1935), recited the poem in school, “holding the class spellbound.”13 As late as 1903, William P. Trent (1862–1939), an English professor at Columbia University, could write, “schoolboys still declaim [Willis’s] ‘Parrhasius.’”14

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“The Man in Purple” The Belgian poet and novelist Pierre Louÿs, born Pierre Louis (1870–1925), was an associate of the French writers André Gide (1869– 1951) and Paul Valéry (1871–1945), with whom he founded a ­short-lived journal in Paris in 1891. A close friend, the composer Claude Debussy (1862–1918), set some of Louÿs’s sapphic poems to music. Associated with Parnassian and Symbolist literary circles, he wrote poems, stories and novels set in antiquity. One such story is titled “The Man in Purple” (1901) and is about Parrhasius and the Olynthian slave (see Appendix E).1 In writing the tale, Louÿs cleverly drew upon several ancient sources, especially the writings of Xenophon, Seneca, and Pliny. The story opens on a scene in Parrhasius’s native Ephesus. Two young apprentices, one of them the narrator, lean against a cypress tree as they silently revere an old and gray sculptor named Bryaxis, who is seated in front of them.2 Suddenly, Ophelion, also a sculptor, bursts upon the scene with a report about the Athenian painter Clesides and his patron, Queen Stratonice.3 Having sent for Clesides to paint her portrait, Ophelion says, the queen was late for an appointment with the artist and when she arrived, coolly greeted him. Clesides had not finished even a preliminary sketch when the queen abruptly turned around, saying that she wanted to pose for a representation of her back, so that she might appear in three different poses as the Three Graces. Clesides obliged, and the queen demanded he return the next day for another sitting. The next day, Ophelion continues, Clesides arrived to find a servant girl seated on a footstool. The queen was tired, and the servant was to take her place. Clesides, who knew he was being ridiculed by the queen, after drawing from the new model, left to return to his lodgings. Along the way, he met Glaucon, a sailor who, according to rumor, is the queen’s lover. The artist hired the sailor to serve as a model for two paintings in each of which the queen appears in Glaucon’s embrace. 93



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During the night before he escaped Ephesus, Clesides fastened the panels to a wall of the palace of Seleucus, the queen’s husband. Stratonice and her entourage visited the exhibited paintings, but she was not perturbed by what she saw: rather, she admired both of the “excellent” works, but could not decide which is the best. After telling the story, Ophelion says that the queen could have had Clesides hunted down and killed, but she did not. In explanation for her lack of action, he proclaims, “in these days the artist is the king of kings, the only inviolable being that lives under the sun.” Even though Bryaxis is disdainful of Ophelion’s remark, he tells a story that supports the latter’s assertion. Once when Alexander the Great was criticizing a painting by Apelles, the painter told him to be quiet because the assistants who ground his colors were laughing at the general, “and Alexander apologized.”4 Bryaxis also points out that no matter the relation between patron and artist, the quality of the art remains the same. Bryaxis then announces what might be called the Parrhassian theme: “it may be good, even great, that an artist dare and have the strength to set himself, not merely above some king […], but above and higher than human laws, higher even than divine laws, on the day when his muses command him to tread underfoot that which is not of them.” When the creative urge strikes, according to Bryaxis, a great artist must not be constrained by human and divine laws. No one except Parrhasius, who “strove to set us on the track,” Bryaxis declares, has had such strength. His young friends do not know the circumstances in which Parrhasius painted his Prometheus. They know nothing of “the tragedy of death” that surrounds it. Bryaxis, echoing Plato, says that the youthful artists know nothing of the “groans out of which came that painting, in blood, like a child from a ­birth-bed of pain.”5 Here Bryaxis makes a parallel of birth and death. The pain of the model’s death is like the pain of childbirth. The excellence of Parrhasius’s painting is born from the death of his model: in a sense death gives birth to art. Urged on by Ophelion and the apprentices, the old sculptor recounts his days in the company of Parrhasius. He begins his account fifty years earlier, “the same year in which Plato died.” After finishing his famous tomb at Halicarnassus, the sculptor set out for Chalcis where he encounters King Philip of Macedonia’s slave market. There, among the eighty thousand captives from Olynthus, Bryaxis sees Parrhasius, who is clad in a purple robe (purple is a royal color) walking behind four Sarmatian slaves carrying gold, followed by “a tiny negro” holding Parrhasius’s staff; each of the artist’s arms is around the 94



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slender neck of a lovely girl. Philip has given the girls to the artist as gifts. Parrhasius recognizes his friend Bryaxis and tells one of the girls to take the sculptor’s arm, and as they walk among the captives, the painter explains that he has come from Athens to find a model for a painting of Prometheus. Other artists have painted the god, he says, but none have succeeded in painting his torment by Zeus’s eagle. Parrhasius boasts that he will succeed and “will nail the image to the wall of the Parthenon.” He has completed the preliminary work on the painting but cannot find in Athens the appropriate model for Prometheus. Besides, he cannot bind an Athenian model and dislocate his limbs in the manner required for his painting.6 He then exclaims, “The laws lie in my hand like the folds of this mantle that I throw over my shoulder.” Parrhasius will ignore the laws of Athens. As an artist he belongs to a class of people who are above the law and ordinary ­god-worshipping citizens. As the two artists continue their walk, Parrhasius sees a beautiful, naked girl for sale among the enslaved individuals. Her body is “a harmony in white.” The artist sees her not as a human being, but as a composition of colors. He buys her and orders that she be clothed in her white tunic. Her name is Artemidora, and she is a virgin. She recognizes Parrhasius and realizes that she is now the property of a great artist. Parrhasius explains to Bryaxis that she will serve as a model, but not for the Prometheus. She will model for some “sportive” sketches. Suddenly Parrhasius spies the model he requires for his Prometheus, a proud, powerful, ­g ray-haired man about fifty years old with a perfect face—he resembles one of the few Olympian gods called “Dominators.” The artist asks the captive his name. The man haughtily and disdainfully replies, “Outis,” which is Greek for “Nobody.” Parrhasius asks the slave for his real name, but he refuses to say and calls the painter a thief. The seller, seeing the artist turn purple with anger, explains that the captive is a famous and knowledgeable physician named Nicostratus. If Parrhasius will hand over thirty drachmas, Nicostratus will be his “thing” forever. The artist asks that the man be stripped of his clothing and views him from all sides. The slave is anatomically perfect for Parrhasius’s purpose; the deal is done; Bryaxis, a witness to the sale, is “stirred by a shiver, which was almost one of envy.” Louÿs is the first author to give the Olynthian slave a name, Nicostratus, and an occupation, physician. Ironically, the model’s occupation as a physician implies that, as part of his profession, he would have 95



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performed dissection and perhaps even vivisection. As Parrhasius tortures him to death, he will receive his just reward. Time passes; the scene shifts to Athens. Impecunious Bryaxis is a guest in Parrhasius’s palace, which is surrounded by gardens. There Parrhasius explains that because Nicostratus has destroyed all of his earlier ideas for the Prometheus, he will begin his picture again. Because painting is “life itself ” to Parrhasius, he began working as soon as he arrived again in Athens. Using Artemidora and the two Sarmatians as models, he has made a salacious picture in wax (encaustic), a Nymph Surprised. The nymph lies sleeping in a landscape; behind her a satyr roughly grasps her shoulders and another bends in front of her. Parrhasius explains that he loves drawing from life. Socrates, he explains, wanted him to “paint love as glances and thoughts,” but for him painting is not about feelings; it is “design and color; its tongue speaks in gesture alone.” The subject of his picture, which is in essence the deflowering of the girl Artemidora by the Sarmatians, is irrelevant. Design and color are of supreme value; she is a “harmony in white.” Later in the day, having ordered the plate heated to melt the wax for his painting, Parrhasius draws aside a tapestry to reveal Nicostratus lying in chains. A month later there is dissatisfaction and unrest in Athens regarding Philip’s treatment and ultimate enslavement of the Olynthians. Bryaxis hears of an incident involving an Olynthian woman; a man has been tried and condemned to death simply for owning her. Bryaxis runs to Parrhasius’s palace to warn him of what is happening. He finds the artist standing serenely before his easel, holding a cup of hot wax in which he dips his brush, gazing at bound Nicostratus. Parrhasius calmly orders his model to scream, but Nicostratus laughs defiantly. Parrhasius then reenacts the eagle’s torture of Prometheus. He gives a glowing, hot tool to one of his Sarmatian slaves, ordering him to touch Nicostratus lightly with it, “under the last rib,” just where the eagle would have peaked at Prometheus. The model screams: his agony lasts for hours. As Bryaxis leaves the scene of torture, he hears Parrhasius say of his model, “The fool! He died too soon!” The next day a great throng of Athenians storms the artist’s palace. The people have heard of Parrhasius’s cruelty and the death of the Olynthian, “a free man,” and intend to poison the painter for killing his model. Parrhasius emerges from his palace and facing the angry crowd, slowly raises his painting in front of him, “till he was quite effaced by it, and the masterpiece appeared in place of the man.” At the sight of the picture, the crowd grew silent. Some of the viewers were not “polluted” by the 96



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character of the artist; rather the moving image in the painting causes them to weep. Then, suddenly there was “a tumult of acclamation.” At the end of Louÿs’s story Parrhasius and his cruel deeds no longer matter to the people of Athens. The artist is above human and divine laws; legally and morally he is absolved of murder. What matters above all is his painting, its “design and color,” its tongue speaking “in gesture alone.”

Apelles as Parrhasius In a story titled “Apelles,” published in Greek in 1905, Constantin Théotokis (1872–1923) has Apelles take the place of Parrhasius. The artist is in Ephesus, where he is painting a picture of Venus.7 There he meets Alexander, who is so impressed by Apelles’s genius, he gives his mistress, Campaspe, to him as a reward. Soon after, she entreats the artist to help her free her brother, Dionysodorus, from slavery. Brother and sister are descended from Theban nobility. Apelles agrees to Campaspe’s request, but changes his mind when he sees Dionysodorus’ physique, which recalls that of Michelangelo’s facchino and Ruben’s descriptions of porters and fighters. He had the presence of a tragic hero. His precious tattered and unkempt cloak fell from his broad shoulders. He had a sculptural body: an expanding chest and a belly that widened with each breath, shapely and muscular thighs, which conveyed an impression of incredible strength, firm legs, feet marked by chains, but loose, giving him a noble gait.8

Apelles decides to use Dionysodorus as a model for his incomplete painting of Prometheus. The picture has remained unfinished because he has not been able to find a suitable model for the figure. Apelles has Dionysodorus tied to a rock and tortured by means of a mechanical vulture. Eventually his slave and model, Campaspe’s brother, dies. As Marcello Barbanera aptly explains: “In a tension between remorse and ambition, creativity and cruelty, Apelles was taken up with a kind of creative ecstasy that did not hesitate to sacrifice the life of a man, Dionysodorus.”9

Albucius In 1990, the French author Pascal Quignard (born 1948) evoked the pagan past, or more precisely, the milieu in which an artist such as 97



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Seneca’s Parrhasius could exist. He did so in a fictional biography of the Augustan orator Caius Albucius Silus, who appears in Seneca’s Controversiae as a declaimer. The biography includes several imaginary stories by Albucius, one of which is titled “Parrhasius and Prometheus.” Using numerous invented details, Quignard’s ­s tory-within-a-story repeats Seneca’s original tale. For example, the author says that the model’s “skin hung loose at his thighs, arms, ass, and breasts; his face was a map of wrinkles.” To have the best light, Parrhasius used the northern part of his studio, and because the painting was not finished when the Olynthian died, the artist packed his model’s body in snow to preserve it and its expression. All of these details show that Parrhasius was, before all, an artist who was concerned with the accurate representation of nature in detail and with the physical conditions of his artistic task. He wished to assure the success of his painting. An envious artist makes the accusation that Parrhasius has harmed the state. The rival also claims that Parrhasius took the slave from Olynthus to give him to art. Parrhasius’s defense is as follows: I bought this aging man. I painted a hero [Prometheus] in the torments he suffered. I performed a greater act of devotion than many other men. I was greater than Philip. Prometheus loved humankind. I recalled to their memory an act of love. To a body with a few seasons to live, I gave eternal glory.10

The rival reminds Parrhasius that the enslaved man was not a criminal, implying that he should not have been killed. When Parrhasius says that his model moved him, the rival asks why then had he slit the Olynthian’s throat. The painter replies, “I slit his throat to make him move me still more,” and explains that he wanted to give to posterity the representation of a face that would move its viewers to tears. In other words, even though he showed no mercy toward his model, Parrhasius wants the viewers of his painting to pity the figure of Prometheus. In the end Parrhasius insists that he did no harm to the state. Rather, instead of “an impotent old man near death,” he gave the world “a painting that distracts us.” Much like the artist in Louÿs’s story, Quignard’s Parrhasius disappears behind his painting, but while the power of the former’s painting silenced the morally outraged crowd of Athenian viewers, the latter’s painting is merely a distraction, though a costly one. Quignard’s Parrhasius says that murdering his model was part of an “act of devotion” to Prometheus, and his painting recalls to the viewer’s 98



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mind the god’s love for humankind. Like the fictional Michelangelo, Parrhasius gives “eternal glory” to his model. The old model loses his life but achieves lasting fame in the artist’s painting. The artist is like God, for he decides the fate of his model and bestows immortality upon him.

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Socrates and Parhassius In 1955, California writer Brèni James (1921–1984) published a short story in which Parrhasius is once again identified as a murderer.1 Her story is an example of historical fiction, for she imagines characters in a particular moment in the history of ancient Athens. That moment occurred in 431 bce when construction of the Propylaea, a monumental gateway at the entrance to the Acropolis, was suspended in 431 as a result of the Peloponnesian War. Pericles (ca. 495–429 bce), an influential statesman and leader of Athens, commissioned the structure, which might have been designed by an architect named Mnesides, about whom nothing further is known.2 This is the era in which Parrhasius and Zeuxis, as well as Greek philosopher Socrates, flourished. The plot of James’s story revolves around Socrates, his friend Mnesides, and the two painters. The representations of the main characters are based on the writings of ancient authors, especially Pliny, Xenophon, and Seneca.

The Murder The story opens with Socrates and Mnesides, standing before the Propylaea, where Socrates expresses admiration for what Mnesides has accomplished, even though the gateway is not completed. Socrates believes the costs of war have led the Athenian officials to suspend construction of the structure. Mnesides, on the other hand, thinks that the officials have diverted money from his project to pay for the large murals on the walls of the gateway, which are painted by Parrhasius and Zeuxis, and will continue to pay the two artists for other works. Their conversation having ended, philosopher and architect, followed by one of Mnesides’ slave boys, walk toward the gateway, where they discover the dead body of a young boy whose head has been smashed. The architect wonders about the identity of the victim. After 100



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examining the muscles and hands of the corpse, Socrates says that he was probably an enslaved youth who carried heavy loads. He speculates that the boy might have been in the service of a stonemason or a sculptor. Socrates notices that the dead body is in the same position as that of a figure in a nearby painting and asks Mnesides to identify the painter responsible for the mural. The architect responds that the artist is Parrhasius. Socrates asserts that Parrhasius is known to “go to great lengths” to achieve the naturalism of his painting and asks Mnesides if he thinks that is true. The architect replies that Parrhasius will do anything to achieve realism in his paintings: he is said “to torture slaves to get the look of pain he wishes to copy.” Socrates asks Mnesides to send his slave to fetch Parrhasius, as well as Zeuxis, but instructs the boy not to tell the artists about the murder. Socrates then notices a painting of Endymion, a mythological shepherd, who is often represented as eternally asleep, on the wall across from the crime scene. The style suggests that Zeuxis is responsible for it. Eventually Socrates and Mnesides observe the two artists approaching from a distance. Zeuxis wears a checkered mantle with his name spelled out in bold letters on the back. Parrhasius wears a purple mantle and a golden crown, which signals his habit of calling himself “the Prince of Painters.” Zeuxis heartily greets Socrates, while Parrhasius sarcastically asks if he and his fellow artist are to have another contest of paintings, which had recently occurred. Here the author refers to the famous tale of the contest between Parrhasius and Zeuxis to determine who was the better at lifelike representation. Zeuxis exhibited a painting of a boy holding some grapes, which appeared to be so like nature that a bird flew down and pecked at the fruit. Next Parrhasius was asked to remove the curtain covering his panel, which covering turned out to be painted. In other words, the curtain covering the painting was the painting itself. Parrhasius had painted the curtains in such a lifelike manner that they seemed to be real, not painted. Soon afterward Parrhasius crowned himself and began wearing the purple mantle, which signify his nobility and life of luxury. Socrates interrogates the individual artists, first establishing that Parrhasius believes in depicting the feelings of his figures. The artist asks if Socrates had seen his nearby mural of the mythological figures of Apollo and Marsyas, particularly Apollo in the act of beating the satyr. Then Socrates, who already has seen Parrhasius’s painting, recalls a 101



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previous conversation. He asks Parrhasius if he still believed that “art should mimic faithfully the actions of men.” The artist responds in the affirmative and says that he feels that art should also faithfully mimic “their states of mind,” their thoughts. Socrates asks the artist if he does not mean that the artist should mimic, not the thoughts of men, but “their reactions to what is inflicted upon them.” Parrhasius agrees, and Socrates asks if the artist feels he can convey such reactions in his figure of Marsyas. The artist responds that when the figure is completed it will have the proper expression. When he has refined his depiction of the figure’s face and hair, the painting will be finished. Socrates then asks about the body of the figure suggesting that it needs more work. Parrhasius responds that it is Zeuxis who knows human anatomy. Socrates asks Parrhasius if he had worked on the face of Marsyas that day. The artist replies that because of the cloudy day, the light prevented him from doing so. Socrates further asks the artist what he did on those days when he could not paint. The painter’s answer is that he walks along the banks of the river Ilissus. Socrates next turns his attention to Zeuxis and asks him how his art differs from that of his opponent, Parrhasius. Zeuxis replies, “I can achieve greatness without resorting to his cruel…”— Parrhasius interrupts his rival ­m id-sentence, saying, “you would do anything for what you call beauty.” Zeuxis answers, “For beauty one does not resort to violence,” and his rival replies, “And for truth, […] one can crush beauty under foot!” The gist of the argument is that Parrhasius seeks truth while Zeuxis seeks beauty. Interrupting the argument, Socrates asks Zeuxis about the kind of beauty he seeks; is it the beauty “as the gods have conceived it,” or is in the beauty that the artist sees in the human body. Zeuxis says that he seeks the latter and explains that he does not find emotions beautiful. He prefers to draw the beauty of a model in repose, as long as the representation is “true to life.” Socrates then asks him if he had painted on that day, which was cloudy. Zeuxis replies that he had painted that morning, when there was plenty of sunlight, and slept during the overcast afternoon. Socrates then asks the two artists to accompany him inside the gateway, where he closely observes the two painters to see the how they will respond to the body of the dead youth. Zeuxis almost faints and needs support. Parrhasius turns red with anger because he believes that Zeuxis is trying to trick him. Socrates asks the artists if they know the boy, and they both deny that they do. Mnesides asks Socrates if either 102



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painter could use the corpse for a model without anyone noticing. The answer is that if the artist used an obedient model, who kept still in his pose, no one would be curious. Would not someone have seen the blood, the architect asks. Parrhasius answers the question: “Do you think that I would leave a dead body here until morning for Zeuxis to discover?” Zeuxis accuses Parrhasius of being “­cold-blooded enough” to kill the slave and adds, “You’d torture to get that look of the face of Marsyas.” Socrates then explains why Parrhasius is not the culprit. The corpse’s head is bashed in, suggesting a speedy death. Thus, Parrhasius would not have used a dead model to represent the expression of agony in his figure of Marsyas. Mnesides asks why the position of the body is similar to that of Parrhasius’s figure. Socrates responds that the murderer positioned the body so as to draw suspicion to Parrhasius. Socrates and Mnesides then turn their attention to Zeuxis but he has disappeared. Socrates explains that the painter is not the culprit, and Mnesides wonders how his friend has reached that conclusion. If Zeuxis had used a model for his figure of Endymion, he would have been sleeping. There would have been no need to kill him. Neither artist needed a dead model. Socrates then explains what has happened. Mnesides killed the boy, his slave, in order to cast blame on the two painters, who worked as a team. Both artists would have been punished for the crime, and the money used for their project would then have been given to the architect to finish the Propylaea. Mnesides’ mistake is that, because he is a man of high social standing, he would have entered the Acropolis with two slaves, but now he has only one with him, the one that the architect favors. Ultimately, the architect confesses. Broadly speaking, James’s tale is about Mnesides’ search for fame and glory. Like Parrhasius and Michelangelo, he kills a slave for the fame and glory he imagines his work will attain.

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The Return of Michelangelo At the end of the nineteenth century, the story of Michelangelo and his model seems to have commanded little interest in the ­English-speaking world. For example, the poet and historian, John Addington Symonds (1840–1893) does not mention it in his monumental and ­still-valuable biography of the artist (1893). In Italy, however, there was a revival of interest in the tale.

Rodolfo Lanciani In the first decade of the twentieth century, Rodolfo Amadeo Lanciani (1847–1929), an Italian archaeologist, commented on the story of Michelangelo in a book about the Renaissance in Rome. Tradition, Lanciani fancifully explains, “says that Michelangelo, having purposely inflicted a mortal wound on the model who posed for him as Christ on the Cross, in order to study the play of the muscles of a dying man, and having thereby incurred the wrath of [Pope] Leo X, fled first to Palestrina, and then to [the nearby village of] Capranica, places which at that time enjoyed the feudal rights of immunity. Here he whiled away the long days of exile.”1 Coincidentally, as we shall see, Caravaggio fled to Palestrina after killing Ranuccio Tomassoni, and Lanciani might have confused Michelangelo Buonarroti with Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Lanciani further comments that “this vulgar story may have originated from Vasari’s hint about Michelangelo’s ‘skinning corpses for the sake of anatomical studies,’ and from the two sonnets in which he prays for pardon of his sins.” Unfortunately, Lanciani does not identify the sonnets to which he refers, but in several of his poems Michelangelo links his sins to the crucifixion of Christ. For example, in one poem he 104



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writes that his “own soul, sure of itself, abruptly stumbled, being quite above advice, smug, ­well-reputed,” and at the end the poem cries out to the crucified Christ: O flesh, O blood, O agony, crucial wood, there’s justification of my sin through You, sin ours from birth, and my father’s too. You are boundless in mercy and sole source of good; O hoist me up from this doomed and evil slough of error: so close to death, from God so far.2

While these lines, or others like them, might have inspired people to see Michelangelo as a murderer, it is difficult to imagine why that might be so.

Damiani, Martinutti and Nascimbeni A few years later, in 1912, Leone Damiani, a lawyer and mayor of Portoferraio on the island of Elba, reported in a local newspaper, the Araldo, that he had found a French book by an anonymous author who refers to Michelangelo and his model. According to the anonymous author, the artist believed he could not succeed in painting “his famous Christ” from nature. When a living model was set before him, Michelangelo, “transported by the force of his genius,” stabbed him “in cold blood to give the final touch to the canvas.” The book had been left on the island of Corisca, where the politician and writer Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi (1804–1873) had read it while a prisoner there. The story about Michelangelo made Guerrazzi so indignant he commented about it in a margin of the book: “C’est une plate mensonge” [“It is a flat lie”], and signed his name and the year, “Guerrazzi 1833.” The writer for the Araldo observes that the “lie” about Michelangelo is confirmed by neither history nor tradition.3 In November 1912, an anonymous, “erudite” woman wrote to an editor of the Milanese newspaper Corriere della Sera saying it was not true (as Damiani had claimed) that the story of Michelangelo and his model was heretofore unknown; rather, as she pointed out, the Comtesse Genlis had recounted it in her memoirs.4 A few days later in the same newspaper, Giovanni Martinutti, a professor at the University of Bologna, followed up with a relatively lengthy discussion of the history of the story about Michelangelo. After referring to several authors who repeat the tale and associate it with Seneca’s story of Parrhasius, he 105



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says he has no faith in the veracity of either story. He also associates the accusation made against Michelangelo with the groundless accusations of “human vivisection” leveled at the ancient Greek physicians, Herophilus and Erasistratus (ca. 315–ca. 240 bce), who founded a school of anatomy at Alexandria in Egypt. Also groundless, Martinutti explains, are the similar accusations made against the widely admired Flemish anatomist Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564), Jacopo Berengario da Carpi (ca. 1460–1530), a physician who published a famous book on human anatomy (1535), and the Modenese nobleman, physician, and anatomist Gabriello Falloppio (1523–1562), author of The French Disease (1564). A little over a week later, this time in the pages of the literary journal Il Marzocco, ­e arly-twentieth-century Florentine critic Giovanni Nascimbeni spoke to the topic. He first summarizes the recent discussion of the tale by Lanciani, the “erudite” woman, and Martinutti. Nascimbeni wonders about the formation and persistence of the story and concludes that over the centuries many people could not explain the powerful truth and beauty of Michelangelo’s painting as the result only of skill and imagination. Consequently, many of them accepted the lurid tale of the painting’s creation, which tale was perpetuated in part by ciceroni (guides) who misled gullible tourists. The author also castigates the ­seventeenth-century Lutheran minister Theophilus Spizelius (Gottlieb Spitzel), who did not have much confidence in the innocence of Michelangelo. Other people, however, have been skeptical of the truth of the tale. Nascimbeni also publishes for the first time the anonymous, ­seventeenth-century sonnet about Michelangelo crucifying his model (see Chapter 6). The poem, he says, is an example of how in the past “men of genius excited excessive indignation among people.” Because these men of genius possessed something of “the magician, of the sorcerer, of supernatural being,” people easily believed the stories told about them, and when they viewed works of genius, they were greatly disturbed. They felt the need to account for the creation of the great work “with visions of blood and death.” In this regard, Nascimbeni recalls the story of Parrhasius and the Olynthian slave and those about the anatomists Vesalius, Berengario, and Falloppio. The last named is said to have dissected condemned criminals while they were still alive “to better learn the secrets of science that he madly idolized.”5 Lastly the author refers to legends of the “huge temples built in Antiquity on foundations consecrated by the blood of thousands of slaves.” Nascimbeni finds curious the “terrible sense of the popular soul of the past.” 106



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Those souls believed that “great men could not accomplish great things on earth without the sacrifice of other men.” They believed that “life could not triumph without the simultaneous triumph of death.”

