Étiquette : Boccaccio

 

Quinten Matsys and Leonardo — The Dawn of The Age of Laughter and Creativity

Par Karel Vereycken, August 2024.

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Quinten Matsys, The Ill-Matched Couple, 1520-25, National Gallery, Washington.

By Karel Vereycken, August 2024.

Summary

Introduction

A. Making our values great again

  1. Cynical jokes or Socratic dialogue?
  2. What is Christian humanism?
  3. Petrarch and the “Triumph” of Death
  4. The Age of Good Laughter
  5. Sebastian Brant, Hieronymus Bosch and The Ship of Fools

B. Quinten Matsys’ Early Life and biography

  1. From blacksmith to painter
  2. Duchy of Brabant
  3. Training: Bouts, Memling and Van der Goes
  4. Getting started in Antwerp and abroad

C. Selected Works and thematics

  1. The Virgin and the Child, « Divine Grace » and « Free Will« 
  2. The Saint Anne Altarpiece
  3. A New Perspective
  4. Cooperation with Patinir and Dürer
  5. The Erasmus Connection
  6. Thomas More’s Utopia
  7. Pieter Gillis and « The Friendship diptych« 
  8. The Da Vinci Connection (I)

D. The Art of Erasmian Grotesque

  1. In religious paintings
  2. Misers, Bankers and Money-changers, the Fight against Usury
  3. The Da Vinci Connection (II)
  4. The Art of Grotesque per se
  5. The metaphor of the “Ill-matched Lovers”
  6. Leonardo’s baby: “The Ugly Duchess”

E. Conclusion

Selected Bibliography

Quinten Matsys.

At the turn of the century, attracting talents from all over the continent as a magnet, Antwerp, and with some 90,000 inhabitants, had become a growing port and trade center, outdoing the Medici’s dominated Brugge in importance.

It was in this environment of a boiling cultural melting-pot that Quinten Matsys met, discussed and collaborated with some of the brightest of the great christian humanists of his time, be it erudite peace activists such as Erasmus of Rotterdam, Thomas More and Pieter Gillis, innovative printers such as Dirk Martens from Aalst, demanding reformers such as Gerard Geldenhouwer and Cornelius Grapheus, Flemish painters such as Gerard David and Joachim Patinir or foreign engravers as Albrecht Dürer, Lucas van Leyden and Hans Holbein the Younger.

Unfortunately, today, large international publishing houses, such as Taschen, for reasons yet unclear, seem to have condemned this highly remarkable artist to oblivion. For all those reasons, one finds hardly mention of Matsys’ name. It only appears in a short chapter dealing with the “Antwerp school”, at the end of Les Primitifs flamands et leur temps (656 pages, Renaissance du Livre, 1994). Even worse, not a single of his works is presented and only two mentions of his name appear in L’art flamand et hollandais, le siècles des primitifs (613 pages, Citadelles et Mazenod, 2003).

The good news is that since 2007, the Ghent Interdisciplinary Centre for Art and Science is working on a new « catalogue raisonné » of his work. That of Larry Silver (Phaedon Press, 1984) is mostly unavailable or/and became largely unaffordable. What remains is the one of Andrée de Bosque (Arcade Press, Brussels, 1975), with very few color prints. As a consolation, readers can access Harald Brising’s 1908 doctoral thesis, in a reprint version of 2019.

To honor and do some justice to this artist, we will attempt to explore in this article some questions left unanswered so far. To what extent did Erasmus’ work directly inspired Matsys, Patinir and their circle? What do we know about the exchanges between this group and prominent Renaissance artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer? What influence did the Erasmian artist exert on his foreign correspondents? Erasmus wasn’t really a fan of what was called “religious” paintings in those days, preferring agapic action for the common good to passive devotion of holy images.

As Belgian art critic Georges Marlier (1898-1968) pointed out in 1954, in his well documented book, while Erasmus respected and honored holy paintings if they evoked real religious sentiment, love and tenderness, that didn’t prevent him from thinking that:

Quinten Matsys. In the past, for good reasons this painting was named The Hypocrites, in modern times Two Praying Monks. (Galleria Arti Doria Pamphilj, Rome.)

Our previous inquiries into the works of both Erasmus and Dürer have familiarized us with Matsys’ age and its challenges, a subject we can not redevelop here at full length, but which gives the author some solid grounds to accomplish this task.

A. Getting our values straight

1. Cynical jokes or Socratic dialogue?

« Tussen neus en lepel », Dutch proverb meaning literally « between nose and spoon », i.e. « between one thing and another. »

Many modern viewers, with untrained eyes and minds steeped in a culture of abusive wokism and pessimism, lack the moral and intellectual integrity to understand the jokes, irony and metaphors which were the very essence of cultural life in the Low Countries of that time.

Lost in their own cultural prejudices, in looking at a painted face, they miss the visual puns the artist is making, trying instead to establish its identity as if the subject was a portrait. They pay obsessive (eventually useful) attention to “secret” and symbolic meanings of iconographic details hoping that their sum will somehow allow them to arrive at a sort of meaning.

We will look here afresh at Erasmus’, Matsys’ and Leonardo’s “grotesques,” which are not “cynical jokes” showing a “lack of tolerance” towards “ugly”, “sick”, “abnormal” or “different” people, as the accusation goes, but caricatures and jokes aimed to free our minds!

Erasmus and his three main followers Rabelais, Cervantes and Shakespeare, are the real if rarely recognized incarnations of “Christian humanism” and good laughter as a powerful political weapon to educate people’s characters, was not yet outlawed at their time.

2. What is Christian Humanism?

The thrust of Erasmus‘ educational and political programme was the promotion of docta pietas, learned piety, or what he termed the “Philosophy of Christ”. It can be summarized as a “wedding” between the humanist principles summarized in Plato’s Republic and the agapic notion of man transmitted by the Holy scriptures and the writing’s of those early fathers of the Church as Jerome and Augustine who saw Plato as their imperfect precursor.

In a complete phase shift and break with feudal “blind” faith putting man’s hope uniquely in his salvation by Christ in a putative existence after death, for christian humanism, man’s nature is good and therefore the origin of evil is not man himself or some outside “Devil”, but those vices and moral afflictions Plato basically identified in his Republic centuries before being turned by the christian humanists into the famous “Seven Capital Sins” that had to be overcome by the “Seven Capital Virtues.”

Hieronymus Bosch, The Seven Deadly Sins and the las four things (Death, Jugement, Heaven and Hell), c. 1500, painted table, , Prado, Madrid.

As a reminder, these deadly sins are:

  1. Pride, (Superbia, hubris) as opposed to Humility (Humilitas);
  2. Greed (Avaricia) as opposed to Charity (Caritas, Agapè);
  3. Wrath (Ira, rage) as opposed to Patience (Patientia);
  4. Envy (Invidia, jealousy) as opposed to Kindness (Humanitas);
  5. Lust (Luxuria, fornication) as opposed to Chastity (Castitas);
  6. Gluttony (Gula) as opposed to Temperance (Temperantia);
  7. Sloth (Acedia, melancholy, spleen, moral laziness) as opposed to Diligence (Diligentia).

Isn’t it quite telling for our own times that these sins (affections preventing us from doing the good), and not their opposing virtues, have tragically been consecrated as the very basic values guaranteeing the well-functioning of the current “Neo-liberal” financial system and its « rules-based » world order!

“Private vices make public virtue”, argued Bernard Mandeville in his 1705’s The Fable of the Bees. It is the dynamics of particular interests that stimulate the prosperity of a society, according to this Dutch theorist who inspired Adam Smith, and for whom “morality” only invites lethargy and provokes the misfortune of the city.

It is greed and perpetual pleasure-seeking and not the Common Good that have been proclaimed to be man’s essential motives, according to the dominant school of British Empiricism: Locke, Hume, Smith and consorts.

“Charity,” “Care” and “Humanitarian” aid have been reduced to a despicable and increasingly rare Lady-do-rightly activity allowing the current system to perpetuate its criminal existence. Oligarchical and banking families’ “charities” and “foundations” have even become the oligarchy’s tool to impose their perpetual dominance.

3. Petrarch and the “Triumph of Death”

Daniel Hopfer, Women looking in a mirror, surprised by Death and the Devil, 1515, copper engraving.

Christianity, as all major humanist religions, relentlessly labor to shake up those wasting their lives in sinful behavior by showing them how their behavior is both dramatic and even ridiculous in light of the extreme shortness of individual physical existence.

Dürer made this the core theme of his three famous Meisterstiche (master engravings) who have to be interpreted and cannot be understood but as one single unity: Knight, Death and the Devil (1513), Saint Jerome in His Study (1514) and Melencolia I (1514).

In each of these engravings one can find an hourglass, metaphor for the inexorable march of time. Saint Jerome is often depicted with an hourglass (time) and a skul (mortality), a metaphor for vanitas. Erasmus made of these concepts his personal banner together with the moto: “Concedi Nulli » which refers to death saying that nobody will escape her grip, underlining even more the inexorable nature of human mortality. In that sense, the Christian Renaissance, was a mass movement for spiritual immortality, both against religious superstition and against the revival of Greco-Roman paganism.

This conceptual theme was congruent with Francis Petrach’s (1304-1374) poetic I Trionfi cycle (1351-1374), structured in six allegorical triumphs.

Illustration of Petrarch’s Triomph of Fame over Death.

Petrarch’s triumphs are “concatenated,” so that the Triumph of Love (over Mankind and even Gods) is itself triumphed over by another allegorical force, the Triumph of Chastity. In its turn, Chastity is triumphed over by Death; Death is overcome by Fame; Fame is conquered by Time; and even Time is ultimately overcome by Eternity, the Triumph of God over all such worldly concerns.

Since death will “triumph” at the end of our ephemeral physical existence, the fear of death and the fear of God should help man concentrate to contribute something immortal to future generations rather than get lost in the labyrinth of earthly pleasures and pains that Hieronymus Bosch’s (1450-1516) depicted with great irony in his Garden of Earthly delights (1503-1515), .

Leonardo, whose far advanced scientific-religious sentiment was considered a heresy by many in Rome, expressed with some anger in his notebooks that many men and women didn’t merit the beautiful human body God gave them.

4. The Age of “Good Laughter”

Dictionaries have it that people have a “good laugh” when they find amusing and funny a situation that was at first upsetting. In short, good laughter is the reward of a true creative process when the “agony” of looking for solutions ends with finding one. That can be for scientific and practical questions but also in the development process of one’s personal identity. The storm and the clouds are gone and full light brings a new perspective.

Erasmus, « grotesque » self-portrait.

For the Christian humanists, through the “mirror-effect” intrinsically inherent to a “Socratic dialogue” (which starts by accepting what you know not – called docta ignorantia by Cusanus), man has and can be freed from these “sinful” afflictions, because man’s free will can be mobilized to bring him to act in accordance to his real (good) nature, that of dedicating himself and getting his ultimate pleasure in accomplishing the common good in service of the others, including in economic activities.

By claiming that man’s life on earth is fully predetermined by God, Luther’s denied the existence of the free will, and made man totally irresponsible for his own deeds. That viewpoint was the exact opposite of that of Erasmus who had started calling on the Church to curb their financial abuses such as the famous “indulgencies” longtime before Luther was brought on the scene.

All of Erasmus’ writings where put on the index of forbidden literature for Catholics. They remained on that list till 1910.

The Christian Humanists were firmly committed to elevate our souls to the highest realm of moral and intellectual beauty by freeing us from our earthly attachments — not by inflicting guilt feelings or moral orations and the lucrative business of fear from hell, but by laughter!

Laughter can ruin the authority of the powerful and the tyrants. Therefore, it is the most devastating political weapon ever conceived. For the evil forces, truth-seeking laughter, of the sort promoted by Erasmus and his followers, had and remains to be ignored, slandered and as much as possible eradicated and replaced with melancholy, obedience and submission to in advance justified narratives and doctrines of painful scholastic constipation.

5. Sebastian Brant, Hieronymus Bosch and The Ship of Fools

Albrecht Dürer, portrait of Sebastian Brant.

Years before Erasmus published his In Praise of Folly (written in 1509 and first published in Paris in 1511), the Strasbourg humanist poet and social reformer Sebastian Brant (1558-1921), opened the of the gates of such Socratic laughter with his Narrenshiff (The Ship of Fools, published in 1494 in Basel, Strasbourg, Paris and Antwerp), a hilarious satirical work illustrated with engravings of Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) and later Holbein the Younger (1497-1543). 73 of the 105 illustrations for the original edition were produced by Dürer.

Brant was a key contact and ally of Johann Froben (1460-1529) and Johann Amerbach (1441-1513), the Swiss printer families that later welcomed Erasmus when being persecuted in the Low Countries he had to go into exile in Basel.

The Ship of Fools took Europe by a storm. Brant was not only a satirist but a well educated humanist who had notably translated Petrarch’s poems.

“Genre-painting,” wrote Georges Marlier in 1954 and more recently the American art historian Larry Silver, depicting aspects of everyday life by portraying ordinary people engaged in common activities, was born with Quinten Matsys (One should rather say with the Erasmian paradigm we just identified).

Images of more ordinary women and men, wealthy tradesman and bankers, suddenly appeared as sovereign individuals to be portrayed for their own merits rather than as donors praying while assisting at a religious scene. Dürer made an engraving of « a cook and his wife. »

Of course, times had changed and so had the client-base of painters. The orders came much less from the religious orders and wealthy cardinals in Rome and increasingly more from wealthy bourgeois out to embellish their homes and eager to offer their portraits to friends.

The expansion of the Antwerp market that made paintings available as a middle-class luxury product is a well-studied phenomenon, and research has confirmed Ludovico Guicciardini’s claim that there were at least 300 active painters’ workshops in Antwerp by the 1560s.

Brant’s Ship of Fools, was a real turning point and game changer of the day, the prelude of a new paradigm. It marked the beginning of a long arch of creativity, reason and education through healthy laughter whose echo resonated loudly until the death of Pieter Bruegel the Elder in 1569. That élan was ony halted when Charles Vth resurrected the Inquisition in 1521 by plublishing his decrees (“placards”) forbidding ordinary citizens from reading, commenting and discussing the Bible.

The Ship of Fools is divided in 113 sections, each of which, with the exception of a short introduction and two concluding pieces, treats independently of a certain class of fools or vicious persons; and we are only occasionally reminded of the fundamental idea by an allusion to the ship. No folly of the century is left uncensored. The poet attacks with noble zeal the failings and extravagances of his age, and applies his sword unsparingly even against the dreaded Hydra of popery and monasticism.

The book opens with the denunciation of the first fool, one which turns away from the study of all the wonderful books in his possession. The third one (out of 113), not far away, is greed and avarice.

Coherent with this, is Hieronymus Bosch’s partly lost triptych. Modern research has established that Bosch’s Ship of Fools (Louvre, Paris), eventually painted before Brant wrote his satire, was the left panel of a triptych whose right panel was The Death of the Miser (National Gallery, Washington).

Interesting here, is the fact that there is no fatality in this painting and that what people become, a fool or a wise man, depends on each person’s personal decision, a doctrine quintessential to the convictions of the Brothers of the Common Life with whom Bosch, without being a member, had major affinities. Even the miser, until his last breath, can choose between looking up to Christ or down to the devil!

We ignore the theme of the central panel which is lost. But we do know that the backsides of the two lateral panels folded together complete the image of a Door-to-door salesman (before mistakenly called The return of the prodigal son) also depicted on the outside panels of Bosch’s triptych of the Hay wagon, showing kings, princes and popes running after a wagon full of hay (a metaphor for money).

The theme of a peregrinating peddler was very popular among the Brothers of the Common Live and the Devotio Moderna for whom individual responsibility and choice was decisive for each person to save above all himself with some help of God.

For Augustine, man is permanently confronted with an existential choice. Either he takes the bumpy, difficult road moving him to a spiritually more elevated position and closer to God, or he goes down the easy way by attaching himself to earthly passions and affections. The beauty of man and nature, warns Augustine, can and should be fully enjoyed and celebrated under condition they are understood as a mere “foretaste of divine wisdom” and not as purely earthly pleasures. The peddler as found in Bosch and Patinir is therefore a metaphor of mankind fighting to remain on the right road and in the right direction.

Bosch will populate his paintings with deprived men and women running like brainless animals behind little fruits as cherries and beys, metaphors for extremely ephemeral earthly pleasures unable to offer any real durable satisfaction.

Hans Holbein the Younger. Illustration for Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly. The homo viator, always going from one place to the next.

The peddler advances “op een slof en een schoen” (on a slipper and a shoe) i.e., he has abandoned his house and has left the created world of sin (we see a bordello, drunkards, etc.), and all material possessions. With his “staff” (a symbol of Faith) he succeeds in repelling the “infernal dogs” (Evil) that try to hold him back. Such metaphorical images are not personal outbursts of the exuberant imagination of Bosch, but a common image very much used in that period. An illumination of a fourteenth-century English psalm book, the Luttrell Psalter, features exactly the same allegorical representation.

The same theme, that of a homo viator, the man who detaches himself from earthly goods, is also recurrent in the art and literature of this period, particularly since the Dutch translation of Pèlerinage de la vie et de l’âme humaine (pilgrimage of life and the human soul), written in 1358 by the Norman Cistercian monk Guillaume de Degulleville (1295-after 1358).

If the three surviving images on the panels of the Bosch triptych (the Ship of fools, the Miser and the Peregrinating peddler) are hard to connect when analysed separately, their coherence appears strongly once one identifies this overriding concept.

Today, an imaginative, creative painter could try to find out what Bosch’s lost panel would have looked like, the theme certainly having focused on the origin of evil (going from a ship of fools to the death of the miser).

B. Quinten Matsys, biographical elements

With this in mind, and knowing what were the stakes at that time, we can now examine more profoundly Matsys’ life and some of his works.

1. From Blacksmith to painter

Quinten Matsys, bronze medal with self-portrait.

One of four children, Quinten Matsys was born in Leuven to Joost Matsys (d. 1483) and Catherine van Kincken sometime between April 4 and September 10, 1466. Most early accounts of Matsys’ life are composed primarily of legends and very little contemporary accounts exist of the nature of his activities or character.

According to the Historiae Lovaniensium by Joannes Molanus (1533-1585), Matsys was born in Leuven between April 4 and September 10, 1466, as one of four children of Joost Matsys (d. 1483) and Catherine van Kincken.

Most accounts of his life blend fact and legend. In reality, there are very few clues as to his activity or character.

In Leuven, Quinten is said to have had modest beginnings as an ironworker. Legend has it that he fell in love with a beautiful girl who was also being courted by a painter. As the girl much preferred painters to blacksmiths, Quentin quickly abandoned the anvil for the paintbrush.

In 1604, chronicler Karel Van Mander states that Quintin, stricken with an illness since the age of twenty, “was in the impossibility to earn his bread” as a blacksmith.

Van Mander reminds us that in Antwerp, during « Shrove Tuesday » celebrations,

Karel Vereycken, Antwerp, etching on zinc, 2011.

In Antwerp, in front of Our Lady’s cathedral at the Handschoenmarkt (glove market), one still can find the « putkevie » (a decorated wrought iron gate on a well) said to be made by Quinten Matsys himself and depicting the legend of Silvius Brabo and Druon Antigoon, respectively the names of a mythical Roman officer who liberated Antwerp from the oppression of a giant called Antigoon who would harm the trade of the city by blocking the entrance of the river.

The inscription on the well reads: “Dese putkevie werd gesmeed door Quinten Matsijs. De liefde maeckte van den smidt eenen schilder.” (« The ironwork for this well was forged by Quinten Matsys. Love made the blacksmith a painter. »)

Documented donations and possessions of Quinten’s father Joost Matsys indicate that the family had a respectable income and that financial need was not the most likely reason for which Matsys turned to painting.

Quinten Matsys, Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels, 1505.

Although no evidence exists documenting Quinten Metsys’ training before his enrolment as a free master in the Antwerp painter’s guild in 1491, his brother Joos Matsys II’s design project in Leuven and their father’s activities suggest that the young artist first learned how to draw and transfer his ideas to paper from his family and that they first exposed him to architectural forms and their creative deployment.

His earlier works in particular clearly suggest that he had training as an architectural draughtsman. In his 1505 Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels, the divine titular characters are seated on a gilded throne whose gothic tracery echoes that in the window on the parchment drawing and the limestone model for the St Peter’s project to which his brother was assigned at around the same time.

In 1897, Edward van Even, without presenting any evidence, wrote that Matsys also composed music, wrote poetry and produced etchings.

What we do know for sure is that the artist produced some magnificent bronze medaillons representing Erasmus, his sister Catarina and himself.

Around 1492, he married Alyt van Tuylt, who gave him three children: two sons, Quinten and Pawel, and a daughter, Katelijne. Alyt died in 1507 and Quentin remarried a year later. With his new wife Catherina Heyns, they had ten more children, five sons and five daughters. Shortly after their father’s death, two of his sons, Jan (1509-1575) and Cornelis (1510-1556), became painters and members of the Antwerp Guild.

2. The Duchy of Brabant

Leuven.

Leuven, at that time, was the capital of the Duchy of Brabant which extended from Luttre, south of Nivelles to ‘s Hertogenbosch. It included the cities of Aalst, Antwerp, Mechelen, Brussels and Leuven, where in 1425, one of the first universities of Europe saw the light.

Five years later, in 1430, together with the Duchies of Lower Lotharingia and Limburg, Brabant was inherited by Philip the Good of Burgundy and became part of the Burgundian Netherlands.

