Visual Engagements: Image Practices and Falconry 9783110618587, 9783110616460

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Visual Engagements

Visual Engagements Image Pr actices and Falconry Edited by Yannis Hadjinicolaou

This publication was funded by the generous support of New York University Abu Dhabi.

ISBN 978-3-11-061646-0 e-ISBN (Pdf) 978-3-11-061858-7 Library of Congress Control Number: 2020943232 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover illustration: Detail James Northcote, Self-portrait with Falcons, 1823, oil on canvas, 102 × 127 cm, Exeter, Royal Albert Memorial Museum (detail of fig. 1, p. 4). Layout and typesetting: P. Florath, Stralsund Printing and binding: Beltz Grafische Betriebe GmbH, Bad Langensalza www.degruyter.com

Contents

VII

A Bird’s-Eye View

2 Yannis Hadjinicolaou Visual Encounters Falconry as Image Practice

Embodied Inter actions 30 Andrea Pinotti What is it like to be a Hawk? Inter-specific Empathy in the Age of Immersive Virtual Environments 48

Herman Roodenburg “Still be mindeful on you.” Hints of Human-falcon Empathy in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

67 Colour Plates

Symbolic Tools 84 Robert Felfe Exploring Pictorial Space with Falcons 108 Monika Wagner Leather and Feather: Material Interactions in the Art of Falconry

124

Baudouin van den Abeele The Hooded Falcon as an Allegory of Hope (15th –17 th century)

147 Colour Plates

Gaze and Agency 164 Christine Kleiter, Gerhard Wolf The Falcon, the Eagle and the Owl Raptors’ and Falconers’ Gaze between Theory, Practice, and Art(s) 196

Horst Bredekamp Falconry as a Variant of the Image Act

214 Klaus Krüger Art is Aiming for the Eye Gazes as Arrows in the Early Modern Era

Epistemology 240

Frank Zöllner Aby Warburg and Flying

256

Peter Geimer Birds and Angels: A Physiologist Meets Mythology

272 Tanja Michalsky Gaining insight through a Bird’s-Eye View On the Chorography of Naples in the Early Modern Era 297

Picture Credits

A Bird’s-Eye View

A falcon held between two hands. The bird of prey does not seem to be bothered by the human hand’s touch, which reveals a kind of hole on the side of her head. It is her ear. The eyes, one of the falcon’s most powerful instruments, are covered by a kind of white veil (fig. 1, plate I). She does not see as she is anaesthetised whilst her ear is “uncovered” by one of the numerous members of staff working at the Abu Dhabi Falcon Hospital. The United Arab Emirates on the Arabian Gulf belongs to a region whose heritage, and especially visual heritage, is based, among other things, on falconry, which is truly an ars vivendi. Visual Engagements. Image Practices and Falconry focuses on intersections between culture and nature, vision and the gaze, tactility and perception, perspective and surveillance and questions concerning political iconology, as well as the migration of objects and images. However, epistemic notions around flying or cartography are also addressed. Any practice is blind without a theory, but theories which do not consciously rely on practices are often problematic. It is of great importance to address the implicit knowledge involved in the pursuit of falconry as is the case with the image in general. The present studies are not based on practical experience (none of the contributors is a falconer) but rather originate from a theoretical point of view that addresses the symbolic and epistemological level of the very practice. For the first time, theoretical reflection brings together two quite different areas in a non-systematic dialogue that evolves in various directions following different associations. Considerations on the conditions and possibilities of perception in humananimal relationships through visual media and technology is certainly of primordial concern for research. The relationship between falcon and falconer, seen both through a cultural historical lens and by drawing on recent cognitive research on empathy, touches upon basic aspects of human-animal interactions. Exploration of the faculty of seeing and the respective visual practices also has the result of stressing relationships between seeing and the handling of hawks in terms

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A Bir d’s-Eye V iew

1   Anaesthetised falcon, Abu Dhabi, Falcon Hospital.

of perception. In more concrete terms the material furniture of falconry such as the hood and the lure, with the feathers that adorn them, bring together practical falconry with image practices, since the falconer is dependent on visual tactile devices that also have deeply symbolic connotations. The faculty of seeing brings a metaphorical dimension to the topos of the gaze as an arrow, having a parallel in the relationship between image and observer. This analogy is also pertinent to relationships between the agency of the image and that of the hawk. Falconry evokes a metaphor for surveying and cartographic gazing. It is a prosthesis of the human eye and body, involving touching and seeing. Here one has only to think of the so-called bird’s-eye view that is a pictorial invention between perspective and measurement, a monitoring as a kind of organic drone avant la lettre. In this sense, visual engagements have a multisensorial dimension that one can combine not only with theories on empathy but also embodiment and enactive perception. In a broader sense, of course, falconry is inextricably linked with flight and, as such, involves the human imagination. Aby Warburg worked exactly on this subject by coining the term “image vehicle” (Bilderfahrzeug). Beyond their actual movement image

A Bir d’s-Ey e V iew

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 Falconer Mohammed al Hammadi during the workshop together with Gregor Stemmrich, Abu Dhabi, New York University.

vehicles can be metaphorical instruments of reflection on symbolic representation. However, there is also an epistemological notion of flying being a meeting point between natural laws and artistic imagination, blending both together to result in a rather paradoxical constellation of order and its negation, of possibility and impossibility. This consideration could serve as an emblem for the present endeavour, namely to prompt these different areas of comparison (falconry, visual imagery, the gaze or image vehicles) as a new terrain for research, questioning about their differences and, most of all, their similarities. The aforementioned image (fig. 1) was taken during a visit on the first day of the workshop that took place in April 2018 at New York University, Abu Dhabi, within the framework of a research fellowship in the Humanities. I wish to especially thank

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A Bir d’s-Eye V iew

Reindert Falkenburg, Martin Klimke and, last but not least, Alexandra Sandu for making things as easy as possible during my inspiring sojourn. Gila Wells and Nora Yousif also helped at different stages of the endeavour. The book was funded generously from the NYUAD institute grants as well as the Humanities Fellowship programme. Andreas Beyer and Reindert Falkenburg also contributed, with their papers and their interventions at the overall discussions during the workshop. Gregor Stemmrich kindly chaired some of the sessions. I wish also to thank Emirati falconer Mohammed al Hammadi (Emirates Falconers’ Club), who brought his falcon to NYUAD and discussed with us various questions concerning falconry training and manning processes (fig. 2). This was truly a moment when theory and practice indeed met in a fruitful interaction. I would like to thank Baudouin van den Abeele and Horst Bredekamp who, although not present at the meeting in Abu Dhabi, contributed to the volume. The publishing house De Gruyter expressed interest in undertaking this edition and I wish to particularly thank Susanne Drexler and Katja Richter for this, as well as Petra Florath for her imaginative work on the design and layout. David Horobin of the British Archives of Falconry corrected all texts in English with great enthusiasm, enriching all of the papers with his comments and questions from the perspective of a practical falconer as well as that of a scholar. The authors must be warmly thanked for their engaging contributions and for their stimulating presence during the workshop at NYU Abu Dhabi. Y.H.

Yannis Hadjinicolaou

Visual Encounters Falconry as Image Practice

Artist cum Falconer In a semi-darkened room appears a finely-clad male figure that is shown in profile (fig. 1).1 With an elevated arm, he is pointing in the direction of two perches, on each of which a hawk is depicted. One is in motion with open wings and looks towards the man. The other, hooded on a perch, is captured in stillness. A dog accompanies the man and observes the active hawk, that has jesses on its feet and is accentuated through light. The light corresponds with the painting’s chiaroscuro and hence to the question of darkness and light, a question that the hawks are also raising through kinesis and stasis as well as seeing (unhooded) and not seeing (wearing the hood as a second skin; its colour partly resembles the hawk’s feathers). The gaze of the person who wears a falconer’s glove (thus simultaneously addressing the crucial role of tactility) and seems to own the two hawks, is absorbed. At the same time the man’s gesture is in motion whereas his left-hand rests on a chair as if combining the behavioural modes of both hawks – activity and passivity.2 The male figure is not only, seemingly, a falconer but is also an artist. A pupil of Joshua Reynolds, James Northcote has painted himself as a falconer in the year 1823.3 This shows that the art of falconry and the art of painting have structural resemblances. Northcote tries to tame the untamed as in his constant struggle with painting media, which, however, have their own agency. Even if the surface of this particular painting is quite tamed, it nevertheless unleashes, through its 1  2 

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would like to thank Léa Kuhn, who brought my attention to this image. Cat. James Northcote, History Painting and the Fables, ed. Mark Ledburg, New Haven and London 2014, p. 135. In the respective catalogue Northcote’s gesture has been interpreted as him having a conversation with the hawks, something a bit far-fetched. His mouth remains demonstratively closed. There is, however, certainly a bodily, non-verbal, communication between the different agents, including the dog. 3   Exhib. Cat. James Northcote (as in note 2).  Exhib.

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1   James Northcote, Self-portrait with Falcons, 1823, oil on canvas, 102 × 127 cm, Exeter, Royal Albert Memorial Museum.

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powerful light, a motion that is connected both to the hawks and to the artist in the previously mentioned dialectic tension, which constitutes one of the image’s principal forces, namely to suggest motion on a two-dimensional motionless surface. One of the basic assumptions of the interaction between falcon and falconer, between image, image maker and beholder, is that vision is a crucial way of perceiving and creating the world, as we briefly also saw with Northcote’s painting. It is no coincidence that Frederick II, in his seminal De Arte Venandi Cum Avibus (ca. 1240), speaks about the ART of hunting with birds.4 Falconry is an art form, a performance in time and space. An artist is like a falconer, pursuing his or her art in a constant dialogue with the image as the falconer does with a hawk, but with the vast difference that a hawk has its own will and vitality, which the work of art only suggestively possesses. The hawk’s activity and the human-animal interaction have certain structural resemblances to the way artists work with materials that have an intrinsic agency. To explore their affordances, as well as letting one be guided through them, creates a reenactment between artist, image and beholder. This could be said equally for the trinity of falcon, falconer and beholder. Each one of the respective practices has its own rules, but vision and tactility, simulation and dissimulation, are features, among others, that both activities have in common.5 The artist and the falconer are gatherers, collectors of images or quarry. It is about ruling and being ruled by, taming and being tamed by. The quarry may become an image as the image may turn into quarry, notably through the ad infinitum interaction of the different agents in each respective practice. The image captures, in its slowness, the speed and almost imperceptible movement of the hawk during its pursuit of quarry that may last mere seconds. It can be argued that the performance of falconry is known to non-falconers, and even to a certain degree practitioners, through images that shape our ideas and actions. This does not mean, however, that the image is freed from any ambiguity. In its concreteness, it opens up a whole reservoir of dynamic tensions. The image only seems to tame, while falconry opens thus a new, untamed, iconic space of meaning for the beholder. Thus, hawks have their own symbolic force, or dynamis, that is closely related to images representing them and their materiality, especially when the hawk becomes an image itself. The hawk’s flight and the intrinsic power of the symbiotic relationship fundamental to falconry are at the core of this dynamis.6 The hawk’s role as both actor and symbol exemplifies a critical material iconology that understands basis (i.e. matter) and superstructure (i.e. symbol) as the horizontal field of an animal activity, or ergon. Form is united with content but certainly not only in a harmonious kind of way. The hawk moves around 4  5  6 

 See

Dorothea Walz, Das Falkenbuch Friedrichs II, Graz 1994. the paper by Christine Kleiter and Gerhard Wolf.  See the contribution by Horst Bredekamp.  See

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 Samuel Williams, after James Northcote, The Brother of the Artist, 1797, mezzotinto, 502 × 352 mm, London, British Museum.

as the images do: it is perhaps no coincidence that the common name of one of the most prized trained hawks is the peregrine falcon, Falco peregrinus – the Wanderfalke. Analogous to this, one might speak of the peregrine image. Northcote’s relationship to falconry, whether practical or, as seems most likely, simply artistic, continued with a portrait of his brother painted in 1796 and which became more famous through the mezzotint print by Samuel William Reynolds (fig. 2). His brother is shown, in contradistinction to the artist’s self-portrait, outdoors with his dog. He has just removed the hood and gently touches the falcon’s breast. Those two elements capture the tension between tameness and wildness. The contrast between the man’s illuminated face and the darker tones that overshadow the falcon’s head are underlined through the forceful mezzotint as well as the respective gazes. We watch the scene as if we are ourselves one of Northcote’s dogs. Searching with the sense of smell, vision, tactility and hearing, and hence finding and targeting, corresponds to the theme as well as to the formal characteristics of the mezzotint that starts from darkness and works out its forms into light in a similar way that occurs with the falcon, when one removes its hood. This fact underlines the transition from non-seeing into

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3 

 David

Dawson, Lucian Freud, 2009, photograph.

seeing and targeting quarry without implying that this cannot lead back to blurriness and non-seeing. The “flying” medium of the print, in the sense of Aby Warburg’s “image vehicle”,7 also corresponds in Northcote’s case to the falcon, which is being prepared to be flown and whose beak almost hits against the picture plane. The contact as well as distant point between hawk and beholder is the image’s outermost surface, that also involves the viewer’s bodily movement towards and away from the picture, constantly observed by the falcon. This interval, the space, being the image or the physical distance between falcon and falconer, is their connecting point, a productive continuum of the agents’ dialectic forces. Hawks’ vision is about eight times more acute than humans’: in comparison, we are like a black and white television, whereas a falcon is similar to a coloured one, as it was eloquently put by Andy Bennett, specialist in avian vision.8 This is addressed in a portrait by David Dawson of Lucian Freud with a kestrel from the year 2009 (fig. 3). It 7 

 See the contribution by Frank Zöllner in this volume. Andreas Beyer, Horst Bredekamp, Uwe Fleckner and Gerhard Wolf, Bilderfahrzeuge. Aby Warburgs Vermächtnis und die Zukunft der Ikonologie, Berlin 2018; Martin Warnke, “Vier Stichworte. Ikonologie/Pathosformel/Polarität und Ausgleich/Schlagbilder und Bilderfahrzeuge”, in: Die Menschenrechte des Auges. Über Aby Warburg, Frankfurt am Main 1980, pp. 53–83. 8   Quoted in: Helen Macdonald, Falcon, London 2016, p. 32.

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 Clifford Cauffin, Lucian Freud, 1947, photograph.

is as if the relationship between foreground (sharp) and background (blurred in this fuzzy, Hockney-like still life) corresponds to the way Freud’s absorbed and blurry gaze centres the attention on the bird of prey and its interaction with the beholder. With only one eye visible, the kestrel gazes sharply towards us and interacts with the photographic lens. An exchange of gaze “shootings” occurs (the falconer should not look a hawk directly in the eyes as this upsets them). It is as if the hawk is now doing the painter’s job in terms of looking and gathering images of the world. If Titian’s painting became more daring, according to the negative undertone of the topic art literature of his times, through his dimmed eyesight, one could argue that this does not happen to Freud due to his kestrel or that he employs exactly those possibilities and limitations of the sense of sight as a surplus (Freud was best familiar with this painting tradition and art theory).9 Known to have kept hawks in his studio in the 1940s, Freud was engaged with the pursuit of metaphorical “falconry” from early on, pursuing his own “quarry” with his sharp gaze as a veritable “hunter”.10 The substitution of painter and 9 

 See Philip Sohm, The Artist Grows Old. The Aging of Art and Artists in Italy, 1500–1800, New Haven and London 2007; Martin Gayford, Man with a Blue Scarf. On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud, London 2014. 10   See Francesca Borgo, “Leonardo’s Hunts. Metaphors for the Physiology of Perception”, in: Hunting without weapons. On the Pursuit of Images, ed. Maurice Saß, Berlin and Boston 2017, pp. 21–27; Exhib.

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hawk is stressed in the physiognomy as well as the gaze. Freud’s gesture here (highly untypical of a practical falconer with a trained hawk) is also noteworthy, as if he would simultaneously present, protect and frame, like an image, the bird of prey (fig. 4).11

Falconry Furnitur e : The Case of the Hood Items of falconry equipment, or “furniture”, allow elaboration on the question of illusion, addressing a further form of visual engagement. When we hear the word “hood” we primarily think of hip hop or demonstrations with people wearing hoods, alluding to a “revolutionary” kind of modus vivendi. We also associate this term with burqas. In the present context we will deal with a different kind of hood intended not for humans but for animals and, more precisely, hawks, moving somewhere between subversive resistance and wilfulness. The hood is a cover, a case, a container of a mobile living being, as the hawk is. It addresses the question of covering and uncovering (the presence and absence of the gaze, seeing and not seeing, focussing and targeting and their opposites). In London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, two displays attract our attention (fig. 5 and fig. 6): one identifies on the left, among weapons and porcelain, a falconry hood with some red fabric cords (“braces”) which secure the hood on the hawk’s head, and on the right we have a similar assemblage, an arrangement containing weapons as well as a hood. It is clear that in the display on the left the objects are European, whereas on the right Asian-Islamic influences predominate, especially when we observe the shape of the daggers. Indeed, it is a display of objects from the Islamic-Indian subcontinent. What is striking though is the fact that the two hoods do not differ greatly. What we see is, in fact, a common, transcultural, technique. The hood was brought to Europe from the Middle East, under the well-known name of burqa. In Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II’s treatise we read: “The falcon’s hood is a discovery of oriental peoples, the Arabs having, so far as we know, first introduced it into active practice. We ourselves, when we sailed across the seas, saw it used by them and made a study of their manner of manipulating this head covering. The Arabian chiefs not only presented us with many kinds of falcons but sent with them falconers expert in the use of the hood.”12 The hood should calm the hawk during the Cat. Lucian Freud und das Tier, ed. Eva Schmidt and Ines Rüttinger, Siegen 2015. 11   This cover derives from the Italian edition of Breakfast with Lucian Freud by Geordie Greig (2013). Unfortunately it hides the other images in Freud’s atelier: Geordie Greig, Colazione con Lucian Freud. Ritrato di una vita nell’arte, Milan 2015. 12   See Frederick II, The Art of Falconry, ed. Casey A. Wood and F. Marjorie Fyfe, Stanford 1983, p. 205. See also Frederick’s descriptions on the hood, pp. 214–218. Robin S. Oggins, The Kings and their Hawks. Falconry in Medieval England, New Haven 2004, p. 26. The falcon’s hood has led contemporary artists to

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 Hood, Punjab, 1880, London, Victoria and Albert Museum.

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 Falcon’s Hood, England or Germany, 1600–1620, London, Victoria and Albert Museum.

manning and training stages, but also before its use in hunting. The goal is that the hawk operates as if in a wild state, yet one created or enabled by the falconer. It is hence an artificial wildness, where culture and nature merge with one another. Falconry and ruling are interlinked with each other, something that is visible in the famous image of Frederick II who rules with his hooded falcon by his side, a performative metaphor of his sovereignty. There are dozens of images of rulers, men and women, learning from an early age how to handle hawks. The handling of unexpected situations makes falconry a perfect model for sovereigns to be engaged with because a

explore questions of emancipation in the Gulf region. One thinks, for instance, of Hoda Tawakol. I would like to thank Eva Meyer-Hermann, who brought this artist to my attention. A photographic series with men wearing huge hoods derives from Toufic Beyhum and shows another perspective on the subject.

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7   Matthäus Merian the Younger, Landgraf Friedrich von HessenEschwege as Falconer, ca. 1655, oil on wood, 190 × 84 cm, Berlin, Jagdschloß Grunewald.

hawk can never be fully tamed, when she is not wearing the hood.13 She can leave the falconer at any time. As one can observe here, falconry skills were handed down as practical techniques from father to son, like in this image by the Legend of St. Madeleine Master depicting Philippe the Handsome, who is shown with a virgula (a small implement for gently stroking the hawk) and a hooded sparrowhawk.14 He handed down this practice to his 13   Yannis Hadjinicolaou, “‘Ich zog mir einen Falken.’ Das ikonische Nachleben der Falknerei”, in: Pegasus. Berliner Beiträge zum Nachleben der Antike, 18/19 (2018), p. 177. 14   See here the text by Herman Roodenburg.

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son Charles Vth, as a mobile kind of ancestral power, also including the technique of hooding (plate VIII and plate IX).15 The Duke of Hessen-Eschwege is depicted by Matthäus Merian the Younger as a heroic ruler who holds a hawk’s hood in his hand, presenting it as if he has just removed it (fig. 7, plate II). He demonstrates that a true sovereign as a trainer-leader is the one who knows when to take a decision, whether it is sending troops to battle or a matter linked to hunting. The light falls from the upper left side, where another hawk – the prized white gyrfalcon – is shown with a red hood. On the other side parts of a heron, as quarry, are visible. The different textures of the feathers as well as the garments are related but also differentiated from each other in bold brushstrokes. Alongside the unhooded goshawk (a species generally difficult to make to the hood) darker shadows predominate (chiasmus of light and dark). The Duke himself unites the modalities of light and dark, seeing and not seeing, embodied by the hawks, hooded or otherwise, dependent on the ruler’s intelligent handling. At the Brandenburg court, with his mews at Lehnin16 the Duke used his hawks in his performative rituals as an unfolding of power as well as an enhancement of the social courtly body. In this very case we can speak of the hood as part of a certain ritual, a ritual, though, that cannot be wholly controlled: the subversive force of the animal can totally change any given situation within the respective hunting ritual, since it can fly away. However, failure is also part of a ritual.17 The hood helps to control certain actions, but it also involves, as soon as it is removed, a moment of contingency that goes beyond sovereignty. It is rather the hawk’s sovereignty – the ruler’s acknowledgement of this fact makes him or her a true leader. A hood owned by Maximilian I illustrates that such material-haptic devices also had a symbolic quality because the owner’s emblem, here the double eagle of the Habsburgs, appears as an icon upon the hood’s gilded leather (fig. 8). When it is carried, the hooded falcon becomes a symbol of imperial power, as it is in movement before its use in a royal hawking expedition or during a diplomatic mission.18 In dozens of still lifes, especially in 17th century Dutch art, the hood is always shown in a certain hierarchical, vertical, position in relationship to the hawk’s quarry, even where the hawk itself is absent (falconry was in decline but falconry images were produced in huge numbers, a fascinating paradox of pictorial mass mobility). The

15   Exhib. Cat. Kaiser Karl V. 1500–1558. Macht und Ohnmacht Europas, vol. 1, Bonn 2000, p. 131. Antonie H. Jahn, Ikonographie der Bildnisse Kaiser Karls V. (1500–1558), unpublished PhD, University of Kassel 2014, pp. 28–29. 16   Jagdschloss Grunewald. Königliche Schlösser und Gärten in Berlin, ed. Stiftung Preussische Schlösser und Gärten, Berlin 2015, p. 21. 17   Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Rituale, Frankfurt am Main and New York 2019. 18   Most of the time, a hood has ornaments, often with dazzling colours. It is as if the “not seeing” condition of the hawk is materialised in the hood’s colourful abstraction.

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 A

hood of Maximilian I, ca. 1500, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum.

pictorial power of falconry furniture such as the hood implies a meta-political iconography (as pars pro toto), a self-referentiality, an index, moving somewhere between presence and absence. What we see is the result of a process: after its hood is removed, the hawk targets its prey. In an image by Abraham Mignon, the painted hood underlines its importance in the scene. In colour and texture it resembles the cockerel over which it has, at least on a symbolic level, triumphed (fig. 9). The duality or better dialectics of life and death, mobility of the insects and immobility of the dead animals as well as the falconry furniture are brought together on the image’s single painted surface. The art of painting and the art of falconry make the invisible visible and vice versa. The work of Willem van der Aelst, a master in the specific genre of still life with game, delivers this relationship in a nutshell (fig. 10).19 The verticality of the hoods underlines their implicit power. The dead partridge appears quite alive through the power of colour and lies, without any traces of blood, on a lure acting as a pillow, which again is on a fictive marble-plate corresponding to its colours. The quarry is carefully placed upon the instrument that not only lured the hawk but also the beholder since it is tangibly placed up against us, slightly above the artist’s signature. The interplay between artificiality and naturalness, between the hawk’s absence and the manifestation of its presence through the hood and the lure, addresses the core question of

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 Exhib. Cat. Elegance and Refinement. The Still-Life Paintings of Willem van Aelst, ed. Tanya Paul, James Clifton, Arthur K. Wheelock and Julie Berger Hochstrasser, New York 2012; Exhib. Cat. Die Geburt des Kunstmarktes. Rembrandt, Ruisdael, Van Goyen und die Künstler des Goldenen Zeitalters, ed. Franz Wilhelm Kaiser and Michael North, Munich 2017, pp. 76–77.

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 Abraham Mignon, Still life with Dead Poultry, ca. 1663–1664, oil on canvas, 58.7 × 49,3 cm, Frankfurt am Main, Städel Museum.

simulation and dissimulation, vision and tactility for both falconry and imagery, as a multisensory experience that moves us.20 The instruments’ materiality is underlined by the trompe l’oeil effect in a painting by Cornelis Gijsbrechts, appealing directly to the viewer’s sense of touch. By suggesting the objects’ physicality and tangibility Gijsbrechts heightened the painting’s agency (fig. 11).21 The hood’s prominent position among the instruments reveals itself in the 20  21 

 On

the sense of touch and falconry see the contribution by Robert Felfe in this volume. Cat. Painted Illusions. The Art of Cornelis Gijsbrechts, ed. Olaf Koester, London 2000, p. 51.

 Exhib.

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 Willem van der Aelst, Prey with Falcon’s Hood, 1671, oil on canvas, 57.5 × 45.7 cm, Schwerin, Staatliches Museum.

diagonal axis. The curtain hanging from the rod records how paintings could be protected from dust but also prevented from affecting the viewer.22 As the hood calms the hawk, so may the closed curtain calm the viewer. At the same time, with its picturein-a-picture effect, the curtain offers a commentary on the art of painting. Indeed, like the trompe l’oeil painting deceiving the viewer, the lure depicted had its trompe l’oeil effect on the hawk, thus bringing it back to the falconer after its hood was removed. 22 

 Exhib. Cat. Hinter dem Vorhang. Verhüllung und Enthüllung seit der Renaissance, ed. Claudia Blümle and Beat Wismer, Munich 2016.

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11   Cornelis Gijsbrechts, Tromp l’Oeil with falconry furniture, 1671, oil on canvas, 118 × 89 cm, Copenhagen, Rosenborg Slot.

The pictorial presence of the hooded falcon was compared in a magazine of 1893 with another icon “as firmly impressed on the popular mind as that of St. George and the Dragon”.23 In a family portrait from Ferrara, a man, appearing in profile, carries a hooded hawk in a reference that extends to the window, showing men going hawking (fig. 12, plate III). He is thus part of the outside presented in the inside, whereas his wife has taken over the inside of the house with the child’s education. The hood carries the 23 

 Macdonald

(as in note 8), pp. 49–50.

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 Painter from Ferrara (Antonio de Crevalcore?), Family portrait, ca. 1480, oil on canvas, 112.3 × 90.8 cm, Munich, Alte Pinakothek.

respective family’s coat of arms and appears in this domesticated interior as a materialmobile bearer of this symbol. It unfolds an abstract dimension in its haptic presence. The red cords on the woman’s clothing correspond to the hawk’s jesses with the golden bells underlining the question of property. However, the gesture of carrying the hawk as well as putting his hand on his wife’s shoulder also brings an analogy between both human and animal as, ostensibly, the man’s “property”. The hawk has its greatest power when it sees and hunts, as is the case with the wife who is the head of the house, especially when the husband is absent and does not try to “tame” her (things can change rapidly, at least for a moment, as the tale of Phyllis and Aristotle eloquently tells).

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13 

 Joachim

Camerarius, Et voluisse sat est,

1599.

A letter from Isabella d´ Este to Louis XII illuminates the pragmatic use of the coat of arms on a hood: “have three dozen hoods made for the sakers, not painted or gilded but rather stamped with the arms and the emblem of the King, which we send you here enclosed”.24 In this way, the coat of arms is the indexical reference of power on a mobile device. The hood refers to a power that goes along with questions of ruling and becomes its metaphor, for instance about the falconer’s/ruler’s decision as to when the hawk should see and therefore hunt. Turbervile’s falconry treatise of 1575 recommends that a hawk “muste have a hood of good leather, well made and fashioned, well raysed and bossed agaynst hir eyes, deep and yet streyght ynough beneath, that it never hurt hir”.25 This speaks for both the aesthetic and functional dimensions of the hood and its relation between freedom and surveillance. Every hood (and indeed its use) should serve the hawk’s individuality and, hence, is unique. The somewhat inflexible leather must become the hawk’s second skin: if the hood is uncomfortable, she will not

24   See Giancarlo Malacarne, Lords of the Sky. Falconry in Mantua at the Time of the Gonzagas, Mantua 2011, p. 134. 25   Arthur MacGregor, Animal Encounters. Human and Animal Interaction in Britain from the Norman Conquest to World War I, London 2012, p. 182.

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remain calm. Hoods are often decorated with feathers alluding to lightness and flying,26 properties of the hawk herself, bearing a dynamic dialectic relation to the leather’s inflexible authority as an image vessel. A famous scene from A Clockwork Orange is a counter example to the hood with seemingly similar goals. The opening of the eyes of young, undisciplined, Alex should confront him with moving images, with the intention that he becomes disgusted by his own former misdeeds; he undergoes a disciplinary of dubious means with the intention of taming his eyes’ visual stimuli. Something similar happens with the hood or with a prior step known as “seeling” in which, traditionally, the hawk’s eyes were held closed with a stitch for the duration of the initial manning process. There is also an emblematic dimension to this, with an image from 1598 that goes hand-in-hand with questions of obedience.27 A falcon wearing a hood (velamentum, meaning membrane, since images were also seen as membranes of the visual realm), the serpentine braces of which splay out like thunderbolts, flies with dangling jesses above a mountainous landscape. This image is linked with the motto et voluisse sat est (“wanting is enough” – i.e. often a small obstacle stands in the way of high pursuits but nevertheless a noble person goes against it) (fig. 13).28 This idea is linked with someone who adamantly pursues his or her goal of freedom, despite the difficulties. The hooded falcon’s image is connected here to contradictory forces that involve the question of tamed and untamed, pertaining to visual perception (or not) manifested through the ritualised technique of the hood as a mobile wearing object device.

The image cult of falconry and its political power In a very dense passage from Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly, illustrated by Hans Holbein the Younger who painted famous portraits of falconers, 29 the Dutch humanist brings image and animal (in this case hawks, as visible from the drawing) into explicit relation (fig. 14): “I cannot pass by without bestowing some remarks upon another sort of fools; they keep a long list of their predecessors, while they themselves are but transcripts of their forefathers’ dumb statues, and degenerate even into those very beasts which they carry in their coat of arms as ensigns of their nobility […] they cry up those 26 

 See Thor Huson, Feathers. The Evolution of a Natural Miracle, New York 2011. See also the text by Monika Wagner in the present volume. 27   Another emblem showing a flying falcon with jesses on her feet speaks of a perilous quest for freedom (Perniciosa libertas). See Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Schöne, Emblemata. Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI. und XVII Jahrhunderts, Stuttgart 1967, p. 782. 28   See Baudouin van den Abeele’s contribution to this volume for tracking down the motif of the hooded falcon as a symbol of hope (post tenebras spero lucem), which can also be connected here with freedom (at least in a broader context). 29   See for instance Oskar Bätschmann and Pascal Griener, Hans Holbein, Cologne 2000.

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14   Hans Holbein on the page of Erasmus’ Praise of Folly, p. 63 (Berlin 1950 after the Basel edition with the drawings of Holbein).

brutes almost equal to gods”.30 It is important to note Erasmus’ much discussed preReformation critique of images, in this case reinforced through Holbein’s drawing with a nobleman carrying a hooded hawk, something that became an “emblem” of falconry itself: Erasmus refers, not accidentally, to a coat of arms with beasts. Image and Falcon move between Philia and Phobia, something addressing the nature of the image itself. We are, for instance, informed how falconers went to church with ex voti that depicted hawks and prayed for the return of lost ones.31 It is also worth mentioning that Luther accused Pope Leo X of neglecting his own duties because of his passion for hawking (hence pursuing earthly amusements, such as falconry, instead of taking the road of spirituality).32 This idea was already expressed in the case of Frederick II,

30   Erasmus, Lob der Torheit. Mit den Randzeichnungen der Basler Ausgabe von Hans Holbein d. J., Berlin 1950, p. 63. 31   John Cummins, The Hound and The Hawk. The Art of Medieval Hunting, London 1988, p. 211. 32   Robert Seidenader, Kulturgeschichte der Falknerei mit besonderer Berücksichtigung von Bayern. Von Augustinus bis Kurfürst Maximilian I., Datensammlung, Vol. 1, Munich 2007, p. 205. A contemporary source says of Leo X: “Gentle and peaceable by nature, he was, nonetheless, so fiercely attached to this

V isua l Encou nters

who was praised but also condemned by contemporary ecclesiastical and political voices for his attachment to falconry and for neglecting state affairs.33 Hawking and state business are interlinked with each other. Already in Oneirocriticon, a book on the interpretation of dreams by the Basra Scholar Achmet (end of 7th century), we find the idea that “the hawk and falcon signify a position of power second after the king”.34 The Boke of St. Albans from 1486 contains a well-known social commentary in the form of a taxonomy of trained hawks corresponding to different positions in the court (and wider society): the king is associated with the gyrfalcon, the saker falcon with a knight and so on.35 The transformation of a natural into a political landscape and the falcon, flying high above the territory, substituting the ruler, defines the core of falconry’s political power. Culture, the ruler’s handling of the falcon, was thus turned into nature and, vice versa, the successful hawk’s quarry could be turned into culture, into the hunting trophies, pictorial or physical, collected by the ruler. At the same time, the art of falconry had to be cultivated. Europe’s high-ranking nobles were raised in this art during their childhood years, just as they were taught the arts of dancing and horsemanship. The true sovereign has to learn to rule and to be ruled by, just as the hawk can never be fully tamed since it remains wild. The non-verbal communication between equals (human and hawk) form, together with the horse, hound and indeed the quarry itself, an inseparable and interdependent chain. The ability to handle unexpected situations which falconry necessitates makes it a perfect model for sovereigns to be engaged with. This idea, alluding to the notion of the shepherd, is referred to in a famous fresco depicting a falconer leaving the town to go hawking in the countryside – an allegory of “good government” by Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Dating from around 1340, the fresco in Siena’s town hall showing The Effects of Good Government in the Countryside, portrays a more participative moment beyond aristocracy (fig. 15).36 In this context, it is particupastime that he spared not his wrath for anyone, were he stranger or known to him, when he acted against the duty of falconry.” Christian Antoine de Chamerlat, Falconry and Art, London 1987, p. 113. 33   Michael Menzel, “Die Jagd als Naturkunst. Zum Falkenbuch Kaiser Friedrichs II.”, in: Natur im Mittelalter, ed. Peter Dilg, Berlin 2003, p. 358. 34   The Oneirocriticon of Achmet: A Medieval Greek and Arabic Treatise on the Interpretation of Dreams, trans. and ed. Steven M. Oberhelman, Lubbock 1991, p. 239; Henry Maguire, “Signs and Symbols of Your Always Victorious Reign. The Political Ideology and Meaning of Falconry in Byzantium,” in: Images of the Byzantine World. Visions, Messages and Meanings. Studies Presented to Leslie Brubaker, ed. Angeliki Lymberopoulou, Farnham 2011, p. 141. 35   Macdonald (as in note 8), pp. 52–53. 36   Nicolai Rubinstein, “Political Ideas in Sienese Art: The Frescoes by Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Taddeo di Bartolo in the Palazzo Pubblico”, in: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 21/3–4 (1958), pp. 179–207; Quentin Skinner, “Ambrogio Lorenzetti. The Artist as Political Philosopher” in: Malerei und Stadtkultur in der Dantezeit, ed. Hans Belting and Dieter Blume, Munich 1989, pp. 85–103. Cf. Max Seidel, Dolce Vita. Ambrogio Lorenzettis Porträt des Sieneser Staates, Basel 1999; Quentin Skinner “Ambrogio Lorenzettis Buon governo Frescoes. Two old questions, two new answers”, in: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 62 (1999), pp. 1–28. The rider on the horse is inspired by De Arte

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15 

 Ambrogio

Lorenzetti, The Effects of Good Government, ca. 1338, fresco, Siena, Palazzo Publico.

larly interesting that the whole scene is given from a bird’s-eye view, underlining the role of the hawk to come.37 In a detail, one can discern another falconer already hawking in this cultivated landscape, where other people are also pursuing their daily activities.38 It is not by chance that the allegory of Security39 is shown above the other falconer, as if she would extend, in an abstract way, the pursuit of quarry by hawks during

Venandi cum Avibus claim Randolph Starn and Loren Partridge, Arts of Power: Three Halls of State in Italy, 1300–1600, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1992, pp. 55 and pp. 76–77. 37   See Andreas Beyer, “Bildnis und Territorium”, in: Sprezzatura. Geschichte und Geschichtserzählung zwischen Fakt und Fiktion, ed. Johannes von Müller, Camillo von Müller and Lukas Burkart, Goettingen 2016, p. 31. Beyer underlines that it is neither about the government of a single person, but rather of a communal council. For the aerial and cartographic view, see Tanja Michalsky’s text in this volume. 38   Herfried Münkler, Politische Bilder, Politik der Metaphern, Frankfurt am Main 1994, p. 60. 39   The motto reads: “senza paura ognúom franco camini, e lavorando semini ciascuno, mentre che tal comuno. Manterra questa donna.” See Seidel (as in note 36), p. 45. The relation to the city and hence to justice makes clear the fresco’s communal function. It is a kind of mirror image corresponding to the habitus of every Sienese citizen. Rubinstein (as in note 36), p. 184 comments upon the role of republican thought and its relation to the motif of Securitas: “In the Italian city Republics it was hailed as to be able to secure civic peace and unity without recourse to despotism. It could thus serve as a republican alternative to the claims of the despots and their followers that only an autocratic ruler could bring salvation to the towns torn by fractions and social struggle.”

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16 

 Giotto, Justice, 1304–1306, fresco, Padua, Arena Capella.

a peaceful period that contributes in general to the whole of Sienese society.40 This has a certain affinity, as already discussed by scholars, with Giotto’s depiction of Justice from his Arena Frescoes, on which the inscription (freely translated) states: “as long as Justice’s arm reaches, the brave soldier hunts, one sings and another trades” (fig. 16).41 40 

 Bram Kempers, “Gesetz und Kunst. Ambrogio Lorenzettis Fresken im Palazzo Pubblico in Siena“, in: Belting and Blume (as in note 36), p. 78. The issue is, however, somewhat more complicated than a strict divide between city and countryside because they both come under the auspices of the same territory. This is manifested especially in the image of the falconer who connects nature and culture through his practice. In this sense, Philippe Descola’s opinion that there is a clear dualism between nature and culture holds firm. See Philippe Descola, Jenseits von Natur und Kultur, Berlin 2011 (French 2005). Descola is criticised by, for instance, Hartmut Böhme, Aussichten der Natur. Naturästhetik in Wechselwirkung von Natur und Kultur, Berlin 2017, p. 42. 41   See Hans Belting, “Das Bild als Text. Wandmalerei und Literatur im Zeitalter Dantes”, in: Belting and Blume (as in note 36), pp. 37–39. The connection to the falconers is not made; Stephan Albrecht, “Gemeinwohl”, in: Handbuch der politischen Ikonographie, ed. Uwe Fleckner, Martin Warnke and Hendrik Ziegler, vol. 1, Munich 2011, p. 403. Cf. Skinner (as in note 36), p. 13 and p. 25, who comments that the detail with the riders is taken from Lorenzetti. See also Klaus Krüger, Politik der Evidenz: Öffentliche Bilder als Bilder der Öffentlichkeit im Trecento, Goettingen 2015.

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It is notable that the riders on the left are not merely huntsmen but falconers, bringing, as their extension, justice and security in a time of “good government”. They are part of a category of privileged individuals assigned the authority to govern. The peasant had no hunting rights, or only had them in accordance with the sovereign. Beyond this, falconry is clearly perceived as an activity, practiced at a time with no indication of war which would denote, according to Lorenzetti, bad government. In the 13th century Spanish translation of Moamin’s 9th century Arabic treatise on falconry (its author was presumably an Arab falconer given his name), the idea of knowing how to hunt with falcons means knowing how to govern, and this stems from a philosophical attitude (“saber governar es una grand partida de filosofia”).42 According to Moamin, falconry imitates true life, and the skills that kings need to exercise therein so that their rule may be successful. In a similar vein, Machiavelli mentions how the Principe has to understand the nature of animals as well as that of humans: making the correct use of this knowledge enhances his sovereignty.43 He also underlines the importance of hunting and getting to know the landscape of one’s territory (as political landscape), which is in fact a preparation for war, a topos that is found in many cultures.44 Falconry, as a practice in political representation, simultaneously involves the shepherd and the wolf theme, bringing a dialectic tension (cura publica and the war paradigm) that is always involved in its pursuit.

Image, Weapon, Falcon Many mobile objects that broaden the sovereign’s ruling power carry the name Falcon, for instance jet fighters or missiles. The deep-rooted connection between hawks and weapons, their substitutional relationship, shapes a living, bodily metaphor, lending an iconic and hence symbolic quality.45 This idea also extends towards the direction of the gaze as a connection between falcon and aircraft, as is visually captured in the 1944 film A Canterbury Tale, preluding the analogy between falcon and drone (fig. 17). Through the gaze of a male falconer-soldier, a falcon’s transformation into an aircraft becomes evident as a continuous line through successive images. The gaze makes the

42   Barbara Schlieben, “Wissen am alfonsinischen Hof - Der kastilische Moamin als Beispiel für höfisches Wissen”, in: Kulturtransfer und Hofgesellschaft im Mittelalter. Wissenskultur am sizilianischen und kastilischen Hof im 13. Jahrhundert, ed. Johannes Fried and Gundula Grebner, Berlin 2008, p. 335. 43   Niccolò Machiavelli, Il Principe. Der Fürst, ed. Pilipp Rippel, Stuttgart 2007, pp. 134–135. 44   A miniature from the Museum in Aurangabad (Maharashtra, India) attests to this with a hawking scene, showing a falcon’s triumph over a heron, above a battle in which elephant riders kill a warrior on a horse. S.B. Deshmukh, Maratha Painting, Part 1, Aurangabad 1992. 45   See Klaus Krüger’s contribution to this volume.

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17 

 Michael

Powell and Emeric Pressburger, A Canterbury Tale, 1944, film stills.

18   Adolf Menzel, Falcon attacking a Dove, 1844, oil on paper concealed on wood, 102.7 × 119 cm, Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

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19 

 Laurent

Grasso, In Air, 2009, film still, Galerie Perrotin, Paris.

connection to what is pursued46 and, thus, we understand that seeing is hunting.47 The sequence commences with pilgrims in the Middle Ages. A medieval falconer is transformed into a soldier at the peak of the Second World War, when the film was made.48 These transformations occur right at the film’s beginning as a kind of frontispiece for the whole, in which characters and themes from Chaucer’s original Canterbury Tales are transformed into a wider tale of Britain’s wartime experiences, just as the falcon is turned, as if in a natural development, from a bird of prey to a direct weapon. Adolf Menzel’s painting of a Falcon Attacking a Dove graphically recalls not only the allusion to war but also the connection between weapon, image and gaze as a single, yet tense, entity since the painting, with its dramatic couleur, literally served as a target for a Prussian shooting club (fig. 18).49 The painting somehow foreshadows the avian aerial combats that happened less than three decades later between Prussia and France. In 1870 during the Prussian siege of Paris, the French defenders of the city sent out 46 

 See Blickzähmung und Augentäuschung: Zu Jacques Lacans Bildtheorie, ed. Anne von der Heiden and Claudia Blümle, Berlin and Zurich 2005. Cf. Georges Didi-Huberman, Was wir sehen blickt uns an. Zur Metapsychologie des Bildes, Munich 1999 (French 1995). 47   James Elkins, The Object Stares Back. On the Nature of Seeing, San Diego, New York and London 1997, p. 11 and p. 21: “looking is just hunting or being hunted.” 48   Macdonald (as in note 8), pp. 150–151 even mentions that falconry “unites powerfully (and) naturalises the ideology of military airpower […] War and Nature are not separated.” 49   Nationalgalerie Berlin. Das XIX Jahrhundert, Katalog der Ausgestellten Werke, ed. Angelica Wesenberg and Eve Förschl, Leipzig 2001, p. 264.

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330 carrier pigeons, but the majority were caught by the Prussians’ trained falcons: only 50 managed to reach their goal.50 The French artist Laurent Grasso brought a further point to this question in his 2009 video work On Air (fig. 19, plate IV), in which a camera was fitted to a falcon prior to flight. This practice was also used during the First World War with pigeons that took thousands of chance images from the front. A series of images results out of these flights that are non-perceivable for the beholder, since they derive from the fastest animal on earth. The sharpness of the falcon’s sight dissolves into amorphic images for the viewer. At the same time, another camera that accompanies the falcon from a distance brings accuracy and fuzziness, slowness and fastness, animal and human, into a playful interaction.51 A living and intelligent weapon is used, one that is not explicitly aggressive but which acts in an intrinsic way against other invisible powers. The low-tech drone falcon, which is much more intelligent than the high tech and nonanimated one,52 engages the question of vision, its sharpness and blurriness, in a paradoxical kind of way that unleashes its iconic power by relating it to the practice of image-making itself.53

50 

 Malin Gewinner, Die Anthropomorpha: Tiere im Krieg, Berlin 2017, p. 107. This tactic took place during the Second World War with British falcons against pigeons used by Axis forces. See Daily Mirror (June 5th, 1945) “Jap spy pigeons to face falcon terror.” See also Paul Beecroft and Peter Devers, We Were Falconers, Marlborough 2018, pp. 39–40. I wish to thank David Horobin for this reference. 51   See the contribution by Andrea Pinotti in this volume. 52   See in general Gregoire Chamayou, Drone Theory, New York 2015 (French 2013). Surveillance systems bear names such as falcon and kestrel. The latter is an American drone in the form of a ­Zeppelin close to the US/Mexican border. See Drone Theory, p. 35 and p. 203. 53   See Peter Geimer’s paper in this volume.

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Embodied Interactions

Andrea Pinotti

What is it like to be a Hawk? Inter-specific Empathy in the Age of Immersive Virtual Environments1

Views from above The fascination exerted by the capacity for flight (one of the most ancient anthropological desires, as attested by the myth of Icarus) has encouraged an identification of human beings with animals. Men have desperately tried to put themselves in the shoes (or rather in the wings) of birds. Unsurprisingly, therefore, echoes of such attempts have reverberated through the centuries in the history of visual arts and, more generally, of image production. A particularly interesting case is offered by the so-called “bird’s-eye view”: an elevated view of an object or of a landscape from above, as if the observer were a bird. Such views are often employed in the making of blueprints, plans and maps for both natural and urban spaces. Remarkable examples are Leonardo’s Bird’s-Eye View of Sea Coast (ca. 1515) (fig. 1) or Jan Micker’s Bird’s-Eye View of Amsterdam (ca. 1652). Such a view is complementary to the opposite perspective of the so-called “worm’s-eye view” (in German “frog’s-eye view”: Froschperspektive; in Italian sottinsù), the view of an object from below, as if the observer were a worm. It is difficult to establish the precise origin of the bird’s-eye view genre of representation. Some scholars claim it can even be traced back to archaic times, as in, for instance, the case of a bird’s-eye view petroglyphic topographic rendering located north of Prescott (Arizona), attributed to the Hohokam people2. Certainly, ever-increasing 1   This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. [834033 AN-ICON]). I wish to thank here Federica Cavaletti, Pietro Conte, Anna Caterina Dalmasso, Barbara Grespi, Giancarlo Grossi, and Giacomo Mercuriali for their valuable suggestions. 2   James A. Dockal and Michael S. Smith, “Evidence for a Prehistoric Petroglyph Map in Central Arizona.” in: Kiva: The Journal of Southwestern Archaeology and History, 4 (2005), pp. 413–420. See also the contribution of Tanja Michalsky in the present volume.

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1 

 Leonardo, Bird’s-Eye View of Sea Coast South of Rome, ca. 1515, pen, ink and watercolour on paper, 272 × 400 mm, Windsor, Royal Library.

efforts in aerial representation can be recognised from early modern times3 through recourse to military ballooning in the Napoleonic and Franco-Prussian wars, down to our contemporary aeroplane4, satellite and drone views.5 It is no surprise that many aircraft have been named after birds, with a remarkable occurrence of hawks and falcons. Amongst numerous examples from the early days of human flight, one might consider the Nieuport Nighthawk fighter (first flight in 1919), the Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk utility helicopter (first flight in 1974), the Northrop Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk surveillance drone (first flight in 1998), the HawkEye micro-satellite (launched in 2018), the Dassault Falcon business jet (first flight in 1963), the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket (first launched in 2010) and the TwoDots Falcon drone (released in 2016). We should not omit the Millennium Falcon, the famous spaceship in the Star Wars saga.

3 

 Andrew John Martin, “Das Bild vom Fliegen, dokumentierte Flugversuche und das Aufkommen von Ansichten aus der Vogelschau zu Beginn der frühen Neuzeit.”, in: Fliegen und Schweben. Annäherung an eine menschliche Sensation, ed. Dieter R. Bauer and Wolfgang Behringer, Munich 1997, pp. 223–240; Daniela Stroffolino, L’Europa “a volo d’uccello”: dal Cinquecento ad Alfred Guesdon, Naples 2012. 4   Wolfgang Sonne, “Weisungen der Vogelschau: Luftbild und Ästhetik der Gesamtstadt im frühen 20. Jahrhundert.” in: Architektur Fotografie. Darstellung – Verwendung – Gestaltung, ed. Hubert Locher and Rolf Sachsse, Berlin 2012, pp. 84–96. 5   Andreas F. Beitin, “Imagination, Elevation, Battlefield Automation. From the Elevated View to Battle Drones”, in: Exhib. Cat. Mapping Spaces. Networks of Knowledge in 17 th Century Landscape Painting, ed. Ulrike Gehring and Peter Weibel, Munich 2013, pp. 460–471.

W h at is it lik e to be a H aw k?

Despite an obvious family resemblance among the various perspectives generally termed “view from above”, it is crucial to underline the fact that, prior to the advent of manned flight, the term “bird’s-eye view” designates an imagined viewpoint, as distinct from a mere high vantage point allowing direct and actual observation, as from a mountain, from a tower or from an aircraft. Human beings have attempted to adopt the perspective-taking of flight through an imaginative operation. The evolutionary link from an imagined bird’s view to actual aerial photography or video-recording taken from manned or unmanned aircraft could be identified in experiments like Julius Neubronner’s Bird Photography, patented in 1907. Neubronner designed a camera that could be fastened to a pigeon’s body and would automatically take pictures during the bird’s flight.6 Unsurprisingly, this animal-machine combination was employed in both the First and Second World Wars as a reconnaissance aircraft. The CIA’s surveillance experiments with pigeon cameras went on until the Seventies: “Pigeon imagery was taken within hundreds of feet of the target so it was much more detailed than imagery from other collection platforms. (Aircraft took photos from tens of thousands of feet and satellites from hundreds of miles above the target). […] Details of pigeon missions are still classified”.7 Neubronner’s integration of animal flight and a mechanical eye can be considered as a precursor of recent visual practices, such as the Dubai World Record Eagle Flight set in 2015 as the highest recorded bird flight from a man-made structure: Darshan, a male imperial eagle with a camera installed on his back, majestically descended the 830 metres of the Burj Khalifa skyscraper to the arm of his trainer, Jacques-Olivier Travers.8

A severe caveat: Nagel From the viewpoint of the phenomenology of perception, the human imaginative adoption of the bird’s-eye perspective is not without problems. In a famous article published in 1974, American philosopher Thomas Nagel asked: “What is it like to be a bat?” Is it actually possible for human beings to understand the experiential world of these fascinating creatures? His answer was definitely a negative one. In the context of a radical criticism of reductionist approaches to the Mind-Body problem, aiming at explaining mental phenomena as effects of physical causes, Nagel focuses on the notion of the “subjective character of experience” as the mark of consciousness: “Fun6 

 Franziska Brons, “Bilder im Fluge: Julius Neubronners Brieftaubenfotografie,” in: Fotogeschichte, Beiträge zur Geschichte und Ästhetik der Fotografie, 100 (2006), pp. 17–36; Julius G. Neubronner, The Pigeon Photographer, Bolzano 2017. 7   From the virtual tour of the official CIA Museum website: https://www.cia.gov/about-cia/ciamuseum/experience-the-collection/#!/artifact/24 (accessed June 8 2020). 8   See the video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um8M9azpmb4 (accessed June 8 2020).

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damentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something it is like for the organism”.9 This “for” – the pour-soi of the experience, its phenomenological implications – is precisely what his argumentation deals with. “Like” in the expression “what is it like” therefore does not imply any form of analogical resemblance between two different experiences, but rather means: “How it is for the subject himself?”10 In order to develop his reflections, Nagel has recourse to the intuitive case of the bat: “Even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life”.11 This alien character is clearly illustrated by comparing the operation of “location” as performed by both bats and humans: namely of the procedures of discriminating size, distance, shape, motion and texture of objects in the space. Whereas humans locate objects mainly by vision, bats accomplish this via sonar: they emit high-frequency sound pulses through their shrieks and detect objects by measuring their return when reflected: their kind of location is echolocation. However, Nagel argues that bat sonar, “though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat”.12 From this introductory presentation of the problem, it appears that “subjective” in the above-mentioned expression “subjective character of experience” refers not so much to the individual aspect of experience (as lived by this particular bat or by this particular man), but rather to the specific access to experience itself: namely to the experience as lived by bats rather than by humans insofar they are species of beings. Nagel employs the term “type” to refer to the possibility of objectively ascribing experiences in the third person, provided this person is sufficiently similar to us so that we can adopt his or her point of view. Of course, individual variations within a type can be significant: within the human species, blind subjects accomplish location tasks by tactile or auditory stimuli, and the understanding of such practices from the viewpoint of non-visually-impaired subjects raises difficulties similar to those related to the human understanding of bat sonar. Are there practicable ways to solve that problem, provided that we as humans do not possess a sense comparable to the bat’s sonar? Scientific explanation of bats’ nervous, sensory and motor systems evidently does not offer us the “experience” of a bat. One possible way could be the recourse to imagination. We could try to imagine what is it

  9  10  11  12 

 Thomas

Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” in: The Philosophical Review, 4 (1974), p. 436. (as in note 9), p. 440.  Nagel (as in note 9), p. 438.  Nagel (as in note 9), p. 438.  Nagel

W h at is it lik e to be a H aw k?

like to have inter-digital webbing enabling us to fly, to catch insects with our mouth, to hang upside down by one’s feet from the ceiling, even to perceive the surroundings through an acoustic reflection. However, objects Nagel, “in so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat”.13 Since imagination is a faculty which works on materials provided by previous experience via operations of additions, subtractions and modifications, and since my previous experience does not entail anything even close to being a bat, imagining will not help me at all in this attempt to understand what is it like to be a bat. The species-specific constitution of my human experience prevents me from being able to even imagine what it could be like to be a bat; even if I imagine undergoing a progressive metamorphosis transforming me into a bat, “nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like”.14 Are there further alternatives other than the imaginative strategy to be pursued? Nagel considers a Martian scientist who is not endowed with vision but tries nevertheless to understand what a rainbow is: the rainbow is a phenomenon which is not reducible to its visual appearance as offered to a human viewpoint, and which could be investigated in its objective, physical features. However, if we talk of “experience”, such “objective” features must, necessarily, be translated into “subjective” experiencing, both for the Martian and for the human being, who remain, ultimately, alien to each other: Members of radically different species may both understand the same physical events in objective terms, and this does not require that they understand the phenomenal forms in which those events appear to the senses of members of other species. Thus, it is a condition of their referring to a common reality that their more particular viewpoints are not part of the common reality that they both apprehend. The reduction can succeed only if the species-specific viewpoint is omitted from what is to be reduced.15 “Viewpoint”, here, evidently means not simply visual perception, but rather perception through the senses as a whole, as configured by species-specific determinations. In this respect, no species can put itself in other species’ shoes. No perspective taking, no empathy is ever possible here. Transcending inter-species barriers is precluded if we insist upon assuming a subjective phenomenological stance. 13  14  15 

 Nagel

(as in note 9), p. 439. (as in note 9), p. 439.  Nagel (as in note 9), p. 445.  Nagel

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Nevertheless, Nagel eventually leaves an albeit problematic possibility open: concluding his article with what he calls a “speculative proposal”, he calls for the elaboration of an “objective phenomenology not dependent on empathy or imagination”, whose aim would be to describe, at least partially, “the subjective character of experiences in a form comprehensible to beings incapable of having those experiences”.16 Such a phenomenology should allow, for instance, describe what seeing is like to a blind person without having recourse to the conventional intermodal analogies, such as “red is like the sound of a trumpet”. In a further stage, objective phenomenological concepts obtained through this kind of non-first-person analysis of “structural features of perception” might even allow inter-specific understanding, as in the case of experiencing bats’ sonar. Unfortunately, such a speculative hypothesis is merely sketched on a negative basis (it should not be subjective, it should not be first-person), and we are given no clues how to even take the first steps. Despite bats being mammals, not birds, for our present purpose Nagel’s argument can be extended to any animal capable of self-powered flight. Since human beings are not capable of such flight, they will never be able to really understand from a phenomenological point of view what it is like to be a flying animal. Consequently, the very expression “bird’s-eye view” – which was our starting point – would constitute a fundamental fallacy: human eyes will never be able to understand what it is like to see the world with birds’-eyes. With respect to Nagel’s 1974 severe caveat, I would now like to chronologically take a step backward and a step forward.

A step backward : Uexküll By the beginning of the twentieth century, the great zoologist Jakob von Uexküll had already started a research program focused on “subjective biology [subjektive Biologie]” in the double sense of a science developed by subjects who engage in the study of subjects.17 In his conception of organisms each species is enclosed within a “bubble” of its own perceptual possibilities: “We must therefore imagine all the animals that animate Nature around us, be they beetles, butterflies, gnats, or dragonflies who populate a meadow, as having a soap bubble around them, closed on all sides, which closes off their visual space and in which everything visible for the subject is also enclosed”.18

16  17 

 Nagel

(as in note 9), p. 449. von Uexküll, “Die Umrisse einer kommenden Weltanschauung”, in: Bausteine zu einer bio­ logischen Weltanschauung. Gesammelte Aufsätze, Munich 1913, p. 143 (1907). 18   Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, translated by Joseph D. O’Neil, Minneapolis 2010, p. 69 (German 1934).  Jakob

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The field for this subjective biology was to be the “inner world [Innenwelt]” of animals meaning, primarily, the domain of their nervous system.19 Moving from Kant’s fundamental acquisition of the transcendental role of subjectivity in the constitution of experience, and at the same time sensing the need to expand his transcendental aesthetics essentially centred on Mensch, on humans in general, Uexküll initiates a process of multiplication of the a priori forms of space and time, whose variety ends up coinciding with the number of animal species. Depending on the constraints imposed by its structural plan (Bauplan), each organism is equipped with receptors that select innumerable environmental stimuli but accept only those which are significant for the organism itself; these stimuli are then analysed according to the nature of the receptors (the same light stimulus can produce chromatic effects in some animals, merely chiaroscuro nuances in others) and finally transformed into nervous excitation.20 Even though the different animal species cohabit in the same world, each of them will live it as its “environment” (Umwelt: literally “surrounding world”) in a specific way inaccessible to all the others, because conditioned by its own organisation. However, the receptive moment is only one side of the Umwelt coin: namely the side that corresponds to the Merkwelt (the perceptual world, offered to the Merken, to the noticing of something, of Merkmale as “perceptual marks” in the phenomenal field, operated by the receptor organs). The other side is the Wirkwelt (the operational world, modified by the Wirken, from the action of the living being on its environment, thanks to its effector organs). The relationship between subject and Umwelt thus comes to take shape in the sense of reciprocal action, in the form of a unitary “functional cycle [Funktionskreis]”; 21 it is a correlation in which, so to speak, we take as much as we give: after having undergone an effect from a perceptive mark, each animal exerts a counter-effect against its environment. The subject-environment interaction is configured as an incessant interpretation of salient and meaningful signs, which are received and sent: the sign theory of sensation (already set by Lotze and Helmholtz) expands in the direction of a real ecological zoosemiotics,22 and foreruns the enactivist approach introduced by Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela and subsequently developed by theorists such as Alva Noë, Evan Thompson, Shaun Gallagher.23 In each animal it is its

19  20  21  22 

 Jakob

von Uexküll, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere, Berlin 1909, p. 6. Uexküll (as in note 19), p. 251.  Von Uexküll (as in note 18), p. 49.  Thomas A. Sebeok, “Biosemiotics. Its Roots, Proliferation, and Prospects”, in: Semiotica, 1–4 (2001), pp. 61–78. 23   Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding, Boston and London 1988; Alva Noë, Action in Perception, Cambridge MA 2004; Evan Thompson, Mind in Life, Harvard 2007; Shaun Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions. Rethinking the Mind, Oxford 2017.  Von

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specific Bauplan which ensures the possibility of a perfect “adequacy [Einpassung]” between receptor organs and perceptual marks on the one side, and effector organs and operational brands on the other: in its environment, the wasp meets wasp-things, the dog dog-things: a dog does not sit on a chair because the chair is a “human opportunity”, and not a canine one, of sitting – an affordance, as Gibson would have said.24 Therefore, arguing against a certain Darwinist reductionism, Uexküll claims that it is precisely adequacy that must be considered, and not adaptation (Anpassung): if we accept the idea that the organisms must progressively adapt to their environment, we would conceive them as fundamentally inadequate to it, at least at an early stage, failing to respect them in their own right and ending up measuring them by extraneous, perhaps human, standards. Throughout the development of his zoological reflection Uexküll fought against the anthropocentric prejudices that hinder a proper understanding of the animal worlds, starting from biological terminology: in his youth, together with his colleagues Beer and Bethe, he had proposed an “objective biological nomenclature”, 25 which substituted, for example, “sight” and “smell” with the more neutral “photoreception” and “stiboreception”. Returning later to the matter,26 he then opted, by contrast, for a nomenclature “referred to the subject” considered case-by-case and with regard to its specific organisation: objectivity is not (however unattainable) neutrality, but recognition of the plurality of subjectivities and their respective organizations. In the early 1870s, Nietzsche enunciated his perspectivist programme in per­ ceptology: It is even a difficult thing for him [viz. for the human being] to admit to himself that the insect or the bird perceives an entirely different world from the one that man does, and that the question of which of these perceptions of the world is the more correct one is quite meaningless. for this would have to have been decided previously in accordance with the criterion of the correct perception, which means, in accordance with a criterion which is not available. But in any case, it seems to me that “the correct perception” – which would mean “the adequate expression of an object in the subject” – is a contradictory impossibility.27

24  25 

 James

J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, New York 2015 (1979). von Uexküll, Theodor Beer and Albrecht Bethe, “Vorschläge zu einer objectivierenden Nomenklatur in der Physiologie des Nervensystems,” in: id., Kompositionslehre der Natur. Biologie als undogmatische Naturwissenschaft. Ausgewählte Schriften. Frankfurt am Main 1980, pp. 92–100 (1899). 26   Jakob von Uexküll and Friedrich Brock, “Vorschläge zu einer subjektbezogenen Nomenklatur in der Biologie,” in: id. (as in note 25), pp. 129–142 (1935). 27   Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”, in: Philosophy and Truth. Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the early 1870’s, ed. and transl. Daniel Breazeale, New Jersey and London 1992, p. 86 (1873).  Jakob

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 39

2   Photograph of a village street (a); village street photographed through a screen (b); the same village street for a fly’s eye (c); village street for a mollusc’s eye (d): from Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, Minneapolis 2010 (1934).