Kris and Kurz Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz also offer an explanation of how the poem about Michelangelo and the porter might have originated. The story, which they link with Seneca’s tale of Parrhasius, is an instance of attempts “to draw conclusions about the circumstances of an artist’s life from his works.”6 In other words, Renaissance writers and connoisseurs affirmed the aphorism ogni dipintore dipinge se (every painter paints himself), which broadly means a work of art is a reflection or embodiment of the artist’s soul, spirit or psyche. Echoing Nascimbeni, Kris and Kurz argue, too, that the “stark effect” of Michelangelo’s art evoked the “awe” that viewers of art have always felt towards artists.7 The authors imply that someone in awe of Michelangelo was so impressed by the “stark effect” of one of his lifelike representations of the crucified Christ (or some other work) that he or she attempted to convey that effect by inventing a story about the artist murdering his model. The Comtesse Genlis, we should recall, already had expressed a similar view.

Giovanni Papini In 1949, one of Michelangelo’s modern biographers, the journalist, editor, avowed atheist, and follower of Benito Mussolini (1883–1945), Giovanni Papini (1881–1956), when musing about the origin of the poem about Michelangelo and his model, acknowledges its likeness to Seneca’s story of Parrhasius. Papini also speculates that Michelangelo’s manifest knowledge of human anatomy, which required the dissection of human cadavers, might have inspired someone to invent the story.8 Papini was probably recalling both Condivi and Vasari, who relate that as a young artist, Michelangelo dissected human corpses. Both authors also say that he made a wooden crucifix for the church of Santo Spirito in Florence.9 There, as Vasari puts it, the prior “placed rooms at his disposal, in which he was constantly flaying dead bodies, in order to study the secrets of anatomy.”10 For Papini the appearance of the story about Michelangelo killing 107



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his model is not surprising because two famous, professional anatomists of the time were also accused of murder. Papini alludes to Berengario and Falloppio mentioned earlier. Falloppio (probably falsely) alleged that Berengario dissected living humans: “This man [Berengario] so hated Spaniards that, when he was at Bologna, he took twin Spaniards suffering from syphilis and determined to practice vivisection on them: being ruined for this reason, he went to Ferrara.”11 In The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton makes a similar charge against Vesalius. Burton alleges that Vesalius, in order to better understand the beating of the pulse in the arteries “was wont to cut up men alive.”12 Not everyone took these accusations seriously. For instance, in his book on human anatomy, the Florentine physician, Antonio Cocchi (1695–1758) mentions the “false” accusations that “Bonarotam, & Carpum, & Vesalium” (Michelangelo, Jacopo Berengario da Carpi, and Vesalius) tormented living men.13 Papini overlooked a story that is especially relevant to the image of Michelangelo as an anatomist. The Anonimo Gaddiano, writing around 1540, recounts an incident that supposedly occurred in the early sixteenth century when Florence was under papal interdict and therefore prohibited from burying its dead. While the corpses were left to decay until the priests could properly bury them, Michelangelo, as the story goes, dissected the remains of a member of the influential Corsini family, who were justifiably appalled when they learned of what had happened. The matter was brought to the attention of Piero Soderini (1452–1522), Gonfaloniere of Justice in Florence at the time, who only laughed and pointed out that Michelangelo was advancing his art.14 Rather than punish Michelangelo or even verbally chastise him, Soderini laughingly excuses the artist because he has been seeking knowledge that will improve his art. For Soderini, art, science and knowledge are greater than civilized life; art is more important than the desecration of a corpse and the concerns of grieving relatives, even if they are socially elevated.

Musicians and Murder In support of his belief that the tale of Michelangelo’s crime originated in Italy, Papini also recalls that artists of the Renaissance and later really tried to kill people and a few succeeded.15 Papini refers to visual artists, but we should briefly notice musicians could also be 108



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killers. For example, in 1518 Michelangelo’s first published poem (Come har ò donque ardire) appeared in a book of musical scores by the composer Bartolomeo Tromboncino (ca. 1470–ca. 1535), who at different times worked for Isabella d’Este (1474–1539), Marchesa of Mantua, and the infamous Lucrezia Borgia (1480–1519).16 Tromboncino killed his wife, Antonia, and possibly her lover when he found them in flagrante delicto. Because of his musical talents and the intervention of Isabella, who held that he had a legal right to kill his wife, Tromboncino’s crime went unpunished.17 In 1590, musical composer Carlo Gesualdo (1566–1613), Prince of Venosa, killed his wife, Maria d’Avalos, and her lover, the Duke of Andria when he found them in bed together. After the murders, Gesualdo is said to have placed the mutilated bodies in front of his palace for all to see. Like Tromboncino, Gesualdo was not punished for his crime.18 Similarly, beyond banishment from Ferrara, the composer Alfonso Fontanelli (1557–1622) was not punished for killing his wife in similar circumstances. He, however, spared the life of her lover. In the seventeenth century, in Messina, the composer and violinist, Giovanni Antonio Pandolfi Mealli (ca. 1630–ca. 1670) allegedly killed a castrato in the Cathedral following an argument.19 If, indeed, he killed the singer, he escaped punishment.

Violent Artists As Papini points out, Michelangelo also lived among violent artists. For example, one of his admirers, the sculptor Leone Leoni (1509– 1590), served a year in the papal galleys for slashing the face of a German jeweler with his sword. Leoni also attacked and is believed to have killed an assistant named Martino Pasqualigo (1524–1580), who refused to accompany his master on a trip to Milan.20 A few years later in Milan, Leoni and his servants attempted to murder Titian’s son, Orazio Vecellio (ca. 1525–1576). Orazio had recently collected two thousand ducats owed his father by the Spanish crown, and Leoni planned to steal the money. In neither of the last two mentioned cases was Leoni punished for his crime.21 Michelangelo was also acquainted with the Florentine sculptor Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571) who killed a rival goldsmith named Pompeo in 1534. In his ­o ften-exaggerated autobiography, written between 1558 and 1566, but not published until 1728 (or perhaps 1730), 109



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Cellini admits that he attacked Pompeo and stabbed him three times in the neck. He also recounts the circumstances of his pardon by Pope Paul III (1468–1549). In Cellini’s presence, the pontiff’s secretary objected to Paul’s action, saying to him: “In the first days of your papacy, it would not be good to grant pardons of this kind.” The pope testily responded, “You don’t understand as well as I do. You should know that men like Benvenuto, unique in their profession, need not be bound by the law.”22 For Pope Paul in Cellini’s story, an artist’s outstanding skill and unique genius separate him from ordinary mortals, who are subject to the law. Because he is an exceptional artist, Cellini, like Parrhasius and Michelangelo, is allowed to live in his own moral universe. Murder and mayhem also flourished among less prominent artists of the sixteenth century. For example, in 1553 the printmakers Antonio Salamanca (1478–1562) and Antonio Laferi (1512–1577), former competitors, joined forces to establish a shop in Rome. A young engraver in the shop, one Gerolamo da Modena, was found murdered in October of 1577. Two printmakers, Lorenzo Vaccari and Michelangelo Marrelli, were suspects in the case, but no one was ever charged with the murder.23 In Genoa in 1581, the ­self-taught painter Giovanni Battista Paggi (1554–1627) twice stabbed a silk merchant with a knife. A short while later the victim, Cristoforo Fronte, died as a result of the attack. The altercation arose over the monetary value of a painting Paggi had made for Fronte. The latter refused to give the artist the amount he wanted and would not return the painting. After Fronte’s demise, Paggi immediately fled Genoa and was banned from the city in absentia for his crime. He settled for a while in the town of Aulla, then in Pisa, and lastly in Florence, where his artistic career flourished under the protection of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Francesco de’ Medici (1541–1587). In 1599, following an appeal to the senate in Genoa by the Archbishop of Sipontino, Paggi returned from exile to his native city, and the Fronte family officially granted him peace.24 Killers were also present among artists of the early seventeenth century. Caravaggio famously stabbed and killed a man named Ranuccio Tomassoni in Rome in May of 1606. In one account of the killing, the ­hot-tempered Caravaggio, who was often in trouble with the law, lost ten scudi in a wager on a game of tennis and challenged his opponent to a fight. That evening in the Campo Marzio, armed with swords, the two men squared off. Caravaggio wounded Tomassoni in the thigh, causing him to fall to the ground. He then ran his enemy through with 110



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his sword, killing him. In another account of the confrontation, the confrontation is said to have followed a dispute over a courtesan from Siena named Fillide Melandroni (born 1581). Ranuccio seems to have been Fillide’s pimp, and Caravaggio, who used her as a model in at least three of his paintings, was romantically involved with her. The artist soon fled to Palestrina, a small village outside Rome. Later, he traveled south to Naples, Sicily, and the island of Malta. Eventually, Isabella d’Este’s ­g reat-great-grandson, Cardinal Ferdinando Gonzaga (1587– 1626) of Mantua worked to obtain a pardon for the artist from Pope Paul V (1552–1621). Because the pardon seemed imminent, Caravaggio decided to return to Rome, but died on July 18, 1610, never having reached his destination.25 One of Caravaggio’s rivals, the painter and writer Giovanni Baglione (ca. 1570–1643) once referred to a Roman artist Tommaso Luini, also called Caravaggio (1600–1637), as a “crazy killer.”26 There is also the example of Agostino Tassi (1578–1644), who collaborated with Giovanni Barbieri, called Il Guercino (1591–1666), on the paintings in the Casino Ludovisi in Rome. When the painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–ca. 1654 or later) accused Tassi of rape, a witness testified that Tassi had hired assassins to kill his wife, Maria, who had abandoned him for one of her lovers. Tassi admitted that his wife had died but denied the accusation that he had killed her. He served only a few months in prison, but not for murder.27 According to an anonymous writer, between the years 1636 and 1638 the renowned sculptor, architect, and painter Gian Lorenzo Bernini was involved in a love affair with a woman named Costanza Piccolomini Bonarelli (died 1662). Gian Lorenzo believed that Costanza, who was married to one of his assistants, Matteo Bonarelli, was also sleeping with the sculptor’s younger brother Luigi Bernini (1612–1681). Wishing to confirm his suspicion, Gian Lorenzo one evening announced that the next morning he planned to visit the countryside, but at the time announced for his departure, he instead went to his studio, which was located near Costanza’s house. Eventually he saw Luigi and Costanza, who was still in her nightclothes, come out of the house. Bernini followed his brother to the church of Saint Peter and there broke two of Luigi’s ribs with an iron bar. Then, as the anonymous writer tells us, Bernini went home, where he instructed a servant to take two flasks of Greek wine as a gift to Costanza and to slash her with a razor when he had the chance.28 Apparently Bernini thought that the wine would divert Costanza’s attention. 111



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The violent end to Bernini’s love affair is also the subject of a letter addressed to Cardinal Francesco Barberini (1597–1679) and signed by Angelica Galante, the artist’s mother. She testifies that on the previous day (the day before she wrote the letter) Gian Lorenzo, intending to kill Luigi, arrived at her house with a group of armed men and forced his way in, even though she indecorously fell to her knees and tearfully begged him not to harm his brother. Not finding Luigi, Gian Lorenzo, armed with a sword, went into the church of Santa Maria Maggiore where he arrogantly searched the entire rectory, brandishing his weapon and frightening the priests with his rage. The priests were especially apprehensive because they “can see that all things pass by him [Bernini] unpunished”; that is to say, the priests are frightened because they know that Bernini’s misdeeds are never punished; his importance as an artist places him above the law. Bernini’s mother closes her letter with an urgent request for the Cardinal to intervene and to stop her impetuous son. Ultimately, Bernini was fined 3000 scudi for ordering the attack on Costanza, but Pope Urban VIII (1568–1644) absolved him of the crime.29 Artists from European countries other than Italy were also involved in murders. For example, the Spanish painter, sculptor, and architect Alonso Cano (1601–1667) was accused of murdering his wife in Madrid. He returned home one evening in 1643, to find her dead and his house robbed. An Italian assistant living in the house, who had disappeared, seemed to be the culprit; but the ­hot-tempered Cano was held for the murder and tortured. Because he pleaded excellens in arte (excellence in art), his right arm—with which he painted—was excluded from the torture. The artist confessed nothing, was released and eventually all charges against him were dropped. Interestingly, like other artists of the time, Cano, though tortured, received relatively lenient treatment, even when he was believed to be a murderer, because he was an excellent artist.30 Later, the Dutch painter Pieter Mulier (ca. 1637–1701), who was living in Rome, married the sister of one of his pupils, but soon grew tired of her. From Genoa, where he had met another woman, he hired an assassin in Rome to murder his wife. Everyone suspected that the artist had initiated the crime, and though condemned to death, he was only sent to prison where he continued to paint. Eventually two powerful patrons obtained his release from incarceration, and he retired to Milan, where he flourished. 31 In 1660, another Dutch painter, Jacques van Loo (1614–1670), stabbed a wine merchant to death in a brawl in 112



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Amsterdam. He fled the city for Paris where he became a member of the Royal Academy. As punishment for his crime, he was banned in absentia from Amsterdam.32 Artists committed murder in the eighteenth century, too. For instance, the Venetian painter, Marco Ricci (1676–1729) is said to have bashed the head of a gondoliere with a tankard, killing the man. Marco fled to Dalmatia on the Adriatic coast and remained there for four years, until his uncle Sebastiano Ricci (1659–1734) had settled matters in Venice. 33 In the next century, English painter Richard Dadd (1817–1886) murdered his father, whom he believed was Satan. Dadd, however, had been treated for insanity. Papini’s point is that because some artists of Michelangelo’s era and later, including famous ones, were capable of violent crimes, we should not be surprised to encounter a tale about him as a murderer. We may add that, because some artists continued to murder wives, lovers, rivals and others, we should not be surprised to find that some people, long after Michelangelo’s death, continued to believe the story that he killed one of his models. Regardless of the origin of the story, its significance resonates with contemporary attitudes towards accomplished artists. In real life they lived in their own moral universe. Because they are skilled at making valuable works of art, they are treated with a great deal of tolerance and several even got away with murder.

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Criminal Artists At the beginning of the twentieth century yet another variation on the Parrhasian theme began to appear. In this new permutation the artist’s status as a criminal is explicit. For example, the ­t wentieth-century tale about the early ­s eventeenth-century Milanese painter Daniele Crespi, discussed earlier, differs from previous variations inasmuch as the police seek to arrest him for his crime.1 In several stories from the early twentieth century, various fictional artists also appear as criminals.

Claudius Ethal The image of the criminal artist appears not only in scholarly articles but also in novels and movies and on television. In Jean Lorrain’s (1855–1906) novel about decadence in fin de siècle Paris, Monsieur de Phocas (1901), the narrator refers to an instance in which a painter is accused of causing the death of his models. A cousin of the Duc de Fréneuse, who renames himself Monsieur de Phocas, tells the duke about an English portraitist, the unscrupulous Claudius Ethal, who has abandoned London for Paris, allegedly to escape prosecution for murder. In his studio Ethal keeps flowers (certain amaryllids and lilies) the scent of which made one of his patrons, the Marchioness of Beacoscome, feel as if she were dying. These flowers have the peculiar property of giving a pearly luster to the skin and causing delectable rings to appear around the eyes of those who breathe their scent, but in awakening the touching rings and the marvelous pallor, such flowers let loose a lethal miasma. For love of beauty or “a fervour for deep, drowned expressions and delicate ­flesh-tints,” Claudius Ethal would poison his models.2 According to a relative of Monsieur de Phocas, Pierre de Tairamond, Ethal used poisonous flowers to murder some society women 114



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who sat for their portrait. Unlike Parrhasius, Ethal does not kill the sitter for the sake of a particular expression needed for the portrayal of a particular subject matter. Rather the painter seeks a kind of beauty, one possessed by women who are ill with consumption. He also pays particular attention to the delicate flesh tones of his dying models. Ethal, in other words, would not murder for a particular facial expression; rather, he seeks a model with a particular mode of beauty.

Buono Legnani The main character of the Italian horror film The House with Laughing Windows (1976), directed by Pupi Avati (born 1938), is an ­a rt-restorer named Stefano. He arrives at an island where he is to clean a painting in fresco depicting a figure of the martyred Saint Sebastian. During the course of trying to solve the mysterious murder of a friend, Stefano learns that Buono Legnani, a syphilitic and insane “painter of agonies,” who committed suicide in 1931, originally painted the figure. For Legnani, representing death was his life, and he often depicted dying people, as well as corpses brought to him by his two sisters. Stefano also learns that the sisters killed the model for the figure in the painting he is restoring, so that their brother could convincingly represent “the real cruelty of martyrdom,” for only great artists are able to convey “a realistic sense of death.”3 In this instance, the sisters resemble the sultan in Carlo Ridolfi’s story of Gentile Bellini’s painting of a head of Saint John the Baptist. In that tale, the sultan kills a slave so that Gentile will have an accurate model for his painting and, therefore, will be able to convey “a realistic sense of death.”

Wolf Garcia and Seacliff In addition to the ­a lready-mentioned stories about criminal artists, there are some that mix aspects of Seneca’s paradigmatic tale about Parrhasius with elements of other stories, such as those in which the artist is a lover. For example, in Artists in Crime (1938), a novel by New Zealand’s most famous writer of murder mysteries, Ngaio Marsh (1895– 1982), the model is a woman and her lover, a sculptor, is her killer— at least he intends to kill her.4 The actual murderer is another artist, a woman. 115



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Marsh tells the story of one of Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn’s most challenging cases. Alleyn investigates the murder of a model named Sonia Gluck, which crime occurs at Tatler’s End, the residence of Agatha Troy, a famous painter, who hosts a kind of workshop at her place of residence. Eight of her fellow artists attend the workshop: three women and five men. All of the artists’ work from the model and one of them, a Frenchman named Francis Ormerin, openly rejects Surrealism, a style of art then in fashion. In effect, the murder of Sonia is set in motion by the art of a character named Cedric Malmsley who is illustrating a “de luxe edition of medieval romances.” At the moment, the subject of his illustration is the murder of a woman by her lover’s wife. The wife pushes a dagger through the underside of a bench and covers the blade with a cloth. When the husband presses his lover down on the bench, he unwittingly impales her on the knife and kills her. Troy obligingly invents a pose for Sonia that will suit Malmsley’s purpose. Sonia, who models in the nude and cannot hold a pose for a long period of time, has trouble getting into the correct position. In order to arrange Sonia in the required pose, Troy must push one of her shoulders down against the drapery covering the platform on which she lies. Several nights later, life begins to imitate art. One of the artists, who is alone in the studio, secretly pushes a dagger through the bottom of the platform on which Sonia will lie the next day and covers the weapon with some drapery. Next morning, Troy is absent; so, when Sonia tries to assume the, by now, usual pose, one of the other artists, the extraordinarily beautiful Valmai Seacliff, helps her and forcibly pushes one of her shoulders downward against the hidden knife, killing her. All of the evidence suggests that the only sculptor in the group, a man named Wolf Garcia, is responsible for the Sonia’s death. Eventually, however, Alleyn discovers the truth. Garcia planned the murder of Sonia and positioned the knife that killed her, but the active culprit is Seacliff. On the night before the murder, standing outside a window of the studio in which they all worked, she observed Garcia as he pushed the knife through the bottom of the model’s platform. Later, when she helps Sonia into the correct pose, Seacliff deliberately and unemotionally impales her. By that time, she has already poured nitric acid down Garcia’s throat, killing him almost instantly. Garcia and Sonia, who were lovers, had threatened Seacliff’s engagement to another of the artists, the wealthy aristocrat, Basil Pilgrim. Before he met Seacliff, Basil 116



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had a brief love affair with Sonia, who later became pregnant with Garcia’s child. At Garcia’s behest, Sonia had threatened to tell Basil’s father of her affair with his son and to make the false claim that Basil was the father of her baby. The character of each of the artists in Marsh’s novel, even the heroine Troy, is flawed. A few are simply despicable figures. In addition to being a blackmailer, the model, Sonia, is an attractive but “silly” woman. She has a strikingly beautiful body, but is “more like an animal than a reasonable” person. After Troy paints a portrait of Seacliff, the best painting Troy had ever made until then, Sonia literally defaces the work, enacting a kind of symbolic murder of the woman she perceives to be her sexual rival. Garcia, a Parrhasian “genius” without conscience, is described variously as “one of those incredible and unpleasant people with strict aesthetic standards, and no moral ones,” and as “a lecherous, thieving little guttersnipe who happens to be a superb craftsman.” Before the murder of Sonia, Garcia hypothetically asks Malmsley if he ever felt he would like to kill his mistress, “just for the horror of doing it.” Garcia concludes that murdering his mistress “wouldn’t be worth it.” Malmsley disagrees: He callously believes that “one has not experienced the full gamut of nervous luxury until one has taken a life,” a belief worthy of the Marquis de Sade. As inspector Alleyn discovers, Garcia lived “entirely for his work” and would “sacrifice himself and everyone else” to it. He arranged to kill Sonia, not for the horror of the act, but because he was afraid that she and her child would distract him from the making of his art. For Garcia, who in this regard resembles Parrhasius, art is larger than life. The active culprit, Seacliff is an “egomaniac” and a “narcissist.” When Troy asks her if, in one of her paintings, she has deliberately elongated Sonia’s legs, the latter replies, “Yes, I see her like that. Long and slinky.” Then, echoing a famous saying from Renaissance Italy, “Every painter paints himself,” she ungrammatically explains, “They say people always paint like themselves.” The figure of Sonia in Seacliff’s painting reflects her own physique. She also implies that she does not see the model, whom she eventually kills, as she really is. Rather in her painting Seacliff artfully transforms Sonia into a likeness of herself. Unlike Parrhasius, Michelangelo, and Giotto, Seacliff does not kill for the sake of her art, and she does not get away with murder. An officer of the law discovers her crimes, and she will surely pay the price for killing Sonia and Garcia, a model and a fellow artist, respectively. 117



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Mark Lewis The storyline of the British psychological thriller Peeping Tom (1960), directed by Michael Powell (1905–1990), also differs from Seneca’s paradigmatic tale, while keeping elements of it.5 The main character is an aspiring filmmaker and serial killer named Mark Lewis. He is an assistant to the cinematographer on the set of a movie, and like Parrhasius, also makes salacious images. In his spare time he takes photographs of scantily clad women in the rooms above a shop in which the proprietor sells the erotic pictures under the counter. Mark’s first victim is a prostitute, whom he murders while filming her with his camera. He focuses on the horror of her expression as she gradually realizes what is happening. Actually, he documents the entire event from the moment at night when he sees the woman on the street, to the next day when the civil authorities, having discovered her body, carry it away. Alone in his rooms, Mark develops the film and watches the footage of his crime. His second victim is an actress, who models for him on the set of the movie in which they are both involved. This time we learn of his ingenious weapon, a knife that springs from one of the legs of the tripod supporting his camera. In short, he kills with an instrument of his art, which he also uses to murder his third victim, a model who poses for his indecent photographs. Mark lives in the house in which he grew up, but has divided the first floor into apartments, which he rents out. One of his tenants is Helen, who lives with her blind mother. Helen takes pity on the reclusive Mark, and he begins to fall in love with her. He tells her of his father and his childhood. His father, a scientist interested in the effects of fear on the human nervous system, tormented the youthful Mark, using him as his subject. To collect material for his study, the father constantly recorded on film and on audiotapes his son’s every response to various strong stimuli. On one occasion the father puts a lizard in the young boy’s bed, terrifying him. The father also films the boy as he is brought to see his mother on her deathbed. Eventually Mark’s father publishes his findings in a ­multi-volume work. As the police begin to suspect him, Mark, who seems prompted by his love for Helen, briefly consults a psychoanalyst who knew and admired his father. Eventually Helen discovers Mark’s films and confronts him. To avoid arrest, Mark kills himself by impaling his neck on the knife in his tripod. As in his previous killings, he has attached a circular mirror to his camera so that he can simultaneously see and record his own fearful expression as he dies. 118



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Although Mark’s ­cold-hearted, cruel, detached father appears only briefly in the films and photographs taken when his son was a boy, he is central to the main story’s significance. His search for knowledge echoes the many comparisons of Parrhasius, Michelangelo, and Giotto to vivisectionists and anatomists. Like the visual artists in their search for knowledge of the human body, the father is a scientist who dissects his son’s juvenile emotions as if they were mere specimens of the human psyche. Like the fictive Parrhasius and Michelangelo, he values facial expression as a reflection of his son’s emotions. His callous and relentless investigation of his son’s psyche and expressions, however, produces the conditions in which Mark grows sociopathic. Mark kills people not simply to see their expressions, but to record their emotions as they see themselves murdered, and as they see their own horrified expressions reflected in a mirror, they know their death is being recorded. They die, not simply a victim, but also a witness to their own murder; they die, too, knowing that everything has been caught on film.