Then, when Matsys was around 11 years old, in 1477, the Duchy of Brabant fell under Hapsburg rule as part of the dowry of Mary of Burgundy to Spanish king Charles V.

The subsequent history of Brabant is part of the history of the Hapsburg « Seventeen Provinces » increasingly under the control of such Augsburg banking families as the Fuggers and Welsers.

Erasmus and Matsys epoch was a glorious period of the “Renaissance in the North” but also marks the continuous efforts of these banking families’ to “buy up” the papacy and achieve world hegemony. The imperial geopolitical sharing of the entire world among the Spanish Empire (run by Venetian and Fugger bankers) and the Portuguese Empire (run by Genovese and Welser bankers), a deal formalized by the Treaty of Tordesillas, endorsed in 1494 in the Vatican by Pope Alexander VI Borgia, opened the gates to colonial subjugation of people and countries, fueled by a highly questionable sense of cultural superiority.

Following the never-ending state bankruptcies of these financial oligarchs, the Low Countries fell prey to economic looting, military dictatorship and fanaticism. By demonizing Luther, increasingly committed to creating an opposition outside the Catholic church, the oligarchy avoided successfully those urgent reforms called for by the Erasmians to eradicate abuses and corruption inside the Catholic church. Rome’s refusal to accept Henry VIII’s demands for divorce, were part of an overall strategy to plunge the entire European continent in “religious wars,” that only ended with the 1648 Peace of Westphalia.

3. Training: Bouts, Van der Goes and Memling

The early triptychs, painted by Matsys, gained him a lot of praise and got historians to present him as one of the last “Flemish Primitives”, in reality a nickname given by Michelangelo to intrinsically slander and discredit all non-Italian art considered “Gothic” (barbarian), or “primitive” in comparison to Italian art whichh immitated the immortal antique style.

Since he was born in Leuven, it has been thought he could have been trained by Aelbrecht Bouts (1452-1549), the son of painter dominating Leuven at that time, Dieric Bouts the Elder (v. 1415-1475).

In 1476, one year after his father’s death, Albrecht reportedly left Leuven, perhaps to complete his training with a master outside the city, most probably Hugo van der Goes (1440-1482), whose influence on Aelbrecht Bouts, but also on Quinten Matsys, seems to have been direct.

Van der Goes, who became the dean of the Painting guild of Ghent in 1474 and died in 1482 in Red Cloister close to Brussels, was a vehement follower of the Brother’s of the Common Life and their principles. As a young assistant of Aelbrecht Bouts, and getting training from Van der Goes, Matsys could have discovered what was the cradle of Christian humanism at that time.

Van der Goes‘s most famous surviving work is the Portinari Triptych (Uffizi, Florence), an altarpiece commissioned for the church of Sant’Egidio in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence by Tommaso Portinari, the manager of the Bruges branch of the Medici Bank.

The raw features of the shepherds (expressing the three states of spiritual elevation identified by the Brothers of the Common Life) in van der Goes’s composition made a deep impression on painters working in Florence.

Quinten Matsys, portrait of Jacob Obrecht, 1496, Forth Worth.

Matsys is also considered as a possible pupil of Hans Memling (1430-1494), the latter being a follower of Van der Weyden and a leading painter in Brugge.

Memling’s style and that of Matsys, in certain aspects, are hard to distinguish.

While the Flemish art historian Dirk de Vos inscribed, in his 1994 catalogue of Hans Memling’s work, the portrait of the musician and composer Jacob Obrecht (1496, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth), as a very late work by Hans Memling, current experts, among which Larry Silver, agreed in 2018, that in reality, it is far more likely that the portrait is the earliest known work of Quinten Matsys.

Obrecht, who was a major influence on polyphonic Renaissance music, had been named choirmaster of the Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp in 1492. Erasmus served as one of Obrecht’s choirboys around 1476.

Obrecht made at least two trips to Italy, once in 1487 at the invitation of Duke Ercole d’Este I of Ferrare and again in 1504. Ercole had heard Obrecht’s music, which is known to have circulated in Italy between 1484 and 1487, and said that he appreciated it above the music of all other contemporary composers; consequently he invited Obrecht who died from the plague in Italy.

Already in the 1460s, Erasmus teacher in Deventer, music composer and organist Rudolph Agricola, had travelled to Italy. After studying civil low in Pavia and attending lectures by Battista Guarino, he went to Ferrare where he became a protégé of the Este court.

Around 1499 Leonardo made a drawing of Ercole’s daughter, Isabella d’Este, according to some to be the person painted in the Mona Lisa.

4. Getting started in Antwerp and abroad

Matsys was registered in Leuven in 1491, but the same year he was equally admitted as a master painter in the Guild of St Luke in Antwerp where, at the age of twenty-five, he decided to settle. In Antwerp, as said before, he depicted the choirmaster Jacob Obrecht in 1496, his first known work, and several Virgin and Child devotional paintings.

After that, since the Liggeren (painting guild records) don’t report any information about Matsys activity in the Low Countries for a period of several years, it remains very tempting to imagine Matsys going on an eventual trip to Italy. There, he could have met great masters among which Leonardo da Vinci, who lived in Milan between 1482 and 1499 and returned to Milan in 1506 where he met his pupil Francesco Melzi (1491-1567) who later accompanied him to France. Matsys could also have traveled over the Rhine to Strasbourg or Colmar. He eventually could have traveled to Nuremberg where he could have met Albrecht Dürer which he seems to have known longtime before the latter came to the Netherlands in 1520.

Dürer was sent by his parents to Alsace to be trained in the art of engraving by Martin Schongauer (1450-1491). But when he arrived in Colmar in the summer of 1492, Schongauer had died. From Colmar the artist traveled to Basel, where he made designs for the woodcut illustrations for books and discovered the impressive engravings of Jacob Burgkmair (1473-1531) and Hans Holbein the Elder (1460-1524). He then went to Strasbourg in 1492 where he met and made the portrait of the erudite humanist poet and author Sebastian Brant already mentioned above.

C. Selected Works

1. The Virgin and the Child, Divine Grace and the Free Will

In 1495, Matsys painted a Virgin and Child (left) (Brussels). Even while still very normative, Matsys already “enriches” devotion with less formal scenery of daily life. The child, playfully exploring new physical principles, clumsily tries to turn the pages of a book, while a very serious Virgin sits herself in an elaborated niche of Gothic architecture, probably chosen to fit with the building or house where the work would end up being exposed.

Another Virgin and Child (right) (Rotterdam) of Matsys goes even further in this direction. It shows a quite happy caring young mother with a playful child, underlying the fact that Christ was the son of God but now had become human.

On a display close to the viewer, a loaf of bread and a cup of milk-soup with a spoon, undoubtedly the daily scene for most inhabitants of the Low Countries trying to feed their children.

Gerard David, Madonna and Child with the Milk Soup, 1520, Brussels

Another “Madonna and child with the milk soup,” (Brussels) this one painted in 1520 by Matsys’ friend, the painter Gerard David (1460-1523), literally shows a young mother teaching her child that the backside of a spoon is not the best tool to transfer milk soup to one’s mouth.

One outstanding feature of many virgins of these period, be it by Quinten Matsys (Virgin and Child, Louvre, 1529, Paris) or Gerard David (Rest on the flight into Egypt, National Gallery, Washington), is the image of the child trying, with great difficulties, to get a hold on a fruit, be it a cherry or a grape of raisin.

In 1534, in his Diatribe on the Free Will, Erasmus also used this metaphor on the fragile equilibrium to be considered in the proportion between the operations of the free will (which, alone, separated from a higher purpose, can become pure arrogance) and those of divine grace (which alone can be misunderstood as a form of predestination).

To make that point clear with an image, Erasmus paints a very simple metaphor, but of extreme tenderness and beauty:

Jan Matsys, Virgin and Child, 1537, Metropolitan, New York.

In short, free will, yes, but without pretending that man can do it alone.

2. Saint Anne Altarpiece

The painted « portico » on the flat panel formed one single unity with the three dimensional original frame, lost today.

In Antwerp, Matsys’ activity made a major step forward with the first important public commissions for two large triptych altarpieces:

  • the beautiful Lamentation quite inspired by Roger Van der Weyden’s Deposition of the cross (Prado, Madrid) ;
  • the Saint Anne Altarpiece (1507–1509), painted for the Collegiate Church of St Peter in Leuven and signed “Quinte Metsys screef dit.” (Quinten Metsys wrote this).

The content and narrative of the Saint Anne Alterpiece was of course entirely dictated to the painter by the commissioners willing to decorate their dedicated chapel of the Church. The central panel depicts the history of the family of St Anne – the Holy Kinship – inside a monumental building crowned by a truncated dome and arcades that offer a wide view on a mountainous landscape.

The altarpiece depicts five scenes from the life of Anne, the Virgin’s mother and her husband Joachim. The various members of the saint’s family appear on the central panel. The key event in the life of Anne and her husband Joachim, namely that they will become the parents of the Virgin Mary while they thought themselves incapable of having children, is depicted in the left and right panels of the triptych.

The Chaste Kiss

The Virgin’s “immaculate” conception, depicted as a chaste kiss between the couple in front of the Golden Gate of the Jerusalem city wall, was already a very popular subject matter painted before by Giotto and later by Dürer.

The “chaste kiss” as a metaphor for the immaculate conception of the Virgin, was well received by the public. As a result, it was rapidly transposed to the immaculate conception of Christ himself. Hence, the sudden appearance of paintings showing Mary “kissing” her baby as close as on the lips.

The cycle on the Altarpiece ends with Anne’s death depicted on the inside right panel where she is surrounded by her children and Christ giving his blessings.

Despite the impressive scale and the conventional narrative, Matsys sought to create a more intimate feeling of contemplation. An example of this is the figure of the small cousin of Jesus in the left corner, who playfully gathers beautiful illuminations around him and, now fully focused, tries to read them.

3. A new perspective

In two other articles, I have underscored the fact that both Jan Van Eyck and Lorenzo Ghiberti, were quite familiar with “Arab optics”, in particular the works of Ibn al-Haytham (known by his Latinized name Alhazen).

During the Renaissance, at least two “schools”, after opposing each other, ended up completing each other respecting the best way to represent “space” in art. For one school, centered on Alberti, space could be reduced to a “central” vanishing point, i.e. a purely mathematical geometrical construction. For the other, that of Roger Bacon, Witelo and later Kepler, one had to start from the physiognomy of both eyes and how they produce the image of space in the mind. Van Eyck and Ghiberti used both approaches employing either the one-eyed « cyclopic » Alberti model denounced by Leonardo, or the « bi-focal » Alhazen approach.

Since the cyclopic approach has been decreed to be the only “mathematical” and therefore the only “scientific” way to represent space, the bi-focal approach was slandered as being full of “errors” or purely intuitive and “non-scientific”. Among those accused, most paintings of the “Flemish Primitives”

Now, as mentioned earlier, since 2007, the Ghent Interdisciplinary Centre for Art and Science (GICAS) has been working on a new « catalogue raisonné » of the work of Quinten Matsys.

In 2010, Jochen Ketels and Maximiliaan Martens investigated Matsys’s 1509 Saint Anne Altarpiece and the impressive italianate portico on the central panel to be understood as a visual element integrating the entire work in a three-dimensional wooden frame currently lost (see images above).

Albrecht Dürer, after Piero della Francesca. What Dürer calles Piero’s « transfer » method would become the basis for projective geometry, the key science that made possible the industrial revolution.

In this respect, it is noteworthy that one of the rare persons, in contact with Matsys at one point or another, which had read and studied Piero della Francesca’s treaty on perspective was none-other than Albrecht Dürer, whose own Four Books on Human Proportion (1528) builds on Piero’s groundbreaking achievements.

The investigators also verified Matsys’ use of the central vanishing point perspective by employing the “cross-ratio” method. Astonished, they demonstrate that “Matsys shows his competence in matters of perspective, equal to Italian renaissance standards” and that his perspective was “very correct, indeed.”

Source: Ghent University publication

Till now, it was taken for granted that the science of perspective only reached the Low Countries after Jan Gossaert’s trip to Rome in 1508, while Matsys’s, showing his masterful and extensive knowledge of science of perspective, started composing this oeuvre as early as 1507.

4. Matsys’ cooperation with Patinir, Dürer and Leonardo

One last note regarding this painting, the mountainous landscape behind the figures, already akin to the typical, eerie landscapes produced years later by Matsys’ friend Joachim Patinir 1480-1524, another badly known giant in the history of painting.

Felipe de Guevara, a friend and artistic assessor to both Charles V and Philip II, mentions Patinir in his Commentaries on Painting (1540) as one of the three greatest painters, alongside Rogier van der Weyden and Jan van Eyck.

Antwerp.
Albrecht Dürer, portrait de Joachim Patinir.

A final note on this painting: the mountainous landscape behind the figures already resembles the typical, disquieting landscapes produced by Matsys’s close friend Joachim Patinir (1480-1524), another little-known giant in the history of painting.

Yet Patinir’s authority was no mean feat. Felipe de Guevara, friend and artistic advisor to Charles V and Philip II, mentions Patinir in his Commentaries on Painting (1540) as one of the three greatest painters in the region, alongside Rogier van der Weyden and Jan van Eyck.

Patinir ran a large studio with assistants in Antwerp. Among those under the triple influence of Bosch, Matsys and Patinir are:

  • Cornelis Matsys (1508-1556), son of Quinten, who married Patinir’s daughter;
  • Herri met de Bles (1490-1566), active in Antwerp, possible nephew of Patinir;
  • Lucas Gassel (1485-1568), active in Brussels and Antwerp;
  • Jan Mostaert (1475-1552), painter active in Haarlem;
  • Frans Mostaert (1528-1560), painter active in Antwerp;
  • Jan Wellens de Cock (1460-1521), painter active in Antwerp;
  • Matthijs Wellens de Cock (1509-1548), painter-engraver active in Antwerp;
  • Jérôme Wellens de Cock (1510-1570), painter-engraver, who, with his wife Volcxken Diericx, founded In de Vier Winden, probably the largest engraving workshop north of the Alps at the time, employing Pieter Brueghel the Elder.
Cornelis Matsys, The Blind Guiding the Blind (1550). 4,5 x 7,8 cm. Etching that inspired Pieter Brueghel the Elder for his own painting on this theme in 1558.

It is generally accepted that Matsys painted the figures in some of Patinir’s landscapes. According to the 1574 Escorial inventory, this was the case for The Temptations of Saint Anthony (1520, Prado, Madrid).

One is tempted to think that this collaboration between friends worked both ways, with Patinir creating landscapes for Matsys’ works and at his request, a reality that somewhat challenges the persistent myth of a Renaissance presented as the cradle of modern individualism.

The fact that Matsys and Patinir were very close is confirmed by the fact that, after Patinir’s untimely death (at age 44), Matsys became the guardian of his two daughters. It’s also interesting to note that Gerard David, who became Bruges’ leading painter after Memling, became a member of the St. Lucas guild in Antwerp in 1515 jointly with Patinir, which gave him legal access to the booming Antwerp art market.

Modern art historians tend to present Patinir as the “inventor” of landscape painting (see my article), claiming that for him religious subjects were mere pretexts for the development of landscapes that were the true protagonists, much as Rubens painted Adam and Eve only because we wanted to paint nudes.

Eventually true for Rubens but dead wrong for Patinir, whose “beautiful” landscapes, as art historian Reindert L. Falkenberg documented in depth, were nothing but a sophisticated sort of deceptive trick of the devil attracting souls to attach themselves to earthly pleasure…

Henri Leys, Visit of Dürer to Antwerp, 1855, Antwerp.

Albrecht Dürer

A unique source of information is Dürer’s diary of his visit to the Low Countries. Why did Dürer come to the Low Countries? One of the explanations is that following the death of his main patron and order giver emperor Maximilian I, the artist came in an effort to get his pension confirmed by Charles V.

Dürer arrived in Antwerp on August 3, 1520 and visited Brussels and Mechelen where he was received by Margaret of Austria (1480-1530), aunt of Charles V, who sometimes lent Erasmus a sympathetic ear, in charge of administering the Burgondian Low Countries as long as Charles was to young.

In Mechelen, Dürer certainly visited the beautiful residence of Hieronymus van Busleyden (1470-1517), soon to become the financial mecenas of the “Trilingual College” launched by Erasmus in Leuven in 1517. Busleyden was a friend of Cuthbert Tunstall (1475-1559), the Bishop of London who introduced him to Thomas More.

While staying with Margaret, Dürer could admire an incredible painting from her collection, The Arnolfini couple (1434) by Jan van Eyck. Margaret had just granted a pension to a Venetian painter, Jacopo de’ Barbari (1440-1515), a diplomat and political exile in Mechelen who painted a portrait of Luca Pacioli (1445-1514), the Franciscan who introduced Leonardo to Euclid and wrote the De Divina Proportiona (1509), illustrated by Leonardo. De’ Barbari was described by his contemporaries, including Dürer, Marcantonio Michiel (1584-1552), and Gerard Geldenhauer (1482-1542).

In 1504, de’ Barbari met Dürer in person in Nuremberg and the pair discussed the canon of human proportions, a core subject of the latter’s research.

Hence, an unpublished draft version of Dürer’s own treatise on the subject reveals that he thought the Italian was holding back on him:

By March of 1510 de’ Barbari was in the employ of Archduchess Margaret in Brussels and Mechelen. In January 1511, he fell ill and made a will, and, in March, the Archduchess gave him a pension for life on account of his age and weakness. He was dead by 1516, leaving the Archduchess with his stock of 23 engraving plates. But when Dürer asked her to provide some of de’ Barbari’s writings on human proportion, she politely declined his request.

The artist’s diary reveals nevertheless that he was often entertained by his local colleagues. In Antwerp, « I went to see Quinten Matsys in his house, » wrote Dürer in his journal.

In the same city, he makes a portrait sketch of Lucas van Leyden (1489-1533), and the famous portrait of the 93 year old bearded old man who became the model for his St. Jerome.

Hans Schwartz, portrait of Dürer, bronze medallion, 1520.

He met Erasmus at least three times, and sketched a wonderful portrait of him showing mutual complicity. Erasmus placed an order with him since the humanist needed a large number of portraits to send to his correspondents throughout Europe. As his diary indicates, Dürer sketched Erasmus several times in charcoal during these meetings and used them for an engraved portrait of him six years later.

After the death of his wife, Patinir married Johanna Noyts. On 5 May 1521, he invited Albrecht Dürer to his wedding. How and when that friendship started, or if it was just opportunistic, is not known. The master of Nuremberg sketched Patinir’s portrait and called him « der gute Landschaftsmaler » (« the good landscape painter »), creating a new word for what became a new genre.

At the wedding he meets Jan Provoost (1465-1529), Jan Gossaert (of Mabuse) (1462-1533 ) and Bernard van Orley (1491-1542), some of them more attracted by the pomp of the court than by Erasmian humanism. But Provoost’s Death and the Miser (1515) is clearly inspired by Bosch.

Jan Provoost, Death and the Miser, c. 1515, Groeningenmuseum, Brugge.

One figure that could have mediated the encounters between intellectuals and craftsmen, was the poet, Latin teacher and philologist Cornelis de Schrijver (Grapheus)(1482-1558), a collaborator of Erasmus printer Dirk Martens. In 1520, he became secretary to the city of Antwerp.

Printers and editors played a key role in the Renaissance as they where the key middlemen between intellectuals, erudites and scholars on the one side, and illustrators, engravers, painters and craftsmen on the other side.

As Dürer himself, he was attracted to the ideas of the Reformation of which they considered both Luther and Erasmus to be leading voices. What is known is that Grapheus bought Dürer a copy of Luther’s De Captivitate (On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church), a must read for anyone having interest in the reform of the Church.

Just as Erasmus and many other humanists, Dürer is also said to have been the guest of Quinten Matsys in the latter’s fabulous house in the Schuttershofstraat, decorated with Italianate decorations (festoons of leaves, flowers or fruit) and grotesques (decorative and symmetric network of lines and figures).

An idealized representation of the Dürer-Matsys encounter (with Thomas More and Erasmus looking on) can be seen in a painting of Nicaise de Keyser (1813-1887) at the Royal Museum of Arts of Antwerp.

Another scene, an 1889 drawing by Godfried Guffens (1823-1901) shows the Antwerp Alderman Gerard van de Werve receiving Albrecht Dürer presented to him by Quinten Matsys.

When Charles V returned from Spain and visited Antwerp, Grapheus wrote a panegyric to welcome his return. But in 1522, he was arrested for heresy, taken to Brussels for interrogation and imprisonment. As a result, he lost his position as secretary. In 1523, he was released and returned to Antwerp, where he became a Latin teacher. In 1540, he was reinstated as secretary of the city of Antwerp.

Quentin Matsys’ own sister Catherine and her husband suffered at Leuven in 1543 for what had become the capital offense of reading the Bible since 1521: he being decapitated, she allegedly buried alive in the square before the church.

Because of their religious convictions, the Matsys children left Antwerp and went into exile in 1544. Cornelis ended his life somewhere abroad.

5. The Erasmus connection

In 1499, Thomas More and Erasmus met in London. Their initial meeting turned into a lifelong friendship as they continued to correspond on a regular basis during which time they worked collaboratively to translate into Latin and have printed some of the works of the Assyrian satirist, Lucian of Samosata (c. 125-180 AD), erroneously called « The Cynic. »

Erasmus translated Lucian’s satirical text The Dependant Scholar and had it send to his friend Jean Desmarais, a Latin teacher at the University of Louvain and a canon at Saint Peter’s Church in that city.