Uexküll endowed such transcendental perspectivism with a biological basis. Yet the anthropocentrism kicked out of the door by Uexküll seems to subtly come back in through the window. If every animal, including man, is locked in its own soap bubble and there is no way that different animals access it, or that it accesses other bubbles, how can it interact, for example in the fatal relationship between predator and prey? It is nature itself that harmoniously embraces the perceptive brand and operative brand of different worlds:28 Nature with a capital “N” becomes thus a sort of meta-animal or immanent and omniscient deity that sees all and knows all, where every species is bound to the boundaries dictated by the corresponding Bauplan. It is, however, difficult to avoid the impression that sometimes Uexküll inclines to make this synoptic point of view coincide with that of the zoologist and, ultimately, of his own person. Uexküll seems to admit that the human as a supreme animal has 28 

 Jakob von Uexküll, “Wie sehen wir die Natur und wie sieht sie sich selber?”, in: id. (as in note 25), pp. 179–213 (1922).

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somehow access to the environments of a fly, a snail or a mussel, whose specific “visions of the world” are obtained thanks to the progressive impoverishment of a photographic image – considered equivalent to human visual data – through the superposition of a series of rasters (fig. 2).29 A peculiar tension is therefore established between a strictly monadological and anti-anthropocentric approach, by virtue of which every animal species – including humans – lives its own space, its time, its movement (in a way that remains inaccessible to any other species) and an anthropocentric temptation, which (thanks to technological prostheses such as the microscope or the camera) allows humans in some way to pierce their own soap bubble to explore those of other organisms, identifying themselves in their visions of the world. Such technical instruments, as human artefacts, are inevitably bound to our perceptive capacity as humans, as Uexküll (1922) himself acknowledges.30 In any case, Uexküll’s merit remains undisputed, having placed the interactive relationship between organism and environment (to which already Lamarck had attracted attention at the beginning of the nineteenth century) at the heart of biological research. His ideas have stimulated the reflections of philosophers such as Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Ernst Cassirer, Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben and Peter Sloterdijk. His notion of Umwelt has found full development in contemporary biology with the notion of “niche”.31

A step forward : bird flight simulators The paradoxical and yet highly stimulating approach developed by Uexküll – theorising a biological monadology of “soap bubbles” on one hand, whilst admitting the possibility of humans acting as “peeping Toms” in other species’ bubbles on the other – seems to have been picked up by contemporary immersive virtual environments. Recent years have been characterised by an ever-increasing diffusion of Virtual Reality (VR) helmets and Head Mounted Displays (HMD) as interfaces for personal computers (Oculus Rift and HTC Vive) and video game consoles (Sony PlayStation VR). These devices are also mimicked by low-budget smartphone wearables (Google Cardboard and Samsung Gear VR). Virtual Retinal Displays (VRD, like Magic Leap One) and increasingly cheaper and standalone devices (Oculus Go) have already been released in 2018.

29  30  31 

 Von

Uexküll (as in note 18), pp. 64–65. Uexküll (as in note 28).  F. John Odling-Smee, Kevin N. Laland and Marcus W. Feldman, Niche Construction. The Neglected Process in Evolution, Princeton 2003.  Von

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In the kind of image experience offered by such devices, a fundamental freedom which characterised the pre-immersive image reception appears definitely negated: namely the possibility of switching one’s gaze beyond the image itself, focusing on non-iconic parts of the visual field: once I have put on the helmet, I cannot physically see anything real but experience only images in a 360° field. This elementary and, at the same time, crucial feature implies a series of experiential consequences, which can be summarised under three main categories: Unframedness: by contrast to pre-immersive image experience (which was characterised by framing devices such as picture frames, statue pedestals and screen borders), the VR immersive image appears in a spatio-temporal continuum with the real spatio-temporal environment of the user, producing a veritable environmentalisation of the iconic field. Immediateness: differentiating itself from pre-immersive pictures (which allowed for a twofold possibility of focusing either on the represented image or on the material medium that supported it), the VR immersive image tends to blur (and ideally to suppress) its mediateness, aiming at effects of illusion and transparency that are paradoxically obtained by highly mediated technological solutions. Presentness: whereas pictures have been traditionally – although highly problematically – interpreted in mainstream Western image theories as referring to an extra-iconic dimension (as being representational “images-of”), environmental VR pictures elicit a powerful presence effect, as paradigmatically exemplified by hyper-realistic and multisensory environments, consisting of simulating reality in the flesh. Because of this tripartite challenge to the conventional iconic experience, VR immersive images might be characterised as “an-icons”: namely as images which tend to negate their own status as images.32 Within this contemporary virtual iconic landscape, a particularly interesting case for our bird’s-eye view subject is the development of bird flight simulators. Let us consider three recent examples. Aquila Bird Flight Simulator (developer and publisher Graeme Scott) is a VR App released in 2017. Originally designed for the Oculus Rift and subsequently made available for OpenVR, Aquila offers the user the possibility of switching between third person and first person: in the former case, a flying eagle’s body can be seen in its entirety, as perceived from the viewpoint of another bird flying beside it; in the latter, the user assumes the eagle’s own subjective vantage point, in which only the wingtips are visible in the visual field.33 The text introducing this simulation software reads as follows: “Have you dreamed of what it would be […] to soar like an eagle? Aquila Bird Flight Simulator lets you experience soaring bird flight using the Oculus Rift headset. 32 

 Andrea Pinotti, “Self-Negating Images: Towards An-Iconology.” Proceedings 856 (2017), pp. 1–9. http://www.mdpi.com/2504-3900/1/9/856 (accessed June 8 2020). 33   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1U1NV4NhsWU (accessed June 8 2020).

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This is a soaring simulation, so you can make use of ridge lift and thermals like any other soarer in the skies […].”34 Eagle Flight is a VR simulation video game developed and published by Ubisoft and released for Microsoft Windows and PlayStation 4 in late 2016. Contrary to Aquila, the only perspective possible here is the first-person view, but in exchange it can be both single-player and multiplayer. Flight direction is chosen by using the tilt of the user’s head. According to the first introduction to this simulator: Humans can’t fly on their own in real life, but we can at least experience the sensation thanks to Eagle Flight. The first VR game to come out of Ubisoft’s Fun House studio, Eagle Fight lets you soar as an eagle above the streets of an abandoned Paris. Vegetation has overtaken its most popular monuments. Its human population has been replaced with all manner of creatures. But as it turns out, there’s still plenty for an eagle to do.35 VR immersive apparatus often triggers so-called “cybersickness” (a pathological syndrome including nausea, vertigo, imbalance, dizziness and blurred vision), 36 because of the conflicting information provided to the brain by three different systems: the vestibular, the visual and the proprioceptive. The subject is affected by a mismatch between two conditions: when you feel motion, but do not see it (like when you are reading in a car), and when you see motion, but do not feel it (like in space, because there is no gravity). In the specific case of simulated flight, the discordancy occurs between the information sent to the brain by the ear (the body is sitting on an armchair) and the one sent by the eyes (the body is flying over a landscape). In order to reduce such unpleasant effects, Ubisoft has adopted two strategies: the introduction of “dynamic blinders” narrowing the view during intense movement, and (most important for my discourse here) of the eagle’s beak in the lower area of the visual field.37 Operating as a partial avatar of the user’s own body incorporated in the eagle’s body, the beak functions as a surrogate for the human nose tip, which is constantly included in our visual field even if not explicitly thematised in standard perceptual life (and which is, by contrast, excluded by the head-mounted display while experiencing a VR immersive environment). 34  35 

 https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/aquila-bird-flight-simulator/details (accessed June 8 2020).  https://news.ubisoft.com/en-us/article/313278/eagle-flight-everything-need-know

(accessed June 8 2020). 36   Alireza Mazloumi Gavgani, “A comparative study of cybersickness during exposure to virtual reality and ‘classic’ motion sickness: are they different?”, in: Journal of Applied Physiology, 6 (2018), pp. 1670–1680. 37   Ashley Whitlatch, “Tunnel Vision: How Ubisoft Created ‘Eagle Flight’, A VR Flying Game With No Nausea”, 2016, https://uploadvr.com/how-ubisoft-created-eagle-flight-sickness/ (accessed June 8 2020).

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3 

 Flight simulator Birdly, designed in 2013 by Max Rheiner, Fabian Troxler and Thomas Tobler at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and subsequently developed by Somniacs.

A further step in flight simulation has been taken with Birdly, originally designed by Max Rheiner, Fabian Troxler and Thomas Tobler at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) in 2013 and subsequently developed by Somniacs.38 (fig. 3, plate V) The official presentation refers to it as to the possibility of finally fulfilling nothing less than “The Ultimate Dream of flight”: For millennia, humans have longed to fly like a bird, to take to the sky, arms outstretched, with the power and innate grace of the avian masters. While human biomechanics will never allow for the facility of unfettered flight, today’s virtual reality (VR), coupled with robotics and simulation technology, can deliver an experience like never before […] fulfilling our ultimate dream of flying like a bird.39 Unlike other flight simulators, Birdly does not require either joystick or mouse but is directly commanded via a full-body series of operations which include instinctive movements of both arms and hands, controlling speed, altitude and navigation. Inputs given by the user’s body, laying horizontally with arms stretched as if they were wings, are translated by a virtual flight processor and returned as physical feedback to the body. A fan in front of the user’s face, producing whirling winds, and the surround 38  39 

 https://birdly.com/language/en/ (accessed June 8 2020).  http://birdlyvr.com/ (accessed June 8 2020).

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audio diffused from the earphones integrated into the headset add to the reality effect of the whole experience. You can choose between a New York Experience, where you can fly through the Manhattan skyscrapers and meet King Kong on the top of the Empire State Building,40 or rather take the prehistoric path and become a pterosaur, immersing yourself in the Jurassic Flight.41

A par adoxical drive Such virtual immersive simulative attempts should be considered in the wider context of an anti-anthropocentric drive, which currently characterises not only the VR world but contemporary visual culture, in various mediums, more generally. Such a drive has been named “the nonhuman turn”, namely “a turn toward and concern for the non­ human, understood variously in terms of animals, affectivity, bodies, organic and geophysical systems, materiality, or technologies”.42 Within this context, particularly interesting for our discourse is the specific attention paid to “nonhuman vision”, intended not merely as a machinic and prosthetic vision (such as the one offered by CCTV cameras, telescopic, microscopic, and endoscopic devices, Google Earth views, satellites, and drones), but as an enlarged notion of vision which considers “the human as part of a complex assemblage of perception in which various organic and machinic agents come together—and apart—for functional, political, or aesthetic reasons”.43 In this scenario, animal perception evidently plays a major role: as the nearest Other to the human, the animal offers multifarious possibilities of exploration that are being investigated in manifold ways, both in fiction and non-fiction genres. Among the non-fictional approaches, a paradigmatic case is the 2012 ethnographic documentary Leviathan, directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, who have recourse to GoPro cameras installed on different bodies – of fishers, fish, and boat – on board a commercial fishing vessel operating in the North Atlantic.44 YouTube already hosts compilations of GoPro videos recorded via an animal POV (Point of View) shooting.45 Amongst fictional works, a rich tradition is represented by animal horror movies,46 in which animal POVs are used to render the subjective theriomor40  41  42  43  44 

 https://vimeo.com/270146072 (accessed June 8 2020). (accessed June 8 2020).  Richard Grusin (ed.), The Nonhuman Turn, Minneapolis 2015, p. vii.  Joanna Zylinska, Nonhuman Photography, Cambridge MA 2017, p. 14.  Michael A. Unger, “Castaing-Taylor and Paravel’s GoPro Sensorium: Leviathan (2012), Experimental Documentary, and Subjective Sounds,” in: Journal of Film and Video, 3 (2017), pp. 3–18. 45   See for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjtxmwZTkIE (accessed June 8 2020). 46   Lee Gambin, Massacred by Mother Nature: Exploring the Natural Horror Film. Baltimore MD 2012; Katarina Gregersdotter, Johan Höglund and Nicklas Hållén (eds.), Animal Horror Cinema. Genre, History and Criticism, Basingstoke 2015.  https://vimeo.com/268133291

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4 

 Film

still from Empire of the

Ants.

5 

 The modified Oculus Rift helmet for the EYEsect project, developed in 2013 by the Berlin art collective The Constitute.

6   Film still from Alien vs. Predator.

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phic perception. Empire of the Ants, a 1977 science fiction horror film co-scripted and directed by Bert I. Gordon and loosely inspired by H. G. Wells’ homonymous short story, is particularly interesting because it aims to reproduce via a multiplication of the same percept the iterated vision characteristic of the compound eye constituted of many tiny lenses (fig. 4, plate VI). A similar approach has inspired more recently the EYEsect project developed in 2013 by Berlin-based art collective The Constitute.47 Two detachable cameras installed on an Oculus Rift helmet provide different visual information to the right and left eyes (fig. 5), going radically beyond the conventional ­stereoscopic human field of vision: “It allows users to take the perspective of a horse, chameleon or a totally out of body point of view”, as Christian Zöllner, one of the members of the collective, claims.48 An analogous effort is that of science-fiction, striving to render the perception of alien life forms and to make this perceptible by human sensory organs: a particularly thought-provoking case is offered by the successful Predator horror saga, which commenced in 1987 with the homonymous movie directed by John McTiernan, continued with Predator 2 (1990), Predators (2010), The Predator (2018) and crossed with the Alien saga in the films Alien vs. Predator (2004) and Alien vs. Predator: Requiem (2007). The lethal extraterrestrial Yautja hunter is equipped with a helmet (the “bio-mask”) providing not only the ability to see a spectrum ranging from the high ultraviolet to the low infrared thermal vision (fig. 6, plate VII) (modelled on the heat vision in snakes),49 but also electro-magnetic field detection, used to visualise Xenomorphs (the aliens). Such attempts intensify, on the one hand, the effort to imaginatively exceed anthropocentric limitations; on the other hand, they cannot patently hope to escape Nagel’s caveat. Since they are visually rendered on a screen, a compound-eye vision, a left-right-eye independent vision or an infrared vision will always be visions processed by a human eye-brain system. Human species-specific organisation operates as a physiological and phenomenological a priori that cannot simply be bypassed. This is, of course, true also for any sort of VR simulation of non-human ways of experiencing the world: they all ultimately have to be processed by such human a priori. Despite the above, the paradox that we have seen embodied in Uexküll’s oxymoronic stance – theorising the impenetrability of the soap bubbles and doing nothing but trying to overcome it – calls for the recognition of a species-specific feature of us humans: namely the insuppressible drive to go beyond the constraints imposed by our physiological constitution through the joined action of imagination and technology. As Nietzsche put it in the above-mentioned text on the impossibility of adequate per-

47  48  49 

 http://theconstitute.org/eyesect/ (accessed June 8 2020). (accessed June 8 2020).  For a compilation of the Predator’s heat vision see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKF7kSL2myg (accessed June 8 2020).  https://vimeo.com/83762484

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ception, it is a matter of aisthesis and invention: “Between two absolutely different spheres, as between subject and object, there is no causality, no correctness, and no expression; there is, at most, an aesthetic relation: I mean, a suggestive transference, a stammering translation into a completely foreign tongue – for which there is required, in any case, a freely inventive intermediate sphere and mediating force”.50

50 

 Nietzsche

(as in note 27), p. 86.

 47

Herman Roodenburg

“Still be mindeful on you.” Hints of Human-falcon Empathy in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, her moving memoir of training a young female goshawk, contains many fine passages but one, perhaps, stands out. One day she suddenly realises that Mabel, as she named the hawk, likes to play. Mabel is fiddling with a ball of crumpled paper and Macdonald, both a falconer and a scholar, is stunned. “No one had ever told me goshawks played. It was not in the books. I had not imagined it was possible.” And she wonders “if it was because no one had ever played with them.”1 In 1912, the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl described a similar scene. When we watch a cat play, he wrote, we not only perceive a moving but an animated, sensing body. We feel that it has a psyche of its own, that it experiences and senses like us. Through its playing, its bodily presence to us, we are given an experiential, direct access to its subjectivity.2 Cats are cuddly; hawks, with their sharp beaks and clutching talons, appear rather the opposite. Feeling empathy, perceiving even these intimidating raptors as minded actors, does not come readily. However, Macdonald fully engages the reader. Her memoir is a phenomenological achievement in itself, and she is one of the few scholars in the field to focus not on human-human but human-animal empathy. Husserl influenced many other scholars of empathy, but like his pupil Edith Stein, the author of the most incisive study of the subject, he was marginally interested in empathising

1   Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk, London 2014, pp. 113–114; in 2006, she published an accessible scholarly book on falconry, which she decided to write instead of completing her doctoral dissertation. See Helen Macdonald, Falcon, London 2016. 2   Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, second Book, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer, Boston 1993, pp. 185–186; for the German edition, see id., Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch, Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, ed. Marly Biemel, The Hague 1952. The original manuscript (never published by Husserl) dates from 1912.

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with animals. Even today, most notice goes to empathy among humans or, inspired by famous ethologists such as Frans de Waal, to animal-animal empathy.3 Macdonald’s historical asides are another charm. Reflecting on her months-long training of Mabel, she takes the reader back to seventeenth-century England. Even then, two falconers, Edmund Bert and Symon Latham, expressed feelings that we might describe as human-falcon empathy. In the following pages, I will take a look at some other, largely medieval, sources. Are there more and older, hints of such feelings? Was Bert’s and Latham’s empathy merely the exception or was it already embedded in falconers’ practices for centuries? If so, what sort of empathy (bodily/affective/cognitive) do we encounter here?

A basic empathy Taming and training a falcon takes time and effort, and is a thoroughly hands-on experience, making a practice approach (Bourdieuian or similar) a natural choice. Some elements, bringing us eventually back to Stein, may be mentioned here. First, as pointed out by cultural historian Monique Scheer, emotions are neither merely mental nor merely bodily – they are something people do. Hence her proposal to address Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and embodied practice and thus focus on the lifeworlds of people, on their daily practices and routines. That’s where emotions are generated.4 Bourdieu himself rarely discussed emotions and, when he did, he saw them not so much as a generative but a conservative force, as “weight of the world.”5 However, Scheer values his practice approach for its rich potential to undermine the well-known dichotomies of mind and body, subject and object and, most importantly, cognition and emotion.6 Citing the cognitive philosopher Alva Noë (“thinking, feeling, and perception are ‘not something the brain achieves on its own’”), Scheer also sought to link her Bourdieuian approach to the various current perspectives on embedded/embodied cognition, the enactivist perspective (Noë’s domain) in particular.7 But as Noë’s colleague, 3 

 But see Corinne M. Painter, “Appropriating the Philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein. Animal Psyche, Empathy, and Moral Subjectivity”, in: Phenomenology and the Non-Human Animal, ed. Corinne Painter and Christian Lotz, Dordrecht 2007, pp. 97–116. 4   Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (And is That What Makes them have a History?) A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion”, in: History and Theory, 51 (2012), pp. 193–210. 5   For a good summary of the issue, see Margaret Whetherell, Affect and Emotion. A New Social Science Understanding, London 2012, pp. 106–108. 6   Scheer (as in note 4), pp. 204–205. 7   The term embedded/embodied cognition conveniently encompasses four contemporary currents in the philosophy of cognitive science: those on the extended, the embodied, the enactive, and the embedded mind.

“Still be mindeful on you.”

Giovanni Colombetti, concluded, most scholars employing these views (Noë included) have looked only at cognition, neglecting its affective dimension.8 What is needed, she believes, is a joining of enactivist insights to developments in affective science. Interestingly, when she addresses the topic of “feeling others,” the ways we experience other embodied agents in concrete encounters, she draws on Stein’s ideas. She sketches a “basic empathy” – a helpful sensitising concept in tracing what medieval falconers, absorbed in their daily engagement with the birds, may have felt and sensed.9 Like other scholars of embedded/embodied cognition, Colombetti opposes the idea that empathy comes down to acts of perspective taking, of imaginatively projecting oneself into another’s situation in order to grasp her or his “hidden” mental states. Beyond such intermediate, intellectual mentalising we also have a direct, experiential access, experiencing others as lived bodies, as sources of a subjectivity of their own. In Stein’s terminology, we have to distinguish Einfühlung from Einsicht. And like her, Colombetti emphasises that Einfühlung is essentially sensual, a question of Einempfin­ dung (sensing-in) how another’s body feels to her or him.10 Colombetti also adopts Stein’s insight that in empathy the other’s bodily sensations are given non-primordially to us, meaning that although we have direct, experiential access we do not experience the other’s sensations as our own.11 To come back to Mabel, when Macdonald watched her play, she did not involuntarily mimic, not feel her playfulness herself. To take another helpful distinction, though Colombetti’s basic empathy includes directly perceiving the other’s lived emotions in her or his postures, movements, gestures or facial and vocal expressions, it excludes the common, everyday connotation of emotional resonance, of also sharing specific feelings.12 Instead, Colombetti focuses on a basic affectivity, found in all living organisms and inherent to their relentless participatory sense-making, of enacting a world that has significance to them, their Umwelt. Cognition is both embodied and embedded. Empathy, with its vital role in intersubjectivity, in the moment-to-moment interaction with others, is a major component.13

  8   Giovanna Colombetti, The Feeling Body. Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind, Cambridge Mass, 2014, p. 205, note 2.; she makes an exception for Evan Thompson, one of the main representatives of the enactivist account.   9   Colombetti (as in note 8), pp. 173–178, esp. p. 176. 10   Colombetti (as in note 8), pp. 173–174. 11   Colombetti (as in note 8), pp. 174–175. 12   Colombetti (as in note 8), pp. 181–182. 13   For an insightful review, see: Tom Froese, “Beyond Neurophenomenology. A Review of Colombetti’s ‘The Feeling Body’” (iles.wordpress.com/2015/01/froese-15-review-of-colombettis-the-feeling-body. pdf, accessed June 9 2020); see also: Fredrik Svenaeus, “Edith Stein’s Phenomenology of Sensual and Emotional Empathy,” in: Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 17 (2018), pp. 741–760.

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If approached kindly Though Macdonald named her goshawk Mabel (“From amabilis, meaning loveable, or dear”), Mabel often acted the opposite.14 Indeed she exhausted and exasperated her trainer. There was also Mabel’s murderous nature, her “killing grip.” It is “an old, deep pattern in her brain,” as Macdonald writes.15 Consider, as well, Mabel’s physical features. When Macdonald sees Mabel for the first time, noting her two enormous eyes, her heart “jumps sideways.” “She is a conjuring trick. A reptile. A fallen angel. A griffon from the pages of an illuminated bestiary,” she recalls.16 Later, when Macdonald starts the manning process (falcons and hawks are not tamed, they are “manned”), she realises how Mabel just stares at her in mortal terror. Sitting in a darkened room, she had just lifted her onto her falconer’s glove after carefully removing the calming hood from her eyes. Especially in the first weeks, manning Mabel proved an ordeal. Over and over again, she only bated (“I hate this”).17 “Bating”, like manning, is falconer’s jargon. Though leashed to a perch or the fist, the hawk – diving headlong, frantically beating its wings – just seeks to escape. As Macdonald remembers, she felt Mabel’s heart beating as fast as hers. Although some trust finally develops, the hawk’s physique keeps fascinating her. She marvels “at how reptilian she is,” noting her “pale, round eyes” and the “waxy yellow skin about her Bakelite-black beak.” “Half the time,” Macdonald confesses, “she seems as alien as a snake.”18 H is for Hawk is a lovely and emotional read. Eventually, the long months of training reach a satisfying end. Mabel learns to accept humans and then, taken out to the fields, to properly return to the glove – the falconer’s moment of truth – and, ultimately, to fulfil the shared goal of hunting her quarry. In the end, Macdonald turns Mabel loose in a friend’s “mews” to moult at the end of the season and finds rest for herself. Taming and training her young hawk helped her go through the deep and overwhelming grief after suddenly losing her father. They had been close: from an early age he had always encouraged her in her passion for birds. By calling Mabel Mabel, Macdonald took a clear stance. She censures the falconry authors of the nineteenth century (all male, of course), who projected the “threatened” virtues of power, wildness, and independence onto the hawks they were “civilising,” were manning and training, at the same time. The hawks, and explicitly goshawks such as Mabel, receiving no lovable names, were described as sulky, flighty, unruly or hysterical. Misogynism played a role. As the females are up to one third larger than

14  15  16  17  18 

 Macdonald (as in note 1), p. 89.  Macdonald (as in note 1), p. 83.  Macdonald (as in note 1), p. 53.  Macdonald (as in note 1), pp. 65–66.  Macdonald (as in note 1), p. 82.

“Still be mindeful on you.”

their mates, making them the stronger sex, it was mostly they who were captured and trained.19 Yet there were other, more empathic times. Macdonald quotes Latham, who owned that goshawks were “shye and fearfull,” yet if approached kindly, they were “sociable and familiar.” As Latham boasted, they could be “as loving and fond of her Keeper as any other Hawke whatsoever.” Bert agreed: his goshawk was his “playfellow,” he wrote, and he was her “friend.” Treat her well, he urged, and she will have “joye in her selfe.”20 Both men, then, believed in some human-hawk empathy. They perceived their goshawks as minded creatures, as having a subjectivity of their own, just like Macdonald saw hers. But were they the exception or were there other falconers, back then or earlier, writing similar things? Historians of falconry have generally neglected such questions. However, when we consult the texts they have studied and edited, we do find hints of a basic empathy between human and falcon. They emerge in the chapters devoted to the falconer’s daily embodied practices.

The virgula depicted Falconers charged with the manning and training of hawks or falcons used a variety of tools, including a little baton called the virgula or virga (Fr. brochette).21 About half a foot long, it served to stroke and caress the falcon’s feathers and breast. The senses, touch in particular, were an essential feature of the practice. Indeed, with the falconer sensing the falcon’s soft skin and feathers at the tip of the little wand (and at the other tip, the falcon sensing her keeper’s caressing hand), his tactile sensations may easily have graded into more affective sensations.22 But what do we know about it, and how widespread was its use? We might start with a few images: a couple of fifteenth-century portraits depicting members of the Burgundian-Habsburg court.

19  20 

 Macdonald

(as in note 1), p. 79 and pp. 111–112.

 Macdonald (as in note 1), p. 112; see also Keith Thomas, quoting Bert and Latham in the same vein,

in: Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World. A History of the Modern Sensibility, New York 1983, p. 101 and p. 339, note 13; Symon Latham, Lathams Falconry, London 1613; Edmund Bert, An Approved Treatise of Hawks and Hawking, London 1619. 21   Baudouin van den Abeele, La fauconnerie au Moyen Age. Connaissance, affaitage et médecine des oiseaux de chasse d’après les traités latins, Paris 1994, p. 116; Jacques Auguste de Thou, La fauconnerie à la Renaissance. Le Hieracosophicon (1582–1584) de Jacques Auguste de Thou, ed. Ingrid A.R. de Smet, Geneva 2013, pp. 302–303 and p. 504. 22   The classic example here, going back to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is that of the blind man feeling the texture of the ground at the tip of his cane. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers proposed their thesis of extended mind, while other scholars of cognition, among them Alva Noë, developed their theses of an enactive or embodied mind.

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1 

 Master of the Legend of St. Madeleine, Portrait of Philip the Handsome, ca. 1492, oil on wood, 27 × 17.5 cm, Paris, Musée de la Chasse.

The first of these portraits represents a young Philip the Handsome, son of Maximilian I of Habsburg and Mary of Burgundy (fig. 1, plate VIII). The panel has been dated to the early 1490s, but the artist is unknown. Following Max Friedländer, he is generally identified as the Master of the Legend of Saint Magdalene, Friedländer’s designation for a number of anonymous painters all active in Brussels.23 Philip is portrayed carrying a hooded peregrine (if it is at all one) on his gloved left hand. Yet he is hardly dressed for the chase, posing in full regalia. The beholder’s eyes are drawn to his purple-red cloak, trimmed with a fine ermine collar, and to his badge, hanging on a gold chain, of the Order of the Golden Fleece. In contrast, the black beret looks rather simple, but it has a precious jewel and a white-grey pearl attached to it. This is clearly a formal portrait, rich with political meaning. The nobles 23 

 Max J. Friedländer, Die Altniederländische Malerei, Pieter Coeck, Jan van Scorel, vol. 12, Leiden 1935, pp. 15 ff.

“Still be mindeful on you.”

2 

 Master of the Legend of St. Madeleine, Portrait of Charles V, 1507, oil on wood, 49 × 35.5 cm, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum.

and courtiers viewing it will have noted Philip’s imperious bearing – his full mastery, symbolised in the virgula he is holding, over the wild creature. The picture’s political iconography, the Habsburgs’ control over their lands, was evident.24 In 1507, some fifteen years later, the Magdalene Master included the virgula in another panel – a portrait of Philip’s son Charles V, then seven years of age (fig. 2, plate IX). There are a few differences. Unlike his father, Charles is depicted looking to the left and wearing a different formal attire though, like him, he wears the Order of the Golden Fleece on a gold chain, while holding both a hooded bird of prey and a virgula. The Burgundian and Habsburg princes must have cherished the iconography. 24 

 Cf. Yannis Hadjinicolaou, “Macht wie die des Königs – Zur Politischen Ikonographie der Falknerei in der Frühen Neuzeit”, in: Hunting without Weapons. On the Pursuit of Images, ed. Maurice Saß, Berlin and Boston 2017, pp. 87–106; see also id. and Herman Roodenburg, “Falconry as Image of Power in the Low Countries. Towards a political iconography”, in: Falconry in the Mediterranean Context, ed. Charles Burnett and Jan Loop (forthcoming).

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3 

 Petrus Christus, The Falconer, ca. 1445–1450, silverpoint, 190 × 144 mm, Frankfurt am Main, Städel Museum.

A mid fifteenth-century drawing, attributed to Petrus Christus, shows an anonymous Burgundian noble, stroking his hawk with the little wand. Dating from the second half of the 1440s, when Philip’s great-grandfather, Philip the Good, still reigned over Burgundy, it may have been a sketch for another portrait (fig. 3).25 Like most late medieval monarchs, the Burgundian and Habsburg rulers loved falconry. Watching the more highly prized falcons, in particular, suddenly stooping from high up offered spectacle and excitement. It also brought prestige, since the expenses were huge: obtaining and maintaining falcons was expensive and so was falconry – large open areas were needed. As the accounts show, Philip the Good employed dozens of staff each year to have his falcons manned, trained and medically cared for. They were the men actually doing the work: the faulconniers helped by their assistants, the varlets de faulcon. They were controlled by the maistre faulconnier, always a nobleman, and his lieutenant. Around the time Petrus Christus made his drawing, some 28 men attended to 67 birds.26

25   Maryan W. Ainsworth, Petrus Christus: Renaissance Master of Bruges, New York 1994, pp. 50–51 and pp. 187–189. 26   Christoph Niedermann, Das Jagdwesen am Hofe Herzog Philips des Guten von Burgund, Brussels 1995, pp. 40–47.

“Still be mindeful on you.”

4 

 Master of the Portraits of Princes, Portrait of Engelbert II, ca. 1480–1490, oil on panel, 33.5 × 24 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

Typically taking a couple of hours, much shorter than hunting with hounds, falconry was pursued with equal enthusiasm by the female rulers of the day. Images of Mary of Burgundy or Charles’ sister, Mary of Hungary, show them on horseback, holding the reins in their right hand and carrying a falcon on their left. But images depicting female rulers holding a virgula may never have existed and the same may hold for portraits of lower-ranking nobles. Count Engelbert II of Nassau, a close ally to both Charles the Bold and his daughter Mary, had himself portrayed carrying an immature peregrine and wearing the Order of the Golden Fleece. Instead of holding the little baton, he rests his hand on the painted frame of the picture (fig. 4). Perhaps, to be painted sporting a virgula was the prerogative of the Burgundian-Habsburg rulers alone, to the exclusion of even their wives, sisters, and daughters. However, was this just a question of power symbolised, of a political iconography, or did the nobles viewing the panels also bring a certain empathy, an ingrained

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5   Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of Robert Cheseman, 1533, oil on panel, 58.8 × 62.8 cm, The Hague, Mauritshuis.

habitus, to the images?27 Obviously, compared to a later falconry-related picture, Hans Holbein the Younger’s portrait of the English courtier Robert Cheseman, the postures of Philip and Charles look disappointingly stiff – Holbein’s mastery is evident (fig. 5, plate X). Cheseman’s protective hand, his fingertips noticeably touching the falcon’s breast, and her trusting calm evoke a mutual closeness that seems to be missing in the two panels. Or is it? Did the nobles viewing these panels perhaps sense more, a degree 27   As shown by Alan Langdale, Bourdieu was greatly influenced in his thinking about habitus by Baxandall and his notion of the “period eye.” See Alan Langdale, “Aspects of the Critical Reception and Intellectual History of Baxandall’s Concept of the Period Eye,” in: About Michael Baxandall, ed. Adrian Rifkin, Oxford 1999, pp. 17–35; see also Herman Roodenburg, “The Visceral Pleasures of Looking. On Iconology, Anthropology and the Neurosciences,” in: New Perspectives in Iconology. Visual Studies and Anthropology, ed. Barbara Baert, Ann-Sophie Lehmann, Jenke van der Akkerveken, Brussels 2011, pp. 211–232.

“Still be mindeful on you.”

of kinesthetic empathy, than we tend to assume?28 With falconry establishments found at all the larger European courts, they not only undoubtedly witnessed the manning and training of the birds, but were also familiar with and informed about the processes involved. There were numerous vernacular texts (few nobles mastered Latin) detailing the practices. What did they learn there?

The virgula r ecommended Falconry manuscripts circulated widely in the fifteenth century. Historians have traced some 45 of them from the French-speaking lands alone.29 Their contents could vary, but all the larger manuscripts offered ornithological, hygienic, therapeutic and cynegetic information. The latter included instructions on manning and training.30 The equipment needed, such as the virgula (or often simply a pigeon’s or partridge’s feather), was also discussed here.31 Other equipment included the leather hoods covering the falcons’ eyes to calm them down, the perches they sat and slept on and the jesses, bells and leaches attached to their legs. An important item was the lure: mostly quarrry affixed to a line swung by the falconer to recall high-flying birds. They would seize or land on this and, from there, hop onto the glove. The sources have their problems. So far, only a handful of the manuscripts have been edited. In addition, most of the falconers’ knowledge was undoubtedly transmitted orally. Indeed, before falconers like Bert and Latham started to write their own treatises, most of the recorded knowledge may have been hearsay. However, the oral and written traditions also overlapped. Witness, for instance, the frontispiece of a French treatise, Guillaume Tardif’s L’art de faulconnerie et des chiens de chasse (1492/3). The picture shows a mews in which a falconer inspects three falcons resting on a perch, 28   Herman Roodenburg, “Beweeglijkheid Embodied. On the Corporeal and Sensory Dimensions of a Famous Emotion Term”, in: The Passions in the Arts of the Early Modern Netherlands, ed. id. and Stephanie S. Dickey, Zwolle 2010, p. 311 and p. 316. See also Yannis Hadjinicolaou, Thinking Bodies – Shaping Hands. Handeling in Art and Theory of the Late Rembrandtists, Leiden and Boston 2019, passim. 29   An Smets and Baudouin van den Abeele, “Manuscrits et traités de chasse français du Moyen Âge. Recensement et perspectives de recherche”, in: Romania, 116/3-4 (1998), pp. 316–367; An Smets, Jean de Francières, “Artelouche de la Alagona et leurs collègues: pour une étude de fauconnerie français du XVe siècle”, in: Memoire en temps advenir. Hommage à Theo Venckeleer, ed. Alex Vanneste et al., Leuven 2003, pp. 301–308; for a recent overview of the 159 medieval hunting treatises, most of them concerning falconry, see Baudouin van den Abeele, “Treatises on Hunting in the Medieval West: An Overview”, in: Raptor and Human – Falconry and Bird Symbolism throughout the Millennia on a Global Scale, ed. KarlHeinz Gersmann and Oliver Grimm, Kiel and Hamburg 2018, pp. 1271–1278, esp. p. 1272. 30   For a concise overview of the Latin treatises, see Baudouin van den Abeele, “Zum ‘Federspiel.’ Die Lateinischen Falknerei-Traktate des Mittelalters zwischen Tradition und Praxis”, in: Zeitschrift für Jagdwissenschaft, 49 (2003), pp. 89–111, here p. 102. 31   Dutch falconers called the feather a frist-frast, clearly an onomatopeia; see A.E.H. Swaen, De valkerij in de Nederlanden, Zutphen 1937, p. 53. See also Monika Wagner’s contribution in this volume.

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while a second man reads to him from a book. Perhaps the passage read was a more learned, medical text.32 Importantly, some of the most influential authors also mentioned the virgula, even relating it to a degree of embodied empathy. The twelfth-century philosopher Adelard of Bath may have been the first to do so. In his much-read treatise De avibus, he recommended a virga semipedalis, a half-foot long baton, for stroking the falcon’s wings and tail.33 The most famous falconry text, the De arte venandi cum avibus, appeared a hundred years later.34 Its main author was Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, King of Sicily, Jerusalem and Germany, and Holy Roman Emperor. Residing in Sicily, Frederick gained a life-long interest in the Middle Eastern traditions of falconry, ­promoting their study at court. In the richly illuminated manuscript, he mentions the virgula in his Book Three, where he discusses the falcons’ manning and training. If a falcon hates the hood, he advised, she might be softly stroked over the throat, neck and breast, using one’s hand, a feather or a little baton (tractari manu, vel penna, vel virgula).35 The first vernacular texts (translations or originals) emerged in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.36 For example, in 1372, the French king Charles V ordered a translation of Bartholomeus Anglicus’ early nature encyclopedia, De proprietatibus rerum.37 The text found a wide readership: some 36 manuscripts and nine incunable editions have been found.38 Somewhat surprisingly, while Bartholomeus’ text, in its chapter “De avibus”, and also its French and English translations, just advised to stroke the falcon’s feathers, the Dutch fifteenth-century version recommended the little baton or cleynen houcken.39 Perhaps it was the House of Burgundy’s influence.40 32  33  34 

 For

both the oral transmission and the frontispiece, see Van den Abeele (as in note 30), pp. 109–110. in: Van den Abeele (as in note 21), p. 116.  Only two French translations are known: the first dating from 1310, the second from 1480. See Martina Giese, “The ‘De arte venandi cum avibus’ of Emperor Frederick II”, in: Gersmann and Grimm (as in note 29), p. 1464. 35   The Art of Falconry, Being the De Arte Venandi cum Avibus by Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, trans. and ed. by Casey A. Wood and F. Marjorie Fyfe, Stanford 1943, p. 208; Latin quoted after Reliqua Librorum Friderici II, Imperatoris. De arte venandi cum auibus, Augsburg 1596, p. 339. 36   Van den Abeele (as in note 21), p. 38; id. (as in note 29), pp. 1275–1278. 37   See: Bartholomeus Anglicus, De Proprietatibus Rerum. Texte latin et réception vernaculaire. Lateinischer Text und volkssprachige Rezeption, ed. Baudouin van den Abeele and Heinz Meyer, Turnhout 2005. 38   Géraldine Veysseyre, “Le Livre des Propriétés de Choses de Jean Corbechon (livre VI), ou la vulgarisation d’une encyclopédie Latine”, in: Science Translated: Latin and Vernacular Translations of Scientific Treatises in Medieval Europe, ed. Michèle Goyens et al., Leuven 2008, p. 332. 39   Bartholomeus Engelsman, Van den proprieteyten der dinghen (1485), ed. E.M. Versélewel de Witt, Bk. XII, fol. 201v.: “si werden inder borsten ende opten start mit een cleynen houcken ghestreelt ende ghestreken op dat haer vederen effen ende suverlicken staen sullen.” Also quoted in: Swaen (as in note 31), p. 53; on the translation, see: Baudouin van den Abeele and Heinz Meyer, “Bericht über die Edition von De Proprietatibus Rerum”, in: Van den Abeele and Meyer (as in note 37), pp. 14–15. 40   Saskia Bogaart, Vernacularisation of Latin Science: On The Properties of Things and Van den Proprieteyten der Dinghen, in: Van den Abeele and Meyer (as in note 37), pp. 32–33; The virgula appears again in the Hieracosophion, written in the 1580s by the French statesman and man of letters, Jacques-Auguste de Thou. The author urges his audience to often caress the bird’s head. But if she responds wrongly, try Quoted

“Still be mindeful on you.”

Minded creatures Touch, then, as embodied in the falconer’s hand handling the virgula was essential to manning. But what about the other senses, the falconer’s bodily knowing, their basic empathy and “sensing-in,” as a whole? Remarkably, two treatises still give us an idea of this knowing. The first of these is Frederick’s De arte venandi. The second is a French text, the Livres du Roy Modus et de la Royne Ratio, probably composed by the Normandy nobleman Henri de Ferrières in the years 1350 to 1370. Philip the Good owned four copies of the treatise. Indeed, with six printed editions appearing in the sixteenth century, it proved a lasting success.41 Its first part, the Livre des deduis, may have been its most attractive part. There, King Modus told a couple of young courtiers about the hunt, the art of falconry included. To start with Frederick’s text, his Book III voted various chapters to the falconer’s sensory practices. As he summarised the work: “All the senses of the wild falcon must be trained gradually to tolerate strange sensations.”42 The falcon’s eyesight came first. More than the other sensory impressions, those entering through the eyes made her “frantic and unmanageable,” made her panic and bate,43 hence his advice to “seel” the eyes, to temporarily blind the bird’s sight by sewing up her lower eyelids. Calming her down this way, she could be habituated, step by step, to her surroundings through the senses of taste, hearing and touch.44 For some reason, Frederick did not include here the sense of smell, though the falconer’s body odour, the smell of the proffered portions of meat and that of the leather equipment employed (the hoods, leashes and jesses) must have been a strange sensation as well. Seeling was a potentially risky operation with which the falconer had to proceed carefully. Though tightly swathed in a linen towel, the falcon should be grasped by two assistants, one “casting” her – holding her wings closed around her trunk – and the other securing her legs and feet. It was a delicate job. Taking care not to injure her eyeballs or membranes, the falconer had to pierce the bird’s eyelids with needle and thread.45 However, the practice continued for centuries, with Bert and Latham still defending it. Apparently, the other temporary blinding technique, that of hooding introduced by Frederick from the Middle East, did not replace seeling. It had the advantage, he

ing to bite her master’s hand, the falconer had better use the little wand. Not a treatise but an erudite Latin panegyric on the art, its practical import may have been limited. See De Thou (as in note 21), pp. 302–303 and p. 504. 41   Les livres du Roy Modus et de la Royne Ratio, ed. Gunnar Tilander, Paris 1932, pp. lvi–lix. 42   Wood and Fyfe (as in note 35), p. 171. 43   Wood and Fyfe (as in note 35), p. 137. 44   Wood and Fyfe (as in note 35), pp. 170–175. 45   Wood and Fyfe (as in note 35), pp. 137–138.

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explained, that the falconer could loosen some of the threads and so narrow the falcon’s field of vision to the meat proffered and the humans standing in front of her.46 With the falcon’s eyesight under control, the falconer could then start training the other senses. The gustatory sense was important: one might feed the bird strategically giving her larger or smaller bits of chicken leg and other meat. Her sense of hearing also played a role. Feeding the falcon, one should use the occasion “to make some caressing vocal appeal, encouraging her to eat.” The words were irrelevant, they might be just a phrase or the bar of a song, but one should stick to them and repeat them every time.47 Similarly, in addition to the feeding and talking, the falconer should try “to become more intimately acquainted with his bird by touching and stroking her.” With each bit of meat, he should habituate her to “a gentle stroking of the mandibles, breast, wings, tail, and feet.” Having been habituated this way, the falcon will finally “permit herself to be handled by man, whose touch is normally abhorrent to her.” As for the stroking, Frederick did not mention the virgula here. However, lest the bird’s feathers be soiled, he cautioned that the falconer’s hands should be clean.48 Eventually, the falconer might restore the falcon’s eyesight, but he had to do it cautiously. He should only remove the seeling threads in a darkened room or, by candlelight, in the evening. Then, with all the falcon’s senses accustomed to him, the falconer might take her on his fist to another room, where the doors and windows are open and where dogs and speech are around. From there, one might take her to other rooms and, finally, still stroking her and saying words to her, the falconer might take her outdoors on his fist and expose her to all the hustle and bustle there. In the first days he had better go by foot and not on horseback. As Frederick pointed out, all these were “fundamental measures.”49 In comparison, de Ferrières’ instructions remained rather brief 50 though, like Frederick, he described the same sensory practices. The falconer should put the falcons “hors de sauvagine,” should adapt their senses to a new sensory world of humans, horses and dogs. The brochette, serving to stroke and caress the falcon, was one of the tools at the falconer’s disposal.51 De Ferrières even had the little baton depicted in some of the miniatures included in the text. Remarkably, it is not wielded by nobles but, judging

46  47  48  49  50  51 

 Wood

and Fyfe (as in note 35), pp. 171–73. and Fyfe (as in note 35), p. 159.  Wood and Fyfe (as in note 35), pp. 170–171.  Wood and Fyfe (as in note 35), pp. 170–171.  Tilander (as in note 41), pp. 177–184.  Another fourteenth-century text mentioning the brochette is the Le Menagier de Paris, a household book, dated ca. 1393 and written not by a nobleman but a well-off bourgeois for his fifteen-year old wife. See Le Menagier de Paris, ed. Georgine E. Brereton and Janet M. Ferrer, Oxford 1981, p. 150.  Wood

“Still be mindeful on you.”

6   Livres du Roy Modus et de la Royne Ratio, Two Falconers, miniature from a 15th-century copy, ms. 10218-19, Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, fº 61.

by their clothes, by falconers engaged at court (fig. 6).52 Its uses are threefold, as King Modus explains. It keeps the falcon from biting her master’s hand. Secondly, her feathers will be less stained if stroked by the brochette rather than by hand. Additionally, though mentioned first, the more the falcon feels its touch, the more secure she will feel (“plus s’en asseure”).53 Especially in the first days of manning, the falconer should have patience and stroke her often with the little wand. The falcon’s seurté, her feeling seur, was obviously important to de Ferrières – he kept coming back to it.54 The bird should feel secure, first in the presence of her keepers 52 

 Van den Abeele (as in note 21), p. 116; and id., La fauconnerie dans des lettres françaises du XII au XIVe siècle, Leuven 1990, p. 96, note 57 and fig. 16. 53   Tilander (as in note 41), pp. 177–178: “la premiere est que plus est un faucon touchié et manié, plus s’en asseure”. 54   Tilander (as in note 41), p. 181: “une chose qui bien l’asseure”; “Et seron ce que tu verras sa seurté”; “que tu verras [en li] signe de seurté”; p. 182: “si tu voies qu’il fust assés seur entre les gens”; “Et se […] tu le treuvez seur”; p. 183: “garde que il soit bien seur et tout hors de sauvagine”; “se il n’estoit bien seur”; “Et se tu le treuvez bien seur et de bonne fain et esgre”). Cf. the lemma’s seur and seurté in: Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française et de tous ses dialectes du IXe au XVe siècle, vol. 7, Paris 1881–1902, p. 406 and pp. 408–409.

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and then in the company of other humans and that of horses and dogs. Indeed, the falconer ought to be courteous (“courtois”) to his falcon, for by nature she is amiable and keen.55 It is a striking observation. Clearly, Macdonald’s amiable Mabel had her medieval forebears. However, a century earlier, Frederick had written in a similar vein. By dispelling the falcon’s panic, the falconer could make her love humans more and feel secure with them (“diligere magis hominem, et assuesieri cum ipso”). Frederick also advised always having an extra ration of food, a tiratorium, lying ready – it made her love the falconer (“faciens falconem diligere falconarium”).56 That he chose to speak of dilectio and not of affectus or passio may be significant. The semantics of medieval emotions have only recently been studied, making it difficult to draw precise distinctions, but according to Aquinas dilectio entailed an element of choice.57 Possibly, falcons’ subjectivity was perceived that way. Like humans, they were minded creatures. Perhaps de Ferrières’ seurté reverts to Frederick’s assuesieri, but the two authors had more in common. De Ferrières’ King Modus asked three things from his young courtiers. The first was to love their falcons perfectly (“les amer parfaitement”), the second to be amiable to them (“de leur estre amiable”) and the third to put one’s heart in it (“que l’en en soit curieus”).58 Adopting these three rules, they made them love (“ faire amer”) the company of other falcons and the hunting dogs and, one supposes (he does not say so), that of their keepers.59 Perhaps such embodied-empathic feelings intensified around 1600. In 1594, the French brothers Pierre and François de Gommer, active falconers themselves, published a hawking treatise, L’autoursserie. They advised to stroke the hawks frequently, taking a partridge feather. The aim was clear: “Caressez-les-donc souvent, vous en serez aymé”.60 As we saw above, a few decades later Bert and Latham expressed similar views.61 Bert recommended carrying the goshawk all day, from before day-break to sunset, and give her constant attention. It would arouse in her a “louing apprehension”, “would 55  56 

 Tilander

(as in note 41), p. 184: “de sa nature il est amiable et famelieus.” quoted after Reliqua Librorum Friderici (as in note 35), p. 129; cf. Wood and Fyfe (as in note 35), p. 174. 57   Barbara Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700, Cambridge 2016, pp. 158–159; recently, two important historical-semantic studies have appeared. See Amanda Bailey and Mario DiGangi (ed.), Affect Theory and Early Modern Texts. Politics, Ecologies, and Form, New York 2017); Juanita Feros Ruys, Michael W. Champion, and Kirk Essary (ed.), Before Emotion. The Language of Feeling, 400–1800, New York 2019. 58   Tilander (as in note 41), p. 172: “il faut que celui qui en veut joïr ait en soi trois choses: la premiere est de les amer parfaitement, la seconde de leur estre amiable, la tierce que l’en en soit curieus”. 59   Tilander (as in note 41), p. 187. 60   Quoted in De Thou (as in note 21), p. 449. 61   Latham (as in note 20) Book II, p. 34: “Give her a fortnights carriage or more as she is in her rusterhood, alwayes stroaking and playing with her, with a hand, or a feather in stead thereof […].”  Latin

“Still be mindeful on you.”

make her loue me as her perch.”62 Like Frederick, he also spoke of courtesy: it was important to treat her kindly. Similarly, when the hawk had taken quarry or the lure, he advised: “thou must make her much in love with thy sweet and milde vsing her, and in doing thus, it will make her love thee better then euer she loued house.”63 Latham chose even stronger words. When manning goshawks, making them “familiar” with himself, the falconer will win over these creatures, who by nature “are altogether shye and fearefull of him,” through his “continuall louing and curteous behauiour towards them […].”64 “For of all Hawkes in the world,” he believed, “the Goshawke as shee is a stately and braue bird to behold; so is shee also as coy, nice, and curious to be handled and dealt withall.” Both English falconers also stressed training the senses. While feeding the hawk, the falconer should touch and comfort her (“alwayes stroaking and playing with her, with a hand, or a feather in stead thereof ”) and make himself heard (“withall vsing your voice or tongue, with chirping and whistling vnto her”).65 It would evoke the hawk’s “gentleness,” enhance the “familiarity” with her keeper. Perhaps Latham phrased the basic, sensory-based empathy best. As he imagined the hawk’s subjectivity, “she will still be mindefull on you, and never forgetfull, but alwayes, and inwardly in her minde attending and listening for your voice, and some other pleasing reward from you, and shee will so much the sooner be made a perfect Hawke.”66

Conclusion Evidently, we will never know what it is like to be a falcon.67 There is no way of fully entering its subjectivity, of grasping how a falcon may feel and sense like one. Yet, as de Waal observed, as scientists we can still try to step outside our own phenomenal world. Referring to Thomas Nagel’s famous essay, “What is it like to be a bat?,” he pointed to the fascinating research on the echo-location of bats, which Nagel could draw on.68 Similarly, other studies in avian biology have shown how falcons, hawks and other raptors have not one but two foveas in each eye, giving them much sharper visual acuity than humans and, diving down, an astounding sense of direction. There are 62  63  64  65  66  67 

 Bert

(as in note 20), pp. 22–23. (as in note 20), p. 52.  Latham (as in note 20), Book II, pp. 2–3.  Latham (as in note 20), Book I, p. 9 and Book II, p. 35.  Latham (as in note 20), Book II, p. 27.  The phrase or rather paraphrase is Macdonald’s. See Macdonald (as in note 1), p. 19; she refers to the classic essay by Thomas Nagel, “What is it Like to be a Bat?”, in: Philosophical Review, 83/4 (1974), pp. 435–50. See previous the contribution by Andrea Pinotti in this volume. 68   Edmund de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, New York and London 2016, pp. 9–11.  Bert

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other essential differences, for instance in colour vision: ours is three-, theirs fourdimensional. Falcons do not only see more clearly, as Macdonald summarised such research elsewhere. Inhabiting a phenomenal world that is radically different from ours, they also literally see things differently.69 In her memoir, Macdonald focused, so to say, on her own, human-animal cognition, decribing her taming and training of Mabel and detailing – to use Colombetti’s enactive vocabulary – the basic empathy, the “sensing-in,” involved in the practices. Valuing the falconer’s embodied cognition, she tried to enter her goshawk’s subjectivity the practical, hands-on way. Quoting Bert and Latham, she also placed the falconer’s embodied knowing on a welcome historical footing. As I understand it, in doing so she also suggested taking a closer look at the different, still pre-Cartesian phenomenal world of medieval and early modern falconers.

69 

 Macdonald

(as in note 1), pp. 19 ff.

* I’d like to thank David Horobin and, especially, Yannis Hadjinicolaou for their fine comments.

Colour Pl ates

I 

 Anaesthetised

falcon, Abu Dhabi, Falcon Hospital.

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II   Matthäus Merian the Younger, Landgraf Friedrich von Hessen-Eschwege as Falconer, ca. 1655, oil on wood, 190 × 84 cm, Berlin, Jagdschloß Grunewald.

Colour Pl ates

III 

 Painter from Ferrara (Antonio de Crevalcore?), Family portrait, ca. 1480, oil on canvas, 112.3 × 90.8 cm, Munich, Alte Pinakothek.

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IV 

 Laurent

Grasso, In Air, 2009, film still, Galerie Perrotin, Paris.

Colour Pl ates

V 

 Flight simulator Birdly, designed in 2013 by Max Rheiner, Fabian Troxler and Thomas Tobler at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and subsequently developed by Somniacs.

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VI 

 Film

still from Empire of the Ants.

VII 

 Film

still from Alien vs. Predator.

Colour Pl ates

VIII 

 Master of the Legend of St. Madeleine, Portrait of Philip the Handsome, ca. 1492, oil on wood, 27 × 17.5 cm, Paris, Musée de la Chasse.

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IX   Master of the Legend of St. Madeleine, Portrait of Charles V, 1507, oil on wood, 49 × 35.5 cm, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum.

Colour Pl ates

X   Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of Robert Cheseman, 1533, oil on panel, 58.8 × 62.8 cm, The Hague, Mauritshuis.

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XI   Clara Peeters, Still Life with Sparrowhawk, Fowl, Porcelain and Shells, 1611, oil on panel, 52 × 71 cm, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado.

Colour Pl ates

XII   Jan Brueghel the Elder, Fish Market by a River, 1605, oil on copper, 29.5 × 42 cm, Munich, Alte Pinakothek.

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XIII 

 Simon de Vlieger, The Return of the Falconer, 1637, oil on panel, 71 × 95 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

Colour Pl ates

XIV   Edwin Henry Landseer, Hawking in the Olden Time, 1832, oil on canvas, 152.5 × 183 cm, London, Kenwood House, The Iveagh Bequest.

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XV 

 Cornelis Brisé (attributed to), Trompe-l’oeil with falconry tools, around 1650, oil on canvas, 78 × 63 cm, Aachen, Suermondt-Ludwig Museum.

Colour Pl ates

XVI 

 Edwin

Henry Landseer, Hooded Falcon, oil on panel, 50.5 × 40.7 cm, private collection.

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Symbolic Tools

Robert Felfe

Exploring Pictorial Space with Falcons

Visual regimes and technologies Long before air space and aeronautics became significant factors of military operations, falconry was employed as a means and metaphor of visual mastery over pictorial landscapes. A view of Brussels, etched in 1640, is a striking example of this (fig. 1). Dispersed across the sky are the Brabant coat of arms, a portrait of Phillip IV of Spain – flanked by allegories of justice and peace – and a triumphant Archangel Michael.1 The message here is unmistakable: these insignia claim political regime – including the explicit use of military might – as absolute and indeed justified by salvation history. Beneath the umbrella of these insignia, the image offers the viewer a perspective of the city that is both rich in detail and aesthetically dense. Brussels appears before us in its entirety, whilst seeming to have achieved a harmonious balance between city and countryside. The particular visual organisation of the pictorial space in this large print is explicitly linked to the theme of falconry. At the far left, a group of falconers carrying their birds, and the aerial battles between falcons and herons, lead the viewer into the image (fig. 1). The falcons here – far more than mere attributes of lordship – are, in the truest sense, agents of this image’s specific visuality as a constituting aspect of its political significance. Heron hawking, here, overlaps with the strategic cultivation of seeing by means of the specific qualities of the pictorial space. Man and hawks in the narrow foreground embody the beholder’s ambivalent situation: We find ourselves coming across the hunting troop on top of a hillside whilst, at the same time, the print offers us a bird’s-eye view of the city embedded in a vast surrounding countryside. It combines 1 

 This view of Brussels, printed in three pieces, is put together virtually, as shown here in the database of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam: (https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search/objects?p=12&ps=12&f. principalMakers.name.sort=Abraham+Dircksz.+Santvoort&st=Objects&ii=6#/RP-P-1883-A-7404,138., accessed January 22 2018). It was initially published as part of a wall map entitled Bruxella nobilissima Brabantiae civitas anno 1640, and was, in this context, glued above or below the map projection.

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1 

 Abraham Dircksz. Santvoort after Nicolaes van der Horst, View of Brussels, etching and engraving, 43.3 × 124.4 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

the options of both: joining the company of riders and footmen, on the one hand, and being elevated in favour of a total overview, on the other. The falconers and their birds figure as integrated agents of this twofold imaginary access into the scene. The veduta of Brussels with falconers opens up more than one perspective on how the practice and imagery of falconry were connected with the orchestration of pictorial space. It is obvious that the issue of falconry as a form of “visual engagement” can be linked to the military mastery of landscape, by survey and ballistics for instance, up to modern technologies of weapon guidance and image-assisted surveillance. What made hawks in general, and specifically falcons, so attractive as trained hunting partners was their astounding sight together with their unique flight, speed and hunting skills that were both masterful and bold.2 This combination of qualities played a decisive role in falconry’s long history of practice and its semantic implications as an attribute and symbol of sovereignty, or at least of a privileged position in the social hierarchy. 3 The imagery of hawks and falconry, however, quickly reveals a very rich semantic field, which does not necessarily dovetail with the correlation between hunting practice, political authority and visual technology. Therefore, the following thoughts widen the scope to provide alternative perspectives on questions targeting the relationship between this particular interaction with animals and pictorial concepts. 2   For descriptions of falcons’ specific physical qualities and behaviour, within the recently very popular field so called “nature-writing” see: Helen Macdonald, Falke. Biographie eines Räubers, Munich 2017, pp. 21–49 (English 2014); and as a classic in this genre: John Alec Baker, The Peregrine, New York 2005 (1967). 3   For a concentrated introduction into the topic, see: Yannis Hadjinicolaou, “Macht wie die des Königs. Zur politischen Ikonographie der Falknerei”, in: Hunting without Weapons. On the Pursuit of Images, ed. Maurice Saß, Berlin and Boston 2017, pp. 87–106.