Albert Marcotto In an episode of the television series Medium, Albert Marcotto, a deceased artist and serial killer, speaks through Allison Dubois, a wife, mother, and psychic who works with the police on murder cases.6 In “Method to His Madness” (2006), the artist has returned to life, or more specifically to Allison’s dreams, because someone has poorly imitated his work, and he is concerned about his “reputation.” To Marcotto, women with “fresh skin” are like “perfect” canvases. Before his death, he mutilated his victims with geometrical patterns cut into their skin. Although each woman eventually bleeds to death, she becomes a work of art. On at least one occasion, before cutting a woman, Marcotto discussed the victim’s “legacy” with her. His intention, he says, is to give “some sort of lasting meaning” to the woman’s life. Everyone remembers, he claims through Allison, Lisa Gherardini (1479–1542) in Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503–1506) now in the Louvre, Paris; the model in Jan Vermeer’s (1632–1675) Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665) in Mauritshuis, The Hague; and the young woman in Andrew Wyeth’s (1917–2009) Christina’s World (1948) in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Great artists are like Leonardo da Vinci, Vermeer, and Wyeth, who made art that “lives forever,” and in the process gave the model in each painting a kind of immortality. Incidentally, Mona Lisa 119



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lives on in Nat King Cole’s (1919–1965) song of the same name, which becomes part of the soundtrack at an appropriate moment. In the crucial scene, which takes place in Allison’s dream, Marcotto tells his victim that his incisions will “hurt for only a minute.” Then, transformed by his “art,” she will be immortal. In her transformation from life to death, she will become an immortal work of art and, the implication is, she will also be immortalized as a human being. Like Parrhasius, Marcotto cuts the flesh of his model, though far more so, and like the fictional Michelangelo he kills a human being in order to transport her from the quotidian moment to eternity. Like his predecessors, he also has “a unique capacity for cruelty.”

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Death and Detachment Although this book is about fictional tales, we should notice that allegedly some artists have been susceptible to the kind of mentality mirrored in most of the stories examined herein. That mentality, according to Michel Delon, is archetypal and is reflected in the stories about the cruelty of artists towards a model.1 In other words, the tales reveal a pattern of attitudes and behavior that might be typical of some artists and perhaps even some other human beings in so far as they are in one sense or another imaginatively creative. For some artists, the creation of art involves an almost absolute detachment from their model.

­Jacques-Louis David According to report, the French painter ­J acques-Louis David (1748–1825) on occasion exhibited a cold detachment from the suffering of his models. For example, he allegedly attended the massacre of some political prisoners, including the Princess Marie Louise de Lamballe (1749–1792), at the Hotel de la Force in Paris in 1792, during the French Revolution. As he witnessed the massacre, David made sketches of the dead and dying, in effect, using them as models. While the artist was working, the painter ­Marie-Thérèse Reboul (1738–1805) asked him to explain himself. He answered, “I am catching the last convulsions of nature in these scoundrels.”2 David was oblivious to the cruel circumstances of the “scoundrels.” He was interested only in depicting their ­death-throes. A similar report concerning David is about an incident that allegedly took place two years later at the execution of two of the artist’s friends, the revolutionists Georges Danton (1759–1794) and Camille Desmoulins (1760–1794), who committed the crime of calling for moderation during the Reign of Terror. Supposedly, David, this 121



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time callously using his former friends as models, again took the opportunity to practice his art. 3 The broader implication is that David’s primary and overriding concern as a human being is his art; for its sake he detaches himself from the gruesome scenes around him. If he felt any affection and sympathy for his friends (or former friends), he suppressed it in order either to record the event, or to acquire knowledge useful in his paintings, or perhaps both.

Claude Monet An echo of David’s emotional detachment from dying and dead “scoundrels” appears in an account of Claude Monet’s (1840–1926) response to the death of his first wife, Camille Doncieux (1847–1879). Allegedly, the painter explained his thoughts and feelings to his friend Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929), who was twice prime minister of France. Clemenceau later reported that Monet said: I found myself staring at the tragic countenance [of my wife], automatically trying to identify the sequence, the proportions of light and shade in the colors that death imposed upon the immobile face. Shades of blue, yellow, gray, and I don’t know what. That’s what I had become. It would have been perfectly natural to have wanted to portray the last sight of one who was to leave us forever. But even before the thought occurred to record the face that meant so much to me, my first involuntary reflex was to tremble at the shock of the colors. In spite of myself, my reflexes drew me into the unconscious operation that is but the daily order of my life. Pity me, my friend.4

Monet’s desire to depict his beloved Camille in the last moments before her death is secondary to his interest in recording the colors of her face. To his credit, Monet seems to have sensed the cold detachment in his “involuntary reflex.”

Claude Lantier We should notice, too, that David’s and Monet’s alleged emotional detachment in the face of the death of loved ones is echoed in French author Émile Zola’s (1840–1902) novel, The Masterpiece (1886). Zola’s character, a painter named Claude Lantier, has a son, ­Jacques-Louis, who dies in his presence. Claude at first mourns the death of his child, but soon, distracted from his grief, he is captivated by his own 122



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“passion for art.” For Claude, the dead child is “no longer his icy son”: rather, the corpse is “merely a model, a subject, the strange interest of which stirred” him. Claude is not merely a neglectful father, but also a truly disturbed artist, “all excited and thrilled” by the sight of his dead child.5

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Afterword: Art and Life Reportedly, the Swiss sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) once famously declared, “In a fire, between a [painting by] Rembrandt and a cat, I would save the cat.” Giacometti’s declaration raises an important moral issue, one that is at the heart of the stories in this book.1 The cat represents life, even if not the highest form of life, but life nevertheless. One supposes that a sense of decorum would have prevented Giacometti from saving a flea or a mosquito in similar circumstances. Nevertheless, for Giacometti, life, at least at the level of the cat, is more important than art, even great art. As Giacometti surely realized, the choice between saving the cat’s life and rescuing a painting by an incompetent or mediocre artist, would be an easy one to make. If Giacometti is confident that he would choose to rescue a cat instead a picture by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), other people might find the choice a difficult one. Before taking action, they might consider the monetary value or perhaps the artistic quality of the painting and the identity of the cat. They might save their own cat from the fire, but not a stray. In different hypothetical circumstances the choice between art and life would be much easier to make. Asked to choose between saving from a fire a painting by Rembrandt and the life of a human being, most people would not hesitate to rescue the man, woman, or child. In most places, most people would consider failing to do so not only heinous, but also immoral. Not saving the human life would also be an affront to Rembrandt’s art, which is deeply moving, in part because it embodies and reflects his profound understanding of the mystery and value of human life. In other words, in similar circumstances, surely Rembrandt would have chosen to save the life of the man, woman, or child rather than his painting. 124



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Woody Allen Even though Giacometti was confident that he would rescue a cat, at least one fictional character has argued for a different decision in a similar situation. In Woody Allen’s (born 1935) film Bullets Over Broadway (1994), a playwright named Sheldon Flender poses a variation on Giacometti’s remark as a question to his friends: “Let’s say there was a burning building and you could rush in, and you could save only one thing: either the last known copy of Shakespeare’s plays or some anonymous human being. What would you do?” Flender answers his own question in this way: the copy of Shakespeare’s plays “is not an inanimate object! It’s art! Art is life! It lives!”2 In this case great art, because it is “life,” is more valuable than an anonymous human being, although apparently not as valuable as the life of an identifiable person whom one might know and perhaps love.

George Orwell on Salvador Dalí The choice between art and life has been a concern of other writers and artists, too. For example, in a review of The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, which was first published in 1942, the English essayist and novelist George Orwell (1903–1950), alludes to then current attitudes toward the criminal artist. After calling Dalí (1904–1989) a “brilliant draughtsman,” who is also “a dirty little scoundrel,” Orwell recalls that portion of Dalí’s fanciful autobiography in which the artist writes about the possibility of murdering his model and his beloved, future wife, Gala. Dalí explains that Gala arrived in his life in order to “annihilate and destroy his solitude” and to prevent him from working on his art. He says, too, that she anticipated his murderous desires towards her by asking to be killed. Dalí adds that “it was by no means a foregone conclusion that I would not end up doing what she asked me […]. Certainly no scruple of a moral nature could prevent me from committing such an act.”3 Such a declaration perverts the traditional belief that love brings forth art. Gala does not inspire Dalí to creativity; she prevents him from enjoying the solitude he needs to create art. Dalí’s definition in 1930 of “the purest surrealist act” is relevant here. Citing the Surrealist poet André Breton (1896–1966), he writes that such an act “would consist of going down to the street holding a revolver, and shooting at random, as much as one can, at the crowd.”4 125



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Dalí and Bréton repeat an idea expressed by the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) who once wrote, “The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!”5 Later, Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) made a similar claim: “Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.”6 Dalí seems to be likening the creative act, as understood by some Surrealists, to mass murder. In any case, he associates an aesthetic movement, Surrealism, and its artistic process with indiscriminate killing. In effect, Parrhasius has become a sociopath. Those who defend Dalí, Orwell explains, claim “a kind of benefit of clergy” for the artist. In other words, those who support Dalí believe that, generally speaking, artists inhabit their own moral universe; the “artist is to be exempt from the moral laws binding on ordinary people,” a sentiment that was later echoed by Sheldon Flender, in the film by Woody Allen mentioned previously. Flender believes that “Guilt is ­p etit-bourgeois crap. An artist creates his own moral universe.” 7 More recently (1997), a character in a popular television sitcom, Frasier, expresses a similar belief.8 In one episode titled “Liar! Liar!,” Frasier Crane, a radio personality, poses this question to his father and a few close friends: “Is it always morally wrong to lie?” A character nicknamed Bulldog, who has a radio talk show about sports, responds: “Yeah, like the lies you tell a chick in bed.” Seeing the look of disapproval on the faces of the other characters, Bulldog adds, “Hey, screw you guys! I’m an artist; we live by different rules.” According to Orwell in the then current moral climate, if an artist “can paint well enough to pass the test, all shall be forgiven” him. While Orwell agrees that an exceptional artist “must be allowed a certain amount of irresponsibility,” he also believes that even a gifted artist should not be allowed to commit murder with impunity.9 Because there is no record of Dalí ever having committed an actual murder, we must assume that Orwell responds to Dalí’s imagined acts of crime, specifically to his obscene fantasies of slaughter made public in his art and in his autobiography. Before the arrival of Gala, Dalí lived the solitary life of the painter who is devoted to his work, and like many of the artists discussed here, Dalí is willing—or at least says that he is willing—to commit murder, but not so that he may enhance or exhibit a particular skill, such as the lifelike representation of nature. Rather, as Orwell implies, Dalí fantasized about murder because Gala threatened his narcissism; she threatened his solitary devotion to the making of his ­self-absorbed art.10 126



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Clement Greenberg The moral issues raised by Orwell were also of concern for one of the most influential American art critics of the late twentieth century, Clement Greenberg (1909–1994), who was keenly aware of the social responsibilities of the artist. Greenberg did not tell a tale of a visual artist murdering his model, or of the choice an artist might make between his art and life. Rather, he is relevant in the present context because he wrote of an American poet who was indirectly involved in the killing of countless, innocent human beings and yet received an honor for his art. In 1949, a year after the Library of Congress had awarded the Bollingen Prize for poetry to Ezra Pound (1885–1972), who admired the dictator Benito Mussolini and collaborated with Italian Fascists during the Second World War, Greenberg wrote, “Life includes and is more important than art, and it judges things by their consequences.” Echoing Orwell, Greenberg also condemns the silliness which condones almost any moral or intellectual failing on the artist’s part as long as he [or she] is or seems a successful artist. It is still justifiable to demand that he [or she] be a successful human being before anything else, even if at the cost of his [or her] art. As it is, psychopathy has become endemic among artists and writers, in whose company the moral idiot is tolerated as perhaps nowhere else in society.11

Greenberg’s observation is relevant to the aberrant psychology present in the literary representations of such artists as Parrhasius, Giotto, Michelangelo, Guido Reni, Rubens, and Daniele Crespi and in the verbal ­self-representation of Dalí.

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Appendix A: Giovanni Paolo Marava, “A Turkish Spy on Giotto” From Giovanni Paolo Marana (1642–1693), Letters Written by a Turkish Spy, trans. William Bradshaw, 6th edition, 8 vols. (London, 1707), 6, 70–75.

To Dgnet Oglou My business in this place obliges me to keep company with all sorts of people. Hence I indifferently associate myself with statesmen, soldiers, courtiers, priests, fiddlers, mechanics, seamen, or persons of any profession, from whom I can hope for any improvement: For there is hardly so despicable a fellow in the world, who may not teach an inquisitive mind something, to which it was a stranger before. Sometimes I converse with painters, whom I generally find to be men of wit and sense, but very lewd and dissolute. However, they serve to divert my melancholy, to which thou knowest I am much inclined. For they are the merriest sparks in the world, abounding with smart repartees, jests and comical stories, besides a hundred mimical tricks of good buffoonery to make one laugh; that it is almost impossible to be sad in their company. They are most of them bred in the academy, or in colleges and schools where the sciences are professed: It being in a manner necessary, that men of this trade should have a smack of all sorts of Learning, and especially, that they should be indifferent good historians; they being many times desired to represent pieces of antique and modern history, without a pattern. They have a very facetious way also of telling a story to the life, as well as of drawing it so in picture. They would dissolve the most stiff and morose Hadgi.1 into laughter and jollity, to hear how gracefully they will ridicule the most serious Matters, and turn 129



Appendix A

everything into burlesque: For they are admirable satirists by nature. Yet these are not all alike, but differ in their tempers like other men. Some of them are proud and stately, others fawning and abject: And all of them great humorists. It was an odd whim of Maarten van Heemskerck, a famous painter, who was born at a village of the same name. He died in the year of the Christians’ Hegira 1574. 2 This man had amassed together in his ­l ife-time, a vast quantity of money; and having no wife or children, nor other relations of his own to leave it to, he was resolved to do something, for which he might be talked of after his death. I have heard of many dying men, that have had one caprice or other in making their last will and testament: But thou wilt say, this of Martin’s was singular. For, on his ­death-bed he bequeathed all his wealth to be distributed into equal dowries, or portions, wherewith to marry a certain number of maids of Heemskerck, his birthplace, yearly, on this condition, that the ­new-married couple, with all the wedding guests, should dance on his grave. It is necessary for thee to know that since his death there has been a great alteration of religion in those parts: The inhabitants, which in his time were Roman Catholics, are now all Protestants. And at the time of this change or reformation, as they call it, it was the general practice of the Protestants, to demolish all images and Crosses wherever they found them. Now, it was the custom of the Roman Catholics to set up a Cross at the end of every sepulcher of the dead. Yet, so great a veneration have the Heemskerckers for the memory of this painter, that whereas there is not a Cross to be seen standing in all the country besides; yet his, being of brass, remains untouched, as the only title their daughters can show to his legacy. It was a more cruel and inhuman caprice of an Italian painter (I think his name was Giotto) who designing to draw a crucifix to the life, wheedled a poor man to suffer himself to be bound to a cross for an hour, at the end of which he should be released again, and receive a considerable gratuity for his pains; but, instead of this, as soon as he had him fast on the cross, he stabbed him dead, and then fell to drawing. He was esteemed the greatest master in all Italy at that time; and having this advantage of a dead man hanging on a cross before him, there is no question but he made a matchless piece of work of it. As soon as he had finished his picture, he carried it to the pope, who was astonished, as at a prodigy of art, highly extolling the exquisiteness of the features and limbs, the languishing pale deadness of the 130



Giovanni Paolo Marava, “A Turkish Spy on Giotto”

face, the unaffected sinking of the head; in a word, he had drawn to the life not only that privation of sense and motion which we call death, but also the very want of the least vital symptom. This is better understood than expressed. Everybody knows that it is a masterpiece to represent a passion or a thought well and naturally. Much greater is it to describe the total absence of these interior faculties, so as to distinguish the figure of a dead man from one that is only asleep. Yet all this and much more could the Pope discern in the admirable draught which Giotto presented him. And he liked it so well that he resolved to place it over the altar of his own chapel: For thou knowest this is the practice of the Nazarenes to adore pictures and images. Giotto told him, since he liked the copy so well, he would show him the original if he pleased. What dost thou mean by the original? said the Pope. Wilt thou show me Jesus Christ on the cross in his own person? No, replied Giotto but I will show your Holiness the original from whence I drew this, if you will absolve me from all punishment. The good, old father, suspecting something extraordinary because the painter thus capitulated to him, promised on his word to pardon him, which Giotto believing, immediately told him where it was; and attending him to the place, as soon as they were entered, he drew a curtain back, which hung before the dead man on the cross, and told the pope what he had done. The Holy Father, extremely troubled at so inhuman and barbarous an action, repealed his promise, and told the painter he should surely be put to an exemplary death. Giotto, seeming resigned to the sentence pronounced upon him, only begged leave to finish the picture before he died, which was granted him. In the meanwhile, a guard was set upon him to prevent his escape. As soon as the pope had caused the picture to be delivered into his hands, he takes a brush, and dipping it in a sort of stuff he had ready for that purpose, daubs the picture all over with it, so that nothing could now be seen of the crucifix, but it was quite effaced in all outward appearance. This made the pope ­stark-mad: He stamped, foamed, and raved like one in a frenzy. He swore the painter should suffer the most cruel death that could be invented, unless he drew another just as good as the former, for if but the least grace was missing, he would not pardon him; but if he could produce an exact parallel, he would not only give him his life, but an ample reward in money. The painter, as he had reason, desired 131



Appendix A

this under the Pope’s signet, that he might not be in danger of a second repeal, which was granted him; and then he took a wet sponge, and wiped off all the varnish he had daubed on the picture, and the crucifix appeared the same in all respects as it was before. The Pope, who looked on this as a great secret, being ignorant of the arts which painters use, was ravished at the strange metamorphosis. And, to reward the painter’s treble ingenuity, he absolved him from all his sins, and the punishments due to them, ordering moreover his steward to cover the picture all over with gold, as a farther gratuity for the painter; and they say this crucifix is the original by which the most famous crucifixes in Europe are drawn. I need make no other reflection on this, than, that as the supposed murder of Jesus, the son of Mary is the source of all the Christians’ devotion, so the real homicide which this painter committed has made it more intense and fervent, by how much the crucifixes drawn after this pattern excel all those that were seen before them in the tragical portraiture of the martyred Messiahs. And from this reason it is that painters are in so great esteem among the Italians, because they form the Gods which those infidels adore. It is no wonder, therefore, that the chief head of their church should so easily absolve murder in a painter as a venial sin, especially when it is done in Ordine ad Deum, as the Jesuits say, that is, to promote God’s glory, as the pope easily persuaded himself this was; since idolatry is the main engine which supports the state and grandeur of the Roman court. And all the world knows that holy city is a type of heaven; or at least, the crafty priests would fain represent it so. My friend, thou and I have seen enough of their tricks and holy frauds in Sicily. Praise be to God they had not power to pervert us. Our faith remains inviolate; we still possess the integrity of Mussulmans [i.e., Muslims], the native attachment we owe to the Prophet, who was sent to exterminate idols. In a word, we adore none but one God, Creator of the worlds. May that Incomprehensible forever keep us in the same faith and practice, till the release of our souls. Paris, 13th of the 9th Moon, of the Year 1661.

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Appendix B: Adelbert von Chamisso, “The Crucifix: An Artist’s Legend” From Adelbert von Chamisso (1781–1838), “The Crucifix: An Artist’s Legend.” Trans. C.M. Aikman. Publications of the English Goethe Society. Vol. 7. 1893: 144–150.1 I. Before his work the master musing stood, And sullen rage alone possessed his heart As on it earnestly he gazed; he would Have fain despised himself; skill, patience, art. He on the Saviour’s form had spent in vain! ’Twas but dead form in which life had no part. What ne’er was flesh can ne’er experience pain. All unresponsive to Art’s vain demand, A frigid block the marble doth remain. Mere symmetry of form can ne’er command The traces of the ­a rt-trained chisel’s stroke To vanish at awakening Nature’s hand: “Oh, Nature, thee I earnestly invoke! Forsake not me, poor bungler! I would raise Thee to perfection’s height.” And, as he spoke, Beside him stood a youth, whose reverent gaze

Upon the work was fixed in wonderment. A student he of sculpture, one whose days In wooing favour of the Muse were spent. Long time he gazed, and, as he gazed, he thought: “How vain and idle my past efforts seem! Compared with this my art is but as naught!” To him the master: “Youth, dost thou then dream “That thou in this cold marble seest aught “Of life? May be, perchance, that thou dost deem, “By feignèd admiration of this stone, “Thus to insult my art, or would’st thou gain “A vision of man’s form when life has flown? [p. 145] “All efforts of my art, alas! are vain! “Death claims this marble block still as his own.” The stranger thus:—“Oh, wondrous man, I fain “Would grave deep in my mind the beauty rare

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“Of that great work of thine. What tho’ the face,— “The face of the Redeemer suffering there,— “Seems all too peaceful, ready to embrace “The calm repose of Death, and doth not wear “The look of pain, I heed not, for I trace “So much of beauty that I stand and gaze “With admiration in my heart alone! “The work that thou dost blame, I can but praise!” And while he speaks, the master’s eyes are thrown Upon the young man’s form. “Would Heaven but raise “A model such as he to be my own!” Such were the master’s thoughts, while he replied: “Thou find’st me well nigh driven to despair. “The look of suffering life in vain I’ve tried “To give to that cold marble standing there. “Nature hath now all farther aid denied. “In vain, alas! are all my skill and care! “A hirèd model here I cannot use, “And did I dare to ask thee for thine aid “Thou, my proud brother sculptor, wouldst refuse,” “Not so,” replied the youth, “be not afraid, “For whatsoever service thou mayst choose “To ask, will be by me most gladly paid, “For God’s great glory, and ray loved Art’s sake.” And, as he speaks, lo! on the master’s sight A vision full of beauty rare doth break. And fills his soul with transport of delight. And, as he looks, in vain he tries to shake His mind free from the thought, black as dark night,

Of how that form would look convulsed with pain! “Wouldst thou make good thy boast thou must, in sooth, “Hang from this cross for me, that I may gain “A vision of what suffering is in truth, “And yet redeem my work from being vain.” Then on the cross the youth is quickly bound, A willing victim in the cause of Art; And, lifting nails and mallet from the ground, The master now proceeds with ruthless heart To fathom to its depths that vast profound Of suffering anguish, and to play the part Of chronicler in stone of all he sees. The first nail pierces! Loud resounds a cry. It meets an ear deaf to its agonies, A heart that knows no pity, and an eye That waits, with awful earnestness, to seize Each new expression of fresh agony. Then quickly is the dreadful drama wrought, And at his task the master works apace. All efforts now he centres in one thought, A fearful look of joy lights up his face: For now he sees—what long in vain he sought— How lingering death its agony doth trace On its fair victim’s form. With ceaseless care, Hour after hour the chisel’s tireless stroke Carves out the image of that form so fair. And now skill, patience, art at length evoke The wondrous life that ­ere-while slumbered there. Nature, at last the spell of Death hath broke!