Lucian blasts scholars that sell their soul, mind and body to the ruling oligarchy:

In a real manifesto against voluntary servitude, Lucian goes after their personal corruption and the real reasons for their selling out:

It was through his meeting with Erasmus that Thomas More got introduced to Erasmus’ friend, Pieter Gillis (1486-1533), a fellow humanist and town secretary of Antwerp. It was Erasmus who suggested that Gilles meet Thomas More. The meeting took place in Antwerp in 1515, when More was sent on a diplomatic mission by King Henry VIII to settle some major international commercial disputes.

Gillis, who started as a seventeen year-old proofreader in Dirk Martens print shop in Leuven, met Erasmus in 1504. The humanist gave him the advice to study further and they kept in contact. Printer Martens had edited in Leuven several humanist’s books, most notably those of Denis the Carthusian (1401-1471) and Rudolphus Agricola’s De inventione dialectica (1515) the higher-education manual most widely bought, and used in schools and universities throughout Europe.

Just as More and Erasmus, Gilles was an admirer of the latter’s teacher at the Deventer school of the Brothers of the Common Life, Agricola, a great pedagogue, musician, builder of church organs, a poet in Latin and the vernacular, a diplomat, a boxer and a Hebrew scholar towards the end of his life.

Gillis‘ house in Antwerp was an important meeting place for humanists, diplomats and artists with international allure. Quinten Matsys is also a gladly seen guest. Gilles also recommended the painter Hans Holbein the Younger, who had illustrated Erasmus In Praise of Folly, to the court of England, where Thomas More received him delighted. His brother Ambrosius Holbein (1494-1519), would later illustrate Erasmus’ and More’s Utopia.

6. Thomas More’s Utopia

Pages of Utopia with the alphabet invented by Pieter Gillis.

Gilles shared with More and Erasmus a great sensitivity to justice, as well as a typically humanist sensibility devoted to the search for more established sources of truth. As a matter of fact, he is best known as a character in Utopia, a famous book in whose first pages Thomas More presents him as a model of civility and a humanist who was both pleasant and seriousness:

Entrance of house Den Spieghel, Antwerp, where Pieter Gilles lived in 1505

Thomas More’s most famous composition was of course his two-volume work entitled Utopia. It is a depiction of a fictional island that was not ruled by an oligarchy as most western states and empires, but ruled on the basis of the ideas of the good and the just Plato formulated in his dialogue, the Republic.

While ErasmusIn Praise of Folly called for a reform of the Catholic Church, Erasmus’ and More’s Utopia, satirizing the corruption, greed, cupidity and failings they saw all around them, called for the reform of the State and Economy.

The whole idea of the book came to Thomas More whilst he was staying at the Antwerp residence of Gillis, Den Spieghel, in 1515.

In the first volume, entitled Dialogue of Counsel, it begins with correspondence between More himself and others, including Pieter Gillis. On his return to England in 1516, the English humanist wrote the main part of the work and the first edition was completed and edited by Erasmus and published in Leuven.

The first edition contained a woodcut map map of the island of Utopia, verses by Gillis and the “Utopian alphabet” the latter invented for the occasion, verses of Geldenhouwer, an historian and reformer educated by the Brothers of the Common Life in Deventer and Grapheus, and Thomas More’s epistle dedicating the work to Gillis.

Several years after More‘s and Erasmus’ death, in 1541, Grapheus, with Pieter Gilles, published his Enchiridio Principis Ac Magistratus Christiani.

7. Pieter Gillis and the “Friendship Diptych”

Besides triptychs and religious paintings, Matsys also excelled in portraits. One of the most beautiful works of Matsys is the double portrait of Erasmus and his friend Gillis, painted in 1517. This friendship diptych would act as a “virtual” visit to their English friend Thomas More in London and they approached Quinten Matsys to carry out the two paintings as he was the leading Antwerp painter at that time.

Erasmus’ portrait was the first to be completed because the portrait of Gillis was constantly being delayed due to him falling ill during the sittings. The two men had told Thomas More about the paintings which may not have been a wise move as More constantly queried them as to the progress of the paintings and became very impatient to receive the gift. The two works were finally completed and were sent to More whilst he was in Calais.

Both learned educated men, although they are portrayed on separate panels, are presented in one continuous study area. Erasmus is busy writing and Pieter Gillis points to a book (not yet published) by the humanist, the Antibarbari, while he holds a letter from More in his left hand. The presentation in a study room makes one think of presentations of St. Hieronymus study room, who with his bible translation is an example for all humanists and whose work Erasmus had just published.

If you look closely, in the folds of Erasmus’ cloak you can just make out a purse. It could be that Erasmus wanted the artist to include this in order to illustrate his generosity. Erasmus and Gillis made a point of informing Thomas More that they had split the cost of the painting because they wanted it to be a present from them both. If you look at the two paintings side by side then one can see that Matsys has cleverly continued the bookcase behind the two sitters and this gives the impression that the two men depicted in the two separate panels occupy the same room and are facing each other.

It is interesting to look at the books on the shelves in the background. On the upper shelf of the Erasmus painting there is a book which has the inscription Novum Testament which alludes to Novum Testamentum Graece, the first published edition of the Greek New Testament produced by Erasmus in 1516.

On the lower shelf there is a stack of three books. The bottom tome has the inscription Hieronymus which refers to Erasmus’s edition of St Jerome; in the middle, there is a book with the inscription Lucian and refers to Erasmus and Thomas More’s collaboration in translating Lucian’s satirical Dialogues. The inscription on the book on top of these three is the word Hor, which originally read Mor. The first letter was probably altered during an early restoration, for besides Mor being the first letters of Thomas More’s surname they almost certainly refer to the satirical essays written by Erasmus whilst staying with Thomas More in his London home in 1509 and entitled Encomium Moriae (Praise of Folly). This collection of essays was considered one of the most notable works of the Renaissance.

We see Erasmus writing in a book. This depiction has been carefully thought out for the words one sees on the page paper are a paraphrase of St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, the handwriting is a careful replication of Erasmus’s own hand, and the reed pen he holds was known to be Erasmus’s favorite writing tool.

Thomas More let his pleasure about these portraits be known in many letters, the paintings being executed, « with such a great virtuosity that all painters from Antiquity pale in comparison », while confessing once he would have preferred his image carved in (far more immortal) stone.

8. The Da Vinci connection (I)

Several paintings clearly prove that Matsys and his circle had extensive knowledge and took some of their inspiration from some of Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings and drawings without necessarily fully comprehending its full and far ranging scientific and philosophical content.

Such is clearly the case in the Virgin and child (1513, Poznan, Poland), literally presenting in front of a Patinir style mountain landscape, the gracious loving pose of Mary embracing the Christ with the latter embracing the lamb, directly a copy of Da Vinci’s Saint Anna and the Virgin (1503-1517), one of the works Leonardo had brought to Amboise in France in 1517.

As said before, it is not known how this “form” came to the attention of the master, be it prints, drawings or other.

Quinten Matsys, The Lamentation of Christ (1508-1511), Antwerp.

A second example can be seen in The Lamentation of Christ (1508–1511), a vast triptych painted for the chapel of the Carpenter Corporation in the Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp (Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp). Both John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, which appear when the triptych is closed, were there patron saints.

The central scene of the open triptych, which is reminiscent of Rogier van der Weyden’s The Descent from the Cross (1435 Museo del Prado, Madrid), is supported by the landscape. The religious drama is considered in detail and harmoniously staged.

Détail of Saint-John (left) in tears.

At the same time, Matsys approaches the great importance of the believers for the narration and the description. If the scene is conducive of reflection and prayer. Matsys uses the science of contrast. If some of the figures, especially the oriental heads, could have been inspired by the many exotic faces the painter would have seen around him in the world trade hub that was Antwerp in his days, the graceful faces of those struck with pain and sorrow are extremely beautiful.

In the middle panel, we see not the suffering, but the lament after the suffering. It depicts the moment at which Joseph of Arimathea comes to ask the Virgin for her permission to bury Christ’s body. Behind the central action is the hill of Golgotha, with its few trees, the cross and the crucified thieves.

The left wing panel shows the martyrdom of John the Evangelist and Salome presenting John the Baptist’s head to the Roman Jewish Client King Herod the Great.

The right hand panel is a scene of extraordinary cruelty, depicting St John, his body plunged into a cauldron of boiling oil. The saint, who is naked from the waist up, seems almost angelic, as if he were not suffering. Around him is a crowd of sadistic faces, ugly boors in garish clothes. The one exception to this rule is the figure of a young Flemish boy, maybe a representation of the painter himself, who is watching the scene from above in a tree.

Now the faces of those surrounding St John the Baptist and also the two main figures heating up the cauldron are directly taken or inspired by a drawing of Leonardo called the Five Grotesque Heads.

Flemish irony and humor gave a great welcome to that of Leonardo!

In Leonardo’s case, the faces even seem as breaking up in hilarious laughter, when looking at each other and at the central figure with a crown on his head. The leaves of the crown are not those of laurels to celebrate poets and heroes, but leaves of an oak tree. At that time, the anti-humanist and war mongering pope was Julius II, which Rabelais put in hell. Julius was a member of a powerful Italian noble family, the House of Della Rovere, literally “of the oak tree”…

Five grotesque heads, Leonardo da Vinci.

D. The Science of Erasmian Grotesque

1. In religious painting

The use of grotesque heads expressing the low passions that overwhelm and dominate evil persons was common practice in religious paintings to create contrast of expression.

In 1505, Dürer went to Venice and also to the university city of Bologna to learn about perspective and then journeyed further south to Florence, where he saw the work of Leonardo da Vinci and the young Raphael, and to Rome.

Christ Among Doctors, Dürer, Thyssen Bornemisza Collection, Madrid.

Christ Among the Doctors, 1506, was painted in Rome in five day’s time and reflects the influence of Leonardo‘s grotesques. Dürer was back in Venice early in 1507 before returning to Nuremberg in the same year.

Christ carrying the Cross, after 1510, Hieronymus Bosch, Ghent.

Hieronymus Bosch’s Christ carrying the cross (after 1510, Ghent) is another famous example. Christ’s head is surrounded by a dynamic group of grotesque “tronies” or faces. Was Bosch inspired by Leonardo and Matsys, or was it the other way around?

While the composition may seem chaotic at first glance, its structure is actually very rigid and formal. Christ’s head is positioned precisely at the intersection of two diagonals. The beam of the cross forms one diagonal, with the figure of Simon of Cyrene helping carry the cross at the top left, and with the “bad” murderer to the bottom right.

The other diagonal connects the imprint of Christ’s face on Veronica’s sudarium at the bottom left with the penitent thief, at the top right. He is attacked by an evil charlatan or a Pharisee and an evil monk, a clear allusion by Bosch to the religious fanaticism of his era. The grotesque heads remind us of the masks that are often used in passion plays as well as of Leonardo da Vinci’s caricatures.

By way of contrast, the softly modeled face of Christ is serene. He is the Suffering Christ, who has been abandoned by everyone and who shall triumph over all evil in the world. This representation ties in perfectly with the ideas of the Devotio Moderna.

Quinten Matsys, Christ carrying the Cross, 1510-1515, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Quinten Matsys, Ecce Homo, 1526, Venice.

Quinten Matsys, in his Ecce Homo’s (1526, Venice, Italy) cleary bases his work on the Bosch‘ tradition.

2. Misers, bankers, tax collectors and money-changers, the fight against usury

The Purchase Agreement (1515, Berlin), Quinten Matsys. A good « deal » between bankers, lawyers, theologians and misers on the one side, and a fool on the other side, maybe a contract for an « indulgence »?

Directly relevant to Erasmus’ and More’s religious, philosophical, sociological and political critique, and certainly with some relevance for today, Matsys’ denunciation of usury and greed.

Marlier keenly sketches how usurers and speculators became dominant players of Antwerp’s economic life.

Under those circumstances, notes Marlier, with everybody over their neck into debt and in urgent need for cash, usurers found a fantastic market to prosper.

The Misers (and their victims) (1520, Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome), Quinten Matsys.

Abroad, the Fuggers and Welsers duly participated in the emerging trade of enslaved people from Africa.

Manillas used by the european bankers to buy slaves in Africa.

The Fuggers used their mines in Eastern Europe and Germany to produce manillas – metal objects of exchange that have gone down in history as a “slave trade currency” due to their use on the coasts of West Africa. The Welsers, in turn, attempted to establish a colony in what is now Venezuela (Spanish name derived from the Italian Venezziola, “little Venice”, which became Welserland) and shipped more than 1,000 enslaved Africans to America. Meanwhile, in the homes of prosperous Augsburg citizens, enslaved people from India were forced to toil for their “masters”.

Carl Ludwig Friedrich Becker, Anton Fugger burns Charles V’s debt titles, 1866.

According to the official Fugger family website, the story that Anton Fugger threw his promissary notes into the fire in 1530, in front of Charles V, in order to generously waive repayment of loans, is pure fiction. But he did grant the new emperor a proverbial “haircut”. In exchange Charles V abandoned his plans for an “imperial monopoly law” that would have massively curtailed the scope of action of the banking and trading houses in the Holy Roman Empire.

According to Fugger researcher Richard Ehrenberg, the story about Anton didn’t emerge until the late 17th century, presumably to demonstrate his loyalty to the Emperor.

Thomas More and Erasmus exposed the rise of predatory and criminal financial abuse in their book Utopia. Erasmus, while not refusing the rise of modern entrepreneurial capitalism, denounces the abuses of financial greed.

Civil servants, he argued in his Education of a Christian Prince written for Charles V, should be recruited on the basis of their competence and merit, and not because of their glorious name or social status.

For Erasmus, (speaking through the mouth of Folly):

Quinten Massys, Tax Collectors, late 1520s, oil on panel, 86 x 71 cm.
Liechtenstein Collection, Vaduz.

One can, as Silver argues, on the basis of what’s written in the records and the fact that tax collection was outsourced to private individuals, rebrand Quinten Matsys’ painting, often referred to as The Misers, as the more « factually exact » name of Tax Collectors. However, that doesn’t change the fact the subject is precisely what exposes an old Netherlandish proverb of the period:

While the municipal financial officer on the left seems « reasonable » since his face is not “grotesque”, the man sitting behind, in a strange turn of his arm protecting a leather purse, shows the grotesque, ugly face of greed, justified by what he declared and was noted in the records. The complicity between both men is the real ugliness of the story.

Money-changers, admits Silver, often performed the same role as bankers, citing economic historian Raymond de Roover. Moreover, the unrepresented fourth scoundrel, the miller (a target in Bosch’s and Brueghel’s paintings), was often castigated because grain prices became a chronic sore spot in eras of fluctuating commodity prices, as was true in just this period.

Considering the fact that financial looting became dominant after the 1520s, such denunciations of financial greed could not but become very popular. The satirical subject was taken up almost immediately by the painter’s son Jan Matsys (1510-1575), copied close to identically by Marinus van Reymerswaele (1490-1546), and by Jan Sanders van Hemessen (1500-1566).

Quinten Matsys, The Money Changer and His Wife, 1514, Louvre, Paris.
Jacob Fugger (the Rich), by Lorenzo Lotto.

In a more “civilized” version of this metaphor, starting from the same theme, there is Matsys’ famous Banker (or Money Changer) and His Wife (1514, Louvre, Paris).

In a chapter of his opus majus Flemish Primitives entitled The Heirs of the Founders, Erwin Panofsky considers Matsys’ The Money Changer and his Wife to be a “reconstruction” of a “lost work by Jan van Eyck (a ‘painting with half-body figures, depicting a boss doing his accounts with his employee’), which Marcantonio Michiel claims to have seen in the Casa Lampugnano in Milan.”

Once again, it is not a double portrait of a banker of his wife, but a moralizing metaphor. While the banker, who has attached his prayer beads on the wall behind him, is cross-checking if the weight of the metal of the coins correspond to their nominal value, his wife, turning the pages of a religious hour book, throws a sad look at the greedy obsessions of her visibly unhappy husband.

The banker has, besides the scales he’s using, attached a pair of them to the wall behind him. For the Christian Humanists, the weight of material wealth is the opposite of that of spiritual richness. In Van der Weyden’s Last Judgment in Beaune, France, the painter ironically shows an angel weighing the resurrected souls, sending the heaviest of them… to hell.

Others speculate the banker’s wife is not completely unaffected by all the coins on the table but the attention of her eyes goes more to the hands of her husband than to the objects on the table. Piety or the pleasure of wealth? A fruit on the shelve (apple of orange), juste above her husband, might be a reference to the forbidden fruit but the estinguished candle on the shelve behind herself recalls the shortness of earthly pleasures.

Tax collector and his wife (1539, Prado, Madrid), Marinus van Reymerswaele.

When Marinus van Reymerswaele copies this theme, the woman’s temptation for the money on the table seems even bigger.

Detail with convexe mirror.

The convex mirror (who disappears in the copies made by Matsys’ followers), operating as a “mise en abîme” (a play in the play or a painting in a painting), shows a man (the banker?), reading himself a (religious?) book. The mirror not necesseraly shows some existing real space but can very will represent an imaginary time sequence outside that of the space-time of the main scene. It might show the banker in his future life, free from greed, reading a religious book with great fervor.

While the use of image of convex mirrors (whose optical laws were examined in depth by arab scientists such as Ibn al-Haytham and studied by Franciscans at Oxford such as Roger Bacon) reminds both Van Eyck’s Arnolfini couple (National Gallery, London) and Petrus Christus (1410-1475) Goldsmith in his workshop or Saint Eligius (1449, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), with a couple standing behind, Matsys’ painting, is a unique creation of its kind.

In terms of content, the painting could also be related to a common theme at that period, namely The Calling of Saint Matthew.

The above passage is probably autobiographical in that it describes the Matthew’s call to follow Jesus as an apostle. As we know, St. Matthew responded positively to Jesus’ call and became one of the Twelve Apostles.

The Calling of Saint-Matthew (1536, Alte Pincacoteca, Munich), Jan van Hemessen.

According to the Gospel, Matthew’s name was originally Levi, a tax collector serving Herod and therefore not very popular. The Romans forced the Jewish people to pay taxes. Tax collectors were known to cheat the people by charging more than required and pocketing the difference. Of course, once Levi accepted the call to follow Jesus, he was pardoned and given the name Matthew, meaning “Yahweh’s gift.”

The Calling of Matthew (1530, Thyssen Bornemisza, Madrid), Marinus van Reymerswaele.

This theme of course could not but have pleased Erasmus, since it doesn’t insist on punishment but on positive transformation for the better. Both Marinus van Reymerswaele (in 1530) and Jan van Hemessen (in 1536), who copied and were inspired by Matsys, took up the subject as The calling of Saint-Matthew showing Jesus (on the right) calling on a tax collector to abandon his profession. In Van Hemessen’s painting we also see, just as in Matsys’ work, the wife of the tax-collector standing in front, also with her hand on an open book.

The good news is that, till now, the most generally accepted hypothesis as to the meaning of this painting is that it is an allegorical and moralizing work, on the theme of the vanity of earthly goods in opposition to timeless Christian values, and a denunciation of avarice as a cardinal sin.

3. The Da Vinci connection (II)

Leonardo da Vinci, five grotesque heads, around 1494, Windsor collection.
Quiten Matsys, détail of the right panel of Lamentation, 1508-1511, Antwerp Politically, to be noted, the Habsburg double-eagle Imperial flag waved by those executing Saint-John…

To sum it up, so far three elements of Matsys’ work have enabled us to establish his deep links with Italy and Leonardo.

1. His expertise knowledge of perspective, in particular that of Piero della Francesca, as demonstrated by the Italian-style marble vault appearing in the Altarpiece of Saint Anne.

2. His use of Leonardo’s grotesque heads, in his Triptych of the Lamentation of Christ.

3. His reworking of the Virgin’s pose from Leonardo’s Saint Anne and the Virgin, in his
Virgin and Child at the Poznan Museum.

How this influence came about remains to be elucidated. Several hypotheses,
which may complement each other, are possible:

1. At an early age, he traveled to Italy (Milan, Venice, etc.), where he may have established direct contact with Leonardo, or with one or more of his pupils.

2. He was able to exchange ideas and prints with other artists who had made such trips
and had established contacts in Italy. Whether Dürer, who had his own contacts in Italy, might have acted as an intermediary is another hypothesis to be explored. Some of Dürer’s anatomical drawings are said to have been made after Leonardo. Jacopo de’ Barbari had painted a portrait of Luca Pacioli, the Franciscan friar who had helped Leonardo to read Euclid in Greek. Dürer had met Barbari in Nuremberg, but, as we saw above, their relationship soured.

Anatomical study (2017; Dresden notebooks) by Dürer, based on Leonardo.
Probable portrait of the young Leonardo, Verrocchio’s study for his David.

3. He was able to see reproductions made and distributed by Italian and northern artists. Although the original drawings and manuscripts were copied and sold by Melzi, Leonardo’s pupil, after his master’s death in Amboise in 1519, Leonardo’s influence on Matsys appeared as early as 1507.