Ex plor ing Pictor i a l Space w ith Fa lcons

2 

 Aegidius Sadeler after Hans Bol, Summer, from a series The Four Seasons, 1580, engraving, 21.5 × 29.8 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

Topical configur ations In the iconography of cosmological order, raptors and falconry appear at significant points of interface between the micro and macro cosmos, between the larger world and the nature of man. These include figures inhabiting topical systems that had persisted through and since the Middle Ages. Among these fundamental patterns of understanding man’s conditions and place in the world, we find the annual cycle of seasons, the ages of human life, the four elements – fire, water, earth and air – as well as the five senses – seeing, hearing, smell, taste and touch. Since the second half of the 16th century, the hitherto multifarious pictorial representations of these categories have been transformed into a more and more standardised iconography. This process was advanced by new media and forms of distribution, above all via prints and series of prints – an increasingly important medium in the fine arts, in many fields of knowledge and collecting. In the imagery of the four seasons the hawk, and falconry motifs, crop up in pictures of spring and summer. In an engraving printed in 1580 by Aegidius Sadeler after Hans Bol, for instance, the female allegory of summer is sitting on a haystack,

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surrounded by an expansive Weltlandschaft (fig. 2). In this landscape, farmers are harvesting hay and shearing sheep, bathers are in a river and, among the seasonal work and leisure activities, a mixed hunting party, including falconers, ranges the middle ground at the right. A hawk on a mounted falconer’s fist, plus falcons engaged in aerial combat with herons above the trees, bind these polyphonic goings-on to the Earth and the cyclical course of the year, represented by the zodiac signs for June, July and August in the sky. Sometimes in combination with its seasonal attribution to spring or summer, falconry also became a standard motif for the age of youth, often involving erotic connotations.4 Iconographic formulae of this combination, coined during the 16th century, often echoed medieval motifs. One of these is the encounter of The Three Living and the Three Dead; 5 another the many versions of young couples, often on horseback, with hawks serving as a metaphor for love as a struggle between passion and virtue, seduction and its mastery.6 One impressive example is a woodcut from 1558 by an artist using the monogram AI, showing the Wheel of Life (fig. 3). On this wheel a young man, at left with a hawk on his fist, is an allegory for youth. The figures for all four phases of life bear wings on their feet as symbols of the inexorably swift passage of time. Upon the axis of the large wheel stands the similarly winged, and thus omnipresent, Death, lording at least temporarily over the earthly world. His attention and his readied spear are focused wholly on the young falconer, the only figure in the print whose eyes address the viewer. The text states that the youth – like the hawk – presses through life, with particular haste, on a permanent quest for happiness and pleasure. However, the print’s depiction of death targeting the youth, of all figures, points to more than simply a 4   As for instance in a personification of the season as a young man, carrying a hawk on his fist in a landscape with hunting scene and musicians in: Gerhard P. Groening(?), Summer, ca. 1572, etching; or as an allegory of spring in: Philips Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck, Spring, from a series of the Four Seasons, 1563, engraving. Here we see a juvenile with bow and arrow in his right hand holding his hooded hawk on his left, with a background of scenes combining agricultural work and a ceremonial meal, both with erotic references. The erotic connotations in such a constellation are most plainly articulated in: Adriaen Collaert after Maerten de Vos, Adolescence under the influence of Venus, 1581, engraving. Here the still-hooded hawk on the young man’s fist echoes the pair of doves in the hand of the goddess above him, but soon he will be stirred up by Amor who is coming into the scene with an arrow, ready to be shot and to arouse the desires of love. 5   The Three Living are always explicitly young noblemen (and women) and in many versions at least one of them carries a hawk. With a specific emphasis on the three young men as falconers, confronted by the dead while their birds are in the air, see: Libro de Horas Carlos V, ca. 1501–1600?, pp. 222–223 (Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España). 6   See for example: Master of the Housebook, A pair of Lovers seen from Behind, ca. 1485–1500, silverpoint and grey ink on paper (Leipzig, Museum der bildenden Künste); Circle of Hans Traut, Falconer and Lady with a Little Owl, 1504, pen and ink, watercolour and body colour on paper (Hamburg, Hamburger Kunsthalle).

Ex plor ing Pictor i a l Space w ith Fa lcons

3

monogrammist ai after cornelis anthonisz., The Wheel of Life, 1558, woodcut with hand colouring and letterpress, 53.2 × 35.7 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

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4 

 Jan Brueghel the Elder (with Hendrick van Balen?), Air, 1611, oil on copper, 46 × 83 cm, Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts.

moral critique of this behaviour. The vertical logic of the image hints that it is indeed the alliance of man and bird that poses a threat to death’s perceived sovereignty over all earthly life.7 In the iconography of the four elements, the element of Air is represented by several motif versions of hawks and their handling. In paintings by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Hendrick van Balen we find them among many other birds in an extensive landscape dominated by a more or less nude female allegory (fig. 4). Together they stand for this element as a specific habitat, populated by a considerably large and manifold part of God’s creation. In some of these images, the hawk plays a dual role: it is part of the presented panoply of collected specimens and it acts as an animal agent within the painting, supervising the whole scenery and directing our curiosity in enjoying the rich diversity of natural phenomena as well as the sensual qualities of the painting.8

7 

 The inscription comments on the figure of youth: “Ansiet, voe die wellustighe Juecht (die niet dan genuecht / en vroude soect) gelück een Valck / seer snell en haestlick / eermen toe siet / passiert en wech vliecht.” 8   In several versions of the topic Brueghel (and van Balen) repeated this double presence of falcons or hawks within the scenery, as for instance: Jan Brueghel the Elder and Hendrick van Balen, Air (or optics), 1621, oil on copper (Musée du Louvre, Paris); Jan Brueghel the Elder, Allegory of Air, 1611, oil on panel (Galleria Doria Pamphili, Rome).

Ex plor ing Pictor i a l Space w ith Fa lcons

5 

 Jan van de Velde after Willem Pietersz. Buytewech, Air, from a series The Four Elements, 1603–1641, etching and engraving, 18.6 × 28.4 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

Beside this iconography of air, some printed series attribute falconry motifs to a male personification of the element.9 Amongst these are engravings after Hendrick Goltzius, Jacob de Gheyn (II) or Nicholas Jansz. Clock.10 In these prints the emphasis lies on a correspondence between the air and certain highly ambivalent mental characteristics, for instance eagerness, ambitiousness and insatiability. In some kind of semantic inversion, the tamed raptor here has its counterpart in the untamed passions and wishes of man. This facet echoes motifs of falconry from around 1600 symbolising erotic desires as a source of restless activity and can also be found in iconographies denoting the sanguine type of temperament and the children of the planet Jupiter.11 9 

 Based on Aristotelian philosophy, a gender differentiation between the four elements was quite common. This distinguished between the more active elements of Fire and Air, qualified as male forces and principles in nature, and the more passive elements of water and earth, understood as female. See Gernot Böhme and Hartmut Böhme, Feuer, Wassser, Erde, Luft. Eine Kulturgeschichte der Elemente, Munich 1996, pp. 26–89. 10   Johann Theodor and Johann Israel de Bry after Hendrick Goltzius, Air from a series of the Four Elements, ca. 1590–1600, engraving; Zacharias Dolendo after Jacob de Gheyn (II), The Element of Air, from a series of the Four Elements, 1595–97, engraving; Nicholas Jansz. Clock, Air, from a series of the Four Elements, 1597, engraving. 11   See for instance: Master of the House-Book, Jupiter and his Children, in: Wolfegger Hausbuch, ca. 1470, fol. 12r.

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A third version of allegorical images of the element air which include falconry as a motif is to be found in a series engraved by Jan van de Velde after Willem Buytewech, printed in the first decades of the 17th century (fig. 5). A group of falconers crowds around a coach that has stopped just before some border markings along a wide road. A densely detailed landscape unfolds behind them. Meadows, shrubbery and the occasional copse of trees alternate towards a distant horizon. The scenery is decidedly unspectacular; the peaceful atmosphere is disturbed neither by the conversations arising here and there nor by the unattended dogs that have retrieved items of quarry and are now reclining by the group. A distant struggle between falcons and heron, high above the meadows, seems to be drawing attention; men and dogs alike react to this aerial battle with visible excitement. However, the group in the foreground reacts to this event, if at all, with the utmost composure. Among this group are several trained hawks, all hooded. Some of the birds are perched on a cadge, whilst one sits with a slightly tilted head upon the hand of a falconer, who appears fully immersed in thought. This image presents two distinct angles on the significance of hawks and falconry. In the distance we see the bird as hunter, in action; its superior mastery of the air reflects an increased vita activa in an aggressive form. The focus of the image, however, lies in the foreground, upon the travelling community of man and beast enjoying a peaceful respite. This emphatically contemplative moment is elaborated by the text beneath the image, reminding the viewer that living souls strive back into the air, since the element is not only the natural sphere of the winged creatures, but the origin of all living beings.12 Together with the natural-philosophical concept of pneuma, or ‘breath of life,’ a philosophical and literary tradition is here intimated; one which can be traced back to Arabic writers, Frederick II’s falconry book or Dante’s Divina Commedia.13 This tradition held falconry not least as a form of spiritual journey and self-transformation on the part of man; and this dimension allowed the domestication and training of hawks to be acclaimed as a philosophy and imparting of wisdom. In van de Velde’s etching, this philosophical horizon determines a landscape genre scene. The practice of falconry here signifies two different modes of being, and the dense aesthetic atmosphere of the scene bridges the immense distance between these poles. A further facet of a conventional symbolism applied to hawks is to be found in allegories of the five senses, an aspect of human condition which correlates directly to the cognitive capacities of man as well as to aesthetic experience and emotions. One of the earliest and most influential series of images on this theme was designed by Cornelis 12 

 The inscription says: “Aer jam sequitur, animæ vitalis origio / Quo sin nil vivit quiquit in orbe datur. / Mobilis assiduo fæcundat semine terram, / Hic regnantque Noti, Penniguerique greges.” 13   See Daniela Boccassini, Il volo della mente. Falconeria e Sofia nel mondo mediterraneo, Ravenna 2003.

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6 

 Frans Floris after Cornelis Cort, Touch, from a series of The Five Senses, 1561, engraving, 20.8 × 27 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

Cort and engraved by Frans Floris in 1561. All five senses are represented by female allegories with animals as attributes.14 In Visus, or sight, the figure’s face – borrowing from the iconography of Prudentia, the personification of the cardinal virtue of prudence – contemplates its reflection in a mirror while accompanied by an eagle to her right.15

14 

 Since initial studies on the iconography of the five senses, this series has garnered specific attention, as for instance in: Hans Kauffmann, “Die Fünfsinne in der niederländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts”, in: Kunstgeschichtliche Studien Dagobert Frey zum 23. April 1943, ed. Hans Tintelnot, Breslau 1943, pp. 133–157; Carl Nordenfalk, “The Five Senses in Flemish Art before 1600”, in: Netherlandish Mannerism, ed. Görel Cavalli Björkman, Stockholm 1985, pp. 135–154; further: Exhib. Cat. Los Cinco Sentidos y el Arte, Madrid 1997, pp. 108–111; recently with further hints at the reception of this series: Exhib. Cat. Hieronymus Cock. The Renaissance in Print, ed. Joris van Grieken, Ger Luijten, Jan van der Stock, New Haven and London 2013, pp. 174–177. 15   The eagle became one of the standard attributes of the sense of sight, which refers to the unique ability of these species to look into the sun as it is reported among others by Aristotle (Historia animalium IX.34). In most versions of allegories of sight an eagle is the only bird to sit beside the female figure, often rendered in a mere heraldic mode and without interacting with other elements of the scenery. An exception in this is: Nicolaes de Bruyn after Maerten de Vos, Visus, from a series of the Five Senses, ca. 1581,

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A direct reference to falconry, however, can be found in the image representing the sense of touch (fig. 6). Here, the female figure’s bare fist carries a small hawk that seems to be biting her unprotected hand. This bite and the feeling of pain it provokes dominate the impact of this allegory. The spider and its web, to indicate the instinctive impulse critical to many skills, as well as the turtle with its natural protection against violent, physical impact, are drowned out by the acute perception of pain. In no other print of the series does the sensory experience unleash emotions as strong as those in the sense of touch. There is another aspect that only this image reflects: the negative sensation of pain prompts the figure to extend her bird-bearing hand away from her body as if it had become estranged through the pain. The gap between her hand and her face, contorted in pain, lays bare the logical correlation of cause and effect while the figure in its totality unites both poles through the simultaneous presence of experience and expression. The spontaneous outpouring of emotion appears to be a component of a quasi-dialogical relationship between the allegorical figure, her sensation and the hawk. Moreover, her raised right hand with its gesturing index finger even suggests that she is speaking to the hawk. On the theme of manning and training the hawk, Frans Floris’ Tactus engraving comprises a peculiar constellation. None of the depictions of the other five senses exhibits the possibility of such a deep split between the individual and its sensation. Similarly, none of the other images captures such a strong discrepancy in the body of the allegorical figure while rendering the instantaneous union of sensation and articulation. The included inscription gives further indication of Floris’ idiosyncratic formulation of the theme. All inscriptions in the series provide a short commentary on the particular sense from an anatomical perspective. This briefly notes which external organ bears responsibility for the sense in question and mentions how the sensory stimulus is transmitted. With all other senses, the inscriptions combine selective focus on one specific organ with the fundamental dichotomy of the external and internal as well as the necessary transmission of sensory impressions to the cognitive centres of the brain. In this respect, the sense of touch is an exceptional case. The text at the lower margin of its print reads: “The sense organ of touch is spread throughout the body; which is thus also its instrument.”16 Research has indicated that the inscriptions in the cycle are borrowed from the 1538 text De anima et vita, published by Juan Luis Vives.17 The Spanish-born physician and humanist worked in Bruges, beginning in 1524. When his book On the Soul and engraving. Here the female allegory is escorted by the conventional eagle whilst, in front of her, a hawk sits on a branch. 16   Translation after: Exhib. Cat. Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, ed. Susan Dackerman, New Haven and London 2011, p. 390. 17   See Kauffmann (as in note 14), pp. 136–137; Nordenfalk 1985 (as in note 14), pp. 138–139.

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Life appeared – in the decade before Vesalius and his Fabrica, 1543 – the author championed a comprehensive reform of medical training. In this context Floris’ engravings, with their captions and combination of the pictorial language of allegory with a knowledge increasingly based on hands-on investigation, were presumably addressed to medical students and professionals.18 As far as I can see, the described constellation of the human body as a complex organ of sensual experience, emotion and articulation – unfolded here as an explicit interaction between the bird and the allegorical figure – was unique in printed series on this topic.19 Even so, these few observations on this early variation on the Tactus seem particularly significant in this context: the intense focus on a single, pointed sensation – the bite of a hawk and the subsequent pain – radiates through the expression and gestures of the allegorical figure in the pictorial space. In this remarkable series, most of the female figures are presented close to the beholder in rather informal postures, yet in no other image does the luxuriously costumed body seem as ostentatiously splayed out over the pictorial field as in the allegory of touch. Thus Tactus is the culmination of varying syntheses of a majestic figure in an act of sensation, which at the same time opens up an intimate introspection and an intense communication with its environment. This aesthetic structure of the images evokes an analogy to one of the core ideas in Aristotle’s philosophy of the senses and human understanding: Even if touch was seen as a somehow lower sense than most of the other senses, and sight was taken as the most superior, the order of the five senses was nevertheless not understood as a simple hierarchy. The sense of touch embodied and realised relations to the environment, which are indispensable for every sensitive being. And even if sight is the noblest sense in terms of knowledge and science, the intellectual abilities of human beings had, for Aristotle, to be realised as a process of structural enhancement, which included the sense of touch as well.20

18 

 See Dackerman (as in note 16), p. 390. Even if the captions were added at the behest of the publisher, as has been argued, it is likely that Floris knew of Vives’ theories. See van Grieken, Luijten, van der Stock (as in note 14), p. 174. 19   In the rich tradition of allegorical cycles of the five senses, this emphasis and the particular activation of falconry seems to have ceased to continue. Although the hawk on the figure’s hand in images of Tactus was repeated continually in subsequent decades, it was rendered merely as an obligatory but passive attribute of a conventional iconography. See for instance in the above mentioned series: Nicolaes de Bruyn after Maerten de Vos, Tactus, from a series of the Five Senses, ca. 1581, engraving; Adriaen Collaert after Maerten de Vos, Tactus, from a series of the Five Senses, 1575, engraving and etching. 20   See Aristotle, De anima, II.5–III.2, III.12; Metaphysica, I.1; Otfried Höffe, Aristoteles, Munich 1996, pp. 41–44 and pp. 133–139.

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Body surface and presence Avium vivae eicones, the series of etchings by Adriaen Collaert printed in Antwerp around 1600, can be seen as a caesura in the early modern depiction of birds (fig. 7).21 The bodies of the animals in the horizontally formatted prints are not understood to be more or less strictly isolated objects; rather, each is set in the narrow foreground of a largely rambling landscape. In this respect, Collaert’s prints seem to have been inspiring for artists far beyond European traditions, as for instance Persian painters and illuminators.22 In relation to the landscape, the birds’ bodies are shown as unrealistically large and often alternate between standard, generalised depictions of birds and portrait-like renderings of an individual. In this presentation they at once become the object of our observation whilst also acting themselves as surrogate observers within the image. This certainly does not apply only to the raptors among the roughly 60 different sorts of birds shown, but it is specifically emphasised in their relatively large, erectly postured bodies. The series shows an additional novelty, at least in terms of the presentation of animals in printmaking. On page after page, the surface structures and tonal values as well as the incidence of light and its play on the plumage of the protagonists are meticulously and discriminatingly rendered. The naturalist Anselmus de Bodt was inspired by this suggestive quality of Collaert’s prints, not only to copy some of them painstakingly, but to retranslate the black and white image into a full colour appearance of the specimen (fig. 8).23 Within the prints it sometimes seems as if the engraving were showcasing its repertoire of articulative possibilities – its broad diversity, its contrastive emphasis – on the birds’ plumage while the same means yield the background landscapes in a tonally subdued interplay of detail. This increased attention towards sensually perceptible surface qualities was part of an interest in natural history, but was also taken up in the fine arts and its theoretical self-reflection. One example is an engraving by

21 

  About this series in the context of other animal series by Adrian Collaert, Dackerman (as in note 16), pp. 208–215. 22   Axel Langer, “Europäische Einflüsse in der persischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts: Von schönen Europäern, nackten Frauen und Pariser Uhren”, in: Exhib. Cat. Sehnsucht Persien. Austausch und Rezeption in der Kunst Persiens und Europas im 17. Jahrhundert & Gegenwartskunst aus Teheran, ed. Axel Langer, Zurich 2013, pp. 170–237 and pp. 232–233. 23   This sheet is part of the 12 albums drawn and collected by Anselmus de Bodt in cooperation with Elias Verhulst, at the behest of Emperor Rudolph II, around 1600 in Prague. About these albums: The Albums of Anselmus de Bodt (1550–1632). Natural History Painting at the Court of Rudolph II in Prague, ed. Marie-Christiane Maselis, Arnout Balis, Roger H. Marijnissen, Bibermühle 1999.

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7 

 Adriaen Collaert, Falco, print no. 24 from the series: Avium Vivae, 1598–1618, engraving, 13 × 19 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

8 

 Anselmus Boëtius de Boodt/Elias Verhulst, Gyrfalcon, 1595–1610, brush and watercolor, 17 × 19.5 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

Nicholas de Bruyn printed in 1605, also in Antwerp (fig. 9).24 A large arrangement of various flowers is flanked by a parrot and a small falcon, presumably a kestrel. The print makes unmistakable reference to the floral still lifes that Jacob de Gheyn, Roelant Savery, Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder and Jan Brueghel the Elder were establishing as an independent genre of panel painting right about that time.25 The 24   The print by de Bruyn after Jacob Savery (I) is an early example of the adaptation of flower bouquets from painting in large-scale intaglio prints. The combination with birds is maybe an invention here, transferred later into painting again as for instance in: Roelant Savery, Large Flower Still Life with Crown Imperial, 1624, oil on panel (Utrecht, Centraal Museum). 25   See Klaus Ertz, “Blumenstillleben”, in: Exhib. Cat. Das Flämische Stillleben 1550–1680, ed. Wilfried Seipel, Lingen 2002, pp. 278–319; Paul Taylor, Dutch Flower Painting 1600–1720, New Haven and London, 1995.

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9   Nicolaes de Bruyn, after Jacob Savery (I), Flower Still Life, ca. 1605, engraving, 58.5 × 40.1 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

art-theoretical implications of these painted floral arrangements have been frequently expounded.26 Referring to sources from antiquity such as Pliny and to the art of poetry, these images formulated painting’s ambition to render, in virtuosic mimesis, the world’s 26 

 Victor Stoichita, Das selbstbewußte Bild. Über den Ursprung der Metamalerei, Munich 1998, pp.  149–157; and further: Justus Müller-Hofstede, “‘Non Saturatur Oculus Visu’. Zur Allegorie des Gesichts von Peter Paul Rubens und Jan Brueghel d. Ä.“, in: Wort und Bild in der niederländischen Kunst und Literatur des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts, ed. Hans Vekeman and Justus Müller-Hofstede, Erftstadt 1984, pp. 243–289.

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astonishing variety of flowers and thus simultaneously to convey their diversity and singularities in a harmonic composition. In the engraving by de Bruyn, printmaking is now employing technical finesse to compete with the diversity of natural phenomena as well as with painting. With supposedly simple means it depicts – with profound effect – forms, surface textures and gradients of brightness and shades of colour while seeking adequate equivalents for all these attributes in its black lineatures on white paper. The aforementioned claim to a harmonic unity through diversity is delivered in the bouquet by the overt return to distinct individual forms and the tonal inclusion of colour and brightness values. The print renders variety and diversity as a continuous fabric of elements whose physical, intrinsic value is subdued as the individual contours become more or less a function of the entire intricately structured and dynamic surface. The body of the vase and, above all, the birds lie in contrast to this tendency. They are depicted as clearly defined volumes that stand distinctly apart from the background. The artefacts, along with the birds, appear as individual things and beings in pronounced contrast to the all over of the flowers. Individual forms and contours thus contest one another, while the lineature of the print draws precise distinctions between the smooth hardness of the vase – with its sculptural décor – and the birds’ plumage. Especially in this segment of the image, the engraver’s burin demonstratively expands its graphical vocabulary by subtly combining the repetition of light effects with the visual interpretation of tactile qualities. This game of contrastive juxtapositioning culminates in a duel of stares between the falcon and the figure of a harpy, forming part of the flower vase, facing it. Here, in the shadow of the harmonic composition of flowers, the raptor wields its penetrating gaze to steadfastly examine the demonic hybrid of woman and bird. In the heightened confrontation between light and dark, hatching on a paper background creates a vibrant self-illumination that can only be manifested through engraving. In no way does this sensually charged, suggestive, presence appear to have been exclusively part of art theoretical reflection or a paragone of media. By the early 16th century, parrots had become beloved pets within courtly circles in Portugal and the Southern Netherlands; 27 and in terms of falconry – as a precondition for spectacular hawking expeditions – close contact with hawks in the home was an indispensable aspect of their manning and training for centuries. 27   See Annemarie Jordan Gschwend, ”Beloved Companions, Mascots and Pets. The Culture of Wild Animals in Renaissance Portugal”, in: Exhib. Cat. Echt tierisch! Die Menagerie des Fürsten, ed. Sabine Haag, Vienna 2015, pp. 18–23. Other semantics of parrots are most likely implied here as well. The bird was appreciated for the brilliant colours of its feathers and for its mimetic abilities in imitating human language. In the painted cycle of the Five Senses by Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder (1617) a remarkably colourful parrot sits on a large Madonna in a wreath of flowers in the panel of Visus, and a cockatoo as well as different kinds of Aras accompany the allegory of Auditus.

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This confraternity of human and hawk is repeatedly described in treatises and manuals about falconry. They contain, for instance, precise instructions on how to nourish the raptors, to recognise and respond to signs of discomfort and on when and how hawks should be bathed. The time-consuming manning rituals, through which hawks come to accept the company of man, are pivotal moments in the training process. Methods alternate between strict grooming based on desire and reward, meticulous general care and flirtatiously approaching the hawk in a courtly manner. Passages in a rather late guide, written by John Ray and printed in 1678 as part of Francis Willoughby’s influential Ornithology, read: He [the falconer] must remember every day to weather his Hawk in the Evening; excepting such days wherein she hath bathed; after which in the Evening she should be put in a warm room, on a Pearch with a candle burning by her, where she must sit unhooded if she be gentle, to the end she may trick her self, and rejoyce by enoiling after the water, before she fly again.28 And a few paragraphs later Ray writes: Late at Even let her seeling thread a little loose, spouting water in her face, that she may jeouk the less, and watching her all night hold her upon your fist unhooded. But if she see any thing she mislikes, and makes shew of being afraid, carry her into some dark place, where you have no more light but to hood her again. Afterwards give her some beaching of good meat; and watch her divers nights together till she be reclaimed, and jeouk upon the fist by day.29 It seems these moments, too, were evidently formative in terms of imagery. Probably the first known still life with reference to falconry was painted in Antwerp by Clara Peeters in 1611 (fig. 10, plate XI).30 Around 1600 hunting and hawking were cultivated with a specific enthusiasm at the court of the Archdukes Albert and Isabel Clara Eugenia in Brussels. The infanta was especially fond of hawking and in 1613 a new law was introduced proclaiming the exclusive right of the nobility to hunt “de poil avec poil et de plume avec plume”, which means taking ground game with hounds and birds with hawks.31 In the barely defined and rather dark interior space of Peeters’ painting, a

28   John Ray, “A Summary of Falconry”, in: Francis Willoughby, Ornithology, London 1678, pp. 397– 441, p. 400. 29   Ray (as in note 28), p. 401. 30   About this painting see: Exhib. Cat. The Art of Clara Peeters, ed. Alejandro Vergara, Madrid 2016, pp. 92–95. 31   This is reflected also in several paintings by Jan Brueghel the Elder, showing the Archducal court on hawking excursions. Alejandro Vergara, “Reflections of Art and Culture in the Paintings of Clara Peeters”, in: Vergara (as in note 30), p. 38.

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10 

 Clara Peeters, Still Life with Sparrowhawk, Fowl, Porcelain and Shells, 1611, oil on panel, 52 × 71 cm, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado.

delicate sparrowhawk – the only living being in the painting – is perched above a heterogeneous assemblage of goods. A rich quarry of wild birds is spread about the tabletop, highlighting the diversity of the game. The quarries’ plumage consumes well over half of the painted object’s visible surface. We mostly see the tectrices of the birds with their characteristic markings and brilliant colours as if the bodies were indeed still unscathed. This impression, however, is defied by the two plucked young pigeons on their bright red plate at the centre of the image. This flickering panoply of forms, colours and tactile stimuli is counterbalanced by the rather neatly stacked porcelain at right. The clearly delineated concentric bowls and plates fit together perfectly with one another; light-dark and tonal values reach a subtle balance within the shades of chromatic grey. Precisely here, in this restrained presentation, the painting impressively renders an equivalence of the combination of fragile delicacy through light and colour effects that made such vessels from East Asia so coveted in Europe. Both tonal registers – the highly contrastive diversity of outlines and colour accents as well as the regular forms and well-tempered smoothness of the porcelain – are echoed in the several sea snails at the lower right. These sought-after collector’s items epitomise the manifold references between nature and art and underscore the

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overlapping of two spheres in the situation. Thus, before us we see a kitchen scene centred on food and we participate in an explicitly aesthetic situation, designed to appeal to the refined senses and pleasures of knowledgeable connoisseurs. The hawk is at once hunter and exhibition piece, agent and object of these dual interests and desires. This biformity and the living bird’s remarkable, steadfast glance provide an alter ego for the beholder – in an extremely dense space in which each visual perception tends to transition into the sensation of direct touch. In at least three other paintings of comparable situations, made by Clara Peeters or followers, the raptor’s physical presence was forced in an almost ostentatious manner.32 The even greater emphasis on the falcon also underlines the moment of an inescapable ambivalence: it is at once the multi-sensorially charged object of the painting and a non-human actor within the image. – When falconry first became an element in still life painting around the start of the 17th century, this biformity and its demonstrative presence appears to have become almost typified; this is in stark contrast to images from later decades – perhaps those by Willem van der Aelst or Cornelis Gijsbrechts – in which falconry furniture replaces hawks and falconers. 33 These observations evoke further questions of a more theoretical nature. One question might pursue how this shift relates to the fundamental restructuring of the concepts of representation, as has been described by Louis Marin for the image of the king in 17th century France and by Michel Foucault in terms of Velazquez’ Las Meninas.34 However, as a final point here, I would like to ask in which way this close proximity, presence and touch may have been linked to a significant expanse of space in pictorial landscapes and the ways of seeing implied here?

32   These are: Clara Peeters, Still life with a Peregrine Falcon and its Prey, ca. 1612–21, Antwerp, Private Collection; Clara Peeters, Still life with Game, ca. 1612–21, Tallin, Art Museum of Estonia; Nicolaes Cave, Still life with a Peregrine Falcon and its Prey, ca. 1625, location unknown. About these paintings see: Vergara (as in note 30), pp. 88–91. It has been assumed that four of these paintings with almost the same measures were intended as a series of the four elements. Seipel (as in note 25), pp. 202–203. 33   As for instance the virtuoso arrangements of hawking equipment on wooden panels: Cornelis Gijsbrechts, Trompe-l’oeil with attributes of Falconry, ca. 1671, oil on canvas (Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst), and by the same painter: Trompe-l’oeil with equipment of falconry and a blue curtain, 1672, oil on canvas, (Copenhagen, De Danske Kongers Kronologiske Samling Rosenborg Slot); or as one of the most brilliant pieces of his many versions of still lifes with attributes of falconry: Willem van Aelst, Game still life, ca. 1665, oil on canvas (Houston, Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation). For this still life tradition and its context see: Hadjinicolaou (as in note 3), pp. 100–105. 34   At the centre of their analysis of absolutism and “classical representation” both authors put strategies of dispersion and a structural invisibility of crucial agents in representational practice. Louis Marin, Das Porträt des Königs, Berlin 2005, pp. 333–346 (French 1981) and Michel Foucault, Die Ordnung der Dinge, Frankfurt am Main 1993, pp. 31–41 (French 1966).

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11 

 Lucas and Johannes van Doetechum after Pieter Bruegel, The Crafty Bird-Catcher, ca. 1555–1557, etching and engraving, 35 × 45.7 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

The long view and fields of sensation Falconry and birds in flight are repeatedly employed as elements of aesthetic involvement in especially expansive landscapes. Certainly the most well-known example of such a scene is the Crafty Bird-Catcher from around 1555 after Pieter Bruegel, in which the title figure is unmistakably toiling in the practice of falconry (fig. 11).35 In his marginal position in the far-right corner of the foreground, this figure – and the hawks on the cadge – together with the birds flying high above, opens up the vast pictorial space. The man on the ground with his trained falcons echoes and is echoed by the pair of birds in flight. His posture is stooped and his attention is fixed on the single falcon on his fist – so the expansive landscape unfolds behind him. The rugged yet inhabited valley falls in the view of the beholder alone, while the birds on high embody this

35 

 The print by Johannes and Lucas van Doetechum after Bruegel was published as one of the twelve so called Large Landscapes by Hieronymus Cock in Antwerp. All of these landscapes experiment with the evocation of extremely expanded pictorial spaces opened up by a more or less fragmented foreground’s modest narration.

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12   Anonymous, after Hans Bol, View of a Village with Falconers, 1562–1570, etching, 22.5 × 32.2 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

expansion of the realm of perception by freeing our gaze figuratively from its bond to the human figure. Crucial to this at once visual and imagined movement is the dual presence of birds: in the immediate company of the man on the ground as well as in the air. This sort of expansion of the pictorial space was repeatedly varied, such as in an etching by Hans Bol, printed in 1565 (fig. 12). The terrain of the foreground more or less centres on a couple on horseback with a hawk, whose momentum seems to be countered by two birds high in the air in front of them.36 In all their stylistic differences, these prints vary their themes of falconry and birds in flight as poetological treatments. They instigate the split roles of agency for the viewer, the falconer and the birds while our vision activates all three as possible subjects of movement and perception – which makes for a polyphonic and multi-dimensional experience of the pictorial space. In painting, as well, this process – of expanding the pictorial space via themes of falconry – was occasionally adapted and transformed. In his Fish Market by a River of 1605, Jan Brueghel the Elder depicts, in his painting’s central vertical axis, a falcon in 36 

 A further example for a comparable use of falconers in the composition of a landscape comes also from the publishing house Au quatre vents run by Hieronymus Cock in Antwerp: Anon., Landscape with Riders Falconers, 1570–80, engraving.

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13   Jan Brueghel the Elder, Fish Market by a River, 1605, oil on copper, 29.5 × 42 cm, Munich, Alte Pinakothek.

the air above a bustling market in the foreground of a vast Weltlandschaft (fig. 13, plate XII). In this case, the falcon lacks the counterpart of a falconer. Instead, the falcon orients itself with the most prominent group of figures in the centre of the foreground, where a brilliantly-lit little girl grips her caretaker’s index finger with her left hand while pointing to the shimmering market fish with her right. There is much gesticulation between the industrious fishwives and their customers; several hands are exchanging money and goods or are busy deboning or otherwise preparing fish to be cooked. As such, the expansive landscape is sandwiched between the airborne falcon and a scene again evoking the close quarters of a kitchen as an experiential realm of predominantly tactile sensations. To control the space as sovereign master of an extremely wide-ranging, inescapable, view is here tied to its counterpart of an involvement in the polyphonic interactions and perceptions of the lower senses. In the tension of this balance, the inherent drama and violence of natural aerial combat and killing remains latent. If it is indeed the case that such expansive landscapes were to unfold through, among other factors, the interplay of opposing implications of falconry, then it seems only logical that this highly complex concept of aesthetic space in painting could be deliberately collapsed or reversed.

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14   Simon de Vlieger, The Return of the Falconer, 1637, oil on panel, 71 × 95 cm, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

This seems to occur in Simon de Vlieger’s Return of the Falconer from 1637 (fig. 14, plate XIII). The painting negates any panoramic view and nearly all spatial extension while celebrating an exquisitely arranged myopia – almost the entire width of the image is consumed by the façade of an old building. A narrow vista to the left of the crumbling masonry highlights this barrier; while a large gateway seems to lead nowhere and to gradually fade into a dark vault. Behind the deeply shaded foreground, the image offers no throughways but for the well-trodden stairs leading up to the right. Various moments of narrative remain isolated islands in the painting, linked only by individual sight lines. There are no movements or plots designed to open up space, and this stillness is emphasised by the horse slowly drinking from the well and the somewhat contained melee of the scuffling dogs. The painting’s texture amplifies the deceleration of the scenery and compression of the pictorial space. The narrow colour spectrum was modulated in exceedingly fine tonal gradations; light and colour create transitions and resonances and evoke an atmospherically dense, and at once open, fabric. Definition by linear design has largely given way to an overwhelmingly supple relief effected by colour values. These moments culminate in the figure of the falconer. He stands at the window with the dark interior of the house behind him; his upper torso is framed by the window,

Ex plor ing Pictor i a l Space w ith Fa lcons

like the subject of a portrait, yet his face remains obscured. References between window opening and painting are affirmed in such details as the curtain and the shadowing at the spatial border between interior and exterior. As complement to this placement in the half-light of the interior space, the hawk sits perched on the man’s fist as he reaches out of the window. Although the trained hawk on his hand occupies exterior space, it is blocked from it by its hood, rendering it effectively, if temporarily, blind. In these repeated and alternating inclusions, framings and bonds, the falconer and the hawk become a figure of inverse correlation and encounterment through the exclusion of a considerable amount of the surrounding world. It seems, here, that the painting is invoking a new and with subtle irony falconry’s spiritually reflexive dimension. In doing so it is also experimenting with the picture surface not primarily as a location for optical projection, but rather as a field charged with sensory qualities to evoke experiences as aesthetic as they are contemplative.

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Monika Wagner

Leather and Feather: Material Interactions in the Art of Falconry

In 1832, Edwin Landseer, who was at the beginning of his successful career as an English animal and landscape painter, exhibited an unusual picture in the Royal Academy in London. Hawking in the Olden Time has a considerable size of more than 1.50 by almost 2 metres (fig. 1, plate XIV). The picture’s most prominent feature is a huge accumulation of feathered wings suspended in the air above a barren landscape with a hunting party in historical costumes. On closer inspection, the interwoven plumage turns out to be parts of two rather different birds, a falcon and a heron – the former attacking the latter. The bird under attack is clearly represented as a victim. Similar to numerous depictions of trophies in 17th century hunting still-lifes, for instance, in the ones by Willem van Aelst or Abraham Mignon,1 the quarry appears upside down. The heron’s left wing has its feathers spread out like a fan, whereas the right wing is partly folded. This slightly asymmetrical feature indicates the desperate movement and shows the complex system of the feathers. Similar to the dead birds in earlier still life paintings, the artist’s bravura is exercised in all sorts of different feathers with their delicate hues and varied textures. In Landseer’s painting the heron’s thin legs pedal helplessly, high up in the air, while its enormous wings with their overlapping flight feathers point downwards to the barren ground. The heron’s head and long, twisted neck turn upwards, while the falcon, sinks her2 claws and beak into the victim. Some of the heron’s flight feathers, with their wonderful graduations of grey, black and white, are already in disorder and stand out individually against the dramatically darkened sky. In contrast to the sinking form of the heron, the falcon’s strong flapping wings with their ornamented

1 

 Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, Die Geschichte des Stilllebens, Munich 1998, pp. 157–163; Exhib. Cat. Die Magie der Dinge. Stilllebenmalerei 1500–1800, ed. Jochen Sander, Städel-Museum, Frankfurt am Main 2008, pp. 215–231. 2   Only female falcons, which are larger than the males, would generally be trained for heron hawking.

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1   Edwin Henry Landseer, Hawking in the Olden Time, 1832, oil on canvas, 152.5 × 183 cm, London, Kenwood House, The Iveagh Bequest.

brownish feathers are directed upward and seem to keep the whole constellation of hunter and hunted in suspense. Landseer was inspired by 17th century animal pictures, in which the contest between predator and prey was often depicted, most prominently in Netherlandish and Flemish paintings, for example in works by Melchior d’Hondecoeter, Frans Snyders or Jan Fyt. In Hawking in the Olden Time some of the features, like the upside down heron with its paddling legs, are similar to those in Boel’s etchings dating around 1657 (fig. 2), which sometimes imply political connotations. However, unlike the 17th century etcher, Landseer does not represent a natural spectacle in which a wild hawk attacks her target. It also differs from later representations of birds fighting in the air such as Adolph Menzel’s dramatic target painting of a falcon attacking a white dove, 3 a fight 3   Adolph Menzel, Falcon attacking a pigeon, oil on paper concealed on wood, 102.7 × 119 cm, Alte National­galerie, Berlin.

Leather a nd Feather : M ater i a l Inter actions in the A rt of Fa lconry

2 

 Peter Boel, Falcons attacking a Heron, around 1657, etching, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

3   Detail Edwin Henry Landseer, Hawking in the Olden Time, 1832, oil on canvas, 152.5 × 183 cm, London, Kenwood House, The Iveagh Bequest.

in which the shooter could partake with his rifle. Different from these, Landseer’s lofty fight does not occur in the wild. Neither is it about the “immutable application of natural law” which implies the survival of the fittest, as has been suggested by Richard Ormond.4 In fact, the falcon’s attack is staged as part of the high art of falconry. Apart from the hawking party at some distance, the thin red jess hanging down parallel to the falcon’s dark tail feathers is most significant in this context (fig. 3, detail). The red line originates at the falcon’s leg, where a golden bell becomes visible between her firm brown tail feathers and the heron’s black, white and grey plumage. In the picture, the flaming red colour of this leather strap marks the border between hunter and hunted and, above all, indicates that the hunting bird is understood to be acting in conjuction with her owner depicted in the background. The fight between falcon and heron was emblematic, sometimes denoting that the conqueror can be conquered by art and courage.5

4 

 Exhib. Cat. Sir Edwin Landseer, ed. Richard Ormond, Philadelphia Museum of Art and Tate Gallery London 1981, p. 118. 5   Joachim Camerarius (1596) in: Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Schöne, Emblemata. Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts, Stuttgart and Weimar 1996, column 785; Heinz Peters, “Falke, Falkenjagd …” in RDK, Vol. 6, Munich 1973, col. 1251–1366.

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4   Yves Klein, Leap into the void, 1960, documented by Harry Shunk, photomontage.

Potential of the feather To command the skies, to defy the laws of gravity and to fly like the birds has been one of mankind’s great dreams. That this dream is still effective in the age of space travel may be verified by Yves Klein’s legendary Leap Into the Void from 1960 (fig. 4). Harry Shunk’s photomontage shows the artist jumping out of a window while spreading out his arms like a bird spreads its wings. The picture became iconic,6 because instead of Yves Klein tumbling down on an asphalted street in Paris he is seen ascending into the bright sky above. For a long time feathers and wings were conceived to be necessary conditions for flying. From this point of view only birds and angels, beings which are distinguished by feathers, can fly.7 In an oft-quoted passage from Plato’s Phaidros Socrates states:

6 

 Shunk rotated the falling figure so that it ascended, see Jeannot Simmen, “Yves Klein”, in: Exhib. Cat. Schwerelos, Stuttgart 1991, pp. 184–185. 7   Images Take Flight. Feather Art in Mexico and Europe (1400–1700), ed. Alessandra Russo, Diana Fane and Gerhard Wolf, Munich 2015.

Leather a nd Feather : M ater i a l Inter actions in the A rt of Fa lconry

5 

 Anonymous,

The Ariel, coloured engraving, 1843.

“Feathers have the power to elevate weights and transport them to the abodes of the Gods, and have thus in some sort acquired a considerable portion of divine substance”.8 Following the tradition of the winged and feathered mediators between heaven and earth, attempts were made to construct flying machines based on movable, feathered wings. After the French success with the Montgolfière balloons in the 1780s the race for better dirigible airships intensified during the 19th century. Many scientists with different approaches and experiments were involved. However, it was in England where the physician and aerodynamicist George Cayley first refused all similarities between birds and the design of air-vessels.9 In his lifelong concern for flying Cayley had exactly calculated that movable wings and any featherlike elements would be unsuitable to elevate a human being into the air. Instead, Cayley’s flying constructions, like the one

8 

 Plato, Phaidros, IV, 246 d6–7; see also Thomas Macho, “Von Vögeln, Engeln und anderen Bewohnern der dritten Dimension”, in: Exhib. Cat. Luft, Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn 2003, pp. 331–342. 9   J. Laurence Pritchard, Sir George Cayley. The Inventor of the Aeroplane, London 1961.

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6 

 Ottomar Anschütz, Otto Lilienthal at the Fliegeberg, 1894, collodium print, Anklam, Otto Lilienthalmuseum.

featured in a print of 1848, were based on rigid supports (fig. 5). However, they met with considerable hostility. Neither the general public nor the experts trusted Cayley’s deviation from the firmly established iconography of bird- and angel-like flights with movable wings. Though Icarus and all his followers had failed, it was this very model of movable feathered wings conquering the air which dominated the imagination. In 1861, the sensational finding of the petrified Archaeopteryx, the first reptile with the feathers of a bird, was for some scientists an additional proof for the bird model with movable, feathered wings.10 10 years later, James Bell Pettigrew, in his Animal Locomotion […] and Aeronautics, warned against any “departure from nature” in particular by wings “which are not flexible and elastic, but rigid”. He regarded flight, the “poetry of motion”, as a “challenge to imitate the movements of the insect, the bat and the bird in the air”.11 The general atmosphere maintained the concept of moving wings, but favoured its improvement. Otto Lilienthal’s gliding constructions from the end of the 19th century demonstrate such refinements based on birds’ wings with their “wing-tip” fingers to manipulate air currents.12 Though Lilienthal perished 1896 in one of his gliding flights, the photos of his birdlike wings taken by several professional

10  11 

 Thor

Hanson, Feathers. The Evolution of a Natural Miracle, New York 2011, pp. 14–23. Bell Pettigrew, Animal Locomotion or Walking, Swimming and Flying, with a Dissertation on Aeronautics, Edinburgh 1873, p. 214 and p. 3. 12   Hanson (as in note 11), p. 145.  James

Leather a nd Feather : M ater i a l Inter actions in the A rt of Fa lconry

photographers, among them Ottomar Anschütz (fig. 6), contributed as much to his fame as his illustrated book Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation, published in 1889. Anschütz, who belongs to the pioneers of chronophotography, seems to have been of special importance for the popularity of Lilienthal’s winged constructions, since he was already well known for his photographic series of flying birds. Many of the bird motifs circulated on picture postcards, like the storks of 1884, with which the flying man accorded perfectly. In his Lectures on Greek and English Birds, published in 1881, the English art critic and writer John Ruskin, who wanted to have the sky reserved for birds only, accused the artists in general for having ”plucked the wings of birds, to make angels of men, and the claws from birds, to make devils of men”.13 Ruskin, who was familiar with Pettigrew’s Animal Motion […] and Aeronautics blamed the author for his poor understanding of birds’ flight and derided modern science which he considered as misguided as the artistic representation of winged angels. Both – science and the fine arts – were, in his eyes, competing against the uniqueness of birds and the freedom of their flight.

Promise of the lure However, in the context of falconry the simulation of a bird flying in the air by manufactured feather wings proved to be highly effective. For the falconer the so-called lure is a most important tool in training the falcon and adapting it – as far as possible – to human command. Giving the illusory appearance of a bird, the falconer’s lure was generally designed by means of white, natural feathers combined with leather. Its task was to coax the falcon to return to the falconer. For hundreds of years the concept, as well as the manufacture, of the lure remained basically the same – even in different empires and continents. Landseer‘s painting demonstrates the deployment of the lure at a critical moment. As the combat between falcon and heron reaches its climax, the falconer, on his white horse in the distance, swings the lure in the air, while a second falcon aims to join the aerial fray. However, she looks back to the falconer, who recalls the bird, in order to relinquish the hard work in taking and subduing the heron in favour of an easier meal on the lure. Landseer’s painting calls attention to the ambivalence of the lure as a tantaliser and an instrument of manning. 14

13   John Ruskin, Love’s Meinie. Lectures on Greek and English Birds, (1881), in: Library edition vol. 25, ed. E.T. Cook, Alexander Wedderburn, London 1906, p. 25. 14   Dustin Cleag Mosley, A Discourse of Hoodwinking: Falcons and Performativity in the Taming of the Shrew, https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsred ir=1&article=3104&context=all_theses (accessed November 12 2018).

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7 

 Frontispiece of Symon Latham’s Falconry, London 1615.

8   Lure, embroidery, feathers, around 1500, Vienna, Imperial Armory.

To ensure the process of training, the fabrication of an attractive lure was crucial. The 8th century AD Arab Book On Falconry (the Kitab dawari at-tayr)15, supposedly the oldest transmitted text, was written at the Caliph’s Court in Baghdad, then the centre of the Arabian Empire. From this, we learn that nothing motivates a falcon’s return to the falconer more than a white pigeon. Therefore “the falconer’s pouch (mihlat) should never lack the wing of a big white bird nor a live white pigeon […]. If the flying falcon turns away, he [the falconer] calls him back with the white-feathered wing (ganah). If the falcon’s attention still remains averted, a white pigeon should ascend on a leather string“.16 In 17th century England, advice on what constitutes a good lure was still very similar. In Symon Latham’s and Nicholas Cox’s treatises on falconry we find, among the necessary utensils, a feathered wing (fig. 7). The arrangement of instruments around the central image of the falcon in Latham’s book calls to mind the Arma Christi – as Yannis Hadjinicolaou has rightly pointed out.17 The impression of instruments of 15 

 Al Gitrif Qudama al-Gassani, Die Beizvögel (Kitab dawari at-tayr), Hildesheim, Zurich and New York 1988, p. 105 (translation M.W.) 16   Al Gitrif (as in note 15), p. 105 (translation: M.W.) 17   Yannis Hadjinicolaou, “Macht wie die des Königs: Zur politischen Ikonographie der Falknerei”, in: Hunting without Weapons, ed. Maurice Saß, Berlin 2017, pp. 87–106.

Leather a nd Feather : M ater i a l Inter actions in the A rt of Fa lconry

9 

 Cornelis Brisé (attributed to), Trompe-l’oeil with falconry tools, around 1650, oil on canvas, 78 × 63 cm, Aachen, Suermondt-Ludwig Museum.

torture is reinforced by the sharp and rigid graphic outlines of their representation, though they were – apart from the pincers and the bells – made from leather and feathers. An existing lure in the Viennese Imperial Armoury from around 1500 provides a vivid impression of a particularly elaborate example (fig. 8). It consists of a richly decorated leather horseshoe-shaped body in the centre with long white feathers on both sides. The lure line is attached to the top of the leather body so that when thrown into, and drawn through, the air with the feathers pointing to the rear, the lure simulates prey. In trompe l’oeil paintings of the 17th century similar feathered lures appear

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among further leather falconry furniture like the hood, the glove and the hawking bag. In a trompe l’oeil attributed to Amsterdam painter Cornelis Brisé, from the mid-17th century (fig. 9, plate XV), the different material qualities of falconry equipment, seemingly hung on a rough wooden board, are emphasised. However, these durable items, the soft feathers and the strong leather of the lure, as they are represented in the still life, provided only the framework. For successful training and practical use the lure had to be supplemented with fresh food. The afore-mentioned Arab treatise, later works such as Latham’s and others all strongly recommend that the lure was garnished with pieces of tender meat. In so doing the falcon, when it obediently returns to the falconer, will feel rewarded. Thus the lure, which combines feather, leather and meat, establishes a strong bond between hawk and falconer. Once again, it was the form of the wing in combination with the materiality of the vibrating and oscillating feathers, which was formative for the lure. It is doubtful whether the wing’s actual form is of any significance in attracting the falcon; rather the feathers and the movement in the air seem to be the decisive factors, which promise food. However, the coining force of the winged form created by a strong iconography of flying kept the lure in this shape.

Leather bonds and inter actions : glove, hood and jesses Beyond the indirect, but all the more intense, bonds tied by greed for food and mediated by feathered dummies thrown in the air, other – directly physical – bonds between hawk and falconer were made of leather. The attraction of the lure in the air operates over certain distances bridged by the falcon’s extremely sharp vision. By contrast, the bonds of leather are connected to touch and to closeness. In his painting Hawking in the Olden Time Landseer takes that into account. The picture contains a little manual for falconry furniture: besides the lure, the binding power of leather is brought to mind by the glove, hood and jesses. Leather, a product of animal origin, possesses a long cultural history and a broad range of utilisation. Up to the plastic age its flexibility combined with resilience was of high practical value. To name but a few purposes, shoes, boots, harnesses for protecting the skin, belts and straps, indeed everything that was suitable for tying something up, were made of leather. The properties of leather allow – if wanted – the continuous movements of a live body and they enable certain forms to be moulded as, for example, the cuirass shows. Depending on its specific origin and its processing, leather can be manufactured as hard as board or as soft as woven cloth. The characteristic large leather glove was the most important attribute identifying the falconer. There is hardly any visual representation of the art of falconry without it. In Landseer’s picture the lure-swinging falconer on the white horse, and another

Leather a nd Feather : M ater i a l Inter actions in the A rt of Fa lconry

man transporting falcons on a cadge, wear the glove. In other genres the glove is a prominent feature, sometimes presenting the trained hawk, as in portraits or hunting scenes.18 In still lifes and trompe l’oeils the single glove acts as a representative of the absent falconer. Even in zoological museums the taxidermic presentation of a hawk is often combined with the leather glove substituting the falconer (fig. 10). The glove has to be made of leather which is durable and tough but sufficiently dense to prevent injury to the hand from the hawk’s sharp claws. It effectively toughens the falconer’s hand, transforming it into a tool capable of interacting with the hawk. Where the glove is lacking, the hand is vulnerable, as Cornelis Cort shows in an engraving after Frans Floris (dating 1561). Here, the hawk on the bare hand, biting at the fingers of a female figure, serves as an allegory of touch (see fig. 6 in Robert Felfe’s contribution). For the trained hawk the glove is her take-off and landing site. Here she comes closest to the human. The iconographic convention of the hawk on the gloved fist is perfectly in line with the glove as an interface for a physical encounter as well as a general sign of conjunction.19 Gloves cover and protect the skin, but enable contact. However, in the case of the falconer’s glove the sensation of touch is greatly reduced by the tough leather. The interaction of falconer and the bird is determined by an inverse deprivation of senses: while the hood deprives the falcon of sight, the leather glove mostly prevents the falconer’s sensation of touch. As far as I can see, a wooden stick or a tree branch in the falconer’s hand could technically serve the same purpose. However, the form of the human hand recreated in the leather glove literally indicates the successful manipulation of the bird. In other words, the glove claims the closeness of touch and an almost intimate relationship between falconer and hawk. A further item in the falconer’s toolbox, the hood, was made of slightly softer leather.20 The hood was developed to calm falcons by depriving them, temporarily, of sight,21 their most active sense. Though there are differences in hoods’ design and style, their basic form is given by their function as a blindfold. The traditional western hood is constructed of three components, two symmetrical ones for covering the eyes and a centre piece with a beak opening. Braces open and close the hood to prevent the

18  19 

 For

a still valuable overview see Peters (as in note 5).

 Novina Göhlsdorf, “Immer in Beziehung. Der Handschuh”, in: Von Kopf bis Fuß. Bausteine zu einer

Kulturgeschichte der Kleidung, ed. Christine Kutschbach and Falko Schmieder, Berlin 2015, pp. 278–286. 20   In Japan hoods were made of pulp, if leather was rare. 21   It is assumed that Frederick II introduced hoods to Europe, as claimed in his famous book De Arte Venandi cum Avibus. The technique was practiced in the Arab and central Asian regions. See Emily AleevSnow, Un-Making Things. An Early Modern Falconry Hood: The Material Mediator, 2014. http://unmakingthings.rca.ac.uk/2014/an-early-modern-falconry-hoodthe-material-mediator/ (accessed September 3 2018). Previously hawks’ eyelids were stitched shut (“seeled”) on capture and in early training to calm them.

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10 

 Taxidermy of an Icelandic falcon, around 1750, Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Rüstkammer.

11 

 Cosmas Damian Asam, Young man with falcons, Oval Hall, detail from the ceiling, 1730, Fresco, Schloß Alteglofsheim.

falcon from removing the hood.22 The mouldable property of fine leather served for particularly valuable hoods, which could be adapted to suit an individual bird’s head. One existing example which has been handed down was manufactured for the Viennese Court in the second half of the 16th century (see fig. 8 in Hadjinicolaou’s paper). The hood, which was elaborately gilded and embossed, not only referred to the parade armour and helmet of the Habsburg monarchy, but the falcon herself became part of courtly regalia, especially when the coat of arms was emblazoned upon the hood. Not without wit does Cosmas Damian Asam’s ceiling painting in the Oval Hall of Schloß Alteglofsheim in Bavaria, dating from 1730, represent a whole regiment of falcons (fig. 11). In their colourfully tufted hoods and uniform brownish-white plumage, typical of the prized gyrfalcons, they appear as if in armour. Whilst one falcon – hardly visible – is high up in the air, attacking a white heron, the row of falcons blindfolded by their ostentatious leather hoods sit on the rim of the arched ceiling.23 As guardians

22   James West Nelson, Hoods, Hooding and Hoodmaking, Wyoming 2016, pp. 23–34. I am grateful to Yannis Hadjinicolaou who kindly provided me with the book. 23   Bärbel Hamacher and Ralph Paschke, “Fresken”, in: Cosmas Damian Asam 1686–1739, ed. Bruno Bushart and Berhard Rupprecht, Munich 1986, p. 247.

Leather a nd Feather : M ater i a l Inter actions in the A rt of Fa lconry

12   Edwin Henry Landseer, Hooded Falcon, oil on panel, 50.5 × 40.7 cm, private collection.

of the border between the two realms of heaven and earth, they seem to await their employment. With their backs towards the vault, they leave the bright blue sky, their very own domain, to Flora and her mythological companions who contribute to the Triumph of Apollo. More recent examples of hoods appear less magnificent. However, with their diverse colours and richly varied tassels and topknots – sometimes still feathered like parade helmets – the hoods continue to mirror contemporary fashion trends and reflect their owner’s standing. The contrast of a hooded falcon and an expanding sky became a topic when falconry lost its social prestige and turned, during the 18th century, either into ceremonial pageantry or a simpler modern sporting activity. In one of Edwin Landseer’s portraits of falcons (fig. 12, plate XVI) dating from the second half of the 1830s, the feature of the falcon’s hood, besides the glove and the leash on the perch, epitomising domestication, contrasts with the width of the empty sky. Since the falcon’s head is presented

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in profile high above the horizon, it becomes even more evident that the burning red hood, which attracts the eye of the beholder, prevents the bird from seeing. Thus the lofty sky, whilst being the falcon’s very realm, is only revealed to the observer. Hoods are accompanied by leather jesses, which are the most restrictive and most direct bonds that physically connect the hawk to the earth. While in allegorical representations of the visual sense (for instance in Jan Saenredam’s engraving after Hendrick Goltzius) a bird as the natural ruler of the sky ascends towards the sun thus demonstrating the overwhelming visual cognition, the jesses prevent the hawk flying to lofty heights. Leather belts and straps of varying types have a very long career in the taming of wild and the training of domesticated animals, among which the horse’s bridle is best known. As a tool for domestication it was so ubiquitous that it served as an attribute of the personification of Temperantia; during the Enlightenment the bridle even became a common icon in illustrations of educational literature. Not entirely removed from the bridle as an indicator of the necessity of training in temperance, but certainly more infamous, were the leather belts for fettering prisoners and constraining mentally disordered persons. In Benjamin Rush’s so called Tranquilising Chair, a person could be lashed down with leather straps and his (or her) head trapped in a wooden box (fig. 13) which deprived him (or her) of seeing, very much like a hooded falcon tethered by her jesses. The jesses restraining a precious hawk during her manning and training had to be made of especially soft leather. Manuals like the Arab book on falconry either recommended tender deerskin or guts and tendons, which should be chewed for some time in order to make them more flexible. Johann Georg Krünitz’s Oeconomische Encyclopädie suggested boiled deer skin24 and Gottfried Semper in his major work Der Stil in 1860 points out that tendons and guts, especially, will become highly elastic when they are boiled and twisted.25 By no means should the jesses cause the hawk pain or discomfort, for any ache would destroy the complex and time-consuming process of manning.

Hawking in modern times During the Romantic Movement hawking, or certainly the concept of it, became fashionable again, above all in England. Walter Scott’s novels and pictures like Landseer’s Hawking in the Olden Time contributed to the revival of medieval life. On the one hand 24 

 Johann Georg Krünitz, Oeconomische Encyclopedie, vol. 12, 1777–1786 (electronic edition of the Universitätsbibliothek Trier http://www.kruenitz.uni-trier.de/, accessed September 3 2018). 25   Gottfried Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten oder praktische Ästhetik; ein Handbuch für Techniker, Künstler und Kunstfreunde (1860), 2 vols., reprinted Mittenwald 1977, vol. 1, p. 99 and p. 103.

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13   Benjamin Rushs Tranquelizing Chair, around 1811, wood engraving, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Hospital Historic Collection.

the medieval Wars of Scottish Independence were allegorically suggested in the birds’ fights, elevating the animal picture to the level of history painting. On the other hand the general subject, the art of falconry, served contemporary purposes. Hawking seemed to be a perfect instrument of education, not only of the hawk, but of the young British elite.26 During the 19th century, when England was still the driving force of industrialisation, medieval virtues were rediscovered. The concept of chivalry was at the very centre and contributed to modelling the ideal gentleman of the Victorian age. So characteristic of chivalry, falconry was highly esteemed among the upper social classes as a sport in which patience was exercised.27 Young gentlemen were trained to become trustworthy and reliable by exercising leather and feather in the quest to “master” nature. 26   Exhib. Cat. The Monarch of the Glen. Landseer in the Highlands, ed. Richard Osmond, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh 2005, p. 33. 27   In 1864 The Old Hawking Club was founded: see Gage Earle Freeman, Practical Falconry. To which is added how I became a falconer, London 1859, p. 5; Arthur MacGregor, Animal Encounters Human and Animal Interaction in Britain from the Norman Conquest to World War One, London 2012.

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Baudouin Van den Abeele

The Hooded Falcon as an Allegory of Hope (15 th –17 th century) 1

Allegory pervades medieval and early modern culture, and it is thus no surprise that one can trace its presence in all types of art and literature, be it fictional, didactic, political or spiritual. Practical texts, such as those on medicine, optics, parlour games or hunting, are generally not the type of works where one expects to find allegorical considerations. Some, however, are relevant: for medical optics, one thinks of the De oculo morali of Petrus Lemovicensis (1270–1280), for parlour games there is the De ludo scacchorum of Jacobus de Cessolis (1275–1300) and for hunting the Livres du Roy Modus et de la Royne Ratio by Norman nobleman Henri de Ferrières (ca. 1370). Since all these texts survive in multiple copies, there was obviously public demand for them. The late Middle Ages thus offer a rich seam of enquiry in the field of allegory. Texts and images often interact, and the latter may develop independent traditions in distant contexts. The hooded falcon is a case in point, and this contribution takes a closer look at its history and interpretation, starting from a late example.