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But while the hand works on, the heart is dead, Dead to all human feelings, to the cries Of that poor sufferer on the cross o’erhead, Who prays in vain amidst his agonies. Thus time speeds on; and now three days are fled And, as the daylight of the third day dies, Low sinks the weary head beneath its load, And with a cry the pain and anguish cease:— “Why hast Thou thus forsaken me, my God!” ’Tis finished, finished too a masterpiece. II. “Why hast Thou thus forsaken me, my God!” Amidst the awful stillness of the night Rang forth the cry within God’s own abode. From whom it came none knew, save that a light Upon the vast cathedral’s altar stood, revealing, faintly outlined, to the sight The figure from whose mouth had come the cry. Mysterious were its movements. On the ground It flung itself, and then, as if to try And dull with cruel force the pain profound, That had wrung forth that cry of agony, Again, and yet again, until the sound Throughout the vast cathedral’s dome did ring. It beat its forehead on the cold hard stone. And then, as though o’ercome with suffering. Long time it seemed to weep and sigh and groan. Until the bitter tears relief did bring. Then when, at length, the night’s dark hours had flown,

And the grey morning dawned! all round was still. The strange mysterious figure, too, had fled. And now, ere long, the church begins to fill. In throng the worshippers, and, at their head, The choir. Along the aisle they pass until They reach the altar steps, when lo! strange dread And wondering admiration thrill their heart, For, there, a wondrous Crucifix they see But lately reared:—a work of marvellous art. ’Twas thus the ­God-Man suffered agony, ’Twas thus He played the Great Redeemer’s part, And sacrificed Himself to make us free. All penitent before the image fall, And seek for peace from Him at Whose command Alone peace comes. “Christ save us” loud they call. It scarcely seemed the work of human hand. For as they gaze, fresh wonder grows on all. Long time before the work amazed they stand. Who could thus carve in stone that Form Divine? How did it thus mysteriously arise Upon the lap of night? Ah, yes ’tis thine, Great master, who, withdrawn from human eyes, Hast long time wrestled with thy great design, Nor deemed aught too great a sacrifice. Spent in the cause of Art, couldst thou but gain Her highest prize! How shall we best reward Such noble ­self-devotion? Gold were vain To recompense such work. Let us award

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The ­laurel-wreath, this he will not disdain As worthy symbol of our high regard. In due procession quickly they repair. Laymen and priests alike walk side by side. And first walks he, who in his hands doth bear The ­laurel-wreath, as leader and as guide: And to the master’s dwelling thus they fare. But when they gain the house, lo! opened wide The portal stands, while all within is still. In vain they call aloud the master’s name, In vain with martial sounds the air they fill: No answer to their clamorous greetings came. For, in the dawning hour of morning chill, A figure clad in black, as though in shame. Or fear of being seen, had been descried Leaving the house. (Thus ran a neighbour’s tale.) The truth it seemed, for nowhere was espied A trace of human life. In vain they hail The master by his name; no voice replied. Through empty rooms they make their way, but fail To find aught that betokens life at all. At length they gain the studio: what they see— O’er that now let the veil of silence fall. III. They bring their prisoner home to try his crime; He has blasphemed their Prophet, and refused To reverence at the fitting time False Mahomet! Of this he is accused. ’Tis the strange pilgrim in a foreign clime,

Who sought beneath those palms, for time misused And sins committed, peace by penance done, Even he who told us of the holy tomb. Will he maintain his faith thus all alone, Beneath the shadow of impending doom? God grant him strength, now nobly to atone For crime, by showing in this hour of gloom A Christian’s steadfast faith though sorely tried! The choice is his:—either a martyr’s fate Or freedom in exchange for faith denied. His choice is made; they have not long to wait. Lo! there he comes with quick unfaltering stride, His face lit up with joy, deep, passionate, As though his great deliverance were at hand. Has he recanted? Nay, still on he’s led, Until beneath the cross at length they stand. “Let none shed tears for me,” the martyr said, “All feelings from my heart I sternly banned, “My ears were firmly closed, no tears I shed, “When on the cross that fair young form I bound.” And now, with brand of Cain upon his brow, Tormented by remorse, and grief profound, His guilt wrings forth the earnest prayer;—“Oh, Thou, “Who for my sins upon the cross wast bound, “And once did suffer death, grant to me now, “From torment of remorse, grant me release! “I do not hope, I do not ask for rest;

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“But that the torturing thought of guilt may cease. “Death and not life comes as a welcome guest, “Through it alone I may attain to peace. “Oh God of grace, grant me Thy pardon blest; “My Spirit I commit unto Thy care!” And as upon the cross they roughly bind Their victim, lo! his face seems now to wear A look of peace, as if Fate had been kind, And, as the cruel nails his flesh do tear, Straightway he seems to gain from inward pain Of torturing remorse, at length respite!

“Ora pro nobis” pray the faithful train Of those beside the cross, who watch the sight; His suffering cries to God. And now again The sun’s bright scorching rays are quenched in night. Thus two days pass, and still death doth delay. At length the third day dawns—the day of death: And, as the sun goes down at close of day. The victim cries out with his latest breath. And straining sight to catch its dying ray, “My God hath not forsaken me in death!”

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Appendix C: Nathaniel Parker Willis, “Parrhasius” From Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806–1867), “Parrhasius,” in Poem Delivered Before the Society of United Brothers at Brown University on the Day Preceding Commencement, September 6, 1831, with Other Poems (New York, 1831), 34–41.

“Parrhasius, a painter of Athens, among those Olynthian captives Philip of Macedon brought home to sell, bought one very old man; and when he had him at his house, put him to death with extreme torture and torment, the better, by his example, to express the pains and passions of his Prometheus, whom he was then about to paint.” Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy There stood an unsold captive in the mart, A ­g ray-haired and majestical old man, Chained to a pillar. It was almost night, And the last seller from his place had gone, And not a sound was heard but of a dog Crunching beneath the stall a refuse bone, Or the dull echo from the pavement rung, As the faint captive changed his weary feet. He had stood there since morning, and borne From every eye in Athens the cold gaze Of curious scorn. The Jew had taunted him

For an Olynthian slave. The buyer came, And roughly struck his palm upon his breast, And touched his unhealed wounds, and with a sneer Passed on; and when, with weariness o’erspent, He bowed his head in a forgetful sleep, Th’ inhuman soldier smote him, and, with threats Of torture to his children, summoned back The ebbing blood into his pallid face. ’Twas evening, and the ­half-descended sun Tipped with a golden fire the many domes

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Of Athens, and a yellow atmosphere Lay rich and dusky in the shaded street Through which the captive gazed. He had borne up With a stout heart that long and weary day, Haughtily patient of his many wrongs; But now he was alone, and from his nerves The needless strength departed, and he leaned Prone on his massy chain, and let his thoughts Throng on him as they would. Unmarked of him, Parrhasius at the nearest pillar stood, Gazing upon his grief. Th’ Athenian’s cheek Flushed as he measured with a painter’s eye The moving picture. The abandoned limbs, Stained with the oozing blood, were laced with veins Swollen to purple fullness; the gray hair, Thin and disordered, hung about his eyes; And as a thought of wilder bitterness Rose in his memory, his lips grew white, And the fast workings of his bloodless face Told what a tooth of fire was at his heart. ••••• The golden light into the painter’s room Streamed richly, and the hidden colors stole From the dark pictures radiantly forth, And in the soft and dewy atmosphere Like forms and landscapes magical they lay. The walls were hung with armor, and about In the dim corners stood the sculptured forms Of Cytheris, and Dian, and stern Jove, And from the casement soberly away

Fell the grotesque long shadows, full and true, And, like a veil of filmy mellowness, The ­l int-specks floated in the twilight air. Parrhasius stood, gazing forgetfully Upon his canvass. There Prometheus lay, Chained to the cold rocks of Mount Caucasus— The vulture at his vitals, and the links Of the lame Lemnian festering in his flesh; And, as the painter’s mind felt through the dim, Rapt mystery, and plucked the shadows forth With its ­f ar-reaching fancy, and with form And color clad them, his fine earnest eye Flashed with a passionate fire, and the quick curl Of his thin nostril, and his quivering lip, Were like the winged God’s, breathing from his flight. “Bring me the captive now! My hands feel skilful, and the shadows lift From my waked spirit airily and swift, And I could paint the bow Upon the bended heavens—around me play Colors of such divinity today. “Ha! bind him on his back! Look!—as Prometheus in my picture here! Quick—or he faints!—stand with the cordial near! Now—bend him to the rack! Press down the poisoned links into his flesh! And tear agape that healing wound afresh! “So—let him writhe! How long Will he live thus? Quick, my good pencil, now! What a fine agony works upon his brow!

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Ha! ­g ray-haired and so strong! How fearfully he stifles that short moan! Gods! if I could but paint a dying groan! “‘Pity’ thee! So I do! I pity the dumb victim at the altar— But does the robed priest for his pity falter? I’d rack thee though I knew A thousand lives were perishing in thine— What were ten thousand to a fame like mine? “‘Hereafter!’ Ay—hereafter! A whip to keep a coward to his track! What gave death ever from his kingdom back To check the skeptic’s laughter? Come from the grave ­to-morrow with that story, And I may take some softer path to glory. “No, no, old man! we die E’en as the flowers, and we shall breathe away Our life upon the chance wind, even as they! Strain well thy fainting eye— For when that bloodshot quivering is o’er, The light of heaven will never reach thee more. “Yet there’s a deathless name! A spirit that the smothering vault shall spurn, And like a steadfast planet mount and burn; And though its crown of flame Consumed my brain to ashes as it shone, By all the fiery stars! I’d bind it on! “Ay—though it bid me rifle My heart’s last fount for its insatiate thirst— Though every ­l ife-strung nerve be maddened first— Though it should bid me stifle The yearning in my throat for my sweet child,

And taunt its mother till my brain went wild— “All—I would do it all— Sooner than die, like a dull worm, to rot— Thrust foully into earth to be forgot! Oh heavens—but I appeal Your heart, old man! forgive—ha! on your lives Let him not faint!—rack him till he revives! “Vain—vain—give o’er! His eye Glazes apace. He does not feel you now— Stand back! I’ll paint the ­death-dew on his brow! Gods! if he do not die But for one moment—one—till I eclipse Conception with the scorn of those calm lips! “Shivering! Hark! he mutters Brokenly now—that was a difficult breath— Another? Wilt thou never come, oh Death! Look! how his temple flutters! Is his heart still? Aha! lift up his head! He shudders—gasps—Jove help him!— so—he’s dead.” ••••• How like a mounting devil in the heart Rules the unreined ambition! Let it once But play the monarch, and its haughty brow Glows with a beauty that bewilders thought And unthrones peace forever. Putting on The very pomp of Lucifer, it turns The heart to ashes, and with not a spring Left in the bosom for the spirit’s lip, We look upon our splendor and forget The thirst of which we perish! Yet hath life Many a falser idol. There are hopes Promising well, and ­love-touched dreams for some,

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And passions, many a wild one, and fair schemes For gold and pleasure—yet will only this Balk not the soul—Ambition only, gives, Even of bitterness, a beaker full! Friendship is but a ­slow-awaking dream, Troubled at best—Love is a lamp unseen, Burning to waste, or, if its light is found, Nursed for an idle hour, then idly broken— Gain is a grovelling care, and Folly tires, And Quiet is a hunger never fed— And from Love’s very bosom, and from Gain, Or Folly, or a Friend, or from Repose— From all but keen Ambition—will the soul Snatch the first moment of forgetfulness To wander like a restless child away. Oh, if there were not better hopes than these— Were there no palm beyond a feverish fame—

If the proud wealth flung back upon the heart Must canker in its coffers—if the links Falsehood hath broken will unite no more— If the ­deep-yearning love, that hath not found Its like in the cold world, must waste in tears— If truth, and fervor, and devotedness, Finding no worthy altar, must return And die of their own fullness—if beyond The grave there is no heaven in whose wide air The spirits may find room, and in the love Of whose bright habitants the lavish heart May spend itself—what t­ hrice-mocked fools are we!

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Appendix D: Espy W.H. Williams, “Parrhasius; or, Thriftless Ambition” Thriftless Ambition: A Dramatic Poem (New Orleans, 1879). The Studio of Parrhasius (Parrhasius at work upon his painting of “Prometheus Bound.” Theon seated near.) Theon. Ambition? Fame? Beware, beware, Parrhasius!å Who tempts the envy of the gods courts ruin. Such fame as men award their honored kind, The fame of good deeds, charity, and love, Brightens Olympus with a smile, and, yes! Makes us in nature gods, though not in name. But such as thou wouldst strive for, such as lives Alone the symbol of imperious self, That shun! It is the gods’ prerogative. They have themselves forewarned us from it! Think Of Phaeton; yes! and Prometheus, Whose expiating tortures thou wouldst paint. Parrhasius. A Socrates! a very Socrates! We now have two in Athens. Theon. Scoff not so.

I am not worthy to be liked to him Whose greatness hath appalled our worthiest great. Not so, Parrhasius. Parrhasius. Well, he is the greater. Theon. Ay, greatest! See in him thy best example. He sought not greatness, but being greatly good, The gods, the world, have thrust it nobly on him. Oh, such a man is he, indeed, Parrhasius, ’Tis shameful, being men, we are unlike him! Parrhasius. Words, Theon! naught but idle, misspent words. Young as I am, I am too old to learn. I love not those poor, vain, ­selfimmolators— Philosophers—whose barren lives distill But envious gall to blight the lives of others. Saving thee, Theon—thee I truly honor. Thy friendship is most welcome; give it still;

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For, to be friend of such a man as thou Is of itself a praise too dear to squander. Theon. A seeker still, a hoarder still of praise. Parrhasius. But for thy lessons, give me less of them, And I will give thee greater love. Theon (aside). ­Self-love! Parrhasius. Even as thou didst speak, to freeze me from it, I felt my blood grow warm, my soul grow great, O’erteeming with my purpose! Even now I feel the inspiration growing on me; Coursing my veins, and filling all my being With strong, invigorating, strange delight. Dost think that now I could forego my purpose? Destroy my parchment? free my prisoner? —And, by the gods, I do believe they sent him! Never was so ­Prometheus-like a face And form!—Dost dream that now, and at a bidding, I could forswear a ­l ife-long cherished hope? No! “Wouldst thou do it were the part thine own? Thou lov’st Philosophy—’tis thy life’s life! Canst thou forswear it? ridicule it? scorn it? In one quick moment root from out thy heart The garnered harvesting of all thy past? Thou wouldst ask this of me! Do thou the same, And I with thee join hands and—die forgotten. You pause? Reluctance clouds your face! Why, then, Prometheus and I shall live forever! Stay, and behold me work.

Theon (rising). And do a murder. Parrhasius (laughing). Why, what is one man’s life to that dear fame Which shall outlive the lives of centuries? If thou wilt stay, ’tis well; if not, farewell. And yet, methinks, the sight were worth the staying; Time might grow gray nor gaze on such another. Theon. Alas! your laughter yet may be a wail, Your impious fame prove misery. Parrhasius (calling). Ho, Damon! Theon. I will not stay to hear or witness more; But this remember: When the time shall come That thy own life shall prove thy greatest curse, And this one deed its climax, then recall That once thine own hand clasped the cup of peace; And when thy friend urged thee to drink, with scorn And laughter thou didst dash it from thee. Damon (entering). Master? Theon (going). Farewell, Parrhasius. Parrhasius. Friend, fare thee well. (He conducts Theon to the door. Theon goes. Then returning, addressing Damon.) Parrhasius Slave, The captive whom I purchased, is he fed? Strengthened with wine? Damon. He has been feasted, master. Parrhasius. Feasted is well; I would not have him weak,

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For half the misery of pain is lost Upon your wasted frames. Prometheus Was strong, and hence his agony was great. Damon, the captive, spite his grizzled head, Is strong? At least, the wine should make him strong. Damon. He is strong, master, strong without the wine; But having wine his strength seems in his tongue. Parrhasius. Tongue? tongue? Talks he? Damon. Incessantly, and loud; Bewails his fate, and curses us and thee. Tells how he is himself a freeman born; At first betrayed by friends, at last by foes, And brought now to be sold a very slave Like to the very soil that nourished him. Parrhasius. Talks? talks? ’Tis strange I did not think of that. It will not do! Talks loud, about himself? Why, then, the dotard might unstring my nerves; Ay, lash me with his tongue into a qualm, And rob me both of mastery and fame. Ere I should run such venture I would— Damon! Damon. Well, master? Parrhasius (after a pause). There is one way, Damon, one; Cut out his tongue, deep, to the very root. Go, quickly, Damon; for the time draws nigh For our—yes! our Prometheus to be tortured. The vultures, too, ha! ha! our vultures, Damon! Have them in readiness unto our call. Mind, cut unto the root!

(Damon goes out. Knocking heard without.) Who knocks? Lydia (without). ’Tis I. Parrhasius (opening the door). My Lydia! Lydia (entering). Oh, my own Parrhasius! Parrhasius. (Embraces her. A pause.) Well? Now, by our sweet Diana, thou art dumb, And yet dost look a volume of strange words. Lydia. Tell me, Parrhasius, truly, dost thou love me? Parrhasius. As I do life—nay, more; as I do fame. Dost doubt me? Lydia. Doubt thee? No! and yet, Parrhasius— That was a foolish question that I asked!— Yet, if thou lov’st me, I would— (She pauses as if abashed.) Parrhasius. Speak thy wishes. Let them be numbered as the drops of rain, And each a favor priceless as its balm, As raindrops live anew in blooming flowers, So shall thy wishes blossom to fulfilment. Lydia. Dear! Listen. Thou dost know my life’s poor story; How like a starless night, whose dews were all The deep, cold damps of sorrow, it did drag Through childhood motherless; through youth, by force Orphaned of him whose being gave my own—

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Till thou didst rise upon it like a sun, To gild it with thy mighty, gorgeous splendor, And warm it with thy love. Parrhasius. And yet one grief Still lingered, Lydia; thou shouldst not forget— Lydia. My father? No! ’tis he I come to speak of. We thought him dead, Parrhasius; but he lives! Parrhasius. Lives? Lydia. Yes, lives! lives, and I have seen him. Oh, My eyes ne’er drank so dear a sight before! Parrhasius. Nor ever have my ears drank in such music. Lives? Lydia. Yes! I passed a slave mart, all by chance, And there, bound like a dog, I saw him. Yes! ’Tis no wild vision; no false hope, Parrhasius. Be patient. Parrhasius. Patient? Bid me cease to breathe! Lydia. At first I thought to fling myself before him, Proclaim him as my father, even there, And bid the cruel merchant bind me, too, Or else free him, for we should be together. But then there came a fear, a chilling doubt, That his might be a fancied likeness only. I sought the merchant, questioned him at length, And gained the proof, past doubt, that ’twas my father. I asked his price: Ten minae! That was all I stayed to hear. I thought of thee; flew hither,

And found thee not, Parrhasius! Oh, the time Waiting thy coining was so slow to pass, Each fleeting second seemed a century! Parrhasius, dear Parrhasius! Oh, my love, Each moment makes his cruel bondage longer! Oh, let me fly to him, ransom in hand, And clasp him to my heart, my father! Parrhasius (fondly). Precious!— “What treasures the gods give us in our children; Eternal benedictions on our lives! Here, take the sum; were it an ­hundredfold, Thou couldst not ask it twice. ’Twas thine unasked. All that I am or would be is but thine. Lydia. As all I am is thine, Parrhasius. Parrhasius. Go! Lose not a moment! “Would I could go with thee; But I must work, my Lydia—work for thee! Now while the spirit spurs me in my breast, And fills me with forethoughts of victory. Lydia. Thy great Prometheus? Parrhasius. My mighty work! My masterpiece—the world’s great wonder! So, one, one more kiss! Now, to thy father go! (He conducts her to the door fondly. She goes out) Surely she is a goddess in disguise! She is more beautiful than all her kind; More purely virtuous than she is fair. (Then closing and fastening the door.) But now to work. —Work! work! There is a spell

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In that one word, more potent, ­f amecompelling, More winning of the halcyon joys of heaven, Than the Chaldean’s loud, ­earth-rending charms, Or incense incantations e’er can boast! Twas work that made a god of Hercules! (Calls.) Damon! Damon (entering). Well, master? Parrhasius. Is it done? Damon. It is. He cannot speak, but now he looks his thoughts. Parrhasius. So would I have him, Damon, if his thoughts Are terrible with speechless hate and pain. The torturers—our vultures—are they ready? Damon. They wait thy orders. Parrhasius. Let them enter. (Damon goes out and returns with two Ethiopian slaves. Parrhasius continues.) Slaves, Ye are my bondmen, flesh and blood, my dogs; But your redemption is at hand. Perform Your task of torture, horribly and sure, And the last breath your quivering victim draws Shall bid ye breathe in freedom. Only this: Prolong his agony till I cry, Done! If ye should fail in that, your death be dogs’! Let him be brought. (Damon and the slaves go out. Presently they return, bringing in the captive,

bound to a rack which is carried like a litter. Damon is pale and trembles.) Parrhasius. There, Damon, place him there, Where the bright light shall fall the strongest on him, So.—Why, thou’rt pale and trembling? Damon! Go! (Damon goes out quickly.) If I can free these Ethiopian dogs, I should free Damon too, and so I shall. His part is full as hard, he more deserving. (He approaches and gases upon the captive for a few moments in silence; then continues.) There is a powerless fury in that gaze; Rebellious resignation in that pose. ’Tis great! Old man, though thou shalt die this life, Live but a little thus, and thou shalt live To know no death, forever on my parchment! Think, what a glorious fame, in aftertime To thrill the souls of mute admiring men With the appalling thought, that that man lived! He was no dream! he was a real Prometheus! —Look at his scorn! by all the gods, sublime! Slaves, quick, begin! Ha! that is well! Spare not. Only, beware, let him not die too soon. (The Ethiopians torture the captive. During the torturing Parrhasius paints rapidly, talking from time to time while he works.) —Would that my pencil had the lightning’s touch, Quick and indelible, to catch and fix That flash of agony! It came and went having no space of time Betwixt its birth and dying. —He smiles, even in pain, like one who smiles, Unconscious, in the midst of horrid dreams,

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And knows not of his own lip’s mockery. —He writhes! they touch his vitals! See! He faints? Let him not die! Wine, give him wine, you dogs! So, so. Wait now till he is conscious. —There is no meaning in a dead man’s grin, Save that it is an epitaph of pain. Prometheus was not dead, his pain was living, Was an eternal life; that was its curse! Yes, by the gods, it is his punishment, And not his sin, hath made Prometheus famous. —Once more, my vultures, once again your parts. —See! see! Each particle of flesh seems living; And with a separate life would strive to burst From his torn carcass, and so fly its misery! Oh, only could a god, an angered Jove, Dream or enforce so dread a torture! —Again, wine! wine, ye dogs! Prop up his head. So. What a look was that! Were those eyes charged with lightning, they would blast me. He sickens with the thought that they are powerless. (He laughs.)—Again, once more, my vultures. —What a sigh! It is as if the ­earth-bound spirit struggled A captive to the flesh, and would be free; And in that moan there was a prayer for death So great, it might have startled Atropos, Pitying, to cut his ravelled skein too soon. —Can he be dying now? So soon? No! no! More wine! Feed him with life! He must not die! Spare him only a little yet, great Jove! —Only a little yet, and all is done;

And thou shalt be at rest, old man, in death. Truly, I pity thee! Thou art so strong, So godlike in thy harmony of strength, That thus to tear thee from the eyes of men Indeed were cruel—but that thou shouldst live, ­New-born, in my Prometheus. —Slaves, you tremble? Beware, your wage is freedom, or ’tis death! Quail not, nor let him die ere I have done; For then ye should yourselves make good your failure, Even upon his rack, and torn as he! —Ha! so! That look, that throe! Sublime! sublime! Again, force him to that again, and if I can but fix it! Ha! there! Good! good! good! All Hades centers in that glance! He gasps? So, it is done! Ha! ha! He dies! he dies Well, well, ’tis not too soon! Go, freedmen, go! (The Ethiopians rush out. Parrhasius sinks into a seat, exhausted, laughing hysterically, and gazing triumphantly at his work.) Dead! dead! But there he lives eternally! Lydia. (Without, knocking at the door) Parrhasius! Parrhasius. Ah! Lydia (without). Parrhasius! Parrhasius. It is Lydia. She should not enter here— the body here! Lydia. Keep me not longer from thee! This delay confirms me in my sweet surmising. Oh, Thou jewel of all men, my own Parrhasius!

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Parrhasius (rising). By Venus, she shall enter! So, this curtain, Thou poor old man, shall be thy gorgeous pall. (Then standing over the body.) His face is calm; he smiles as dreaming sweetly; No sign of pain, not even the cold dew That beaded all his brow in agony. Yet it was terrible! Damon was pale With but the thought of it; and the poor blacks Shivered unto their bones, and fled in fright And left him here, forgetting their last duty. Lydia (knocking). Parrhasius, why, why do you keep me waiting? Parrhasius. Am I forgetful too? Yes, Lydia. (He covers the body; then opens the door.) Lydia (entering and embracing him.) Dearest! Oh, I could hang forever on thy neck— Parrhasius. And there would shine a circlet all of love, Priceless beyond all price. But, love, thy father? Lydia. Parrhasius, do you ask me? Ransomed, surely. Parrhasius. Then I am trebly happy! Most in thee, Whose delicate nature hath inwrought my life With a bright tale, of woes o’ercome by joys, In that strange, marvellous broidery, called Love. Next in thy father, who in having thee Blest me, and lives now to be blest by me. And, lastly, in my great Prometheus. But, love, where is thy father? Lydia.

Guess you not? Oh, speak, Parrhasius; it is thou must answer! I have been patient till I almost die. Parrhasius. You have been patient? Why, love? Lydia. O Parrhasius Must I then weep, and yet you will not melt? Parrhasius. Tears? tears? This is too much! What is it, love? The dew gems of thine eyes are far too precious To scatter thus, and without reason. Nay, Look up! What is it thou canst wish? Lydia. My father. Parrhasius. Thy father! What! have you not seen him, then? Not ransomed him? Lydia. He was already ransomed. Parrhasius. Already ransomed? Did you not bespeak him? He was already ransomed, love, by thee, Wanting alone the silver counted down. The merchant would not break his word. You smile? Ah! some old friend, passing perchance like thee, Discovered him, and, for old friendship’s sake, Freed him at once from bondage? Is’t not so? Lydia. Yes, a true friend, an unknown friend, has freed him. Parrhasius. An unknown friend? Lydia. Unknown to him; to me Known, oh, so truly, dearly! Dear Parrhasius,

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That friend, by some strange chance winning my secret, Ere I had thought that it had left my keeping, Ransomed my father, that to him, alone, I still might owe my greatest, dearest blessings. Parrhasius. Thou must repay the ransom twice—ay, thrice! Lydia. Nay! I will pay it o’er a ­t housand-fold, In coin more precious than the purest gold, Yet count the reimbursement scant. Thou, thou, My own Parrhasius, thou didst ransom him! And I can only pay thee back with love, with life. (Parrhasius starts, aghast, as if by some terrible thought.) Where is my father? Speak! Too long, too long Have I forborne thy playing with my patience! The merchant’s tale was plain. Scarce had I left him, When thou didst pass, and—yes, it must be thus! Some one who had o’erheard my talk betrayed me— And with no question thou didst pay the sum And take my father with thee. Even, Parrhasius, The very time that I did seek his ransom, He was beneath thy roof, free—freed by thee! And, unkind husband, yet indeed how kind, You let me forth upon a fruitless search. Yet I forgive; for surely ’twas thy purpose Thus to give keener relish to my joy. Parrhasius (aside). Prometheus! O Prometheus! Lydia (impatiently). Speak, Parrhasius! Where is my father?