Leonardo’s work captivated the attention of many in Europe. For example, a life-size replica of Leonardo’s Last Supper fresco was purchased in 1545 by the Norbertine Abbey in Tongerlo, Belgum. Andrea Solario (1460-1524), a pupil of Leonardo da Vinci, is said to have created the work with other artists. Recent research suggests that Leonardo may have painted parts of the replica himself. Professor Jean-Pierre Isbouts and a team of scientists from the Imec research institute examined the canvas using multispectral cameras, which can reconstruct the different layers of a painting and distinguish restorations from the original. According to the researchers, one figure in particular catches the eye. John, the apostle to Jesus’ left, is painted using a special “sfumato” technique. This is the same technique used to paint the Mona Lisa, and one that only Leonardo mastered, says Isbouts.

Similarly, Joos Van Cleve, in the lower part of his Lamentation (1520-1525), repeats the composition of Leonardo’s Last Supper, showing that the image was known to most northern painters.

Moreover, as Silver keenly points out, one of those same heads, a near-profile but reversed from its Leonardo model (the head on the left), reappears for the lustful old man in Matsys’ later “Ill-Matched Lovers » !

The fact that it appears as a mirror image might be the result of Matsys working from a print. The engraver copies the « positive » image, but whet it is prited it appears as « negative ». In other words, as a mirror image of the original.

But also a study by Leonardo of a (not grotesque) head of an Apostle for the Last Supper, shows features close to those used by Matsys.

A life-sized replica of Leonardo’s Last Supper fresco, has been owned since 1545 by the Norbertijnen abbey in Tongerlo. Andrea Solario (1460-1524) a student of Da Vinci, would have created the work with fellow artists.

However, according to recent research, it seems that Da Vinci painted parts of the replica himself. Professor Jean-Pierre Isbouts, together with a team of scientists from Imec research institute, went over the canvas with multispectral cameras, that can reconstruct the different layers in a painting, and distinguish the restorations from the original.

One figure specifically catches the eye, according to Isbouts. John, the apostle on Jesus’ left side is painted with the special ‘sfumato’ technique. This is the same technique used to paint the Mona Lisa, and Da Vinci himself was the only artist that had mastered it, claims Isbouts.

Life-size replica of Leonardo’s Last Supper fresco, done before the master’s death, belonging to the Abbey of Tongerlo in Belgium since 1545.

Also Joos Van Cleve, in the lower section of his Lamentation (1520-1525), bases himself on Leonardo’s Last Supper, showing clearly the image was well-known to most painters in the North.

4. The Art of Grotesque per se

Da Vinci’s work on “grotesque heads” dates at least from the early Milan period (1490s) and later when he started looking for a model to paint “Judas” in the Last Supper fresco (1495-1498). Leonardo reportedly used the likenesses of people in and around Milan as inspiration for the painting’s figures. When the painting was nearly finished, Leonardo still was lacking a model for Judas. It’s said that he loitered around jails and with Milanese criminals to find an appropriate face and expression for Judas, the fourth figure from the left and the apostle who ultimately betrayed Jesus. He advised artists to always carry a notebook to draw people around town, “quarreling or laughing or fighting”. He took note of outlandish faces on the piazza, because in another note recommending sketching strangers, he adds:

When the convent’s prior complained to Ludovico Sforza of Leonardo‘s « laziness » as he wandered the streets to find a criminal to base Judas on, Leonardo responded that if he could find no one else, the prior would make a suitable model… While the painting was being executed, Leonardo’s friend, the mathematician Lucia Pacioli, was around and in contact with the master.

For the Italian scientist, always keen to explore the dynamic of contrasts of nature, exploring the ugly was not only a game but inherent to the role of the artist:

Italian scholar Sara Taglialagamba notes that the grotesque, being abnormal or “out of norm”, in the works of Leonardo is conceived as “the opposite of balance and harmony” but “not to oppose beauty.”

The deformities that connote Leonardo’s figures affect both men and women, are present in the young and the old (although on the latter they are concentrated for the most part), spare no portion of the body, and are often combined to give the subjects even more bestial appearances.

Geometry of Human Proportions

From his side, Dürer, now accused of « racial profiling » took very seriously the issue of understanding human proportions, considered, especially with the discovery of Vitruvius book De Architectura, as to offer the key to the right proportions for human architecture and urban planning. According to Vitruvius, « Beauty is produced by the pleasing appearance and good taste of the whole, and by the dimensions of all the parts being duly proportioned to each other. »

Dürer therefore measured all parts of the human body to establish harmonic relations among them. The variations in the proportions of faces and bodies, he concluded, obey the variations generated by geometric projections. They don’t change in terms of harmony but will appear different and even grotesque when projected from a different angle.

Both Leonardo and Dürer, and later Holbein the Younger in his painting The Ambassadors (1533, National Gallery, London), became masters in the science of “anamorphoses”, I.e. geometrical projections from tangent angles making an image hardly recognizable for the viewer looking straight to the plane surface while the image can be understood when viewed from that surprising angle.

Having such masters of “serious” beautiful forms as Leonardo or Matsys suddenly engaging in outrageous cartoon drawing may look disturbing, while it should not. All cartoons are based on metaphorical thinking and so is all great art.

Renaissance art is often assumed to be orderly and reassuring but these faces succeed the uncompromising polemics of the gargoyles of the cathedral builders, the “monsters” in the margin of so many illuminated manuscripts that Bosch invited on the forefront and anticipate those of Rabelais, Goya and Ensor. They are so distorted and out of the habitual norm that they get the label “grotesque” but they also make us smile when we, reluctantly and even with some anger, accept to look down on our own imperfections or those of our beloved we prefer not to see. We are not the icons we take for real that we see in the magazines.

In ErasmusPraise of Folly, the narrator (Folly personified), first identifies, among many other accomplishments, its own leading role in making things work that with pure logic, reason and intellect would fail, such as the ridiculous acts required to achieve human reproduction.

Hence, says Folly, “if all were thus wise you see how soon the world would be depopulated, and what need there would be of a second Prometheus, to plaster up the decayed image of mankind?”

Folly, with satirical irony, claims it is doing a great job helping especially older people to refuse dying off like animals:

5. The metaphor of the “Ill-matched Lovers”

Quinten Matsys, The Ill-matched Lovers

If Erasmus will blast with biting irony the corruption and madness of the Kings, Popes, Dukes and Princes, he will also expose with uncompromising irony the corruption affecting the common man, for example older men dropping their spouses to hook up with younger women, a practice, says Folly, “grown so common, that it is become the a-la-mode of the times.”

The pairing of unequal couples has a literary history dating back to antiquity when Plautus, a Roman comic poet from the 3rd–century BC, cautioned elderly men against courting younger ladies.

The « grotesque marriage » comes straight from the satirical literature, such as the above mentioned Ship of Fools (1494) of Sebastian Brant, which in its 52nd chapter tackles the « marriage-for-money » theme.

Besides In Praise of Folly, Erasmus dedicated in 1529 a colloquium to this theme titled The Unequal Marriage. (Box)

This Erasmian theme of the “Ill-matched Lovers,” became quite popular. According to art historian Max J. Friedlander, Matsys was the first to propagate this theme in the Low Countries.

Matsys depicts this theme by showing an older man besotted by a younger, beautiful woman. He gazes at her adoringly, not noticing that she is stealing his purse. In reality, the grotesque ugliness of the man, blinded by his lust for the young woman, corresponds to the ugliness of his soul. She, blinded by her greed, appears superficially as a “nice” girl, but in reality is abusing the naive fool. But the viewer rapidly finds out that the money she steals from the old fool, goes directly in the hands of the jester standing behind her and whose face expresses a combination of both lust and greed. In final analysis, that’s the moral, all the gain goes neither to him nor to her, but to foolishness itself (The Jester). A situation reminiscent of Bosch’s 1502 painting The Conjurer.

Matsys’ painting raises the issue of “Mutually Assured Corruption,” where, just as in geopolitics, both sides think they are winning at the expense of the other in a zero sum game. From that standpoint, the “moralistic” lesson here goes far beyond simple cheating among partners.

As said before, what were considered so far as “sins” (lust and greed) by the Church, became a subject of laughter for the humanist with the painting offering a “mirror” allowing viewers to self-reflect and to improve their own character.

Albrecht Dürer, The Ill-Matched Couple, Metropolitan Museum, New York.

The theme already appears in a copper engraving of Dürer in 1495, with the girl opening her hand to get money from his purse into her own.

Old Man and a Young Woman, 1503, Jacopo de Barbari, Philadelphia.

And in 1503, Jacopo Barbari painted a similar subject, An old man and a young woman. (Philadelphia)

Cranach the Elder, who made a trip to Antwerp in 1508, and was visibly inspired by the Leonardo style grotesques of Matsys, started mass producing paintings on this theme (including the use of Matsys reworked grotesque of Leonardo!), clearly answering the growing demand of protestant Germany, a production continued by his son Cranach the Younger.

http://eve-adam.over-blog.com/2016/03/les-couples-mal-assortis-lucas-cranach.html

Cranach will make variations on the theme, often reducing the theme to only “lust” leaving “greed” (money grabbing) out of the picture.

Of course, the uglier and the older the man, and the younger and the more beautiful the lady, the more the resulting contrast creates an emotional impact by underscoring the shocking character of the event. Cranach will playfully inverse roles and show an old woman with her maid, seducing a handsome young gentleman.

The Ill-Matched Lovers, Jan Massys.

Quinten Matsys’ son, Jan Matsys, will do his own variation on the theme, adding a new social dimension, that of poor families using their daughters as bait to trap older rich gentlemen whose wealth and money will allow the family to have a living, a theme also Goya took up.

Already in one of Cranach’s versions, the rich man has in front of him a loaf of bread on the table. But what strikes in Jan’s version, is the mother, standing behind the old foolish man, staring at the bread and the fruits on the table. If the greed and the lust remain real, Jan points to a given context which cannot simply be laughed away.

Among the many other artists that painted this theme one has to note Hans Baldung Grien (1485-1545), Christian Richter (1587-1667) and Wolfgang Krodel the Elder (1500-1561).

None of them reproduced completely the pun crafted by Matsys and most loyal to the real spirit of Erasmus, that of foolishness coming out on top winning the game, a truly laughable situation ! The Triumph of Folly!

Also here, for the face of the old foolish man, Matsys was influenced by sketches of grotesque heads by Leonardo.

6. Leonardo’s baby, the “Ugly Duchess

This allows us now to introduce maybe the most outrageous painting ever made, alternatively called the Old ugly woman or The ugly Duchess. Oceans of ink have been thrown on paper to speculate on her identity, her “disease” (Paget’s disease), her “gender”, most of the time to turn the eye of the viewer to a literal, “fact-based” explanation rather than enjoying and discovering the “mental” metaphor the artist paints, not on the panel, but in the mind of the viewer.

The painting has to be analyzed and understood with its pendant – an accompanying painting – which depicts an old man whose attention she solicits. In a surprise move, as a first approach, one can say that Matsys inverts the common gender roles here, since what we see is not an old man trying to seduce the girl, but an old woman trying to attract a rich old man.

–First, there is the old lady, whose physical state is ultimate decrepitude, who desperately tries to seduce an old rich man. Just as Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Old man and young boy (1490, Louvre, Paris), the person’s outside appearance prompts the audience to consider the relationship between internal and external beauty.

Once again, the obvious literary influence is Erasmus‘s essay In Praise of Folly (1511), which satirizes women who « still play the coquette », « cannot tear themselves away from their mirrors » and « do not hesitate to exhibit their repulsive withered breasts. » The woman’s clothes are rich. She is dressed to impress, including bulbous headgear that heightens her unusual features. Defying the modesty expected from older women during the Renaissance, she is wearing a low-cut, uncovered, and tightly laced bodice that emphasizes her wrinkly cleavage.

Jan Van Eyck, portrait of his wife, Margaret.

Her hair is concealed in the horns of a heart-shaped bonnet, over which she has placed a white veil, secured by a large, bejeweled brooch. However fine her attire, by the time this panel was painted in the early sixteenth century her clothes would have been many decades out of date, reminding those of Van Eyck’s portrait of his wife Margaret a century earlier, prompting laughter rather than admiration.

Her headdress had by then become an iconographic shorthand for female vanity, its horns compared to those of the devil or at best those indicating she was betrayed by her lovers (cornuto). She appears to be selling herself on her looks, for she holds a flower, often an advert for sex work in Renaissance art. It was in the tragic fate of the rose that the flight of time, and with its physical decay, found its most alarming illustration. Whether fresh or fragile, the rose, while calling for immediate pleasure, seems to protest that death is just around the corner.

Margarete Maultasch.

To identify the woman, several names are put forward. In the seventeenth century, the painting was misidentified as a portrait of Margarete Maultasch (1318-1369), who, having separated from her first husband Jean Henri de Luxembourg, remarried Louis 1er, Margrave of Brandenburg, after a thousand and one twists and turns, culminating in the couple’s excommunication by Clement VI. A complicated story in turbulent times, which earned Margarete the nickname “mouth-bag” (big mouth), or “prostitute” in Bavarian dialect. The problem is that other portraits of Margarete are known to exist, in which she appears most comely…

Defamed as the “ugliest woman in history,” she gained the nickname “The Ugly Duchess,.” In the Victorian era, this picture (or one of its many versions) inspired John Tenniel’s depiction of the Duchess in his illustrations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). This entrenched the moniker and turned this figure into an icon for generations of readers.

The old man saying yes, no, or not now?

–Second, the old Man, whose fur-trimmed robe and visible gold rings, while not as demonstrably archaic or absurd as the costume of the Woman, nonetheless suggest conspicuous wealth, and his distinctive profile echoes the familiar profile of Europe’s leading merchant-banker of the fifteenth century, the late Cosimo de’ Medici of Florence.

After having played a key role as a patron of the arts and a backer of the Renaissance and the Council of Florence, became quite a disgusting figure. It has to be noted that in 1513 the warrior pope Julius II, a strong enemy of Erasmus, died and Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici became pope Leo X.

The figure has also been compared to the lost portraits of the early fifteenth century of Duke Philip the Bold of Burgundy.

Jacob Fugger.

But if one takes a second look, and forgets the woman’s breasts, the viewer realizes that her face is that… of an ugly man. Maybe the whole undertaking was a political statement and the faces were those of real people whose identity we’ve not yet discovered. They might be some hated politicians or theologians of those days, selling out one to the other in an elan of greed and lust. Maybe the old ugly prostitute was a reference to fugger banker Jacob the Rich, the eternal bankroller of the increasingly bankrupt Vatican ? For the moment, let’s accept we just don’t know.

The Bohemian artist Wenceslaus Hollar (1607-1677) saw Matsys double portrait and made in 1645 an engraving of it, adding the title “King and Queen of Tunis, invented by Leonardo da Vinci, executed by Hollar.”

Engraving from Wenceslaus Hollar

In periods of carnival, when people were allowed to do away with the rules of society for a couple of days, at least in the Low Countries and the Northern Rhine area, people had a lot of fun by shifting roles. Putting things upside down, poor peasants could dress up as rich merchants, laymen as clergymen, thieves as policemen, male as female and one and all the other way around.

The original concept of this metaphor seems to have come from Leonardo, who made a tiny sketch of an ugly woman, eventually a prostitute, remarkably with the horn bonnet and a tiny flower planted between her breasts, exactly the same attributes, metaphors and symbols employed later by Matsys in his work.

Old grotesque woman, National Gallery, Washington.
Francesco Melzi?

Leonardo’s pupil Melzi and other students or followers, as they did with many other of Leonardo’s sketches, seem to have copied Leonardo’s work and, amused, counter-posed the horny woman with a greedy, wealthy Florentine merchant. Did Melzi share or sell his sketches to others?

Various amusing versions of the theme are scattered around the world and figure in private and pubic collections.

Another sketch, either by Leonardo himself of his followers, shows a wild grotesque man with his hair raising up his head, with a series of grotesque looking scholars, including one looking like Dante! Leonardo, of course, who always signed his writings with the words “man without letters,” was a mere craftsman and never taken serious by those scholars Lucian exposed for having sold out to the establishment.

All these elements that what Matsys did was nothing “bizarre” or “extravagant,” but as someone sharing a “culture” of grotesque faces whose variations could be used to express the metaphorical puns of the humanist culture.

But of course, what made his old man and woman impact so huge, was the fact that what for Leonardo were nothing but rapid sketches in a notebook, became with Matsys life-size frighteningly hyper-realistic representations!

In the Queen’s Windsor Collection, there exists a red chalk drawing of the woman nearly exactly as she appears in Matsys work.

Francesco Melzi or another pupil of Leonardo da Vinci, done after original from Quinten Matsys, Royal Collection, Windsor.

Untill very recently, historians were convinced that Quentin Matsys had “copied” this drawing of around 1490 attributed to Leonardo which he enlarged to produce his oil painting. “So Leonardo designed this unique person, even to the wrinkled bosom emerging from her dress. All Matsys did was enlarge her in oils,” it is said.

However, recent research suggests it could have been the other way around! Either Melzi, or Leonardo himself, could have made the red chalk drawing starting from Matsys painting, either from a direct view, prints or reproductions. An Italian copying a Flemish painter, can you imagine?

Leading expert Susan Foister, Deputy Director and Curator of Early Netherlandish, German and British Painting at The National Gallery, London, who was also the curator of the museums 2008 exhibit “Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian,” told The Guardian at that time : « We can now say with confidence that Leonardo – or, at least, one of his followers – copied Matsys’s wonderful painting, not the other way around. This is a very exciting discovery. »

Foister said they had discovered that Matsys made amendments as he went along, suggesting he was creating the image all by himself rather than copying a model. Also, in the two Leonardo copies, the forms of the body and clothes are oversimplified and the woman’s left eye is not in its socket. « It was always assumed that a lesser known northern European artist would have copied Leonardo and it has not really been thought that it could have been the other way round, » said Foister. She added that both artists were known to be interested in ugliness and exchanged drawings « but credit for this masterful work belongs to Matsys ».

Source: The Guardian

E. Conclusion

The conclusion writes itself. The “Seven Capital Sins” which More and Erasmus tried to eradicate five centuries ago have become the very axiomatic “values” of today’s “Western” system.

At the ground level, people are offered the “freedom” to sell out to lust, envy, greed, sloth, gluttony, etc. — all of this packed as “diversity”, on condition they don’t call into question the speculative financial and war policies that is imposed on them from a tyrannical oligarchy on the top. And those pretending to defend « european » and « judeo-christian » values will lack any credibility if they don’t take up the fight against financial oligarchism so clearly exposed by Thomas More and Erasmus.

Erasmus would turn around in his grave if he knew that his name is mainly associated with a scholarship offered by the EU for pupils willing to study in other EU member states. As Belgian professor Luc Reychler has suggested, such scholarships should include a mandatory training period in Erasmus’ thoughts and especially his advanced concepts of peace building.

In short, to make a new renaissance a reality, we have to free our fellow citizens from fear. While unaware about such real dangers as nuclear war, they live in fear of threats they have been brought to imagine. For those like us longing for peace, time has come to take Erasmus’, Leonardo’s and Matsys’ vision of “good laughter,” very, very, very seriously.

I end here with following rebus:

« D » stands for « The »; the world stands for « World »; the foot, in flemish « voet », meaning also « feeds », and the « vedel » (Vielle) also means « many », following by two happy fools. The phrase therefore reads: « The World Feeds Many Happy Fools! » And you are one of them! But don’t tell! Mondeken Toe!

Selected biography

Merci de partager !

Raphael 1520-2020: What Humanity can learn from « The School of Athens »

On the occasion of the five-hundredth anniversary of the death of the Italian painter Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (1483-1520), several exhibitions are honoring this artist, notably in Rome, Milan, Urbino, Belgrade, Washington, Pasadena, London, and Chantilly in France.

The master is honored, but what do we really know about the intention and meaning of his work?


Introduction

Raphael, portrait of a young boy.

There is no doubt that in the collective mind of the West, Raphael, along with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, appears as one of the most brilliant artists and even as the best embodiment of the « Italian Renaissance”.

Although he died at the age of 37, Raphael was able to reveal his immense talent to the world, in particular by giving birth, between 1509 and 1511, to several monumental frescoes in the Vatican, the most famous of which, 7.7 meters long and 5 meters high, is known as The School of Athens.

The viewer finds himself inside a building that brings together the thoughts of all mankind: united in a timeless space, fifty philosophers, mathematicians and astronomers of all ages meet to discuss their vision of man and nature.

French National Assembly.


The image of this fresco embodies so powerfully the « ideal » of a democratic republic, that in France, during the February 1848 revolution, the painting representing Louis Philippe (till then hanging behind the President of the National Assembly) was taken down and replaced by a representation of Raphael’s fresco, in the form of a tapestry from the Manufacture des Gobelins, produced between 1683 and 1688 at the request of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the founder of the French Academy of Sciences.

Then, in France, arrived the idea that Raphael, being « the Prince of painters », embodied « the ultimate artist ». Superior to Rubens or Titian, Raphael was thought to have achieved the subtle « synthesis » between the « divine grace » of a Leonardo da Vinci and the « silent strength » of a Michelangelo. What more can be said ? A true observation as long as one looks only at the purity of the « forms » and thus of the « style ». Adored or hated, Raphael was erected in France as a model to be imitated by every young talent attending our Academies of Fine Arts.