The bird of Villers Abbey in Br abant In the cloister of the former Cistercian abbey of Villers-la-Ville, near Ottignies in Brabant,2 a large carved stone (1m 13cm high, 70cm wide) presents, within an oval medallion, a bird in a peculiar attitude (fig. 1). Sitting on what seems to be an olive branch, it stands on one foot whilst scratching its downward-bent head with the other, 1 

 This text was first presented in French at the conference “Figurer la nature. Les métamorphoses de l’allégorie (XIIIe–XVIIe siècles)” (Louvain-la-Neuve, 19–21 November 2009), whose proceedings have not yet been published. 2   Villers was one of the most important Cistercian abbeys in the Netherlands; on its site, ruins and history, see Thomas Coomans, L’abbaye de Villers-en-Brabant. Construction, configuration et signification d’une abbaye cistercienne gothique, Brussels and Brecht 2002.

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1 

 Villers-la-Ville, Abbey emblem in the cloister, stone carving, ca. 1716–1734.

and one notices that the head seems covered. Underneath, carved in capital letters, a Latin sentence reads Post tenebras spero lucem and two croziers and a mitre are represented at the oval’s summit. It is unknown where the stone was originally situated, probably above a doorway or on a facade, but the type of setting is that of the 18th century and it has been linked with Jean Hache, who was Abbot of Villers from 1716 to 1734. Regarding the bird itself, some 20th-century site guides write that it is a dove, or even a phoenix, but Jacques Foret’s 1997 article clarified the matter: it is a bird of prey. 3 The image is, in fact, linked to falconry, for it shows a trained hawk wearing a hood, a small leather cap which, placed over a hawk’s head, calms her by creating artificial darkness.4 Here, the device is topped by a little ornament and is of the type called in Foret, “Des pierres pour l’éternité (2e partie). Post tenebras spero lucem”, in: Villers. Revue trimestrielle de l’abbaye, 4 (1997), pp. 6–13. 4   Hubert Beaufrère, Lexique de la chasse au vol. Terminologie française du XVIe au XXe siècle, Nogent-leRoi 2004 (Bibliotheca cynegetica 4), p. 75 : “coiffe de cuir dont on couvre la tête de l’oiseau de chasse pour l’isoler du monde extérieur en le mettant artificiellement dans l’obscurité.” 3 

 Jacques

The Hooded Fa lcon as a n A llegory of Hope (15 th –17 th century)

French “chaperon à cornette”, with a decorative plummet of fabric, feathers or both enabling an easy grip; this type is often depicted in 17th century painting.5 Treatises on falconry, such as the famous De Arte Venandi Cum Avibus of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen (ca. 1245), tell us that it is useful to hood hawks for several reasons. During the first stages of its manning, when the hawk is still shy since she has been captured from the wild,6 the hood enables her gradual introduction to the presence of man without seeing him or being upset by the various new situations surrounding him. Thanks to the hood, the hawk stays calm, without bating. Initially, one removes the hood in favourable situations, before progressively familiarising the hawk with more varied surroundings, even in noisy places. After that, one can start the actual training. However, the hood’s purpose is far from over at this stage: when going hawking, for example, the hawk is hooded during transportation. Thus she is not excited by the sight of birds which happen to fly over during the trip, and arrives, stress-free, at the hawking ground, having reserved her full strength and energy for flight when the falconer decides to start hunting. The carver of Villers depicted, on the hawk’s legs, the bells which were used to locate the bird by sound when necessary.7 These are fixed with a small leather strap (a “bewit”), also visible here. A pair of bells usually has an interval of a half tone, which makes their sound more perceptible at a distance. Hence, the falconer is able to find and retrieve his hawk if it happens to be sitting somewhere out of sight, in a bush or behind a fence for example.8 It is hard to tell what species of hawk is depicted in Villers. The carving has no colours, and detail is lacking. It could be a falcon, or a goshawk or a sparrowhawk. One of the criteria is the length of the wings in proportion to the tail: the wings are far shorter with true hawks (known to falconers as “shortwings”), whereas they are longer with falcons (“longwings”) such as the peregrine, and they reach the end of the tail when the hawk is perched. Here this is the case, so it might be a falcon, in all probability a peregrine, the most widely used species of longwinged hawk in former times. Furthermore the hood was primarily used with falcons, less so with goshawks and sparrowhawks. Consequently, whilst the formal generic term for all trained hunting birds is technically “hawk”, for the sake of simplicity, we will talk of a falcon in this contribution, although there is no absolute certainty.

5  6 

 Several

examples in Christian Antoine de Chamerlat’s book La fauconnerie et l’art, Paris 1986. wild falcons and hawks was the only way to obtain birds of prey for hawking; after some previous experiments, captive breeding was only developed as a practical option in the late 20th century, starting in the United States (Dr. Tom Cade). 7   Beaufrère (as in note 4), p. 338. 8   On the impedimenta of falconry, see Baudouin van den Abeele, La fauconnerie au Moyen Age: connaissance, affaitage et médecine des oiseaux de chasse d’après les traités latins, Paris 1994 (Collection Sapience, 10), pp. 106–114.  Capturing

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The Villers falcon is the trained hunting companion of the princes and noblemen who used to hunt in Brabant. A typical activity of the aristocracy during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, falconry was widely practised in the Low Countries, where it seems to have been less reserved for aristocrats than elsewhere in Europe. Since the end of the 14th century, we know through the legal assessments of the socalled “joyeuses entrées” , the festival inauguration of a new duke or sovereign in Brabant, that the princes granted to all inhabitants of Brabant the right to hunt small game, including with the help of hawks.9 This special rule might be due to the fact that professional falconers were active all over the Duchy to catch wild hawks and falcons, in order to sell them to the Duke or to export them abroad.10

2 

 Villers-la-Ville, Abbey emblem, engraving by Jacques le Roy, 1692.

The Villers falcon appears in several places in the Abbey in the 17th and 18th centuries.11 There is a second falcon on a carved stone in the cloister. It occurs above the Nivelles gateway marking the entrance to the monastic precincts, is placed on the façade of the Montaigu Chapel nearby and on the lintel of the Abbey Farm at some distance. A few estates in Brabant depending on the Abbey also display the sign. Thus the buildings of Mellemont Farm, some 20 km east of Villers, preserve a double heraldic carving, which has been extracted from a wall but is well kept. It shows on one side the arms of Abbot Jean Hache with his motto Fortiter et suaviter, and on the other side the hooded falcon, very akin to the carving in the Villers cloister described above. The farm of Gémioncourt, near Genappes, has a memorial plate above the main chimney dated 1706, with an inscription relating the farm’s foundation, above which a medal9   In particular, the Joyeuse Entrée of 1386, text quoted by J. Smit, Het Brabantsche Jachtrecht voor de regering van Karel de Stoute, Amsterdam 1911, p. 46. 10   Cf. the section “Fauconnerie et société” in: Van den Abeele (as in note 8) pp. 165–171. 11   Special thanks to Michel Dubuisson (Villers-la-Ville), who provided several references and photographs.

The Hooded Fa lcon as a n A llegory of Hope (15 th –17 th century)

lion has been placed with the falcon. One might allude also to the Abbey’s seat at the University of Louvain (Villerscollege), where the main façade is topped by a similar shield. Other media may display the Villers emblem: a chasuble of the 18th century in a private collection, bottles found during excavations at Villers and a medallion on the painted portrait of Robert de Namur (Abbot from 1647 to 1652).12 Finally, two 17th century engravings show the Abbey in its past splendour, one in the Chorographia sacra Brabantiae published in 1659 by Antonius Sanderus, the other in its reproduction by Jacques le Roy in 1692 (fig. 2).13 They include a medallion or a coat of arms with the hooded falcon, which had obviously become a visual emblem of Villers Abbey.14

Darkness and light At first sight, the hooded falcon seems somewhat out of place in a foundation dedicated to retreat from the world. That the abbots of the austere Cistercian order chose the falcon, protagonist of a secular pastime par excellence, is somehow paradoxical.15 However, a proper understanding of the emblem implies an allegorical bias. The motto Post tenebras spero lucem indicates the proper sense: “after the darkness I hope for light”. Literally, the hawk waits to be unhooded by the falconer in order to see freely, and its impatient gesture is quite true to life. But the motif obviously has a deeper, spiritual sense. It is, in fact, a truncated quotation from the Book of Job, chapter XVII, verse 12, where Job replies to Eliphaz who is accusing him of hiding sins. Job is in trouble: “My days have passed away, my thoughts have gone astray while tormenting my heart. They have changed the night into day, but still, after the darkness, I hope for light.”16 In the Bible, numerous quotations take advantage of the contrast between darkness and light, tenebrae and lux, in order to exalt the light as an image of eternal life, or even of God himself.17 The phrase had particular resonance in the Cistercian context, since the monks used to sing a hymn by Saint Ambrose:

12  13  14 

 Namur,

Musée de Groesbeeck de Croix. in Coomans (as in note 2), p. 17 and p. 24; see also p. 46.  According to Coomans, the Villers emblem goes back to the 16th century (personal communication), but the documents available to me do not allow the identification of a precise starting point for its use. 15   On the prohibition of hunting for clerics, see Thomas Szabó, “Die Kritik der Jagd – Von der Antike zum Mittelalter”, in: Jagd und höfische Kultur im Mittelalter, ed. Werner Rösener, Goettingen 1997, pp. 167–229. 16   The Latin text of the Vulgate gives for the second part: Noctem vertunt in diem, et rursus post ­tenebras spero lucem. 17   See for example Is. 9.2, Mi. 7.8, Mt. 4.16, Act. 26.18 or Eph. 5.8. Sample in Foret (as in note 3), p. 7.  Reproduced

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Darkness lets place to light And night to the course of the day That fault which arises at night May vanish by the gift of light. The falcon waiting to be unhooded thus represents a strong image of the soul hoping to be delivered. One might also see in it an allegory of the condition of the monk, who is oriented towards the light of the end of times, and whose earthly life is considered as a passage through a valley of tears. These hidden meanings make the hooded falcon an original and suggestive emblem for the monastery of Villers. Exactly when the Abbey adopted this image is unknown, but the earliest known examples are from the early 17th century, ca. 1610 with the carved stone of the Montaigu Chapel, consecrated in 1616. However, the motif itself is earlier so it is important to search for its sources of inspiration.

A possible source : printers’ marks From the year 1550 onwards, numerous printers chose the hooded falcon and its motto as a personal mark. The first examples known to date appear in the Netherlands, France and Spain. The motif has enjoyed a lasting fortune in the Netherlands. A most elegant falcon appears on the title-pages of Steven Joessen, whose activity is documented since 1551 in Kampen (fig. 3a).18 The hawk sits on a dead branch above a rock, surrounded by a square frame bearing an inscription where the biblical quotation is enriched by a double verse: “Cum fueris felix que sunt adversa caveto/ Non eodem cursu respondent ultima primis (When you are happy, beware of what is contrary/ For often the end does not correspond to the beginning).” This is a quotation from the Disticha Catonis, a widely-used school text.19 Its conjunction with the hooded falcon and the biblical extract is rather puzzling, for the pessimistic verses of the Disticha seem contradictory with the falcon waiting for better times. The same image is taken over one year later by Cornelis Karelsen in Amsterdam, and during the next century by Cornelis Dirkszoon Cool, between 1614 and 1666.20 In Brabant, the mark appeared in 1566 at the Brussels workshop of Jan Roelants, in a nearly identical version, but for the addition of a coat of arms and the printer’s

 Peter van Huisstede and J. P. J. Brandhorst, Dutch Printer’s Devices, 15th –17th Century. A Catalogue, Nieuwkoop 1999, vol. 1, p. 651. 19   Disticha Catonis, Book I, 18, cf. ed. Marcus Boas, Amsterdam 1952, p. 54. On the Disticha Catonis as a school book see Michael Baldzuhn, Schulbücher im Trivium des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit, Berlin and New York 2009. 20   Van Huisstede and Brandhorst (as in note 18), p. 349.

18 

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3 

 Printer’s marks

a Steven Joessen, Kampen, 1551.

b  Jan Roelants, Brussels, 1566.

c  Jean I Mommaert, Brussels, 1590–1600.

d  Jean II Mommaert, Brussels, 1635–1670.

e  Jehan II Bonhomme, Paris, 1551.

f  Pierre Guymier, Paris, 1552.

monogram IXR (fig. 3b).21 The hooded falcon was also taken over by Jean I Mommaert, printer in Brussels from 1585 to 1630 (fig. 3c). One of his six known marks, it existed in two variants between 1590 and 1600.22 Here, the bird is depicted on a gloved fist that holds the leash, coiled up in circles. This is the long strap with which a hawk is restrained and, due to its length (over a metre), can be attached to a perch or held in the hand.23 A palm-tree is placed at the back, and the biblical motto is written around

21   J. Vandenweghe and B. Op de Beeck, Marques typographiques employées aux XVe et XVIe siècles dans les limites géographiques de la Belgique, Nieuwkoop 1993, p. 216. 22   Vandenweghe and Op de Beeck (as in note 21), pp. 166–167, and reference on p. 42. On the printer, see the note by A. Rouzet, Dictionnaire des imprimeurs, libraires et éditeurs des XVe et XVIe siècles dans les limites géographiques de la Belgique, Nieuwkoop 1976, pp. 152–153. 23   Beaufrère (as in note 4), p. 238.

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the oval rim.24 The son and successor of this printer, Jean II Mommaert, born in 1611 and active from 1635 to 1670, took over this mark in a fuller composition, as it were doubled (fig. 3d): the hawk on the glove is situated in front of the palm-tree and, in a second instance, on the hand of a lady at the tree’s right; on the left side, a seated man holds a spade.25 This complex mark was taken over by an anonymous Amsterdam printer in 1642.26 Falcon and motto further appear as the mark of François Foppens in Brussels, 1672.27 Finally, one might highlight Peter Warnerssen in Kampen and Emmerik between 1540 and 1575, who took as his mark a hooded falcon sitting on a glove, wings outspread, but without the motto.28 In France, the motif was also present in early years, but its career as a printer’s mark was brief. Jehan II Bonhomme adopted it in 1551 at Paris (fig. 3e), 29 showing the falcon on a tree stump marked with the printer’s monogram; wings outspread, it is surrounded by a garland bearing the quotation from the Book of Job written on a scroll. Nearly contemporaneously, another Paris librarian, Pierre Guymier, printed the motif in 1552 (fig. 3f), but here the bird sits quietly on a trunk bearing his personal motto, “Raison par tout”, and the biblical quotation is written on a scroll held in the falcon’s beak.30 We have found no French examples of this type of mark at later dates. The hooded falcon also enjoyed remarkable popularity in Spain, for it is known as a printer’s mark for no less than twelve printers or librarians. It is not impossible that it is of Flemish inspiration, which would be no surprise due to the historical ties linking the two zones in the 16th century. The first printer having made use of it, Adrian Ghemart, was in fact of Flemish origin: he published in Medina del Campo and Valladolid between 1550 and 1573,31 and chose, in 1550, a mark (fig. 4a) showing a hooded falcon on a gloved fist, protruding from dark clouds and holding in its beak a scroll inscribed with the biblical quotation. The next year, his mark gained an oval frame and, in 1555, the printer chose to inscribe it within a long and undulating scroll bearing the quotation; he added his monogram at the base, under the gloved fist, but 24  25 

 Reproduced

by Foret (as in note 3), p. 12. Paul E. Claessens, “Deux familles d’imprimeurs brabançons. Les Mommaert et les Friex, de 1585 à 1777”, in: Brabantica, 3 (1958), pp. 205–220, esp. pp. 212–213. 26   Van Huisstede and Brandhorst (as in note 18), p. 85. 27   The Internet site Union Catalogue of Emblem Books, directed by Peter Daly at McGill University (Quebec), signals this mark for an edition of Otto Van Veen published in 1672. 28   Van Huisstede and Brandhorst (as in note 18), vol. 3, p. 1130. 29   Reproduced from L.C. Silvestre, Marques typographiques ou Recueil des monogrammes, chiffres, enseignes, emblèmes, devises, rébus et fleurons des libraires et imprimeurs qui ont exercé en France, depuis l’introduction de l’imprimerie en 1470 jusqu’à la fin du XVIe siècle, Paris 1853, reprinted Amsterdam 1971, no. 1079. 30   Silvestre (as in note 29), no. 450. Reproduced also by A. Balis, “De jachten van Maximiliaan”, in: Gentse Bijdragen tot de Kunstgeschiedenis, 25 (1978–1980), p. 20. 31    Juan Delgado Casado, Diccionario de impresores españoles (siglos XV–XVIII), Madrid 1996, vol. 1, pp. 273–274.  See

The Hooded Fa lcon as a n A llegory of Hope (15 th –17 th century)

this time the falcon was turned to the right (fig. 4b).32 Ghemart’s mark with oval frame was taken over without modifications by Juan Gracián at Alcalá de Henares in 1573, and by Juan Soler at Saragossa in 1577.33 The motif returned, this time with a more elaborate frame, as the mark of Pedro Madrigal between 1589 and 1598, and with additional details in 1592–1595 (fig. 4c): here, a lion is lying underneath the gloved fist.34 This is a most interesting variant, for the lion is another symbol of hope in future life, largely developed since the ancient Christian Physiologos and taken over by all medieval bestiaries, and by encyclopaedic and didactic texts on animals. According to the Physiologos, the lion keeps its eyes open during sleep; in the same way, while Christ’s body was dying on the cross, his divinity was awake. Furthermore, the text tells that the lioness gives birth to dead-born cubs, which are brought to life on the third day by their father’s breath or roar.35 Thus, the lion became a symbol for resurrection, which explains its manifold appearance in Christian iconography. It is very much in line with the falcon as a symbol for hope. Madrigal’s successor was no other than Juan de la Cuesta, editor of Cervantes, who took over the combined motif of falcon and lion (fig. 4d). Thus the hooded falcon figured on the title-page of the editio princeps of Don Quixote de la Mancha in 1605, and in 1615 for its part II.36 It is probably no coincidence that Cervantes inserts an allusion to the motto in his romance, in chapter 68: Don Quixote awakens Sancho Panza in the middle of the night and wants him to go out with him, singing canticles, but the page prefers to continue sleeping; hence the master laments about his page’s ingratitude, in spite of the great honours that he bestows on him, for he tells he will become an earl before the end of the year and “hopes for light after the darkness” (in Latin in the text).37 The printer’s mark and the quotation have given rise to many readings and hypotheses by Hispanists, even venturing into esoteric paths. This brilliant episode does not close the career of the printer’s falcon in the Peninsula. Juan Godinez de Millis made use of it in 1602, and so did Jeronimo Morillo in 1632 (who copied Adrian Ghemart’s motif with the undulating scroll), whereas an anonymous printer took over the falcon and lion variant in 1633 for an edition of Lope de Vega.38 Mateo Espinosa further chose the falcon and lion in 1668 and 1669, 39 and 32 

 Francisco Vindel, Escudos y marcas de impresores y libreros en España durante los siglos XV a XIX (1485–1850), Barcelona 1942, pp. 163–164. 33   Vindel (as in note 32), p. 230 and p. 237. 34   Vindel (as in note 32), pp. 273–275. 35   See the edition and translation of the Greek Physiologos by Arnaud Zucker, Physiologos. Le bestiaire des bestiaires, Grenoble 2004, p. 54. 36   Vindel (as in note 32), pp. 334–335. 37   Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Vicente Gaos, Madrid 1987, chapter LXVIII, p. 961. 38   Vindel (as in note 32), respectively p. 320, p. 367 and p. 369. 39   Vindel (as in note 32), p. 403.

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 Printer’s

marks a Adrian Ghemart, Medina del

b Adrian Ghemart, Medina del

Campo, 1550.

Campo, 1555.

c  Pedro Madrigal, 1589.

d  Juan de la Cuesta, Madrid,

e Reginald Wolf, England,

f Conrad Scher, Strasbourg,

1605.

1571.

1599.

finally an anonymous Valencian printer of 1683, as well as Mateo Llanos y Guzman in 1688 at Madrid, adopted Pedro Madrigal’s first version.40 Other countries utilise the marks, but to a lesser degree. With Antonio Alvares, who printed Cervantes at Lisbon until 1644, Juan de la Cuesta’s mark appeared in Portugal.41 Passing to Italy, one encounters the falcon and its motto in two Venetian printer’s marks around 1570: Eneas de Alaris, who is known for 13 editions from 1573

40 

 Vindel (as in note 32), respectively p. 416 and p. 426. For Spain, we have found further references to two printers that remain to be verified: Pedro Delgado (Medina del Campo, 1550–1551) and Jeronimo Morilla (Valladolid, 1620–1633).  41   Reference from the internet site Marcas Tipográficas by Carlos Fernández, page “Marcas de la mano y el halcon”.

The Hooded Fa lcon as a n A llegory of Hope (15 th –17 th century)

to 1576, and Orazio de Gobbi, active between 1576 and 1583.42 For England, we found only one case. In 1571 and 1572, Reginald Wolf, who printed books between 1542 and 1573, made use of a mark (fig. 4e) showing a hooded falcon on a perch between two trees, with a somewhat modified and less assertive motto: tenebras sequetur lux forte, “light might come after darkness”.43 As to the German Empire, we have encountered no equivalent examples, but for one mark which has some acquaintance with our subject. Conrad Scher, printer in Strasbourg between 1599 and 1631,44 elaborates a mark (fig. 4f) showing a hooded falcon on an anchor with a serpent coiled around it. The motto, divided on both sides of the anchor, reads prudentia firma and simplex spes, the latter maybe as an echo of the spero in the Book of Job’s quotation. As to the anchor motif, it will return later on in these pages. It is intriguing to see the simultaneous appearance in several parts of Europe of a similar motif and motto: Ghemart in 1550 in Spain, Bonhomme in 1551 in France and Joessen in 1551 in the Netherlands. It is probable that some intermediate or previous examples have not come down to us, for such a parallel inspiration seems hard to explain. However, these three starting points have no common features as to their form: the falcon is depicted in different attitudes and with different surroundings in these three cases. In fact, as far as we can judge by the known corpus, each of the cultural zones developed a proper iconographic model, and the formal similarities stay “national”: the Spanish printers copy one another, but one does not encounter the hand protruding from a cloud or the crouched lion outside of the Peninsula. One cannot but be impressed by the variety of forms for a motif whose basic inspiration is identical. What could be the explanation for the vogue of this emblem amongst the printers? Did these men conceive their work as bringing light in a world full of darkness? Alternately, was their craft perceived as threatened by obscure powers, in times of religious troubles and of censorship which they hoped would be transitory? It is remarkable that the mark was most prevalent in the Catholic countries. As to Protestant Europe, the motif of the falcon with the biblical quotation seems, as far as we know, to be absent from Germany and Switzerland, although the motto post tenebras lux was used by some protagonists of the Reformation, such as the city of Calvin,

42 

 For the first, see Dizionario dei tipografi e degli editori italiani. Il Cinquecento, ed. M. Menati et al., vol. 1, Milan 1997, pp. 10–11. For the second, the reference comes from the site of Carlos Fernández, but the information has not been found elsewhere. 43   Ronald B. Mc Kerrow, Printers’ and Publishers’ Devices in England and Scotland, 1485–1640, London 1913, no. 163. 44   See J. Benzig, Die Buchdrucker des 16.–17. Jahrhunderts im deutschen Sprachgebiet, Wiesbaden 21982, p. 451.

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Geneva.45 Only the Calvinist Northern Netherlands are an exception, with some examples in 17th century Amsterdam. Coming back to our starting point, one cannot but conclude that the choice of the abbots of Villers concords with the spirit of their time. The motif of the hooded falcon abounds in book title-pages and, if it is used prominently in Villers, it may have been inspired from the printed production of the epoch. Concretely, the image and the motto could stem from the Brussels editions of Jan Roelants or Jan I Mommaert.46 One should observe, however, that none of the printer’s marks shows the falcon trying to cast off the hood. This is an originality of the Villers coat of arms, maybe meant to signify the monk’s desire to be delivered from his imperfect worldly condition. However, the association of the hooded falcon with the quotation from the Book of Job can draw us to still other cases. Is it possible to go one more step backwards than 1550?

A poetical ancestor? Trying to find earlier examples, we have sought these in emblem books, a most productive tradition inspired by the Italian models following the Emblematum liber of Andrea Alciato (1492–1550). These books enjoyed tremendous success after 1530,47 but the motif we are interested in does not appear as such.48 There are a number of emblems inspired by falconry and showing a falcon or an accipiter (goshawk), or depicting falconry equipment such as the lure, but no hooded falcon awaiting light appears. However, there are examples of the motif in other contexts. A possible starting point might be found in a work by the French poet Henri Baude, who was in touch with the court of the Dukes of Bourbon at Moulins. This court was a lively cradle of literary culture in the 15th century, particularly under Dukes Jean I and Jean II.49 Born at Moulins in the first third of the 15th century and motto, in fact, has accompanied the city seal since the end of the 15th century, and was used in later periods: see Wappen, Siegel und Verfassung der Schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft und der Kantone, Bern 1948, pp. 1243–1250. Many thanks to Mathieu Caesar (Université de Genève) for references and copies. 46   One should verify whether the editions of these printers were present in Villers library at that time, but the contents of the library are not well known for the early modern period. 47   See the classical reference work by Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Schöne, Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts, Stuttgart and Weimar 1967, and the synthesis of Alison Saunders, The sixteenth-century French emblem-books. A decorative and useful genre, Geneva 1988. 48   Further verifications could confirm or complement our statement, since emblem books represent an enormous corpus. 49   For a literary panorama of the Moulins court: François Ferrand, “Remarques sur les ducs de Bourbon et la tradition poétique du XVe siècle”, in: Le Duché de Bourbon des origines au Connétable. Actes du colloque des 5 et 6 octobre 2000 organisé par le Musée Anne-de-Beaujeu de Moulins, Saint-Pourçain sur Sioule 2001, pp. 179–196. 45 

 The

The Hooded Fa lcon as a n A llegory of Hope (15 th –17 th century)

probably deceased around 1496, Baude gained his place in literary history with his poems and moral plays.50 The text we are interested in is known as the Dictz moraulx pour faire tapisserie, a title occurring in certain manuscripts.51 The Dictz, a work situated between the collections of proverbs and the emblem-books,52 is a sequence of brief poems accompanied by drawings in certain manuscripts, the most famous being the copy created for François Robertet at the turn of the 15th century (Paris, BNF, fr. 22461).53 On folio 39 (fig. 5, plate XVII) we encounter a depiction of a man taking shelter from the rain in a cave; in the foreground, a hooded hawk is tied to a perch, from which a scroll bearing the words Post tenebras spero lucem originates. On the right side, a landscape unfolds with rocks, a river, some trees and a distant castle. The drawing is accompanied by a dit of the Bourbon poet.54 Cy suis mucé pour le mau temps Après lequel le beau atens En atendant mon mal endure Car qui bien n’atend bien peu dure Qui dure vaint, ainsi l’entens QUI PATITUR VINCIT The text corresponds with the drawing: the man is waiting for the passing away of bad weather, armed with patience, so as to overcome his ill fate. In the last verse, qui dure vaint has to be understood as qui endure vainc, as is confirmed by the closing sentence in Latin: qui patitur vincit.

50   Biographical data and texts in Jean-Loup Lemaître, Henri Baude. Dictz moraulx pour faire tapisserie. Dessins du Musée Condé et de la Bibliothèque nationale, Ussel 1988, pp. 7–21. A good entry on Baude by Sylvie Lefèvre in: Dictionnaire des lettres françaises. Le Moyen Age, revised ed. Michel Zink and Geneviève Hasenohr, Paris 1992, pp. 670–671 (with bibliography). 51   Critical edition by Annette Scoumanne, Dictz moraulx pour faire tapisserie, Geneva and Paris 1959 (Textes littéraires français, 83). Among recent scholarship on Baude, see Andreas Bässler: “Wenn der Autor nicht im Bilde ist. Entkoppelung von Körper und Rede in proto-emblematischen und emblema­ tischen Sprichwörterbildern an der Wende vom 15. zum 16. Jahrhundert”, in: Frühmittelalterliche Studien, 43 (2009), pp. 271–292. 52   See Alison Saunders, “Is it a proverb or is it an emblem? French manuscript predecessors of the emblem book”, in: Bibliothèque d’humanisme et de Renaissance, 55 (1993), pp. 83–111. Many thanks to A. Saunders for references and copies. 53   For a general statement about these drawings, see François Avril and Nicole Reynaud, Les manuscrits à peintures en France, 1440–1520, Paris 1995, pp. 354–355, and more in detail, Paul Vandenbroek, “Dits illustrés et emblèmes moraux. Contribution à l’étude de l’iconographie profane et de la pensée sociale vers 1500 (Paris, BNF, ms. fr. 22461)”, in Jaarboek Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen, (1988), pp. 23–94. See also the entry by M.H. Tesnière, in the Exhib. Cat. France 1500. Entre Moyen Age et Renaissance, Paris 2010, p. 290. 54   It is Dit XXXVIII in the edition of Scoumanne (as in note 51).

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Baudouin Va n den Abeele

5   Henri Baude, Dits moraux, ms. Paris, BNF, fr. 22461, f. 39.

As we did for the Villers image, let us observe the hawk. The long tail barred with dark stripes, the wings crossing relatively high with respect to the tip of the tail and the long legs invite us to determine it as a sparrowhawk or a goshawk, and not a falcon. Some details are particular: the two bells and the falconer’s knot in the leash are well observed. However, the main detail is the hood, for the bird thus becomes an allegory of the man in the cave: as the latter waits for the return of the sun after the storm, the falcon “hopes for light after the darkness”. As to the man, he wears an ample coat and a broad hat, and he is holding a staff: all these are attributes of the pilgrim. He probably symbolises man’s condition, walking through this world and waiting for a better future. As in the Villers shield, the hooded hawk evokes the suffering soul. There are a few copies of the collection made for François Robertet, the most remarkable being the one in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal at Paris (ms. 5066), maybe created for another member of the Robertet family.55 Two other illustrated copies, of relatively lower quality, are preserved at the library of the Musée Condé at Chantilly 55 

 Opinion

of Nicole Reynaud in: Avril and Reynaud (as in note 53), p. 355.

The Hooded Fa lcon as a n A llegory of Hope (15 th –17 th century)

6   Henri Baude, Dits moraux, ms. Chantilly, Musée Condé, 509, f. 10.

(mss. 509 and 510). The drawing of pilgrim and hawk is inverted in ms. 509, f. 10 (fig. 6),56 and the draughtsman has reduced the scene to a few motifs, thereby omitting two important elements, the cloud and the rainfall; he added an anecdotal detail, a small wooden barrel at its foot, meant to be the pilgrim’s gourd. This time, the hawk is seen from the back, on a branch protruding from a rock, which stresses its direct link with the scene. In the Robertet volume, the bird seemed somehow “pasted” on the scene, installed on a perch fixed to two small and partial tree-trunks, a rather artificial setting that draws the attention to the motif. With the Dits of Henri Baude transmitted ca. 1500 by the Robertet collection, we might have the first explicit association of the biblical formula with the image of the hooded hawk which will be so popular in the next two centuries. Between Baude and the printers of the middle of the 16th century, good fortune enables us to place an

56 

 This

manuscript has been partly reproduced in Lemaître (as in note 50).

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7 

 Tiles from the Ferme des Templiers, Saint-Martin de Boscherville, 1509–1539.

artefact that has recently come to light.57 During works carried out at the “Ferme des Templiers” of Saint-Martin de Boscherville, in Normandy, some glazed floor tiles have been discovered and four of them, assembled, show a hooded falcon on a perch, surrounded by a partly vanished motto, which can nevertheless be recognised as our quotation: post tene…sp…o lu..m (fig. 7).58 Other tiles from the same floor carry the arms of Antoine Le Roux, who was Abbot of Saint-Georges of Boscherville between 1509 and 1539. Since the “Templar’s Farm” depended from this Abbey, the Abbot’s arms also provide a dating for the tiles. This new piece of evidence indicates the circulation of the motif since the first half of the 16th century.

The figure of Hope with a falcon The motif of the hooded falcon is also present in a more allusive way, without the sentence from the Book of Job, but in a context which leaves no doubt about its sense. A first example occurs in an early 16th century manuscript, produced in Bruges and at present in Renate König’s collection at Cologne. It is a kind of ironic variant of the allegory. At fol. 16 (fig. 8), a bas de page shows the hooded falcon on the gloved hand of a hare provided with the attributes of a Flemish falconer: a pole for leaping across 57 

 Mrs Josette Ratier, to whom we are most grateful, wrote to us on February 2 2012 drawing attention to the object described here, which was a most welcome surprise. 58   Mrs Ratier kindly gave us the permission to reproduce the drawing of the ceramics.

The Hooded Fa lcon as a n A llegory of Hope (15 th –17 th century)

8 

 Marginalia in a ms. of Petrarca, Cologne, collection Renate König, s.n., f. 16.

ditches often used in Flanders, from which another small hare, dead, is suspended by its hind legs. It is clearly a scene of the world upside down. The codex contains a Latin translation of Petrarch’s poetical Commentary to the Seven Penitential Psalms. It probably is no coincidence that the verse under which the hare-falconer is depicted is: “sed in misericordia tua domine sperabo”.59 This same hare with hawking pole and falcon appears in a second Flemish manuscript of the same period, a Book of Hours copied and illuminated ca. 1510 at Bruges and preserved at the Brussels Royal Library.60 It might be a motif circulating through model books in workshops at Bruges. The series of the twelve tapestries inaccurately known as the “Hunts of Maxi­ milian”, kept at the Louvre, offers a discrete hint at our theme.61 This exceptional set 59 

 Reproduction of the page and commentary upon this ms. in: Ars moriendi. Ars vivendi. Die Handschriftensammlung Renate König, Munich 2001, p. 380. 60   Brussels, KBR, IV 280, f. 102. 61   In secondary literature, the designation “Hunts of Maximilian” is usual, but the tapestries are later than Maximilian I (who died in 1519). In the recent exhibition on Bernard van Orley (Brussels, 2019), they were thus called “Hunts of Charles V”.

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of large hangings, created ca. 1533 in Brussels on the basis of drawings by Bernard van Orley,62 illustrates the cycle of the months by various hunting activities, situated at Brussels or in its neighbouring forests. One recognises various places such as the Coudenberg Palace, the castle of Tervuren or the priory of Rooklooster (Rouge-Cloître). The scene for April shows a departure for the hunt, with the royal venery buildings of Boitsfort in the background.63 Riding side-saddle, a lady identified sometimes with Mary of Hungary holds a hooded sparrowhawk on her left hand, which she raises high. Under her saddle, a precious cloth protects the horse, and it bears the word SPERO. Some commentaries of these tapestries have indeed made the link with the printer’s marks showing the hooded falcon.64 At the end of the 16th century, we encounter several examples in the production of the painter and engraver Joris Hoefnagel, considered as the last great miniaturist of the Low Countries.65 At the lower margin of a page in the Vienna Missale Romanum, lavishly illustrated by him in Munich between 1581 and 1590, he has painted on one side a pelican, and on the other side a hooded falcon, each one sitting on a stone engraved with Christ’s monogram; the centre of the page is occupied by the text of the Credo, and underneath is written a verse alluding to hope: “Sancta fides iustos reddit, spes omnia vincit. Tertia divino pectus amore fovet.” 66 Another major creation of Hoefnagel is the decoration of the so-called Alphabet of Rudolf II of Habsburg, in the model book written by Adam Bocksay in 1561–1562. The illumination was added by Hoefnagel when the artist was in the Emperor’s service in 1592–1596 at Frankfurt or Vienna.67 It is an alphabet of capitals where each character occupies one page and is traced all’antica on a square and chequered field; added to the lower margin is a psalm extract beginning with the corresponding character. All around, Hoefnagel painted geometrical, heraldic, vegetal and animal motifs which create an elaborate frame, charged with scholarly allusions, and sometimes including hints at his imperial patron. For the character G (fig. 9, plate XIX), the double verse written underneath is a quotation from Psalm 33: Gustate et videte quam suavis est Dominus: Beatus vir qui sperat in eo. The 62   Reproduction and analysis of the cycle by A. Balis, K. De Jonge, G. Delmarcel and A. Lefébure, Les Chasses de Maximilien, Paris 1993. 63   Balis et al. (as in note 62), pp. 16–17. 64   Balis et al. (as in note 62), p. 119 for the association with the mark, here the one of Pierre Guymier. This link had previously been suggested by Balis (as in note 30), pp. 20–21. 65   On the artist and his work, see the recent and very comprehensive study by Thea Vignau-Wilberg, Joris and Jacob Hoefnagel. Art and Science around 1600, Berlin 2017. 66   Ms. Wien, ÖNB, 1784, f. 33; reproduced in Thea Wilberg Vignau-Schuurman, Die emblematischen Elemente im Werke Joris Hoefnagels, Leiden 1969, ill. 33. In Vignau-Wilberg (as in note 65), the author devotes detailed attention to this ms. on pp. 66–72. 67   Reproduced in Lee Hendrix and Thea Vignau-Wilberg, An Abecedarium. Illuminated alphabets from the court of the Emperor Rudolf II, London 1997. The ms. is preserved at the Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (ms. 20) and has been completely reproduced as Mira calligraphiae monumenta, Malibu and London 1992.

The Hooded Fa lcon as a n A llegory of Hope (15 th –17 th century)

9 

 Joris Hoefnagel, Decoration of the alphabet of Rudolf II of Habsburg, ms. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum.

sweetness evoked by the first verse is symbolised by a beehive at the top of the page, while the idea of hope in the second verse is embodied by the hooded falcon resting on a perch above the character. The page of the M is also quite rich: 68 the verse Mihi adherere Deo bonum est ponere in Domino Deo spem meam, from Psalm 72, is illustrated with two hooded falcons sitting on the base of an anchor which seems to pass through the page in a sort of trompe-l’œil. In the margins two banners are displayed, with the 68 

 The

page with G is f. 133r of the ms; the page with M is on f. 136r.

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Baudouin Va n den Abeele

10 

 Peter

Bruegel the Elder, Spes, engraving by Philips Galle, ca. 1559.

red and white colours of Austria and a medallion bearing the character R of the imperial forename, while lilies evoke a sentence of Matthew on the lily of the valley (Mt. 6, 28). Once again, the idea of hope is thus associated with the falcon. The anchor, on the other hand, recalls the Strasburg printer’s mark of Scher. However, more profoundly, the link between anchor and hope could be an echo of a verse of Saint Paul in the Epistle to the Hebrews: “This hope, we will keep it as the solid and firm anchor of our soul” (Hebr. 6, 19). Together with the evangelic anchor, the hooded falcon has obviously, during the th 16 century, become an attribute of the personified Hope, Spes, one of the three theological virtues of the Christian tradition. Curiously, this motif does not appear for Speranza in the famous Iconologia of Cesare Ripa, a collection of personifications and allegorical attributes69 which became an unsurpassed source of inspiration for artists. However, in other figurative contexts, one encounters Lady Hope with anchor and falcon. Let us consider a few examples, starting with the drawing of Spes by Peter 69   We have consulted the first illustrated edition: Cesare Ripa, Iconologia overo descrittione di diversi immagini […], Rome 1603.

The Hooded Fa lcon as a n A llegory of Hope (15 th –17 th century)

Bruegel the Elder, signed and dated 1559, which is preserved at the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett; its printed version was engraved by Philips Galle (fig. 10) who thus ensured its diffusion.70 While Hope stands immobile in the midst of a stormy sea, keeping her balance on a floating anchor, a series of small scenes around her evoke situations of

11   Medallion by Friedrich Brentel (?), Hope, 1630, Budapest, Szépmüvészeti Muzeum.

12 

 Hope, Wall painting, Regensburg, Altes Rathaus, ca. 1660.

distress: a shipwreck, men at sea and an urban fire. At the left of the engraving (at the right side of the original drawing), a powerful tower withholds a group of prisoners who are praying, with joined hands. One of the bars fixed at the window serves as a perch for a hooded falcon: this is but a tiny detail in a complex engraving, but it is highly significant and directly recalls the biblical sentence from the Book of Job. Soon, the hawk will land on the lady’s hand. A sequence of engravings of the personified virtues, published ca. 1575 and attributed to the Flemish artist Erasmus Hornick, includes Hope carrying the hawk and holding the anchor.71 This is also the case in a cycle on the cardinal virtues and the capital vices engraved by Hendrick Goltzius

70 

 See the Rotterdam and New York Exhib. Cat. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Drawings and Prints, ed. Nadine M. Orenstein, New York 2001, p. 184 (drawing) and p. 185 (engraving). 71   A brief inquiry in the “Cabinet des estampes” of the Brussels Royal Library has yielded three more engravings related to this theme, all three originating in the Low Countries. Ref.: KBR, Cabinet des estampes, F 908-915.

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Baudouin Va n den Abeele

(1558–1617) and edited by Philips Galle.72 There is, furthermore, an engraving by Crispin Van de Passe (ca. 1564–1637), where Hope holds the same two attributes.73 The eldest child of Joris Hoefnagel, Jakob, who lived from 1573 to 1632 or 1633, has long been credited with a series of painted parchment roundels, for the most part inspired by emblems. More recently, they have been attributed to Friedrich Brentel and dated after 1630.74 On one of them, Hope is sitting on an anchor and holds the hooded falcon (fig.  11, plate XVIII).75 In Northern Bavaria, the main Hall of the Altes Rathaus in Regensburg is decorated with a monumental imperial coat of arms painted ca. 1660 on the internal wall of the loggia facing the market place. Around the shield, one notices at the top a crane holding a stone in her raised right foot, as an incarnation of Prudence, at the left Justice as a woman holding a balance and, at the right side, Lady Hope with her attributes, the anchor and the falcon (fig. 12). Hope with the falcon recurs even in the 18th century: the Cologne edition of the works of Petrus Berchorius, dated 1731, shows on its frontispiece five virtues, amongst which are Hope with falcon and anchor.76 * The Villers coat of arms thus introduces us into the longue durée of allegorical images. From the 15th to the 18th century, the hooded falcon, sometimes accompanied by a quotation from the Book of Job, has known remarkable success, in the Low Countries as well as in the neighbouring countries, and as far away as Spain where librarians were attracted by this emblem, or Central Europe under the pen of the last of the ­Flemish miniaturists, Joris Hoefnagel. The Villers abbots were probably inspired by a mark of one of the Brussels printers when creating their Abbey’s telling emblem: the hooded falcon became here a subtle allusion to their monastic condition.

72   Brussels, KBR, Cabinet des estampes, S.II 83406-83420. Reproduced after a copy in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam in the Exhib. Cat. The Lure of Falconry. De verlokkingen van de valkerij, Amsterdam 2012, p. 52. 73   Brussels, KBR, Cabinet des estampes, S. IV 12614. 74   See Vignau-Wilberg (as in note 65), p. 517. The roundels are kept at Budapest, Szépmüvészeti Muzeum, no. inv. 1910-233. 75   Reproduced in the Exhib. Cat. Prag um 1600. Kunst und Kultur am Hof Rudolfs II, Freren/Emsland 1988, p. 357 and colour plate 357. 76   Petri Berchorii Pictavensis Reductorium morale, Cologne: Johannes Wilhelmi Huisch, 1731.

Colour Pl ates

XVII 

 Henri Baude, Dits moraux, ms. Paris, BNF, fr. 22461, f. 39.

XVIII   Medallion by Friedrich Brentel (?), Hope, 1630, Budapest, Szépmüvészeti Muzeum.

 147

148  

Colour Pl ates

XIX   Joris Hoefnagel, Decoration of the alphabet of Rudolf II of Habsburg, ms. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum.

Colour Pl ates

XX 

 Hunt organised by Emperor Maximilian I in honour of the envoy of Sultan Bayezid II, illustration by Jörg Kölderer, in: Tiroler Fischereibuch Maximilians I., 1504, Vienna, ÖNB, Codex Vindobonensis 7962, fol. 12v.

 149

150  

Colour Pl ates

XXI 

 Catching a sparrowhawk attracted by an owl as a decoy, in: Henri de Ferrières, Le livre du roy Modus et de la royne Ratio (France, 1379), fol. 86v. Paris, BNF, ms. français 12399.

Colour Pl ates

XXII 

 Stand for hood with the Medici-Toledo coat of arms and falcon hood, Florence (?) ca. 1550, ivory, leather, velvet, feathers, Ø 4.7 cm, 9.3 cm (ivory). Florence, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, inv. no. 194 Carrand.

 151

152  

Colour Pl ates

XXIII   Young girl with falcon and little dog called La Falconiera, Southern Italy, first half of the 13th c., sardonyx agate. Florence, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, inv. no. 1244 Carrand.

XXIV 

 Dante and Beatrice before the eagle of Justice, miniature painting, in: Yates Thompson MS 36, 1444–1450, London, British Library, fol. 162r.

Colour Pl ates

XXV 

 Master of the Codex Manesse, King Conrad of Swabia hawking, covering colour on vellum, Heidelberg, University Library.

 153

154  

Colour Pl ates

XXVI   Master of the Cité des Dames, Federigho degli Alberighi and his falcon, book illumination, 1414–1419, Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. lat 1989, f. 174v.

XXVII   Heap of stones deposited between forking roots, still from the film Stone-Throwing Chimpanzee (2016).

Colour Pl ates

XXVIII 

Estense.

 Guercino,

Venus, Cupid and Mars, 1634, oil on canvas, 139 × 161 cm, Modena, Galleria

 155

156  

Colour Pl ates

XXIX 

 Domenichino,

The Hunt of Diana, 1617, oil on canvas, 225 x 320 cm, Rome, Galleria Borghese.

Colour Pl ates

XXX 

 Cecco

del Caravaggio, Cupid at the Fountain, 1615–1620, oil on canvas, Private Collection.

 157

158  

Colour Pl ates

XXXI 

 Commercial Poster for the Prinz Heinrich-Flug 1914.

XXXII 

  Hungary, air mail stamp, Icarus flying over Budapest, 1924.

XXXIII 

  Belgian Congo, air mail stamp, Postluchtdienst – Service Postal Aérien, 1921.

Colour Pl ates

XXXIV 

 

 159

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, View of Naples, ca. 1550, oil on wood, 42.2 × 71.2 cm, Rome, Galleria Doria Pamphilii.

160  

Colour Pl ates

XXXV 

XXXVI 

 

Anton van den Wyngaerde, View of Naples, ca. 1550, Oxford, Ashmolean.

 

Tavola Strozzi, 1472, Naples, Museo di San Martino.

Colour Pl ates

 161

Gaze and Agency

Christine Kleiter, Gerhard Wolf

The Falcon, the Eagle and the Owl Raptors’ and Falconers’ Gaze between Practice, Theory and Art(s)

This article discusses various aspects of hunting with avian predators, i.e. hawks1 and owls, starting with the nature of the birds’ day and night vision and the means by which hunters instrumentalised the avian visual system. In the first part, various texts from Greco-Roman Antiquity to early modern Europe will be read in relation to hawking practices. The study also incorporates treatises on medieval hunting and early modern natural history to underline hawking’s broad impact on the early stages of a discipline that came to be known as ornithology. Frederick II’s and Maximilian I’s passion for falconry are excellent examples to demonstrate the importance of hunting with birds in court culture, which can be traced respectively in its visual as well as material culture. Part II shifts from hawking’s visual culture to its material one, presenting a few objects related to falconry in their material dimension and the intertwining between functional and aesthetic aspects. The last chapter discusses Frederick II’s hawking treatise and Dante’s Comedy regarding the complex world of taming, educating, learning and ennobling in falconry, shifting from practices to metaphors inspired by them – particularly concerned with the interaction between human being (falconer) and animal (hawk). It questions the relationship between eagle and falcon, in political, theological and symbolic terms. A final look into Boccaccio’s falcon novel serves as a counterpoint to the royal and divine sphere.

1   For a more detailed explanation of the distinction between falconry and hawking see Richard Grassby, “The Decline of Falconry in Early Modern England”, in: Past & Present, 157 (1997), pp. 37–62, esp. pp. 37–38. We do not follow this distinction in this article.

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Chr istine K leiter, Ger h a r d Wolf

Hunting methods and birds’ vision Hunting with hawks and reflections on bird sight In Book IX of his Historia Animalium, Aristotle writes about an alliance between men and hawks for fowling: In Thrace, in the district sometimes called that of Cedripolis, men hunt for little birds in the marshes with the aid of hawks. The men with sticks in their hands go beating at the reeds and brushwood to frighten the birds out, and the hawks show themselves overhead and frighten them down. The men then strike them with their sticks and capture them. They give a portion of their booty to the hawks; that is, they throw some of the birds up in the air, and the hawks catch them.2 Apparently, the fowlers benefitted from the hawks’ abilities, namely speed, height and mainly sharp sight, but the practice described is not actual falconry. It is particularly interesting that this hunting method, centred on an interaction between men and birds, was carried out in a cross-border region of the Roman Empire such as Thrace and therefore an area of transregional influences.3 Hawks’ sharp sight was not just useful for hawking, where animals were the falconer’s weapon, but also became a means of representing territorial and social control in courtly contexts. A miniature painting in the 1504 so-called Tiroler Fischereibuch (Tyrolean Fishery Book) (fig. 1, plate XX) depicts a hawking scene in a valley near Innsbruck organised in 1497 by Maximilian I in honour of Sultan Bayezid II’s envoy.4 Presumably seen from the “falcon’s-eye view,” the animals pursuing ducks are circling high over the heads of the noblemen. The vast terrain is put not only under the control of the outside onlookers – showing the hunting territory – but also that of the falconers from within the scene. The falcon’s function as a sort of detached eye of the falconer 2 

 Aristotle. The History of Animals, Book IX, part 36. See for a similar account Pliny The Elder, Natural History, Book X, chap. 10, v. 23. 3   Cf. Daniela Boccassini, Il volo della mente. Falconeria e Sofia nel mondo mediterraneo: Islam, Federico II, Dante, Ravenna 2003, p. 39. On aspects of the development of falconry in the Eastern and Western world, cf. Stefan Georges, Das zweite Falkenbuch Kaiser Friedrichs II. Quellen, Entstehung, Überlieferung und Rezeption des Maomin, Berlin 2008, chap. 1. See also Kurt Lindner, Beiträge zu Vogelfang und Falknerei im Altertum, Berlin and New York 1973. 4   Indeed, it is a “re-production” of the outdoor gathering that took place on 24th of July 1497 not exactly there, but on another hunting ground, the “Herzogswiese” near Stams. Cf. Franz Unterkircher, Das Tiroler Fischereibuch Maximilians I. Codex Vindobonensis 7962 (with an introduction, transcription and translation by Franz Unterkircher), Graz et al. 1967, vol. 1, p. 32 and Michal Dziewulski and Robert Born. “The influences of the Ottoman Orient on the Court Culture in Europe”, in: Exhib. Cat. The Sultan’s World. The Ottoman Orient in Renaissance Art, ed. Robert Born, Michal Dziewulski and Guido Messling, Ostfildern-Ruit 2015, p. 69.

The Fa lcon, the Eagle a nd the Ow l

1   Hunt organized by Emperor Maximilian I in honour of the envoy of Sultan Bayezid II, illustration by Jörg Kölderer, in: Tiroler Fischereibuch Maximilians I., 1504, Vienna, ÖNB, Codex Vindobonensis 7962, fol. 12v.

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Chr istine K leiter, Ger h a r d Wolf

characterises the animal as a ‘remote-controlled lens’ through which the territory could be surveyed, and the quarry could be sighted and finally attacked. The fishery book with six illustrations in total served primarily to illustrate Maximilian’s fish ponds and the hunting territories he ruled as the highest-ranking hunter of the Holy Roman Empire (“Oberster Jägermeister des Heiligen Römischen Reiches”), a title which had belonged to the archdukes since the fourteenth century.5 Interestingly, the hunting area in question here is an artificial lake, which no longer exists today, where a vast variety of fish were cultivated.6 Moreover, Maximilian claimed in his autobiography Der Weisskunig that he possessed the best fishponds, which set him above all the other kings.7 Given that hunting is closely bound to the use of a particular territory, including its airspace, the restrictions on hunting in areas marked and defended by the hunter/monarch reinforce larger social structures. The Tyrolean Fishery Book witnesses this correlation of territorial and social boundaries, since one of its functions is to document these hunting grounds. Of course, there were also certain hunting privileges for the landowner, in this case the ruler and his hunters.8 Besides duck hawking with falcons, the illustration also shows a stag hunt with hounds and, most importantly, fishing. The accompanying text describes the depicted fishing ponds and the qualities of their fish population.9 In the image, the location encompasses a meadow, a lake and a stream between high mountains, providing the perfect ground for Maximilian and his men to perform all three hunting disciplines at the same time.10 The hunt for the Eastern envoy is “reproduced” in this particular area since it provided the opportunity to impress the emissary with the full variety of hunting activities rather than just one. As if that were not enough, it also sets the appropriate stage for an act of great diplomatic importance and meaning, in which “Eastern” falconry is performed by the imperial huntsmen alongside Ottoman hunters that are testing their skills in Western hunting practices (in the case of the stag hunt with a lance).11 While a figure on horseback wearing a turban and a coat is engaged in hunting

5 

 Exhib. Cat. Emperor Maximilian I and the Age of Dürer, ed. Eva Michel and Maria Luise Sternath, Munich et al. 2012, Cat. no. 90. 6   Unterkircher (as in note 4), p. 21. 7   Cf. Michel and Sternath (as in note 5), Cat. no. 92. 8   For an example in North Italy cf., Giancarlo Malacarne, Le cacce del Principe. L’ars venandi nella terra dei Gonzaga, Modena 1998, p. 58. 9   Cf. Exhib. Cat. Herrlich Wild. Höfische Jagd in Tirol, ed. Wilfried Seipel, Vienna 2004, Cat. no. 1.5. For a broader discussion of Maximilian’s passion for hunting and his preference for falconry cf. Larry Silver, Marketing Maximilian. The Visual Ideology of a Holy Roman Emperor, Princeton N. J. 2008, pp. 170–182. 10   Cf. Exhib. Cat. Herrlich Wild (as in note 9), Cat. no. 1.5; Exhib. Cat. Natur und Kunst. Handschriften und Alben aus der Ambraser Sammlung Erzherzog Ferdinands II. (1529–1595), ed. Alfred Auer and Eva Irblich, Vienna 1995, Cat. no. 6. 11   On the origins of falconry see note 3.

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ducks, Maximilian I is depicted twice engaged in fishing – in a boat in his characteristic grey-green hunting dress in the centre of the illustration and, on the lower left, sitting on a horse.12 It is quite interesting that in this illustration the Emperor himself is not shown as an active falconer (this role is given to a diplomatic guest – maybe the envoy himself?), whereas Maximilian, an enthusiastic falconer, is only depicted as a fisherman, engaged actively on the boat or as an advisor overlooking the haul. Duck hawking frequently used peregrine falcons, prized for their stoops at speed that allow them to overhaul and take fast-flying quarry.13 Here, they are depicted both sitting on the falconer’s gloved fist and flying above the huntsmen. In the middle ground near the river, a falconer can be seen. With his other equipment probably stored in the bag fixed at his belt, he carries a feathered lure to attract the falcon’s attention. This is a very important tool used to recall hawks and prevent their straying and reverting to the wild, which would be a great loss for the hunter but foremost for the ruler himself.14 This miniature can thus be read as a representation of the double function of the sublimity of the falcon’s sight and its use in falconry as a physical and a social marker of power. Whilst trained hawks were used for capturing quarry, owls, primarily nocturnal, were also tamed by men for a more passive hunting method. Their day-blindness and sharp vision at night was also intriguing from a scientific point of view as will be shown in the following paragraph studying the French Renaissance natural historian Pierre Belon’s work.

The particularity of nocturnal birds for hunting purposes Let us recall the well-known anecdote by Pliny the Elder about the competition between Zeuxis and Parrhasius, in which birds are deceived by the extraordinary skill of Zeuxis in the veristic reproduction of grapes in a painting.15 The lifelike grapes serve to lure the birds in and, in a certain sense, the painting itself becomes a trap. Of course, ultimately the painting will not cause harm to the tricked birds, but this anecdote could also be read as a way to picture birds’ ability to recognise objects in a way that is similar to how humans conceive an object. In other words, the anecdote deals 12  13  14 

 Cf.

Silver (as in note 9), p. 173. John Cummins, The Hound and the Hawk. The Art of Medieval Hunting, London 1988, p. 191.  Cummins (as in note 13), pp. 201–202 and pp. 210–211; Malacarne (as in note 8), pp. 62–68. Early written traces of the use of the lure (it. logoro) as training equipment can be found (in a figurative sense and therefore already rooted in the volgare) in one of the sonnets by the Sienese author Cecco Angiolieri (ca. 1260–1311/13): E dico: “Dato li sia d’una lancia!”, / ciò a mi’ padre, che mi tien sì magro / che tornare’ senza logro di Francia (LXXIV, 9–11). See Cecco Angiolieri, Le Rime, ed. Antonio Lanza, Rome 1990. Objects and equipment used in falconry will be discussed later in this article. See further the contributions by Baudouin van den Abeele, Herman Roodenburg and Monika Wagner in this volume. 15   Pliny The Elder (as in note 2), Book XXXV, chap. 36, vv. 65–66.  

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not only with the often-discussed topos of mimesis but also with the fact that ancient authors and/or artists were already considering the bi-dimensional vision of birds and their way of seeing from close up and at a distance. Thus, from close up the painting, or the lure, wasn’t functional anymore, because the birds decoded the optical illusion evoked by the masterfully painted still life.16 If so, what does this tell us about the way humans since Greco Roman Antiquity thought about birds’ eyesight in general and the eyesight of diurnal and nocturnal raptors in particular? The sharp eyesight of diurnal raptors is indeed very useful for hunting purposes, but nocturnal birds like owls are nearly day-blind, a circumstance already discussed by authors from Antiquity like Aristotle, and for which early modern naturalists were still looking for explanations. To delve deeper into this aspect, we want to take a closer look at the work of one of the most important naturalists of the 16th century, the French pharmacist and diplomat Pierre Belon. He describes the particularities of owls as nocturnal birds of prey in his treatise on birds entitled L’Histoire de la nature des oyseaux, published in Paris in 1555. For each of the six different owl species (fig. 2) represented in the text, the author stresses how they are superior to other animals because of their ability to see during the night, which would account for their enormous eyes.17 However, he cannot limit his praise by noting that (leaning on Aristotle and his description of the owls’ bad eyesight) even these birds cannot see anything if there is absolutely no light at all.18 For this, Belon refers to a rather simple experiment, which is to put an owl in a dark room in order to demonstrate that nocturnal birds are also unable to see in complete darkness.19 He also refers to their eye colour, a reddish-brown “couleur verone”, which the Greek authors already used to refer to nocturnal birds as Glaucopis. This is an epithet for the Greek goddess Athena20 and indeed, in Homer’s Iliad, Book I, v. 206, the goddess Athena is described as γλαυκῶπις, “the bright-eyed/flashing-eyed”.21 The goddess was associated with the owl from very early on, as can also be seen in the well-known iconography of Pallas Athene with an owl.22

16   Cf. for a similar approach Jörg Schirra and R. J. Täuschung, “Ähnlichkeit und Immersion: Die Vögel des Zeuxis”, in: Vom Realismus der Bilder. Interdisziplinäre Forschungen zur Semantik bildhafter Darstellungsformen, ed. Klaus Sachs-Hombach and Klaus Rehkämpfer, Magdeburg 2000, pp. 119–135. 17   Belon also notes the same characteristic (among others) for an efficient and excellent falcon, cf. Pierre Belon, L‘Histoire de la nature des oyseaux avec leurs descriptions et naïfs portraicts retirez du naturel, Paris 1555, Book II, chap. XVIII, p. 116. Cf. Desmond Morris, Owl, London 2009. 18   Aristotle (as in note 2), Book IX, Part 34. 19   Belon (as in note 17), Book II, chap. XXIX. 20   Belon (as in note 17), Book II, chap. XXIX, p. 134. 21   Cf. for the two translations Homer, The Iliad, with an English translation by A.T. Murray, two volumes, Cambridge/London 1924 and 1960. 22    For a very early example see a bronze statue at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Acc. no. 50.11.1 https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/254648 (accessed June 5 2020); cf. Eric M. Moormann, Lexikon der antiken Gestalten, Stuttgart 1995, pp. 137–141.

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2 

 De notre grand Duc, printed page with woodcut, 37.5 × 24.0 cm, in: Pierre Belon, L’ Histoire de la nature des oyseaux, Paris 1555, p. 136, BPU Neuchâtel, ZQ 120.

Another particularity Belon discusses in his general introduction to night birds is a sort of eyelid which the birds can half or entirely close. Belon supposes that this helps them to see better during night-time.23 As we know today, Belon observed the partly transparent nictitating membrane or “third eyelid“, which gives moisture and protection to the eye, but is not a sight-sharpening “tool”.24 It is interesting how pheno­mena like this were described as an explanation for the seemingly miraculous night sight. In this period, Andreas Vesalius performed public dissections of human bodies in Padua and Bologna, from 1537 onwards, and his famous treatise on anatomy De 23  24 

p. 51.