Parrhasius (as before). Jove, where are thy thunders? Lydia. Parrhasius? This—this is not well, Parrhasius. Thy silence chills me with a dreadful fear, Of what I know not—yet it crazes me! Speak! Ha? (She sees the painting, and with a scream advances toward it, eying it searchingly.) That face?—that seems my father’s face! Oh, speak, Parrhasius! Heard I not a groan, Oh, very faint, and yet so full of pain, Just ere I paused without the door? Silent? Still silent?—Then I did!— Was it my father’s? If you do love me, pity me and speak. —Silent? That face! that agony! O gods! But I will find him! Murderer, where is he? (She starts frantically, about to leave the room, and sees the corpse. She stops suddenly, for a moment appalled, then rushes to it and lifts the covering.) This, this, this! O ye gods, have ye no vengeance? (She falls fainting on the body.) Parrhasius (rushing to her and raising her in his arms). Call down no greater vengeance—this has crushed me. She does not breathe; have I done double murder! Theon (without, knocking). Parrhasius. Parrhasius (not hearing). Oh, thou blighted, frozen lily! If thou art dead, I cannot blame the gods, For I—I am unlit to keep thee. Theon (as before). Friend! Parrhasius (still unheeding). Open thine eyes, though they should scorn me!

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I would kiss thee, but that my kiss might kill thee, And send thy spirit, shrinking from my breath, Poisoned, to the remorseless shades of Hades. Thou wert my all; I loved thee more than fame, And yet for fame have murdered thee! O Lydia! Theon (as before). Parrhasius. Parrhasius (hearing).

Theon? (Then after a pause) Enter, friend. Theon (entering, seeing and comprehending). Woe! Woe! Oh, my Parrhasius! where is now thy glory? Parrhasius. Behold!—thy prophecy. Thus do the gods Inflict our punishments with our own hands, And scourge us mortally with our own errors! —O Lydia, Lydia!

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Appendix E: Pierre Louÿs, “The Man in Purple” From Pierre Louÿs, “The Birth of Prometheus,” Munsey’s Magazine, 68 (October 1919–January 1920), 81–91. Trans. B.J. Stolper.

I. In the green gardens of white Ephesus, we were two young apprentices, with Bryaxis, the gray ancient. The old man had just seated himself on a bench of stone as colorless as his own face. He said nothing, but drew careful, aimless lines in the dust with the end of his worn staff. Out of respect for his great age, and for the great and even more venerable glory that was his, we remained standing, our backs against two dark cypresses. We did not venture to open our lips as long as he remained silent. Motionless, we stared at him with a sort of worship of which he seemed aware. Our young hearts warmed toward him as toward a lone survivor of those great departed whom we wished we had known. We loved to have him show himself to us, mere children that we were, born too late to hear the heroic voices; and, foreboding future days in which no man would see him more, we sought in silence the invisible clues which bound this man to his remarkable achievements. That brow had conceived, that thumb had modeled in the clay sketch, a frieze and twelve statues for the tomb of Mausolus; the five colossi reared before the city of Rhodes; the Bull of Pasiphaë, which made to dream the eyes of women; the formidable Apollo of bronze; and the Seleucos Triumphant of the new capital [i.e., Antioch, founded by Seleucus Nicator]. The more I contemplated their maker, the more it appeared to me that the gods must have fashioned with their hands this 151



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sculptor of light, before descending unto him, that he might reveal them to men. Suddenly a rapid step, a shrill whistle, a gay call—and little Ophelion bounded among us. “Bryaxis!” he exclaimed. “Hark to what the whole city knows already. If I am the first to tell you, I’ll offer—a bean to Artemis. But first, greetings! I had forgotten.” Out of the corner of one eye he gave us a quick wink that might have passed for a greeting, unless it was meant to signal: “Prepare to marvel!” And immediately after he plunged into his news. “Did you know, best of old men, that Clesides was doing the queen’s portrait?” “It was mentioned to me,” answered Bryaxis. “But the end of the story—was that mentioned, too?” “So there is a story?” “Is there? You do not know a thing! Clesides came quite expressly from Athens, eight days ago. They led him to the palace; the queen was not ready. She had the temerity to be a little late. At last she appeared on the scene, greeted her painter with a bare nod, and posed—if you call it posing. It seems she fidgeted incessantly, under the pretext Sappho once gave. Clesides blocked in as well as was possible, with a good many gesticulations, and in vile bad humor, as you can imagine. His very sketch had not been finished, when lo and behold, the queen whirled about and declared she wished to pose for her back!” “She gave no reason?” “Her back, she said, is as perfect as the rest of her, and must appear in the painting, too. In vain Clesides protested that he is a painter and not a sculptor; that no one peers behind a panel; that it is impossible to draw, on the same surface, a woman in the round. She replied that it is her will; that the laws of art are not her laws; that she has seen the portrait of her sister as Persephone, of her mother as Demeter, and that she, Stratonice, all by herself, will pose as the Three Graces!” “That’s not bad,” said Bryaxis. “Continue.” “Clesides was raging angry, the more so that he betrayed nothing. He completed his study of the back, the queen rose, demanded that he come again next day; he accepted and left her.” Ophelion crossed his arms truculently. “Next day, do you know who was there, waiting for him? A ­servant-girl, on a footstool! ‘Stratonice,’ she said, ‘is tired this morning. She will not sit for you any more, master; and so I have taken her place, because the picture must be finished. That is what she has decided!’” 152



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We shouted with laughter, and even Bryaxis hardly suppressed a smile. “The slave was not badly made,” Ophelion continued gaily. “Clesides clung to his scruples to the extent of giving her cramps of stiffness, that she might the more nearly resemble her mistress. Then he informed her dryly that he had no further need of her and went back to his lodgings with his sketches.” “Good for him!” I cried. “The queen was making a ­laughing-stock of him.” “On the way, as Clesides was passing along the mole of the merchants, he perceived a sailor who, someone had told him, visited the queen in secret, though no one had proof of the fact. It was Glaucon; you know him. Clesides had him brought to his lodgings, paid him, posed him, and four days later had finished two cartoons, which showed him and the queen in each other’s arms.” “Precisely what she had bargained for,” I interrupted. “Rather more than less. Last night—at what hour nobody knows— Clesides fastened the two painted panels to the wall of the palace of Seleucos. I suppose he managed to escape in some vessel after his public vengeance, for there was not a trace of him to be found.” “The queen will surely die of rage!” we exclaimed. “The queen? She knows all about it, by now; and if she is furious at bottom, she hides the fact wonderfully. The whole morning, an enormous crowd surged in front of those scandalous bulletins. Someone told Stratonice, who demanded to see them, too. Followed by eighty persons of her court, she walked down and paused before each of the two subjects, approaching and retreating, in order to judge by turns detail and ensemble. I was there in the crowd. And as I followed her, shivering with my eyes, asking myself which of us she would have put to death, her fury broke. ‘I do not know which is the better,’ she said calmly, ‘but both are excellent.’” We clamored approval, but Bryaxis merely raised his eyebrows, and his lined face took on the additional furrows of surprise and respect. “She has proved at least no less temperamental than impudent,” he remarked. “The story is really odd. But why so exultant, children? It seems to me that the role of the artist was hardly as telling as that of the model, in the anecdote I have just heard.” “Exultant!” retorted Ophelion. “If the queen had dared, she would have had Clesides pursued even beyond the seas, and killed like a dog. 153



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But then the whole Greek world would have considered her a barbarian woman—she who longs to believe herself an Athenian. Stratonice holds Asia in her hand like a bit of rag; yet she gave way before a man whose sole weapon was a ball of wax. In these days the artist is the king of kings, the only inviolable being that lives under the sun. That is why we’re so exultant!” The old man curled his lips disdainfully. “You are young,” he replied. “In my time, too, they repeated the same formula, and perhaps with more reason. When Alexander timidly attempted to explain why such and such a painting seemed good to him, my friend Apelles bade him be still, saying the very youngsters who ground his colors were laughing at him; and Alexander apologized. Ah, well! I have never found that that sort of anecdote was worth the trouble taken to relate it. No matter what the respect or the arrogance of the king toward the contemporary painter, the paintings are neither the better nor the worse for it. All that is a matter of great indifference. But on the contrary, it may be good, and even great, that an artist dare and have the strength to set himself, not merely above some king whose army passes along his walls, but above and higher than human laws, higher even than divine laws, on the day when his muses command him to tread underfoot that which is not of them.” Bryaxis had risen. “Who has done that?” we murmured. “None, perhaps,” said the old man, a dream of far days in his eyes, “none, unless it were Parrhasius. And yet, did he do well? I believed so, once. Today, I no longer know what to think.” Ophelion threw me a puzzled glance; but I could tell him nothing. “We do not understand you,” I said to Bryaxis. He strove to set us on the track. “The Prometheus,” he said in a whisper. “Yes?” “You do not know? You do not know how Parrhasius painted the Prometheus of the Acropolis?” “We have not been told.” “You know nothing of that horrible scene—of the tragedy of death and groans out of which came that painting, in blood, like a child from a ­birth-bed of pain?” “Speak! Tell us the whole scene; we know nothing of it.” For an instant the gaze of Bryaxis hung suspended above our young 154



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heads, as if he were hesitating to plunge into our souls, so suddenly, such a recollection. Then he seemed to come to a resolution. “Very well! Yes—I will tell you.” II.

What I mean to recount to you, young men, took place in the last year of the hundred and seventh Olympiad—the same year in which Plato died. It is quite fifty years ago. I was then in Halicarnassus, and had just completed, after five years, my part of the work on the tomb of Mausolus. I was starting for Chalcis. “The Euripus,” I said to myself, “is not over wide; and from Aulis, by way of Tanagra and the Archanian road, I shall soon reach Athens.” The sea voyage was disagreeable. I was very shabbily treated, although I took up but little room in my corner. Of course, my name had not then the repute it carries today; and the Mausoleum was much too new to elicit great respect. I was a citizen of Athens; the other passengers inquired no further. Athens had been unfortunate, and that was enough to draw their jeers and insults to her and to me. One morning, when the sun had already passed the peaks of the eastern heights, we landed at Chalcis, in the midst of an immense crowd. I lost myself among them with pleasure. On inquiry, I learned that outside the city gates an extraordinary market was being held. Philip, King of Macedon, upon the fall of Olynthus, after having razed the city, had led into slavery the entire population—eighty thousand persons. The sale had been going on for two days. It had been calculated that it would last as much as three months. Chalcis, therefore, swarmed with strangers, both buyers of slaves and sightseers. With great difficulty I shouldered passage for myself between innumerable animated groups. I was at a loss as to how to pursue a progress so disputed, when I beheld in front of me a majestic procession before which the crowd gave way. Six Sarmatian slaves advanced, two and two, each bearing a weight of gold and several naked swords stuck into his girdle. Behind these came a tiny negro, holding horizontally, like a cup from which libations are poured, a long crozier of pink cedar bound with a cord of gold— the august staff of the master. Finally, gigantic and ponderous, crowned with flowers, his beard impregnated with perfumes, his tall shoulders towering above two lovely girls whose slender necks he encircled with 155



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his arms, I saw Parrhasius himself, draped in a purple robe, his great feet crushing the verdure. He seemed the Indian Bacchus incarnate. His eyes feel upon me. “If you are not Bryaxis,” he said, drawing his brows together, “how have you dared to assume his features?” “And you, if you are not Parrhasius, the son of Semele, who is it has given you those vast ambrosial locks, that Dionysiac stature, and that robe of purple woven by the Graces on Naxos?” He smiled. Without even disengaging his arm from the charming support, which extended it, he stretched forth to me, like a golden plaque above one of the girls, his great hand laden with rings. “Chariclo,” he said to the young girl on his right, “entwine my friend with an arm that will be sweet to him, and let us continue our promenade. Soon the sun will be too ardent for your burden not to suffer.” So we all set forth again, our arms interlaced. Parrhasius invested our advance with a vast and rhythmic cadence, pompous as a hexameter, in which the tripping steps of the women beat out the dactyl. In three words he had enlightened himself as to my works and my life. At each response from me, he said with animation: “Perfect!” curtailing explanation. Then he began to speak of himself. “You must understand clearly that I have taken you under my protection,” he said; “for no citizen of Athens, except myself, is safe with the Macedonian. If the least dispute had brought you before the judges, I would not have given two obols this morning for your independence. Now you may ease your mind.” “I am not,” I replied, “of a timorous nature; but I do not doubt that even here, and if you gave your name–” “It is done,” he declared. “I have announced myself. When Philip learned that I was about to do him the honor of visiting his new city, where his sutlers alone had been installed, he dispatched on my road, at a distance of ten stadia from the Euripian viaduct, an officer of his palace. The man brought me gifts that were royal; among others, six colossi of the north and the two lovely girls whom you see—force to open my road, grace to adorn my person.” We were approaching the great auction. He stopped, and, measuring me with his glance: “But you do not ask me what I have come to seek here?” “I have not dared,” I replied. “I have come from Athens to Chalcis in order to find a model, my son. Ah, you are surprised! I quite expected that.” 156



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“A model? There are none left, then, between the Academy and Piraeus?” “Four hundred and forty thousand, for me,” said Parrhasius proudly; “the population of Attica. And yet I seek a model at the Olynthian ­slave-block. Behold the reason. You will understand it.” He towered to his full height. “I am doing,” he said, “a Prometheus.” As he pronounced that name, he remained with rigid and open lips, and all the horror of his subject passed into the fold of his eyebrows. “Prometheuses, you will know, are to be found under every portico. Timagoras sold one. Apollodorus attempted another. Zeuxis believed he had power to achieve one. But why recall so much of pitiable painting? Prometheus has never been done.” “I can believe you,” I replied. “There have been reproduced naked peasants, fastened to wooden crags, the face twisted by gods know what manner of grimace that savored of toothache; but Prometheus, forger of fire, Prometheus, maker of man, and his struggle with the ­god-eagle amid mountains and thunder—ah, no, Bryaxis, that has not been done. That Prometheus, awful, overpowering—I see him, as I see your face; and I will nail his image to the wall of the Parthenon.” As he uttered this, he released the two girls, took his golden staff from the tiny bearer, and swept it in large gesture through the air. “For two months I worked at it,” he went on. “I had found superb crags in the dominions of Crates, on the promontory of Astypaleus. All my studies were finished. The ground of my landscape was ready. The line of the figure was in place. And all at once I was checked, absolutely, for I could not find a head. Oh, if it had been a matter of a Hermes, of an Apollo, or of a Pan, every citizen of Athens would have been proud to pose for me. But to take for my model a man whose high genius glows in his face, and to truss that man by his feet, by his fists, to the sort of dais I must use—you can see that that is not possible. One may not dislocate, in that manner, the limbs of any but a slave. And those people have the heads of brutes! They are Enceladuses, Typhons; they are not Prometheuses! Why? Because we lack slaves who once were ­f ree-born Hellenes. Very well. Philip is bringing us those. I have come to take them where he sells them.” “An Olynthian?” I said, shuttering. “A vanquished ally? But where will you do this painting?” “In Athens!” “On the soil of Athens your slave will be free.” 157



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“He will be what I wish.” “But then, if you hold him captive, are you not afraid that the laws—” “The laws?” said Parrhasius with a smile. “The laws lie in my hand like the folds of this mantle that I throw over my shoulder.” And with a magnificent movement he wrapped himself in purple and in sunlight. III.

The Olynthian ­slave-market stretched before us. As far as the eye could see, and extending in an unbroken line of six broad, parallel avenues, platforms of planks had been laid on low trestles, rising to about ­m id-thigh of the passing crowds. The population of an entire city was massed there, before another multitude—the one chattels, the other buyers. Eighty thousand men, women, and children, their hands bound behind their backs, their feet hobbled with degrading ropes, waited there, the greater part standing, for the unknown master who would lead them away toward some mysterious point in the Hellenic world. Parrhasius penetrated into the principal street, in which were exposed, to right and left, the young men and the maidens who seemed worth setting forth at highest price. To my amazement, I caught nothing of the sadness in their curious glances. Human sorrow has its bound; and youth sees it very, very soon. The crowd around them surged and jostled, eager to examine, more undecided in the buying. Few decided quickly in the midst of such a display of wares. The slaves were handled a good deal. Hands tested the muscles of a leg, the delicacy of a skin, the breadth of a virile fist. And then the same people passed on to the neighboring platform, hoping to find still better. Parrhasius paused for an instant at the feet of a budding adolescent, whose tall, slender form was a harmony in white. “Here,” said he, “is a pretty child.” At once the seller hurried over. “The prettiest girl in the auction, lord. See how erect she is, and how white! Sixteen years old yesterday.” “Eighteen,” corrected the girl. “You lie, by Zeus! She is no more than sixteen, lord. You must not believe her. Look at her black hair, piled high with the comb. When she loosens it, it falls to her haunches. Look at her hands, at her long fingers, which have never even touched the distaff.” 158



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Parrhasius struck the dry soil with the tip of his sounding staff. “Take off these shackles that mar her grace—and quickly,” he commanded. “Let her put on her garments. I have bought her. What is her name?” “Artemidora,” she said. “Very well. Artemidora, know that you are now in the train of Parrhasius.” She opened her great eyes, hesitating naively. “You are—could you be the Parrhasius who—” [she stops speaking]. “I am he,” responded her master. And placing her in the keeping of the people who accompanied him, he resumed his forward march. Presently the great painter deigned to offer me explanation. “White limbs—martyred on a peak in Caucasus—the young maiden would make a dainty picture. Yet I did not acquire her in the design of completing, with her, the Prometheus of which I have told you. She shall serve me as model for certain figure sketches, with which I relax my mind during my leisure hours, and which are far from being, you must know, the least noble part of my work.” We walked on for a long time in front of the trestles. The throng had grown even denser. The sun burned more and more unbearably in that vast, shadowless plain, amid that rolling human surf. Artemidora had garbed herself, first with her white tunic, then with her ­v irgin-girdle clasped below her breasts. Her hair had disappeared within the apex of a bluish veil that enveloped her whole form. She turned around frequently to look at us; and I noticed then that, with her resumption of clothing, she had reclothed, as it were, a new soul. Her girlish face had become transformed. We had traversed, thus, a full half of the principal street, when Parrhasius stopped, stretched forth his hand, and cried: “There he is!” I approached, expectant and curious. The man he had designated was about fifty years of age. Of towering stature and excellent proportions, he had a broad forehead, a powerful, muscular frontal arch. His nose was bold and ­s traight-cut, his nostrils sensitively spread, his ears deep and perfectly turned. His hair was gray, his beard still quite brown, short, and rolled in round clusters as markedly expressive as his features. The strong cords of his throat formed a sort of pedestal, which imparted, through the singular harmony of the whole, a still grander authority to the glowing intellect of his eyes. 159



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Parrhasius accosted him. “What is your name?” “Outis.” “I am not asking you for poetry, my good fellow, but for the name you received from your father; and you will answer me, I think.” “For a month I have called myself Outis. If I ever bore a more ancient name, it does not suit me to tell you which.” “Why?” “Nor to tell you why, you son of a thief!” Parrhasius, beside himself, grew more purple than his mantle. The ­slave-seller, quite alarmed, advanced with pleading gesture. “Do not listen to him, lord; he speaks like a madman. And it’s pure malice on his part, for he has more brains than I. He is a physician. For knowledge, as for skill, he hadn’t his equal in Olynthus. I’m only giving you common rumor, repeated everywhere, for he was famous far into Macedon. Give me thirty drachmas, and Nicostratus will be your thing forever.” “Nicostratus,” repeated Parrhasius to me. “So! I know that name.” Turning to the dealer, he commanded: “Strip off his garments.” Nicostratus submitted indifferently, passive and disdainful. “Set him face front. Very well. Side view—back view—now to the right—his face again. Done! It’s a bargain.” He clapped his hand lightly on my shoulder, and said to me, in an undertone: “Youngster, superb!” I answered nothing; for I felt myself stirred by a shiver, which was almost one of envy. Fifty years have passed—the space of a human life. I have seen thousands of models, but never one to compare with Nicostratus of Olynthus. He was the personification, the very statue of man in all his grandeur, at the age when force has become power. Parrhasius named him Prometheus; but any name, no matter how eternal, would have been no less worthy of this new slave. That man in my workroom for the space of a year of labor, and I would have done enough sketches to fill my whole career with Zeuses, with Plutos, with Poseidons, with the fifteen graybeard gods who are called the Dominators. As he stood there, he evoked Olympus to his feet. When he extended his arm, one saw the trident within it; when he raised it aloft, behold the thunder! The lines of his ­shield-like ­chest-muscles merged at his shoulders with a slow, majestic curve that invested his every move with divinity. IV.

I came back alone, on horseback, across Attica. During my absence 160



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of five years my creditors had sold what little property I possessed; and I put up modestly at an inn in Athens for the long weeks that must precede my renewal of old connections. Parrhasius had followed me after several days’ interval. On learning to what an unpretentious place I had had my baggage carried, he refused to let me accept any hospitality but his, and sent me word that he was awaiting me. The next day I went to his house, alone, and for the purpose of declining his generous offer. He occupied, midway between the Ceramica and the Academy, a palace of marble and bronze, near the little house where Plato lived. His gardens stretched far down the slope to the blue banks of the Cycloborus, and, rising again on the other side, encircled the white building with gorgeously useless trees. Parrhasius received me on the threshold of the great interior court that served as his ­work-chamber. Standing there, draped as ever in sweeping purple silk, the fillet bound about his brow like an Olympian god, he opened his great arms to me. And presently I followed at his side into the illustrious hall, the birthplace of masterpieces, wherein I was deeply stirred to set foot once more. “My Prometheus?” he said, in reply to my question. “No, I no longer feel it as a thing complete and rounded. This Nicostratus has great need of being meditated for a time, and I foresee that my first conception of the subject will be shattered to fragments from the moment when I make his personality to enter in my theme. In a day or two we shall see.” I asked him if he were resting; but I hardly knew his energy. Painting was life itself to him. At midnight he had returned from the journey; and in the early morning he had already begun a new picture. “Come,” he said to me abruptly. “I am glad that you can see it; the little thing is a marvel. I have never done anything lovelier.” The panel, only just begun, reposed obliquely on an easel of sycamore wood, the two uprights of which arched back, almost at the point of contact, in two golden ­s wan-throats. I leaned forward respectfully and beheld a singular object, but one which did not surprise me in the workroom of Parrhasius. His picture represented a sylvan landscape charming to see, in which a sleeping nymph lay stretched on rounded hip and elbow, her arrows in her hand. A satyr bent before her; behind, a second satyr roughly grasped her white shoulder, without troubling her young slumber, which must truly have been profound. But when I raised my eyes again, I perceived, some paces away, 161



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stretched on a broad bench, Artemidora between two barbarian Sarmatians, who had just posed with her. “Yes,” Parrhasius explained, “I love these sketches of life. Socrates, who began by being a bad sculptor before becoming a good philosopher, wished to see me paint love as glances and thoughts. That was absurd criticism. Painting is design and color; its tongue speaks in gesture alone. I have painted Achilles in the moment when he slays. His brooding wrath I leave to the poet. But enough of that; we understand one another.” He seated himself before his easel, and with his fine brush, the handle of which was ivory inlaid in reed, he added the final touches to the sketch, to accentuate still more its impeccable design. Then two of his young apprentices brought him his instruments. “You see,” he said to me, smiling, “I have ceased painting in distemper. Here is wax and here are irons, according to the new method. Those youngsters of the school of Sicyon—I will beat them on their own ground!” The hours passed without my having felt their flight, except when Parrhasius commanded: “Relax!” Toward the end of the day he rose, calling to the apprentices: “Have the plate heated! It is finished,” he added, turning to me. Presently the glowing plate was brought, with the sparks flying from it. He seized it by the staple with ­long-armed tongs. Very slowly he passed it back and forth before the painting; the wax rose to the surface, fixing in the dry wood its multicolored soul. And that was how there was finished between the dawn and the dusk of one day, the “Nymph Surprised” of Parrhasius, which is now in Syracuse. Parrhasius gazed at his work with careless satisfaction; then, suddenly rising aloft his fine, expressive hand, he shouted: “Yes! This is the training before the battle!” “What battle?” I demanded, bewildered. He seemed astonished that I had not comprehended. With great strides he crossed the apartment and drew aside the tapestry. There was Nicostratus, bound in chains. He raised his eyes to ours. Parrhasius drew himself up till he towered to his full height before the Olynthian, and passing his fingers through his beard, murmured: “My battle—of the god against the human being!”

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V.