Hence, for five centuries, artists, historians and connoisseurs have not ceased to comment and often to confront each other, not on the intention or the meaning of the artist’s works, but on his style! In a way akin to some of our contemporaries who adore Star Wars and its special effects without paying attention to the ideology that, underhandedly, this TV series conveys…

For this brand of historians, « iconography », that branch of art history which is interested in the subjects represented, in the possible interpretations of the compositions or particular details, is only really useful to appreciate the « more primitive » paintings, that is to say that of the « Northern Schools »…

One knows well, especially in France, that once the « form » takes the appearance of perfection, it does not matter what the content is! This or that writer tells abject horrors, but « it is so well written! »

The good news is that in the last twenty years or so, a handful of leading historians and especially female art historians, have undertaken and published in depth new research.

I am thanking in particular of Marcia Hall (Temple University), Ingrid D. Rowland (University of Chicago), Reverend Timothy Verdon (Florence and Stanford), Jesuit historian John William O’Malley, and especially Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier.

The latter’s book Raphael’s Stanza della Signatura, Meaning and Invention (Cambridge University Press, 2002), which I was able to read (thanks to the pandemic lockdown), allowed me to adjust some of the leads and intuitions I had summarized in 2000 in, let’s be honest, a rather messy note.

If my work had consisted in trying to give some coherence to what is in the public domain, through their assiduous archival work in the Vatican and elsewhere, these historians, for whom neither Latin nor Greek have any secrets, have largely contributed to shed new light on the political, philosophical, cultural and religious context that contributed to the genesis of Raphael’s work.

Enriched by these readings, I have tried here, in a methodical way, to « make readable » what is rightly considered Raphael’s major work, The School of Athens.

Instead of identifying and commenting from the outset on the figures we see in the Stanza della Segnatura (« Room of the Segnatura” of the Vatican in Rome), I have chosen first to sketch a few backgrounds that serve as “eye-openers” to penetrate this work. For, in order to detect the painter’s intentions, actions and feelings, it is essential to penetrate the spirit of the epoch that engendered the artist’s: those days political and economic challenges, the cultural heritage of Rome and the Church, a close-up on the pope who commissioned the work, the philosophical convictions of the advisors who dictated the theme of the work, etc.

However, if all this seems too tedious for you dear reader, or if you are just eager to familiarize yourself with the work, nothing prevents you from going back and forth between the deciphering of the frescoes at the end of this article (Guided visit) and the contextualization that precedes them.

Cleaning our eyeglasses

General view of two of Raphael’s four frescoes decorating the Chamber of the Signature.


To see the world as it is, let’s wipe our glasses and stop looking at the tint of our glasses. For as is often the case, what « prevents » the viewer from penetrating a work, from seeing its intention and meaning, is not what his eyes see as such, but the preconceived ideas that prevents him from looking at the outside world. Learning to see usually starts by challenging some of our preconceptions.

1. It’s not a easel painting! Since the 16th century, we Europeans have been thinking in terms of « easel paintings » (as opposed to mural). The artist paints on a support, a wooden panel or a canvas, which the client then hangs on the wall. However, The School of Athens, as such, is not a « painting » of this type, but simply, in the strict sense, a part or a « detail » of what we would call today, « an installation ». I explain myself. What constitutes the work here is the whole of the frescoes and decorations covering the ceiling, the floor and the four walls of the room! We will explain them to you. The viewer is, in a way, inside a cube that the artist has tried to make appear as a sphere. So, to « explain » the meaning of The School of Athens, in isolation from the rest and without demonstrating the thematic and symbolic interconnections with the iconography of the other walls, the ceiling and the floor, is not only an exercise in futility but utter incompetence.

2. Error of title! Neither at the time of its commission, nor at the time of its realization or in the words of Raphael, the fresco carried the name “School of Athens”! That name was given later. Everything indicates that the entire room covered with frescoes was to express a divine harmony uniting Philosophy (The School of Athens), Theology (on the opposite side), Poetry (on its right side) and Justice (on its left side). We will come back to that.

3. The theme is not the artist’s choice!
The only person who met both Raphael and Pope Julius II during his lifetime was the physician Paolo Giovio (1483-1552) who arrived in Rome in 1512, a year before the death of Julius II. According to Giovio, it was the pontiff himself who, as early as 1506, that is, two years before Raphael’s arrival, conceived the contents of the « Signing Chamber ». This is logical, since it was the place where he installed his personal library, a collection of some 270 books, arranged on shelves below the frescoes and classified according to the themes of each wall decoration (Philosophy, Theology, Poetry and Justice). However, given the complexity of the themes, and given Julius II’s poor literary culture, historians agree that the intellectual authorship of the frescoes was attributed to the pope’s advisors and especially to the one who would have been able to synthesize them, his chief librarian, Thomaso Inghirami (1470-1516).

Raphael, who seems to have constantly modified his preparatory drawings according to the feedback and comments he received from the commissioners, was able to translate this theme and program into images with his vast talent. In short, if you like the images, congratulate Raphael; if you like or don’t like the content, talk to the « boss ».

On the far right side of The School of Athens, Raphael and Il Sodoma seem to co-sign the fresco.

4. Painted by several people? What remains to be clarified is that, according to Vatican accounts, the entire decoration of the room was entrusted in mid-1508 to the talented fresco artist Giovanni Antonio Bazzi (1477-1549), six years older than Raphael and known as Il Sodoma. He appears to be the only person to have received any money for this work. Raphael does not appear in these accounts until 1513…

However, as the cycle of frescoes on the life of St. Benedict in the territorial abbey of Santa Maria in Monte Oliveto Maggiore testifies, Sodoma also had considerable talent, and above all, an incomparable know-how in fresco technique. Although he has never been honored, his style is so similar to Raphael’s that it is hard to mistake him.

Portrait of Pietro Aretino by the Venetian painter Titian.

It should also be noted that Sodoma, who came to Rome at the request of the pope’s banker Agostino Chigi (1466-1520), was asked to decorate the latter’s villa in 1508, which would have given Raphael free rein in the Vatican before joining him on the same site.

According to the french historian Bernard Levergeois, the sulphurous Pietro Aretino (1495-1556), a pornographic pamphleteer, before becoming the protégé and « cultural agent » of the banker Chigi in Rome, spent many years in Perugia.

There he took interest in the young pupils of Pietro Perugino (c. 1448-1523), Raphael’s master, and, says Levergeois, it was there that he

met the most prestigious painters of the day: Raphael, Sebastiano del Piombo, Julius Romano, Giovanni da Udine, Giovan Francesco Penni and Sodoma, all of whom took turns decorating the magnificent villa (the Farnesina) that Chigi had built in Rome. Some of them also worked on the no less famous Villa Madam (for pope Julius II), a grandiose project that was never completed.

Aretino as he appears in Michelangelo’s fresco in the Sistine Chapel.

As seen in the portrait painted by Titian, Aretino, nicknamed « the scourge of Princes », was a powerful, possessive and tyrannical character. A blackmailer, a flamboyant pansexual and well-informed about what was going on in the alcoves of the elites, he worked himself up, like FBI boss Edgar Hoover in the Kennedy era, as a king-maker, a power above power. Historians report that both Raphael and Michelangelo, before showing their works to the public, felt compelled to seek the advice of this pervert Aretino.

And in the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo depicts St. Bartolomeo in the guise of the Aretino. The artist must have thought that the traditional attribute of the martyr flayed alive was a perfect fit for the one who was bullying him: he is wearing the remains of his own skin and holding in his hand the large knife that was used for the torture…

It is therefore tempting to think that it was Aretino, the favorite of the Pope’s banker, and not necessarily Renaissance architect Donato Bramante, as is commonly accepted, who may have played the role of intermediary in bringing both Sodoma and Raphael to Rome in order to revive the glory of his patron and the oligarchy that held the Eternal City in contempt.

To my knowledge, Raphael, neither in his own letters nor in the statements reported by his entourage, would have commented on the theme and intention of his work. Strange modesty. Did he consider himself a simple « decorative painter »?

Finally, if Sodoma‘s participation in the realization of the School of Athens remains to be clarified, his portrait does appear. He is in the foreground on the far right, standing side by side to a rather sad Raphael (both on the side of the Aristotelians). A double signature?

This makes the question arise: Can one continue to speak of the frescoes as painted « by Raphael »? Are they not rather the frescoes of the four men team composed of Julius II, Inghirami, Sodoma and Raphael?

An unusual patron, « the warrior pope » Julius II

Medal with the effigy of Julius II the « Ligurian » (Genoese). On the back, the project of reconstruction of the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome.

Before talking about these famous « impresarios of the Renaissance » and understanding their motivations, it is necessary to explore the character of future pope Julius II: Giuliano della Rovere (1443-1513). He was appointed bishop of Carpentras by Pope Sixtus IV, his uncle. He was also successively archbishop of Avignon and cardinal-bishop of Ostia.

On October 31, 1503, 37 of the 38 cardinals composing the Sacred College, make him the head of the Western Church, under the name of Julius II, until its death in 1513, a moment Giuliano had been waiting for 20 years.

Before him, others had made their way. In fact, in 1492, his personal enemy, the Spanish Rodrigo de Borgia (1431-1503), succeeded in getting himself elected as pope Alexander VI. True to the legendary corruption of the Borgia dynasty, he was one of the most corrupt popes in the history of the Church. Jealous and angry at his own failure, Giuliano accused the new pope of having bought a number of votes. Fearing for his life, he leaves for France to the court of King Charles VIII, whom he convinces to lead a military campaign in Italy, in order to depose Alexander VI and to recover the Kingdom of Naples… Accompanying the young French king in his Italian expedition, he enters Rome with him at the end of 1494 and prepares to launch a council to investigate the pope’s actions. But Alexander VI managed to circumvent the machinations of his enemy and preserved his pontificate until his death in 1503.

Medal with the effigy of the pope Alexander VI Borgia.

From the moment of his accession, Giuliano della Rovere confessed that he had chosen his name as pope, Julius II, not after Pope Julius I, but in reference to the bloodthirsty Roman dictator Julius Caesar. He asserts from the start his firm will to restore the political power of the popes in Italy. For him, Rome must once again become the capital of an Empire much larger than the Roman Empire of the past.

When Julius II took office, decadence and corruption had brought the Church to the brink. The territories that would later become Italy were a vast battlefield where Italian condottieri, French kings, German emperors and Spanish nobles came to fight. The ancient city of Rome was nothing more than a vast heap of ruins systematically plundered by rapacious entrepreneurs in the service of princes, bishops and popes, each one seeking to monopolize the smallest column or architrave likely to come and decorate their palace or church. Reportedly, out of the 50,000 inhabitants of the city, there were 10,000 prostitutes and courtesans…

Obviously, Julius II was the pope chosen by the oligarchy to restore a minimum of order in the house. For, particularly since 1492, the extension of Catholicism in the New World and then in the East, required a « rebirth », not of « Christian humanism », as during the Renaissance of the early 15th century, but of the authority of the Church.

The spread of printing and humanism in Europe.

For us today, the word « Renaissance » evokes the heyday of Italian culture. However, for the powerful oligarchs of Raphael’s time, it was a matter of resurrecting the splendor of Greco-Roman antiquity, embodied in the glory of the Roman « Republic », mistakenly idealized as a great and well-administered state, thanks to efficient laws, capable civil servants possessing a great culture, based on the assiduous study of Greek and Latin texts.

And it is well to this rebirth of the Roman authority that Julius II is going to dedicate himself. In first place by the sword. In less than three years (1503-1506), the rebellious César Borgia is reduced to impotence. He was the illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI who, at the head of an army of mercenaries, waged war in the country and terrorized the Papal States,

In 1506, Julius II, quickly nicknamed « the warrior pope » at the head of his troops, took back Perugia and Bologna.

As the humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam (1467-1537), who was present in Italy and was an eyewitness to the sacking of Bologna by the papal troops, reproached him, Julius II preferred the helmet to the tiara. Questioned by Michelangelo in charge of immortalizing him with a bronze statue, to know if he did not wish to be represented with a book in his hand to underline his high degree of culture, Julius II answers:

Why a book? Rather, show me a sword in hand.

Originally from the region of Genoa (Liguria), Julius II undertook to chase the Venetians, whom he abhorred, out of Romagna, which they occupied. « I will reduce your Venice to the state of hamlet of fishermen from which it left, » had said one day the Ligurian pope to the ambassador Pisani, to which the proud patrician did not fail to retort:

And we, Holy Father, we will make of you a small village priest,
if you are not reasonable…

This language gives the measure of the bitterness to which one had arrived on both sides. In the bull of excommunication launched shortly afterwards (April 27, 1509) against the Venetians, these were accused of « uniting the habit of the wolf with the ferocity of the lion, and of flaying the skin by pulling out the hairs… ».

The League of Cambrai

Italy at the time of the Ligue of Cambrai.

Against the rapacious practices of Venice, on December 10, 1508, in Cambrai, Julius II officially rallies to the « League of Cambrai », a group of powers (including the French King Louis XII, the regent of the Netherlands Margaret of Austria, King Ferdinand II of Aragon and the German Emperor Maximilian I).

For Julius II, the happiness is total because Louis XII comes in person to expel the Venetians of the States of the Church. Better still, on May 14, 1509, after its defeat by the League of Cambrai at the battle of Agnadel, the Republic of Venice agonizes and finds itself at the mercy of an invasion. However, at that juncture, Julius II, fearing that the French would establish their influence on the country, made a spectacular turnaround. He organized, from one day to the next, the survival of Venice!

His treasurer general, the Sienese banker Agostino Chigi (a Sienese billionaire close to the Borgias, to whom he had lent colossal sums of money and later Raphael’s patron), set the conditions:

  • In order to pay for the Swiss mercenaries capable of repelling the attackers of the Ligue of Cambrai, Chigi granted the Venetians a substantial loan.
  • In exchange, the Serenissima agreed to give up its monopoly on the trade of alum that it imported from Constantinople. At the time, alum, an irreplaceable mineral used to fix fabric dyes, represented a real « strategic » issue.
  • Once Venice stopped importing alum, the entire Mediterranean world was forced, from one day to the next, to obtain supplies, not from Venice, but from the Vatican, that is to say, from Chigi, who was in charge of exploiting the « alum of Rome » for the Papacy, located in the mines of the Tolfa mountains, northwest of Rome in the heart of the Papal States.
  • Aware that its very survival was at stake, and for lack of an alternative, Venice grudgingly accepted the golden deal.

In his biography on Jules II, french historian Ivan Cloulas specifies:

Above all stands out Agostino Chigi, the banker from Siena, farmer of the pontifical mines of alum of Tolfa since the reign of Alexander VI. The favor that this character enjoyed with Julius II is surprising, since he was a banker who had long served Caesar Borgia. The pontiff, according to the tradition, conferred at the time of his accession the load of ‘depositary’ to one of his Genoese compatriots, Paolo Sauli, charged to carry out all the financial transactions of the Holy See in connection with the cardinal camerlingue Raffaelo Sansoni-Riario. But Chigi did not suffer disgrace, because he advanced Julian della Rovere considerable sums of money to buy electors [cardinal members of the Sacred College], and he made the exploitation and export of alum extracted from the pontifical mines a success. The experience and value of the Sienese made him a partner of the various bankers of the papacy, notably the Sauli and the Fugger, who gained new wealth as the fruitful trade in indulgences developed in Germany.

Hence, now in alliance with Venice, Julius II, in what appears to the naive as a spectacular « reversal of alliance », set up the « Holy League » to « expel from Italy the Barbarians » (Fuori i Barbari!). A coalition in which he made enter the Swiss, Venice, the kings Ferdinand of Aragon and Henri VIII of England, and finally, the emperor Maximilian. This league will then drive out the French out of Italy. Julius II said with irony:

If Venice had not existed,
it would have been necessary to invent it.

In response, Louis XII, the King of France, attempted to transpose the struggle into the spiritual realm. Thus, a national council, meeting in Orleans in 1510, he declared France exempt from the obedience of Julius II. A second council was convened in Italy itself, in Pisa, then in Milan (1512) trying to depose the pope. Julius II opposed to the King of France the Vth ecumenical council of the Lateran (1512) where he will welcome warmly those who abandoned that of Milan…

Maritime Empires

Julius II was determined to re-establish his authority both on land and on the oceans. A bit like in ancient Greece, Italy experienced a rather particular phenomenon, that of the emergence of « maritime republics ». If the « Republic of Venice » is famous, the maritime republics of Pisa, Ragusa (Dubrovnik on the Dalmatian coast), Amalfi (near Naples) and Genoa are less known.

In each case, operating from a port, a local oligarchy built a maritime empire and above all poisoned its competitors. However, maritime activity, by its very nature, implies taking risks over time. Hence the need for skillful, robust and forward-looking finance, offering insurance and purchase options on future assets and profits. It is therefore no coincidence that most financial empires developed in symbiosis with maritime empires, notably the Dutch and British, and with the West and East India Companies.

At the end of the 15th century, it was essentially Genoa and Venice that were fighting for control of the seas. On the one hand, Venice, historically the bridgehead of the Byzantine Empire and its capital Constantinople (Istanbul), was by far the largest city in the Mediterranean world in 1500 with 200,000 inhabitants. Since its heyday in the 13th century, the Serenissima has defended tooth and nail its status as a key intermediary on the Silk Road to the West. On the other hand, Genoa, which, after having established itself in the Levant thanks to the crusades, by taking control of Portugal, financed all the Portuguese colonial expeditions to West Africa from where it brought back gold and slaves.

Two maritime achievements will exacerbate this rivalry a little more:

  • 1488. Although the works of the Persian scholar Al Biruni (11th century) and old maps, including that of the Venetion monk Fra Mauro, made it possible to foresee the bypassing of the African continent by the Atlantic Ocean to reach India, it was not until 1488 that Portuguese sailors passed the Cape of Good Hope. Thus, Genoa, without any intermediary, could directly load its ships in Asia and bring its goods back to Europe;
  • 1492. Seeking to open a direct trade route to Asia without having to deal with the Venetians or the Portuguese (Genoese), Spain sent the Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus west in 1492. More than a new route to Asia, Columbus discovered a new continent that would be the object of covetousness.
The imperial sharing of the entire world among the Spanish (Venice) and the Portuguese (Genoa),
as signed on by Pope Alexander VI Borgia with the treaty of Tordesillas in 1494

Two years later, on June 7, 1494, the Portuguese and Spanish signed the Treaty of Tordesillas to divide the entire world between them. Basically, all of the New World for Spain, all of the old one (from the Azores to Macao) for Portugal. To delimit their empires, they drew an imaginary line, which Pope Alexander VI Borgia set in 1493 at 100 leagues west of the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands.

Later, the line was extended, at the request of the Portuguese, to 370 leagues. Any land discovered to the east of this line was to belong to Portugal; to the west, to Spain. At the same time, any other Western maritime power was denied access to the new continent. However, in 1500, to the horror of the Spaniards, it was a Portuguese who discovered Brazil. And given its geographical position, to the west of the famous line, this country fell under the control of the Portuguese Empire!

Julius II, a child of Liguria (region of Genoa, therefore linked to Portugal) and vomiting Alexander VI Borgia (Spanish), in 1506, takes great pleasure in confirming, by the bull Inter Cætera, the treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 allowing to fix the dioceses of the New World, obviously to the advantage of the Portuguese and therefore to his own.

The ultimate weapon, culture

On the « spiritual » and « cultural » level, if Julius II spent most of his time at war, posterity retains essentially the image of « one of the great popes of the Renaissance » as a great protector and patron of the arts.

Indeed, to re-establish the prestige (the French word for soft power) and therefore the authority of Rome and its Empire, culture was considered a weapon as formidable as the sword. To begin with, Julius II opened new arteries in Rome, including the Via Giulia. He placed in the Belvedere courtyard the antiques he had acquired, in particular, the « Apollo of Belvedere » and the « Laocoon », discovered in 1506 in the ruins of Nero’s Imperial Palace.

Portrait of Julius II by Raphael, and his tomb by Michelangelo.

In the same year, that is to say six years before the end of the military operations, Julius II also launched great projects, some of which were only partially or entirely completed after his death:

  • The reconstruction of St. Peter’s Basilica, a task entrusted to the architect and painter Donato Bramante (1444-1514) ;
  • The tomb of Julius II, which the sculptor Michelangelo was entrusted with in the apse of the new basilica and of which his famous statue of Moses, one of the 48 bronze statues and bas-reliefs originally planned, should have been part;
  • The decoration of the vault of the Sistine Chapel built by Pope Sixtus IV, the uncle of Julius II, was also entrusted to Michelangelo. Julius II let himself be carried away by the creative spirit of the sculptor. Together, they worked on ever more grandiose projects for the decoration of the Chapel. The artist gave free rein to his imagination, in a different artistic genre that did not please the pope. Until October 31, 1512, Michelangelo painted more than 300 figures on the vault;
  • The frescoes decorating the personal library of the pope will be entrusted to the painter Raphael, called to Rome in 1508, probably at the suggestion of Chigi, Aretino or Bramante. The Stanza was the place where the pope signed his briefs and bulls. This room later became the private library of the pontiff Julius II, then the room of the Tribunal of Apostolic Signatures of Grace and Justice and later, that of the Supreme instance of appeal and cassation. Before the arrival of Julius II, this room and « the room of Heliodorus », were covered with frescoes by Piero della Francesca (1417-1492), a painter protected by the great Renaissance genius cardinal philosopher Nicolaus of Cusa (1401-1464), immortalizing the great ecumenical council of Florence (1438). Decorations by Lucas Signorelli and Sodoma were added later. Following his election, Julius II, anxious to mark his presence in history, and to re-establish the authority of the oligarchy and the Church, had the frescoes of the Council of Florence covered with new ones. Convinced by his advisors, the pope agreed to entrust the direction of the work to Raphael. Officially, it is said that Raphael spared some of the frescoes on the ceiling, notably those executed by Sodoma, so as not to antagonize him entirely. But, as we have said, the content, the very elaborate theme and part of the iconography of the frescoes were decided upon as early as 1506, even before Raphael’s arrival in 1508;
  • To modernize the city of Rome. Julius II, undoubtedly advised by the architect Bramante, singularly transformed the road system of Rome. In order for all the roads to converge towards St. Peter’s Basilica, he ordered the Via Giulia to be pierced on the left bank and the Lungara, the paths that meandered along the river on the right bank, to be transformed into a real street. His death interrupted the great works he had planned, in particular the construction of a monumental avenue leading to St. Peter’s and that of a new bridge to relieve the congestion of the bridge over St. Angelo, to which he had also facilitated access by widening the street leading to it. The extent of the work undertaken poses the problem of materials; although it was, in principle, forbidden to attack the ancient monuments, the reality was quite different. Ruinante, became the nickname of Bramante.
Drawing of the entrance door to the Vatican, circa 1530.