 Belon  Steve

(as in note 17), chap. XXIX, p. 134. Parker, Color and Vision. The Evolution of Eyes and Perception, Buffalo and New York 2016,

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humani corporis fabrica was published in 1543. Padua indeed advanced to become one of the first universities with a school of anatomy.25 Belon, himself a medical student in Padua in 1544, and other naturalists also made dissections. Indeed, besides practicing and writing about it, in his fish treatise of 1551 Belon shows a woodcut of an actual dissection.26 His bird treatise, though, does not give any image of a dissected bird. Ulisse Aldrovandi, on the other hand, shows an owl’s head in profile with the bird’s inner, though this is less a dissection than a closer look at the animal (fig. 3). He may have done so to argue that the ear had a kind of balancing organ for the day-blind bird to equilibrate the lack of sight. As Florike Egmond has pointed out, zooming in, i.e. focussing on a detail in a depiction, was a known practice for techniques and modes of representation from the Middle Ages onward, but it is quite intriguing that naturalists from the 16th century onwards use the method to focus on fascinating and distinctive details of the owl’s ear.27 This is linked to the (later) invention of the microscope by Galileo Galilei, a member of the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome.28 Indeed, the drawing collection of the Rome-based naturalist Cassiano dal Pozzo, also a member of the Lincei, includes an anatomical drawing of an owl’s head, again in profile, where the hearing organ is presented by pulling forward the ear flap, which normally hides the inner part.29 The naturalists were intrigued by the fact that the so-called long-eared owl (whose “ears” are only erect detached feathers) and other species like the common barn owl do not have an outer ear, but depend heavily on their hearing organ (if they had one, a subject of contention). The owl’s lack of sight during daytime could also be considered an actual “ability” very suited for passive hunting methods. This method makes use of a phenomenon called mobbing, whereby potentially dangerous predators – like owls – are attacked by several other smaller birds in order to drive them off.30 As owls do not react to the smaller birds (non-nocturnal raptors would indeed escape from them), the rather blind and motionless owl can be used as a decoy to attract other birds and lure them into traps that had been previously set up. An already well-known phenomenon that 25 

 Some scholars described the year of 1543 as the first ever “scientific revolution.” See Guy Freeland and Anthony Corones (ed.), 1543 and All That. Image and Word, Change and Continuity in the ProtoScientific-Revolution, Dordrecht/Boston/London 2000. 26   Pierre Belon, L’Histoire naturelle des estranges poissons marins, avec la vraie peincture et description du daulphin, et de plusieurs autres de son espèce / observée par Pierre Belon du Mans, Paris 1551, pp. 40 f. 27   Florike Egmond, Eye for Detail. Images of Plants and Animals in Art and Science, 1500–1630. London 2017, p. 186. 28   Cf. David Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx. Galileo, his friends, and the beginnings of modern natural history, Chicago and London 2002, chap. 6 and chap. 7. 29   Cf. Henrietta McBurney, Ian Rolfe, Caterina Napoleone and Paula Findlen (ed.), Birds, other animals and natural curiosities (The Paper Museum of Cassiano Dal Pozzo. Series B. Parts Four and Five), London 2017, Cat. no. 162. 30   See also Aristotle and Pliny for a very early description of this phenomenon, Aristotle (as in note 2), Book IX, Part 1; Pliny The Elder (as in note 2), Book X, chap. 95, vv. 204–205.

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3 

 De Avibus Rapacibus Nocturnis, printed page with woodcut, in: Ulisse Aldrovandi, Ornithologiae tomus alter, Bononiae 1599, p. 526, Augsburg, Staats- und Stadtbibliothek, 2 Nat 1a -1.

had been observed for centuries, this “ability” was used for fowlers’ and falconers’ best possible benefit. Early medieval descriptions of this method can be found in the hunting treatise Le Livre du roy Modus et de la royne Ratio, written by Henri de Ferrières between 1354 and 1377.31 The oldest illustrated version from 1379, today preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris, BnF, ms. Fr. 12399) shows how to use the

31 

 Sandrine Pagenot, “La transmission du cycle enluminé d’un traité didactique profane de 1379 à la fin du XVe siècle: Le ‘Livre de déduis’ de Henri de Ferrières”, in: Re-Inventing Traditions. On the Trans­ misson of Artistic Patterns in Late Medieval Manuscript Illumination, ed. Joris Corin Hayder and Christine Seide, Frankfurt am Main 2015, pp. 49–63; Sandrine Pagenot, “Le recours au texte pour la création iconographique profane au XIVe siècle: le cas d’un traité de chasse (Livre du roy Modus et de la royne Ratio de Henri de Ferrières”, in: Quand l’image relit le texte. Regards croisés sur les manuscrits medievaux, ed. Sandrine Hériché-Pradeau and Maud Pérez-Simon, Paris 2013, pp. 271–282; Bernard Bousmanne, “Le livre du roy Modus et de la royne Ratio”, in: Art de l’enluminure, 18 (2011), pp. 18–63.

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4 

 Catching a sparrowhawk attracted by an owl as a decoy, in: Henri de Ferrières, Le livre du roy Modus et de la royne Ratio (France, 1379), fol. 86v. Paris, BNF, Ms. français 12399.

owl during daytime to attract songbirds as well as predators like the sparrowhawk. Whistles, sticks covered in bird-lime or a snapping contraption were then used to catch the birds. To provoke a day-tired eagle owl to move its wings and consequently to function as a lure, the hidden hunters attached a string to its feet which could be pulled if necessary (fig. 4, plate XXI).32 As this paragraph has shown, the interest of artists and naturalists in bird’s vision remained undiminished. Belon and other early modern naturalists were seeking 32 

 For a German translation of the ca. 1455 version today preserved in Brussels (Bibliothèque Royale Albert Ier, MS. 10.218–19) cf. Dagmar Thoss (ed.), Le livre du Roy Modus. Bibliothèque royale Albert 1er, Bruxelles, Ms 10.218: facsimile & commentarium, Graz 1989. Cf. for a discussion of the motif of the snapping contraption (‘Kobe’) in medieval and Renaissance art: Jeroen Stumpel, “The Foul Fowler Found out: On a Key Motif in Dürer’s ‘Four Witches’”, in: Simiolus 30, 3/4 (2003), pp. 143–160, here pp. 146–149.

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answers for the night sight phenomenon, but still based their knowledge on antique literature to which they added “new” empirical information gained from anatomical observation to solve the puzzle. Nevertheless, the use of the birds’ vision or non-vision was driven towards perfection for hunting and trapping purposes. This is even more evident in another hunting method, which combines both the keen sight of the active falcon and the blind decoy owl.

The alliance of falcons and owls for hawking A characteristic illustration of this type of hawking is a woodcut from Emperor Maximilian I’s enormous graphic project of the Triumphal Procession series (fig. 5 and fig. 6), created between 1516 and 1518.33 Most of the 136 designs are attributed to Hans Burgkmair, the rest to Albrecht Altdorfer, Hans Springklee, Leonhard Beck and Hans Schäufelin. Woodcut no. 6, designed by Burgkmair, depicts five falconers on horseback holding their birds, one of which is not a falcon but a massive eagle owl. Woodcut no. 5 shows the master falconer Hans Teuschel and falcons in flight, and nos. 7 to 14 depict other huntsmen on horseback lined up for a procession and accompanied by yet others covering the broad practices of hunting at the Habsburgian court. As stated above, hawking was one of Maximilian’s most loved pursuits and, in this context, it should be pointed out that the line of huntsmen is headed by falconry and seems to continue in hierarchical order. Maximilian obtained the falcons from various places such as Russia, Scandinavia and Greece, and 15 falconers as well as about 60 “servants”, some of whom appear in the woodcut series, were responsible for their care.34 No. 5 and no. 6 should be imagined as a pair showing the master falconer in front of his falconers. As dictated in 1512 to his secretary, Marx Treitzsaurwein, Emperor Maximilian explicitly wished Teuschel to be depicted on horseback with a lure (seen at his belt) and holding a banner, followed by five other mounted falconers with four falcons and one owl. One of the followers should bear a perch, which could be represented by the long wand-like object fixed to the falconer’s belt in the foreground. A modification from the emperor’s requirements is the number of flying falcons shown on woodcut no. 5. Instead of the three birds dictated by the emperor, five falcons are depicted: the first catches a heron,

33 

 The project was only executed in 1796 due to the emperor’s death in 1519 and the interruption of the printed series. Cf. Exhib. Cat. Hispania-Austria. Die katholischen Könige, Maximilian I. und die Anfänge der Casa de Austria in Spanien, ed. Artur Rosenauer and Alfred Kohler, Milan 1992, Cat. no. 136 and Exhib. Cat. Emperor Maximilian I and the Age of Dürer (as in note 5), Cat. no. 68. A first version of the series was executed in an edition in 1526 thanks to the efforts of Maximilian’s grandson, the Archduke Ferdinand. Here we are referring to the 1796 Bartsch edition, cf. Exhib. Cat. Emperor Maximilian I and the Age of Dürer (as in note 5), Cat. no. 68. 34   Cf. Exhib. Cat. Natur und Kunst (as in note 10), Cat. no. 6 and Silver (as in note 9), pp. 170–171.

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5 

 Hans Burgkmair the Elder, Triumphal Procession series: Master Falconer Teuschel with hunting falcons, 1796 (1526), woodcut, Vienna, Albertina, inv. no. DG1931/35/5.

the second a vulture and the third a duck, while the other two seem simply to compositionally “complete” the hunting scene or link it contextually to the other woodcut. 35 Interestingly in woodcut no. 6, the sportsmen dressed for the triumphal procession are presented in poses that demonstrate the feather-ornaments on their hats, whereas the falcons’ hoods do not have any visible embellishment.36 The eagle owl, which is not hooded, is shown in a mute dialogue with its falconer. The discrepancy between the hooded falcons and the bald-headed owl further illustrates these raptors’ different visual abilities, almost caricaturising it in the case of the owl. The eagle owl was primarily used in hawking the red kite, a diurnal predator and scavenger known for its ability to fly very high and for its capability of defending itself using its great agility to avoid capture. Therefore, it was counted among the most chal35 

 Stanley Appelbaum, The Triumph of Maximilian I. 137 woodcuts by Hans Burgkmair and others. With a translation of descriptive text, introduction and notes, New York 1964, p. 2. 36   Cf. “From Hoods and stands” (p. 179) for a deeper insight.

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6 

 Hans Burgkmair the Elder, Triumphal Procession series: Falconers with falcons and eagle-ear owl, 1796 (1526), woodcut, Vienna, Albertina, inv. no. DG1931/35/6.

lenging of quarry species, and this flight was eventually considered even more difficult than the similar one at herons, a very prestigious quarry for which the peregrine or the rare gyrfalcon were mainly used.37 As Belon reports in his treatise, the kite could generally only be captured using an eagle owl with a fox brush tied to its feet, feigning a prey as decoy in order to bring the kite down to a suitable altitude for attack by one or more sakers, or other large falcons.38 As the eagle owl was mobbed by the kite in order to rob it of its furry prey, a falcon was unhooded and “thrown” (or “slipped”) from the falconer’s fist to attempt to catch the kite. Antonio Tempesta’s engraving in Giovanni 37 

 Cf. Cummins (as in note 13), p. 191 and p. 204; Christian Antoine de Chamerlat, Falconry and Art, London 1987. 38   Belon (as in note 17), Book II, chap. XXX, p. 136. The kite would generally be at high altitude looking for food and, from such a height, would easily outfly falcons (often flown in “casts” of two or “leashes” of three) unless they could commence their flight with less of a disadvantage. The falcon would have to out-climb the kite and, once above, make a series of stoops (dives) which the kite would use its agility to evade. Such flights could go to great altitudes and cover miles.

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7   Antonio Tempesta, Hunting with the Eagle Owl, in: Giovanni Pietro Olina, Vccelliera ovvero discorso della natura e proprietà di diversi uccelli, Rome 1622.

Pietro Olina’s bird treatise L’Uccelliera, published in Rome in 1622, documents this exact hawking method with an eagle owl (fig. 7).39 Here, the fox brush lure fixed to the feet of the two depicted owls is clearly visible.40 In Belon’s description of the flight at kite, he astonishingly questions why the kite is initially agitated by the owl, if in the end he leaves the nocturnal bird uninjured. Belon again refers to Aristotle for an answer, citing his reasoning that normally predators do not hurt each other as a kind of unwritten rule.41 While Aristotle (and Belon) falls back on the hierarchical order of the animal kingdom for his explanation, the falconers crossed this “predetermined” 39  40 

 Olina’s

text gives also the alternative of a little owl (Athene noctua). Francesco Solinas, “Cacce romane”, in: Exhib. Cat. Cacce principesche. L’arte venatoria nella prima età moderna, ed. id., Rome 2013, p. 14 and illustration on p. 16, fig. 5.A.; Francesco Solinas, L’Uccelliera. Un libro di arte e di scienza nella Roma dei primi Lincei, Florence 2000. 41   Belon (as in note 17), Book II, chap. XXX, pp. 136–137; Aristotle (as in note 2), Book VIII, part 3.  Cf.

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boundary to attain an artificial, aesthetic flight outside of their natural scope. In using the owl as a decoy and the trained falcon, the falconers could capture quarry that is normally out of their reach or their terrain – thereby stretching their grasp towards the sky. This brings us once again to the alliance between hawks and men stressed by antique authors like Aristotle whose description of fowling with hawks shows humans’ ability to draw upon close observation of avifauna and apply this to highly developed hunting techniques.

From hoods and stands As discussed above, sight is the falcon’s most developed sense. For hawking, exploiting this sense was therefore paramount in order to best employ the falcon’s abilities. Considering the examples at the Habsburg court and, more precisely, from Burgkmair’s woodcut no. 6, the falconer in the foreground displays falconry furniture such as the hood, the hawking bag to store equipment like the “tiring” (tiratorium), a piece of wing or thigh to pacify the hawks if necessary, and a lure on the falconer’s belt. The hoods42 are most crucial, as they are the essential instrument for keeping hawks calm. By shutting out every source of light, they guarantee that the hawks are not affected by external stimuli via their highly developed sense of vision. Furthermore, it is very important that the hood fits perfectly to prevent injuries. From the moment a hawk is unhooded, it gets agitated and ready to catch the quarry it is directed to, a behaviour that is a) natural to the hawk and b) strengthened by constant training. In this way, a hawk becomes a weapon that one can “draw” at the most convenient moment, similar to an arrow that is pulled out of its quiver. One could also conclude that a hawk which is manned by sitting thus blindfolded on the gloved fist over a huge amount of time becomes in a certain way an extension of the falconer’s body, a pre-programmed detachable winged and eyed (once unhooded) hand.43 During his crusade in 1228/29, Frederick II was introduced to the use of hoods, and spread the knowledge to the rest of Europe.44 There existed a more brutal way of manning hawks, which is shown in Frederick’s falconry treatise before the explanation

42 

 There existed various forms and decorative levels for these objects depending on the hierarchical level, cf. Cummins (as in note 13), pp. 201–202. 43   Marcy Norton discusses, in her article, the concept of the neuroscientific discourse of ‘peripersonal space’ in this regard, see: Marcy Norton, “Going to the Birds. Animals as Things and Beings in Early Modernity”, in: Early Modern Things. Objects and their Histories, 1500–1800, ed. Paula Findlen, Abingdon et al. 2013, p. 58. 44   Cf. Olaf B. Rader, Friedrich II. Der Sizilianer auf dem Kaiserthron. Eine Biographie, Munich 2010, p. 305.

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of how to use hoods.45 In this technique, the hawk’s eyelids are sewn in order to temporarily blind them, an operation that is illustrated for didactic purposes.46 This is one of several illustrations in the treatise, which shows both images of hooded falcons and pages only depicting the hood, emphasising its importance. On page 104v, there are two hoods without braces (the straps that close the hood) and on page 105r one hood with a brace to tighten it to the falcon’s head – a process described in detail in the text. Consequently, besides literary sources on hunting, such as the fundamental De arte venandi cum avibus by Frederick II, and later hunting treatises such as the Roy Modus, material evidence can give a deeper insight into the methods for training hawks.47 How were hoods stored when not on the hawk’s head? Frederick’s II book does not give any hints, but there was actually a way of storing them in order to prevent them losing their shape. At the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence, four hoods in different shapes and sizes are displayed on four stands, three of them in ivory, one in wood.48 All four are stored today in the museum’s armoury, where they are easily overlooked as they are exhibited on the lower shelf of a big showcase full of weaponry. Maybe the best known stand is 194 C (fig. 8, plate XXII), an ivory object with the Toledo-Medici coat of arms on the bottom part, which links it to Grand Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici and his wife Eleonora de Toledo, both known for their passion for falconry

45 

 The original edition was probably lost in the battle of Parma in 1248. Today there are various versions. It is very likely that the copy of the original commissioned and completed by Frederick’s son Manfred and illustrated with over 500 bird illuminations, today preserved in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Cod. Pal. Lat. 1071, is the closest one to the original. Another copy of this type with a translation in French, commissioned by Jean de Dampierre et St. Dizier, is today preserved in Paris, Bibliothéque Nationale, MS. Fr. 12400. For this article we are referring to the copy in the Vatican. Cf. Anne Möller, “Die Geschichte des Falkenbuchs”, in: Von der Kunst mit Vögeln zu jagen. Das Falkenbuch Friedrichs II. – Kulturgeschichte und Ornithologie, ed. Mamoun Fansa and Carsten Ritzau, Mainz 2008, pp. 29–33. 46   Cf. Arnold Willemsen, Das Falkenbuch Kaiser Friedrichs II. Nach der Prachthandschrift in der Vatikanischen Bibliothek. Dortmund 1980, fol. 61v and p. 275. 47   Cf. for a general overview Ernst Kantorowicz, Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite, Berlin 1931, pp. 330–336; Francis Klingender, Animals in Art and Thought to the End of the Middle Ages. London 1971, pp. 447–450; Fansa and Ritzau (as in note 45); Rader (as in note 44), esp. chap. 9 on Frederick as a falconer. Silver also refers to the fact that Emperor Maximilian I was in possession of Frederick’s bird treatise, cf. Silver (as in note 9), p. 173. Cf. Exhib. Cat. Maximilian I. 1459–1519, ed. Franz Unterkircher, Vienna 1959, Cat. no. 596. 48   Igino Benvenuto Supino (ed.), Catalogo del R. Museo Nazionale di Firenze (Palazzo del Podestà). Rome 1898, p. 255, Cat. nos. 193 and 194. 194 C is part of the Carrand collection, as well as 193 C. The Ressman Collection (also in the Bargello) has another ivory stand (253 R). A fourth stand (252 R) is made from wood. We want to thank Ilaria Ciseri for a brief check of the Carrand and Ressman inventories and Benedetta Chiesi for her kind advice. For a very accurate account see now the catalogue entries by Benedetta Chiesi in: Ilaria Ciseri (ed.), Gli avori del Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Milan 2018. Cf. also Raymond Koechlin, Les ivoires gothiques français, two volumes, Paris 1924, vol. 1, p. 461; Exhib. Cat. La caccia e le arti. Mostra nazionale e internazionale della caccia, ed. L.G. Boccia and Filippo Rossi, Florence 1960, V8 a,b,c,d. The hoods are all dated mid 16th c., 252 R is dated 1520 and attributed as German art, whereas the hood on 253 R is dated between 16th and 17th century. See Ciseri (2018) for the latest account on this.

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 Stand for falcon hood with the Medici-Toledo coat of arms and falcon hood, Florence (?) ca. 1550, ivory, leather, velvet, feathers, Ø 4.7 cm, 9.3 cm (ivory). Florence, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, inv. no. 194 Carrand.

and fishing.49 Before we concentrate on the stands, we want to delve more into the headgear placed on 194 C. The hood, in dark leather with red cloth-covered eyepieces, is topped with white feathers (probably cockerel feathers in a rather bad state), while the wire that holds the 49 

 Luisa Berretti, “‘[…] Le caccie di Cerreto le quali son veramante così belle et dilettevoli che più non si può desiderare […]’: Cosimo I de’ Medici e la pratica venatoria”, in: Exhib. Cat. A caccia con Cosimo I. Armi medicee in Villa, ed. Marilena Tamassia, Livorno 2014, pp. 35–44. Mario Scalini assumes that the stand was part of the inventory of Palazzo Vecchio of 1553 together with 12 gloves and a box with 40 hoods. See: ASF GM n. 28, c. 24: “12 guanti nuovi da strozzieri / u° schatola dentrovi 40 cappelli da falconi” Cf. Mario Scalini, “Curiosità e oggetti esotici tra i preziosi medicei”, in: Tesori dalle Collezioni Medicee, ed. Cristina Acidini Luchinat, Florence 1997, p. 154, note 11; cf. also Berretti 2014, pp. 39–40 and note 42. There the stand is mentioned again, but it is not part of her argument. Due to Benedetta Chiesi’s new research regarding the stands, it seems much more likely that this item was listed in the inventory of the Guardaroba Medicea in 1666: “una forma d’avorio per far cappelletti da falconi o renzuoli, con arme de’ Medici e Toledo” (ASF, GM, 741, c. 130, n. 65). See Ciseri (as in note 48).

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feathers is adorned with a fine greenish thread. The leather of the hood is decorated in a rather simple manner, and the braces which open and close the hood are similarly made from good quality leather. As noted, the hood must fit perfectly on the hawk’s head to guarantee comfort and be completely light tight to keep the bird calm. This means that they were made for each individual hawk: indeed there is a variety of hoods and various forms of stands (sometimes with a slightly sloped back for hawks’ heads). Some of these types are present in the Bargello collection. One additional feature that bears witness to the intertwining of function and aesthetics of these apparently more decorative objects is the feather plume on the hood. Apart from recalling the decorative feathers or animal figures made out of leather or other materials that were placed on knights’ helmets during tournaments, the plume could also allow the falconer to take off the hood with only one hand, a procedure that would indeed lead to frequent renewal of the feather crown and gives a hint to a more ceremonial, rather than practical, use of such feathered hoods.50 These hood stands bespeak the high representative quality of the objects and accessories related to courtly falconry. They are made of materials such as ivory or wood, which were both precious and lightweight, and therefore practical. The ivory stand 194 C in the Bargello is 9.3 cm high, the second tallest of the four. In addition to the coat of arms at the front of the stand, the oval-shaped base is encircled with a feather or leaf-inspired ornament, which begins at the coat of arms before tapering in the back. Above the coat of arms are three narrow ringed elements, which lead into a tall concave section. The latter may have imitated the falcon’s neck, but also functioned as a practical handle for transport and as a mount for storing the hood. The stand is capped by an imitation of a falcon’s head that can hold the hood. In the case of 194 C, it is interesting that this part was sawn off in the middle, so that today only half of the head is preserved. The beak was possibly also cut off. In general, this item seems very worn, which may be due either to bad conservation or to its actual use in the context of hunting. Some of the wear and features of the design suggest stands were attached to the front of the mounted falconer’s saddle in some cases.51 Since the bottom part of the ivory stand 194 C was hollowed out, it could have been slipped over the saddle pommel or stored in the falconer’s bag for greater convenience. In the case of 194 C and its base with feather ornaments one could think of Piero de’ Medici’s (1416–1469) impresa of a falcon holding a diamond ring in its claws and the motto “SEMPER” which stands for the Medici family’s monarchical ambitions and

50 

 Cf., for example the Imperial Armoury Collection in Vienna which preserves hoods from the second half of the 16th c., crowned by stylised helmets made of leather, p.e. inv. no. Hofjagd- und Rüstkammer, D 37 (https://www.khm.at/objektdb/detail/374113/?offset=15&lv=list, accessed June 22 2020). 51   This hypothesis is mentioned in Supino (as in note 48), p. 255. 193 C shows also a hole on the ­bottom. Chiesi questions this use, see Ciseri (as in note 48), p. 425.

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dynastic succession, as Linda Koch convincingly pointed out,52 – a visual legacy which was very present in the Florentine cityscape and still reused by other members of the family in the 16th century. Much like the stand’s Medici-Toledo stemma, the frieze of the Tabernacle of the Crucifix in San Miniato al Monte in Florence (commissioned 1447) situates feathers around a central ring. Of course, this is quite a loose comparison, but for Medici family members and other noble parties, it must have been noticeable, a nod to Piero de’ Medici and his use of the falcon as a symbol of power. Besides the aforementioned coat of arms, inscriptions such as motti or references to the hawk itself can be found on the stands. Indeed, ivory stand 253 R bears the inscription “TERTIOLUS ASTURIS” at the bottom and hints that this smaller stand (7.5 cm) was used for a male (lat. tertiolus) goshawk hood. 53 193 C shows a hawking scene with birds and dogs at the bottom which could likewise hint at the hunting method for which the hawk was used. As the inscription reads “Forme da semerlo pisulle”, it gives proof that this stand held the hood for a merlin, a bird commonly used for hunting the Eurasian skylark.54 What we can deduce from the stands analysed in the Bargello collection is that their highly functional features do not at all exclude or diminish their artistic value for special occasions. The addition of personalised features like the coat of arms for the Medici-Toledo stand, motti, dedications or hints at hawking methods – makes them part of the meaningful imagery of the whole sphere of hunting, where hawks are considered even more important than hounds and horses and where they are perceived as weapons that were fit to be adorned with precious hoods and their accompanying ivory decorations. From the analysis of the case studies discussed above, we could trace the long cultural history of hawking at European courts, where different methods were practiced and passed on for generations. This knowledge was also transferred through literature such as hunting treatises and books on natural history which, since Greco-Roman Antiquity, reflected the great interest and the practical motivations of these works, even if falconry was not known in occidental Antiquity. The translation of Arabic

52   Linda A. Koch, “Power, Prophecy, and Dynastic Succession in Early Medici Florence: The Falcon Impresa of Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici”, in: Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 73/4 (2010), pp. 507–538. 53   Female hawks, commonly used for hunting, are bigger and therefore often more useful for hawking larger quarry. There exists a total of seven known ivory stands, dispersed in various museums and collections., as Tomasi lists in his catalogue entry, Cf. Simonetta Castronovo, Fabrizio Crivello and Michele Tomasi (ed.), Collezioni del Museo civico d’arte antica di Torino: Avori medievali. Savigliano 2016, Cat. no. 25; see also Exhib. Cat. Il Tesoro della città. Opere d’arte e oggetti preziosi da Palazzo Madama, ed. Silvana Pettenati and Giovanni Romano, Turin 1996, p. 197; Luigi Mallè, Smalti-Avori del Museo d’Arte Antica, Turin 1969, p. 311; Koechlin (as in note 48), vol. 2, Cat. nos. 1250 and 1251; Ciseri (as in note 48). 54   See Ciseri (as in note 48), p. 425.

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treatises from the 12th /13th centuries onwards played a prime role in the elaboration of the royal and noble art of falconry in Europe and had a strong impact on ornithological knowledge in general.

The falcon and the eagle (Frederick II, Dante, Boccaccio) The line of argumentation has reached a point where we have returned to the initial observation that the appreciation of the bird’s eye, that of the falcon in particular, can be seen as part of the prehistory of optical prostheses for the human eye. In reality, the engagement with these eyes and hawks in falconry has a long history of its own, from its early beginnings, its migrations from Central Asia to the Mediterranean world and to East Asia; its role in Islamic and later in European courts; to its present role in the United Arab Emirates. In a transcultural horizon, falconry became a multifaceted practice and technique, with its set of objects and rituals (as well as language), varying according to the many dimensions of hunting, with many continuities and also changes over time and space. Frederick II’s famous book on “the art of hunting with birds”, based on experience, conversations with falconers and research on manuals in Arabic and other languages, is not only concerned with falconry sensu stricto.55 It presents itself as an ornithological treatise, describing the biodiversity of southern Italy (though not exclusively) and its more than 100 different bird species, with their feathers and bodies, their geographical areas and migrations, their habits and their habitat. It is an environmental study avant la lettre. It is based on sharp-eyed observation and profound knowledge of nature, according to the famous statement: “Intentio vero nostra est manifestare ea quae sunt sicut sunt.” It does not exclusively study birds as quarry, but also includes birds which came to the court as precious gifts, as for example a yellow headed parrot (probably a sulphur-crested cockatoo). Its ultimate hero, however, is the falconer, with the hawks, the respective instruments and techniques. Frederick, on the one hand, draws on the Siculo-Norman tradition, summarised in two treatises on hawking, the most influential one Dancus rex, which discusses falconry as a royal endeavour, and is based on Arabic texts. On the other hand, he directly relies on Arabic works, for example ninthcentury treatises from Abbasid Bagdad. At Frederick’s commission, Theodor of Antioch had a compilation of these texts, which was attributed to the so-called Moamin, translated into Latin. This had a wide distribution in medieval and early modern Europe,

55   Rader (as in note 44), pp. 298–306. Ragnar Kinzelbach, “Modi auium – Die Vogelarten im Falkenbuch des Kaisers Friedrich II”, in: Fansa and Ritzau (as in note 45), pp. 63–135.

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 Young girl with falcon and little dog called La Falconiera, Southern Italy, first half of the 13th c., sardonyx agate, Florence, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, inv. no. 1244 Carrand.

whereas Frederick’s book remained mostly unknown for a long time.56 In her wideranging study Il volo della mente: Falconeria e Sofia nel mondo mediterraneo. Islam, Federico II, Dante (2003), Daniela Boccassini has elaborated on the poetic, political, philosophical, mystical, and erotic discourses of falconry in Arabic and other texts from late Antiquity to Dante.57 The following considerations are strongly inspired by her readings and arguments, even if they only consider a few of the points she discusses and go beyond them in a short excursus on Boccaccio.

56  57 

 Boccassini  Boccassini

(as in note 3), chap. 1 and 2, in particular pp. 92–107. (as in note 3).

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Frederick calls falconry an art: it is based on knowledge and experience and, in the first place, consists of the process of manning. What comes into play in all of the sources mentioned above is the relationship between falconer and falcon, and the primary attention of these texts is often on this aspect rather than on the falcon’s eyes (fig. 9, plate XXIII). The superiority of the latter is subsumed under that of the human mind. Manning is not only a “taming” process, which transmutes the wild nature of the hawk into a domesticated one, but involves a self-taming of the falconer, who exercises a double control, so to speak: while taming the falcon he tames himself and manages his own violent energies. One needs to add the female form, too, for as the Manesse Codex shows, women also practised hawking, and, the hawks themselves are frequently female. In any case, the metaphorical potential of falconry from an imperial point of view is obvious. The emperor as a valid falconer tames his own fierce nature, his animal state, which is a precondition of his power to domesticate his subjects, in their aggressive nature. This is based on his knowledge of the world and divine wisdom, incarnated by himself. Frederick legitimises himself historically in reference to the Roman emperors, and in theological terms by a nearly Adamitic approach to his own person, seeing himself as mankind ideally recreated, in a nearly prelabial condition. His study of birds and his ideals of hunting analogise him to Adam’s naming of the animals.58 Synthesising the complexity of Frederick’s concepts of nature, reason and law, and the related self-attribution of his role as universal ruler, one easily grasps the tensions and friction of various traditions, by which they are inspired or related, not least the Siculo-Norman culture of garden palaces as paradise and the Christo-mimetic self-fashioning of the Norman kings. As for Frederick’s emblematic birds, the falcon is only one of them. The other is the eagle, the symbol of the Roman Empire, strongly promoted by the Hohenstaufen. Frederick’s gold coins, the Augustales, present his portrait in profile on one side, and the eagle, also in profile, on the verso, circumscribing it with the name of the emperor: FRIDE – RICUS. In the opposition and complementarity of eagle and falcon, of two sharp-eyed birds, flying high, but under different conditions, the two principles of Frederick’s rulership are evoked. In the words of ­Daniela Boccassini: “The imperial eagle […] is the hypostasis of an absolute power conceived as ‘naturally’ divine in origin. In contrast, the tamed falcon, at rest on the emperor’s fist, became for Frederick II the emblem, of an acquired form of wisdom – of a nobility, that is, which must be educated so that its inborn aggressiveness may be restrained and redeployed under the superior command of reason. The falconer thereby becomes the image of the ideal sovereign […].”59 If human dignity is defined by the sovereignty of humankind over untamed nature, the universal emperor incar58  59 

 Kantorowicz

(as in note 47), pp. 235–238 and p. 320; Rader (as in note 44), p. 309. Boccassini, “Falconry as a Transmutative Art: Dante, Frederick II, and Islam,” in: Dante Studies, 125 (2007), pp. 157–182 here pp. 165–166.  Daniela

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nates the eagle and the falconer, in the same moment, as the “repository of natural law and the guarantor of positive law, that is, of justice.”60 The falcon, in Frederick’s view, has to respect the superiority of the eagle. One of Le Ciento Novelle Antike (Il Novellino), compiled in the second half of the thirteenth century, highlights this point, no matter if referring to a real event or even not: One of Frederick’s sakers, more highly valued by the Emperor than a city, flew from his fist to hunt herons. Once in the air, she discovered an eagle and thrust her claws into the bird. Frederick called the falcon back and ordered her to be beheaded. Asked why, he exclaimed “Perk’ avea morto lo suo signore.”61 As for the Emperor himself, Dante, despite his great admiration for him, placed him in the sixth circle of the Inferno, namely among the “Epicureans,” meaning the heretics who denied the immortality of the soul. But let us leave him there in his flaming sarcophagus, placed in the infernal city of Dis, and turn to falcons, falconry and the eagle in the cosmos of the Commedia. Our guide remains Daniela Boccassini, and again we aim to understand the relationship of the two birds of prey, now in Dante’s view.62 As is well known, the cosmos of the Comedy is a multisensorial, but primarily a visual, one: eye is the most frequent noun. Dante works with optical models and metaphors and displays a physics and metaphysics of light, which culminates in the radiance of the “luce eterna” in the last verses of Paradiso.63 Good eyes are needed, and the movement of the eye is a recurrent theme, between attention and distraction, fixation and volatility. Only rarely are eyes present in the characterisation of protagonists the pilgrim encounters during his journey. An exception is to be found in Inferno IV: Cesar figures in a list, introduced by a continuous I’ vidi / vidi…, as one of the companions of Electra, and is called: “Cesare armato con gli occhi grifagni,” with eyes of a falcon or a sparrowhawk. This is mostly understood as Cesar “in armour,” with eyes like a hawk, but it also contracts into the Cesarean eyes as a weapon or symbol of imperial force. Dante’s own eyes are of a different nature, they pass many states and change during his journey, active and passive as they are, instruments and receptacles by all means. Then there are Beatrice’s eyes, obviously, which attract Dante the pilgrim with such an intensity that she says to him in Paradise XVIII, 19–21, still in the sphere of the 60  61  62 

 Boccassini

(as in note 59), p. 166. Ciento Novelle Antike (Il Novellino), Nov. 90; Cf. Rader (as in note 44), pp. 308–309.  Boccassini (as in note 3), chap. 7; Boccassini (as in note 59); Tiffany Niebuhr, “Dante’s Falcons: Metaphor as Theology in the Commedia”, in: RAMIFY, The Journal of the Braniff Graduate School of Liberal Arts, 02/1 (2011), pp. 28–37. In the reading of the Commedia we work with Anna Maria Chiavacci Leornadi’s 2009 edition and commentary. We use the English translation by Allen Mandelbaum: for the translation see Digital Dante https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/ (accessed June 6 2020). 63   Gerhard Wolf, “Dante’s Eyes and the Abysses of Seeing. Poetical Optics and Concepts of Images in the Divine Comedy”, in: Vision and Its Instruments: Art, Science and Technology in Early Modern Europe, ed. Alina Payne, University Park 2015, pp. 122–137.  Le

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planet Mars: “Vincendo me col lume d’un sorriso, / ella mi disse: ‘Volgiti e ascolta, / ché non pur ne’ miei occhi è paradiso.’” (But, conquering my will with her smile’s splendour, / she told me: “Turn to him and listen / for not only in my eyes is Paradise.”) She increases her spiritual beauty, ascending from sphere to sphere. Arriving in Saturn in canto XXI, the smile is taken from her eyes, for it would burn the pilgrim, as Semele was incinerated by seeing Zeus. Not armed with “occhi grifagni,” her eyes have nonetheless become dangerous for a mortal, in their close participation in the divine light. She also adds the admonition: “Ficca di retro a li occhi tuoi la mente, / e fa di quelli specchi a la figura / ch ‘n questo specchio ti sarà parvente.” (“Let your mind follow where your eyes have led, /and let your eyes be mirrors for the figure / that will appear to you within this mirror”). (Paradise XXI, 16–18.) Ficcare means to stare actively and intensely at something, here shifted to the inner eye, the mind behind the corporeal eyes, and the repetition of ­specchi/specchio evokes the descent of the divine light in the human mind. At this point, the question becomes: what about falconry and falcons, or the relation of falcon and the eagle in the Comedy? This, not by chance, leads us back to Paradise XVIII; the pilgrim now follows Beatrice’s advice not to look only into her eyes, but to watch the souls of martyrs fighting for faith. Among them he sees the flames of Charlemagne and Roland: “due ne seguì lo mio attento sguardo / com’occhio segue suo falcon volando” (“[my] / attentive eye held fast to that pair like / a falconer who tracks his falcon’s flight.”) (Paradise XVIII, 44–45.). It is the only time in the Comedy that Dante compares himself (i.e., Dante the pilgrim) with a falconer, and it is witty that the two “fighters for Christianity” are implicitly compared to birds of prey. The eye he speaks of is that of the falconer, not of the falcon; a vagating eye, in a somewhat passive position, not that of the falconer recalling his hawk. Soon Beatrice accompanies Dante to the next sphere that of Giove, while a transmutation of colour from red to argent takes place. Here we assist in one of the most sublime scenographies of Paradise. It is introduced by an ornithological metaphor: “E come augelli surti di rivera, / quasi congratulando a lor pasture / fanno di sé or tonda or altra schiera” (“And just as birds that rise from riverbanks, / as if rejoicing after feeding there, / will form a round flock or another shape”) (Paradise XVIII, 73–75.). Drawing on classical references to the flocking of birds, Dante describes the formation of letters into a monumental celestial script by means of the configuration of the soul-flames into the opening of the Book of Wisdom 1: “Diligite Iustitiam, qui iudicatis per terram.” The sphere of Giove is that of Divine Justice, and the words appear in golden letters on the silver ground of the planet. This image-phrase transmutes, by the myriad flames contracting in the splendour of the letter M (of terram), which remains alone. There is no reason to doubt that this “Emme” refers to Monarchia, as it has been understood from the earliest commentaries. In his homonymous treatise Dante has declared monarchy the only form of government able to guarantee justice on earth. A further transformation of this figure

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10 

 Dante and Beatrice before the eagle of Justice, miniature painting, in: Yates Thompson MS 36, 1444–1450, London, British Library, fol. 162r.

is put in motion: it seems to become a heraldic lily and finally, with more than a thousand shining flames flying over it, an eagle (fig. 10, plate XXIV). A metamorphosis orchestrated by God himself: “He who paints there has no one as His guide: / He guides Himself; in Him we recognize / the shaping force that flows from nest to nest,” (Paradise XVIII, 109–111) that means the shape (forma) of the bird itself (as emerging from the egg) has its origin in the divine painter. In any event, the collective body of the eagle, whose substance is the many thousands of flaming souls, then appears as “bella imagine,” with open wings in front of the pilgrim Dante: this is the opening of Paradise XIX. At a certain point, the eagle starts to move and to speak with its beak. These are the decisive terzine for our argument: Quasi falcone ch’esce del cappello, move la testa e con l’ali si plaude, voglia mostrando e faccendosi bello, vid’ io farsi quel segno, che di laude de la divina grazia era contesto, con canti quai si sa chi là sù gaude. Just like a falcon set free from its hood, which moves its head and flaps its wings, displaying its eagerness and proud appearance, so

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I saw that ensign do, that Eagle woven of praises of God’s grace, accompanied by songs whose sense those up above enjoy. (Paradise XIX, 34–39.) The painted eagle is revealed to be a gold embroidery on a silver textile; it is alive because it consists of the soul-flames whose visual and aural praise of God are one and the same. They conflate in the gesturing and speaking of the collective body-image they form. The eagle commences by an evocation of God as “The One who turned His compass to mark the world’s confines.” (Paradise XIX, 40–41.) Here we interrupt our short look into Paradise XVIII and XIX, and turn to the question regarding the relationship between falcon and eagle. Considering what has been discussed regarding Frederick II, it may be surprising that Dante presents a simile in which the eagle flapping her wings is compared to a falcon in the moment before taking wing, after being unhooded. It is not surprising because of the analogy of the two animals taking flight, but because of their different symbolic status as discussed above. There is no doubt that the eagle in Paradise XVIII–XX is the Roman eagle translated into a sign of the universal reign of God. In Paradise VI, the sphere of Mercury, Justinian recounts the history of the Roman Empire, starting with Constantine shifting the eagle to the East. The narrator (“Cesare fui e son Iustiniano”) is chosen for his codification of the Roman law and the unification of the Empire in its Mediterranean extension. Justinian tells its history, beginning from Aeneas’ escape from Troy, presenting the Empire as sacred in its providential role, as Dante defines it, and the Roman eagle is called “Uccel di Dio.” Whereas Justinian in canto VI represents the “iustitia per terram,” the eagle of Paradise XVII to XX stands for divine justice, binding the former to the latter (and vice versa), for the celestial eagle is a transfiguration of the “M” of “terram,” and implicates the sacrality of monarchy or empire. Built by the soul-flames, as a collective body, the eagle belongs to the tradition of political imaging known from classical Antiquity, defining the state as a body formed by the people or social groups, and (in case of a monarchy, but not only) represented by the body of a monarch or a symbolic figure. The title page of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan is an early modern revision of this tradition.64 The eagle in Dante’s Paradise is ultimately ‘painted’ by God: he has given it its form. Comparing it to a falcon, on the one hand, means that it remains a creature ‘tamed’ by God, in the service of God and able to speak his “laude” with its beak. On the other hand, it reveals that moment of liberation when the falcon is joyfully flying up, becoming free of its blindness, flying up like an eagle towards the sky, towards heaven. The eagle’s falconer is, so to speak, God himself. 64   Cf. Horst Bredekamp, Thomas Hobbes: Der Leviathan. Das Urbild des modernen Staates und seine Gegenbilder. 1651–2001, Berlin 2003 (second edition).

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To conclude this second part, we return to the figure of Dante, to discuss briefly another simile from the realm of falconry in the Comedy. This requires shifting from Paradise XIX to Purgatory XIX, where the pilgrim is compared to a falcon. Dante has just woken up from a dream and, with his head full of thoughts, he is moving by the side of his guide, bowed like the arch of a bridge, when his gaze is directed upwards to the heavenly spheres, by an angel flapping his swan-white wings. At this moment, Virgil invites him to look up, which the pilgrim does…: Bastiti, e batti a terra le calcagne; li occhi rivolgi al logoro che gira lo rege etterno con le rote magne. Quale ’l falcon, che prima a’ pié si mira indi si volge al grido e si protende per lo disio del pasto che là il tira, tal mi fec’ io; e tal, quanto si fende la roccia per dar via a chi va suso, n’andai infin dove ’l cerchiar si prende. Let that suffice, and hurry on your way; fasten your eyes upon the lure that’s spun by the eternal King with His great spheres. Just like a falcon, who at first looks down, then, when the falconer has called, bends forward, craving the food that’s ready for him there, so l became – and so remained until, through the cleft rock that lets one climb above, I reached the point at which the circle starts. (Purgatory XIX, 61–69.) This looking up to the heavenly spheres occurs during the passage from one circle of purgatory to the next (the fifth). The simile from falconry seems to refer to the process of taming and learning. Initially, the hawk is connected to the falconer by a thin cord (the creance) and then, in the next step, she flies free, directed and brought back by the falconer’s call and the lure she or he whirls, garnished with pieces of meat. The simile plays with the directionality of gaze and attention, from being bound into oneself to a desire nurtured by the call and the circular movement of the lure. The latter is a metaphor for the cosmic spheres, which precede the simile. The universe itself, in its beauty, is a lure “spun” by God; it attracts the human soul, which ultimately, like a falcon,

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wants to return to his Lord. The falconer again is God himself, in the case of Dante, whilst his guide Virgil is also in charge of directing him.65 As Boccassini has worked out in her discussion of the role of falconry in the selfdefinition of Frederick II and Dante, the former sees himself as falconer and the latter as falcon. However, it is not only the pilgrim Dante attracted to the divine lure (that is the cosmic spheres), falcon-like, but also the celestial eagle in the respective canto of Paradise, whose first words precisely invoked God as geometer with the compasses in his hands, creating the universe without being contained by it. The flying falcon in the simile of Purgatory. XIX, initially looks downwards at her feet, then, having been recalled, protends forward by her own will whereas that of Paradise XIX is flapping her wings in the moment before rising in the air. On the other side of such similes are Dante, obedient to the divine call, and the eagle, emblem of divine justice, built of myriads of souls. The relation of the two (Dante and eagle) is regulated by the admonition of Beatrice to make his eyes mirrors of the divine mirror. In his visionary pilgrimage, Dante anticipates his own participation in the divine light, in an itinerary of spiritual perfection. This is finally played out at the end of the Comedy, where the word volgere, so frequently used in regard to the movement of the pilgrim or in the invitations to him to move, returns to denote the new “wheeling” state of the pilgrim’s desire and will, in unison with the rotation of the cosmic machine, moved by love. It is a double movement, that induced by God and that of love, that allow it to rotate around and towards him. The circling of the lure and the flight of the falcon are synchronised, or fall into one. “Ma già volgeva il mio disio e l’velle / si come rota ch’igualmente è mossa, / l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle.” (But my / desire and will were moved already – like / a wheel revolving uniformly – by / the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.) (Paradise XXXIII, 143–145.) 66 The references to falconry in the Commedia include the lure; the hood; the relationship between falconer and falcon; the behaviour of the former as a rather passive observer of the falcon’s flight (in Paradise XVIII, Dante, compared to a falconer, watches the flying souls of Charlemagne and Roland); or rotating the lure (in Purgatory XIX) and the habit of the hawk, flying with or without the creance (Purgatory XIX), or flapping the wings before flying up, after being unhooded (Paradise XIX). A fourth falcon, we have not discussed, appears in the Inferno, also as a simile. Here, it is a disobedient falcon, tired of flying and without sight of the lure or a bird to hunt, not following the falconer’s call, but coming down in many wheelings to alight, “angry and sullen, far from its master.” The reference is to the giant Geryon, setting the pilgrim and his guide down at the bottom of the eighth circle of the Inferno. The list could be enriched by another falcon in the Inferno, from which a duck hides, submerging in the 65  66 

 Cf.  Cf.

Boccassini (as in note 3), pp. 369–377. also Boccassini (as in note 3), p. 372.

The Fa lcon, the Eagle a nd the Ow l

water. Finally, we want to mention the temporary punishment of the envious, whose eyes are sewn with a metal thread “che a tutti un fil de ferro i cigli fora / e cusce sì, come a sparvier selvaggio / si fa però che quetò non dimora” (“for iron wire pierces and sews up / the lids of all those shades, as untamed [sparrow]hawks / are handled, lest, too restless, they fly off”) (Purgatory XIII, 70–72). It is no mere coincidence that the eyes of the envious are sewn, for “to envy” (Latin invidere) means to look at somebody or something with negative intention. For Daniela Boccassini this passage, in particular, sustains her argument that falconry in the Comedy is linked to the taming of the wild, a process of education, of teaching and learning in a process of ennoblement and perfection.67 The analogy to Frederick’s understanding of falconry as the taming of the subject (falcon as well as falconer) is obvious, but also the difference between the political reading of this ennoblement in the former and the theological one in the latter. As we have seen in both, the emperor and the poet, the relationship between eagle and falcon is crucial, and even if in Dante this does not lead to an act of double violence as in the novella (that of the falcon killing the eagle, and that of the emperor having beheaded the falcon), it is bound to the concept of a sacred empire, and an universal monarch as falconer, who is God himself. Whereas Frederick had written a detailed treatise about the manning of, and hunting with falcons, in Dante, falcons dwell in metaphors and similes. Even from his short references it seems that the poet was well-informed about the art of falconry. As Boccassini has argued, this presumably was not based only on the textual, but also the technical knowledge he may have gained at the courts of Forlì and Verona, which “[…] still lived in the wake of Frederick II and his royal habits […].”68 Falconry, however attractive for royal self-understanding it may be, at first hand is a noble art: taming, self-taming, and being tamed are a fundamental concern in the formation of noblemen and noblewomen. Learning and practicing the art of falconry ennobles, for nobility is not just to be understood as an innate virtue, but needs to be learnt, trained and cultivated. In falconry, indeed, all this is summarised: it could deliver educational and behavioural codes or metaphors that apply to love, courtly interaction, warfare and religion. Whilst we have focused here on the thirteenth and fourteenth century, particularly in Italy, the topic could also be discussed in a transcultural or transhistorical perspective. This finally brings us to Boccaccio and his famous falcon novella in the Decameron, the collection of novelle told by ten young Florentines in the ten days of their lockdown during the pestilence, in a villa in Fiesole.69 Each day a king or queen is nominated to narrate. On the fifth day, it is the turn of Fiammetta with falcon-like

67  68  69 

 Boccassini

(as in note 3), p. 367 and notes 115 and 116. (as in note 59), p. 161.  Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Decamerone (V, 9). See Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Amadeo Quondam, Maurizio Fiorilla and Giancarlo Alfano, Milan 2013, pp. 511–544.  Boccassini

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eyes (“con due occhi in testa che parevano di un falco pellegrino”). This queen herself tells the ninth novella, of a young nobleman Federigo degli Alberighi. Highly esteemed in arms and courtly manners (“in opera d’arme e in cortesia”), he falls in love with the rich gentildonna Giovanna, who is married and does not respond to his advances. In vain, he invests all of his fortune to convince her and finally falls into poverty, with only a little estate left in Tuscany and his falcon, one of the best on earth. The gentildonna becomes a widow and after her son falls ill, they move by chance close to Federigo, where, at a certain point, the son encounters Federigo’s falcon. He asks his mother for the falcon, whose company would heal him. Giovanna announces her visit to Federigo together with a friend. Federigo who has nothing to offer the two ladies, kills his falcon and serves it to them at the table. After the meal when Giovanna asks for the falcon, he cries and tells her that they have just eaten it, showing her the feathers, beak and feet. The son dies, not having got the bird, whereas Giovanna, in the end, is convinced by Federigo’s sacrifice and marries him, after a dispute with her brothers, making him rich and happy. Hawking, for Federigo, is no longer just a noble sport, affirming knowledge of and some sense of domination of nature, but a necessity to survive: he eats the quarry and, in the end, with his guests the falcon herself. Narrated by the falcon-eyed queen of the day, Fiammetta, the novel is about the sacrificial dimension of love. The nobility of Federigo resides in his ultimate possession, the falcon, and his ultimate gesture of cortesia, killing her. The impoverished Florentine gentiluomo is light years away from the world of Federico II, but both share an addiction to the falcon yet both are ready to kill it. If we take the story in the Ciento Novelle Antike about the Emperor seriously for a moment, the former kills for love and according to the rules of nobility, the latter as punishment for a violation of what he considers the natural, that is imperial, order. In Boccaccio’s novel the substitutional relation of bird and woman is anticipated and mirrored in the eyes of the narrator, those of a peregrine falcon. She tells the story from a regal position, with a laurel crown over her head, sopra il suo capo biondissimo, but only for a day, belonging to a world of passage between nobility and mercantile borghesia.

Horst Bredekamp

Falconry as a Variant of the Image Act

Falconry as Art Falconry is a special form of the relationship between human and animal, as has often been described, since the hawk moves in the element to which a human has no natural access: the air. In his immortal work on falconry De Arte Venandi Cum Avibus, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II left no doubt that falconry, being a living metaphor for all kinds of representations which went far beyond the realm of hunt. The reason for its paradigmatic meaning, the precondition for all further metaphors associated with the hawk until the present, depends on the hawk’s relative independence. Everything that can be attributed to human intervention and force can be traced to strength and mechanics, but the hawk is master of the air, and no human is in a position to rise into this space and exercise power in the same way as he does on earth. This means that the hawk represents a centre of power that opens up realms other than that of mechanics and the associated realm of strength allied. This principle is based on the same human capacity that also enables the creation of art: “Humans can take possession of quadrupeds with violence and other means; but the birds that circle high in the skies can be caught and trained only through human ingenuity.”1 Integral to this ingenuity are two items of falconry “furniture”: the lure used to recall the hawk and the hood, which an artful falconer gently persuades the hawk to have placed over her head. Both of these essential management tools are depicted in a

1 

 Carl. A. Willemsen (ed.), Über die Kunst mit Vögeln zu jagen. Miniaturen aus einer Handschrift des Falken-Buches von Kaiser Friedrich II., Frankfurt am Main 1979, pp. 15–16. Das Falkenbuch Kaiser Friedrichs  II. Vollständige Wiedergabe des Codex Ms. Pal. Lat. 1071, ed. Carl Arnold Willemsen, Dortmund 1980. Translation after Yannis Hadjinicolaou, “Macht wie die des Königs. Zur politischen Ikonographie der Falk­nerei”, in: Hunting without Weapons. On the Pursuit of Images, ed. Maurice Saß, Berlin 2017, p. 90.

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1   Cornelis Gijsbrechts, Tromp l‘Oeil with falconry furniture, 1671, oil on canvas, 118 × 89 cm, Copenhagen, Rosenborg Slot.

painting by Cornelis Gijsbrechts (fig. 1).2 The picture, painted around 1670, shows the hood at the upper left, crowned by a plume of blue and red feathers to the left of a blue curtain that is gathered at the top and thus stages the furniture like revealed arcana. The hood, fabricated in a delicate and ornamented form, was placed over the hawk’s head and beak, thus becoming a work of art in its own right, somewhat reminiscent of a knight’s helmet made of leather and feathers.3 Crafted from the same materials, the lure hangs below in front of a white hawking bag. Connected to it, at the end of the rope, a ball serves both to retain the lure 2  3 

 Hadjinicolaou  Hadjinicolaou

(as in note 1), p. 93. (as in note 1), p. 93.

Fa lconry as a Va r i a nt of the Im age Act

when it is being swung and as a counterweight, preventing the hawk from carrying it, if need be.4 The painted lure represents the principle by which the hawk is enticed from the air, attracting her by simulating the movement of her quarry. The artistic craft of lures is even more pronounced in a specimen from Emperor Maximilian I’s possession of around 1500 (fig. 2), which resembles a “cap” in its form,

2 

 Emperor Maximilian I‘s lure, ca. 1500, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum.

adorned with the depiction of a couple reminiscent of the emperor and Bianca Maria Sforza.5 The cap encloses several attached wings and has tassels in the middle, through which this precious textile art somewhat simulates the falcon’s most prestigious quarry, the heron, when it flies through the air. This detail embodies the organic symbol of the picture’s combat between falcon and heron: a spiraling play with different forms of active representations. Engelbert II of Nassau‘s Book of Hours wonderfully conveys the technique of luring the falcon. It depicts a young man imparting momentum to the lure extended on its line, twisting his arched body from the hips to draw the lure, held in his outstretched 4  5 

 Hadjinicolaou

(as in note 1), p. 94. Hadjinicolaou, “Ich zog mir einen Falken. Das ikonische Nachleben der Falknerei”, in: Pegasus. Berliner Beiträge zum Nachleben der Antike, 18/19 (2018), pp. 181–182.  Yannis

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 Vienna Master of Mary of Burgundy, Swinging of the lure, 1475/1480, tempera and ink on parchment, Oxford, Bodleian Library.

right arm, towards him (fig. 3). The lure’s wings spread out at the end of the line, attracting the falcon which flies in from the upper left.6 This clearly shows how the lure is an example of art’s power to imitate, to a greater or lesser extent, and thus in some way to replace nature. The hawk’s willingness to fly closer to the falconer also expresses a decisive aspect of falconry which makes it so significant in the histories of both the theory of good government and that of art theory.

6   Annette Hoffmann, “Peacock Feathers and Falconry in the Book of Hours of Engelbert of Nassau”, in: Images Take Flight. Feather Art in Mexico and Europe 1400–1700, ed. Alexandra Russo, Gerhard Wolf and Diana Fane, Munich 2015, pp. 156–177; Hadjinicolaou (as in note 5), pp. 182–183.

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4 

 Emblem of Cura Publica, in: Sambucus, 1564, p. 189.

Statecr aft: Sovereign Approaching The particular significance of falconry in the theories of both the state and of art lies in the hawk‘s relative autonomy. In Hungarian humanist Johannes Sambucus’ emblem book, a nobleman holds a lure, apparently causing its wings to flap, in his right hand, while the hawk intercepts three other birds in the sky (fig. 4).7 It hunts across the firmament like a comet, making the falconer‘s gesture seem almost futile. Therein lies the critical point of falconry. The way the three freely flying birds can be brought

7 

 Joannes Sambucus, Emblemata, Antwerpen 1564, p. 189; id., Emblemata, ed. Bibliotheca Hungarica Antiqua, Budapest 1982, p. 218. See Arthur Henkel and Wolfgang Schöne, Emblemata. Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts, Stuttgart 1978, col. 781.

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down is the core of the symbiosis between hawk and human; a symbiosis which is achieved best through long experience.8 In the Manesse manuscript, composed around 1320, we see and read paradigmatically (fig. 5, plate XXV): “I raised a falcon/ for more than a year./ But when, as I wanted, he/ had been tamed by me/ And I had/ well clothed his plumage with gold,/ He rose up mightily/ and flew to another country”.9 Part of the symbiosis between hawk and falconer is thus a familiarity that depends on the ruler’s understanding that both partners in the relationship are equals. It emerges solely through mutual empathy. For this reason, advice on how to achieve this concordance extends even to suggesting that hawk and falconer spend the night in the same room.10 Even though she works together with the falconer, the hawk remains alien, an independent being with a mind of its own. The falconer has to use the art of illusion to entice the hawk with the lure, rewarding her with food to accustom her to himself to the point that she allows him to remove her sight with the hood, and then to release her into the vastness of the sky, in order to profit from her arts of flight and hunting. This relational structure is so complex that it made an apt allegory for rule that was not based on violence and repression, but on artful deception, rewards, empathy and on close inspection of a body that maintains its autonomy throughout. The Oneirocritikon, written around 700, makes it clear that “the hawk and falcon signify a position of power second from the king.”11 This is the tradition from which Frederick II defined himself as a falconer on the throne. His book on hawks launched a science of the hunt in which falconry takes its special rank as a symbol of successful rule, because the animal is not drilled, but bound within its own will.

The Falcon as a Motif in Poetry In this paradigmatic meaning, the falcon became a significant term in literary history. In 1871, Paul Heyse (later winner of the 1910 Nobel Prize in Literature) furnished his theory of the novella with what he called the theory of the falcon. Unlike the novel,

8  9 

 Hadjinicolaou

(as in note 5), pp. 168–169. Manesse. Die Miniaturen der Großen Heidelberger Liederhandschrift, ed. Ingo F. Walther, Leipzig 1989, tabl. 125, p. 257. Cf. Hadjinicolaou (as in note 5), p. 176. 10   John Cummins, The Hound and the Hawk: The Art of Medieval Hunting, London 1988, p. 202; Hadjinicolaou (as in note 5), p. 177. 11   Achmetis Oneirocriticon, ed. F. Drexl, Leipzig 1925, p. 232; Henry Maguire, Signs and Symbols of your always Victorious Reign. The Political Ideology and Meaning of Falconry in Byzantium, in: Images of the Byzantine World. Visions, Messages and Meanings. Studies Presented to Leslie Brubaker, ed. Angeliki Lymberopoulou, Farnham 2011, p. 141; Hadjinicolaou (as in note 1), p. 89, note 6.  Codex

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5 

 Master of the Codex Manesse, King Conrad of Swabia hawking, covering colour on vellum, Heidelberg, University Library.

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6   Master of the Cité des Dames, Federigho degli Alberighi and his falcon, book illumination, 1414–1419, Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. lat 1989, f. 174v.

which is able to capture a whole view of the world microcosmically, he says, the novella must concentrate on a single motif or story to avoid dispelling the reader‘s suspense. A strong silhouette, he wrote, using a metaphor from painting, is essential to the story: sharply contoured and instantly recognisable.12 It must appear as the pivot of the entire story, “to strike the innermost heart with one rapid blow.”13 As a pioneering example, Heyse names Giovanni Boccaccio‘s falcon novella, presented as the ninth story of the fifth day of the Decameron which was frequently illuminated, as by the Master of the Cité des Dames (fig. 6, plate XXVI). Heyse writes that the test of the novella is whether its whole material can be condensed into a few lines, as Boccaccio did with his content summary: “Federigo degli Alberighi loves unrequitedly; in chivalrous courtship, he squanders all his possessions, retaining only his sole falcon. When the lady he loves coincidentally visits him and he has nothing else to prepare a meal with, he presents the falcon to her at the table. She learns what he has done, suddenly 12   Paul Heyse, “Einleitung”, in: Deutscher Novellenschatz, ed. id. and Hermann Kurz, vol. 1, Munich 1871, p. XIX. 13   Heyse (as in note 12), p. XVII.

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changes her mind, and rewards his love by making him the master of her hand and her fortune.”14 The story is more complicated: the beloved damsel wanted the living falcon for her ill son, who dies soon thereafter, whereupon the mother inherits the son‘s huge fortune, enabling her to marry the initially unsuccessful suitor. But the abridged content description contains the essential point that, in his all-consuming love, Federigo degli Alberighi sacrifices everything, including the most precious, unique and last thing he owns: the falcon. The falcon is the central motif and at the same time the framework spanning the entire story. As a powerful, willful anima, the falcon is like an externalised part of Federigo, and, with the falcon, he sacrifices something of himself. In this play of strangeness and closeness lies a conclusion that has fundamental importance for the philosophical characterisation of the picture, which is as striking as the comparison of falconry to the theory of the state and, according to Heyse, to the coup d’oeil of a novel’s central motif.