I remained in Athens for a whole month, busied with personal affairs, which did not permit of my return to the house of Parrhasius. Since the downfall of the Olynthians, Athens had truly been a city of sorrow and mourning. The ­slave-mart of Chalcis, the selling of a whole people, that scandal and affront at the very gates of Attica, was the subject of every conversation, the brooding thought behind every silence. Against Philip nothing could be done. Crates did not want war, and Demosthenes himself did not ask it any longer. But Eschines, returning from the Peloponnesus, had met on his way troops of Olynthians herded like beasts, and his mere contact with that exodus of slaves had been enough to rouse, at his voice, the people’s indignation against the guilty cities. On a certain day, however, public feeling became even more bitter; for it was learned that in Athens itself a citizen was holding as captive an unfortunate Olynthian woman. The man was arrested, judged, condemned to death on the spot. Alarmed, I beheld Parrhasius menaced by a like fate; and, dropping everything, I went down to his palace to warn him, if there were still time to do so. Doors were closed and hangings down when I appeared at his wall. The slave refused to let me cross the threshold. I was driven to insist, to reveal my dread, to swear my visit concerned the life or death of his master. At last he let me by; and traversing at a run the great, empty gallery, I raised the arras. I shall never forget the slow, grave look that Parrhasius gave me, when he saw me enter. He was on his feet, painting, and he loomed gigantic before a panel of black wood of almost his own height. The vaguely stormy sky gave his tall form an almost superhuman semblance. So serene was his face that the features stood out no longer; the very lines and furrows had become effaced, as in the lifeless clay of a man incredibly old and couched in the peace of the dead. He spoke no word. He no longer looked at me. The hot rod held in his fingers, he carried the melted tears of wax between the cup and the upright panel with a hand as sure and as quiet as if he had created the world with drops of color. It was then, following his eye, fixed now on his work and now on a point in the vast hall, that I perceived, clamorous and naked, lashed by his four wrenched limbs to the brow of an actual crag, with every 163



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muscle heaving as he pulled desperately at four twisted ropes—Nicostratus! For a long time I remained motionless, holding my breath, no longer knowing what I had come to do and to say. My brain drifted wholly on the marvels of vision. My other senses spoke to me no more; and I had less in me of thought than one has in a ­day-dream. Suddenly Parrhasius pronounced one word: “Scream!” And his voice was calm, as were his brow and his gesture. Nicostratus gave vent to a violent burst of forced laughter which shook the hall. He cried that he would not scream—that he was master of his face—that they could not bind his features, like his limbs, with ropes to the rock—that he would prevent the making of this picture! Then he vomited the foam of his rage in outbursts of insult. The face of Parrhasius did not change by a line. He laid down the caustic which he held in his hand, slowly picked up another which was glowing at white heat on a ­near-by brazier, and, measuring the exact spot where the vulture in his picture gorged on the liver of Prometheus, said to a Sarmatian slave: “Take it. To the right—under the last rib. Touch lightly, without penetrating.” Nicostratus looked at the fellow as he advanced toward him. His mouth set in a deathly smile, and his flesh shriveled; but not a word came from his lips. But soon his eyes glazed. A dreadful sweat rolled down his temples. He began to scream at first, then to moan in a voice shaken with sobs, like a little child. Parrhasius, impassive, gazed on at his face. How long a time did that last? I do not know. Till the evening, I think. I do not know at what hour I found the strength to drag myself out of that hall, for I was nerveless from head to foot. As I passed out through the door there was a sudden silence, and then I heard a voice in the distance: “The fool! He died an instant too soon!” When it became known in Athens, next day, how Parrhasius had achieved the “Prometheus Bound” that he destined for the Parthenon, there was heard in the city one great cry of horror. The whole population surged in a mass along the Cycloborus road, rushing to attack the painter’s house, the doors of which had been locked. “An Olynthian! A free man! A man vanquished by the Macedonian!” 164



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“The poison for his murderer!” I mingled with the raging crowd, though not in order to save my friend; for I, too, thought that he deserved any punishment, and the screams of Nicostratus kept sounding in my ears. But I followed the tumult, whirled along by the maelstrom of bodies, and appeared with the throng under the besieged walls. The mob shrieked for a long time. The house seemed dead. Not a slave appeared on the threshold, not a voice behind the tapestries, which hung, motionless and closed, between the columns. At last Parrhasius, between two opening curtains, appeared in the upper story, his arms folded over his royal robe, and his brow still bound with the sacred fillet. A storm of shrieks rose up to where he stood. “Assassin! Barbarian! Ally of Philip! Where is the Olynthian? We will give him a funeral like a conquering general. And the poison for you! The poison for you!” Parrhasius let their rage break forth and abate. Then, grasping by the two sides of its panel, from where it rested at his feet, the “Prometheus” he had just painted, he raised it slowly and solemnly, at first above the balustrade, then above his own forehead, till he was quite effaced by it, and the masterpiece appeared in place of the man. A spasmodic shudder shook the crowd, which surged nearer. A prodigious thing was there before it. The picture of human sorrow and of eternal defeat through suffering and through death, palpitated overhead. Before those countless eyes the summit of tragic grandeur stood there revealed for the first time. They shivered. Many men wept. A silence as of a temple spread far out to the most distant lips of the multitude. And when scattered hooting, here and there, rose again for an instant, a thunderous shout drowned it in a tumult of acclamation.

165

Notes Preface

8. Ibid., 55. The story’s debt to the myth of Daedalus and Talus has been duly noted by many authors, including Philip Coppen, The Stone Puzzle of Rosslyn Chapel: The Truth Behind Its Templar and Masonic Secrets, 3rd ed. (Amsterdam: Frontier Publishing, 2004), 63–66. 9.  Thomas Kirk, “An Account of a Tour in Scotland,” in Thomas Kirk and Ralph Thoresby, Tours in Scotland, 1677 and 1681, ed. P. Hume Brown (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1892), 42. 10.  Quotation from Shannon Dorey, The Nummo: The Truth About Human Origins (Elemental Expressions, 2013), 31–32. 11.  Ibid., 32. 1 2.  Jennifer Westwood and Sophia Kingshill, The Lore of Scotland: A Guide to Scottish Legends (London: Random House, 2009), 263. 13.  C.C. Bombaugh, Gleanings for the Curious from the ­H arvest-Fields of Literature (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1890), 689. 14.  Ibid., 689. 15.  Giorgio Nicodemi, “Daniele Crespi,” Emporium 73, no. 4 (1931): 23–33. 16.  Ibid., 27. See also Antonio Monti, Nostalgia Di Milano: 1630–1880 (Milan: Hoepli, 1945), 12, who refers to the “legend” without citing a source. 17.  Seneca, the Elder, Controversiae: Declamations, 5:1–28. Michael Winterbottom, trans., The Elder Seneca: Controversiae: Declamations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974). 18.  Seneca, the Elder, Opera Omnia, ed. Desiderius Erasmus (Basel, 1515), 604. The same text is in Seneca, The Elder, Opera, ed. Desiderius Erasmus

1.  Plackinger, Andrew, Violenza: G e walt al s D e nk f ig ur im mi c he l ange l e ske n Kun st di sk urs (Mu n ich : ­Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, 2016).

Chapter 1 1.  For stories about the artist as buffoon and trickster, see Norman E. Land, Masters, Tricksters, Buffoons (Columbia: Lyme Press, 2018). 2.  Laurinda S. Dixon, The Dark Side of Genius (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), has recently examined representations of the melancholic artist. 3.  Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History, trans. C.H. Oldfather, 12 vols. (London and Cambridge: Heinemann and Harvard University Press, 1956), 3, 58–60. 4. Ibid., 58–60. For another version of the myth, see Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Charles Martin (New York and London: Norton, 2005), 272–273. 5.  Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere, 2 vols. (New York and Toronto: Knopf, 1996), 1, 452–453. For a recent discussion of this tale, see Charles Nicholl, “Death in Florence,” London Review of Books 34, no. 4 (February 23, 2012), 9–10. 6.  Andrew Ladis, Victims and Villains in Vasari’s Lives (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 51. 7.  François de Pommeraye, Histoire De L’Abbaye Royale De S. Ouen De Rouen (Rouen: Richard Lallemant et Louys du Mesnil, 1662), 55.

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(Basel, 1529), 645. Nicholaus Faber published Erasmus’ version of the Controversiae separately at Paris in 1587. In Seneca, the Elder, Opera, ed. Desiderius Erasmus (Basel, 1537), 533 and 645, both entries read, “laesae Religionis Sit Action.” 19.  John Henry Merryman, et al., Law, Ethics and the Visual Arts, 5th ed. (Alphen aan den Rijn [Netherlands]: Kluwer International, 2007), 100.

or Banquet of the Learned, trans. C.D. Younge, 3 vols. (London: 1854), 3, 869– 870. 11.  Athenaeus, Learned Banqueters, 15.687b. 1 2.  Athenaeus, Learned Banqueters, trans. S. Douglas Olson, 6, 163. 13.  Claudius Aelianus, Varia Historia, trans. Diane Ostrom Johnson (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1997), 136. See also Athenaeus, trans. S. Douglas Olson, 6, 163. 14.  Suetonius, Lives of the Twelve Caesars, trans. H.M. Bird (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1997), 150. 15.  The Greek Anthology, trans. W.R. Paton, 5 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1916–1918), 1, 431, n. 111.

Chapter 2 1.  Throughout I refer to Xenophon, “Memoirs of Socrates,” in Conversations of Socrates, trans. Hugh Tredinnick and Robin Waterfield, ed. Robin Waterfield (London: Penguin, 1990), 164–165. 2. Cicero, De inventione, De optimo genere oratorum, Topica, trans. H.M. Hubbell (London and Cambridge: Heinemann and Harvard University Press, 1960), 166–169. For a recent study of the legend of Zeuxis, see Elizabeth C. Mansfield, Too Beautiful to Picture: Zeuxis, Myth, and Mimesis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 3.  Xenophon, 165. 4.  Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 35.65–68. Trans. John Bostock 6 vols. (London: 1857), 6, 249–268. 5.  This story is also told by Aelianus, Varia Historia, 136; and Athenaeus, Learned Banqueters, 12.543f. Athenaeus, The Learned Banqueters, ed. and trans. S. Douglas Olson, 7 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 6, 163. 6. Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory, trans. J. Patsall, 12 vols. (London, 1774), 2, 407. 7.  There is a temple of Apollo Parrhasius on Mount Lykaion. The epithet likely references its location in Parrhasia, a region in Arcadia, Greece. Pliny mentions Parrhasiaus made use of the name (Natural History, 35.21). 8. Athenaeus, The Learned Banqueters, 12.544a. 9. Themistius, The Private Orations, trans. and ed. Robert J. Penella (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 145. 10.  At henaeu s, Deipnosophi st ae ,

Chapter 3 1.  Seneca the Elder, Controversiae, 10.5.1–28. Translated in Declamations, trans. M. Winterbottom, 2 vols. (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press and Heinemann, 1974), 2, 448– 449. Throughout I quote from this edition (448–475). For a discussion of this controversiae, see Helen Morales, “The Torturer’s Apprentice: Parrhasius and the Limits of Art,” in Art and Text in the Roman World, ed. Jas Elsner (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 182–209. 2.  The Temple of Minerva, a Roman goddess, is actually the Temple of Athena, today known as the Parthenon. 3. Hesiod, T he Homeric Hymn s and Homerica, trans. Hugh Gerard ­E velyn-White (London and New York: Heinemann and Putnam’s Sons, 1920), 117. See also Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, trans. Eric Alfred Havelock (Seattle: Universit y of Washington Press, 1968). 4.  Lucian, “Prometheus,” in T he Works, trans. A.M. Harmon, 8 vols. (London and Cambridge: Heinemann and Harvard University Press, 1960), 2, 243 and 253. Online illustration. 5.  Andreas Rumpf, “Parrhasios,” American Journal of Archaeology, 55, no. 1 (1951): 2. Rumpf says the story is a fiction. 6. Xenophon, Memorabilia, 3.10.1–5.

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7. Seneca, Controversiae, 10.5.3. 8. Seneca, Controversiae, 10.5.8–10. 9. Seneca, Controversiae, 10.5.25. 10.  Seneca, Controversiae, 10.5.7. 11.  Seneca, Controversiae, 10.5.12. 12.  Seneca, Controversiae, 10.5.13–16. 1 3.  Seneca, Controversiae, 10.5.17; Horace, Ars Poetica in Horace for Students of Literature: The “Ars Poetica” and Its Tradition, trans. Leon Golden (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995), 7. 14.  Seneca, Controversiae, 10.5.19; Trans. Winterbottom, Declamations, 2, 467. 15.  Seneca, Controversiae, 10.5.17. 16.  Seneca, Controversiae, 10.5.18. 17.  For “Dragon’s Blood,” see Pliny, Chapters, 97 and note. See also Norman E. Land, “Blood as Paint: Rubens, Guido Reni and Parrhasius,” Source: Notes in the History of Art 31, no. 2 (2012): 22–23. 18.  Seneca, Controversiae, 10.5.27–28. 19.  Pliny, The Natural History, 251: “Zeuxis having painted a child carrying grapes, the birds came to peck at them; upon which, […] he expressed himself vexed with his work, and exclaimed—‘I have surely painted the grapes better than the child, for if I had fully succeeded in the last, the birds would have been in fear of it.’" 2 0.   Seneca, Controversiae, 10.5.1; Trans. Winterbottom, Declamations, 2, 451. 21.  Seneca, Controversiae, 10.5.3; Trans. Winterbottom, Declamations, 2, 453. 2 2.  Seneca, Controversiae, 10.5.9–10; Trans. Winterbottom, Declamations, 2, 457. 2 3.  Diodorus, The Library of History, 4, 22–27; and Lucian, “Phalaris,” in The Works, trans. Austin Morris Harmon, 8 vols. (London and New York: Heinemann and Macmillan, 1913), 1, 17–21; Lucian, The Works of Lucian of Samosata, trans. H.W. Fowler and F.C. Fowler, 4 vols. (Oxford: 1905), 2 pp. 206–208. For some visual representations of the tale, see Charles Avery, “The Bull of Perillus: A Relief attributed to Giovanni Caccini,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 6 (1971): 22–24.

2 4.  Lucian, “Phalaris,” 1, 19; Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton University Press, 1993), 2, 271 describes such torture in later centuries: Saint Eustace, his wife, and sons, were martyred when the Roman Emperor Trajan ordered them put into a bronze bull that had been heated by fire. They prayed and commended themselves to God as they roasted. For other saints martyred in this manner, see Arthur Bernard Cook, Zeus: A Study in Ancient Religion, 5 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1914), 1, 1102. 25.  Pliny, The Natural History, 187.

Chapter 4 1.  Seneca, the Elder, Opera Omnia, ed. Desiderius Erasmus (Basel, 1515), 604. The same text is in Seneca, The Elder, Opera, ed. Desiderius Erasmus (Basel, 1529), 645. Nicolaus Faber published Erasmus’s version of the Controversiae separately at Paris in 1587. In Seneca, the Elder, Opera, ed. Desiderius Erasmus (Basel, 1537), 533 and 645, both entries read, “laesae religionis sit actio.” 2.  For Schott’s edition of 1604, see under “Seneca the Elder” in Anthony Grafton, et al., eds., The Classical Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 872–873. 3.  Paul Thomas De Girac, Replique de monsieur de Girac a monsieur Costar (Leyden, 1660), 235. 4.  Carlo Roberto Dati, Vite Dei Pittori Antichi (Florence, 1667), 98–107 and 127. 5.  Jonathan Richardson, “An Argument in Behalf of the Science of a Connoisseur,” in Two Discourses (London: 1719), part 2, 89. 6.  William Hayley, An Essay on Painting, 3rd ed. (London, 1781), 1, 13, lines 206–209. 7. Ibid., 1, 63. 8.  Luigi Lanzi, Storia Pittorica Della Italia, 4th ed., 6 vols. (Bassano, 1818), 1, 3, n.a. 9.  ­J a c q u e s -N i c o l a s P a i l l o t d e Montabert, Traité complet de la peinture, 9 vols. (Paris, 1851), 2, 24.

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10.  ­P ierre-Alexandre Coupin, Dictionnaire de la conversation et de la lecture, 68 vols. (Paris, 1837), 42, 228. 11.  Ralph Nicholson Wornum, The Epochs of Painting Characterized (London, 1847), 74–75. Phillip T. Sandhurst, The Table Book of Art (New York, 1880), 5 also called Seneca’s tale into question on historical grounds: “This story, even if true, could not refer to this Parrhasius, as he would have been about 120 years of age, if living, when Philip took Olynthus. The last record we have of Parrhasius dates to about B.C. 400.” 12.  See Chapter 6 herein. 13.  Alexander Stuart Murray, “Greek Painters,” The Contemporary Review, 25 (June–Nov. 1874), 475. 14.  Alexander Stuart Murray, A History of Greek Sculpture, 2 vols. (London, 1880), 1, 13. 15.  Alexander Stuart Murray, Handbook of Greek Archaeology (London, 1892), 380 16.  Benson J. Lossing, Outline of the History of the Fine Arts (New York, 1840), 190. 17.  Louis Viardot, An Illustrated History of Painters of All Schools (London and Philadelphia, 1877). 18.  Céline Fallet, The Old Masters: Princes of Art, trans. Levina Buoncuore Urbino (Boston, 1870), 106–107. 19.  Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (New York, 2001), part 1, 382. 2 0.  Anonymous, [editorial], The Medical Times (July 12, 1845): 295–296. 21.  Georges Tarenne, La Cochliopérie (Paris, 1808), 18–19. 2 2.  Jacques B. Salgues, Des erreurs et des préjugés répandus dans les diverses classes de la société, 5th ed., 3 vols. (Brussels: 1847), 3, 34. The three volumes of the first edition appeared between 1810 and 1813. 23.  Seneca, Controversiae, 464–465. 24.  Josef Hyrtl, Antiquitates Anatomicae Rariores (Vienna: Vindobonae, 1835), 36, note n. 2 5.  Alfred Lochée, A Descriptive and Tabular Report of the Medical and Surgical Cases Treated in the Kent and Canterbury Hospital from October 16, 1840, to June 1, 1842 (Canterbury, 1842), 9.

2 6.  Albert Leffingwell, The Vivisection Controversy (London: 1908), 59. 27.  He echoes a poem by Edward Young 1714 in which Michelangelo’s model stands next to the artist’s easel. See Chapter 8 herein. 2 8. A nony mous, “Address to the Society of Alumni of Union Theological Seminary, Virginia,” The Southern Presbyterian Review, 7 (2 (1854), 272– 273. See also Robert Lewis Dabney, Sacred Rhetoric or a Course of Lectures on Preaching (New York, 1870), 300– 301, which contains a revised version of the essay. The author’s emphasis on Parrhasius’s quest for fame is typical of the ­n ineteenth-century American authors (see Chapter 8 herein). 29.  George Whitefield Samson, Elements of Art Criticism (Philadelphia, 1867), 561–562. 3 0.  A.J. Faust, “The Greatest of Mediaeval Hymns,” Catholic World, 36 (October 1882): 34–35. 31.  George Augustus Simcox, A History of Latin Literature from Ennius to Boethius, 2 vols. (London: 1883), 1, 428–429. 3 2 . Cat heri ne Joseph i ne Ba r ton, “Healing Thoughts,” The Life: A Monthly Journal of Christian Metaphysics, 10, no. 1 (July 1906): 79–84. 3 3.  Albert E. Waff le, If Christ Were King (Philadelphia: Griffith and Rowland, 1912), 243–244. 3 4.   Shearjashub Spooner, Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, 3 vols. (New York, 1853), 1, 151–152. Thomas John Gullick and John Timbs, Painting Popularly Explained (London, 1859), 42 also say that Parrhasius crucified the slave: “The story told by Seneca of Parrhasius crucifying an old Olynthian captive, in order to paint more truly the agony of Prometheus chained, in a picture of that subject, is highly improbable.” 35.  Ibid., 152.

Chapter 5 1.  Bonsignori’s painting is in the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in

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Curtatone, which is in the province of Mantua. Although he visited Mantua for a few days in 1541, Vasari seems not to have seen Bonsignori’s painting, for its presentation of a calm and composed Saint Sebastian does not fit Vasari’s story. Seemingly, Vasari intended to focus on the ferocious personality of the Marquis as opposed to the timidity of the artist. For Vasari’s visit to Mantua, see Patricia Lee Rubin, Giorgio Vasari: Art and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 129–130. 2.  Vasari (de Vere), Lives, 2, 28–29. For recent discussions of this painting, see Nigel Jonathan Spivey, Enduring Creation: Art, Pain, and Fortitude (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 87–88, and David Young Kim, “The Horror of Mimesis,” Oxford Art Journal, 34, no. 3 (2011): 346–348. 3.  On Gentile Bellini’s visit in Constantinople, see Elizabeth Rodini, “The Sultan’s True Face? Gentile Bellini, Mehmet II, and the Values of Verisimilitude,” in The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye, 1450–1750 (London: Ashgate, 2011), 26. Rodini doubts the veracity of the tale. See also Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time, ed. William C. Hickman, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 428–429, who connects the tale to Seneca’s story of Parrhasius. 4.  There is a Head of Saint John the Baptist by Gentile’s brother, Giovanni Bellini, in the Museo Civico, Pesaro. 5. Ca rlo R idol f i, Le Maraviglie Dell’arte, ed. Detlev Freiherr von Hadeln, 2 vols. (Rome: Società Multigrafica Editrice SOMU, 1965), 1, 57–58. 6.  Louis Thuasne, Gentile Bellini Et Sultan Mohammed II (Paris: E. Leroux, 1888), 54, doubts the veracity of the tale and associates it with Seneca’s story of Parrhasius and the story of Michelangelo killing his model. See also Spivey, Enduring Creation, 95, who links the story to Seneca’s Parrhasius and to Vasari’s tale of Francesco Bonsignori, and Kim, “The Horror of Mimesis,” 337. 7.  Vasari (de Vere), Lives, 1, 628–629. 8. A Bacchus by Sansovino is in the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence.

9. Ibid., 2, 808. 10.  For an extended discussion of the story in relation to the Pygmalion myth, see Victor I. Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock, trans. Alison Anderson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 57–79. 11.  Gian Lorenzo translates to John Lawrence. Bernini’s Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence is now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. 12.  For the story of Mucius, see Livy, The History of Rome, trans. Canon Roberts, ed. Ernest Rhys, 5 vols. (London, Dent, 1905), 1, 69. 13.  Domenico Bernini, Vita Di Cavalier Gio. Lorenzo Bernino (Rome, 1713), 15. For a discussion of this story, see Franco Mormando, Bernini: His Life and His Rome (University of Chicago Press, 2011). 14.  Caravaggio’s painting is in the Museo Regionale in Messina, Sicily. 15.  Francesco Susinno, Le vite de’ pittori messinesi, ed. Valentino Martinelli Florence: Le Monnier, 1960), 113. Related to the “barbarism” of this tale is a saying, attributed to Annibale Carracci, that Caravaggio “ground f lesh rather than colors” (“costui macinava carne”), meaning that his painted flesh had the color and texture of real flesh. For this, see Luigi Lanzi, The History of Painting in Italy, trans. Thomas Roscoe, 6 vols. (London: 1828), 2, 199; and Matthew Pilkington, A General Dictionary of Painters, 2 vols. (London, 1852), 96. Neither author cites a source for Annibale’s remark. 16.  Sholto and Reuben Percy, The Percy Anecdotes, 20 vols (London, 1820– 1823), 1, 71–72. Sholto and Reuben Percy, “Brothers of the Benedictine Monastery of Mont Benger,” are pseudonyms for Joseph Clinton Robertson (1788–1852) and Thomas Byerley (1789–1826), respectively. The story also appears in Anonymous, “Cruelty of a French Painter,” in The Terrific Register, or Record of Crimes, Judgements, Providences and Calamities, 2 vols. (London, 1825), 1, 149–150. 17.  Ferencz Pulszky, Meine Zeit, Mein Leben, 4 vols. (Pressburg and Leipzig, 1880–1883), 1, 109 cited in Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, 1736–1783, ed. Michael

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K rapf, t ra n s. Joh n Brow njoh n a nd Rebecca Law (­O stfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2003), 20–21, note.

11.  Paolo Giovio, “Michaelis Angeli Vita,” in Scritti D’arte del Cinquecento, ed. Paola Barocchi, 3 vols. (Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1971–1977), 1, 12. 1 2.   Anonimo Gaddiano, Il Codice dell’anonimo gaddiano Cod. Magliabechiano XVII Nella Biblioteca Naionale Di Firenze, ed. Cornelius von Fabriczy (Florence, 1893), 90. 13.  Giovio, 1, 12. 14.  Ascanio Condivi, Vita di Michelangelo Buonarroti, ed. Giovanni Nencioni (Florence: SPES, 1998), 59; and Vasari, Lives, 2, 736. 1 5.  Francisco de Holanda, Diálogos Em Roma (1538): Conversations on Art with Michelangelo Buonarroti, ed. Grazia Dolores ­Folliero-Metz, trans. A.G. Bell. (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 1998), 74. 16.  Donato Giannotti, Dialogi (Florence, 1859), 31–32. On Michelangelo’s solitary character, see also David Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton University Press, 1981), 10–12. 17.  Gian Paolo Lomazzo, Scritti Sulle Arti, ed. Roberto Paolo Ciardi, 2 vols. (Florence: Marchi and Bertolli, 1973), 1, 291. See also Dwight Shurko, “A Forgotten Michelangelo Story,” Source: Notes in the History of Art 21, 3 (2002), 21, who refers to this anecdote in the context of another story about Michelangelo. 18.  Seneca, the Younger, Moral Essays, trans. John W. Basore, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963– 1965), 2, 285. Seneca attributes the saying to Aristotle. 19.  Giovanni Gaye, Carteggio inedito d’artisti dei secoli XIV, XV, XVI, 3 vols. (Florence, 1840), 2, 333. Aretino chastised Michelangelo for his lack of decorum in using nude and obscene figures in a holy place. 2 0.  Ibid., 2, 500 note: “Nel medesimo mese si scoperse in Sto. Spirito una Pietà, la quale la mandò un fiorentino a detta chiesa, et si diceva che l’origine veniva dallo inventor delle porcherie, salvandogli l’arte ma non devotione, Michelangelo Buonarruoto.” Nanni di Baccio Bigio (died 1568) made the copy of Michelangelo’s Pietà for the church of Santo Spirito in 1549.