These major construction projects, patronage and military expenses drained the Holy See’s revenues. To remedy this, Julius II multiplied the sale of ecclesiastical benefits, dispensations and indulgences.

In the twelfth century, the Roman Catholic Church established the rules for the trade of « indulgences » (from the Latin indulgere, to grant) through papal decrees. They provided a framework for the total or partial remission before God of a sin, notably by promising, in exchange for a given amount of money, a reduction in the time spent in purgatory to the generous faithful after their death. In the course of time, this practice, essentially exploiting a form of religious superstition, turned into a business so lucrative that the Church could no longer do without it.

In northern Europe, particularly in Germany, the Fugger bankers of Augsburg were directly involved in organizing this trade. This practice was strongly denounced and fought against by the humanists, in particular by Erasmus, before Luther made it an essential part of the famous 95 theses that he posted, in 1517, on the doors of the church in Wittenberg.

In his book Erasmus and Italy, french historain Augustin Renaudet writes that Erasmus, after having met the highest authorities of the Vatican, was not fooled:

He was not long in understanding that apart from the Holy See, the services of the Curia and the Chancellery, apart from the cardinals, the innumerable prelates on mission and in charge, apart from a motley crowd of civil servants and scribes, who populated the administrative or financial offices and the courts, there was nothing in Rome. In all the cities he had known, in Brussels, in Paris, in London, in Milan, in Florence, and recently in Venice, an active economy, fed by industry, commerce, and finance, supported a strong urban bourgeoisie, or as in Venice, an aristocracy of shipowners. In Rome, all the economy, all the trade, all the finance, were in the hands of foreigners: Florentine or Genoese merchants, Florentine or Genoese bankers. These foreigners held in their dependence a people of small merchants, of small craftsmen who sold in the back room, of money changers and Jewish traffickers. Very little industry, the Roman population lived at the service of the Curia, the prelates and the convents. Erasmus marveled at the pride with which the descendants of the people-king pretended to maintain their ancient majesty.
The word of the Roman people was no longer an empty word; Erasmus was to write one day that, in the modern world, a Roman citizen counted less than a burgher of Basel.

Historians André Chastel and Robert Klein, in L’Humanisme, l’Europe de la Renaissance, share this observation:

Another trend, favorable to Caesar and Augustus, had emerged: Rome becoming again more and more the ‘imperial’ capital of all the powerful borrowed or sought to borrow a style from it.

This new style associates besides more and more arma and litterae, the sword and the book.

(…) Rich or poor, any sovereign of the Renaissance will occupy the artists and the scholars insofar as he needs prestige: the greatest patrons of the Renaissance were the ambitious and the warriors, Maximilian, Julius II, Henry VIII, François I, Charles V.

Raphael’s « impresarios »

If, from a contemporary point of view, it seems close to unthinkable for an artist to be « dictated » the theme of his work, this was not the case at the time of the Renaissance and even less so in the Middle Ages. For example, although he was a high-level diplomat of the Duke of Burgundy Philip the Good, the Flemish painter Jan Van Eyck (, one of the first painters to sign his works with his name, was advised on theology by the Duke’s confessor, the erudite Dionysus the Cartusian (1401-1471), a close friend of Cardinal Nicolaus of Cusa. And no one will dare say that Van Eyck « did not paint » his masterpiece The Mystic Lamb.

Raphael’s position was more delicate. In his time, painters still had the status of craftsmen. Including Leonardo da Vinci, who was known for his superior intelligence, declared himself to be a « man without letters », that is to say, unable to read Latin or Greek. Raphael could read and write Italian, but was in the same condition. And when, towards the end of his short life, he was asked to work on architecture (St. Peter’s Basilica) and urban planning (Roman antiquities), he asked a friend to translate the Ten Books of the Roman architect Vitruvius into Italian. Now, any visitor to the « Chambers of the Signature » is immediately struck by the great harmony uniting several dozen philosophers, jurists, poets and theologians whose existence was virtually unknown to Raphael before his arrival in Rome in 1508.

In The Marriage of the Virgin, Perugino (left) starts with a geometric harmony between a rectangle, an isosceles triangle and a circle whose center serves as the vanishing point of the perspective. His pupil Raphael took up the process, but starting from the square.

Moreover, with the exception of The Marriage of the Virgin, painted in 1504 at the age of 21, based on the way his master Pietro di Cristoforo Vannucci, known as Pietro Perugino (c. 1448-1523) had treated the same subject, Raphael had not yet had to meet the kind of challenge that the Stanza would pose to him.

As we have already said, the cartoons and other preparatory drawings, sometimes quite different from the final result, also suggest that, following the « commission, » discussions with one or more impresarios led the artist to modify, improve or change the iconography to arrive at the final result.

As for the theme, as we have already mentioned, the ideas and concepts seem to have emerged during a long period of maturation and were undoubtedly the result of multiple exchanges between Pope Julius II and several of his advisors, librarians, and « orators » of the papal court.

According to historian Ingrid D. Rowlands, the archival documents unquestionably indicate the decisive contribution of three very different personalities of the time:

  • Battista Casali ;
  • Giles of Viterbo;
  • Tommaso « Fedra » Inghirami.

The thorough investigation of the historian Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier has established the predominant role of Inghirami. He was the only one in a position, and in a position, as the pope’s chief librarian, to set the program of the rooms. Raphael, will be his enthusiastic collaborator and will undoubtedly end up being « recruited » to the orientations and vision of his commissionners. This is evidenced by the fact that he demanded to be buried in the Roman Pantheon, considered the most Pythagorean, and believed to be the most neo-Platonic, temple of the Roman era.

Battista Casali

As documented by the Jesuit historian John William O’Malley, it was on January 1, 1508, the year of his appointment to St. John Lateran, a few months before Raphael’s arrival in Rome, that Battista Casali (1473-1525), a professor at the University of Rome, evoked the image of The School of Athens in an oration delivered in the Sistine Chapel in the presence of Julius II:

One day (… ) the beauty of Athens inspired a contest between the gods, where humanity, learning, religion, primacies, jurisprudence and law came into being before being distributed in every country, where the Athenaeum and so many other gymnasiums were founded, where so many princes of knowledge trained their youth and taught them virtue, fortitude, temperance and justice – all of this destroyed in the whirlwind of the Mohaematan war machine… ) However, just as [your illustrious uncle Pope] Sixtus IV [who ordered the construction of the Sistine Chapel], in a way, laid the foundations of education, you laid the cornice. Here is the Vatican library which he erected as if it had come from Athens itself, gathering the books he was able to save from the wreckage, and created in the image of the Academy. You, now, Julius II, supreme pontiff, have founded a new Athens when you invoke the downtrodden world of letters as if it were rising from the dead, and order it, surrounded by threats of suspended work, that Athens, its stadiums, its theaters and its Athenaeums, be restored.

Giles of Viterbo

Giles of Viterbo.

Another major influence on the theme, Giles of Viterbo (1469-1532) of which we will say more below.

  • An outstanding orator, he was called to Rome in 1497 by Pope Alexander VI Borgia ;
  • In 1503, he became the Superior General of the Order of Hermits of Saint Augustine; with 8000 members, it was the most powerful order of its time;
  • He is known for the boldness and seriousness of the speech he gave at the opening of the Fifth Lateran Council in 1512;
  • He severely criticized the bellicose policy of Julius II and urged him to triumph by culture rather than by the sword;
  • After the death of the latter, he became the preacher and theologian of Pope Leo X who appointed him cardinal in 1517.

Tommaso Inghirami

Tommaso Inghirami, Pope Julius II‘s chief librarian and Raphael’s true impresario for the frescoes decorating the Signing Room. Here is his portrait, painted by Raphael in 1510..

Finally, the prelate Tommaso Inghirami (1470-1516), who spoke both Latin and Greek, was also a formidable orator. The man owed his fortune to Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449-1492).

Educated by the Neoplatonic philosopher Marsilio Ficino, Lorenzo the Magnificent was the patron of both Botticelli and Michelangelo who lived with him for three years.

Born in Volterra, Inghirami was also taken in by the Magnificent after the sacking of that city. He carefully supervised his studies and later sent him to Rome where Alexander VI Borgia welcomed him. Inghirami was a handsome and well-dressed man.

At 16, Inghirami earned the nickname « Phaedra » after brilliantly playing the role of the queen who commits suicide in a Seneca tragedy performed in a small circle at the residence of the influential Cardinal Raphael Riario, cousin of Julius II or nephew of Pope Sixtus IV and therefore cousin of Julius II. Thereafter, Phaedra, bon vivant and for whom the celestial and terrestrial pleasures were happily completed, gained in political and especially… physical weight.

  • In 1475, he accompanied the nuncio of Pope Alexander VI to the court of Emperor Maximilian I of the Holy Roman Empire, who named him Count Palatine and poet laureate;
  • On January 16, 1498, Inghirami delivered an oration in the Spanish Church of Rome in honor of the Infant Don Juan, the murdered son of the King of Spain. Inghirami, in the name of Alexander VI Borgia, fully endorsed the Spanish policy of the time: to extend Christianity as well as imperial looting into the New World, to drive the Moors out of Europe and to strengthen the colonial plunder of Africa. If Julius II hated Alexander VI, he will continue this policy;
  • In 1508, Julius II nominates Inghirami to head the Library of the Vatican to be installed in the Stanza;
  • In 1509, while he was heavily involved in the realization of the frescoes of the Stanza, Raphael made his portrait. Raphael shows us a man suffering from divergent strabismus who seems to turn his gaze towards the sky in order to signify where this « humanist » drew his inspiration from;
  • In 1510, the Pope appointed him Bishop of Ragusa;
  • Finally, in 1513, he became papal secretary and at the urgent request of the dying pope, Inghirami delivered his funeral oration: « Good God! What a mind this man had, what sense, what ability to manage and administer the Empire! What a supreme and unshakable strength! »

Inghirami soon served as secretary to the conclave electing Pope Leo X (John of Medici, second son of Lorenzo de Medici, also a great protector of neo-Platonists and « culture »), another pope whose portrait Raphael will paint.

In 1509, eager to reform the Catholic church on the basis of the study of the three languages (Latin-Greek-Hebrew) to settle the religious conflicts which were looming and announced the religious wars to come, Erasmus of Rotterdam meets Inghirami in Rome. The latter exposes to him the imposing cultural building sites which he directed. Erasmus does not say a word about it.

However, a long time after the death of Inghirami, Erasmus complained that the Vatican and the oligarchy recruited among the humanists. He notably fingerpointed the sect of “the Ciceronians”, omnipresent in the Roman Curia and of which Inghirami was one of the leaders.

Thus, in 1528, in a pamphlet titled The Ciceronians, Erasmus quoted Inghirami’s oration on Good Friday of 1509. He denounced the fact that the members of this sect, on the grounds of the elegance of the Latin language, only used Latin words that appeared as they were in the works of Cicero! As a result, all the new language of evangelical Christianity, enshrined in the Council of Florence, which Erasmus wished to promote, was either banned or « re-translated » into pagan terms and words of the Roman era! For example, in his sermon, Inghirami had presented Christ on the cross as a pagan god sacrificing himself heroically rather than as a redeemer.

Finally, shortly after Raphael’s death, Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto (1477-1547) wrote a treatise on philosophy in which Inghirami (meanwhile tragically deceased) defended rhetoric and denied the value of philosophy, his main argument being that everything written was already contained in the mystical and mythological texts of Orpheus and his followers…

Plato and Aristotle, the impossible synthesis

The Triumph of Saint Thomas of Aquinas (detail), here reconciling Aristotle (left) and Plato (right). Painting by Benozzo Gozzoli, Louvre, Paris.

Now, in order to be able to « read » the theme deployed by Raphael in the « Chamber of the Signature, » let us examine this Florentine « neo-Platonism » that animated both Giles of Viterbo and Tommaso Inghirami.

The approach of these two orators consisted above all in putting their « neo-Platonism » and their imagination at the service of a cause: that of asserting with force that Julius II, the pontifex maximus at the head of a triumphant Church, embodied the ultimate outcome of a vast line of philosophers, theologians, poets and humanists. At the origin of a civilizational and theological « big bang » presumed to lead to the immeasurable lustre of the Catholic Church under Julius II, not only Plato and Aristotle themselves, but those who had preceded them including Apollo, Moses and especially Pythagoras.

From 1506 onwards, Giles de Viterbo, in an exercise that can be described as « beyond” impossible, wrote a text entitled Sententia ad mentem Platonis (« Sentences with the mind of Plato »). In it, he tried to combine into one ideology the Sentences of Peter Lombard (1096-1160), the scholastic text par excellence of the 13th century and the starting point for the commentaries of the Dominican Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) for his Summa Theologica, and the esoteric Florentine neo-Platonism of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) * of whom Giles de Viterbe was a follower.

All this could only please a pope who, in order to establish his authority on earthly and spiritual matters, warmly welcomed this agreement between Faith and Reason defended by Thomas Aquinas who says that “the Truth being one”, reason’s only role is to confirm faith’s superiority.

The very idea to present the wedding of Aristotelian scholasticism (logic presented as « reason ») with Florentine neo-Platonism (Plotinus’ emanationism dressed as « faith ») as a source of poetry and justice as « The Signing Room » does, comes from this.

Let us recall that in the middle of the 13th century, two mendicant Orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, were contesting the drift of a Church that had become, above all, the simple manager of its earthly possessions. The one who would later be called St. Thomas Aquinas, opposed on this point (his competitor) St. Bonaventure (1221-1274), founding figure of the Franciscan Order.

For his part, Aquinas relies on Aristotle, whom Albert the Great (1200-1280), whose disciple he was in Cologne, had made known to him, to establish the primacy of « reason ». For the man who was nicknamed « the dumb ox », faith and human reason, each managing their own domain, had to move forward together, hand in hand while of course, the Church had the last word.

The Triumph of Saint Thomas of Aquinas, ca. 1470, painting by Benozzo Gozzoli, Louvre, Paris.

Several paintings (the great fresco of 1366 in the Spanish chapel of Santa Maria Novella in Florence; the painting by Filippino Lippi of 1488 in the Carafa chapel in Rome; or the painting by Benozzo Gozzoli (1421-1497), painted around 1470, in the Louvre in Paris), have immortalized the “Triumph of Thomas Aquinas”.

Gozzoli’s painting in the Louvre is of particular importance because several elements prefigure the iconography of the Signing Chamber, notably the three levels found in Theology (Trinity, Evangelists and religious leaders) as well as the couple Plato and Aristotle found in Philosophy.

In Gozzoli’s painting, we see Aquinas, standing between Plato and Aristotle, throwing down before him the Arab philosopher Averroes (1126-1198) (Ibn-Rushd of Cordoba) expelled for having denied the immortality and the thought of the individual soul, in favor of a « Single Intellect » for all men that activates in us the intelligible ideas.

In the West, before the arrival of Greek delegations in Italy to attend the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1438, if several works of Plato, including the Timaeus, were known to a handful of scholars, such as those of the School of Chartres or Italians as Leonardo Bruni in Florence, most of the West’s knowledge of Greek thought came down to the works of Aristotle.

For the Aristotelians, who became dominant in the Catholic Church with Aquinas, Plato had to be considered as incompatible with Christianity.

On the other hand, for the Platonists, including Augustine, Jerome and especially Nicholas of Cusa and Erasmus, who honored and adorned him that Erasmus called « Saint Socrates », Plato was to be venerated by Christians: he was monotheistic, believed in the immortality of the soul and venerated, in the form of the Pythagorean triad, the mystery of the Trinity.

John Bessarion, by Justius of Ghent, Louvre, Paris.

In the 15th century, for lack of epistemological clarity and some confusion on the authorship of certain manuscripts, some humanists, in particular Nicolaus of Cusa‘s friend and close collaborator Cardinal John Bessarion (1403-1472), one of the key organizers of the reunification of the Eastern and Western Churches, presented Plato as the « equal » of Aristotle, the latter’s disciple, with the sole purpose of making Plato « as acceptable as possible » to the Catholic Church.

Hence Bessarion‘s now famous phrase « Colo et veneror Aristotelem, amo Platonem » (I cultivate and venerate Aristotle, I love Plato) which appears in his In Calumniatorem Platonis (republished in 1503), a rejoinder to the virulent charge against Plato elaborated by the Greek Georges Trébizond.

Thus, in the School of Athens painted by Raphael, Plato and Aristotle appear side by side, not confronting each other but complementing the other with their respective wisdom : the first holding his book the Timaeus (on the creation of the universe) in one hand, and with the other, pointing to the sky (To the One, to God), the second holding his Ethics (the science of the good in personal life) in one hand, and raising the other arm horizontally to indicate the earthly realm (Physics).

If the commissioners had wanted to underscore the opposition of both philosophers, Plato would have rather been portrayed with his Parmenides (On Ideas) and Aristotle with his Physics (On natural sciences). That is clearly not the case.

Giles de Viterbo in his Sententia ad mentem Platonis will mobilize extreme sophism to erase the irreconcilable and very real oppositions (see box below) between the Platonic thought and that of Aristotle.


Why Plato and Aristotle are not complementary

By Christine Bierre

Logic (Aristotle) versus Dialectic (Plato). Bas-relief by Luca della Robbia.

The fundamental concepts that gave birth to our European civilization can be traced back to classical Greece, and through it, to Egypt and other even more ancient civilizations.

Among the Greek thinkers, Plato (-428/-347 B.C.) and Aristotle (-385/-323 B.C.) asked all the great questions that interest our humanity: who are we, what are our characteristics, how do we live, where are we situated in the universe, how can we know it?

The accounts that have come down to us from this distant period speak of the disagreements that led Aristotle to leave Plato’s Academy, of which he had been a disciple. History then bears witness to the violence of the oppositions between the disciples of the one and the other. During the Renaissance, the most reactionary Catholic currents, the Council of Trent in particular, were inspired by Aristotle, whereas Plato reigned supreme in the camp of humanism, in the hands of some of the greatest, such as Erasmus and Rabelais.

There were various attempts, however, to make them complementary, as discussed in this article by Karel Vereycken. If Plato represents the world of Ideas, Aristotle represents the world of matter. Impossible to build a world without both, we are told. It seems so obvious!

The Greek philosopher, Plato.

Bust of Plato.

All this starts, however, from a false idea opposing these two characters. For Plato, we are told, reality is found in the existence of ideas, universal concepts which represent, in an abstract way, all the things which participate of this concept. For example, the general concept of man contains the concept of particular men such as Peter, Paul and Mary; similarly for good, which includes all good things whatever they are. For Aristotle, on the contrary, reality is located in matter, as such.

What is false in this reasoning is the concept that the Platonic Ideas are abstractions. The Platonic Ideas are, on the contrary, dynamic entities that generate and transform reality. In the myth of the cave in The Republic, Socrates says that at the origin of things is the sovereign Good. In The Phaedo, he explains that it is through « Ideas » that this sovereign Good has generated the world.

In the myth of the cave, Socrates uses an offspring of the idea of the good, the Sun, to help us understand what the sovereign Good is. The Good, he says, has generated the Sun, which is, in the visible world, in relation to sight and objects of sight, what the Good is in the intelligible world in relation to intelligence and intelligible objects. The prisoners in the cave saw only the shadows of reality, and then, on coming out, they saw, thanks to the Sun, the real objects, the firmament and the Sun. After this, they will come to the conclusion about the Sun, that it is he who produces the seasons and the years, that he governs everything in the visible world and that he is in some way the cause of all those things that he and his companions saw in the cave.

The Sun not only gives objects the ability to be seen, but is also the cause of their genesis and development. In the same way for the knowable objects, they hold from the Good the faculty to be known but, in addition, they owe him their existence and their essence. The idea of the Good is thus for Plato the dynamic cause of the things: material and immaterial and not dead universals.

Aristotle’s splintered « One »

Bust of Aristotle.

For Aristotle, as for all the empiricist current which followed him, reality is situated at the level of the objects knowable by the senses. Nature sends us its signals that we decode with our mental faculties. Ideas are only abstractions of the sensible universe which constitutes reality. For him the universals have no real existence: man « in general », does not generate anything. It is only an abstraction of all the men in particular. The particular man is generated by the particular man; Peter is generated by Paul.

It is also said of Aristotle that he « exploded » Plato’s One. There are two ways of conceiving the One. One can think of it either as an absolute One (God or first cause), depending on whether one is a religious person or a philosopher, a purely intelligible principle but a dynamic cause that has generated all things; or one can think of it as the number « one » that determines each particular thing: the number one when we say: a man, a chair, an apple.