The Falcon as Embodiment of the Image Act Falconry and its iconography are outstanding metaphors for a cultural concept that considers all designs that confront a person as image acts.15 One of the most impressive examples is Jan van Eyck‘s Portrait of a Man in London’s National Gallery, almost certainly a self-portrait of the artist (fig. 7).16 Viewers are invariably overwhelmed by the interplay between the cloak’s indistinct fur, the photorealistic wrinkles around the eyes and the tactile qualities of the turban’s shimmering fabric. The sitter observes the beholder with an intensity that fixes him wherever he stands.17 Nicolaus Cusanus reflects on this quality in a well-known passage of De Visione Dei that might almost seem to refer to van Eyck‘s picture: “Every one of you, from whichever place you may behold the picture, will think the picture is looking solely at yourself.”18 After considering various options, Cusanus concludes that the picture is active in an autonomous way, responsive simultaneously to every gaze, independent of the viewer‘s position and movements, and hence an embodiment of the multi-perspectivity of the Visione Dei. This alone characterises the painting’s activity as theorised by 14  15 

 Heyse

(as in note 12), p. XIX. Bredekamp, Image Acts. A Systematic Approach to Visual Agency, Berlin and Boston 2018 (German 2010). 16   Bredekamp (as in note 15), pp. 54–56. 17   Exhib. Cat. Renaissance Faces. Van Eyck to Titian, ed. Lorne Campbell, Miguel Falomir, Jennifer Fletcher and Luke Syson, London 2008, p. 178. 18   “Et quisque vestrum experietur, ex quocumque loco eandem inspexerit, se quasi solum per eam videri”, Nicolaus von Cusanus, Opera omnia, ed. Adelheid Dorothee Riemann, vol. 6, Hamburg 2000, Praefatio, 3, l. 2s., p. 5.  Horst

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 Jan van Eyck, Portrait of a Man, 1433, oil on wood, 25.5 × 19 cm, London, National Gallery.

van Eyck himself, who allows his painting to speak in the first person singular. Along the lower edge of the frame, the picture declares: “Jan van Eyck me fecit” (Jan van Eyck made me).19 This recourse to the first person singular alludes to the fact that notwithstanding their non-organic materiality, pictures seem to be endowed with the capacity to act. In a mixture of Greek and Flemish, the inscription on the upper picture frame adds a second I: ALC.IXH.XAN. (As I can).20

19   Reinhard Liess, Zum Logos der Kunst Rogier van der Weydens. Die “Beweinungen Christi” in den Königlichen Museen in Brüssel und in der Nationalgalerie in London, vol. 2, Münster/Hamburg/London 2000, pp. 126–133. 20   Bredekamp (as in note 15), pp. 55–56.

Fa lconry as a Va r i a nt of the Im age Act

The fundamental message is that the work of art harbours a power so autonomous that it is able to speak in the first person. This linguistic turn presumes a pseudoliving presence in pictures. No known culture, presumably, has failed to recognise this phenomenon of imagines agentes.21 Reflections on its universal validity are found in elaborations of a range of philosophical and biosemantic concepts, which – while not necessarily related to one another and perhaps even mutually contradictory – agree that pictures act with an often uncontrollable semantic force. These theorems range from Aristotle‘s concept of the intrinsic energy of forms22 and Lucretius‘s conviction that seeing is a special form of being touched.23 Today, the theory of the image act is an independent variant of the philosophy of embodiment. It takes up James Gibson’s affordances, in particular, which transforms the separation between subject and object into an alternating tension that develops between the two.24 The hawk is an aesthetically striking bird that, shaped in her trained state, can be regarded as a living work of art. If one employs the hawk instead of the pictorially active picture, it provides the perfect symbol of what is to be understood by image acts. The hawk’s participation in hawking is the result of long training, i.e., an elaborate shaping of her natural behaviour. Above all, however, it is the hawk’s independence that makes her comparable to the concept of the active picture. As I can – this phrase from van Eyck’s painting could be spoken analogously by the hawk which, high in the air, decides on her own when to return to the falconer’s fist. Philosophical constructivism would define the viewing of the picture as nothing other than the product of the viewing subject approaching the work. In this sense, the hawk would be a purely reflective organ reacting to the impulses coming from the person. However, it does this only in accordance with its own sovereignty, and this is also true of the picture. If the work of art did not contribute something of its own, it would not need to be met with esteem. In this sense, falconry receives what is true for the work of art as well: an esteem based on the fact that what is produced is more than what was invested in it. The trained but independent hawk is the organic variant of the inorganic, but seemingly animated, work of art. 21   With pointed irony, W. J. T. Mitchell has attributed the perception of pictures as being “alive” to “primitives, children, the masses, the illiterate, the uncritical, the illogical, the ‘Other’” (W. J. T. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, Chicago 2005, p. 7). For an early and lucid refutation of this position, see David Freedberg, The Power of Images. Studies in the History and Theory of Response, Chicago and London 1989. 22   Aristotle, Rhetoric, ed. and transl. Franz G. Sieveke, Munich 1980, 1411 b 25, p. 193. Cf. Valeska von Rosen, “Die Enargeia des Gemäldes. Zu einem vergessenen Inhalt des Ut-pictura-poesis und seiner Relevanz für das cinquecenteske Bildkonzept”, in: Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft, 27 (2000), pp. 171–208. 23   Lucretius developed this conviction in Book IV of De rerum natura. On this concept and the ­Lucretian tradition of chance images: Bredekamp (as in note 15), pp. 273–278. 24   James Jerome Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Boston 1979. Cf. Anthony Chemero, Radical Embodied Cognitive Science, Cambridge MA 2009.

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The Problem of the Natur al Barrier With this ability, the hawk becomes the protagonist of an even larger context, the question of the natural barrier. There is no doubt that every living thing depends on exchange with its environment.25 However, until now, it was considered a valid rule that only human beings were able to act symbolically. Ernst Cassirer, who pursued like no other the question of articulation in the framework of his comprehensive philosophy of symbols, was convinced of the existence of an insurmountable natural barrier between animals and humans. The anthropos, he said, was “as if expelled” from the “paradise of pure organic existence”.26 However, falconry teaches us another lesson. Man, his hawk, his dog and the quarry do not merely all interact together; the hawk and the dog form an almost autonomous unit (fig. 8).27 The falcon, for instance, circling in the air whilst “waiting on”, observes whether the dog is doing his job, locating quarry and indicating its whereabouts prior to it being flushed from cover. This is clearly illustrated in a number of illuminations in the Manesse manuscript. What to my knowledge has never been illustrated is the punishment of the hunting dog when it is not doing its job properly: the hawk might strike the dog, albeit without the intention of killing it. This kind of punishment, which works independently from human intervention, creates the widest possible horizon in which the question of autonomous cooperation between animals can be answered with modest affirmation. Through this, falconry might well become a key for a new understanding of symbolic behaviour. Currently tendencies are emerging in anthropology, prehistory and biology that posit the permeability of the boundary between the general articulation of life and the

25   Wilhelm Dilthey therefore brought together, in the broadest possible way, articulation and the principle of life: “Life articulates itself”: Wilhelm Dilthey, “Grundlegung der Wissenschaft vom Menschen, der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte. Ausarbeitungen zum zweiten Band der Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (ca. 1870–1895)”, in: id. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. XIX, ed. Helmuth Johach and Frithjof Rodi, Goettingen 1982, p. 345. Cf. Magnus Schlette and Matthias Jung, “Einleitende Bemerkungen zu einer Anthropologie der Artikulation”, in: Anthropologie der Artikulation. Begriffliche Grundlagen und transdisziplinäre Perspektive, ed. id., Wuerzburg 2006, pp. 7–28. 26   Ernst Cassirer, “Form und Technik (1930)”, in: Symbol, Technik, Sprache. Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1927–1933, ed. E. W. Orth and J. M. Krois, Hamburg 1985, p. 73. On this: John Michael Krois, “Ernst Cassirer‘s philosophy of biology”, in: Sign System Studies, 32/1-2 (2004), p. 286, note 15; Birgit Recki, “Symbolische Form als ‘Verkörperung’? Ernst Cassirers Versuch einer Überwindung des Leib-SeeleDualismus“, in: Bodies in Action and Symbolic Forms. Zwei Seiten der Verkörperungstheorie, ed. Horst Bredekamp, Marion Lauschke and Alex Arteaga, Berlin 2012, pp. 3–13. 27   Walther (as in note 9), tabl. 2, p. 5.

Fa lconry as a Va r i a nt of the Im age Act

8 

 Master of the Codex Manesse, Kunz von Rosenheim hawking, 1305–1340, covering colour on vellum, Heidelberg, University Library.

symbolic articulations of which only humans were thought capable.28 Recent research on chimpanzee behaviour renders the boundary which had been drawn until now questionable. Among the discoveries of this research, conducted over multiple years, is the West African primates‘ practice of piling stones in tree stumps and branching roots

28   “Eine Anthropologie, die den Artikulationsbegriff zum Grundbegriff macht, ist strukturell antiessentiell und antidualistisch. Der Begriff […] betont […] die Kontinuität zwischen den Ausdrucks- und Kommunikationsformen höher organisierter Säugetiere mit denen der Menschen”. See Schlette and Jung (as in note 25), p. 16.

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9   Heap of stones deposited between forking roots, still from the film Stone-Throwing Chimpanzee (2016).

(fig. 9, plate XXVII). Male and female, old and young chimpanzees take part in these acts,29 in which a first form of collecting and hoarding treasure is to be observed. Since these activities are neither used for hunting nor for smashing objects like nutshells, it must be assumed that the conventional distinction between animalistic-instinctive and human-symbolic behaviour cannot be maintained.30 A wealth of similar chimpanzee activities confirms an interpretation in terms of symbolism. Thus, a more complex form of treasure formation lies in taking up stones of substantial size, hefting them and throwing them against the trunk of a mighty tree (fig. 10). Their force makes them bounce back so dangerously that the thrower must

29 

 Hjalmar S. Kühl, Ammie K. Kalan, Mimi Arandjelovic, Floris Aubert, Lucy D’Auvergne, Annemarie Goedmakers, Sorrel Jones, Laura Kehoe et al., “Chimpanzee accumulative stone throwing”, 29 Feb. 2016, in: Nature: Scientific Reports | 6:22219 | doi: 10.1.038/srep.2221. Cf. the report of the Max-PlanckGesellschaft from the Zentrum für Primatenforschung am Leipziger Max-Planck-Zentrum für Evolutionäre Anthropologie: Hjalmar S. Kühl et al., This Could Be The First-Ever Observed Ritual Practice Among Chimpanzees, www.mpg.de/10327526/Schimpansen-werfen-steine (accessed June 9 2020). A similar research film was screened in the framework of the exhibition on ape culture shown in summer 2015 at Berlin’s House of World Cultures (Exhib. Cat. Ape Culture/Kultur der Affen, ed. Anselm Franke and Hila Peleg, Berlin and Leipzig 2015, p. 137). 30   “It is likely that it has some cultural elements”. Christophe Boesch, Why do chimpanzees throw stones at trees? Newly discovered stone tool-use behaviour and accumulation sites in wild chimpanzees reminiscent to human cairns, February 29 2016, in: http://www.mpg.de/10328790/chimpanzee-stone-tree? (accessed June 7 2016).

Fa lconry as a Va r i a nt of the Im age Act

10 

 Male

chimpanzee throwing a stone against a tree trunk, as fig. 9.

elude them by swiftly moving aside. These actions are repeated until the bouncing stones have formed a large pile.31 The energy of the rebounding stones contains the basic precondition of design that everyone who shapes things must reckon with. It corresponds to the sense of the Latin ob-jectum as counter-throw.32 It unites the throw of the form into the world with its repercussion that affects the actor in turn. This makes the chimpanzee into the object of the rebound affecting it. The chimpanzee‘s stone-throwing actions thus become a manifestation of the fact that willful use turns things into images, which, from their own energy, challengingly act back, thereby realising the basic precondition of all design and all art.33 Throwing stones presupposes a highly complex consideration of the physics of the object in its relation to the ambient conditions and the possibilities of the active body. Under labo-

31  32 

 Kühl,

Kalan, Arandjelovic et al. (as in note 29), pp. 4–6. “Objekt”, in: Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer, vol. 6, Darmstadt 1984, col. 1027. 33   Horst Bredekamp, “Early Forms of Articulation”, in: Symbolic Articulation. Image, Word, And The Body Between Action And Schema, ed. Sabine Marienberg, Berlin and Boston 2017, pp. 3–29; id., “ImageActive Design Forms of Animals and Humans”, in: Exhib. Cat. +ultra gestaltung schafft wissen, ed. Nikola Doll, id. and Wolfgang Schäffner for the Cluster of Excellence Image Knowledge Gestaltung. An Interdisciplinary Laboratory at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Leipzig 2017, pp. 12–31.  Kobusch,

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ratory conditions, it has turned out that this highly developed form of abstraction addresses the same neuronal zones as those in which language is formed.34 In a broader sense, falconry can be understood as a highly developed, temporally extremely extended form of throwing. If the falcon is understood as a substitute for the stone that is released into the air to return willfully, then this is in principle the same procedure, but carried out between humans and falcons in an infinitely more complex way, in which the thrower and the thrown tend to become equals. Falconry is a paradigmatic symbiosis between human and animal that was and still is significant for theories of the state and art. Evidently, it has this significance because the pictorially active animation of objects and organisms surmounts the natural barrier. Throwing and coming back: this dialectic proves to be the basic condition of all symbolic thinking.

34 

 “Thus, the results reported here are consistent with the evolutionary hypothesis that throwing may have served as a preadaptation for the neural adaptation of motor programmes necessary for complex motor actions, including language and speech?”. William D. Hopkins, Jamie L. Russell and Jennifer A. Schaeffer, “The neuronal and cognitive correlates of aimed throwing in chimpanzees: a magnetic resonance image and behavioural study on a unique form of social tools”, in: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B. Biological Sciences, 367 (2012), p. 44.

Klaus Krüger

Art is Aiming for the Eye Gazes as Arrows in the Early Modern Era

The following, very sketchy, considerations deal with the manifold associations of gazes and arrows and the relation of this metaphorical field to discourses about the effects of art, love and sight. Hence, they contribute little to the more specific main topic of falconry, but they may provide insight into the broader context of hunting and art, of seeing as a form of hunting, of gazes, especially desiring gazes, and their goals and encounters and of related image practices and visual engagements.1 Without a long preface, let us begin with a painting that thematises the connection between hunting and love, gaze and imagination, and points to the role that the art of painting might play in this context. A painting of the encounter between a hunter and a nymph from the circle of Paris Bordone, created around 1550–1560 (fig. 1), conveys quite openly erotic implications, and it is staged so as to incorporate the viewer as a voyeur whilst at the same time excluding him.2 It is only by means of his imagination that the beholder can project himself into the role of the hunter in the image, who is in sufficiently close proximity to the nymph to be able to touch her shoulder. Moreover, this projection remains tied to the literary, fictional horizon of a bucolic and mythological past. From images of this kind, it would be easy to widen our scope and consider the pastoral genre more generally, for example in its depictions of bucolic concerts. An image by Giovanni Cariani in Warsaw, dating from 1510–1520 (fig. 2), shows a reclining nymph who presents her beautiful nude body to the viewer’s gaze, but who also, in her

1 

 The present contribution is largely unchanged from the paper given at the Abu Dhabi conference in 2018, and reverts partially to material and arguments that I have already discussed elsewhere (see Klaus Krüger, Das Bild als Schleier des Unsichtbaren. Ästhetische Illusion in der Kunst der frühen Neuzeit in Italien, Munich 2001, esp. Ch. III. 1, pp. 205–242 and pp. 243–251). Therefore, the notes have only been updated as far as necessary. 2   Gemäldegalerie des Kunsthistorischen Museums in Wien. Verzeichnis der Gemälde, Vienna 1991, p. 34.

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1 

 Paris Bordone (circle of), Nymph and Hunter, ca. 1550–1560, oil on canvas, 45 × 61 cm, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum.

2 

 Giovanni Cariani, Pastoral Scene, 1510–1520, oil on canvas, 88 × 163 cm, Warsaw, Muzeum Narodowe.

A rt is A iming for the Ey e

gestus melancholicus, seems to lament the loss of an irretrievable Arcadian ideal.3 It is a mood that is subtly reinforced and virtually intoned by the motif of the music played on flutes. Because, like the beautiful nymph, the beautiful sound of the music remains inaccessible to the viewer, it remains irretrievably inaudible to him. The only way for him to participate in this imaginary world is through his projection and, in consequence, through the aesthetic experience of painting. Beauty, in other words, is born in the eye of the beholder and by means of his or her involvement in the painting. Hence, it is not by chance that the motif of flute-playing is linked with a piercingly sharp gaze that aims directly at the viewer and almost hits him. In addition, as we just saw, it is not uncommon that this motif of a sharply directed gaze is associated with the metaphor of the chase; more precisely with pursuit by hounds, archery and virtually hunting somebody down. A telling example is offered by an engraving after Crispin de Passe in Charles Sorel’s Le Berger extravagant, published in Paris in 1627, which is pointedly ironic in the spirit of anti-Petrarchism (fig. 3). The engraving presents a parody of the idealised lady, “un portraict fait par Metaphore”, as the text explains, which takes Petrarch’s metaphors literally: the mouth a piece of coral, the cheeks covered with roses and lilies, the eyebrows depicted as arches, the hair like golden chains, threads, and nets, and so on. Not least, the eyes are two burning suns, but true arrows emerge from them instead of rays, while Amor with his bow makes it clear that they are darts of love that will dangerously strike the one they meet.4 Against this background of the broad field of motifs and metaphors (only pointed out here), related to the interconnection of gazes, arrows, art and imagination, it

3   Rodolfo Pallucchini and Francesco Rossi, Giovanni Cariani, Bergamo 1983, pp. 142–143, no. 79; Paul Holberton, “The ‘Pastorale’ or ‘Fete champetre’ in the early sixteenth century”, in: Titian 500, ed. Joseph Manca (Studies in the History of Art, 45; Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts; Symposium Papers, XXV), Washington D.C. 1994, pp. 245–262, here pp. 247 f. et seq. 4   Friedrich Wilhelm Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts ca. 1450–1700, Bd. 16, Amsterdam 1974, p. 142, no. 182. “Anselme auoit fait vn petit tour de malice ingenieuse & suiuant ce que le Berger luy auoit dit de la beauté de sa maistresse, imitant les extrauagantes descriptions des Poetes, il auoit depeint vn visage qui au lieu d’estre de couleur de chair, auoit vn teint blanc comme neige. Il y auoit deux branches de corail à l’ouuerture de la bouche, & à chaque ioue vn lys & vne rose croisez l’vn sur l’ autre [… etc.]. Cecy se doit appeler vn potraict fait par Mètaphore”, in: Charles Sorel, Le berger extravagant, Rouen 1629 (first ed. Paris 1627), pp. 67 f. et seq. See John Humphrey Whitfield, “La belle Charitè”, in: Italian Studies 17 (1963), pp. 33–53; Leonard Forster, Das eiskalte Feuer. Sechs Studien zum europäischen Petrarkismus, Kronberg/Ts. 1976, pp. 4–5 and p. 45; Françoise Borin, “Judging by Images”, in: A History of Women in the West. III: Renaissance and Enlightenment paradoxes, ed. Natalie Zemon Davies and Arlette Farges, Cambridge and London 1994, pp. 187–254, here pp. 214–215; Rosmarie Zeller, “Keine besonderen Kennzeichen. Anmerkungen zur Poetik des physischen Porträts”, in: Physiognomie und Pathognomie. Zur literarischen Darstellung von Individualität. Festschrift für Karl Pestalozzi zum 65. Geburts­ tag, ed. Wolfram Groddeck and Ulrich Stadler, Berlin and New York 1994, pp. 373–386, here pp. 374–375; Lucie Desjardins, “De la ‘surface trompeuse’ à l’agréable imposture. Le visage au XVIIe siècle”, in: Intermédialités / Intermediality, 8 (2006), pp. 53–66, here pp. 57–61.

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3   Van Lochom, La belle Charité, engraving after Crispin de Passe, in: Charles Sorel, Le Berger extravagant, Paris 1627.

becomes clear that in the examples just cited, the beholder is constantly and emphatically made aware not only of his own gaze but also of vision itself as an activity that feeds his imagination, his desires and hopes, and indeed his despair of them. These aspects of the sense of vision and the theoretical reflection about them were ubiquitous in epistemological discourse from the Middle Ages. The eyes function as organs that mediate between the visible world and the human soul (anima) or heart (cor) as the seat of the cognitive and appetitive faculties. In the warning formulation of Hrabanus Maurus, towards the middle of the 9th century, love originates in the eyes, since the arrow of love enters the heart through the eyes: “Per oculos intrat ad mentem sagitta amoris.”5 The erotic poetry of courtly love took up this idea in the motif of the reciprocal gaze. In a thirteenth-century chanson, Adam de la Halle declares: “[…] But there is still a better reason why I have to sing about love desire. For without threatening, I was shot in the heart and hit in my heart, by some radiant clear and bright eyes, that laugh to aim better. Against them can resist neither armour nor shield!”6 The ungraspable beauty of the beloved, the charm of her gaze, becomes an arrow with which Cupid 5 

 Liber de modo bene vivendi, in: PL 184, col. 1241; cf. Rüdiger Schnell, Causa Amoris. Liebeskonzeption und Liebesdarstellung in der mittelalterlichen Literatur, Bern and Munich 1985, p. 245. 6   “Encore i a millour raison, pour ci/ Je doi canter d’amerous desitier;/ Car sans manechier/ Sui ou cuer trais et ferus/ D’uns vairs ius ses et agus/ Rians pour mius assener!/ A chou ne puet contrester/ Haubers ni escus!”; Rudolf Berger, Canchons und Partures des altfranzösischen trouvére Adan de le Hale le Bochu d’Aras, Halle 1900, no. 16, Str. 1, pp. 3 ff.; cf. Schnell (as in note 5), p. 252.

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4 

 Guercino,

Venus, Cupid and Mars, 1634, oil on canvas, 139 × 161 cm, Modena, Galleria Estense.

strikes the lover. This arrow is the “Biaus semblanz” (the beautiful appearance, der schöne Schein) praised by Provençal love poetry,7 and its force remains a basic premise of courtly love poetry in the Renaissance and beyond: “il principio d’amore nasca dagli occhi e dalla bellezza”, as Lorenzo de’ Medici explains in his Comento ad alcuni sonetti d’amore.8 Guercino dramatises the very same idea in his famous painting in Modena, dated 1634, in which Cupid, following Venus’ directions, aims his arrow directly at the

7 

 Karlheinz Stierle, “Bemerkungen zur Geschichte des schönen Scheins”, in: Kolloquium Kunst und Philosophie, ed. Willy Oelmüller, vol. 2: Ästhetischer Schein, Paderborn/Munich/Vienna/Zurich 1982, pp. 208–232, esp. pp. 210–211; id., “Der Schein der Schönheit und die Schönheit des Scheins in Ariosts ‘Orlando Furioso’”, in: Ritterepik der Renaissance, ed. Klaus W. Hempfer (Text und Kontext 6), Stuttgart 1989, pp. 243–276, esp. p. 249. 8   Lorenzo de’ Medici, Comento ad alcuni sonetti d’amore, in: id., Opere scelte, Novara 1969, p. 128.

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beholder’s eye (fig. 4, plate XXVIII).9 This dramatic gesture addresses with inescapable directness the theme of the viewer’s enchantment with the beauty of the image. In the earlier words of Petrarch, “love placed me as a target for his arrow (amor m’ à posto come segno a strale)”, which strikes from the eyes of the beloved, “from your eyes (dagli occhi vostri)” like a “mortal blow (colpo mortale)”, “against which no time or place helps me (contra cui non mi val tempo né loco)”. Countless other references and examples for the concept of the eye as “sagitta amoris” or “sagitta cupidinis”, the arrow of love or desire, could easily be cited.10 Guercino’s painting served as a reminder that the nature of this arrow is such that no suit of armour can protect against it, not even the cuirass of Mars, so artistically staged with its specular reflections of light. The painting’s direct addressee was, of course, Duke Francesco I of Modena, who commissioned the image. He is implied as the real and ideal viewer in front of the image, and at the same time as a viewer and player on the stage of the picture itself, in the figure of his mythological representative Mars, the god of war. In the image, Mars in full armour draws the curtain aside from the bed, where he surrenders spellbound to the sight of the beautiful Venus – a constellation that would have had its speaking correspondence in the theatrical act of drawing aside the actual curtain covering the painting to reveal the beautiful work of art. The painting and the sense of acute unsettledness, even threat, that it creates for the viewer, through its precise aiming at him, plays with a variety of allusions and ambivalences which cannot be discussed in detail here. These concern, amongst other things, the shocking vehemence that harbours the motif of Amor’s arrow directly aimed at the eye of the beholder, further reinforced by the irrefutable authority of Venus and her finger-pointing, while at the same time the goddess of beauty avoids any direct eye-contact and remains aloof and unattainable. Francesco Gonzaga alone, alias 9 

 Luigi Salerno, I dipinti del Guercino, Rome 1988, p. 242, Cat. no. 151; David M. Stone, Guercino. Catalogo completo dei dipinti, Florence 1991, p. 158, Cat. no. 139; David Mahon, in: Exhib. Cat. Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, Il Guercino, 1591–1666, ed. Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, Frankfurt am Main 1991, pp. 242 f. et seq., no. 43; Julian Kliemann, “Kunst als Bogenschießen. Domenichinos ‘Jagd der Diana’ in der Galleria Borghese”, in: Römisches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana, 31 (1996), pp. 273–312, esp. pp. 302 ff. et seq. Most recently, for more in detail on the painting, its context and the further implications of Cupid as a symbol of painting: Elisabeth Oy-Marra, “Vorsicht! Amor schießt auf den Betrachter. Guercinos Mars und Venus als handelndes Bild”, in: Das Entgegenkommende Denken, ed. Franz Engel and Sabine Marienberg, Berlin and Boston 2016, pp. 181–200. 10   Francesco Petrarca, Le Rime, ed. Giosuè Carducci and Severino Ferrari, Florence 1972, p. 211, no. CXXXIII. For numerous analogous formulations see also Hugo Friedrich, Epochen der italienischen Lyrik, Frankfurt am Main 1964, Register s.v. ‘Auge’, ‘Metaphern: Pfeil, Pfeile’; as well as Tobias Eisermann, Cavalcanti oder die Poetik der Negativität, Tübingen 1992, passim, e.g. p. 113, p. 122, p. 140, pp. 146 ff. et seq., p. 166 and pp. 167 f. et seq. p. 174; see also the list given by Marianne Albrecht-Bott, Die bildende Kunst in der italienischen Lyrik der Renaissance und des Barock. Studien zur Beschreibung von Portraits und anderen Bildwerken unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von G. B. Marinos ‘Galleria’, Mainzer Romanistische Arbeiten, XI, Wies­baden 1976, p. 185 (‚Auge‘). For the term sagitta cupidinis see also Schnell (as in note 5), pp. 264–265.

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5 

 Anonymous German Artist, Archer, early 17th century, engraving.

6 

 Andries Stock, Archer with Milkmaid, 1610, engraving after Jacques de Gheyn.

his pictorial alter ego Mars, seems to be protected from this attack on the viewer. Because, on the one hand, the targeted arrows are clearly Cupid’s weapons, whilst on the other the Gonzagas’ heraldic eagle appears on the quiver (at bottom right) that holds them. This testifies that the actual executive authority of the whole scenario staged here lies with the Duke himself. There is, in other words, a more powerful protection from the dangers of love, as well as those of war: namely the ruling power of art, or respectively the artful power of ruling, which is quite emblematically alluded to by the aimed, acute arrow as an indicator of the acutezza of painting.11 The way in which the meaning and aesthetic function of this painting are shaped by the discourse of art and love, gaze and arrow, especially as it had been developed in literature and the visual arts, could be traced further and along various routes. This 11 

 The imagery of battle and war is current from Ovid onwards: “Every lover is a soldier, and Cupid has a camp of his own […].” Ovid, Amores, in: Heroides and Amores, trans. Grant Showerman, London 1971, vol. 1, I, 9, v. 1-2. See for e.g. Petrarch, in: Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The ‘Rime Sparse’ and Other Lyrics, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling, Cambridge 1979, pp. 176–177, no. CXXXIV: “Peace I do not find, and I have no wish to make war […] (Pace non trovo et non ò da far guerra […])”. See Friedrich (as in note 10), pp. 11–12. See further Kliemann (as in note 9), pp. 302 et seq. (the arrow as an indicator of the acutezza of painting), with additional examples, pp. 299 et seq., of the arrow metaphor.

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7 

 Herman tom Ring, Triumph of Death and the Last Judgement, ca. 1550/55, oil on canvas, Utrecht, Museum Catharijneconvent.

would ultimately lead well beyond Italy (fig. 5 and fig. 6). The motif of the arrow aimed at the viewer is remarkably frequent around 1600 in German and Dutch prints and paintings, most of which pretend to be didactic images that moralise on the tenuous relationship between love and delusion, passion and deceptive appearances and, ultimately truth and falsehood.12 A German engraving from the early seventeenth century 12   R. Adèr, “De boogschutter en het meisje”, in: Boymans bijdragen. Opstellen van medewerkers en oud‑medewerkers van het Museum Boymans‑van Beuningen voor J. C. Ebbinge Wubben, Rotterdam 1978,

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gives an example (fig. 5). It probably refers to an iconography that was used in public town halls or public religious paintings, like that of Herman tom Ring in Utrecht from ca. 1550/55 (fig. 7), which confront the viewer with the figure of Death (here right in the centre of the painting) as the ultimate and unbribable judge of truth or falsehood, belief or unbelief. “Schaw, rede was die Warheit is, wo nicht, so treff ich dich gewis”, runs the inscription on the engraving, while the bowman is directly aiming at the beholder. Far more often, however, the motif of the ‘all-seeing’ archer appears in pictures that were only, if at all, outwardly moralising but in reality quite obviously erotic or filled with innuendos and titillating meanings. A rather large engraving (over 40cm high) by Andries Stock, which might have been an imposing wall decoration, is based on a virtually identical drawing by Jacques de Gheyn, which is dated around 1610 (fig. 6). The archer, who inevitably threatens the viewer, has a bulging codpiece and has allowed the milkmaid to put on his hat, a motif that implies a sort of rather loose behaviour. All the more so, indeed, since the milkmaid is actually holding both of the archer’s elbows

8 

 Gerrit

Claesz Bleker, Milkmaid, 1643, etching.

pp. 59–64; Philipp Ackermann, Textfunktion und Bild in Genreszenen der niederländischen Graphik des 17. Jahrhunderts, Alfter 1993, pp. 154–157 (brief remarks); further examples and references in Eddy de Jongh, Ger Luijten, Mirror of Everyday Life. Genreprints in the Netherlands 1550–1700, Amsterdam and Ghent 1997, pp. 129 et seq.; Exhib. Cat. Emotions. Pain and Pleasure in Dutch Paintings of the Golden Age, ed. Gary Schwartz and Machiel Keestra, Rotterdam 2015, pp. 45–50, and pp. 122–123, Cat. no. 40; William W. Robinson, Drawings from the Age of Bruegel, Rubens, and Rembrandt: Highlights from the Collection of the Harvard Museum, Cambridge 2016, pp. 145–147, Cat. no. 40. For further perspectives on De Gheyn’s motif and its combination of gaze and arrow see, amongst others, Hans Belting, Florenz und Bagdad. Eine westöstliche Geschichte des Blicks, Munich 2009, pp. 229–239; Yannis Hadjinicolaou, “Das allumfassende Auge. Zur Bildsukzession bei Jacques de Gheyn II”, in: Et in imagine ego. Facetten von Bildakt und Verkörperung. Festgabe für Horst Bredekamp, ed. Ulrike Feist and Markus Rath, Berlin 2012, pp. 93–116, esp. pp. 97 et seq. From another, rather broad, perspective on the widespread connection between art and hunting see most recently: Hunting without weapons. On the pursuit of images, ed. Maurice Saß, Berlin 2017.

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9 

 Jacques de Gheyn (circle of), Archer with Milkmaid, Early 17th century, Private Collection.

10 

 Pieter Serwouters, Archer, ca. 1607– 1608, engraving after David Vinckboons.

and guiding him, being a maiden, as the inscription confirms, that gives good advice: “bene virgo docet”. That this “virgo” here is a milkmaid, and with a tub filled with milk to the brim, is no coincidence, for this kind of woman traditionally had a rather dubious reputation in contemporary art and literature. An etching by Gerrit Claesz Bleker from 1643 sheds a clear light on this (fig. 8). It shows the milkmaid in lively, even sensuous, activity, with a visibly cheerful expression directly corresponding to that of the man watching her, obviously not without some kind of frivolous ulterior motive. What this means for Andries Stock’s engraving is shown in quite concrete terms by the quasipastoral scene in the background, which represents the couple’s intimate love affair by the cows around them, using quite sensual, frivolous, if not to say animalistic semantics. I do not want to pursue the various aspects of the particular iconographic motif of the archer who aims at the observer. Numerous, rather mediocre replicas in painting could be cited, such as an example from the early seventeenth century, which replaces the milkmaid with a market woman, significantly with dead birds in her basket (fig. 9). Another, a print by Pieter Serwouters after a design of David Vinckboons (fig. 10), depicts a kneeling bowman aiming at the viewer whilst, simultaneously, an owl defecates on him from the tree above, referring to the deceptive fate of those with too self-confident, too self-righteous attitudes. These examples could be multiplied and followed up to the present day. Consider the photo of former Finnish soldier

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11   Martti Peltonen and Liina Aunola, Performance with crossbow, Bielefeld, Christmas 2017.

12 

 Werner Jacobsz. van den Valckert, Venus and Cupid, ca. 1612–1614, oil on canvas, 10.4 × 75.6 cm, Haarlem, Private Collection.

Martti Peltonen’s circus act, staged in different performances around Christmas, 2017, in the city of Bielefeld. In this, he aimed his crossbow at a rose in his partner Liina Aunola’s hand, then fired and accurately hit it (fig. 11). Instead, I would like to return to the argument that is connected with Guercino’s painting in Modena (fig. 4), namely the turning of the acute, even threatening, constellation of gazes and arrows into a moment of aesthetic experience at the sight of the art of painting. More specifically, an art of painting that consists essentially of the dialectical tension between performance and withdrawal, representation and presence, making the medial dimension of painting the very core and fundamental meaning of this kind of aesthetic experience. Let us pursue this argument a little further, starting with a painting by Werner Jacobsz. van den Valckert from around 1620, now in Haarlem, whose subject matter is closely related to Guercino’s (fig. 12).13 In this, the semi-nude Venus is presented with her body half immersed in light, half concealed by darkness, and her subtle indecision between uncovering and concealing herself creates 13 

 Pieter J. J. van Thiel, “Werner Jacobsz. van den Valckert”, in: Oud Holland, 97 (1983), pp. 128–195, here p. 179, no. 6; Eric Jan Sluijter, “‘Les regards dards’. Werner van den Valckert’s Venus and Cupid”, in: In His Milieu: Essays on Netherlandish Art in Memory of John Michael Montias, ed. Amy Golahny, Mia M. Mochizuki and Lisa Vergara, Amsterdam 2006, pp. 423–439; Exhib. Cat. Emotions. (as in note 12), pp. 122–123, Cat. no. 39 (Gary Schwartz).

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a seductive combination of self-presentation and withdrawal. As before, this motif can, in part, be understood as a metaphor for the image’s inherently ambivalent nature and for the appeal of its oscillation between the represented and the painterly self-presence; that is to say as a metaphor for the art of painting. It is just this appealing ambivalence that generates the aesthetic experience in the viewer, who is mesmerised by Venus’ reciprocating gaze, half in bright light, and half in dark shadow, visible and invisible, and by her lips – sensual, alive and, yet again, a vivid red colour; and who is aimed at by Cupid’s arrow, which makes it clear to him, as exciting as it is painful, that it is with the eye and the imaginative sight alone that all of this arises, but also passes away. The same motif or, more precisely, this same complex configuration of gaze and art, arrow and love, image and imagination, intertwined as it were in Venus’ veil with its dialectic of concealing and revealing, is described a little later by Jan Vos. In an ekphrastic poem from the middle of the 17th century, Vos describes how Cupid, the stoker of love (“de minnestooker”), falls prey to his own weapon, the arrow of love (“minnepijl”), in front of the painting that portrays Geertuidt van Maarseveen as a young beauty: “I know no other arrows than the looks that come from this high forehead […]. Beauty, he said, is an arrow, as he reached for the figure full of loveliness: but he embraced a flat panel. These, he called out, are painted limbs. O Maarseveen! Can the artist’s brush inflame hearts with cold colours? This makes my arrow useless, he said. Now the little God will learn how to make images. Painting serves as a weapon of love.”14 The double function of the aesthetic experience is here, as in van den Valckert’s painting, intensified to the point of producing, on the one hand, a sensual, erotic allure, and compensating, on the other, for the non-fulfilment of the promise it contains. Last but not least, the old concetto of “Omnia vincit amor”, which goes back to Virgil, is also articulated in the painting since, as an all-seeing archer, Cupid will similarly defeat the observer in the end. Thus, all the more, the image reminds the viewer to reflect on the way he sees, and also on the ethical, moral foundations, which come into play through his imagination. As can be understood against this background, staging the relationship between image and viewer in such seductive terms provoked art theory to raise questions about the moral qualities of the gaze and about the interplay and opposition between internal and external vision, between “chaste” and “unchaste” viewing.15 As the poetry and 14   “Ik ken geen pylen dan de blikken/ […] / De schoonheidt, zeidt hy, is een schicht: / En greep naar’t beeldt vol aartigheeden: / Maar hy omhelsd’ een plat panneel. / Dit zyn, riep hy, gemaalde leeden. / O Maarseveen! kan ‘t Kunstpenseel / Door koude verven harten blaake? / Zoo is myn pyl, zeidt hy, onnut. / Nu leert het goodtje beelden maaken. / De Maalkunst strekt de Min tot schut.” All de Gedichten van Jan Vos, ed. Gerrit and Hendrik Bosch, Amsterdam 1726, I, 287. Quoted after Gregor J. M. Weber, Der Lobtopos des ‘Lebenden’ Bildes. Jan Vos und sein ‘Zeege der Schilderkunst’ von 1654, Hildesheim, Zurich and New York 1991, pp. 222–223. 15   Werner Busch, “Das keusche und das unkeusche Sehen. Rembrandts ‘Diana, Aktaion und Callisto’”, in: Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 52 (1989), pp. 257–277.

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moral theology of the Middle Ages had previously done,16 the seventeenth century developed a particular interest in those biblical and mythological subjects that focused on the perils of an unchecked “desire of the eyes (concupiscentia oculorum)”: for example, Bathsheba Bathing, Susanna with the two Elders, The Bath of Danae, and the story of Diana and Actaeon, but also Medusa or David with the Head of Goliath.17 For example, in a passage from his Schilder-const (the “Art of Painting”), published in 1604, to which Werner Busch has drawn attention, Karel van Mander admonishes the young painter always to remember, while painting, the tragic fate of Actaeon. Overwhelmed by sensual desire, his eyes yearned to behold Diana until he was dreadfully mauled by her hounds. Actaeon, who preferred the unbridled senses and passion to thoughtfulness and restraint, serves here as a warning to the painter, to always uphold the right and true vision of art over false and corrupting views.18 Two works by the Amsterdam painter Jacob van Loo, one in Berlin (painted in 1648)19, the other in Braunschweig

16 

 See Schnell (as in note 5), pp. 245 et seq., esp. pp. 265 et seq. on the literary theme of Susanna, Joseph and Potiphars Weib, Diana, Achilles and Polixena; see also pp. 396 et seq. (“disguising of sexual desire”). Gunther Bös, Curiositas: Die Rezeption eines antiken Begriffs durch christliche Autoren bis Thomas von Aquin, Paderborn 1995, p. 26 and pp. 81–82 (deadly curiosity in the case of Actaeon). 17   See among others Kurt Badt, “Domenichinos ‘Caccia di Diana’ in der Galleria Borghese”, in: Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst, 3.F. 13 (1962), pp. 216–237; Lynne Lawner, Lives of the Courtesans. Portraits of the Renaissance, New York 1987, esp. pp. 151 et seq.; Jacques Foucart, Peintres rembranesques au Louvre (Les dossiers du département des peintures, 35), Paris 1988, pp. 88 et seq.; Busch (as in note 15); Mieke Bal, Reading ‘Rembrandt’. Beyond the Word-Image Opposition, Cambridge 1991, pp. 138 et seq.; Weber (as in note 14), pp. 212 et seq.; Exhib. Cat. Rembrandt. Der Meister und seine Werkstatt. Gemälde, Munich/Paris/London 1991, pp. 167 et seq., pp. 196 et seq., pp. 233 et seq., pp. 242 et seq.; Elizabeth Cropper, “The Petrifying Art: Marino’s Poetry and Caravaggio”, in: Metropolitan Museum Journal, 26 (1991), pp. 193–212; Steven Z. Levine, “To See or Not to See. The Myth of Diana and Actaeon in the Eighteenth Century”, in: Exhib. Cat. The Loves of the Gods: Mythological Painting from Watteau to David, New York 1992, pp. 73–95, esp. pp. 88 et seq.; Charles Dempsey, The Portrayal of Love. Botticelli’s ‘Primavera’ and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Princeton 1992, pp. 95 et seq., 102 et seq.; Petra Welzel, Rembrandts ‘Bathseba’ – Metapher des Begehrens oder Sinnbild zur Selbsterkenntnis?, Frankfurt am Main/Berlin/Bern 1994; Kliemann (as in note 9); Stefan Grohé, Rembrandts mythologische Historien, Cologne/Weimar/Vienna 1996, pp. 195 et seq., p. 225, pp. 277 et seq.; Klaus Krüger, „Gesichter ohne Leib. Dispositive der gewesenen Präsenz“, in: Verklärte Körper. Ästhetiken der Transfiguration, ed. Erika Fischer-Lichte and Nicola Suthor, Munich 2006, pp. 183–222; Caroline van Eck, “The Petrifying Gaze of Medusa: Ambivalence, Ekplexis, and the Sublime”, in: Journal of the Historians of Netherlandish Art, 8.2 (2016), DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2016.8.2.3 (Available at http://www.jhna.org/index. php/vol-8-2-2016/336-caroline-van-eck, accessed June 8 2020); Thijs Weststeijn, “The Painting Looks Back: Reciprocal Desire in the Seventeenth Century” in: Ut pictura amor. The Reflexive Imagery of Love in Artistic Theory and Practice, 1500–1700, ed. Walter Melion, Michael Zell and Joanna Woodall, Leiden 2017, pp. 264–295. 18   Karel van Mander, Den grondt der edel vry schilderconst, ed. Hessel Miedema, Utrecht 1973, vol. 1, pp. 90–91 (Exhortatiae, Cap. I, 62); see Busch (as in note 15), p. 172. 19   Gemäldegalerie. Holländische und flämische Gemälde des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts im Bode-Museum, Berlin 1976, pp. 58–59.

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13   Jacob van Loo, Diana and her Nymphs, 1648, oil on canvas, 136.8 × 170.6 cm, Berlin, Staatliche Museen, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Gemäldegalerie.

(slightly later, around 1650–52)20, reveal the significance that this subject matter was thought to have for bringing about a dynamic and meaningful relationship between image and the viewer’s imagination (fig. 13 and fig. 14). Both works show the goddess Diana surrounded by her nymphs, shown either preparing for their bath or already drying themselves off. In the Braunschweig painting, Diana’s undressed companions are seen from various viewpoints and in poses that delicately exhibit their feminine forms, in ways familiar from the depiction of nymphs in pastoral painting. The goddess’ threatening look seems all the more severe as she silently and solemnly stares out at the viewer. The beholder suddenly finds himself in the role of Actaeon, the discovered voyeur who is now in imminent danger. The threat is intensified by the discovery of the quiver at Diana’s feet and, next to it, numerous birds and hares which she has already killed. Their fate prefigures the viewer’s own in his role as an imaginary participant in the image. Openly confronted by the gaze, the viewer is drawn into the situation, but paradoxically, at the same time, he becomes aware of his secure location outside the image. His view of the naked nymphs generates a continuous renewal of both attraction and risk, of a pleasurably disquieting, alert and wary sense of intrusion. 20 

 Exhib. Cat. Gods, Saints and Heroes. Dutch Painting in the Age of Rembrandt, Washington D.C. 1981, p. 62, Cat. no. 51.

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14   Jacob van Loo, Diana and her Nymphs, ca. 1650–1652, oil on canvas, 162.5 × 199 cm, Brunswick, Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum.

This interplay of forces results, ultimately, in the experience of an ambiguous oscillation, which lets what is presented to the eye fluctuate between reality and imagination. In the same context, Domenichino’s famous painting of the Hunt of Diana from 1617 could also be discussed (fig. 15, plate XXIX).21 Unlike van Loo’s painting, it shows the goddess’ hunt in full swing and in the acute moment of the just-shot arrow, with violently excited, barely controllable hounds. The youthful, naked nymph in the very foreground is only too willing, indeed tempting and provocative, to look at the beholder and attract him. The two young men, however, who hide in the bushes on the far right and whom the beholder in fact only discovers at second glance, remind him, not without a sudden fright, of caution and restraint. If the one fixes him directly with his gaze and with a gesture that urges him to remain silent and, somehow, to stay prudently away from the scene and the painting, then the other one is completely under the spell of the ongoing action, which with the prey already taken basically prefigures the upcoming fate of Actaeon – alias that of the observer. Domenichino’s painting

21 

 See Badt (as in note 17) and esp. Kliemann (as in note 9); Julian Kliemann, Il bersaglio dell’arte. la Caccia di Diana di Domenichino nella Galleria Borghese, Rome 2001; Stefano Pierguidi, “La freccia in aria, ovvero la rappresentazione del tempo in pittura. ‘La Caccia di Diana’ di Domenichino e ‘Le tre Parche’ di Simon Vouet”, in: Les cahiers d’histoire de l’art, 7 (2009), pp. 20–25.

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15 

 Domenichino,

The Hunt of Diana, 1617, oil on canvas, 225 × 320 cm, Rome, Galleria Borghese.

focuses on the acute moment, truly an “Augenblick”, of the aesthetic experience as a constellation full of tension, a tension of pleasure and distance, immediacy and reflection, sensuality and cognition. It also clarifies that this tension is hardly a dichotomy, but rather is to be understood as a continuous, inseparable interweaving and a synthesis to be renewed again and again through the act of imaginative contemplation. Against this background let me finally turn to a last example, even more famous than Domenichino’s, which brings out this very tension in a striking but also puzzling way, Caravaggio’s Victorious Cupid, painted in 1602–1603 (fig. 16).22 The painting shows a youth with richly feathered wings, therefore a creature or being not found in nature, but who in the image presents himself in so natural a fashion that the eye is struck by his seemingly tangible presence. The model for the picture is a boy of eleven 22 

 The literature on the painting has meanwhile grown enormously and is barely manageable. Still fundamental: Mia Cinotti, “Michelangelo Merisi detto il Caravaggio (con saggio critico di G. A. Dell’Acqua),” in: I Pittori bergamaschi dal XIII al XIX secolo: Il Seicento, I, Bergamo 1983, pp. 203–641, here pp. 409–411, no. 1. A more recent overview of the research can be found, among others, in Valeska von Rosen, “Caravaggios Eromenos. Der Amor für Vincenzo Giustiniani”, in: Amor sacro e profano. Modelle und Modellierungen der Liebe in Literatur und Malerei der italienischen Renaissance, ed. Jörn Steigerwald and id., Wiesbaden 2012, pp. 333–361; and Helen Langdon, Caravaggio and Cupid: homage and rivalry in Rome and Florence, Edinburgh 2017. The following remarks refer back to my earlier interpretation in Krüger (as in note 1), pp. 243–251, with more specific references and notes.

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16 

 Caravaggio, Victorious Cupid, 1602–1603, oil on canvas, 156 × 113 cm, Berlin, Staatliche Museen, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Gemäldegalerie.

or twelve years, or so, posing for the painter with two large, grey-brown eagle wings that Caravaggio had presumably borrowed as a prop from the studio of his painter colleague, Orazio Gentileschi. Cupid as a poetically condensed creature of mythological fantasy presents himself as a strikingly physical, conceivably unmythological, namely all-too-human, all-too-natural boy. Or vice versa: A boy in his bare, indeed naked, existence presents himself as a fictional, deified figure of mythology. This ambivalence of the painting’s relation to reality and of its semiotic determination becomes a central, indeed provocative, experience for contemplating it. This is not by chance: it is also reflected in early descriptions of the work which are torn between two ways of interpreting the picture’s subject, whether as a naked boy or as the god of love.23 23 

 Michael Wiemers, “Caravaggios ‘Amor Vincitore’ im Urteil eines Romfahrers um 1650”, in: Pantheon, 44 (1986), pp. 59–61; Joachim von Sandrarts Academie der edlen Bau-, Bild- und MahlereyKünste von 1675. Leben der berühmten Maler, Bildhauer und Baumeister, ed. Alfred R. Peltzer, Munich 1925, p. 276 (“Nachmalen mahlte er […] einen Cupido in Lebensgrösse nach Gestalt eines ohngefehr zwölffjährigen Jünglings […]”). For the early sources see Herwarth Röttgen, Caravaggio: Der irdische Amor, oder Der Sieg der fleischlichen Liebe, Frankfurt am Main 1992, pp. 5 et seq; Walter F. Friedlaender, Caravaggio Studies, Princeton 1955, p. 182; Howard Hibbard, Caravaggio, New York 1983, pp. 155 et seq.

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The objects arranged like a veritable still life at the figure’s feet reveal the consistency with which this ambivalence pervades the entire image. A lute, a violin and a sheet of music with mensural notation, together with a square and a pair of compasses, a piece of metal armour, behind it a book with a quill and a laurel branch, and, finally, a crown and sceptre – all of these are depicted, like the boy himself, in an objective, concrete fashion. As real, natural objects, they stand for themselves. But at the same time, they point beyond themselves to the universal significance of music and poetry, of science and the art of war, of fame and secular power, and by this they vividly demonstrate the meaning of the traditional concept of “Omnia vincit amor”. The only object that diverges from this semantic structure, the starry globe behind the boy, is, significantly, a later addition. It alone is not a self-contained object but has a purely symbolic function, representing “the world” as such, and resisting interpretation as a real object that would provide a – precarious – seat for the youth. As a whole, then, the image aims simultaneously at naturalising allegory and at allegorising a pre-existing objective reality. This interplay, which confuses and complicates the difference between being and signifying, is in itself the painting’s actual theme. One cannot escape the impression that the depicted scene is staged, an arranged, artificial mise-en-scène that makes the painting seem like the depiction of a tableau vivant, an image of a dummy image (“Bild eines Scheinbildes”) and leaves the viewer continually wondering whether the painting presents Cupid in the shape of a boy or a boy in the role of Cupid. This remarkable ambiguity of representation is expressed in a different and more direct, explicit fashion in a work by Cecco del Caravaggio, which was created only ten or fifteen years later. This painting presents Cupid drinking at a fountain as an image within the image (fig. 17, plate XXX).24 The canvas that is shown leaning against a wall within the painting has been revealed to the viewer from a curtain of red brocade, which has been pulled aside. Therefore, the painting’s true subject is not Cupid at the Fountain but A Picture of Cupid at the Fountain. But to which of these two images and to which of their respective realities does Cupid belong? While the surroundings in which he kneels to quench his thirst are marked by a rock face overgrown with plants and populated with animals, the background to the right, next to the curtain, is a plastered brick wall, hardly different from the back wall against which the canvas is leaning. Similarly, the light that illuminates Cupid from the left barely differs from the 24   Daniel Arasse, Le Détail. Pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture, Paris 1992, pp. 135 et seq.; Röttgen (note 23), pp. 55–56; Mina Gregori, “Il ‘San Giovannino alla sorgente’ del Caravaggio”, in: Paragone, 44, 519–521 (1993), pp. 3–20, esp. pp. 13–14.; Gianni Papi, Cecco del Caravaggio, Florence 1992, pp. 23 et seq.; Gianni Papi, “Caravaggio e Cecco”, in: Come dipingeva il Caravaggio. Atti della giornata di studio, ed. Mina Gregori, Milan 1996, pp. 123–134, esp. pp. 132 et seq.; most recently: Julian Kliemann, “Amor an der Quelle von Cecco del Caravaggio oder die Grenzen der Malerei”, in: Kunst und Eros, ed. Christoph Wagner and Ulrike Lorenz, Regensburg 2015, pp. 8–16.

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17 

 Cecco

del Caravaggio, Cupid at the Fountain, 1615–1620, oil on canvas, Private Collection.

light illuminating the canvas and the red brocade, casting their shadows on the wall behind them. Any attempt at assigning determinate modes of reality is finally called into question by the arrow at the lower right, which can be grouped with the items that Cupid has laid on the ground at the fountain, but which projects beyond the realm of reality defined by the canvas. As Cupid’s arrow in the examples shown above had its reality, so to speak, in the eye of the beholder, so here, somewhat similarly, the arrow is part of the painting’s reality yet simultaneously tends to emerge from this reality. The arrow alludes to acutezza and hence points out the artful painting of the picture, and at the same time it refers to the brush itself as the instrument of painting. It is placed with all its ambivalence – as part of the painting and part of the outer reality – exactly where we would expect the signature of the painting, and not by chance, alluding to the idea that Cupid himself painted it, with an arrow that hits us in the eye. This visual play confuses not only the relations between the different realities within the painting, but also, through the effects of trompe-l’oeil, their external relation to the viewer. From the left, the image appears as though it could be directly entered, and the snail sitting on a stone in the foreground seems so tangible that one is tempted to reach out and touch it. However, to the right, it is not just the arrow but also the red cloth and, not least, the canvas itself that present themselves as no less real. The brocade curtain, whose colour contrasts so emphatically with the brown tones that prevail

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in the rest of the image, quite obviously alludes to the well-known anecdote from Pliny: Zeuxis, who had succeeded in deceiving birds with illusionistic painted grapes, was in turn deceived by Parrhasios, who had painted a curtain (linteum) in front of an image, which Zeuxis tried to draw aside. More than just a learned reference, however, the motif of the curtain points to the fictional potential of painting. It is a pictorial rendering of the old topos of the veil of artistic invention, the velo di finzioni, as the cloak of artistic form. Giambattista Marino, also in the early Seicento, praised the poetic and inventive powers of classical mythology; that is to say of the imaginary universe of which Cupid is a part: “La Grecia, di tutte le bell’arti inventrice, sotto velo di favolose finzioni soleva ricoprire la maggior parte de’ suoi misteri (Greece, the inventor of all fine arts, under the veil of fabulous fictions used to cover most of its mysteries)”.25 Cupid’s specific manifestation as a visual fiction, especially, has played an important role in mythographic writings since Antiquity. In his elegies, Propertius explains that it was actually the art of painting that first gave the idea of Cupid a sensually concrete form and appearance. The characteristic aspects of that appearance, however, were to be understood as purely allegorical. His childish appearance, according to Propertius, symbolises the sometimes nonsensical behaviour of lovers, while his wings indicate the flirtatious inconstancy of amorous feelings. Cupid’s arrows point to the incurable wounds produced by love, and so forth.26 Medieval and, later, humanist thought introduced and developed the topos that the youthful Cupid’s appearance was the paradigm of an allegory naturalised by painting. Consequently, and especially since the early Trecento, he was then, indeed, represented many times in painted pictures (see for example a fresco in Assisi, dated around 1325: fig. 18; and a later one, painted around 1452–1466 by Piero della Francesca in Arezzo: fig. 19). “Alatus pingitur,” “he is painted with wings,” as Hrabanus Maurus explained as early as the Carolingian era, because nothing more volatile and mutable can be found, “quia nihil […] levius, nihil mutabilius invenitur.” He is painted as a boy, “puer pingitur,” because nothing is more stupid or more irrational (“quia stultus est et irrationalis amor”).27 In the late Duecento, the poet Federico dell’Amba wrote a sonnet specifically addressing the fact that Cupid, by his nature, cannot be grasped or seen, but can be represented as tangible and visible by painting:

25 

 Giambattista Marino, Epistolario, seguito da lettere di altri scrittori del seicento, ed. Angelo Borzelli and Fausto Nicolini, Bari 1911–1912, vol. 2, p. 16. See Anne-Marie Lecoq, “‘Finxit’. Le peintre comme ‘fictor’ au XVIe siècle”, in: Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 37 (1975), pp. 225–243, here p. 229. 26   The essential, abundantly documented study remains Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanist Themes in the Art of the Renaissance, New York 1962 (first edition 1939), pp. 95 et seq. (“Blind Cupid”), p. 96 and p. 104 (Propertius). 27   Panofsky (as in note 26), p. 105.

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18 

 Unknown Artist, Blindfolded Cupid with wings and arrows, ca. 1320–1330, Assisi, San Francesco, Lower Church, Fresco in the crossing.

19   Piero della Francesca, Blindfolded Cupid with wings and arrow, between 1452 and 1466, fresco, Arezzo, San Francesco.

If Amor, from whom proceeds good as well as bad, were a visible being of nature (visibil cosa da natura), then he would without doubt be just as he is shown in painting (nella dipintura): A boy with a quiver tied to him, shooting, blind, naked and with wings.28 The poem then continues with the customary allegorical interpretation. Many further texts of this sort could easily be cited until well into the seventeenth century and beyond, from authors such as Francesco da Barberino, Petrarch, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, or Leone Ebreo. In a treatise from 1496, the humanist Mario Equicola explains that “Cupid appears as a boy in painting, […] naked, because he cannot hide; winged, because he is quick and fickle […]. The bow stands for unfaithfulness, the string for 28 

 “Se Amor, da cui procede bene e male, / Fusse visibil cosa da natura, / Sarebbe senza fallo appunto tale / Com’el si mostra nella dipintura: / Garzone col turcassio alla cintura / Saettando, cieco, nudo e ricco d’ale.” See Panofsky (as in note 26), p. 108.

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lust, the quiver for arbitrariness […], his hair indicates youth”.29 Even Emanuele Tesauro, who in his treatise on style, the 1655 Cannocchiale Aristotelico, praises allegory as the highest and most ingenious form of artful and elevated poetry, illustrates his point using as his paradigm the visualisation of love by the boy Cupid.30 At about the same time, the French painter, poet and theoretician Charles-Alphonse Dufresnoy created a painting that can be read as a comment to the same effect (fig. 20).31 Probably painted around 1653 during his lengthy sojourn in Rome, the painting shows the female personification of painting (Pictura), sitting in front of an easel and about to begin painting a youth in the role of Cupid. As in Caravaggio’s canvas, the youth has open wings and is standing in a relaxed, rather nonchalant attitude with various emblems of the arts and sciences spread out before his feet. While his gaze is directed straight at the artist in front of him and therefore implicitly at the prospective viewer (as in Caravaggio’s case), his right hand points up towards the curtain gathered up by a cord, an indication that it has only just been raised specifically to reveal Cupid’s appearance as mediated by the art of painting. If the self-reflection of painting, which Cecco del Caravaggio so explicitly produces in his image, alludes to the traditional notion of Cupid as the paradigm of a figurative fiction, that connection is intensified further in this case: fiction itself is now understood as a play, actually with the viewer’s expectation to be deceived. It is a play that involves a blurring of the opposition between fiction (finto) and truth (vero), which was given such importance in seventeenth-century art theory especially. Insofar as painting (pictura) is capable of producing deceptive images (simulacri) by means of its imitative capacity, it generates within the intellect the reflective pleasure of illusion, as Emanuele Tesauro knew: “genera nell’intelletto un piacevole inganno […] facendoci à credere che il finto sia il vero.”32 Both works by Caravaggio’s followers draw attention to the self-referential dimension of their subject matters. They focus on the conditioned nature of pictorial representation and display themselves as reflections on the idea of imitating nature.

29 

 Examples in Panofsky (as in note 26), p. 117, p. 125 and, on Equicola, p. 127, who is also discussed by Röttgen (as in note 23), p. 38, but in a different context. 30   Emanuele Tesauro, Il Cannocchiale aristotelico, o sia dell’arguta et ingeniosa elocutione, che serve à tutta l’Arte Oratoria, Lapidaria, et Simbolica, Examinata Co’Principii del divino Aristoteles (Reprint of the edition Turin 1670), ed. August Buck, Bad Homburg/Berlin/Zurich 1968, pp. 481 et seq. (on allegory), esp. pp. 485–486. (on Cupid). 31   In the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon; for the roots of Dufresnoy’s art theory in the academic milieu of Rome, where he has certainly also seen Caravaggio’s notorious painting of the Amor Vincitore, see Jean-Claude Boyer, “Bellori e i suoi amici francesi”, in: Exhib. Cat. L’Idea del Bello. Viaggio per Roma nel Seicento con Giovan Pietro Bellori, ed. Anna Gramiccia and Federica Piantoni, Rome 2000, vol. 1, pp. 51–54. 32   Tesauro (as in note 30), p. 26.

A rt is A iming for the Ey e

20 

 Charles-Alphonse Dufresnoy, Allegory of Painting, ca. 1653, oil on canvas, Dijon, Musée des Beaux-Arts.