Chapter 6 1.  Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Historie de l’art chez les ancients, trans Gottfried Sellius, 2 vols. (Paris, n. d.), 2, 275–276, note 5. 2.  Henry Houssaye, Historie d’apelle, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1867), 104–105. 3.  Carlo Gastone della Torre di Rezzonico, Opere, ed. Francesco Mocchetti, 10 vols. (Como, 1830), 10, 81. 4.  L. Annaei Senecae, Opera Declamatoria, ed. Marie Nicholas Bouillett (Paris, 1831), 449, note 2. 5.  Author’s translation. The poem was first published by Giovanni Nascimbeni, “Michelangelo accusato di Omicido,” Il Marzocco, 17, 46 (November 17, 1912), 4. According to Nascimbeni, the manuscript, which is a collection of poems and prose from the late sixteenth and seventeenth century, bears the title Giardino di varie composizioni, and is in the Biblioteca Estense, Modena. See also Giovanni Papini, Vita di michelangiolo nella vita del suo tempo, 7th ed. (Milan: Garzanti, 1952), 599, and Guido Cimino, Il Crocifisso di Michelangelo per Vittoria Colonna (Rome: Edizioni Cremonese, 1967), 39. 6.  For paint as blood, see note Norman E. Land. 7.  Sperone Speroni, Dialogo d’amore in Trattatisti del Cinquecento, ed. Mario Pozzi, 2 vols. (Naples, Riccardo Riccardi, 1978), 1, 547–548. 8. Vasari, Lives, 2. 9.  Edward Norgate, Miniatura or the Art of Limning, eds. J.M. Muller and J. Murrell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 79–80. Norgate wrote his treatise in 1627–1628 and revised it in 1648–1649. 10.  The translation is from Roger De Piles, The Principles of Painting, trans. William Soames, rev. John Dryden (London, 1743), 92. The book was first published as Cours de peinture par principes avec un balance de peintres (Paris, 1708).

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Chapter 7

1 2.   Ascanio Condivi, T he Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti, trans. Herbert Horne (Boston: 1904), 79. Vasari, 6: 112 only refers to the drawing and only in the 1568 edition of the Lives. 13.  Christus living. 14.  Michelangelo’s drawing is sometimes associated with the Christ on the Cross (black chalk, ca. 1541) in the British Museum, London. See Alexander Perrig, Michelangelo’s Drawings: The Science of Attribution, trans. Michael Joyce (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 47–49. Perrig believes that the drawing is a copy after an origina l by Michelangelo. For an attribution to Michela ngelo, see Sylv ia ­Ferino-Pagden, Vittoria Colonna: Dichterin und muse Michelangelos (Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum, 1997), 413– 414, 418–419, and 421–423. For a thorough discussion of the paintings and a print by one of Michelangelo’s followers, see Georg W. Kamp, Marcello Venusti: religiöse Kunst im Umfeld Michelangelos (Egelsbach: ­H änsel-Hohenhausen, 1993), 28–35, Guido Cimino, Il Crocifisso Di Michelangelo Per Vittoria Colonna (Rome: Edizioni Cremonese, 1967). For a discussion of the drawing in relation to theology and the ­d isegno-colore debate, see Una Roman D’Elia, “Drawing Christ’s Blood: Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna, and the Aesthetics of Reform.” Renaissance Quarterly 59 (2006): 103–113. 1 5. C a r penter m ig ht have b e en responding to the Catholic belief in the importance of the image in worship, a belief that both Michelangelo and Vittora Colonna held. See D’Elia, n. 14 above.

1.  Richard D. Carpenter, Experience, Historie and Divinitie (London, 1641), frontispiece. Carpenter republished the book as The Downfall of Antichrist (London, 1647). 2.  Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxonienses: An Exact History of All the Writers and Bishops Who Have Had Their Education in the University of Oxford from 1500 to 1690, ed., Philip Bliss, 4 vols. (London, 1815), 2, p. 516, col. 419–420. The first edition appeared in two volumes in London (1691–1692). For more about Carpenter, see A lison Shell, “Multiple Religious Conversion s a nd t he Men ippea n Sel f: The Case of Richard Carpenter,” in Catholicism and ­A nti-Catholicism in ­S eventeenth-Century Texts, ed. Arthur F. Marotti (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 154–197. 3. Plato. 4.  Carpenter, 231–232. Carpenter’s condemnation of artistic deception turns on the conventional notion that painting and poetry—images and words—are by definition illusionistic imitations of nature. In regard to painting, as early as 1435, Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. Rocco Sinisgalli (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 74, had explained: “It is task of the painter to delimit and depict with lines and colors on a surface any assigned bodies to such a point that […] painted things that you see appear […] very much like those bodies.” Over a century later, Vasari, Lives, 1, 117 asserted that painted objects should not seem painted. Rather, they should seem alive and to project beyond the surface of the work. 5.  Carpenter, 234. 6. Ibid., 232–233. 7. Ibid., 233. 8. Ibid., 234–235. 9. Ibid., 236. 10.  Dante, Purgatory, trans. Anthony Esolen (New York: Modern Librar y, 2004), 130–131. 11.  For more on the topos, see Norman Land, “Vasari, Dante and Michelangelo’s Pietà in Rome,” Lectura Dantis, 22–23 (1998): 181–198.

Chapter 8 1.  The poem was first published in Richard Steele, Poetical Miscellanies (London, 1714), 236–237. In Edward Young, Poetical Works, 2 vols. (London, 1852), 2, 189–190, the poem has a different subtitle, which refers to Michelangelo: “Who Is Said to Have Stabbed a Person That He Might Draw It [i. e., the Crucifixion] More Naturally.” In this

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edition the poem also carries an editorial note that reads: “Though the report was propagated without the least truth, it may be sufficient ground to justify a poetical fancy’s enlarging on it.” The poem appears without reference to Young in Joe Miller’s Jests: With Copious Additions, ed. Frank Bellew (New York, 1865), pp. 272–273; the title of the poem is “On a Painter, who stabbed a man fastened to a Cross, that he might draw the picture of the Crucifixion more naturally.” An unidentifiable author (J.W.C.) mistakenly writes that Young’s poem is about “Caravaggio stabbing a man” and observes that it “appears to be a modern application of the legend of Parrhasius”; see Anonymous, “The Two Michael Angelos,” Dublin University Magazine, 44, no. 262 (October 1854): 410–413. 2. Young, Poetical Works, 2, 189. 3 . M a rqu i s de S ade [D on at ien Alphonse François], Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings. trans. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver. (New York: Grove, 1965), 552. 4.  Alexander Pushkin, “Mozart and Salieri,” in The Poems, Prose and Plays of Alexander Pushkin, ed. Avrahm Yarmolinsky, trans. A.E.B. Clark (New York: Modern Library, 1936), 436. 5.  A.G. [Aimé Guillon de Montléon], Lyon tel qu’il étoit et tel ou’il est (Paris, 1797), 38–39. 6.  Interestingly, in an anonymous review of Athanase de Raczynski, De L’Art Moderne En Allemagne (Paris, 1836), in Foreign Quarterly Review 18, no. 35 (October 1836): 60, Parrhasius is said to have been “the Rubens of his time.” Clarence Cook, “Greek Art, III: Painting,” The Chautauquan 9, no. 7 (April 1889): 389, also links Rubens and Parrhasius: “We may mention that the compliment paid to Rubens, that his cherubs were fed on ­r ose-leaves, was originally paid to Parrhasius, of whose ‘Theseus’ the same thing was said.”

note 2, where the editor quotes Schott. See also Jeremy Taylor, The Whole Works, eds. Alexander Taylor and Charles Page Eden, 10 vols. (London, 1855), vol. 10, 623 note, where Schott also appears as the source of the tale. 3.  De Girac, Replique, 235. 4. Dati, Vite, 127. 5.  Theophilus Spizelius, Felix literatus ex infelicium periculis et casibus (Augsburg, 1676), 681–682: “Bonarottae artem aemulantur (sit amen is fuit) qui vivum hominem suffix in crucem, ut expressius Christum pingeret morientem.” In the index, the phrase “facinus horrible” appears next to Michelangelo’s name. 6.  Pompeo Sarnelli, Lettere Ecclesiastiche (Naples, 1686), carte 38, as cited in Ascanio Condivi, Vita Di Michelangelo Buonarroti, ed. Antonio Francesco Gori, 2nd ed. (Florence, 1746), 117–118. 7.  Pompeo Sarnelli, La Vera Guida De’ Forestieri (Naples, 1713), 218. 8.  Abbé Hauchecorne, Vie De MichelAnge Buonarroti (Paris, 1783), 410. 9.  Antoine Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville, Abrégé De La Vie Des Plus Fameux Peintres, 4 vols (Paris, 1745), 1, 81–82. 10.  François Ma x imilien Misson, Nouveau Voyage D’Italie, 3rd ed., 3 vols. (The Hague, 1698), 2, 32–33. 11.  Ibid., 125. 1 2 .   P ie t ro Ro s si n i, I l Me rc ur i o errante delle grandezze di Roma (Rome, 1700), 48: “un Christo in Croce fatto da Michel’Angelo Buonarota, fatto come si dice dal naturale; cioè che legasse un Facchino suo Compare in Croce, e doppo che li desse alcune ferite per esprimere al vivo l’atto di moribondo.” 1 3.  For the paintings in the Palazzo Borghese in Rome and in Florence, see Edward Wright, Some Observations Made in Travelling Through France, Italy, Etc., 2 vols. (London, 1730), 294 and 156, respectively. 14.  Ibid., 216. 15.  Ibid., 155–156. 16.  John George Keyssler, Travels Through Germany, Bohemia, Hungary, Switzerland, Italy, and Lorrain, 3rd edition, 4 vols. (London, 1760), 2, 350–351. 17.  Ibid., 2, 351.

Chapter 9 1. Schott. 2. Seneca, Opera Declamatoria, 449,

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18.  Ibid., 3, 94. 19.  Ibid., 2, 62. 2 0.   ­P ierre-Jean-Baptiste Nougaret, Anecdotes Des ­B eaux-Arts, 3 vols. (Paris, 1776), 1, 308–309. 21.  ­A ntoi ne-Ma ri n Lem ierre, La Peinture (Paris, 1769), 64 (poem) and 89 (commentary). 2 2.  Carlo Gastone della Torre di Rezzonico, Opere, ed. Francesco Mocchetti, 10 vols. (Como, 1830), 10, 81. 2 3.  ­J oseph-Jérôme Le Français de Lalande, Voyage d’un François en Italie, 8 vols. (Venice and Paris, 1769), 6, 161. 2 4.  Giuseppe Sigismodo, Descrizione Della Città Di Napoli E Suoi Borghi, 3 vols. (Naples, 1789), 3, 114. 2 5.  Comtesse de Genlis (StéphanieFélicité Ducrest de Saint Aubin), Memoirs, 8 vols. (New York, 1825), 2, 32–33. An anonymous author refers to this account in a Milanese newspaper. See “Riviste e giornali,” Corriere della sera, November 4, 1912, 3. 2 6.  Anonymous, “Experimental Cast,” The ­Art-Union, vol. 7, January 1, 1845, p. 384.

10.  John Russell, Letters from a Young Painter Abroad to His Friends in England (London, 1748), 93–94.

Chapter 11 1.  Giovanni Paolo Marana, Letters Written by a Turkish Spy, trans. William Bradshaw, 26th ed., 8 vols. (London, 1770), 6, 66–69. 2. Ibid., 6, 65–66. 3.  For the Dantean topos, see note 134 herein. 4. Vasari, Lives, 2, 169. 5.  For more on the stories about Buffalmacco, see Norman Land, “Vasari’s Buffalmacco and the Transubstantiation of Paint,” Renaissance Quarterly, 58 (2005): 881–895. 6.  Gilbert Charles Le Gendre, Traité De L’opinion, 8 vols. (Paris, 1733), 256– 257. 7. Tarenne, La Cochliopérie, 18– 19. 8. Salgues, Des erreurs et des prejudges, 3, 34. The first edition appeared in 1810–1813. 9.  The article appeared anonymously and simultaneously in London Chronicle 1, no. 4 (March ­31-April 2, 1757): 317; and in The London Magazine (26 March 1757): 123. The author might refer to a scene attributed to Giotto in the church of San Francesco at Assisi. In that scene Saint Jerome examines Saint Francis’s stigmata. A Crucifix appears in the upper part of the fresco. 10.  The author might refer to Giotto’s fresco of Saint Jerome Verifying the Stigmata on the Body of St. Francis (1300) in the upper church of San Francesco at Assisi, which contains a representation of a crucifix. 11.  Anonymous, “First Painting of the Crucifixion,” The Ariel 2, no. 10 (September 4, 1828): 79; Joshua Watts, The Museum of Remarkable and Interesting Events, 2 vols. (Cleveland: Sanford and Hayward, 1844), 1, 204. 1 2.   Percy, The Percy Anecdotes, 4, 69–72. 1 3.  James Elmes, Arts and Artists, 3 vols. (London: 1825), 3, 281–283; John

Chapter 10 1.  Jonathan Richardson, “An Argument in Behalf of the Science of a Connoisseur,” part 2, 89. 2.  Jonathan Richardson, An Account of Some of the Statues, ­B as-reliefs, Drawings and Pictures in Italy (London, 1722), 183. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5.  Susinno, 113: “Dicesi altresì di Michelagnolo Buonarota io son di pare che fosse favola aver conficcato con veri chiodi un pover’uomo ad un legno ed avergli quindi trapassato il cuore con una lancia, per digingere un crocifisso.” 6. Condivi, Vita, ed. Gori, 117–118. 7.  Giorgio Vasari, Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, ed. Guglielmo della Valle, 11 vols. (Siena, 1793), 10, 278–279. 8. Lanzi, Storia Pittorica, 1, 143, note a. 9. Hayley, An Essay on Painting, 1, 63.

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Thornton, Anecdotes, 2 vols. (London: 1821), 71. 14.  An anonymous, shortened version of Marana’s tale appears as “Genius, Art and Cruelty,” in The Terrific Register, or Record of Crimes, Judgements, Providences and Calamities, 2 vols. London: 1825, vol. 1, p. 149. Another shortened version appeared in The London Encyclopedia, 22 vols. (London, 1829), p. 195. 15.  Spooner, Anecdotes, 2, 262–264. 16.  Clara Erskine Clement Waters, An Outline History of Painting for Young People and Students (New York: 1883), 68–69; Clara Erskine Clement Waters, A History of Art for Beginners and Students (New York: 1887), 68–69. 17.  Edward ­L ucie-Smith, The Faber Book of Art Anecdotes (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), 14–15. 18.  Lossing, Outline of the History of the Fine Arts, 190. 19.  De Sade, La Nouvelle Justine, in Oeuvre Complètes, 30 vols. (Paris: Circle du livre précieux, 1966–1967), 6, 262; See also Delon, 84. 2 0.  Michel Leiris, Journal: 1922–1988, ed. Jean Jamin (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 438–439: The entire entry is as follows: “peintre à la craie sur trottoir affirmant, au moyen d’une pancarte, que l’artiste, portraiturant le Christ, n’a pas craint— tel Guido Reni—de crucifier un modèle pour obtenir une resemblance plus exacte.”

A.I. du P. Coleman later published a translation of the poem in The German Classics: Masterpieces of German Literature Translated Into English, eds. Kuno Francke and Isidore Singer, 20 vols. (New York: The German Publication Society, 1914), 5, 333–338. An abridged and altered version of Aikens’s translation is in Shocking Tales, ed. Robert K. Brunner (New York: Current Books, 1946), 311–314. For the original poem, see Adelbert von Chamisso, “Das Kruzifix: Eine ­Künstler-Legende,” in Sämtliche Werke: Nach dem Te xt der Ausgaben Letzter und den Handschriften, ed. Jost Perfahl, 2 vols. (Munich: Winkler, 1975), 1, 463–468.

Chapter 13 1.  Anonymous, “Parrhasius: A Passage from Grecian History,” The Knickerbocker, 7, no. 5 (May 1836): 484–491. 2.  Benson J. Lossing, “The Rivals: A Pencil Sketch,” The Poughkeepsie Casket, 2, no. 1 (April 21, 1838): 2–3. The story was republished in The ­O dd-Fellow’s Offering, ed. Paschal Donaldson (New York, 1847), 199–211; and again in The Scrap Book, 1 (March 1906): 321–324. 3.  For an excerpt from one of the revisions, see Mary W. Mount, Some Notables of New Orleans (New Orleans, 1896), 59–65. 4.  See Paul T. Nolan, “Classical Tragedy in the Province Theater,” American Quarterly 13, no. 3 (Autumn, 1961): 410–413. 5. Pliny, Chapters, 168–169 mentions an artist named Theon.

Chapter 12 1.  Jeremy Taylor, The Whole Works, 15 vols. (London, 1822), 14, 371. See also Jeremy Taylor, The Whole Works, 1855, 10, 623–624 note, where the story is linked to those about Michelangelo and Parrhasius. 2.  The first to publish an English translation of Chamisso’s poem is C.M. Aikman, “The Crucifix: An Art Legend,” Publications of the English Goethe Society, 7, Transactions 1891–1892 (1893): 144–150. Aiken read his translation at the general meeting of the Goethe Society, at the rooms of the Royal Society of British Artists, on January 22, 1892.

Chapter 14 1.  James Pettit Andrews, Anecdotes, Etc.: Antient and Modern with Observations (London, 1789), 172–174. 2.  See Anonymous, “Inhumanity,” The Historical Magazine 1, no. 12 (1789), 450; Anonymous, “On Thoughtless Cruelty,” The Literary Magazine, and American Register 3, no. 16 (January 1805): 61–62; Anonymous, “Inhumanity,” The European Magazine and London Review,

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70 (1816): 402–403. A few years later, the story was reworked by John Thornton, Anecdotes, 2 vols. (London, 1821), 1, 68–69. 3.  John Lawrence, A Philosophical and Practical Treatise on Horses and the Moral Duties of Man Towards the Brute Creation (London, 1796), 131–132. 4.  Anonymous, “Barbarity of an Athenian Painter,” in The Terrific Register, or Record of Crimes, Judgements, Providences and Calamities, 2 vols. (London, 1825), 1, 803–804. 5.  Nathaniel Parker Willis, Poem (New York, 1831). 6.  For Willis’s poem and slavery, see Edith Hall, “The Problem with Prometheus: Myth, Abolition, and Radicalism,” in Ancient Slavery and Abolition: From Hobbes to Hollywood, eds. Richard Alston, et al. (Oxford University Press, 2011), 238–240. After he had written and published his poem about Parrhasius, Willis employed an enslaved woman, the abolitionist Harriet Ann Jacobs (1813– 1897). In 1853, Willis’s wife, Cornelia, purchased Jacobs from her owner in North Carolina and emancipated her. 7.  Anonymous, “Notes and Notices,” The Zoophist and Animals’ Defenders 20, no. 1 (August 1, 1901): 91. The reviewer offers several quotations from Black’s book. 8. Ibid. 9.  Henry Marlin Soper, ed., ScrapBook Recitations (2: A Miscellaneous Collection of Prose and Poetry for Recitation and Reading, Designed for Schools, Home, and Literary (Chicago, 1880), 59. 10.  William Holmes McGuffey, Fourth Eclectic Reader (Cincinnati, 1838), 61–63. 11.  For Lincoln’s recitation of the poem, see Francis B. Carpenter, The Inner Life of Abraham Lincoln: Si x Months at the White House (New York, 1872), 115: “N. P. Willis once told me, that he was taken quite by surprise, on a certain occasion when he was riding with the President and Mrs. Lincoln, by Mr. Lincoln, of his own accord, referring to, and quoting several lines from his poem entitled ‘Parrhasius.’” See also William Makepeace Thayer, The Pioneer Boy

and How He Became President: The Story of the Life of Abraham Lincoln (London, 1882), 314–315. 1 2.  Henry Clay Barnabee, Reminiscences, ed. George Leon Varney (Boston: Chapple, 1913), 93–97. 1 3.  Robert A. Burns, Preacher: Billy Sunday and ­Big-Time American Evangelism (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 30. 14.  William P. Trent, A History of American Literature: 1607–1865 (New York: Appleton, 1903), 454.

Chapter 15 1.  Pierre Louÿs, L’homme de pourpre (Paris: L. Borel, 1901). I have consulted the French text in ibid...., L’homme de pourpre, ed. Emanuel Dazin (Bègles: Le Castor Astral, 1994). A less than satisfactory translation is ibid...., “The Wearer of Purple,” in The Collected Works of Pierre Louÿs, trans. Mitchell S. Buck (New York: Liveright, 1932), 571–589. See also H.P. Clive, Pierre Louÿs: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). 2. Pliny, Chapters, 200–201 mentions a ­4 th-century bc sculptor named Bryaxis. 3.  The tale is taken from Pliny, Chapters, 164–165. A Pan by Ophelion is the subject of an epigram in The Greek Anthology 1, 316, 469. 4.  The story is told by Pliny, Chapters, 124–125. Pliny, however, does not say that Alexander apologized to Apelles. 5. Plato 6. Seneca, Controversies, 448–449. A declaimer, Gavius Silo, indicates that Parrhasius’s enslaved model was “torn limb from limb.” 7.  I have used the French translation of the story: Constantin Théotokis, “Apelles,” in Le peintre antique (1993), See also Rouveret, Agnes. “Parrhasios ou le peintre assassin.” In Ars et ratio. sciences, art et métiers dans la philosophie Hellénistique et Romaine, ed. C. Levy (Brussels: Collection Latomus, 2003), 184–193. 8.  Théotokis 1993, 61: “Il avait la prestance d ’un héros de tragédie. Sa précieuse chlamyde tombait en lambeaux

177



Notes—Chapters 16 and 17

de ses larges épaules et laissait voir un corps sculptural: une poitrine qui se gonflait et un ventre qui se creusait à chaque mouvement de respiration, des cuisses galbées et musclées qui imposaient une impression de force inouïe, des jambes fermes, des pieds marqués par les fers, mais déliés, et qui lui donnaient une démarche pleine de noblesse.” Translation from Marcello Barbanera, The Envy of Daedalus: Essay on the Artist as Murderer (München, 2013), 40. 9. Ibid. 10.  Pascal Quignard, Albucius, trans. Bruce Boone (Venice [CA]: Lapis Press, 1992), 144–146. French text in Pascal Quignard, Albucius (Paris: P.O.L., 1990), 146–149.

7. Ibid. 8. Papini, Vita Di Michelangiolo, 599–600. 9. Vasari, Lives, 2, 649; Condivi, Vita, 1998, 14–15. 10.  Vasari, Lives, 2, 649. 11.  Jacopo Berengario da Carpi, A Short Introduction to Anatomy (Isagogae Breves), trans. L.R. Lind (University of Chicago Press, 1959), 10. 1 2.  Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, part 1, 149. 1 3.  Antonio Cocchi, De Usu Artis Anatomicae: Oratio, 2nd edition (Florence, 1761), 19. The first edition was published in 1732. 14.  Anonimo Gaddiano, 91–92. 1 5.  Papini, Vita di Michelangiolo, 600. Significant in this regard is the case of Cesare Bettini, one of Michelangelo’s assistants, whom he had hired as overseer of the construction of Saint Peter’s in 1560. In 1563 Bettini was caught copulating with another man’s wife. The outraged husband, the Bishop of Forli’s cook, stabbed Bettini thirteen times, killing him. See William E. Wallace, Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man and His Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 313–314. Wallace notes the prevalence of violence of sixteenth century Rome. 16.  Bartolomeo Tromboncino, Fioretti Di Frottole, Barzellette, Capitoli, Strambotti E Sonetti, 2 vols. (Naples, 1518), bk. 2, as cited by James M. Saslow, The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Annotated Translation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 12 note. 17.  Allan W. Atlas, Music at the Aragonese Court of Naples (Cambridge University Press, 1985), 350. 1 8.  Glenn Watkins, The Gesualdo Hex: Music, Myth and Memory (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), 19. 19.  Mealli. 2 0.  Helmstutler Di Dio, Kelley, Leone Leoni and the Status of the Artist at the End of the Renaissance (Ashgate, 2011), 85. 21.  Rudolf and Margot Wittkower, Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists (New York and London: Norton, 1969), 191–92.

Chapter 16 1.  Brèni James, “Socrates Solves Another Murder,” Ellery Queens Mystery Magazine, Feb. 1955, 65–71. The author also wrote under the name of Brèni James Pevehouse. 2.  Mnesides is the Latin form of the Greek name for the historical architect named Mnesikles.

Chapter 17 1.  Rodolfo Amadeo Lanciani, The Golden Days of the Renaissance in Rome (New York: Houghton and Mifflin, 1906), 156–158. 2. Michelangelo, The Complete Poems, trans. John Frederick Nims (University of Chicago Press, 2000), 50–66. 3.  Giovanni Nascimbeni, “Michelangelo accusato d’omicido,” Il Marzocco 17, no. 46 (17 November 1912), 4, describes the article in the Araldo. 4.  Anonymous, “Riviste e Giornali,” Corriere della sera 37, no. 307 (November 4, 1912), 3. 5.  See Katherine Park, "The Criminal and the Saintly Body: Autopsy and Dissection in Renaissance Italy" Renaissance Quarterly 47, no. 1 (1994), 1–33 6.  Kris and Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic, 118–119.