Aristotle‘s One simply becomes a particular unity, characteristic of all things that participate in unity. It is not the cause of what « is » but only the predicate of all the elements that are found in all the categories. The Being and the One, he will say, are the most universal of predicates. The One, he will say again, represents a definite nature in each kind but never the nature of the One will be the One in itself. And the Ideas are not the cause of change.

What is the point of all this?

Does this discussion make more sense than all the never-ending debates about the sexes of angels that gave scholasticism such a bad name in the Middle Ages? The One or the many, what does it matter in our daily lives?

This point is however essential. The fact of being able to go back to the intelligible causes of all that exists, puts the human species in a privileged situation in the universe. Unlike other species, it can not only understand the laws of the universe, but also be inspired by them, in order to improve human society. This is why, in history, it is the « Platonic » current that was at the origin of the great scientific, technological and cultural breakthroughs in astronomy, geometry, mechanics, architecture, but also the discovery of proportions that allow the expression of beauty in music, painting, poetry and dance.

As for Aristotle, it must be said that his conceptions of man and knowledge only led him to establish categories defining a dozen possible states of being. Aristotle was also the founder of formal logic, a system of thought that does not claim to know the truth, but only to define the rules of a correct reasoning. Logic is so little interested in the search for truth that one can consider that a judgment that is totally false in relation to reality can be said to be right if all the rules of « good reasoning » of logic have been used.

Woman riding Aristotle. Humanists have long since put their finger on a domain that totally escaped Aristotle‘s logical thinking: desire… A 13th century fable summarizes the story. Aristotle, whose pupil was Alexander the Great, reproached the latter for letting himself be distracted from his royal duties by the courtesan Phyllis, with whom he was madly in love. Obedient, the brave king of Macedonia thus ceases to frequent the damsel and returns to treat the business of the State. Learning the reasons of its abandonment, the lady decides to be avenged of the old philosopher and tries to seduce him by strutting under his windows in light dress. Aristotle falls under her charm ! Phyllis then announces to the wise man that if he wants to possess her, he will have to give himself up to a small caprice and, saddled and bridled, to let himself be ridden by the beautiful. The eminent bearded man accepts this game without suspecting the trick that is being played on him. In saddle and go ! here is Phyllis who rides Aristotle‘s back in the gardens of the king, whipping him to make him advanc

Suite

To begin with, Giles de Viterbo underlines that Aristotle is a « pupil » of Plato and that the « two princes of philosophy » could be reconciled. Very much imbued with the neo-Pythagorean spirit, and for whom Plato was only one of the greatest disciples of Pythagoras, the author argues that both philosophers agree that, contrary to the pagan pantheon, the « One » is the ultimate expression of the divine. Clearly, they were both monotheists and thus their convictions anticipated those of Christianity.

Giles of Viterbo:

Philosophy, which traces and examines all things, judges that all number and multiplicity are absent from God, as Plato and his pupil Aristotle say. Humanity has as its goal the understanding of divine things, as even Aristotle admits in his Ethics.
Thus, if it is necessary to pursue this goal, it is necessary to arrive at the understanding of God.

And he continues:

Now these princes of Philosophy [Plato and Aristotle] can be reconciled, and no matter how much they disagree about creation, the Ideas, or the goal of the Good, these points [of agreement] can be identified and demonstrated (…) [Then], they appear not to disagree with each other at all (…) These great princes can be reconciled if we postulate the double nature of things, one which is free from matter and the other which is within matter (…) Plato follows the first, Aristotle the second, and because of this, these two great leaders of philosophy hardly differ from each other. If you think that we are making this up, listen to them yourselves. For if we speak of humanity, after all the subject of our conversation, then Plato says the same thing, he says humanity is the soul, in the (First) Alcibiades; and in the Timaeus, he says that humanity has two natures, and we know one of these natures by means of the senses, and the other by means of reason. Also, in the same book, he teaches us that each part in us does not exist in isolation from the other, that each nature is concerned with the other nature. Aristotle, in the tenth book of his Ethics, calls humanity Understanding. So you can know that each philosopher (Plato and Aristotle) feels the same way, no matter how much it seems to you that they are not saying the same thing.

Pico della Mirandola the Neo-Platonist

Medal with the effigy of Pico della Mirandola. On the reverse, a deviation from the Platonic theme of the Three Graces (Beauty, Love, Pleasure), an image taken identically from a Roman fresco in Pompeii, which Raphael would in turn take up in his work on the same subject.

Giles of Viterbo, like Tommaso Ingharimi, seems to have taken up the gauntlet thrown to them by John Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), the young disciple of Ficino.

A precocious scholar, a protégé of Lorenzo de’ Medici (like Inghirami), this man of omniscience was fearless. Thus, in 1485, at the age of 23, he announced his project to gather, at his own expense, in the eternal city and capital of Christianity, the greatest scholars of the world to debate the mysteries of theology, philosophy and foreign doctrines. The objective was to go back from scholasticism to Zoroaster, passing by the Arabs, the Kabbalah, Aristotle and Plato, to expose to the eyes of all, the concordance of wisdom. The affair failed. His initiative, which reserved an important place for magic, could only arouse distrust. For the Vatican, all this could only smell of sulfur, and the initiative was discarded at the time.

However, it will mark the minds of a generation. For his Oratio de hominis dignitate, his inaugural speech written in an elegant and almost Ciceronian style, intended for the presentation of his nine hundred theses, published together after his death, was a great success, especially among young scholars like… Inghirami.

Pico’s achievement, which was not well received by the authorities, was to give humanistic studies (studia humanitatis) a new purpose: to seek the concordance of doctrines and define the dignity of the human being. The aim was, by bringing out what unites them despite their differences, to discover their common ground and, by a coincidence of opposites, to have them meet in a unity that transcends them.

Pico della Mirandola:

That is why, not content with having added to the common doctrines a quantity of remarks on the primitive theology of Mercury Trismegistus, on the teachings of the Chaldeans and Pythagoras, on the most secret mysteries of the Jews, we have also proposed for discussion a certain number of discoveries and conceptions of our own in the physical and theological fields. First of all, we have argued that Plato and Aristotle agree: many have thought so before us, no one has proved it sufficiently. Among the Latins, Boethius had promised himself to do so, but there is no indication that he ever realized what was always his project. Among the Greeks, Simplicius had given himself the same program: heaven forbid that he should have lived up to his intentions! Augustine himself, in his work Against the Academicians, writes that many authors have conceived, with great finesse in argumentation, the project of establishing this same point, namely that the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle are one. Thus John the Grammarian [The Hellenist John Lascarus] affirms well that only those who do not hear the words of Plato believe him to be in disagreement with Aristotle, but it is to his successors that he left the care of the demonstration. We have also added various developments where the concordance between the opinions – reputedly discordant – of Scotus and Thomas on the one hand, of Averroes and Avicenna on the other hand, is affirmed. Secondly, our considerations on Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy have been enriched by seventy-two new physical and metaphysical propositions: by making them one’s own, if I am not mistaken (and I will soon be sure of this), one will be able to solve any problem of a natural or theological nature, according to a philosophical method which is quite different from the one taught orally in schools and which is in honor among the doctors of our time.

In a manuscript found unfinished at the time of his death in 1494 and entitled Concordia Platonis et Aristotelis, Pico della Mirandola explicitly mentions Plato’s Timaeus and Aristotle‘s Ethics, precisely the two books that appear as attributes of their authors in Raphael’s fresco.

Then, in his Heptaplus, a work he completed in 1489, Pico della Mirandola asserted that the writings of Moses and the Mosaic Law, according to him the foundation of all wisdom, were the basis of Greek civilization before becoming that of the Church of Rome. The Timaeus, the major work of Plato, says Pico, demonstrates that its author was an “attic Moses” (from Athens).

Cicero the Neo-platonist

For Inghirami, fascinated by the eloquence and the style of Cicero (-106/-43 BC) of whom he believed himself the reincarnation, the challenge launched by Pico della Mirandola to reconcile Apollo, Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, appeared almost as a divine test and the frescoes of Raphael decorating the Stanza will be above all his answer.

In addition, Cicero himself claimed to be a neo-Platonist. In the first volume of his work, the Academica, after condemning Socrates for continually asking questions without ever « laying the foundations of a system of thought », Cicero asserts, several centuries before Pico della Mirandola, that the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, in essence, « had the same principles »:

In the shadow of Plato’s genius, a fertile, varied, universal genius, a unique philosophy was established under the double banner of the academicians and the peripatetics, who, agreeing on things, differed only on the terms. For Plato, who had made Speusippus, son of his sister, the heir of his philosophy, also left two disciples of great talent and rare science, Xenocrates of Chalcedony and Aristotle of Stagire: those who followed Aristotle, were named peripatetics, because they discussed while walking in the Lyceum; whereas those who, according to the institution of Plato, held their assemblies and disserted in the Academy, the other gymnasium of Athens, received from this place the name of Academicians. But both of them, all penetrated by Plato’s fertile genius, formulated philosophy into a certain complete and finished system, and abandoned the universal doubt of Socrates, and his habit of discussing everything without affirming anything. There was then what Socrates entirely disapproved of, a philosophical science, with regular divisions and a whole methodical apparatus. This philosophy, as I have said, under a double name, was one; for between the doctrine of the peripatetic [Aristotle] and the ancient Academy [Plato] there was no difference. Aristotle prevailed, in my opinion, by the richness of his genius; but the one and the other had the same principles, and judged the goods and the evils in the same way.

Royal Portal of Chartres. In the center, Pythagoras with above him the Quadrivium (the sciences: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music). To his right, a disciple, with above him the Trivium (the humanities: grammar, rhetoric and logic).

Inghirami was also strengthened by the reading of countless Christian authors in this sense, such as the Frenchman, Bernard of Chartres (12th century), a Neoplatonist philosopher who played a fundamental role in the Chartres school, which he founded. He was appointed master (1112) and then became chancellor (1119) responsible for the teaching of the cathedral school.

You wonder the sculptures of Pythagoras and Aristotle appear side by side on the western portal of the cathedral?

Historian Etienne Gilson writes:

Bernard of Chartres was first of all influenced by Boethius, whose Platonism he adapts. He then set out to reconcile Plato’s thought with that of Aristotle, which made him the greatest Aristotelian and Platonic thinker of the 12th century. John of Salisbury affirmed, in the most formal terms, that Bernard of Chartres and his disciples did not believe that they were simply expounding Plato’s thought by explaining in this way the relation of ideas to things, but that they had the pretension of putting Aristotle in agreement with Plato. That the trouble they took was wasted, is what John of Salisbury clearly states. With a very British humor he notes that these philosophers arrived too late and that they worked uselessly to reconcile dead men who had been arguing all their lives.

Inghirami will have read St. Bonaventure (1217-1274), one of the founders of the Franciscan order, who pointed out that Plato and Aristotle each excelled in their own field:

And so it appears that among philosophers, Plato’s gift is to speak of wisdom, Aristotle‘s of science.

Or the Florentine Marsilio Ficino, this neo-Platonic philosopher of the XVth century whose « Platonic Academy » had put in saddle Pico della Mirandola. Ficino, had he not written in his Platonic Theology that

Plato treats natural things divinely while Aristotle treats even divine things naturally.

In the preface he wrote for The Fable of Orpheus, a play written by his disciple Poliziano (1454-1494), Ficino, referring to Saint Augustine, makes the mythical Hermes Trismegistus (Mercury) the first of the theologians: his teaching would have been transmitted successively to Orpheus, Aglaophemus, Pythagoras, Philolaos and finally Plato.

Thereafter, Ficino will place Zoroaster at the head of these prisci theologi, to finally attribute to Zoroaster and Mercury an identical role in the genesis of the ancient wisdom: Zoroaster teaches this one among the Persians at the same time as Trismegistus taught it among the Egyptians.

Preceding Plato, Pythagoras

The great pre-Socratic thinker, Pythagoras of Samo

In Raphael’s School of Athens, the figure of Pythagoras of Samos (580-495 B.C.), surrounded by a group of admirers, takes a major place. He is clearly identifiable by a tablet on which the musical chords and the famous Tetraktys appear, which we will discuss here.

While historians have so far mainly explored the influence of the Platonic and Neo-Platonic currents on the Italian Renaissance, historian Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier, in her book Pythagoras and Renaissance Europe, has highlighted the extent to which the ideas of the great pre-Socratic thinker Pythagoras influenced the thought and art of the Renaissance.

Geometry (Thales of Miletus?) and Arithmetic (Pythagoras?), bas-relief by Luca della Robbia, Campanile, Florence.

In art, Pythagoras inspired the Roman architect Vitruvius (90-15 BC), and later such theorists of the golden mean such as the Franciscan monk Luca Pacioli (1445-1517), whose treatise, De Divina Proportiona, illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci, appeared in Venice in 1509.

However, if a theorem, probably from India, bears his name (attributed to Pythagoras by Vitruvius), little is known of his life. Just like Confucius, Socrates and Christ, if we are sure that he really existed, no writing from his hand has come down to us.

By necessity, Pythagoras

became a living legend, and even very active during the Renaissance, so much so that most people saw Plato as a mere « disciple » of the « divine Pythagoras ».

Arabic and Chinese texts demonstrating the theorem attributed in the West to Pythagoras.

Born in the first half of the 6th century B.C. on the island of Samos in Asia Minor, Pythagoras was probably in contact with the school of geometer’s founded by Thales of Miletus (-625/-548 B.C.).

Around the age of 40, he left for Crotone in southern Italy to found a society of friends, both philosophical, political and religious, whose chapters were to multiply.

For Pythagoras, the issue is to build a bridge between man and the divine and on this basis to transform society and the city. When asked about his knowledge, Pythagoras, before Socrates and Cusa, asserted that he knew nothing, but that he sherished « the love of wisdom ». The word philo-sophy would have thus been born.

No Christian humanist, reading Saint Jerome (347-420), one of the Fathers of the Catholic Church, could escape the praise that the latter gives to Pythagoras.

In his polemic Apology against the Books of Rufinus, Jerome, in order to evoke an exemplary behavior, quotes what two disciples of Pythagoras would have said:

We must by all possible means avoid softness of the body, ignorance of the spirit, intemperance, civil dissensions, domestic dissensions and in general excess in all things.

And Jerome invokes the « Precepts of Pythagoras » :

Everything must be common among friends; a friend is another ourselves. We must consider two periods in life, the morning and the evening, that is, what we have done and what we must do. After God, we must seek the truth, which alone can bring men closer to the Creator.”

Secondly, Jerome believes that Pythagoras, in affirming the concept of the immortality of the soul, preceded Christianity:

Listen to what Pythagoras was the first to find in Greece, Jerome says: That souls are immortal, that they pass from one body into another, and, it is Virgil himself who tells us in the sixth book of the Aeneid: When they have made a revolution of a thousand years, God calls them in great numbers to the banks of the river Lethe, so that they may undoubtedly see again the heaven they no longer remember; it is then that they begin again to revive a new body, which first was Euphorbus, then Calide, then Hermoticus, then Perhius and finally Pythagoras ; and that after a certain time what has existed begins to be born again, that there is nothing new in the world, that philosophy is a collection of meditations on death, that every day it strives to free the soul from the chains that bind it to the body and to give it back its freedom. Plato communicates many other ideas in his writings, especially in the Phaedo and in the Timaeus.

The hidden geometry of numbers

For Pythagoras « the beginning is half of everything ». According to Theon of Smyrna (v. 70/v. 135), for the philosopher, « numbers are, so to speak, the principle, the source and the root of all things ».

Aristotle, in his Metaphysics reports:

The Pythagoreans first applied themselves to mathematics… Finding that things [including musical sounds] model their nature mainly on the set of numbers and that numbers are the first principles of the whole of nature, the Pythagoreans concluded that the elements of numbers are also the elements of everything that exists, and they made the world a harmony and a number.

And as Cleinias of Tarantum (4th century BC), a Pythagorean friend of Plato, said:

When these things, therefore, are at rest, they give birth to mathematics and geometry, when they are in motion to the harmonica and astronomy.

The idea of the « monad », a dynamic unity participating in the One, perfected several centuries later by the philosopher and scientist Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) in his « Monadology« , comes to us from this period. Etymologically meaning « unity » (monas), it is the supreme unity (the One, God, the principle of numbers) which, while being at the same time the minimal unity, reflects in the microcosm the same dynamic activity that the One represents in the macrocosm.

Already, just the name of Apollo (a god considered as « the father » of Pythagoras) means, as Plato, Plutarch and other ancient authors point out: free of all multiplicity (Pollo = multiplicity; a-pollo = non-multiple).

Xenophanes of Colophones (born around 580 BC), asserts the existence of a unique God governing all things by the power of his intelligence. It is about a god not similar to the men, because eternal, incorporeal and spherical.

The triangular numbers: 1, 3, 6 and 10. Note the presence of a hexagon inside the number 10, the famous Tetraktys of Pythagoras.

As much as this conception of a dynamic One has sometimes provoked an explosion of esoteric interpretations, it has stimulated the most creative minds and terrorized the formalists of thought.

When speaking about simple things, arithmetic numbers, Pythagoras uses the terms of one, two, three, four, five, ten…, while to evoke ideal numbers and their power, he speaks about: monad, dyad, triad, tetrad, decad, etc. Thus, by conceiving numbers in a non-linear but figurative way, he offers an arithmetic applicable to astronomy, music and architecture. By arranging these numbers, like marbles, in a particular way, Pythagoras discovered the famous « geometry of numbers ». For example, in the case of triangular numbers, three points form a triangular surface. If we add three points below, we find the number 6, but it is still a triangle. And if we add four more points, we get the number 10, still a triangular number.

The Patriarch of Constantinople Photius (810-893) confirms that :

The Pythagoreans proclaimed that the complete number is ten.
The number ten, is a compound of the first four numbers that we count in their order. That is why they called Tetraktys the whole constituted by this number.

Besides the plane and triangular numbers (1, 3, 6, 10, etc.), Pythagoras explored the square numbers (1, 4, 9, 16, …), rectangular, cubic, pyramidal, star-shaped, etc. In doing so, Aristoxenus said, Pythagoras had « raised arithmetic above the needs of merchants ». This approach, that of seeing harmony above and within the multiple, has inspired many scientists throughout history. One thinks of Mendeleev for the elaboration of his table of elements or of Einstein.

The power of numbers was also well understood by the cardinal-philosopher Nicolaus of Cusa, who evokes Pythagoras in the first chapter of his treatise De Docta Ignorantia (1440), when he states that :

All those who search, judge the uncertain by comparing it to a certain presupposition by a system of proportions. All research is therefore comparative, and uses the means of proportion: if the object of research can be compared to the presupposition by a small proportional reduction, the judgment of apprehension is easy; but if we need many intermediaries, then difficulty and pain arise. This is well known in mathematics: the first propositions are easily brought back to the first principles which are very well known, whereas the following ones, because they need the intermediary of the first ones, have more difficulty. Therefore, all research consists of a comparative proportion, easy or difficult, and this is why the infinite, which escapes, as infinite, from all proportion, is unknown. Now, the proportion which expresses agreement in a thing on the one hand and otherness on the other hand, cannot be understood without the number. This is why the number encloses all that is susceptible of proportions. Therefore, it does not create a proportion in quantity only, but in everything that, in some way, by substance or by accident, can agree and differ. Therefore, Pythagoras strongly believed that everything was constituted and understood by the power of numbers. Now, the precision of combinations in material things and the exact adaptation of the known to the unknown are so far above human reason that Socrates considered that he knew nothing but his ignorance; at the same time as the very wise Solomon affirms that all things are difficult and that language cannot explain them.

The Geometry of numbers,
the secret of mental calculations

Here is a simple example.

One day, in Göttingen, the teacher of the young German mathematician Carl Gauss (1777-1855) asked his students to calculate the sum of all the numbers from one to one hundred. The students did so and began to add the numbers 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5, etc.

The young Gauss raises his hand and, following a mental calculation, announces the result of the operation: « 5050, Sir! »

The teacher, surprised, asks him how he arrived at the result so quickly. The young Gauss explains: to see if there is a geometry in the number 100, I added the first digit (1) with the last (100). This gives 101. Now, if I add the second digit (2) with the second to last one (99), it also makes 101. I concluded that within the number 100 there are fifty pairs of even and odd numbers whose sum is 101 each time. Thus, by multiplying 101 by the number of couples (50), I immediately arrive at 5050.

From Pythagoras to Plato

For Pythagoras, the most perfect surface is the circle and the ideal volume is the sphere since regular polyhedra can be inscribed. According to one of his disciples, the Italian Philolaus of Croton (-470/-390 BC), Pythagoras would have been the first to define the five regular polyhedrons:

  • the cube,
  • the tetrahedron (a pyramid with 4 triangular faces),
  • the octahedron (composed of 8 triangles),
  • the icosahedron (64 triangles) and
  • the dodecahedron (composed of 12 pentagons).

Since Plato describes them in his work, the Timaeus, these regular polyhedra took the name of « Platonic solids ». Let’s recall that Plato went to Italy several times, notably to meet his close friend, the great Pythagorean scientist, astronomer, musical theorist and political leader, Archytas of Tarantum (-428/-387), considered today as « the father of robotics ».

A direct disciple of Philolaos, Archytas became the mathematics teacher of the brilliant Greek astronomer and physician Eudoxus of Cnidus (-408/-355).