Painting is able to play with illusion, writes Tesauro, only due to its capacity for imitation, “per virtù della Imitation materiale.”33 Caravaggio’s Victorious Cupid incorporates similar notions, although not quite so explicitly. The artist’s quarrel with Baglione, which centred on this painting but which cannot be discussed here, is evidence of its programmatic ambitions in this respect.34 Against the background just considered, the figure’s brazen nakedness and the uninhibited directness of the look that he gives the viewer turn out to have a deeper, more subtle content. The reciprocal gaze confronts the viewer with the paradox that although love originates in seeing – amore nasce nel vedere, as Mario Equicola writes –, in the meeting of eyes, Cupid himself can be seen only in fictional images.35 In a cunning paradox, his unabashed nakedness therefore becomes a symbol of the mask or covering created by painting, its veil of fiction (velo di finzione). From this perspective, Victorious Cupid proclaims the triumph of painting, as indeed it was understood to do in a distich penned in 1610 by the poet Mirzio Milesi: “By Michelangelo

33 

 Tesauro (as in note 30). For the close connection between fingere and imitare in art theory since Alberti, see Lecoq (as in note 25), pp. 238 et seq. 34   See Röttgen (as in note 23), pp. 16 et seq., pp. 23 et seq. 35   Panofsky (as in note 26), p. 125, note 77. On this topos, see above, pp. 212 et seq., with notes 5 and 10.

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da Caravaggio, who painted Cupid as the vanquisher of everything, – omnia vincit Amor, Cupid conquers everything, as you, painter, conquer everything (tu pictor et omnia vincis), the former the souls, you, the bodies and the souls.”36 The beholder is struck by the force of the expressive gaze of Caravaggio’s Cupid, confirming the impression that Gasparo Murtola had already described in 1603: “Do not look at Cupid on this canvas, which will ignite your heart. For though he is only painted, he has his arrows with him (che benché sia dipinto, pure ha seco gli strali), those full of love, the others deadly. And those colours, so fresh and alive, are nothing but delusion”.37 If, after all, one can say that Caravaggio’s Victorious Cupid amounts to a re-naturalisation of an allegory, then it is not, of course, in the narrow sense of a proper “imitation of nature” but rather in the sense of a strategy that focuses on the nature of the image itself, on representation as such. Neither the model of nature nor a meaning behind the image referred to by its representation can account for the creation of pictorial reality. Only the image itself as a medium can be credited with making that reality appear. The arrows Amor has with him (pure ha seco gli strali, as Murtola emphasises) are all too real, one black, the other red; one full of love, the other deadly. Ultimately, however, their substance is that of colour alone, which exactly for that very reason is capable of beguiling and banishing the eye. The sense of puzzlement that even a modern viewer experiences in front of the painting does not result from the unbroken congruence of nature and representation, of model and copy, but stems rather from being made aware of the painting’s mediation between these two sides. A good thirty years after the completion of the painting, it was thought necessary to conceal it with a silk curtain in its original location, the private gallery of the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani, in order, as Joachim von Sandrart retrospectively reported in 1675, to prevent it from eclipsing all other works in the collection and reducing them to insignificance by its forceful presence.38 The subtle artfulness (artificium) of the interplay between concealed revelation and concealing revelation was thus given an extrinsic form, and the image’s inherently paradoxical character was now in a literal, quite concrete, sense covered over. The painting, in fact, had now become an image that could be beheld only voyeuristically.

36   “De Michaele Angelo de Caravaggio qui Amorem omnia subigentem pinxit – omnia vincit amor, tu pictor et omnia vincis scilicet ille animos, corpora tuque animos”, quoted after M. Marini, Caravaggio. Michelangelo Mersisi da Caravaggio, “pictor praestantissimus”, Rome 1989, p. 461. 37   “Non guardar, non guardare / In queste tele Amore, / Che incenderatti il core, / Che benché sia dipinto / Pure ha seco gli strali / Amorosi, e mortali, / E quei colori suoi freschi, e vivaci / Non sono altro, che faci”; Gaspare Murtola, Madrigal 468 (1603), published in Venice in 1604, quoted after Marini (as in note 36), p. 460. 38   Sandrart (as in note 23), pp. 276–277.

Epistemology

Frank Zöllner

Aby Warburg and Flying

Human flight has been the stuff not just of fantastical night-time dreams, but also of practical day-time pursuit ever since the earliest times. We need only to think of the legends of flight and flying that have come down to us from antiquity or the Middle Ages, for example, and the experiments of engineers and artists in the fifteenth century.1 Most famous of all, undoubtedly, are Leonardo da Vinci’s investigations into the subject. For Leonardo, however, the dream of flying was only to be fulfilled in symbolic fashion. This is witnessed not by his studies of flying machines or bird flight, but by his topographical drawings of North Italy. Two of these enormous ink and watercolour maps show, in bird’s-eye view, an artificial lake stretching along the Valdichiana valley, south-east of Florence (fig. 1). In real life, however, there was no such reservoir: it existed only Leonardo’s imagination. However, it is significant that Leonardo simulated flight with this aerial perspective, and that the imaginary body of water in both drawings suggests the shape of a giant bird which is gliding over the Central Italian landscape.2 I have chosen Leonardo’s maps to introduce my subject because they illustrate, in emblematic fashion, that when it comes to the dream of flying, it is not necessarily always about flying itself, but about its visualisation and heightened symbolic expression. For more than two millennia, in fact, the visualisation of the dream of flying was significantly more important than flying itself. Human flight only became a reality

1   Wolfgang Behringer and Constance Ott-Koptschalijski, Der Traum vom Fliegen. Zwischen Mythos und Technik, Frankfurt am Main 1991. I would like to thank Karen Williams for her translation of my text and Elisabeth Schaber (Leipzig) and Claudia Wedepohl (London) for advice and references. 2    For Leonardo’s drawings of the topography of Italy and his studies of flying machines, see Frank Zöllner, Leonardo da Vinci 1452–1519. Complete Paintings and Drawings, Cologne et al. 2011, pp. 540–557, Cat. nos. 464 and 466 (Windsor Castle, Royal Library 12277r and 12278r), and pp. 648–675, with further references (third edition).

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1 

 Detail Leonardo, Map showing the west coast of Italy from Magra to Corneto, 1503/1504, 317 × 449 mm, Windsor Castle, Royal Library 12277r.

with the hot-air balloon of the eighteenth century (1783), the gliders of the nineteenth century and the zeppelins and first airplanes of the early twentieth century.3 Up to the start of the twentieth century, flying took place first and foremost in images. Prior to this point, it was definitely more of a visual than an airborne practice. Only with the military aviation of the First World War, and with the introduction, during approximately the same period, of regular passenger and mail flights by plane and airship, did flying move beyond the realm of madcap experiments to become a firm reality.4 Flying was thereby considered the most exciting statement of technological progress, something that in turn inspired a vast wealth of images on the subject. An example is a poster advertising the 1914 Prinz Heinrich-Flug, a competition which was inaugurated in 1911 and in which the technical reliability of aircraft was tested

3 

 Ein Jahrhundert Flugzeuge. Geschichte und Technik des Fliegens, ed. Ludwig Bölkow, Düsseldorf 1990, pp. 8–31; Camille Allaz, History of Air Cargo and Airmail from the 18th Century, London 2004, pp. 9–30; Robert Wohl, A Passion for Wings. Aviation and the Western Imagination 1908-1918, New Haven and London 1994. 4   Bölkow (as in note 3), pp. 334–345 and pp. 375–398.

Aby Wa r burg a nd Fly ing

2 

 Commercial

1914.

Poster for the Prinz Heinrich-Flug,

3 

 Medal for Hugo von Eckener’s transatlantic flight with LZ 126, October 1924.

(fig. 2, plate XXXI).5 My second example is the commemorative medal issued on the occasion of Hugo von Eckener’s crossing of the Atlantic in October 1924 (fig. 3). The advances in aviation, and the visual practice that accompanied them, fell within the last two decades of the life of the Hamburg-based art historian and cultural theorist Aby M. Warburg, who died in 1929. Warburg engaged repeatedly and intensively both with aviation itself and with its visual and symbolic representation. In a short essay written in 1913, he discusses the celestial flight taken – according to Greek legend – by the Macedonian king, Alexander the Great.6 Warburg analyses the illustration of this legend in the example of a fifteenth-century Burgundian tapestry, in which Alexander is shown being carried up into the sky in a chariot drawn by four griffins. In this case the griffins are both the vehicles of locomotion and symbols of flying. 5  6 

 Hans

von Lüneberg, Geschichte der Luftfahrt, vol. 1, Mannheim 2003, p. 118. Warburg, “Luftschiff und Tauchboot in der mittelalterlichen Vorstellungswelt” (1913), in: id., Gesammelte Schriften, ed. the Bibliothek Warburg, Leipzig and Berlin 1932, pp. 241–249 (Reprint 1969).  Aby

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Later, in the 1920s, Warburg turned his attention to flying itself, as well as to its representation and to the symbolism of air transport. He thereby concentrated on examples from airship aviation, the airmail transport service and airmail stamps.7 Like his contemporaries, Warburg was convinced that aviation and its reflection in visual culture and pictorial practice held extraordinary cultural-historical significance.8 Warburg’s enthusiasm for the aviation of his day was fuelled by the worldwide successes of this technology. The rigid airships being produced by the Zeppelin company in Germany were already a subject of interest to him shortly before, as well as during, the First World War.9 He subsequently became particularly interested, at the latest as from November 1924, in the airship pioneer Hugo von Eckener, who captained the first successful zeppelin flights across the Atlantic in October 1924.10 Shortly after this date, Warburg sought to make contact with Hugo von Eckener, with whom he wished to write a book about airship travel! In airship aviation, Warburg saw nothing short of a revolutionary shift in humankind’s attitude towards the cosmos.11 In the mastery of the skies, he saw a triumph of technology over the previously uncontrollable and potentially threatening forces of the cosmos. He thereby understood the zeppelin and the technologies of airship navigation as a symbol of this triumph.12 The zeppelin was relatively sluggish in its handling, however, and consequently a comparatively undynamic symbol. A far more dynamic aircraft, by contrast, was the modern airplane, which became a frequent, symbolically charged motif of airmail stamps as issued from 1912. As a visual medium, moreover, the airmail stamp is particularly suitable as a means of illustrating Warburg’s views on the creation of symbols. In 1926 Warburg himself created at least two designs for a new Deutsches Reich airmail stamp (fig. 4). His sketches show an airplane soaring upwards over the sea. From the private notes he made about this design, it would appear that the plane is taking off against a morning sky. The underside of the wings should carry the inscription “IDEA VICTRIX”.13 7 

 Tagebuch der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg, ed. Karen Michels and Charlotte SchoellGlass, Berlin, 2001, pp. 23–25; Ulrich Raulff, “Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg einer Idee. ‘Idea vincit’: Warburg, Stresemann und die Briefmarke”, in: Vorträge aus dem Warburg-Haus, 6 (2002), pp. 125–162; Dorothea McEwan, “IDEA VINCIT – ‘Die siegende, fliegende Idea’. Ein künstlerischer Auftrag von Aby Warburg”, in: Der Bilderatlas im Wandel der Künste und Medien, ed. Sabine Flach et al., Munich 2005, pp. 121–151; Karen Michels, Aby Warburg. Im Bannkreis der Ideen, Munich 2007, pp. 109–113. 8   McEwan (as in note 7), pp. 122–130. 9   Warburg Institute Archive (WIA), General Correspondence (GC), Gustav Leithäuser to Aby Warburg March 5 1913. 10   WIA, GC, Aby Warburg to Felix Warburg November 5 1924. 11   WIA GC, Aby Warburg to Alfred Giesecke July 31 1925; August 19 and 28 1925. 12   Michels and Schoell-Glass (as in note 7), p. 523; Ernst Gombrich, Aby Warburg. Eine intellektuelle Biographie, Hamburg 2006, p. 402 (English 1970). 13   Charlotte Schoell-Glass and Karen Michels, “Aby Warburg et les timbres en tant que document culturel”, in: Protée. Revue internationale des théories et de pratiques sémiotiques, 30 (2002), pp. 85–92; Raulff

Aby Wa r burg a nd Fly ing

4   Aby Warburg, First sketch for an air mail stamp, 1926, London, The Warburg Institute Archive.

5 

 Postmark from Japanese mail flight from Tokyo to Osaka, 1919, Berezowski 1925, p. 146.

In his notes, Warburg also identifies the direct source of inspiration for his stamp design: a Japanese postmark used for the first official Japanese mail flight from Tokyo to Osaka in 1919 (fig. 5).14 In a particularly vivid expression of the dynamism of modern (as in note 7); McEwan 2005 (as in note 7); Fernando Esposito, “‘Veicoli iconici’. Il motivo dell’aviazione nel francobollo di Warburg e nel fascismo”, in: Visual History. Rivista internazionale di storia e critica dell’imagine, 3 (2017), pp. 99–120. 14   Michels and Schoell-Glass (as in note 7), p. 23; Alexander Berezowski, Handbuch der Luftpostkunde. Katalog sämtlicher Marken und Abstempelungen der Luftposten, Neustadt (Orla) 1925. For Warburg’s use of this book see WIA III. 99.1.1.2, fol. 93/32f.

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aviation, the Japanese postmark appears to show a plane soaring boldly upwards – something that Warburg takes up directly in his own designs. The inscription IDEA VICTRIX, which became IDEA VINCIT in the final version, may be read as a programmatic statement: it proclaims the hope that a forwardlooking idea will win the day and will do so under the banner of technological progress. This progress finds ideal expression in aeronautics and thus in a technology which is able to transcend national boundaries (see below). Warburg asked two artists – firstly Alexander Liebmann and then Otto Heinrich Strohmeyer – to develop his sketches further. Strohmeyer’s resulting design, of which Warburg had several copies printed and which he distributed among politicians and friends, presents a highly stylised image of a monoplane, with the motto IDEA VINCIT on the underside of its wings, against the backdrop of the sweeping trusses of an aircraft hangar (fig. 6). In a strip along the bottom of the design are the names Briand, Chamberlain and Stresemann. They refer to Aristide Briand, Joseph Chamberlain and Gustav Stresemann, the French, British and German foreign ministers who in 1926 received Nobel Peace Prizes in recognition of their diplomatic efforts to establish a peaceful post-war order in Europe. Warburg’s stamp project was bound up with his hope that a mass medium such as the postage stamp would carry the idea of international understanding far and wide. As Warburg wrote, on 28 February 1927 in the official diary of the Warburg Library for Cultural Sciences, the “airmail stamp puts the energetic dynamism of transport in place of the conveyance of the national political will”.15 In other notes from this same period, Warburg observes that “the momentum of the European soul”, which “despite everything soars free”, finds expression in the airmail stamp. He saw the visual medium of the airmail stamp as a symbol of the transcending of borders in politically agitated times and under the conditions of rapid technological progress.16 Warburg’s stamp design invoked the technological progress embodied by aviation, as well as its potentially international character and its visualisation in the postage stamp, but contemporary reality at times looked quite different. This is shown, for example, by the airmail stamps issued between 1921 and 1924 by the Free City of Danzig (fig. 7).17 Following Germany’s defeat in the First World War and after the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, Danzig was separated from the former German Empire, to whose territories it had previously belonged, and now lay in the so-called “Polish Corridor”. Its airmail stamps thereby became a symbol of the Free City’s separation. They show a monoplane above a silhouette of the Danzig skyline. In this case, however, it symbolises

15  16  17 

 Michels

and Schoell-Glass (as in note 7), p. 62. III 99.1.1.2, fols. 69/24 and 119/44.  Berezowski (as in note 14), pp. 37–38; Michel-Briefmarken-Katalog Deutschland 1985/1986, Munich 1985, Danzig pp. 66 ff., pp. 112 ff., pp. 133 ff. and pp. 202 ff.  WIA

Aby Wa r burg a nd Fly ing

6 

 Otto Heinrich Strohmeyer, IDEA VINCIT, 1926, 20 × 29.8 cm, linocut, Cambridge MA, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Paul J. Sachs.

not the “momentum of the European soul”, as in Warburg’s ideal of aviation, but a nationalistic programme – a programme, moreover, that is still deploying a conservative visual language. The modernity of Warburg’s design also becomes clear when we compare it with the German airmail stamps of these years. Their designs can be characterised as follows: the carrier pigeon familiar from the traditional letter post; stylised representations of this motif; modified versions of traditional postal-service symbols; and illustrations of modern aircraft (planes or zeppelins). The German Empire’s first official airmail stamp, issued in 1912, shows a pigeon flying with a sealed letter clamped in its beak against the backdrop of a rising or setting sun (fig. 8).18 With its representation of a carrier pigeon, the postage stamp thereby illustrates an anachronistic means of transportation. In reality, airmail was carried not by pigeons, but by two modern aircraft: either by the Zeppelin-built airship Schwaben, also known as the LZ10, or by the Gelber Hund 18 

 Michel

(as in note 17), Deutsches Reich, pp. I ff.

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mail plane, both of which made their first official mail flights in June 1912. The postage stamps were also franked with a different postmark, depending on whether they were carried by airship or plane. Thus airmail postcards with the pigeon-motif are stamped Gelber Hund, or “yellow dog”, the name given to the mail aircraft on account of its yellow tail and wings (fig. 8). The airmail flights made by the Schwaben and the Gelber Hund in the RhineMain region in June 1912, or similar flights in Bavaria on 10 October of the same year, were nevertheless more about putting on a spectacular show for the public’s entertainment than about delivering the special commemorative postcards they carried. Although these cards were flown a few kilometres by air, they often completed the remainder of their journey by land in the normal manner. Flights were halted in bad weather and the mail transported overland. Airships also threw mail overboard in a sack, with the request that it should be handed in at the next post office.19 But technology was advancing, as reflected in some of the airmail stamps of the year 1919. Thus the green forty-Pfennig Deutsche Flugpost stamp, for example, carries the image of a modern biplane (fig. 9). The orange ten-Pfennig stamp, on the other hand, shows a post horn – an iconographical motif dating back to the earliest days of the postal system. To identify it as an airmail stamp, the post horn has been given a pair of wings (fig. 10).20 Another Deutsche Flugpost stamp, issued several times between 1922 and 1924, was intended to look more modern, but from a design point of view represents no real improvement (fig. 11). This Deutsche Flugpost stamp returns to the motif of the carrier pigeon, but shows it in a stylised form and without a sealed letter in its beak. This stylisation as an expression of modernisation was poorly received, and the would-be modern design was mockingly dubbed the “wood pigeon”.21 The penultimate airmail stamp issued under the Weimar Republic dates from the years 1926 to 1927. It was designed by Oskar Werner Hermann Hadank and shows an eagle with wings outspread perched on a rocky pinnacle. The motif has none of the stylisation that, in the case of the “wood pigeon” stamp, was intended to convey modernity. Instead, Hadank gives us an almost realistic portrait of the eagle. Modernity

19   Berezowski (as in note 14), pp. 42–47 and pp. 51–56; Gebrüder Senfs Illustrierter Briefmarkenkatalog 1927. Postmarken von Europa, Leipzig 1927, p. 105. The Warburg Institute Library (shelf mark NOP S25) has 12 editions of Senf ’s catalogues, published between 1907 and 1928. https://www.muenchen.de/ rathaus/Stadtverwaltung/Direktorium/Stadtarchiv/Chronik/1912.html (accessed September 23 2017]. 20   Michel (as in note 17), Deutsches Reich, pp. 111 f. of 1919. For the iconography of the “Posthorn” see Alexander Bungerz, Großes Lexikon der Philatelie, Munich 1923, p. 460 and pp. 571 f. (used and recommended by Warburg himself; see WIA, GC, Aby Warburg to Ludwig Binswanger December 16 1926; Aby Warburg to Herbert Munk March 7 1927). 21   Michel (as in note 17), Deutsches Reich, pp. 210 ff. of 1922; pp. 235 ff. and pp. 263 ff. of 1923; pp. 344 ff. of 1924.

Aby Wa r burg a nd Fly ing

7 

 Danzig, Air mail stamp, Flugpost Freie Stadt Danzig, 1921–1924.

8 

9 

 German Reich, Air mail stamp, Deutsche Flugpost, 40 Pfennig, 1919.

10 

11 

12 

 German Reich, Air mail stamp, Deutsche Flugpost Holztaube, 1922–1924.

 German Reich, Air mail stamp, Erste Deutsche Flugpost am Rhein, postmarked Gelber Hund, 10 Pfennig, 1912.

 German Reich, Air mail stamp, Deutsche Flugpost, 10 Pfennig, 1919.

 German Reich, Air mail stamp, Deutsche Flugpost, 1926–1927.

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13 

 Aby

Warburg, Lecture on postage stamps, 1927, Plate 9, London, The Warburg Institute Archive.

is confined to the sans-serif capital letters of the writing around the edges of the stamp (fig. 12).22 Warburg made his most detailed study of the topics of flying, aviation and the airmail stamp in the lecture on stamps that he delivered on 13 August 1927 (“Die Funktion des Briefmarkenbildes im Geistesverkehr der Welt”). Hundreds of preparatory notes have come down to us from this lecture, along with two of the original plates with which Warburg accompanied his talk. Another fourteen plates from the lecture are documented in black-and-white photographs. Warburg used these plates and other materials to illustrate his lecture.23 Plate 9, in which Warburg presents an international selection of airmail stamps, is particularly interesting (fig. 13). For Warburg, as we have already seen, the “airmail stamp puts the energetic dynamism of transport in place of the conveyance of the

22  23 

 Michel

(as in note 17), Deutsches Reich, pp. 378 ff. Warburg, Bilderreihen und Ausstellungen, ed. Uwe Fleckner and Isabella Woldt, Berlin 2012, pp. 151–189.  Aby

Aby Wa r burg a nd Fly ing

national political will”.24 The intention behind his plate with its examples of airmail stamps, however, is above all to illustrate the creation of symbols and their relationship to mythology and modern technology. Plate 9 shows, almost without exception, airmail stamps with motifs, symbols and representations from the realm of flight, including eagles and aircraft as well as a pigeon and a kestrel or falcon on the 400 Kronen stamp from Austria. The exceptions include two standard Reichspost stamps, which have been overstamped in order to convert them into airmail stamps. The plate also reveals a completely foreign object. It starts top left not with an airmail stamp, but with a Mexican revenue stamp from the year 1891 bearing the coat

14   Bolivia, Postage stamp, Centenary Year of the Bolivian Republic, 1925.

of arms of Mexico. These arms consist of an eagle that has landed on a cactus and holds a writhing snake in its beak. The representation of the eagle and the snake is a reference to the foundation of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan, modern-day Mexico City. According to legend, Tenochtitlan was founded on the precise spot, in the middle of a lake, where an eagle – as lord of the skies – caught and devoured the snake. Eagle and snake thus symbolise a magical, primal moment in the city’s history and together condense into what Warburg calls a “heraldic quintessence”, which he elsewhere describes as a designated function of airmail stamps.25 The Bolivian stamp showing an Andean condor (Vultur gryphus), which appears directly below the Mexican coat-of-arms stamp in Plate 9 (fig. 14), can be interpreted in a similar fashion. The bird of prey, also very large here, is perched on a rocky pinnacle. Underneath and beside it are two inscriptions: one commemorates the “Centenario de la Republica”, in other words the centenary of the Bolivian republic, while the second – on the right, next to the condor – reads “Hacia el Mar”, meaning “seaward”, and expresses Bolivia’s claim to free access to the sea.26 24  25  26 

 Michels

and Schoell-Glass (as in note 7), p. 62. III.99.1.2.1, fol. 81/58; WIA III.99.1.2.2, fol. 58.  Gebrüder Senfs Illustrierter Briefmarkenkatalog 1927. Postmarken von Übersee, Leipzig 1927, p. 125.

 WIA

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The Andean condor has been part of the coat of arms of Bolivia since 1888 and is thus a mythical symbolic figure whose existence dates back to Bolivia’s pre-colonial era. Its heraldic and national political status roughly corresponds to the status of the eagle in European heraldry. As in the case of the Mexican revenue stamp, Warburg is interested here, too, in the “heraldic quintessence” of the postage stamp. Such “heraldic quintessence” is present in a number of the European airmail stamps, too. A case in point is the semi-official 25-Pfennig stamp, issued in 1912 in the Kingdom of Bavaria, on the far left at the top of Warburg’s plate (fig. 15). Its lion motif is based on an emblem designed by Otto Hupp for the Bavarian Aero-Club, and offers a variation on the heraldic lion familiar from Bavaria’s normal postage stamps. Here, the heraldic lion is given a pair of wings and front legs ending in claws, while its long tail sweeps round in a circle. Inside this circle are the initials of the Bayerische AeroClub: B A E C. On its head, the modified heraldic beast wears the Bavarian crown.27 The imagery of mythical fabulous beasts also appears in the Leipzig airmail stamp on the far right at the top of Warburg’s plate (fig. 16).28 Designed by Max Seliger and likewise issued in 1912, it shows two anthropomorphically conceived winged beings, who are sprinkling the earth with flowers as they fly. When Warburg speaks in his notes of the “animation of the heraldic symbol by the air mail”, he is probably thinking of these airmail stamps with their winged beings. In contrast to conventionally designed normal postage stamps, in other words, the heraldic symbols on airmail stamps are “animated” and brought to life.29 The stamps that Warburg has assembled in Plate 9 also illustrate the visual fusion of airmail motifs with mythological tales of flight. In a Hungarian airmail stamp, for example, visible in the second row, second stamp from the right, the winged figure of Icarus hovers over Budapest (fig. 17, plate XXXII). The third and fourth rows of Plate 9 are made up of variations on the theme of the airmail stamp, including representations of birds with a symbolic meaning and heraldic design, for example eagles and pigeons. Warburg was unconvinced in particular by the Deutsche Reichspost airmail stamps with their eagle motif, designed – as we have already seen – by Otto Werner Hermann Hadank and first issued in 1926/27 (fig. 12). The eagle, which faces left, appears to be about to take flight and thus gives a naturalistic impression, while at the same time recalling the German imperial eagle and thus a heraldic symbol. In other words, Hadank’s eagle is a hybrid of heraldry and naturalism – something that the sceptical Warburg found disturbing and which he considered little more than a makeshift solution.30 27  28  29  30 

 See

Bungerz (as in note 20), p. 41 and p. 434; Berezowski (as in note 14), pp. 13–15. (as in note 14), p. 50.  WIA III.99.1.1.2, fol. 5/2.  Michel (as in note 17), Deutsches Reich, pp. 378 f.; WIA III 99.7.2, fol. 2 f.; WIA III 99.1.2.1, fol. 83/63; WIA GC, Edwin Redslob to Aby Warburg August 3 1927.  Berezowski

Aby Wa r burg a nd Fly ing

15 

 Bavaria,

Air mail stamp, Luftpost BAEC,

1912.

16 

 Leipzig, Unofficial air mail stamp, Margaretenvolksfest Leipzig 18. Mai 1912 – Luftpostmarke, 1912.

17 

 Hungary, Air mail stamp, Icarus flying over Budapest, 1924.

18   Belgian Congo, Air mail stamp, Postluchtdienst – Service Postal Aérien, 1921.

19   Switzerland, Air mail stamp, Pilot in his Airplane, 40 cent, 1923.

20 

 Switzerland, Air mail stamp, Airplane, 20 cent, 1925.

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In the bottom row of Plate 9, lastly, Warburg demonstrates what, in his view, contemporary airmail stamps ought to look like. In the centre he places a naturalistically designed airmail stamp from the Belgian Congo (fig. 18, plate XXXIII), issued in 1921.31 It is flanked on either side by two Swiss airmail stamps from the years 1923 to 1925 designed by Karl Bickel (fig. 19 and fig. 20).32 The stamp from the Belgian Congo serves to illustrate Warburg’s reservations towards a naturalism that more or less corresponded to the picture postcards of the epoch: it shows a mail plane flying over the modest dwellings of the indigenous population. More convincing, on the other hand, are the two Swiss airmail stamps on either side, whose aesthetic corresponds to the “energetic dynamism of transport” that Warburg claimed for the airmail stamp.33 Both show a modern monoplane and both convey a sense of progress in their stylisation of airplane and pilot. Here, in Warburg’s view, was a perfect design: no longer traditionally heraldic and no longer naturalistic, but stylised in a modern idiom that conveyed the dynamism of aviation, but which at the same time created more distance than tame naturalism. Warburg’s own design for an airmail stamp also obeys this aesthetic calculation. Warburg’s own visual practice thus spans a wide arc from non-European and European mythology, from heraldry and from traditional symbolism to the achievements of what was the most advanced technology of his day, aviation – and it does so from a thoroughly global perspective. This was by no means self-evident: even in 1923 Warburg still viewed airplanes as devilish machines34, and his aesthetic education, too, erred on the conservative side. However, he could not help succumbing to the general enthusiasm for flying, any more than he could resist the possibilities of transcending international borders that were offered by the postage stamp, as the smallest and most mobile visual medium. Warburg thus became a key figure in a transitional period during which flying still offered generous scope for the imagination, but had at the same time already become a fascinating reality – one which found its symbolic expression in the medium of the postage stamp.

31  32  33 

 Berezowski

(as in note 14), pp. 19 f. (as in note 14), pp. 227–228.  WIA GC, Dubois, Oberpostdirektion, to Aby Warburg December 9 1926. See also Michels and Schoell-Glass (as in note 7), p. 23 and p. 62; McEwan (as in note 7). 34   Aby Warburg, Schlangenritual. Ein Reisebericht. Mit einem Nachwort von Ulrich Raulff und einem Nachwort zur Neuausgabe von Claudia Wedepohl, Berlin 2011, p. 75 (fifth edition).  Berezowski

Peter Geimer

Birds and Angels: A Physiologist Meets Mythology

I In 1891, German physiologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond gave a lecture to the members of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, focusing on the relation between natural science and visual art. The speaker made clear that the historical course of “these two lines of human activity […] reveals no correspondence”. Whilst art “at best remains on the same level”, natural science was engaged in “an unstoppable triumphant advance”.1 For Du Bois-Reymond, this never-ending triumph of science was guaranteed by the monopoly that art held over reality. Art was a “kingdom of freedom”, a human activity beyond strict laws and the constraints of causality. Science, on the other hand, aimed at a “knowledge of the world as it is”.2 The scientist had to look into “the inexorable face” of nature and to “take the enormous responsibility that lies in stating even the most simple fact”. Where the artists furnished “a half sensual, half mental pleasure”, the scientists dealt with “laws that were valid forever”. They were genuine agents of reality – “sworn witnesses before the tribune of reality”.3 Thus, natural science was the “absolute organ of culture” while the arts glittered somewhere at the periphery – as in the unavoidable quote from Goethe that Du Bois-Reymond put in front of his speech in solemn decorum. Du Bois-Reymond’s speech would have come to an immediate end if the relations between science and art had actually meant nothing more to him than a mere 1   “In dem gemeinsamen Aufschwung von Kunst und Wissenschaft um den Anfang dieses Jahrhunderts wird man nur ein zufälliges Zusammentreffen erblicken dürfen: die Kunst verharrte seitdem bestenfalls auf gleicher Höhe, die Wissenschaft ist noch immer in unabsehbarem Siegeslauf begriffen.” Emil Du BoisReymond, “Naturwissenschaft und bildende Kunst”, in: Reden von Emil Du Bois-Reymond, vol. 2, ed. Estelle Du Bois-Reymond, Leipzig 1912, p. 391. 2   Du Bois-Reymond (as in note 1), p. 392. 3   Du Bois-Reymond (as in note 1), pp. 392–393.

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non-relation. Of course, according to the speaker, what the visual arts had to offer to natural science was next to nothing – except for some knowledge about mixing colours that could be useful for the theory of colours. However, in the opposite direction an important transfer of competence was at work. Even though science could not “reanimate the fading life of art […] it nevertheless possesses the capacity to offer invaluable services by increasing the insight of art, perfecting its technical means and protecting it from making mistakes”.4 It turned out that, for Du Bois-Reymond, the imbalance between science and art was by no means a symmetrical relation. Producing art was incompatible with science yet, conversely, scientific thinking was absolutely applicable to visual art – even where artworks entered the realm of fiction – since science’s monopoly over reality also governed the “kingdom of freedom” that Du Bois-Reymond reserved for the arts. Freedom, in this kingdom, did not extend so far as to prevent a scientist from announcing certain “hideous inventions”, “mistakes”, “horrors” and “offences”, as well as from diagnosing a “degenerated imagination”. Among these failures ranged the numerous monsters that appeared in mythological representations. Du Bois-Reymond made a whole list of violations that he had discovered in roaming through art history: centauri with two thoracic cavities; the fantastic spinal column of a hydra; Hesekiel’s four pairs of extremities; a crocodile at the Fontaine Cuvier in Paris’ Jardin de Plantes sufficiently flexible as to bend its neck up to its belly or Schinkel’s winged horses on top of the Schauspielhaus: lightings in zigzag form and “offences against the laws of plant metamorphosis”. Therefore, Du Bois-Reymond concluded, contemporary artists should be taught “the basic principles of vertebrate morphology”.5 One might consider this approach to painting in terms of disciplining, as an attempt to put arts and artists in charge of a restrictive regime of normality. Probably this would not be too wide off the mark. However, to me a more rewarding approach lies in the question of how scientific objects were created in this peculiar encounter of science and art. What happened to the mythological “monsters” of art history when they crossed the “scientific” sector? What did these artificial beings look like from “the tribune of reality”? What space of knowledge was attributed to them, and why was it that scientists felt at all responsible for them instead of leaving them to the allegedly boundless realm of artistic freedom? No physiologist could expect to meet with a hydra. Angels were not supposed to cross the laboratory. Nevertheless, as the following chapter will show, their physiology seemed to be accessible to scientific questioning. Paintings were searched for their content of reality – even when it came to fiction and even when they showed the impossible.

4  5 

 Du  Du

Bois-Reymond (as in note 1), p. 399. Bois-Reymond (as in note 1), pp. 417–418.

Bir ds a nd A ngels : A Ph ysiologist Meets M y thology

II In 1882 Sigmund Exner, professor of physiology at the University of Vienna, published a talk he had presented some months earlier at the Museum für Kunst und Industrie at Vienna. Exner’s subject was some flying objects that had accompanied him on his long mountain hikes in the Austrian Alps. “Last summer certain figures from great masters’ works of art followed me on my lonesome hikes through hills and ravines pushing themselves in the foreground and asking for an answer to their riddle”.6 The riddle Exner referred to concerned those well-known angels, saints and putti that painters had depicted for centuries. How was it that such a physiological impossibility like a body floating in the air could be represented in such a plausible manner? Exner’s approach is utterly confusing because he continued to use the language of proof and causality even when it came to fiction, even when he faced the impossible. He could not ignore the completely factious nature of floating bodies in art; nevertheless he treated those saints and angels as if they had to obey the rules of physiology. Moreover, Exner complicated the text by linking two different questions: the question of the physiological correctness of flying beings and the question of their psychological probability and powers of persuasion. The first question would be: how is it that a human body can keep its weight in the air – against all laws of gravitation? The second question would be: how is it that a painter can depict such a phenomenon in a manner we do not judge to be false, ridiculous or improbable? In the beginning of his text, Exner let the imaginary voice of a “naturalistic” artist appear: “There are still artists that seem to treat a meticulously exact imitation of nature as the most important task of art. If we asked such an artist how he would represent a floating or flying figure, a figure he had never seen nor will ever see he might respond: ‘I have never seen a human figure hanging from a cross either but I will paint it anyway; I will paint it as it would look if were hanging on a cross. Similarly I will paint the floating or flying figure as it would look if it were really able to fly or float.’ This artist would be fundamentally mistaken […].”7 In order to prove this error, Exner assimilated

6 

 Sigmund

Exner, Zur Physiologie des Fliegens und Schwebens in den bildenden Künsten, Vienna 1885,

p. 6. 7   “Es gibt immer noch Künstler, denen die peinlich genaue Nachahmung der Natur die wichtigste Aufgabe der Kunst zu sein scheint. Würde man einen solchen fragen, in welcher Art er eine schwebende oder fliegende Gestalt, die er doch nie gesehen hat, noch je sehen wird, darstellen wollte, so könnte er vielleicht antworten: ‘Ich habe auch nie eine menschliche Gestalt auf dem Kreuze hängend gesehen, und male sie doch; ich male sie eben so, wie die menschliche Gestalt aussehen müßte, wenn sie an’s Kreuz geschlagen wäre. Ebenso werde ich die schwebende und fliegende Gestalt malen, wie sie aussehen müsste, wenn sie wirklich fliegen oder schweben könnte.’ Dieser Künstler befände sich in einem grossen Irrthum […].” Exner (as in note 6), p. 8.

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this artist’s claim to a meticulously exact imitation of nature. “Let us have a closer look at how a human figure that were able to fly […] would look. Naturally we would supply it with wings.”8 It is with this hypothesis that Exner entered his heuristic clash between artistic imagination and the rules of physiology that ran all the way through his argument. For why was it ‘natural’ to supply wings to a human figure that was supposed to be able to fly? What ‘nature’ did Exner refer to here? His whole questioning on “how a human figure that was able to fly […] would look” was utterly ambivalent: It asserted the possibility of what was, right from the beginning, known to be physiologically impossible. The object in question – a human being with wings – did not show up in the physiological handbooks, but Exner’s discourse on it sounded so clear and reasonable, as if the notions of proof and causality were responsible even when it came to the fantastic. Exner had no natural equivalent for the painted subjects in question. Lacking such candidates, he chose a model that allowed the projection of the inaccessible “original” onto a new space. This model was a sparrow. In the case of a sparrow, the ratio of the weight of its muscles to the total weight of its body was 1 to 6. Thus, Exner calculated what a real flying man – given a weight of 60kg – would look like. He would have wings and his supplementary muscles would weigh 10kg: The result would be an enormous hump, whose dimensions would exceed everything we have seen so far, moreover, it would be located in the front […]. Our artist certainly would have constructed something which is able to fly but something which would not resemble a human being any more. It would be a monstrum, something from the workshop of a hellish Breughel […]. The pictorial representation of a human figure that would really have the capacity to fly is therefore impossible.9 It is not easy to grasp what exactly it was that Exner deduced here. The proof was tautological: the impossible is impossible. Exner carried his investigation of painted beings to an extreme. A putto taken from Raphael’s Galathea served to demonstrate the physiological and physical impossibility of the phenomenon in question. He presented a rough sketch of this figure

8  9 

 Exner

(as in note 6), p. 8. riesiger Buckel, dessen Dimensionen Alles übersteigen, was wir je von solchen gesehen haben, der überdies vorne sitzt, wäre das Resultat […]. Unser Künstler hätte so zwar ein etwas construirt, das fliegen könnte, aber einer menschlichen Gestalt nicht mehr ähnlich wäre. Es wäre ein Monstrum, etwa aus der Werkstatt eines Höllen-Breughel […] Die bildliche Darstellung einer menschlichen Figur, welche das Vermögen des Fliegens wirklich besässe, ist also unmöglich”. Exner (as in note 6), p. 9. By “hellish Breughel” Exner referred to the painter Pieter Bruegel (1525–1569) and particularly, his way of representing hell in his personification of avarice (Dulle Griet).  “Ein

Bir ds a nd A ngels : A Ph ysiologist Meets M y thology

1 

 Sigmund Exner, Zur Physiologie des Fliegens und Schwebens in den bildenden Künsten, Wien 1885, p. 17.

2 

 Sigmund Exner, Zur Physiologie des Fliegens und Schwebens in den bildenden Künsten, Wien 1885, p. 18.

(fig. 1) and transferred it into a corresponding scheme (fig. 2): a marks the point from which the putto’s wings are suspended; ab represents the axis of the body; ac represents the vertical, de refers to air resistance and ef refers to gravity. By taking into account the probable speed of the flying body, its hypothetical weight, the effect of gravitation and the specific weight of air, Exner made a calculation. “The result is: the putto would advance at a speed of 54 m per second.” Exner modified his formula by adopting the much more probable speed of 2 m per second. In that case the putto’s weight would

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amount to a mere 2 g. Exner concluded: “These observations reveal that we are not dealing with flying in a mechanical sense here.”10 Once again, Exner’s conclusion and the causal line of argument behind it seem extraordinary. It is utterly strange to see a figure that, since 1512, has been lifelessly glued to its painted ground at the Villa Farnesina in Rome suddenly enter into a mathematical calculation. Where are these two entities supposed to meet? How can a fictitious being be transferred into the realm of speed, specific weight, and gravitation? It is nothing less than the border between matter and life, two dimensions and three dimensionality that Exner’s formula was supposed to bridge. Exner carried the notions of causality and calculability to an extreme: He dealt with tools of the possible in the realm of physics’ impossibility. This strange consequence distinguished his approach from Du Bois-Reymond’s juxtaposition of science and art. For Du Bois-Reymond, it was enough to assign the artist’s deviations and to call them back to the authority of science.11 There was no need to take them for granted or even to follow them all their way. Exner, on the other hand, treated such monsters as if they could be real. Exner continued his investigation in this manner: if flying was proved impossible – what about the phenomenon of floating? A floating figure would need to be weightless. However, Exner stated that the phenomenon depicted for centuries could not be floating. A floating figure could make no claim to have its legs down, its head up; the reversed position would be equally comfortable to it. A group of saints floating upwards would be an absurdity […]. Under the conditions of weightlessness certain motifs would be impossible. I recall angels and saints who take care in carrying heavy objects – for instance the cross – through the air […]. All these figures perform the strong movements of their muscles in vain; if they are weightless, the object they carry will fall as if they did not hold it and if they hold tight onto it the only consequence would be their being dragged down to earth along with it. The only thing they can do is to reduce their fall by using the effect of air resistance – like a parachute.12 10   “Diese Betrachtungen zeigen, dass wir es mit einem Fliegen im mechanischen Sinne hier durchaus nicht zu thun haben”. Exner (as in note 6), p. 20. 11   Interestingly enough, in the case of angels, Du Bois-Reymond (as in note 1) is surprisingly tolerant: Of course, they are monsters (“Mißgeschöpfe”) but in the meantime our eyes have got used to them and it “may be pedantic” and “in any case in vain” to forbid artists to represent them. Nevertheless, the author did not fail to add: “Doch hat solche Duldung ihre Grenzen” (p. 416). 12   “Eine schwebende Figur hätte keinen Anspruch, mit den Beinen unten und dem Kopfe oben dargestellt zu werden, die umgekehrte Stellung wäre ihr genau ebenso bequem. Eine nach aufwärts schwebende Gruppe wäre ein Unding, von andächtig aufblickenden Augen könnte keine Rede mehr sein u.s.w  […]. Gewisse Motive […] würden durch die Voraussetzung der Schwerelosigkeit auch unmöglich. Ich erinnere an Engel und Heilige, welche sich sichtlich bemühen, einen als schwer gedachten Gegenstand, z.B. das Kreuz, durch die

Bir ds a nd A ngels : A Ph ysiologist Meets M y thology

Exner’s speculation on the physiology of floating opened up a new perspective on the masterworks of art history. Here again, one is struck by the unperturbed consequence that caused Exner to introduce basic principles of physics such as conditions of weightlessness or the effects of gravitation and air resistance into the closed world of a painting. With Exner’s ideas in mind, we can imagine how a well-ordered group – let’s say from Albrecht Dürer’s Adoration of the Trinity – falls into iconographic anarchy. We see the holy group slowly drifting apart. They start to rotate on their own axis and cross the air with their legs up, their heads down. Their robes turn into splendid sails, their hair is streaming in the wind. Their golden crowns would fall down from their heads and – together with the heavy, wooden cross – would smash to pieces on the floor. In a second attempt – since with his physiology of the impossible he could not prove the cause of the phenomenon in question – Exner tried another perspective. At stake was no longer the question of whether flying angels and saints in art were physiologically plausible but rather how painters could depict them in such a way that they seemed probable and real to us. Here the text explicitly changes from a physiological to a psychological perspective. Its maxim is: “The psychic principle on which every artistic depiction of objects and actions is based, be it in the visual arts or in any other art, is memory”.13 Here Exner explicitly referred to Gustav Theodor Fechner and the “Aesthetisches Assoziationsprinzip” he had formulated in his Vorschule der Äshetik.14 Ernst Brücke, Exner’s predecessor at the chair of physiology in Vienna, had stressed this important role of memory (“Erinnerungsbild”) in an article on the representation of movements in the visual arts.15 According to this idea, an artist has to organise his representations in such a way as not to contradict the beholder’s experience and memory image. Thus, if floating saints and putti do not appear totally strange and outrageous to us, there must be something they remind us of. Exner found this something – and he found it in the water. “I mean our memory images of swimming. What is painted as floating is often nothing else than swimming with some modifications.”16 Lüfte zu tragen […]. Alle diese Figuren machen ihre theilweise recht kräftigen Muskelactionen vollkommen vergebens; wenn sie schwerelos sind, so fällt der von ihnen gehaltene Gegenstand genau so, als würden sie ihn nicht halten, in die Tiefe, und umklammern sie ihn, so hat das nur zur Folge, dass sie von demselben mit­ gerissen werden. Das Einzige, was sie leisten könnten, ist, dass sie durch den Luftwiderstand, den sie finden, den Fall etwas verzögern, nach dem Prinzip des Fall­schirms”. Exner (as in note 6), pp. 10–11. 13   “Die psychische Basis, auf welcher jede künstlerische Darstellung von Objecten und Vorgängen beruht, handle es sich um bildende oder um andere Künste, ist das Gedächtnis”. Exner (as in note 6), p. 13. 14   “Jedes Ding mit dem wir umgehen, ist für uns geistig charaketerisiert durch eine Resultante von Erinnerungen an Alles, was wir je bezüglich dieses Dinges und selbst verwandter Dinge äusserlich und innerlich erfahren, gehört, gelesen, gedacht, gelernt haben.” Gustav Theodor Fechner, Vorschule der Ästhetik, First part, Leipzig 1925, p. 93. 15   Ernst Brücke, “Die Darstellung der Bewegung durch die bildenden Künste”, in: Deutsche Rundschau, vol. 26, Berlin 1881. 16   “Ich meine unsere Erinnerungsbilder an das Schwimmen. Was als ein Schweben gemalt wird, ist häufig nichts als ein Schwimmen mit einigen Modificationen.” Exner (as in note 6), p. 27.

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3 

 Sigmund Exner, Zur Physiologie des Fliegens und Schwebens in den bildenden Künsten, Wien 1885, p. 23.

Exner reported that it was a ceiling fresco at S. Ignazio in Rome that first revealed this analogy to him and made him think: “that looks like a swimming class when seen from below”.17 Once again, Exner’s approach opened up a peculiar perspective on art history. Tintoretto’s Saint Mark, who comes from heaven to free the slave from his chains, is now a diver. Exner presented two sketches taken from Michelangelo’s scenes from the Old Testament at the Capella Sistina in Rome. The first one (fig. 3) shows God the Father, surrounded by three angels – a group taken from Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam: “It would be possible to reconstruct it [this masterpiece of a floating group] as a living image; one would only have to immerse the whole group in water. The figures, especially that of God the Father, appear as though they were produced by the use of swimming models”.18 The same is true for Michelangelo’s God separating Light and Darkness (fig. 4). “Indeed, one could represent Michelangelo’s second God the Father as a living

17   “Gerade ein solches Deckengemälde, das der Kirche St. Ignatio zu Rom, (von Pozzi gemalt) war es, bei dem mir diese Analogie zuerst auffiel, bei dem mir der Gedanke kam: das gleicht einer Schwimmschule von unten gesehen.” Exner (as in note 6), p. 30. 18   “Würde man es sich zur Aufgabe machen, dieselbe als lebendes Bild zu stellen, so könnte man dieses, nur müsste man die ganze Gruppe in Wasser einsenken. Die Gestalten und insbesondere die des Gottvaters erscheinen geradezu, als wären sie an der Hand schwimmender Modelle entstanden.” Exner (as in note 6), p. 30.

Bir ds a nd A ngels : A Ph ysiologist Meets M y thology

4 

 Sigmund Exner, Zur Physiologie des Fliegens und Schwebens in den bildenden Künsten, Wien 1885, p. 33.

image, if one did it, at least in part in the water and if one allowed the actor to take a running jump in order to gain the necessary speed”.19 Exner’s psychological explanation of human flight in painting no longer referred the phenomenon to laws of physics and physiology but to the memory of its beholders. Painters might represent whatever they liked – if only it did not contradict the beholders’ experiences.20 On the one hand, this second perspective was much more conventional than Exner’s physiology of the impossible. On the other hand, it followed a similar pattern to his physical and physiological speculations: the plausibility of the phenomenon in question could only be attested to if there was a real existing object outside the 19   “In der That, man könnte auch diese Herrgottsgestalt Michelangelo’s als lebendiges Bild, und zwar sammt seiner Bewegung darstellen, wenn man dieses erstens, wenigstens theilweise, im Wasser thäte, und zweitens dem Darsteller erlaubte, sich durch kräftigen Anlauf den nöthigen Schwung zu geben.” Exner (as in note 6), p. 34. 20   Wilhelm Henke, a professor of anatomy at Tübingen, referred to the same idea when he explained the peculiar posture of Michaelangelo’s Aurora at the tomb of the Medici in Florence: “Wie oft ist von der letzteren nicht schon gesagt und wie nahe liegt es auch: hat sich wol je ein Mensch so hingehockt, um zu schlafen? Es ist eigentlich nicht mehr zeitgemäß, so zu fragen, denn in Eisenbahncoupées kann man dergleichen wohl sehen […] Man könnte eine Leiche so hinsetzen, sie würde nicht umfallen.” Wilhelm Henke, “Michelangelo”, in: Deutsche Rundschau, vol. 5, Berlin 1875, p. 229.

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canvas that stands for its correctness. In the first case – the physiological approach – it was a sparrow that served as a model and a representative of reality. In the psychological approach, it was the idea of a group of actors that one would only have to immerse in the water in order to reconstruct Michelangelo’s objects. In the second case, Exner was even willing to accept the bizarre idea of a sixteenth century painter performing underwater studies with the sole purpose of anchoring God the Father floating in reality.21 Four years later, Exner dedicated a second text to this set of problems. In a little book on Physiology and Pathology in the Visual Arts, he examined painted objects such as the nimbus of saints or the single eyed nature of cyclops and attributed them to optical phenomena that both artists and beholders might have experienced in observing nature.22 How shall we handle Exner’s text? 23 It might be worth noting here that I could not decipher any signs of irony or parodic esprit in Exner’s investigation. However, even if this physiology of fantastic beings was a piece of intended and very subtle irony, how should that change our reading of it? To officially declare it a ‘parody’ would not re-establish the order that Exner’s approach removed so consequently: too late, one might say – the picture is already affected. On the other hand, it would be much too simple to accuse Exner of being naïve and of fundamentally misunderstanding the artistic imagination. This would amount to reproducing Du Bois-Reymond’s dichotomy – this time the other way round and by accusing scientists that they have lost themselves in the artistic kingdom of freedom. In my view, the interesting point is not what Exner tells us about painting but what his approach to art may reveal about his own heuristics. One might therefore wonder whether Exner’s phantom of a “realistic artist” (see note 7) who aims to give “a meticulously exact imitation of nature” betrays the practice of the meticulously naturalist. Exner’s speech is the discourse of a ventriloquist. Therefore, one might attempt to compare his speculations about the flying saints in painting with his other research on flying beings – and with the hybrid apparatus he had built in order to simulate it. To 21 

 At this point in Exner’s line of argument, it becomes very clear that his approach to painting is totally unhistorical. He never seemed to be interested in embedding his observations in history e.g. by asking whether Michelangelo could have made such underwater studies in early sixteenth century at all (in a public bath?). However, more importantly, this unhistorical examination of figures in painting seems to fit very well with Exner’s basic requirement to treat them as quasi-natural objects. They should somehow obey the laws of physics and physiology and, as such, they are no objects of historical relativity. 22   See Sigmund Exner, Physiologisches und Pathologisches in den bildenden Künsten, Vienna 1889. 23   In a brief introduction to a reprint of Exner’s Physiologie des Fliegens und Schwebens, Olaf Breidbach tried to present it as if nothing unusual had happened, though if I’m not mistaken he had difficulties doing so. See Olaf Breidbach, “Bemerkungen zu Exners Physiologie des Fliegens und Schwebens”, in: Natur der Ästhetik – Ästhetik der Natur, ed. id., Vienna and New York 1997, pp. 221–223. The art historian Jeannot Simmen briefly mentioned Exner’s text as a “curiosity” and “an amusing piece of work.” Jeannot Simmen, Vertigo. Schwindel der modernen Kunst, Munich 1990, p. 23. Simmen is right but it is not enough to leave it at that.

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put it another way, when Exner perceived no gap between studying objects in nature and studying objects in art, why not reverse the perspective in order to see what happened on the other side of this equation?

III In the summer of 1906 Exner faced another riddle on his long and lonely mountain hikes in the Austrian Alps. This time it concerned a puzzling experience that he often had in the mountains. From his elevated standpoint, he observed a buzzard in the valleys beneath him flying higher and higher and ending up moving in circles. While circling, the buzzard constantly gained height – although its wings did not show any movement. How could a bird keep its body in the air and even gain height without flapping its wings? “Here we have a problem”, Exner noted, “and in view of such a buzzard – in addition to the common sensation of smallness and humbleness that man has in high mountain regions anyway – I felt the humiliation of a naturalist who faces a phenomenon but cannot explain it.”24 The riddle of the buzzard gave birth to a series of experiments that Exner published under the title “On the flotation of birds of prey” (Über das Schweben der Raubvögel) in Pflügers Archiv für die gesammte Physiologie des Menschen und der Thiere. Exner’s investigation started with a memory image (“Erinnerungsbild”) that showed up in September 1904 in a train compartment when Exner left his annual holiday resort to join a naturalists’ meeting in Breslau. A scene came to his mind that he once had witnessed in a zoo on a journey through Belgium and the Netherlands. Exner’s imagination presented him with an image of some birds of prey lying on the ground of their aviary, their wings’ primary feathers trembling intensely. Could this trembling be a kind of floating exercise? The high rapidity of the trembling would at least give an explanation why Exner could not distinguish it from his distant standpoint. Thus, his “humiliation as a naturalist” concerned a phenomenon that 1. was too rapid to be recognised by an unequipped observer and that 2. was not easy to simulate experimentally because it exclusively occurred a long way up in the air. As the object under study was inaccessible – too far away to be examined, unable to fly if caught – Exner had to reconstruct it on earth. In retrospect, his initial memory image of the captive birds lying on the ground in the zoo seems to be an emblem of the

24 

 “Hier liegt ein Problem vor, und wenn sich der Mensch in der Natur des Hochgebirges ohnehin oftmals klein und nichtig fühlt, so habe ich Angesichts eines solchen Bussards bisweilen noch die Demüthigung als Naturforscher empfunden, der rathlos vor der Erscheinung steht.” Sigmund Exner, “Über das ‘Schweben’ der Raubvögel”, in: Archiv für die gesammte Physiologie der Menschen und der Thiere, 114 (1906), pp. 109–110.

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whole experimental series that followed, for all the objects that Exner mobilised in order to represent the buzzard’s flight operated on the ground and were totally unable to fly. The phenomenon that first showed up in the mountains shifted to other spaces: a zoo, an aviary or a laboratory. After his arrival in Breslau, Exner did not hesitate to get to the bottom of his memory image. He went to a local zoo which kept eagles and “in order to verify my memory (“Erinnerungsbild”) I looked for the keeper of this eagle aviary”.25 The keeper related the peculiar, majestic turns that the eagles performed with their whole bodies when lying on their backs. In the course of the following investigation, the keeper, whose remarks Exner noted in detail, turned into the first model organism of the phenomenon in question: I went on to ask him whether he had observed some other movements. Now he spread out his arms and while performing trembling movements he explained how the eagle’s feathers used to vibrate. He added that this was especially the case when the animals were lying up and sunning themselves in the sand and he described their bent claws imitating them with his fingers. I did not know that phenomenon until then […].26 Thus, the trembling keeper from Breslau – bending his fingers and spreading his arms – became Exner’s first replicator of the floating birds of prey. In order to stabilise his new information, Exner contacted zoo directors in Vienna, Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Berlin who all confirmed the existence of the trembling feathers. Exner wanted to see the mentioned behaviour again – “so I organised some buzzards and placed them in a big aviary. I hoped to be able to study their trembling movements, their frequencies and degree of deflection by use of a stroboscope.”27 Exner intended to use a hand-stroboscope, a device that his pupil M. Ishihara had successfully used to study the fin movements of seahorses. However, the captive buzzards did not perform the desired behaviour – probably, Exner presumed, because they had been taken too young and thus had no time to learn natural behaviour. He therefore continued with an artificial bird. His experiments investigated, on the one hand, “the mechanics of whirring” (“die Mechanik des Schwirrens”) – that is, the question as to whether a bird’s trembling 25  26 

 Exner

(as in note 24), p. 112. fragte ihn weiter, ob er noch andere Bewegungen gesehen habe. Nun machte er, seine Arme ausbreitend, mit den Händen zitternde Bewegungen, indem er nachahmend schilderte, wie die Schwungfedern zu vibrieren pflegen, sagte, dass dies besonders der Fall sei, wenn die Thiere flach auf dem Sande liegend sich sonnen, wobei er weiter die zusammengebogenen Krallen beschrieb und mit den Fingern imitierte. Ich hatte letzteres bis dahin nicht gewusst […].” Exner (as in note 24), p. 113. 27   Exner (as in note 24), p. 114.  “Ich

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5   Sigmund Exner, “Über das ‘Schweben’ der Raubvögel”, in: Archiv für die gesammte Physiologie der Menschen und der Thiere, 114 (1906), p. 139.

wings were able to produce a sufficient amount of energy to affect the surrounding air. On the other hand, they also concerned the physiology of whirring – whether a bird’s moving organs were capable of performing such a rhythmic movement at all. In order to explore the mechanical aspect of whirring, Exner constructed a machine made of wire, wood, a buzzard’s wing and a motor (fig. 5). A rotating disc raised the wing, a strong spiral feather drew it back (since the bird-machine is shown at work, the rapidly vibrating wing is hardly visible; it appears as a blurred object next to the motor that is fixed to the laboratory table). The machine allowed Exner to vary the frequency of the wing’s movement as well as the degree of vibrations. In order to visualise the corresponding flow of air he used white paper strips (these are the three constructions that are clearly visible in the picture).28 Exner’s performance showed him that a buzzard’s wing was able to produce a certain amount of energy in the surrounding air. It remained to be examined whether the bird’s physiology was capable of producing the same frequency of whirring that his machine had performed. Exner introduced two electrodes into a living – although anaesthetised – buzzard’s muscular system and, by means of a Du Bois-Reymond induction apparatus, he showed that a trembling of the wings could be provoked by 28 

 “Schon der erste orientierende Versuch zeigte mir, dass der Flügel, in solcher Weise in Vibration versetzt (die äussersten Spitzen der Fingerschwingen machten Ausschläge von 7 cm, und die Vibrationszahl war 17,8 pro Sekunde) einen mächtigen Luftstrom erzeugt, der im Wesentlichen nach hinten und unten näherungsweise unter einem Winkel von 45° gegen die Verticale gerichtet war. Zigarrenrauch vorsichtig auf die Rückenseite des Flügels geblasen, wurde von demselben eingesaugt und an der Bauchseite mit grosser Vehemenz hervorgetrieben.” Exner (as in note 24), p. 117.

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electric impulses. Finally, the stylus of a myograph inscribed the wing’s vibrations. Thus, a phenomenon that first occurred with a floating buzzard in the mountains was brought to earth – including a trembling guard in the zoo, unwitting eagles in an aviary, a bird of wood and wire, an anaesthetised buzzard and the inscription of its electric trembling. Exner finished his article with a discussion (and rejection) of all current theories on the principles of floating.29 To Exner, the realistic idea of flight in painting would only be possible with beings that in reality were unable to fly. A realistic artist would have to construct “something” (“ein Etwas”), a “monster from the workshop of a hellish Breughel.” One might argue that, to some extent, Exner’s bird-machine was such a hybrid as well: a monster from the workshop of a physiologist, an artificial being made of feathers and a motor, “something” that cannot float but which allowed the study of the conditions of floating. Exner’s motor-bird was a remarkable piece of bricolage. To some extent it resembled those “degenerated“ beings that Du Bois-Reymond wanted to expel from visual representations: centauri with two thoracic cavities, the fantastic spinal column of a hydra and Hesekiel’s four pairs of extremities. Similarly, Fechner’s characterisation of centauri, hydra and winged angels in art could have been related to Exner’s apparatus: “nothing but compositions in whose parts things are put together that never occur together in nature.”30 Exner himself was quite aware that, strictly speaking, it was impossible to reproduce the supposed vibration of wings with the aid of “a dead, artificially spread and fixed wing”,31 but this is true for every model. Thus, he concluded that was indispensable to use such models – “especially in the present case, where it is unforeseeable when and how we will be able to examine more closely the physiological behaviour of a bird floating high up in the air.”32 Exner’s research on the floating buzzard was thus based on models that could not themselves float: a self-made bird and an anaesthetised buzzard brought to life by electricity. If they had been able to fly they would have escaped from the physiologist’s laboratory. In Exner’s view, Raphael’s painted putto and the floating buzzard in the Austrian Alps were not strictly separate phenomena. Of course, there was no myograph for 29   For example those of John William Strutt who, in his studies on the mechanical principles of flight, had explained the phenomenon of floating by the bird’s use of different wind speeds. Exner objected to this explanation on the grounds that the birds could float perfectly in dead calm as well. 30   “[…] lauter Compositionen, in denen Theile zusammengefügt sind, die in der Natur nicht zusammen vorkommen.” Fechner (as in note 14), p. 98. 31   “Es wäre selbstverständlich ein vergebliches Beginnen, die supponirten vibrierenden Flügelschläge, wie sie ein Raubvogel ausführen dürfte, mit einem todten, künstlich aufgespannten und befestigten Flügel genau nachahmen zu wollen […]. Immerhin aber schien es mir wünschenswerth, den mechanischen Effect des durch meine Maschine grob imitierten Schwirrens wenigstens näherungsweise kennen zu lernen.” Exner (as in note 24), pp. 118–119. 32   “[…] zumal in dem vorliegenden Falle, wo es unabsehbar ist, wann und wie wir in die Lage kommen sollten, das physiologische Verhalten eines hoch in den Lüften schwebenden Vogels genauer zu studiren.” Exner (as in note 24), p. 142.