178



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Chapter 18

2 2.  Benvenuto Cellini, My Life, trans. Julia Conway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Ox ford: Ox ford Universit y Press, 2002), 125. For Cellini’s crimes, see Paolo L. Rossi, “The Writer and the Man: Real Crimes and Mitigating Circumstances, Il caso Cellini,” in Crime, Society and Law in Renaissance Italy, ed. Trevor Dean and K.J.P. Lowe (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 151–183. 2 3.  Christopher L.C.E. Witcombe, Print Publishing in ­S ixteenth-Century Rome: Growth and Expansion, Rivalry and Murder (London: Harvey Miller, 2008), 293–301. 2 4.  For a thorough account of the murder and the pardon of Paggi, see Peter M. Lukehart, “Contending Ideals: The Nobility of G.B. Paggi and the Nobility of Painting,” 2 vols. (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1988), 1, 27–48 and 102–111. 2 5.  For an extended account of Caravaggio and Ranuccio Tomasoni, see Helen Langdon, Caravag gio: A Life (Boulder and Oxford: Westview, 2000), 309–314. 2 6.  Wittkower, Born Under Saturn, 195 and 308, note 33. 27.  Ibid., 162–163. For the trial involving Artemisia Gentileschi and Tassi, see Mary D. Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 2 8.  The affair is thoroughly discussed by Sarah McPhee, “Costanza Bonarelli: Biography Versus Archive,” Bernini’s Biographies: Critical Essays, ed. Martin Delbeke, et al. (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 315–376. See also ibid...., Bernini’s Beloved: A Portrait of Costanza Piccolomini (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012) and Mormando, Bernini, 99–109. 29.  McPhee, “Constanza Bonarelli,” 321. 3 0.   A nony mou s, Ret ratos de los Españoles ilustres con un epítome de sus vidas (Madrid, 1791), no pagination. 31.  Wittkower, Born Under Saturn, 182–183. 32.  Ibid., 182. 33.  Ibid., 143–144.

1.  Giorgio Nicodemi, “Daniele Crespi,” Emporium 73, no. 4 (1931): 23–33, illustration. 2.  Jean Lorrain, Monsieur De Phocas, trans. Francis Amery (London and New York: Daedalus and Hippocrene, 1994), 241. For the original French, see Jean Lorrain, Monsieur de Phocas (Paris: Éditions du Boucher, 2002), 69. Jean Lorrain is a pseudonym for Paul Alexandre Martin Duval. 3.  Antonio Avati, Pupi Avati, Gianni Cavina and Maurizio Costanzo, La casa dalle finestre che ridono, DVD. Directed by Pupi Avati (Hollywood, California, Twentieth Century Fox: 2002). First released in 1976. 4.  Ngaio Marsh, Artists in Crime (London: Bles, 1938). 5.  Leo Marks, Peeping Tom, DVD. Directed by Michael Powell (London, England, ­A nglo-Amalgamated Productions: 1960). 6.  “Method to His Madness,” Medium, season 2, episode 11. January 2, 2006. Written by Robert Doherty.

Chapter 19 1.  Michel Delon, “Souf france et beauté: La légende de ­M ichel-Ange assassin,” in La Quête du bonheur et l’expression de la douleur dans la littérature et la pensée Françaises: Mélanges offerts à Corrado Rosso, ed. Carminella Biondi et alia (Geneva: Droz, 1995), 77. I am much indebted to this article. Delon is concerned mostly with Michelangelo and Parrhasius. 2.  Kazlitt Arvine, The Cyclopaedia of Anecdotes of Literature and the Fine Arts (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1853), 500. 3. Ibid., 500. Charles Henry Sanson (1739–1806) says that he saw David drawing Danton; for this, see Clément Henry Sanson, ed., Memoirs of the Sansons from Private Notes and Documents (1688–1847), 2 vols. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1876), 2, 140. 4.  The translation is from Mar y Mathews Gedo, Monet and His Muse:

179



Notes—Chapter 20 and Appendices

Camille Monet in the Artist’s Life (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 206. For the original French, see George Clemenceau, Claude Monet: Les Nymphéas (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1928), reprint ed., Claude Monet: Cinquante Ans D’amitié (Paris: Paris, La Palatine 1965), 21–22. Daniel Wildenstein, Monet, 4 vols. (Paris: Taschen, 1996), 1, 146, believes that Emile Zola invented the scene described by Clemenceau. 5.  Émile Zola, His Masterpiece (L’Oeuvre), ed. and trans. Ernest Alfred Vizetelly (London: Chatto and Windus, 1902), 248–249.

Baber, 1938), 8: “In order to create it is necessary to destroy: and the agent of destruction in society is the poet.” 6.  Pablo Picasso. 7.  Allen and McGrath, Bullets Over Broadway, 1994. 8.  “Liar! Liar!,” season 4, episode 10, written by Anne ­F lett-Giordano & Chuck Ranberg, and directed by James Burrows. Originally aired on NBC, 14 January 1997. 9.  George Orwell, “Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dalí,” in Essays (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2002), 654– 657. Orwell’s review of The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942) was written in 1944, but not published until 1946. 10.  In 1937 Dalí represented himself in the guise of Narcissus in a painting and in a poem about the same painting. See Dalí, “Metamorphosis of Narcissus,” in The Collected Writings, 324–329. 11.  Clement Greenberg, “The Question of Ezra Pound,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, 4 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986–1993), 2, 305. According to the American poet Allen Ginsberg, “Encounters with Ezra Pound,” in Composed on the Tongue (Bolinas: Grey Fox Press, 1981), 8, late in his life Pound apologized to Ginsberg, saying that his “worst mistake was his stupid suburban prejudice of anti–Semitism.”

Chapter 20 1.  James Lord, Giacometti: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1983), 299: “Dans un incendie, entre un Rembrandt et un chat, je sauverais le chat.” 2.  Woody Allen and Douglas McGrath, Bullets Over Broadway, DVD. Di rec ted by Woody A l len (Hol lywood California, Miramax: 1999). First released in 1994. 3.  Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, trans. Haakon M. Chevalier (New York: Dover, 1993), 224–225. 4.  Salvador Dalí, “The Moral Position of Surrealism,” in The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, ed. and trans. Haim Finkelstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 219. Dalí refers to André Breton, Second Manifeste du Surréalisme (Paris: Éditions Kra, 1930), 69. Breton, 155, explains surrealism as follows: “The simplest surrealist act consists in going into the street with revolvers in your fist and shooting blindly into the crowd as much as possible. Anyone who has never felt the desire to deal thus with the current wretched principle of humiliation and stultification clearly belongs in this crowd himself with his belly at bullet height.” 5. Bakunin on Anarchy, ed. and trans. Sam Dolgoff (New York: Vintage, 1971), 233. See also Sir Herbert Read, Poetry and Anarchism (London: Faber and

Appendix A 1. A hadgi (Hadji) is a Muslim who has been to Mecca as a pilgrim. 2. Hegira refers to Muhammad 's departure from Mecca to Medina in 622 ce. The Muslim era is calculated from the Hegira.

Appendix B 1. The poem was read at a general meeting of the Goethe Society in the rooms of the Royal Society of British Artists on January 22, 1892. An edited version of the poem appears in Shocking Tales, ed. Robert K. Brunner (New York: Current Books, 1946), pp. 311–314.

180

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189

Index Achilles ​15 Ajax ​15 Albucius ​23, 97–98 Alexander the Great ​94 Alexander VI (pope) ​65 Allen, Woody ​124, 126 Alleyn, Roderick ​116–117 The Anatomy of Melancholy ​31, 33, 90, 108, 138 Andrea del Castagno ​6, 7 Andrews, James Pettit ​89–90 Apelles ​46, 62, 94, 97, 154 “Apelles” ​97 Apollo ​16, 27, 101 “Apprentice Column” ​8 Araldo ​105 Arellius Fuscus ​22–23 Aretino, Pietro ​52 Argentarius ​21 Artemidora ​95–96, 159, 162 Artists in Crime ​115 Atalanta ​17 Athena/Minerva ​21, 25 Athenaeus of Naucratis ​12, 16–17 Avati, Pupi ​115

Bernini, Gian Lorenzo ​42, 111–112 Bernini, Luigi ​111–112 Bernini, Pietro ​42 “The Birth of Prometheus” ​151–165 Black, John Janvier ​91–92 Boccaccio, Giovanni ​76 Bonarelli, Costanza Piccolomini ​111–112 Bonarelli, Matteo ​111 Bonsignori, Francesco ​38–40, 49 Borgia, Lucrezia ​109 Bradshaw, William ​72, 129 Breton, André ​125–126 Brown-Séquard, Charles-Édouard ​34 Bryaxis ​93–96, 151–154, 156–157 Buffalmacco, Buonamico ​75, 76 Bullets Over Broadway ​124 Burton, Robert ​31–33, 90, 107, 138 Campaspe ​97 Cano, Alonso ​112 Carpenter, Richard D. ​53–58, 62, 64, 66, 75, 77, 80 Cassandra ​85 Cellini, Benvenuto ​109–110 Chamisso, Adelbert von ​81–82, 90, 133–137 Charles I of England (king) ​50, 80 Christ on the Cross ​78 Christina’s World ​119 Cicero, Marcus Tullius ​12 Claudius Aelianus (Aelian) ​17 Cleiton ​13–14 Clemenceau, Georges ​122 Clesides ​93–94, 152–153 Close, Chuck ​80–81 Cocchi, Antonio ​108 Cole, Nat King ​119–120 Colonna, Vittoria ​56 Come har ò donque ardire ​109 Condivi, Ascanio ​51, 56–57, 63, 70–71, 107 Controversiae ​1, 10, 19–20, 28–30, 35, 46, 48, 89–90, 98 Corriere della Sera ​105 Coupin, Pierre-Alexandre ​29 Crane, Frasier ​126

Bacchus ​41 Bacchus ​41 Baglione, Giovanni ​111 Bakunin, Makhail ​126 Baldinucci, Filippo ​66 Barbanera, Marcello ​3, 97 Barberini, Cardinal Francesco ​112 Bargieri, Giovanni ​111 Barnabee, Henry Clay ​92 Barolsky, Paul ​2 Bartolino, Giovanni ​41 Barton, Catherine Josephine Wigginton ​ 35–36 Bede ​54 Bellini, Gentile ​39–40, 115 Bellini, Giovanni ​39 Berengario da Carpi, Jacopo ​106, 108 Berneval, Alexandre de ​7 Bernini, Domenico ​42

191

Index Crespi, Daniele ​9–11, 114, 127 Crucified Christ ​75 Crucifix (painting) ​73–75 Crucifix (sculpture) ​81–83 “The Crucifix: An Artist’s Legend” ​81, 90, 133–137 Crucifixion of Christ ​10, 45, 48, 63–67, 69–70 Cybele ​17

Erasistratus ​106 Erasmus, Desiderius ​28 An Essay on Painting ​29, 70 Ethal, Claudius ​114–115 Euphranor ​84–85 Evenor ​17 Experience, Historie, and Divinitie ​53

Dabney, Robert Lewis ​34 Dadd, Richard ​113 Daedalus ​3, 5–9, 82 Dalí, Gala ​125–126 Dalí, Salvador ​125–127 Damiani, Leone ​105 Damon ​86–87 Dante Alighieri ​51, 56, 73 Danton, Georges ​121 Dati, Carlo Roberto ​28–29, 62, 70 d’Avalos, Maria ​109 David, Jacques-Louis ​121–122 Debussy, Claude ​93 De Chamisso, Louis Charles Adélaïde ​see ​ Chamisso, Adelbert von Declamationum ​28 Deipnosophistae ​12 de Lalande, Joseph-Jérôme Le François ​66 del Fabbro, Pippo ​41–42, 50 Delon, Michel ​2, 121 De’ Medici, Francesco ​110 de Montabert, Jacques-Nicolas Paillot ​29 Demos ​14 Description of the City of Naples ​66 Desmoulins, Camille ​121 d’Este, Isabella ​109, 111 de Tairamond, Pierre ​114 Dezallier d’Argenville, Antoine Joseph ​63 Dialogue on Love ​49 Dialogues ​52 Diocletian ​38 Diodorus ​75 Diodorus Siculus ​26 Dionysodorus ​97 Divine Comedy ​51, 56 Doncieux, Camille ​122 Dubois, Allison ​119–120 Ductor Dubitantium or The Rule of Conscience ​80 Ecclesiastical Letters ​63 Elements of Art Criticism ​35 Eleos ​22 Elmes, James ​77 Emporium ​9 Enduring Creation ​2 Endymion ​101, 103 The Envy of Daedalus ​3

Fallet, Céllet ​31 Falloppio, Gabriello ​106, 108 Faust, A.J. ​35 “First Painting of the Crucifixion” ​77 Flender, Sheldon ​124, 126 Fontanelli, Alfonso ​109 Forty Years in the Medical Profession ​91 Fourth Eclectic Reader ​92 François, Donatien Alphonse ​see ​Marquis de Sade Frasier ​126 The French Disease ​106 Fronte, Cristoforo ​110 Fulvius Sparsus ​21, 23–24, 48 Gaddiano, Anonimo (aka Anonimo Magliabechiano) ​51, 108 Galante, Angelica ​112 Galileo Galilei ​28 Gallio ​22–23 Garcia, Wolf ​115–117 Garegnano ​10 Gentileschi, Artemisia ​111 Geralamo da Modena ​110 Gesualdo, Carlo ​109 Gherardini, Lisa ​119 Giacometti, Alberto ​124–125 Giannotti, Donato ​52 Gide, André ​93 Giotto di Bondone ​1, 3, 72–83, 89, 91, 117, 119, 127, 129–131 Giovio, Paolo ​51 Girac, Paul Thomas de ​28–29, 62 Girl with a Pearl Earring ​119 Glasiano ​84 Glaucon ​93, 153 Glaucus of Nicopolis ​12, 18, 26 Gluck, Sonia ​116–117 Gonzaga, Cardinal Ferdinando ​111 Gori, Anton Francesco ​70–71 The Greek Anthology ​12, 18 Greenberg, Clement ​127 Guerrazzi, Francesco Domenico ​105 Hayley, William ​29, 70–71 Heemskerck, Maarten van ​73, 130 Helen of Troy ​12–13 Hercules ​16, 17, 20, 22, 146 Hermes ​16 Hermes ​s ee ​Mercury

192



Index

Herod Antipas ​39 Herophilus ​32–33, 89, 106 Hesiod ​19 Hispo, Romanius ​23 History of Ancient Art ​46 Holanda, Francisco de ​52 Holofernes ​56 Horace ​23 The House with Laughing Windows ​115 Houssaye, Henri ​46 Howard, Thomas ​50 Hyrtl, Josef ​34

Lossing, Benson J. ​30, 78–79, 85 Louis XIV (king) ​72 Louÿs, Pierre ​93, 95, 151–165 Lucian of Samosata ​20, 26 Lucie-Smith, Edward ​78 Luini, Tommaso ​111 Lydia ​86–88 Malmsley, Cedric ​116–117 “The Man in Purple” ​93–99, 151–165 Mantegazza, Paolo ​33 Mantell, Robert Bruce ​86 Marana, Giovanni Paolo ​72, 75–79, 83, 91, 129 Marcotto, Albert ​119–120 Marie Louise, Princesse de Lamballe ​121 Marquis de Sade ​60–61, 76, 79, 117 Marrelli, Michelangelo ​110 Marsh, Ngaio ​115, 117 Marsyas ​101–103 Martinutti, Giovanni ​105–106 The Marvels of Art ​39 Il Marzocco ​106 The Masterpiece ​122 Mausolus ​151 Maxentius ​43 McGuffey, William Holmes ​92 The Medical Times ​32 Medium ​116 Mehmed II ​39–40 Melandroni, Fillide ​111 Meleager ​17 Memorabilia ​12, 21 Mercury ​16 Messerschmidt, Franz Xaver ​44–45 Metamorphoses ​41 “Method to His Madness” ​119 Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti ​1, 2, 10, 11, 50, 51, 62, 104 Michelangelo in the Life of His Era ​2 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio ​1, 43, 67, 104, 110–111 Michelangelo’s Nose ​2 Milo ​43–44, 79 Miniatura or the Art of Limning ​50 Misson, François Maximilien ​63–64 Mnesides ​100–103 Mona Lisa ​119 Monet, Claude ​122 Monsieur de Phocas ​114 Montléon, Guillon de ​61 Morales, Helen ​2 Moses ​49 Moses ​49 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus ​61 Mulier, Pieter ​112 Murray, Alexander S. ​30 Mussolini, Benito ​127

Ianthe ​84–85 Idea of the Temple of Painting ​52 If Christ Were King ​36 James, Brèni ​100, 103 Judas Iscariot ​48, 49 Julius II (Pope) ​49 Justine ​60 Keyssler, Johann Georg ​64–65, 67 Kirk, Thomas ​8 Kris, Ernst ​2, 107 Kurz, Otto ​2, 107 Laferi, Antonio ​110 Lanciani, Rodolfo ​104, 106 Lantier, Claude ​122–123 Lantier, Jacques-Louis ​122 Lanzi, Luigi ​29, 70 Last Judgment ​52 Latro, Marcus Porcius ​22–23, 33 Lawrence, John ​90 Lazarus ​43 Leffingwell, Albert Tracy ​33–34 Le Gendre, Gilbert Charles (Marquis de Saint-Aubin-sur-Loire) ​76 Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment ​2 Legnani, Buono ​115 Leiris, Michel ​79 Lemierre, Antoine-Marin ​66 Leo X (pope) ​104 Leonardo da Vinci ​1, 40, 51, 119 Leoni, Leone ​109 Letters Written by a Turkish Spy ​129 Lewis, Mark ​118–119 The Life ​36 Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti ​51 Lincoln, Abraham ​92 Lives of the Ancient Painters ​28, 62 Lives of the Artists ​6 Lives of the Painters of Messina ​43, 70, 75 Lochée, Alfred ​33 Lomazzo, Gian Paolo ​52 Lorrain, Jean ​114

193

Index Narcissus ​5 Nascimbeni, Giovanni ​105–107 Naso, Publius Ovidius (Ovid) ​41 Natural History ​12, 14, 27 Naucratis ​12 The New Justine ​79 Nicator, Seleucus ​151 Nicodemi, Giorgio ​10 Nicostratus ​95–96, 160–162, 164–165 Night Thoughts ​58 Norgate, Edward ​49–50 Nougaret, Pierre-Jean-Baptiste ​66 Nymph Surprised ​96

Pound, Ezra ​127 Powell, Michael ​116 The Principles of Painting ​50 Prometheus ​10, 19–21, 24–25, 29–33, 35–38, 46–48, 51, 86–87, 89–90, 94–98, 138–139, 142–149, 151, 154, 157, 159–161, 164–165 Prometheus Bound ​86 Prometheus Chained ​30–31 Prometheus Torn by the Vulture ​32 Publications of the English Goethe Society ​ 133–137 Pulszky, Ferencz Aurelius ​44–45 Purgatory ​56, 73 Pushkin, Alexander ​61 Pygmalion ​5, 41, 82

Odysseus ​15 Oglou, Dgnet ​72, 129 Ophelion ​93–94, 152–154 Ormerin, Francis ​116 Orwell, George ​125–127

Queen Stratonice ​93–94, 152–154 Quignard, Pascal ​97–98 Quintilian ​15, 35

Paggi, Giovanni Battista ​110 Pandolfi Mealli, Giovanni Antonio ​109 Papini, Giovanni ​2, 107–109, 113 Parker, George ​64 “Parrhasius” ​34, 91, 138–141 “Parrhasius and Prometheus” ​98 “Parrhasius and the Captive” ​92 “Parrhasius: or Thriftless Ambition” ​85, 90, 142–150 Pasqualigo, Martino ​109 Paul III (pope) ​110 Paul V (pope) ​111 Peeping Tom ​116 Percy, Reuben ​43 Percy, Sholto ​43 The Percy Anecdotes ​43, 77, 79 Pericles ​100 Perillus of Athens ​26–27, 57, 75–76 Peter Schlemihl ​81 Phalaris ​26–27, 57, 75 Phidias ​21, 24 Philip II (king of Macedonia) ​19–20, 22–25, 29–31, 57, 89, 94–96, 138, 155– 157, 163, 165 Philoctetes ​18–19, 26 Picasso, Pablo ​126 Pietà ​52 Piles, Roger de ​50 Pilgrim, Basil ​116–117 Plackinger, Andreas ​2 Poem Delivered Before the Society of United Brothers at Brown University on the Day Preceding Commencement, September 6, 1831, with Other Poems ​138–141 Polygnotus ​46 Pommeraye, Dom François de ​7 Pompeo ​109–110 Porsena, Lars ​42

Raising of Lazarus ​43 Raphael ​52 Reboul, Marie-Thérèse ​121 Rembrandt van Rijn ​124 Reni, Guido ​1, 78–79, 80, 83, 127 Rezzonico, Carlo Gastone della Torre di ​ 46, 66 Ricci, Marco ​113 Ricci, Sebastiano ​113 Richardson, Jonathan (the older) ​29, 68–70 Richardson, Jonathan (the younger) ​69 Ridolfi, Carlo ​39–40, 115 “Roman Dialogues” ​52 Romney, George ​29 Rossini, Pietro ​64 Rosslyn Chapel ​8 Rubens, Sir Peter Paul ​1, 50, 61, 80, 127 Rumpf, Andreas ​20 Russell, John ​71 Sacchetti, Franco ​76 Saint-Aubin, Stéphanie-Félicité Ducrest de ​67 Saint Jerome ​77 Saint John the Baptist ​39 Saint Martin ​67 Saint Sebastian ​38–39 Salamanca, Antonio ​110 Salgues, Jacques-Barthélemy ​32–33, 77 Salieri, Antonio ​61 Samson, George Whitefield ​35 Sansovino, Jacopo ​41–42 Sarnelli, Pompeo ​63, 70 Savonarola, Girolamo ​65 Scaevola, Gaius Mucius ​42 Schott, André ​28, 46, 62 Schottus, Andreas ​see ​Schott, André

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Index

Seacliff, Valmai ​116–117 The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí ​125 Secundus, Gaius Plinius (elder Pliny) ​12, 14–17, 19–20, 24, 26–27, 29, 35, 37, 93, 100 Sellius, Gottfried ​46 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (the elder Seneca) ​ 1, 2, 10–12, 19–20, 22–35, 38, 42–48, 51–52, 57, 70, 78, 80, 83, 89–91, 93, 98, 100, 105, 107, 115, 118 Sforza, Francesco ​51 Sigismondo, Giuseppe ​66 Silo, Pompeius ​23 Silus, Caius Albucius ​98 Simcox, George Augustus ​35 Socrates ​12, 14, 21, 26, 30, 73, 86–87, 96, 100–103, 142, 162 Soderini, Piero ​108 Some Anecdotes of Painting in England ​77 Soper, Henry Marlin ​92 Speroni, Sperone ​49, 83 Spivey, Nigel ​2 Spizelius, Theophilus (aka Gottlieb Spitzel) ​62, 106 Spooner, Shearjashub ​37, 78 Spyridion ​24 Stolper, B.J. ​151 Stratonice ​93–94, 152–154 Sunday, Billy ​92 Susinno, Francesco ​43, 69–70 Symonds, John Addington ​104 Talus (or Talos) ​6–9 Tarenne, George ​32–33, 76–77 Tassi, Agostino ​111 Tassi, Maria ​111 Taylor, the Rev. Jeremy ​80–81 Thearchus ​85 Themistius ​16 Theon ​86–87 Théotokis, Constantin ​97 Thornton, John ​77 Timanthes ​15 Titian ​49 Tomassoni, Ranuccio ​104, 110 Tranquillus, Gaius Seutonius (Seutonius) ​ 17 Treatise on Opinion ​76

Trent, William P. ​92 Tromboncino, Antonia ​109 Tromboncino, Bartolomeo ​109 Urban VIII (pope) ​112 Vaccari, Lorenzo ​110 Valéry, Paul ​93 valle, Father Guglielmo della ​70 van Loo, Jacques ​112 Vasari, Giorgio ​6–7, 27, 38, 40, 41, 44, 49–51, 66, 70, 75, 104, 107 Vecellio, Orazio ​109 Veneziano, Domenico ​6, 7 Vermeer, Jan ​119 “Verses Occasioned by that Famous Piece of the Crucifixion Done by Michael Angelo” ​58 Vesalius, Andreas ​106 Viardot, Louis ​30–31 Virgil ​56 Virgin and Child ​75 The Vivisection Controversy ​33 Waffle, Albert E. ​36–37 Walpole, Horace ​77 Waters, Clara Erskine Clement ​78 Williams, Espy W.H. ​85–88, 142–150 Williams, William Hendricks ​see ​Williams, Espy W.H. Willis, Nathaniel Parker ​34, 90–92, 138–141 Wilson, William ​35 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim ​46 Wood, Anthony ​53 Wornum, Ralph Nicholson ​29 Wright, Edward ​64–65, 68 Wyeth, Andrew ​119 Xenophon ​12–14, 21, 26, 73, 93, 100 Young, Edward ​58–59, 80, 82 Zeus ​19–21, 24–25, 95, 158 Zeuxis ​12, 15, 24, 30, 36, 40, 46, 57, 84–85, 100–103, 157 Zola, Émile ​122

195