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putti, no induction apparatus that would fit for saints; however Exner treated these painted beings in a way similar to that which he approached his experimental objects. This symmetry is worth noting. To Du Bois-Reymond or Fechner, hybrids like angels were not objects of ontological interest: the “crude and outrageous ideas” of religion had produced them.33 They belonged to history, and an enlightened century could recognise them in that way. To Exner, they were agents of flight and, as such, they could be related to gravitation, speed and air resistance.

33 

 “[…] die Kunst […] hat von vornherein im Dienst der Religion gestanden, und deren anfangs ungefügte und ungeheuerliche Ideen nicht anders als in entsprechend ungefügten ungeheuerlichen Bildungen auszudrücken gewusst.” Fechner (as in note 14), p. 99.

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Gaining insight through a Bird’s-Eye View On the Chorography of Naples in the Early Modern Era

Since the 16th century, bird’s-eye views, townscapes, and city maps have been favoured media for representing claims to power, but also for representing the histories of the structures of cities.1 They play a special role in historical research into urban settlements, firstly because they strive to depict topographical features with precision and, secondly, because they seek, through a painstakingly constructed overview, to render the organically evolving structure of the city comprehensible.2 Here, a complex heuristic task consists of analysing those aspects of map production that are devoted to surveying, to the projection of data and, hence, to ostensibly illustrative tasks in the context

1 

 This text is based largely on the German version of the topic: Tanja Michalsky, “Gewachsene Ordnung. Zur Chorographie Neapels in der Frühen Neuzeit”, in: Museum, Bibliothek, Stadtraum: Räumliche Wissensordnungen 1600–1900, ed. Robert Felfe and Kirsten Wagner, Berlin 2010, pp. 261–286. 2   Cf. the pioneering, methodically reflected, approaches in dealing with historical city maps: Bruno Zevi, Saper vedere la città, Turin 1960; John A. Pinto, “Origins and Development of the Iconographic City Plan”, in: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 35 (1976), pp. 35–50; Jürgen Schulz, “Jacopo de Barbari’s View of Venice: Map Making, City Views and Moralized Geography before the Year 1500”, in: Art Bulletin, 60 (1978), pp. 425–474; Lucia Nuti, “The Mapped Views by Goerg Hoefnagel: the Merchant’s Eye, the Humanist’s Eye”, in: Word and Image, 4 (1988), pp. 545–570; id., “The Perspective Plan in the Sixteenth Century: The Invention of a Representational Language”, in: Art Bulletin, 76 (1994), pp. 105–128; id., Ritratti di città: visione e memoria tra Medioevo e Settecento, Venice 1996; id., “Mapping Places. Chorography and Vision in the Renaissance”, in: Mappings, ed. Denis Cosgrove, London 1999, pp. 90–108; Thomas Frangenberg, “Chorographies of Florence. The Use of City Views and City Plans in the Sixteenth Century”, in: Imago Mundi, 46 (1994), pp.  41–64; Naomi Miller, Mapping the City: the Language and Culture of Cartography in the Renaissance, London and New York 2003. Finally, with a decidedly political approach: Ryan E. Gregg, City views in the Habsburg and Medici courts. Depictions of rhetoric and rule in the sixteenth century, Leiden and Boston 2018 (Brill’s studies on art, art history, and intellectual history); for bird’s-eye view see Exhib. Cat. Die Welt von Oben. Die Vogelperspektive in der Kunst, ed. Ursula Zeller and Frank-Thorsten Moll, Zeppelin-Museum Friedrichshafen, Friedrichshafen 2013; Exhib. Cat. Von oben gesehen – die Vogelperspektive, ed. Yasmin Doosry, Germanischen Nationalmuseum Nürnberg, Nuremberg 2014.

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of the ways in which, inevitably, they assign meaning through the form and format of the depiction. A reconstruction of historical spaces with the help of maps and bird’seye views requires attention to the specific epistemological form of the “overview,” which seems to present everything, but at the same time selects and orders by positioning individual elements in relation to one another. Maps and map-like views such as bird’s-eye views do not simply represent spatial configurations – they create them in the first place.3 The spectrum of functions fulfilled by maps for the understanding of urban spaces and their significance can be highlighted with reference to a pair of highly divergent positions within urban research: Bruno Zevi’s Saper vedere la città as well as Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City were both published in the year 1960.4 The urban historian Zevi analyses the achievement of the Ferrarese Renaissance urbanist Biagio Rossetti as a preservationist of evolved structures, in the process emphasising the ­concrete, organically evolved materiality of the city. Lynch is interested in the mental maps of inhabitants of large American cities, characterised, conversely, by a reduction of complexity. For his synchronous comparison of urban structures, Zevi utilises aerial photographs of cities that have remained as intact as possible. For the diachronic comparisons, he uses historical maps, although for the most part he does not reflect upon their specific representational form. The merit of his methodologically traditional

3 

 “Mapping” has become a popular metaphor for the spatial representation and ordering of knowledge for several years. In the same way that mapping has been discovered as a meaningful representation of knowledge or information, the map, in its essentialist claim to project the surface of the world, has been increasingly examined for its meaning. Cf.: Stephen Bann, “The Truth in Mapping”, in: Word and Image, 4/2 (1988), pp. 498–509. Christian Jacob, L’empire des cartes: Approche théorique de la cartographie à travers l’histoire, Paris 1992; id., The Sovereign Map. Theoretical Approaches in Cartography Throughout History, Chicago and London 2006; J. B. Harley, “Deconstructing the map”, in: Writing Worlds. Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape, ed. Trevor Barnes and James Duncan, London 1992, pp. 231–247; Denis Wood, The Power of Maps, New York 1992; Geoff King, Mapping Reality. An Exploration of Cultural Cartographies, New York 1996; Mapping. Ways of Representing the World, ed. Daniel Dorling and David Fairbairn, London 1997; Denis Cosgrove: “Introduction. Mapping Meaning”, in: id. (as in note 2), pp. 1–23; Ute Schneider, Die Macht der Karten. Eine Geschichte der Kartographie vom Mittelalter bis heute, Darmstadt 2004; Tanja Michalsky, Projektion und Imagination. Niederländische Landschaft der Frühen Neuzeit in Geographie und Malerei, Paderborn 2011; id., “Karten unter sich. Überlegungen zur Intentionalität geographischer Karten”, in: Fürstliche Koordinaten, ed. Ingrid Baumgärtner, Leipzig 2014, pp.  321–339; id., “Karten schaffen Räume. Kartographie als Medium der Wissens- und Informations­ organisation”, in: Gerhard Mercator. Wissenschaft und Wissenstransfer, ed. Ute Schneider and Stefan ­Brakensiek, Darmstadt 2015, pp. 15–38. On Naples see id., “Geschichte im Raum. Topographische Imaginationen Neapels in der Frühen Neuzeit”, in: Exhib. Cat. Caravaggios Erben. Barock in Neapel, ed. Peter Forster, Elisabeth Oy-Marra and Heiko Damm, Munich 2016, pp. 14–29. 4   Zevi (as in note 2); Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, Cambridge 1960, pp. 16–25.

Ga ining insight through a Bir d’s-Ey e V iew

1 

 Kevin

Lynch, Boston, that everyone knows.

study is to sensitise us to the overlapping of larger historical developments and concrete planning interventions. Notwithstanding a marked interest in its history, the city is reduced, ultimately, to an aesthetic structure that is no longer transparent in relation to its concrete historical legibility. When Kevin Lynch, by contrast, juxtaposes an aerial photograph of Boston – ultimately the modern variant of the bird’s-eye view – with a graphic version showing the most important landmarks, and then with a simplified map of Boston (fig. 1) that everyone knows, the structuration runs along completely different lines. His presentation is designed to demonstrate that collective perceptions of the urban organism, evaluated via resident questionnaires, is remote from the complexity of the kind of topographical description that is already common today, and that the individual urban space is not congruent with the conventionally mapped one. Historical maps, aerial photographs, modern re-drawings, as well as sketches of the city featuring familiar landmarks: each constructs different urban spaces, and each is capable of conveying much about the individual city. Through their mode of representation, from the projected bird’s-eye view, to the map, and all the way through to the photograph, all repre­ sent an understanding of the city as such.

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With reference to a number of early maps, views, and descriptions of Naples, the following addresses two fundamental questions: 5 a.  the historicity of bird’s-eye views and city plans themselves, as well as the epistemological models they represent; b.  the transparency of maps, images and text of cities in relation to the historical reality of their period of origin.

Views and images Giovanni Tarcagnota’s Del Sito, Et Lodi Della Citta Di Napoli Con Vna Breve Historia De Gli Re Svoi, & delle cose piu degne altroue ne’ medesimi tempi auenute was published in Naples in 1566. This account of the city of Naples begins by describing the city’s appearance and then narrates its history in chronological sequence up until the year of the book’s publication.6

5 

 Comparable analyses could be made on most cartographically documented cities. The mapping of Naples is the focus of a recent research project of the Bibliotheca Hertziana, MPI of Art History and the CIRICE in Naples: Naples Digital Archive, found at: https://www.biblhertz.it/de/dept-michalsky/naplesdigital (accessed August 8 2019). The pioneering work in the field was done by Cesare de Seta. See Cesare de Seta, Storia della città di Napoli dalle origini al Settecento, Bari 1973; id., Napoli fra Rinascimento e Illuminismo, Naples 1991; id., “The Urban Structure of Naples: utopia and reality”, in: Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo: the representation of architecture, ed. Henry A. Millon et al., London 1994, pp. 349–371; id., Napoli. La città nella storia d’Italia, Rome and Bari 2004; id., Napoli e i centri della provincia. Iconografia delle città in Campania, ed. Alfredo Buccaro, Naples 2006; cf. Maria Iaccarino, L’evoluzione dell’iconografia di Napoli, dal XV al XIX secolo, Naples 2006, pp. 99–112. See also Napoli, stratificazione storica e cartografia tematica, ed. Massimo Rosi, Naples 1991; Maria Forcellino, “Considerazioni sull’immagine di Napoli. Da Colantonio a Bruegel”, in: Napoli nobilissima, 30 (1991), pp. 81–96; Vladimiro Valerio, Piante e vedute di Napoli dal 1486 al 1599. L’origine dell’iconografia urbana europea, Naples 1998; Barbara Naddeo, “Topographies of Difference. Cartography of the City of Naples”, in: Imago mundi, 56 (2004), pp. 23–47; id., “Representation and Self-Perception. Plans and Views of Naples in the Early Modern Period”, in: A Companion to Early Modern Naples, ed. Tommaso Astarita, Leiden and Boston 2013, pp. 63–86; Giovanni Muto, “Urban Structures and Population”, in: ibid., pp. 35–62. 6   Giovanni Tarcagnota, Del Sito, Et Lodi Della Citta Di Napoli Con Vna Breve Historia De Gli Re Svoi, & delle cose piu degne altroue ne’ medesimi tempi auenute di Giouanni Tarchagnota di Gaeta, Naples 1566. This is the third printed description of Naples. Cf. Franco Strazzullo, “Un descrittore della Napoli del ‘500. Giovanni Tarcagnota”, in: Atti della Accademia Pontaniana N.S., 38 (1989), pp. 131–140. A few years earlier, Benedetto di Falco, Descrittione dei luoghi antichi di Napoli e del suo amenissimo distretto, Brescia 1549 (who refers primarily to ancient ruins) and Pietro De Stefano, Descrittione de i luoghi sacri della città di Napoli, con li fondatori di essi, reliquie sepolture et epitaphii scelti che in quelle si ritrouano, Naples 1560 (based exclusively on the city’s sacred buildings and institutions) appeared. Cf. Libri per vedere. Le guide storico‑artistiche della città di Napoli: fonti, testimonianze del gusto immagini, di una città, ed. Francesca Amirante et al., Naples 1995; Tanja Michalsky, “Die Stadt im Buch. Die Konstruktion städtischer Ordnung am Beispiel frühneuzeitlicher Beschreibungen Neapels”, in: Urbanität. Formen der Inszenierung in Texten, Karten, Bildern, ed. Martina Stercken and Ute Schneider, Cologne 2016, pp. 105–131; cf. also the excellent

Ga ining insight through a Bir d’s-Ey e V iew

2 

 Antonio

Lafreri (publisher) after Étienne Dupérac: Map of Naples, Rome 1566.

The author begins with a topical praise of cities as refuges and symbols of human civilisation, listing a number of qualities attributed to Naples. He begins with the magnificent palaces, then proceeds to the numerous noble families, before mentioning architects and urbanists individually: “[…] no less praiseworthy are those who demonstrate how one can and must construct beautiful cities with spectacular buildings, so that from time to time […] we arrive at that grace/indefiniteness (vaghezza) of the buildings, and the unique arrangement which then becomes perceptible.”7 With his argument, Tarcagnota is very much up to date, i.e. when he stresses the conjunctions between planning and historicity, between control and contingency, so to speak, and when he enumerates precisely those factors that allow a city to become unique and distinctive.8 Then, however, he takes up a rhetorical artifice which, with all of the topoi online edition, available at: www.memofonte.it/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=40& Itemid=329 (accessed August 8 2019), where, however, Tarcagnota’s text is not included. 7   “Ma non meno degno di lode sono quegli altri, che mostrarono poi come si potessero & dovessero le belle città bene ordinate & di magnifichi edifici adorne fabricare; ben che penso io, che di tempo in tempo, come di tutte le cose aviene, a quest’ultima vaghezza di edificii si venisse & di ordine cosi distinto come poscia si vede”; Tarcagnota (as in note 6), fol. 1v. 8   Cf. the introduction to the six-volume work of Stadtdarstellungen, which Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg published from 1572 onwards; “ad praesens me opus convertam in quo quidnam ornamenti vniverso periti Architecti vrbium, oppidorumque; structura conzulerint, artificiosae Simonis Novellani, &

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employed, is particularly telling: he has three cavalieri, whose voices now become the vehicles of his text, gather in a villa outside of the town which offers a fictive view of Naples, one that, whilst it does not appear in this slender volume, can nonetheless be readily visualised on the basis of contemporary maps and bird’s-eye perspectives of Naples (fig. 2). The gathering takes place in the home of Don Geronimo Pignatelli in a Villa del monte which is set above the city and, in view of the loveliness of the day, their host suggests that they dine in a windowed loggia.9 “Visible from there” we read “was the sea and the entire city, as though one were situated directly above it.” Clearly, this precise localisation of the fictive conversationalists serves to evoke a view whose perspective approaches a bird’s-eye view very closely; namely, an elevated standpoint that provides an overview.10 It is in this privileged position that the host speaks, turning toward his guests: “Have you ever seen a view lovelier than this one? And if you saw it portrayed in one of these Flemish pictures, could you fail to say that it is the most exquisite thing in the world?” Taking this comparison with contemporary landscape painting as his point of departure, he continues, explaining that the city is embedded in nature – and how readily one felt refreshed before the extraordinary beauty of these natural surroundings. No matter how we wish to conceptualise, in methodological terms, the historical relationship between concrete, painted or graphic images and linguistic evocations of subjective views, a view of Naples painted by Pieter Bruegel, either during the 1550s, when he was in Italy (fig. 3, plate XXXIV), or slightly later in Antwerp,11 is inevitably Francisci Hogenbergij manus, mirifica quadam industria, tam accuratae, & ad viuum partium singularum proportione, & vicorum ordine ad admussim observaro, expresserunt vut non icones & typi vrbium, sed vrbes ipsae, admirabili caelaturae artificio, spectantium oculis subiectae appareant. Quas partim ipsi depinxerunt, partim ab iis, sagaci diligentia conquisitas, atque depictas acceperunt, qui singulas quasque vrbes perlustrarunt […]. In quo topographicae vrbium oppidorumque descriptiones tam geometrica, quam perspectiva pingendi ratione, cum genuina situs, locorum, moeniorum, publicorum & privatorum aedificiorum obser­ vatione, singulari artis industria atque praesidio sunt delineare.” Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg, Civitates Orbis Terrarum. 1572–1618, ed. Raleigh A. Skelton, Amsterdam 1965, vol. 1, D2 (First Edition 1572). 9   “[…] in una di queste ville del monte, che soprasta alla citta […] volle, che in vna loggietta finestrata, perche era una giornata amenissima, si mangiasse […].” (Tarcagnota [as in note. 6], S. 2v). For the construction of palaces in Naples and its surroundings, as well as the problems associated with the great influx of nobles since the end of the 16th century, see Gerard Labrot, Baroni in città. Residenze e comportamenti dell’aristocrazia napoletana 1530–1734, Naples 1979, chapters I. and II. 10   “Et eßendosi riposati alquanto, perche da quella loggietta si vedeva il mare, & la citta tutta come se le fossero stato sopra, il Sign. Don Geronimo volto verso gli altri con certa maraviglia incominciò in questo modo a dire: Vedeste mai per vita vostra la piu bella prospettiva di questa? Se si vedesse ritratta in uno di questi quadri di Fiandra, chi non direbbe, che questa fosse la piu delicata cosa del mondo?” Tarcagnota (as in note 6), fol. 3r. 11   The picture is painted in oil on wood and measures 42 × 71 cm. It is located in Rome in the Galleria Doria Pamphili. Cf. Gustav Glück, Das große Bruegel-Werk, Vienna and Munich 1963, p. 37; Roger H. Marijnissen, Bruegel, Antwerp 1988, pp.  381–382; Philippe Roberts-Jones and Françoise RobertsJones, Pieter Bruegel der Ältere, Munich 1997, p. 281–282. The work is neither signed nor dated, but the

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3 

 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, View of Naples, ca. 1550, oil on wood, 42.2 × 71.2 cm, Rome, Galleria Doria Pamphilii.

called to mind at this point. This work’s provenance remains unresolved, but the fact that it remains in Italy alone suggests it was produced for an Italian client, perhaps one belonging to the milieu of the Spanish court in Naples – to which Tarcagnota’s fictional conversational partners were also attached.12 Having been recently restored, this picture’s quality can now be appraised once again, and the topographical data provided by this bird’s-eye view becomes recognisable with precision.13 The picture’s ostensible subject is the return of the victorious fleet or a naval battle, but even more impressive is Bruegel’s embedding of the city in a ‘delicate’ landscape and the dynamism of harbour life. Whether Tarcagnota knew this particular picture is both impossible to attribution to Bruegel is generally accepted. Surprisingly enough, no further interpretation of this picture has been made until today, although Pieter Bruegel’s complete work has undergone a number of complex individual interpretations in recent decades. On Bruegel’s trip to Italy cf. Nils Büttner, “‘Quid Siculas sequeris per mille pericula terras?’ Ein Beitrag zur Biographie Pieter Bruegels d. Ä. und zur Kultur­ geschichte der niederländischen Italienreise”, in: Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft, 27 (2000), pp. 209–242. 12   Roberts-Jones and Roberts-Jones (as in note 11), consider whether the picture was owned by the Bruegel collector Cardinal Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, who, however, only came to Naples as a viceroy from 1571 to 1575 (p. 282). 13   See Manfred Sellink, “Les Vaisseux de mer de Pieter Bruegel l’Ancien. Un aspect moins connu de son oeuvre”, in: Exhib. Cat. La Flandre et la mer. De Pieter l’Ancien à Jan Brueghel de Velours, ed. Sandrine Vezlier-Dussart and Stéphane Curveiller, Musée départemental de Flandre, Heule 2015, pp. 53–73; Gregg (as in note 2), pp. 170–175; Exhib. Cat. Bruegel. Die Hand des Meisters, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien ed. Elke Oberthaler, Sabine Pénot, Manfred Sellink and Ron Spronk, Stuttgart 2018, Cat. no. 54.

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4 

 Carlo

Theti, Map of Naples.

ascertain and, ultimately, incidental. Of greater relevance to a historical comprehension of media is the fact that, alongside printed bird’s-eye views, such landscape images, referred to as Flemish, were also in circulation; images which served to visualise the beauty and delectability of specific views. Educated readers were able to recall such paintings mentally in order to supplement graphic and verbal descriptions of the city. Meanwhile, Don Giovanni d’Avalos responds directly to his host: it is very beautiful, no doubt, but it is no less amusing to view the city itself, in particular its beautiful palaces, its (artfully) outfitted churches, the marvellous collections of the aristocracy, and the refreshing fountains – along with its streets, filled with cavalieri and nobles.14 Following this praise of nature and of the city itself, with its many attractions, a further volte-face, which prioritises the view of the city above its traversal, is introduced. Don Geronimo politely concedes to his friend that during a ride through the town, one indeed sees much, but he objects that the noise and confusion largely cancel one’s 14   “Bellissima certo, Ma non minore giocondità si sente, quando dentro la citta isteßa si veggono in particolare i bei palagi, le ornate chiese, i magnifici seggi, le fresche fontane, & le strade da tanta cavalleria & da cosi honorato popolo frequentate.” Tarcagnota (as in note 6), fol. 3.

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enjoyment, enjoining his friends to instead enjoy the view:15 “In undisturbed peace of mind, we enjoy this cheerful prospect. Contemplate its gracefulness for a while, and chat with me at length about the beautiful situation of the city. As you can see, it has been shaped by the charming hills that surround it, as though it were a marvellous theatre.” This passage is substantially longer, but these excerpts suffice to highlight the importance that was accorded to views of organically evolved and ordered cities in the mid-16th century. This fictional discussion leads quite artfully from a view through a window, an unmistakable reference to the framing of the picture, and then to a bird’seye view of the city. This severe, framed view of individual details, meanwhile, is countered by the allusion to Flemish landscape painting, which refreshes the eye in particular by depicting the beauties of nature. Finally, with a renewed focus on the individual details of the urban organism that only a map can provide, the author praises the possibilities of a placid peregrination through the city, which he then undertakes in the subsequent pages of his book. The city lies there like a theatre, not solely by virtue of its semicircular outline, but because it is conceived explicitly as a repository of knowledge of local history, of the kind treated in the book.16 A 16th century text could hardly articulate the dispositive of the ordering gaze with greater clarity, a gaze that is on the one hand reflected in linguistic discourse, but especially, on the other, in the pictorial production of the time, to which the author has recourse in such a self-evident fashion. Representations, conceptions and perceptions of the city, then, are intertwined with one another in highly concrete ways – but in view of the by now broad consensus according to which media generate their message, it remains to ask: What is, and has been, the concrete contribution of the pictorial media to a historical understanding of the city? Appearing more or less parallel with Tarcagnota’s book in Naples was a hybrid view of the city by Étienne Dupérac, published by Antonio Lafreri in Rome, which renders the city itself as an axonometry, and the surroundings in a distinctly more

15 

 “Ma lo strepito, & la confusione delle genti toglie gran parte di quel diletto. Il che qui hora à noi non aviene, che con ogni nostra quiete di animo godiamo di questa generale & gioconda vista, quale io poco avanti essere diceva. Miriate un poco di grazia & discorriate meco in particolare questo bel sito della città. Vedete come è egli maraviglioso, & quasi fatto studiosamente tale dalla natura. La citta é situata & formata come vedete à guisa di vn bel theatro , insieme con questi ameni colli, che alle spalle le sono & che la circondano da questa parte.” Tarcagnota (as in note 6), fol. 3r. The topos of so-called “travelling in an armchair” can be found throughout the chorographic literature of the 16th century, cf. Skelton in Braun/Hogenberg (as in note 8), p. VII; Nils Büttner, Die Erfindung der Landschaft. Kosmographie und Landschaftskunst im Zeitalter Bruegels, Goettingen 2000, p. 171; Frangenberg (as in note 2), p. 49, mentions that early modern tourists were advised to study city maps before travelling. 16   Cf. Frances A. Yates, Theater of the World, Chicago 1969. Numerous card collections bear the title Theatrum, cf. Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum orbis terrarum, Antwerp 1570, the first modern atlas avant la lettre.

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oblique bird’s-eye view.17 It is certainly no accident that these scrupulously precise projections – whose details are virtually imperceptible in small reproductions – are capable of substituting for the map which Tarcagnota delineates before the inner eye of his reader. Text and map spring from the same interest in the way in which history comes to assume the forms that are manifested in cities. No isolated phenomenon, they belong to a larger group of mid-16th century publications that address the history of nations and cities in images and texts.18 One well-known example is Ludovico Guicciardini’s Descrittione dei paesi bassi from 1567, which appeared in numerous editions supplied with an increasing number of maximally up-to-date city plans, and which advertises this feature already in its very first edition – as well as the Civitates orbis terrarum, edited by Frans Hogenberg and Georg Braun, published in six volumes beginning in 1572, which combines townscapes with ethnographic and historical infor­mation.19 Nor is it any accident that Dupérac’s map, which prevailed for many years against competition from other contemporary versions, also served as the basis for the map contained in Braun and Hogenberg’s city book, which made precisely this image of Naples accessible to a wider public. This view also satisfies the requirements specified by Tarcagnota and his friends. Firstly, it shows the beauty of the city’s situation, with its perimeter of gentle hills, and it orchestrates the sea in ways that go well beyond topographical necessity. It suggests a prospettiva by inscribing the buildings in oblique parallel projection on this highly precise map (which has a scale of 1:6000). They are too uniform in perspectival terms, i.e. ‘false’ in relation to a unified perspectival scheme, but they nonetheless create the impression of offering the reader a genuine vista, while providing detailed views of the individual buildings and sites listed in the legend. 20

17 

 Cf. Michelangelo Schipa, “Una pianta topografica di Napoli del 1566”, in: Napoli nobilissima, 4 (1895), pp. 161–166; Naddeo (as in note 5), pp. 24–26. 18   For the production, marketing and reception of maps in Italy see David Woodward, Maps as Prints in the Italian Renaissance. Makers, Distributors and Consumers, London 1996, pp. 100–101. Woodward also emphasises the widespread use of printed maps in Italy (which is less well researched than the ­Netherlands due to a lack of inventory in this area). Like other graphic products, they were traded and collected (also integrated), and esteemed both aesthetically and intellectually. Their role in disseminating knowledge and ideas about the world can hardly be overestimated. 19   Ludovico Guicciardini, Descrittione dei paesi bassi, Antwerp 1567; Braun and Hogenberg (as in note 8). See Lodovico Guicciardini (1521–1589): Actes du Colloque international 28, 29 et 30 mars 1990, ed. Pierre Jodogne, Brussels 1991; esp. Fernand Hallyn, “Guicciardini et la topique de la topographie”, in: ibid., pp.  151–161; Frank Lestringant, “Lodovico Guicciardini Chorographe. De la grande a la petite Belgique”, in: ibid., pp. 119–134, who introduces Guicciardini as a witness to a new conception of history. Cf. Guicciardini illustratus. De kaarten en prenten in Lodovico Giucciardini’s “Beschrijving van de Nederlanden”, ed. Henk Deys et al., Utrecht 2001. 20   Cf. Daniela Stroffolino, “Technice e metodi di rappresentazione della città dal XV al XVII secolo”, in: Buccaro (as in note 5), pp. 33–45, here p. 42.

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With regard to all of these qualities, it is superior to the map – just six years older – of Carlo Theti (fig. 4), whose interest in military cartography leads him to present a far more dramatic version. This version, whilst it certainly registers the city’s structure and also follows the conventions of the bird’s-eye view, accommodates neither the desire for vaghezza nor the demand for additional information concerning the town’s marvellous churches and palaces.21 One can readily imagine contemporaries laying out Dupérac’s map (fig. 2) next to them while reading Tarcagnota’s description of the city, which consists, significantly, of topographic and chronological parts. This, indeed, is precisely how Abraham Ortelius, the publisher of the first modern atlas, the Theatrum orbis terrarum (1570), imagined readers using his handy maps. As we know, Ortelius referred to geography as the “eye of history,” and praised maps for their capacity to present the settings of history to the eye as though they were actually present, so that deeds and places became recognisable.22 We know that Ortelius was familiar with Tarcagnota’s book because the copy presently preserved in Berlin’s Staatsbibliothek 23 was once in his possession. To be sure, this says very little about the direct relationship between the two texts, but serves as an indication of how closely linked historians and geographers were in the mid-16th century as they worked to integrate historiography and topographic description.

Chorogr aphy Much of the information contained in the geographic and cosmographic literature of the time suggests that an understanding of history was closely bound up with not only maps in general, but also with townscapes, which is to say that a heuristic potential was attributed to views of the organic order of the city which could not be exhausted in the

21   For the concept of vaghezza in Italian art theory and, in particular, in relation to landscape paintings: Karen Hope Goodchild, Towards an Italian Renaissance Theory of Landscape, Ph.D. thesis (University of Virginia), Ann Arbor 1998, pp. 83–100. The term derives from vagare, meaning wandering, connecting hiking, desire and beauty, whilst in the metaphorical sense it also means (feminine) sensuality, which in painting is primarily conveyed by colour. 22   “Geographia, quae merito a quibusdam historiae oculus appellata est”, Ortelius (as in note 16) writes in his preface, later: “si Tabulis ob oculos propositis liceat quasi praesentem, res gestas, aut loca in quibus gestae sunt, intueri.” In addition, he praises her for her memorability, which serves to keep the story itself, as present in the maps, longer in the memory: “Tabulis his quasi rerum quibusdam speculis nobis ante oculos collocatis, memoriae multo diutinus inhaerent”, literally translated: “Panels set up like mirrors of reality in front of our eyes extend the memory.” See Tanja Michalsky, “Geographie – Das Auge der Geschichte. Historische Reflexionen über die Macht der Karten im 16. Jh.”, available at: https://www.vossstiftung.de/tanja-michalsky-geographie-das-auge-der-geschichte-historische-ref lexionen-uber-diemacht-der-karten-im-16-jh/ (accessed August 8 2019). 23   The name is inscribed by hand and appears to be authentic in its Album Amicorum when compared with the writing of Ortelius.

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5 

 Peter

Apian, Chorography, 1524 (from Cosmographicus liber, fol. 2r).

projection of data. The term “chorography” reflects the historical understanding of such depictions. Originally derived from the antique term “cosmology,” it was used more or less synonymously with the term “topography” beginning with Ptolemy.24 More precisely, however, it is individual details that are depicted by chorography, while geography is concerned with the representation of the world as a whole. Chorography therefore means more than the ‘precise depiction of a place’ (which is how the term topography is used today), for it is first and foremost a component of a larger system whose ambition is to describe and explain the history of the entire world.

24   Woodward (as in note 18), pp. 5–7; Tanja Michalsky, “Medien der Beschreibung. Zum Verhältnis von Kartographie, Topographie und Landschaftsmalerei in der Frühen Neuzeit”, in: Text-Bild-Karte. Kartographie der Vormoderne, ed. Jürg Glauser and Christian Kiening, Freiburg 2007, pp. 319–349, esp. pp. 325–329.

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In 1524, which is to say when modern representations of the world were first emerging, Peter Apian explained precisely this in his Cosmographicus liber, which was supplied with informative illustrations (fig. 5). Accordingly, geography corresponds to a map of the world, or to the entire human head, while chorography is the equivalent of the individual parts, and is hence represented by an abbreviated view of a town, as well as by the two sensory organs, the eye and the ear. Freely translated, the picture caption explains that chorography’s aim is achieved with the accurate illustration or portrayal of particular places, just as if a painter were to paint or draw nothing more than an individual ear or eye.25 Although this metaphor is primarily intended to clarify the subordinate role of chorography, it nonetheless provides a bridge of sorts to the tangible, sensuous perception that is to be expected, according to Tarcagnota, from a beautiful, delicate, townscape. During the 16th century, in short, chorography referred to the depiction of a place, one that moreover portrayed its “organic order” within the larger context of cosmography (which is to say world history). It is important to realise that early modern chorography itself, with its dominant media, the image and the map, advanced a spatial explanatory model of the urban organism, one we continue to use today, and one that will be explored below in greater detail, finally, with reference to Naples. The urgent question here is: how did the maps of 1566 display history and social order, and what conclusions can be drawn concerning the contemporary understanding of the city as an expression of the social fabric? To begin with, the answer involves a detour into the topic of modern maps, which facilitate a grasp of urban development.

Modern maps of history Reference to these highly reductive graphic representations of the historical urban development of Naples facilitates a brief account of the city’s history, along with the method of its depiction (fig. 6a–d.) The images are drawn from the new edition of a historical city guide, and register (in accordance with current conventions) only

25   “Finis verò eiusdem in effigienda partilius loci similitudine consummabitur: veluti si pictor aliquis aurem tantum aut oculum designaret depingeretque”, see Petrus Apian, Cosmographicus Liber, ed. Gemma Frisius, Antwerpen 1533, fol.3r. William Cuningham also distinguished in his Cosmographical Glasse (1559) between the cosmography with the picture of the globe as “the heavens containe in them the earth”, the worldmap “without circles, representeth th’earth, set forth with Waters, Hylles, Mountaynes, and such like” as geography, and took as an example for chorography: “th’excellent Citie of Norwych, as the forme of it is, at this present 1558” accompanied by a perspective view of the city, cf. William Cuningham, The Cosmographical Glasse, London 1559, reprinted in facsimile, Amsterdam and New York 1968, pp. 7–8.

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important new buildings and urbanistic changes for the respective epoch, with the localisation of the buildings based on a modern map.26 The initial Greek settlement of Parthenope was situated on the Pizzofalcone (fig. 6a). Neapolis, from which the name Naples was derived, was the associated new town and was expanded by the Romans. Readily recognisable are the symmetrical street layout, the forum and the nearby theatre. Situated outside of the town were sprawling imperial villas, whose memory was preserved for centuries.27 Medieval Naples was characterised in particular by an expansion toward the southwest (fig. 6b). Rightly the map emphasises the large church buildings, erected primarily under the French Royal House of Anjou during the 13th and 14th centuries.28 Also included are the New Cathedral (20), the mendicant church of San Lorenzo (11), San Domenico (9) and the enormous double cloister of Santa Chiara (16), as well as the fortifications, some of them integrated into the city wall (Castel Capuano, 22, Castel Carmine, 25), some positioned outside of it, such as the Castel Sant’ Elmo and the Castel Nuovo. In concrete urbanistic terms, the fortifications and the expansion of the harbour stood in the foreground. In contrast, the church buildings were utilised in order to underscore the new dynasty, buildings whose imposing dimensions must have shaped the townscapes significantly at that time. During the Renaissance, which in this instance means the second half of the 15th century when the Aragonese resided in Naples, the westward expansion continued (fig. 6c). However, urbanistic transformations are reflected less in the map itself, where the most likely object of attention is the large pleasure palace, Poggioreale, in the adjoining hunting grounds, and instead more in the legend, which now registers fewer churches and more palaces. In fact, the interest of the royal house and of a number of noble families shifted during the 15th century toward the construction of profane buildings, which transformed the townscape significantly in ways comparable to other Renaissance cities. A sweeping new town plan of the kind that is tangible in 15th century Tuscan cities, for example, can not, however, be demonstrated

26 

 Enrico Bacco, Naples. An Early Guide, trans. and ed. Eileen Gardiner, New York 1991. The best overview of the city’s history since the Middle Ages is offered by Giuseppe Galasso, Napoli capitale. Identità politica e identità cittadina. Studi e ricerche 1266–1860, Naples 1998. 27   Cf. for the urban development of Naples in antiquity: Wolfram Döpp, Die Altstadt Neapels. Entwicklung und Struktur, Marburg 1968; Paul Arthur, Naples, from Roman Town to City State. An Archeological Perspective, Rome 2002; Anna Andreucci Ricciardi, “Forma Urbis e scacchiera ippodamea”, in: Rosi, Napoli, stratificazione storica (as in note 5), pp. 14–23; Christoff Neumeister, Der Golf von Neapel in der Antike. Ein literarischer Reiseführer, Munich 2005. 28   Cf. Tanja Michalsky, Memoria und Repräsentation. Die Grabmäler des Königshauses Anjou in Italien, Goettingen 2000 (Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte 157), pp. 92–154; Caroline Bruzelius, The Stones of Naples. Church Building in Angevin Italy, 1266–1343, New Haven and London 2004.

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6 

 a,

b, c and d Four thematic maps of Naples.

for Naples. Only individual piazzas were reorganised in accordance with functionalist aspects, for example the area around the market (23).29 With his urbanistic projects, Viceroy Pedro da Toledo (in office from 1532–1553) shaped the Naples of the Spanish viceroys (fig. 6d). His most significant action was the laying out of the Via Toledo which is named after him, providing an entirely new access to the town on the west, and creating a link to the Quartieri spagnoli, the newly constructed quarter for soldiers. This also meant that the control of the viceroys became quite conspicuous with reference to the military presence.30 The outline of “Spanish 29 

 Cf. Jerry H. Bentley, Politics and Culture in Renaissance Naples, Princeton 1987; Andreas Beyer, Parthenope. Neapel und der Süden der Renaissance, Berlin 2000; Naples, ed. Marcia B. Hall and Thomas Willette, New York 2017 (Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance). 30   Cf. Giulio Pane, “Pietro di Toledo viceré urbanista”, in: Napoli nobilissima, 14 (1975), vol. 3, pp. 81–95; id., vol. 5, pp. 189–196; Giuseppe Coniglio, Il viceregno di don Pietro di Toledo, 1532–53, 2 vols., Naples 1984; Guido d’Agostino, Per una storia di Napoli capitale, Naples 1988, chap. II. Capitale e Viceregno; Daria Margherita, La strada di Toledo nella storia di Napoli, Naples 2006.

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Naples” is shown more or less in the state depicted by the well-known Dupérac map, which indeed shows the town in its current state of development, with as many buildings and facilities as possible. This brief visualisation on the basis of reduced maps already strongly alters particular views, guided respectively by specific interests, of Dupérac’s historical townscape (fig. 2). More readily recognisable here is the Greco-Roman street grid, specifically emphasised in many city guides from the early modern period. Also becoming visible here, within the early modern townscape, are neglected features such as the antique forum, displaced entirely by church buildings. Some medieval buildings, among them the double-cloister of S. Chiara, appear even larger and more imposing in view of their dates of origin. The Quartieri spagnoli from the era of the viceroys are identifiable by virtue of their homogenous building methods, whilst the numerous castelli, which date from various phases of the city wall’s construction, illustrate the urgency of protection and surveillance during various epochs. Against the background of specialist historical knowledge, clearly, such maps themselves order information while at the same time visualising it in a concentrated, two-dimensional mode. Remaining open, nevertheless, is the question of whether this knowledge is congruent with a broader historical perception of inhabited, urban space which was the focus of interest in Kevin Lynch’s studies, or whether such depictions of cities as repositories of knowledge are not primarily the product of a specific interest in the conjunction of topography and history, one that preoccupied historians and urbanists in particular – and which found an educated readership throughout 16th century Europe. Precisely because such depictions are sustained by a discourse that was set into motion by historians and geographers, it remains to clarify how deeply or widely this discourse extends, and whether it is inscribed in the spatial praxis of residents and travellers. The fascinating quality of these plans and bird’s-eye views is that they employ all of the rhetorical tools available to them in order to orchestrate the registration of historically evolved contingency, while at the same time, through minimal linear displacements, imposing an ordering on the city that is explicable only in relation to the historian’s interests.

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7 

 Anton

8 

 Jan

van den Wyngaerde, View of Naples, ca. 1550, Oxford, Ashmolean.

van Stinemolen, View of Naples, 1582, Vienna, Albertina.

Historical images of Naples Needless to say, other depictions of Naples existed during the 16th century. For his townscape, created during the 1550s (fig.  7, plate XXXV) and almost certainly the model for a cycle found in the Alcazar in Madrid, Anton van den Wyngaerde, for example, chose the pier as his standpoint, so that the town nestles cosily in the hillsides behind the royal palace, from which the Spanish viceroys rule.31 Despite Wyngaerde’s undoubted precision in rendering the topography, very little is recognisable, and the scopic regime that characterises Tarcagnota’s Text and Dupérac’s map is restricted here to the exclusion of the beholder. Jan van Stinemolen, by contrast, positions the beholder 31   See Richard L. Kagan, “Philipp II and the Art of the Cityscape”, in: Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 17 (1986), pp. 115–135; id. (ed.), Spanish Cities of the Golden Age: The Views of Anton van den Wyngaerde, Berkeley 1989; Montserrat Galera Monegal, Antoon van den Wijngaerde, pintor de ciutats i de fets d’armes a l’Europa del Cinc-cents. Cartobibliografia raonada dels dibuixos i gravats, i assaig de reconstrucciò documental de l’obra pictòrica, Barcelona 1998.

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9 

 Ieronimo Pico Fonticulano, Map of Naples, 1582.

on the surrounding mountains (fig. 8), and the regime of his perspectival construction interferes with the viewer’s perception of the city’s organisation. The most revealing version however, when it comes to the power of cartographers, is the one by Ieronimo Pico Fonticulano from a manuscript book dated 1582 (fig. 9) and which is preoccupied explicitly with describing the city.32 Here, it is an urbanist and cartographer, of all people, one who elsewhere compiled the tools of triangulation and the calculation of projections as guidance for aspiring cartographers with the greatest precision,33 who chose for his cartographic definition of Naples the intersection of the antique decumanus maximus with the above-mentioned Via Toledo, which he shows surrounded by the city wall in a correct projection. Our sense of orientation

32 

 See Pico Ieronimo Fonticulano, Breve descrittione di sette illustri città d’Italia, ed. Mario Centofanti, L’Aquila 1996 (1582). See Stroffolino (as in note 20), p. 40. 33   The work was published posthumously by his brother: Geometria di Ieronimo Pico Fonticulano dell’Aquila, L’Aquila 1597.

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10 

 Tavola

Strozzi, 1472, Naples, Museo di San Martino.

is improved by rotating the map 90° (in conformity with entrenched conventions); recognisable now are the Palazzo, the castelli and the city gates, as well as, alongside a small number of churches, the small, semicircular symbol which identifies the Seggi, the most important public gathering places for the nobility, and hence an explicitly political emblem within the urban space. Decisive here is that beginning around the mid-16th century, various images of Naples (and, evidently, of other cities as well) were accessible in relatively large quan­ tities, and that they consequently shaped conceptions of the city that were embedded in a larger framework of geographical and historical interests. Such views of the city are congruent with the notions of its history that are formulated in contemporary texts, and the temptation is great to suppose that, thanks to all of these documents, we are fully capable of viewing the city of the time with a 16th century eye (i.e. Michael Baxandall’s “period eye”).34 Precisely this, however, must be called into question – instead, we should be mindful of how strongly the specific, to a high degree seemingly neutral, projection of a “container-space” embodied in the cartographic representation of cities developed in the 16th century continues to pursue us right up to the present, when we attempt to comprehend a structure as complex as a city. Can we conclude, for example, from the absence of such depictions from the th 15   century that the city was in fact perceived somehow differently? How does the Tavola Strozzi, extolled as the first view of Naples and executed in 1472 on a commission from Filippo Strozzi to serve as the backboard of a bed, which also shows the city from 34   See Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Florence, Oxford 1972, chap. II; cf. Allan Langdale, “Aspects of the Critical Reception and Intellectual History of Baxandall’s Concept of the Period Eye”, in: About Michael Baxandall, ed. Adrian Rifkin, Oxford 1999, pp.  17–34; Adrian Randolph, “Gendering the Period Eye: ‘Deschi da Parto’ and Renaissance Visual Culture”, in: Art History, 27 (2004), pp. 538–562. Cf. Tanja Michalsky, “The Local Eye. Formal and Social Distinctions in Late Quattrocento Neapolitan Tombs”, in: Art History, 31/4 (2008), pp. 484–504 and pp. 599–600.

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the sea, fit into this picture (fig. 10, plate XXXVI)?35 While it is certain that the projection was elaborately calculated, that here, Francesco Rosselli – who drafted the celebrated View of Florence with the Chain around the same time – produced a highly precise view of Naples, one nonetheless notices that individual buildings are more strongly emphasised, suggesting that such selections involve attributions of meaning that are conveyed with greater directness than in later maps. Here, the painted chorography displays the situation, splendour and security of the large city that was to a large degree the work of the previous generation of rulers. Here, urban organisation is orchestrated, but despite the wide-angle perspective and the use of two different vanishing points, it remains more faithful to actual experience. In 1997, with reference to Florence, Marvin Trachtenberg argued for relating medieval planning more strongly to intra-urban perspectives.36 Additionally, in a recent conference volume that addresses conceptions of urban beauty in the Middle Ages, quarters, rituals, ordinances and heraldic signs are emphasised as factors of order. 37

The historical understanding of the city If we take up an older text for the Naples of 1472, in search of other examples, this impression is, initially, confirmed. An anonymous description of Naples from 1444 alternates between structuration and the inspection of the urban realm.38 It begins by naming the castelli and their functionality for the king, before moving on to a number of the city gates, with the one through which Alfonso of Aragon had passed a year earlier in his triumphal procession receiving special emphasis. Seemingly without order, it shifts between the enumeration of a series of acts of destruction which occurred during battles for the city, and the structural register which states that the city is divided into five parts. These five parts are, however, not described in topographic terms, but instead registered within the public space together with their emblems.39 These are the five 35 

 Cf. De Seta (as in note 5), pp. 11–22, here also the comparison with the following city maps and other pictures (pp. 31–53); id. (as in note 5), pp. 363–367, with the attribution of the panel to Francesco Rosselli, who also designed the so-called “chain plan” of Florence. See Cat. no. 1 in: id. and Buccaro (as in note 5), p. 113; Giulio Pane, La Tavola Strozzi tra Napoli e Firenze. Un’immagine della città nel Quattrocento, Naples 2009. 36   See Marvin Trachtenberg, The Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art and Power in Early Modern Florence, Cambridge 1997. 37   See La bellezza della città. Stadtrecht und Stadtgestaltung im Italien des Mittelalters und der Renaissance, ed. Michael Stolleis and Ruth Wolff, Tübingen 2004; see my review in: Das Mittelalter, 12 (2007), p. 211. 38   Cesare Foucard, “Descrizione della città di Napoli e statistica del regno nel 1444”, in: Archivio storico per le province napoletane, 2 (1877), pp. 725–757. 39   Foucard (as in note 38), p. 732: “La ditta citade se parte in cinque parti e cinque sedie […] le qual Sedie sonno lozie lavorate e ornate, dove se reduce tuti i zentilhuomini delle ditte contrade […].”.

Ga ining insight through a Bir d’s-Ey e V iew

loggias of the nobility in which the gentilhuomini assemble throughout the day. Emphasised thereafter, in a direct comparison to Venice, are the main axes, along which the author moves, beginning from the city gate on the market, in order to enumerate the contiguous industries (in particular the saddlery), which, with its numerous cross streets, occupies an entire district. Before the text proceeds toward purely statistical data, the stroll through the city culminates in the following sentence: the longest street in the city leads to the sedia di Nido, where we find long, beautiful streets, as well as large palaces.40 Thanks to the beautiful palaces, one can move in parallel to the Tavola Strozzi; although the correspondences with the map by Fonticulano (fig. 9) are even more remarkable. Registered there alongside the few streets, city gates and castelli are precisely these sedie: Porto, Portanova, Montagna, Nido, and Capuana, as well as the market together with the saddlery (Selleria). On the one hand, the drawing articulates the conceptions of order of the city planner at the end of the 16th century, with his interest in route-straightening measures and ceremonial avenues; 41 on the other, it mirrors the city’s political and social structure, and hence still corresponds with astonishing precision to the circumstances of the previous century, thereby underscoring the longue dureé of an urban realm that is permeated with meaning, and has been shaped by political symbols and buildings.42 Fonticulano’s map, which, today, would probably be called a thematic map as distinct from a topographic one, demonstrates that despite the predominant rhetoric of the regime of 16th century cartographers’ gaze, as exemplified by Tarcagnota’s text, they were capable of performing reductions and attributions of meaning with great precision – that our current view of the historical city is also skewed, due to the superior state of preservation of elaborately printed maps, in favour of the overview.

40 

 Foucard (as in note 38), p. 734: “Poy se va al diritto, e per longa se trova la strata Capuana, la quale è la piu dritta e longa strata sia in Napoli, vegnendo verso la sedia di Nido. E in quella sedia de nido se trova de belle e longe strate e magni palace.” 41   The accompanying text, in which Naples is always considered in comparison to Rome, is rather pejorative and sober: “Napoli non ha per il piú strada con ordine ripartita, né che commoda o bella sia o pur rende vaga e riguardevole”. Even if Charles I and his successors have already worked hard “[…] invero una città da principio malpartita, difficilissima cosa è il poterla mai rimediare, se non si butta a nuova pianta.” As expected, Viceroy Pedro da Toledo receives the only praise for his new clear cut axis; cf. Fonticulano (as in note 32), p. 10. 42   Fonticulano (as in note 32), p. 12. The marking of this sedie is all the more astounding, as they are not specifically mentioned in the text, while there the individual places are named and consistently blamed for their smallness and irregularity.

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Urban space and social reality The perception of the urban order as an image of its social reality in societal and economical categories can already be substantiated for the 15th century. Here, orientation is provided by the main streets, the settings incidentally for political rituals such as processions, the large palaces – and the sedie or seggi (and this particular phenomenon is dependent upon Naples’ social structure), which refer both to the subdivisions of the various quarters, as well as to their assembly spaces.43 Modern maps either visualise the city’s spheres of control, for example Rosalba di Meglio, with shaded areas for the various quarters (fig.  11), or demarcate their singular role through a particular colouration, as in the drawing by Cesare de Seta, which renders legible the close proximity of the seggi to the churches, which accommodated their most important chapels.44 In short: the social space described by the anonymous historian of 1444 is registered again on the current maps, but movement, which can be depicted successively in a text, is reduced now to the divisions and adjacencies that result from the cartographic medium. A comparison with such modern maps is relevant because they are also confronted – albeit in a sophisticated and reflective way – with the above-discussed problem: that of coordinating historical social spaces with the topographically determined continuum of a map. Confronting one another here is the contingency of the organic city, with all of its upheavals, and the control of the historian, who projects meaning onto it. But how are the historical inhabitants to be incorporated; those who, unlike the nobleman at the Villa sopra monte cited above, rarely enjoy access to an overview and instead, of necessity, invent their own patterns of meaning in the process of using the city, patterns that are related to the city’s history, but which are also contoured for instance through functions or rituals? Despite all well-intentioned attempts to approximate historical reality through modern maps, to structure it and render it comprehensible, the historical experience of the city is, precisely through this procedure, overlaid by a newer medium that suggests an overview. To emphasise it once again: the problem, 43 

 Cf. Camillo Tutini, Dell’origine e fundazione de’ seggi di Napoli, Naples 1754; Maria Antoniette Visceglia, “Corpo e sepoltura nei testamenti della nobiltà napoletana (XVI–XVIII)”, in: Quaderni storici, 17 (1982), pp. 583–614; id., Identità sociali. La nobiltà napoletana nella prima età moderna, Naples 1998, pp. 90 ff.; Christoph Weber, Familienkanonikate und Patronatsbistümer. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte von Adel und Klerus im neuzeitlichen Italien, Berlin 1988, pp. 279 ff.; Giuliana Vitale, “La nobiltà di seggio o Napoli nel basso Medioevo: aspetti della dinamica interna”, in: Archivio per le province napoletane, 106 (1988), pp. 151–169; Ordnungen des sozialen Raumes. Die Quartieri, Sestieri und Seggi in den frühneuzeitlichen Städten Italiens, ed. Grit Heidemann and Tanja Michalsky, Berlin 2012; Fulvio Lenzo, Memoria e identità civica. L’architettura dei seggi nel Regno di Napoli XIII–XVIII secolo, Rome 2014. 44   Cf. Rosalba Di Meglio, Il convento francescano di S. Lorenzo a Napoli. Regesti dei documenti dei secoli XIII–XV, Salerno 2003, p. XXXIII; De Seta (as in note 5), pp. 78–79.

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11 

 Modern

Map of Naples with the Seggi.

both current and historical, of understanding the city as a so to speak organically evolved and continually re-ordered structure is also manifested in the media used to represent it. However, even (and especially) in the era of Google Earth, which ostensibly makes satellite views accessible to all, there still remains the ineluctable dilemma that emerges when we attempt, through cartographic reduction, to mediate between the convoluted materiality, built up over centuries, and the social space that is inherent in it, because the historical perception of this space is, as a rule, repressed by its putatively objectifiable topography. * The early modern chorography of Naples is part of that discourse in the science of ­history which, in the 16th century, discovered in maps and map-like representations such as the bird’s-eye view an authentic medium for anchoring historical events and social spaces in a territory, thereby controlling the contingency of historical events, at least ex post. Although today, at least in theoretical geography, maps have long since been deconstructed, they continue to radiate their fascinating power, evidently making it possible to endow difficult-to-grasp historical facts with a space, and hence with reality. Many of the spatial conceptions and forms of orders from earlier times, so conditioned by social reality, however, can only be investigated through comparison with the few

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surviving texts, and with the urban architecture itself. Precisely because the bird’s-eye view, with its performance of an imaginary overview, emerges as so seductively objective, it is advisable to maintain methodological distance in relation to it, pulling it down to the terra firma of interest-guided projection.

Picture Credits

Preface 1, 2 

 Photo

Yannis Hadjinicolaou.

Yannis Hadjinicolaou 1, 2   Exhib. Cat. James Northcote, p. 135 and p. 104; 3   Exhib. Cat. Lucian Freud und das Tier, p. 23; 4   G. Greig Colazione con Lucian Freud, Cover; 5, 6   Photograph Yannis Hadjinicolaou; 7, 15   Wikipedia; 8   Exhib. Cat. Herrlich Wild, p. 142; 9   Mirjam Neumeister, Holländische Gemälde im Städel Museum 1550–1800, vol. 3, Petersberg 2010, p. 323; 10   Exhib. Cat. Die Geburt des Kunstmarktes, p. 77; 11   Wikimedia Commons; 12   © Alte Pinakothek Munich, Munich; 13   Camerarius, p. 62; 14   Lob der Torheit, p. 63; 16, 18   Wikipedia; 17   Macdonald 2016, p. 144; 19   Galerie Perrotin,

Paris.

Andrea Pinotti 1   Zöllner 2011, Cat. no. 464;  2   Von Uexküll 2010, pp. 64–65; 3   Still from the video Flying the Birdly Virtual Reality Simulator, https:||www.youtube.com|watch?v=gWLHIusLWOc,  accessed June 8 2020;  4   Bert I. Gordon 1977;  5   Photo from the website of the FILE – Electronic Language International Festival:https:||file.org.br|metro_sp_2014|file-sp-2014-metro-5, accessed June 8 2020;  6   Paul W. S. Anderson 2004.

Hermann Roodenburg 1 

 Wikimedia Commons;  2   Hadjinicolaou 2018, p. 178;  3   © Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Foto U. Edelmann;  4   © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam;  5   © Mauritshuis, The Hague;  6   ms. 1021819, Bibliothèque Royale, Brussels, fº 61.

Robert Felfe 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12 14   © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam;  4  Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, Lyon;  10   Exhib. Cat. The Art of Clara Peeters,  p. 93;  11   Exhib. Cat.  Hierony­mus Cock, p. 383;  13   Exhib. Cat. Von Bruegel bis Rubens, Das große Jahrhundert der flämischen Malerei, ed. Ekkehard Mai and Hans Vlieghe, Cologne 1992, p. 436.

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Pictur e Cr edits

Monika Wagner 1, 3   © The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood House, London;  2   © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam;  4   Photograph Harry Shunk|VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, in: Sidra Stich: Exhib. Cat. Yves Klein, Museum Ludwig Koeln et al. 1995, p. 216;  5   Private Collection;  6   Otto Lilienthalmuseum, Anklam (creative commons 4.0);  7   Hadjinicolaou 2017, p. 99;  8   Exhib. Cat. Herrlich Wild, p. 139;  9   © SuermondtLudwig Museum, Aachen;  10   akg images, Berlin;  11   Bildarchiv Foto Marburg und Zentralinstitut für Kunstge­schichte, Munich;  12   Exhib. Cat. Sir Edwin Landseer, p. 138;  13   © Pennsylvania Hospital Historic Collection, Philadelphia.

Baudouin Van den Abeele  Photo B. Van den Abeele;  2   Coomans 2002, p.  17;  3a   Van Huisstede and Brandhorst 1999, p. 651;  3b   Vandenweghe and Op de Beeck 1993, p. 213;  3c   Silvestre 1853, no. 270;  3d    Claessens 1958, p. 210;  3e   Silvestre 1853, no. 1079;  3f   Silvestre 1853, no.  450; 4a–d   Vindel 1942, p. 163, p. 164, p. 274, p. 335;  4e   McKerrow 1913, no. 163;  5   © Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris;  6   Lemaître 1988, p. 46;  7   Photo Josette Ratier;  8   Ars moriendi. Ars vivendi, p. 380;  9   Hendrix and Vignau-Wilberg 1997, p. 15;  10   Exhib. Cat. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, p. 185;  11   Exhib. Cat. Prag um 1600, p. 357.

1, 12 

Christine Kleiter, Gerhard Wolf 1   © ÖNB, Vienna;  2   Bellon 1555, p. 136, BPU Neuchâtel, ZQ 120, https:||doi.org|10.3931|erara-7294 | © Public Domain Mark;  3   Aldrovandi 1599, Staats- und Stadtbibliothek Augsburg -- 2 Nat 1a -1, p. 526, urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb11200210-9;  4   © Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris;  5   © The Albertina Museum, Vienna;  6   © The Albertina Museum, Vienna;  7   Olina 1622, ed. Solinas 2000, p. 158;  8   © Su concessione del Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali e per il turismo – Museo Nazionale del Bargello | Photo Antonio Quattrone, Florence;  9   © Cabinetto Fotografico delle Gallerie degli Uffizi;  10   © British Library Board: Yates Thompson MS 36 f162r.

Horst Bredekamp 1   © Rosenborg Slot, Copenhagen;  2   © Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna;  3   Engelbert II of Nassau’s Book of Hours, Oxford, Bodleian Library, fol. 55v;  4   Sambucus 1564, p. 189 [1982, p. 218];  5   Codex Manesse, University Library, Heidelberg, Cod. Pal. Germ. 848, fol. 7r;  6   Giovanni Boccaccio, Decamerone (French transl.), Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican, Ms. Palatino Latino 1989, fol. 174v;  7   © National Gallery, London;  8   Codex Manesse, Heidelberg, UB, Cod. Pal. Germ. 848, fol. 394r;  9, 10   © MPI-EVA PanAf|Chimbo Foundation Leipzig.

Klaus Krüger 1–20 

 Fotothek

KHI FU Berlin.

Frank Zöllner 1 

 Zöllner 2011, Cat. no. 464;  2   Private Collection, photo Martin Weicker;  3, 4   The Warburg Institute Archive, London;  5   Berezowski 1925, p. 146, Photo author;  6   © President and Fellows of Harvard College: 7–20   Photo Frank Zöllner.

Pictur e Cr edits

Peter Geimer 1, 2, 3, 4 

 Exner

1885, p. 17, p. 18, p. 23, p. 33;  5 

 Exner

1906, p. 139.

Tanja Michalsky 1  5 

Fig. 5, p. 20;  2, 3, 4, 9, 10   De Seta 1991, p. 68, p. 80, pp. 60–61, pp. 74–75, pp. 24–25;  Büttner 2000, p. 323;  6   Bacco 1991, Appendix;  7   Fonticulano 1996;  8   De Seta 1991, pp. 32–33;  11   Rosalba Di Meglio 2003, Tav. 2, p. XXXIII.  Lynch,  

Colour Plates I   Photo Yannis Hadjinicolaou; II   Wikipedia; III   © Alte Pinakothek Munich, Munich;  IV    Galerie Perrotin, Paris; V   Still from the video Flying the Birdly Virtual Reality Simulator, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=gWLHIusLWOc, accessed June 8 2020; VI   Bert I. Gordon 1977; VII   Paul W. S. Anderson 2004; VIII   Wikimedia Commons; IX   Hadjinicolaou 2018, p. 178; X   © Mauritshuis, The Hague; XI   © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; XII   Exhib. Cat.  Von Bruegel bis Rubens, Das große Jahrhundert der flämischen Malerei, ed. Ekkehard Mai and Hans Vlieghe, Cologne 1992, p. 436; XIII   © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; XIV   © Kenwood House, The Iveagh Bequest, London; XV    © Suermondt-Ludwig Museum, Aachen; XVI   Exhib. Cat. Sir Edwin Landseer, p. 138; XVII   © Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris; XVIII    Exhib. Cat. Prag um 1600, p. 357; XIX   Hendrix and Vignau-Wilberg 1997, p. 15; XX   © ÖNB, Vienna; XXI   © Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris; XXII   © Su concessione del Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali e per il turismo – Museo Nazionale del Bargello / Photo Antonio Quattrone, Florence; XXIII   © Cabinetto Fotografico delle Gallerie degli Uffizi; XXIV   © British Library Board: Yates Thompson MS 36 f162r; XXV   Codex Manesse, University Library, Heidelberg, Cod. Pal. Germ. 848, fol. 7r.; XXVI   Giovanni Boccaccio, Decamerone (French transl.), Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vatican, Ms. Palatino Latino 1989, fol. 174v.; XXVII   © MPIEVA PanAf/Chimbo Foundation Leipzig; XXVIII, XXIX, XXX   Fotothek KHI FU Berlin; XXXI   Private Collection, Photo Martin Weicker; XXXII, XXXIII   Photo Frank Zöllner; XXXIV   De Seta 1991, pp. 74–75; XXXV   Fonticulano 1996; XXXVI   De Seta 1991, pp. 24–25.

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