A geometrical vision of numbers allows to see how their power increases. For example, by going from the number 3 to the number 4, one goes from the second dimension to the third.

Starting with Archytas, the Pythagoreans associate the 1 to the point, the 2 to the line, the 3 to the surface (the two-dimensional geometrical figure: circle, triangle, square…), the 4 to the solid (the three-dimensional geometrical figure: tetrahedron, cube, sphere, etc.).

Let’s add that in the Timaeus, one of Plato’s last dialogues, after a brief exchange with Socrates, Critias and Hermocrates, the Pythagorean philosopher Timaeus of Locri (5th century BC) exposes a reflection on the origin and the nature of the physical world and of the human soul seen as the works of a demiurge while addressing the questions of scientific knowledge and the place of mathematics in the explanation of the world.

Cicero (Republic, I, X, 16) specifies that Timaeus of Locri was an intimate of Plato:

No doubt you have learned, Tuberon, that after the death of Socrates, Plato went first to Egypt to learn, then to Italy and Sicily, in order to learn all about the discoveries of Pythagoras.
There he lived for a long time in the intimacy of Archytas of Taranto and Timaeus of Locri, and had the chance to obtain the Commentaries of Philolaos.

The music of the spheres

Luca della Robbia: Pythagoras discovering harmony.

A magnificent bas-relief on the campanile of the Florence cathedral reflects what the early Italian humanists knew about Pythagoras.

Luca della Robbia (1399-1482), the sculptor working on the instructions of the humanist chancellor of Florence Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444), shows Pythagoras, a large hammer in one hand, a small hammer in the other, striking an anvil and concentrating his mind on the difference in the sounds he produces.

Pythagoras among the blacksmiths.

According to the legend, Pythagoras was walking near a forge when his attention was caught by the sound of hammers striking the anvil. He discerned in his ear the same consonances as those he could produce with his lyre. His intuition led to a fundamental discovery: musical sounds are governed by numbers.

This is how Guido d’Arezzo (992-1050), the Benedictine monk who created the system of musical notation still in use, relates the event in the last chapter (XX) of his book Micrologus around 1026:

A certain Pythagoras, a great philosopher, was traveling adventurously; he came to a workshop where an anvil was being struck with five hammers. Amazed by the pleasant harmony [concordiam] they produced, our philosopher approached them and, believing at first that the quality of sound and harmony [modulationis] lay in the different hands, he interchanged the hammers. When this was done, each hammer retained its own sound. After having removed one that was dissonant, he weighed the others, and, admirably, by the grace of God, the first weighed twelve, the second nine, the third eight, the fourth six of I don’t know what unit of weight. He thus knew that the science [scientiam] of music resided in the proportion and ratio of numbers [in numerorum proportione et collatione] […] What can we say about the science of music? […] What more can be said? By arranging the notes according to the intervals mentioned above, the illustrious Pythagoras was the first to perfect the monochord. As it is not lasciviousness that one finds there, but a fast revelation of the knowledge of our art, it met a general assent among the scholars. And this art has gradually been affirmed and developed to this day, for the Master himself always illuminates the human darkness and his supreme Wisdom endures for all centuries. Amen.

Here, the diagram (found on a slate placed at the feet of Pythagoras in Raphael’s fresco), which visualizes the musical harmonies obtained by dividing a string. Dividing it in two gives the octave, in three the fifth and in four the fourth. Finally, epogdoon (from the prefix epi- meaning above and ogdoon meaning the eighth) translates the interval of 9/8, which here corresponds to the tone.

IMAGE

The diagram (visible on the slate placed at the feet of Pythagoras in Raphael’s fresco), which visualizes the musical harmonies that are obtained by dividing a string. Dividing it in two gives the octave, in three the fifth and in four the fourth. Finally, epogdoon (from the prefix epi- meaning above and ogdoon meaning the eighth) translates the interval of 9/8, which corresponds here to the tone.

Let’s go back to the harmonic ratios that Pythagoras discovered from the weights of the hammers: 12, 9, 8 and 6.

  • The ratio between 12 and 6 is the half and corresponds to the octave (diapason). It is found on a musical instrument by vibrating half a string;
  • The ratio between 12 and 8 is a ratio of two thirds, which corresponds to the fifth (diapente);
  • The ratio between 8 and 6, is a ratio of three quarters, which corresponds to the fourth (diatessaron);
  • Finally, the ratio between 8 and 9 gives the interval of a tone (epogdoon, the prefix epi- meaning above and ogdoon meaning the eighth).
Illustration from the treatise Theorica musiche (1480, Naples), by the theorist and composer Franchini Gaffurio (1451-1522), a friend and colleague of Leonardo da Vinci at the Sforza court in Milan.

Later, the Pythagoreans transposed the same proportions to other objects, including volumes of water in glasses, the size of bells as well as bronze disks or the length of strings of musical instruments or flutes. For Pythagoras, this experience is fundamental because it corroborates the basic intuition of his philosophy: everything that exists is number, including phenomena as immaterial as musical intervals. In a famous passage of the Timaeus (35-36), Plato describes the fabrication of the proportions of the World Soul by the Demiurge. This passage is based on the numerical series 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 8, 27, which corresponds to the fusion of the series of the first powers of 2 (2, 4, 8) and the series of the first powers of 3 (3, 9, 27). Now, from this series, we can derive the numerical relationships on which the musical intervals are based.

In his Metaphysics, Aristotle also notes :

The Pythagoreans noticed that the whole of the modes of musical harmony and the relations which compose it are resolved in proportional numbers.

With the French philosopher Pierre Magnard, we would rather say:

If to know is to measure, music is the art of pursuing measurement beyond the threshold of incommensurability. When numerical, metric and weight standards are no longer capable of establishing proportions between natural realities, harmony comes to the rescue of its own scales – diatonic, chromatic, enharmonic – and of its intervals – fifth, fourth, third, octave – to make up for the lack of calculation.

Finally, as the Roman musicologist Theon of Smyrna (70-135) stated:

The Pythagoreans assert that music is a harmonic combination of opposites, a unification of multiples and an agreement of opposites.

In addition, for the Pythagoreans, music also had an ethical and medical value:

He started education with music, using certain melodies and rhythms, thanks to which he healed the character traits and passions of men, and brought harmony between the faculties of the soul.

All this made Pythagoras the incarnation of a cosmic and universal harmony**. Moreover, he would have been the first to have used the word « cosmos » (perfection, order).

A page from The Harmony of the World by Johannes Kepler.

Pythagoras, praised by the first true astrophysicist Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), is said to have been the first to coin the concept of « the music of the spheres » or « the harmony of the spheres ».

For, as Sextus Empiricus (towards the end of the second century) states in his Pyrrhonian sketches, Pythagoras would have noted that the distances between the orbits of the Sun, the Moon and the fixed stars correspond to the proportions regulating the intervals of the octave, the fifth and the fourth. In the Republic, Plato states that astronomy and music are « sister sciences ».

A page of the Harmony of the World where the astronomer Johannes Kepler evokes the music of the spheres.

Copernicus admits that the work of the Pythagoreans inspired his own research:

Others think that the Earth moves. Thus, Philolaos the Pythagorean says that the Earth moves around the Fire in an oblique circle, as do the Sun and the Moon. Heraclitus of Pontus and Ecphantos the Pythagorean do not, it is true, give the Earth a translational motion [motion around the Sun, heliocentrism]… Starting from this, I too began to think of the mobility of the Earth

(Copernicus, letter to Pope Paul III, preface to De revolutionibus orbium caestium [On the Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs], 1543).

The name Pythagoras (etymologically, Pyth-agoras: « he who was announced by the Pythia », the goddess), derives from the announcement of his birth made by the oracle to his father during a trip to Delphi. However, legend has it that Pythagoras was the son of Apollo, the god of light, poetry and music.

According to the oldest pre-Socratic traditions, Apollo had conceived a plan to control the universe. This plan was revealed in « the music of the spheres » under the wise supervision of Apollo, the sun god and god of music; a Greek god who passed to the Romans without changing his name. Apollo is represented with a crown of laurels and a lyre, surrounded by the nine muses.


GUIDED TOUR

After reviewing the political situation of the time, the motivations of Pope Julius II and his advisors seeking to re-establish the authority of a « Triumphant Church, » the ultimate culmination for centuries to come of a culture that goes back to Apollo, Moses, Pythagoras, Plato, Cicero and their disciples, the viewer now has some solid « keys » (the « codes ») in hand that will allow him or her to « read » Raphael’s frescoes adorning the Stanza.

Without Raphael’s account of his work, this reading remains an obstacle course. For example, the identification of the figures remains uncertain, since, with a few rare exceptions, no tablet tells us this. The idea, in any case, is that the spectator, by analyzing the appearance and gestures of each one, discovers for himself who is represented.

As we said, when entering the room, the viewer is immediately asked to appreciate each fresco not in isolation, but as an expression of a coherent whole.

When entering the Stanza, as if inside a painted cube, one immediately realizes that one is facing a theatrical setting. For the great vaults that the spectator discovers are only painted images and do not respond to any structural reality of the building. Inghirami was a speaker, an actor and a director who knew who should appear where, with what attitude and dressed in what way. Thanks to this imagination, a room that was at first sight rectangular and boring, was transformed into a spherical cube because the corners of the room were « rounded » with stucco.


A. THE CEILING

The ceiling of the Signing Chamber: at the centre, the coat of arms of Julius II (A). Then four circles with Philosophy (B), Theology (C ), Poetry (D) and Justice (E).

From the thematic point of view, the visual path, as one might expect, begins on the ceiling and ends on the floor. In the center of the ceiling, a small circle with the coat of arms of Julius II. Around it, an octagon surrounded by four circles connected by four rectangles. Each of the four circles touches the top of one of the four vaults painted on the four walls and shows an allegorical figure and a text announcing the theme of the large frescoes below.

Each time, it is a question of emphasizing the harmony uniting all the opposing (circle, square) parts. While the real incompatibilities are left to the checkroom, the oppositions and the formal differences will even be strongly emphasized, but exclusively to show that one can accommodate them by submitting them to a higher design.

The four circular frescoes decorating the ceiling of the Signature Chamber. Starting at the top left and going clockwise: Theology, Philosophy, Justice and Poetry.

Thus two double themes (2 x 2) are articulated:

  • Philosophy (the true accessible by reason), nicknamed The School of Athens, and Theology (the Truth accessible by divine revelation), nicknamed since the Council of Trent, the « Dispute of the Holy Sacrament »; a theme common to Aquinas and the neo-Platonists.
  • Poetry and music (the Beautiful), and Justice (the Just), a theme of Ciceronian origin.
  • Above the theme Philosophy, in one of the four circles, is represented by a woman wearing a dress with each of the four colors symbolizing the four elements evoked by a motif: blue illustrates the stars, red the tongues of fire, green the fish and golden brown the plants. Philosophy holds two books entitled « Morality » and « Nature », while two small genius (geniuses) carry tablets on which one can read « CAUSARUM » and « COGNITO », read together meaning « To know the causes ». Clearly, the aim of moral and natural philosophy is to know the causes, that is to say to go back to God.
  • Above Theology, a woman dressed in red and green, colors of the theological virtues. In her left hand, she holds a book, her right hand points to the fresco below. Two geniuses carry tablets saying « DIVINAR.RER » and « NOTITIA », « The revelation of sacred things ».
  • Above Poetry, the winged figure of the Poetry carrying lyre and crown of laurels. Two putti (cherubs) present us with tablets on which are inscribed the words of Virgil: « Inspired by the spirit » (NVMINE AFFLATVR). Since we are dealing with puttis and not geniuses, there is a clear reference to the Christian spirit that inspires the arts.
  • Finally, above the last fresco, Justice, a woman holds the attributes of justice: the scales and the sword. Two putti carry tablets with the words of the Emperor Justinian: « IVS SVVM VNICUMQUE », that is, « to each his just punishment ».

Then, still on the ceiling, as we have indicated, there are four rectangular frescoes connecting the four circles whose theme we have just specified. Again, these are two pairs that complement each other.

In the four squares: A. Wisdom, the first mover; B. The Fall with Adam and Eve driven out of Paradise; C. The Judgment of Salomon; D. The triumph of Apollo over Marsyas in the fight for the lyre.

A. A first rectangular fresco, linking Philosophy with Poetry, shows us a woman (wisdom, the first mover) here as the first cause and setting a celestial globe in motion and thus the universe in action. It may be the mythical Sibyl mentioned by Heraclitus, a superhuman incarnation of the prophetic voice. Philosophically, it is an allegory of the creation of the universe (or Astronomy). The constellation that appears on the globe has been identified. It corresponds to the sky map of the night of October 31, 1503, the date of the election of Julius II… which of course the date he became the “prime mover” of the universe.

B. The second rectangle, diametrically opposed to the first one and linking Justice to Theology, represents « Adam and Eve driven out of Paradise ». Considered as the beginning of theology, « The Fall of Man », will be repaired by the « redemption » that the Church and Pope Julius II will bring, embodied by the creative wisdom putting the universe back into motion.

C. The third rectangle, linking Philosophy and Justice, represents « The Judgment of Solomon, » a scene showing King Solomon’s wise judgment when two mothers claimed the same child.

D. And finally, the fourth, at the other end of the diagonal, connecting Poetry and Theology, represents, not « The Flogging of Marsyas » as has been claimed, but another rather rare scene, « The Triumph of Apollo over Marsyas » in the struggle for the lyre. The latter receives a crown of laurels. The two judgments are based on different bases for their mutual appreciation. While King Solomon, representing the Old Testament, judges on the basis of the divine law, Apollo, who represents antiquity here, prevails thanks to the rules of the pagan pantheon, his will power.


B. THEOLOGY

(THE DISPUTE OF THE HOLY SACRAMENT)

Theology (Dispute of the Holy Sacrament)

*In the upper (celestial) register :
A. God the Father, B. Jesus Christ, C. Mary, D. St. John the Baptist, E. Apostle Peter, F. Adam, G. St. John the Evangelist, H. King David, I. St. Lawrence, J. Judas Maccabaeus, K. St. Stephen, L. St. Stephen, M. Moses, N. James the Greater, O. Abraham, P. St. Paul, SE. Holy Spirit.


*In the lower (earthly) register:
1. Fra Angelico, 2. ?, 3. Donato Bramente, 4. ?, 5. ?, 6. Pico della Mirandola, 7. ?, 8. ?, 9. ?, 10. Saint Gregory, 11. Saint Jerome, 12. ?, 13. ?, 14. ?, 15. ?, 16. Saint Ambrose, 17. Saint Augustine, 18. Saint Thomas of Aquinas, 19. pope Innocent III, 20. Saint Bonaventure, 21. pope Sixtus IV, 22. Dante Alighieri, 23. ?, 24. ?; 25. a mason, 26. ?, 27. ?

Historians tell us that it was the first fresco to be made. The core subject here is the Trinity and « transubstantiation », a supernatural phenomenon signifying the conversion of one substance into another, in the case of Christians, the conversion of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist under the action of the Holy Spirit. This meant a « real presence » of God at mass and thus a major attraction to attract the faithful and a precondition to obtain « indulgences » from him. For some humanists, such as the Swiss Protestant Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531), any doctrine of the real presence is idolatry because it would be tantamount to worshiping bread and wine as if it were God.

Erasmus, for whom the performance of rituals should never be a substitute for true faith, explains that when Christ said to his disciples, in offering them bread, « this is my body » and « this is my blood, » in offering them wine, he was in reality talking metaphorically, not of bread and wine, but of his disciples (his body) and his teaching (his blood).

The idea of the composition is to show the triumph of the unity of the Church in Christ in all its complexities and diversities. The scene takes place on two levels, one celestial and the other terrestrial, lining up, as in a theater, a vast variety of actors presenting themselves to the public.

Above, in the celestial register, the heart of the subject, « the Trinity » with God the Father (A) blessing enthroned above a Christ (C) surrounded by Mary (B) (the New Testament) on his right and St. John the Baptist (D) (the Old Testament) on his left, themselves appearing above a dove symbolizing the Holy Spirit (SE).

Around them, to match the architecture of the School of Athens opposite, sit peacefully on a semi-circular cloud bench, the remarkable figures of the Church Triumphant, accompanied by their traditional attributes and dressed in colorful garments specific to each.

At the ends of the semicircle, two apostles: the Apostle Peter (E), representing the Jews, and the Apostle Paul (P), representing the Gentiles, face each other, as if they were the outer guards of the triumphant Church, the custodians of both the key and the letter of it. The Old Testament is represented by Adam (F) facing Abraham (O), and Moses (M) facing King David (H) with his harp in hand. The New Testament is also represented by St. John (G) facing St. Matthew (N) (two authors of the Gospel), by St. Lawrence (I) and St. Stephen (L) (both martyred saints).

At the bottom, in the terrestrial register, there is an enormous altar (Y) on which is written (in the middle) « IV LI VS » (Julius). A golden monstrance (X) with a host in its center proclaims the presence of Christ in the mystery of transubstantiation. Next to it, the Doctors of the Church of the early days of Christianity: on the left (under the features of Julius II) St. Gregory (No. 10), the great reformer of the ritual and the chant of the Mass, next to St. Jerome (No. 11), the most profound scholar of Christianity), accompanied by his lion. On his right Saint Augustine (N° 17) and Saint Ambrose (N° 16). These four doctors are, unlike the other figures, seated, which already brings them closer to the figures in the heavens; we can also distinguish two later doctors who are St. Thomas Aquinas (No. 18), a Dominican; and St. Bonaventure (No. 20), a Franciscan.

The historian Konrad Oberhuber, adds that these last two,

embody two tendencies of the Church: one that sees its essence of Christianity in ritual and devout adoration (the dimension of feeling), the other that defends the importance of theology (the dimension of thought).

Only two figures appear twince in Raphael’s frescoes: Dante Aleghieri and Pico della Mirandola. The latter, here on the left, dressed in white, in Philosophy, on the right, dressed in yellow in Theology.

Then, Popes Innocent III (1160-1216) (N° 19), the most powerful pope of the Middle Ages who established the political independence of Rome) and Sixtus IV (1414-1471) (N° 21, Francesco della Rovere by name) rub shoulders with religious figures such as the Dominican Savonarola (instigator in 1494 in Florence of a political revolution (return to the Republic) and moral revolution (rechristianization) or, the painter Fra Angelico (N° 1), contemporary of Savonarola, admired for his frescoes and his sublime paintings, accompanied by Dante Alighieri (N° 20), whose Divine Comedy (with hell, purgatory and paradise) had an influence on theology in the Middle Ages, Donato Bramante (N° 3), the famous architect of St. Peter’s Basilica, not forgetting Pico della Mirandola (N° 6), (mistaken for Francesco Maria della Rovere) who, with his hair blowing in the wind, is pointing towards the Trinity in a light and graceful wiggle. On the right, masons (N° 22), who build churches, bend forward. If on the right, behind the figures, the white marble foundations (Z), allude to the new St. Peter’s Basilica whose reconstruction Julius II has just launched, on the left, a village church (Q) reminds us that Christianity must penetrate the daily life of the humble.


C. PHILOSOPHY

(“SCHOOL OF ATHENS”)

A beautiful central view perspective shows a get together of 58 Greek and other thinkers in an ideal temple. No chiaroscuro effect disturbs the balance of the colors and the clarity of the composition.

The American thinker Lyndon LaRouche (1922-2019), during his visit to the Vatican, marveled at the graceful harmony that radiates from this work. It could not help but resonate with a concept LaRouche developed throughout his life: that of the « simultaneity of eternity »; the poetic idea that « immortal » ideas continue their dialogue in a place beyond material time and space.

According to historians, Raphael, faced with the Herculean task of creating this series of portraits, and lacking reliable visual data about the figures to be portrayed, sent one of his assistants to Greece to collect indications and provide him with documentation to meet the challenge.

Small detail: the event doesn’t take place in Athens or Greece, but in Rome. The architecture is clearly inspired by the church of Sant’Andrea of Mantua, renovated shortly before his death by Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) and by Bramante‘s plans for the reconstruction of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. It is Rome set to become the new Athens.

Nave of the church of Sant’Andrea in Mantua, built in 1473 by the architect Leon Battista Alberti.

Although the steps can be found in the preparatory drawings, the large arches with their coffered vaults, typical of the dome of the Roman Pantheon, do not appear. Another probable source of inspiration is the arches, also with coffered vaults, the Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine, built in Rome at the beginning of the 4th century to reaffirm the power of the beauty of the Eternal City.

It is not excluded that Bramante himself, who had made a tromp-l’oeil using this type of pattern in the apse of the church of Santa Maria presso San Satiro in Milan, designed them in person. With three arches (tetrad) and seven rows of caissons, Pythagorean numerology is never far away.

Visually, the ensemble is divided in two. The audience is on the same level as the foreground, a paved parterre behind which a very wide staircase leads to a raised forecourt. For the viewer, a slightly cavalier perspective reinforces the monumental dimension of the figures on the upper level. This setting is inevitably reminiscent of a theater stage.

The actors, arriving from the old world, can enter the stage on one side, under the statue of the Greek god Apollo (A), god of light, and leave on the other, towards the new world, under the statue of Pallas Athena (B), which became Minerva in Roman times, protector of the Arts, to exchange ideas with each other, address the audience or climb the stairs and leave through the back.

In the center of the square and in the center of a perspective with a central point of view, Plato (N° 9) and Aristotle (N° 10) don’t confront each other but move forward, side by side, towards the viewers (and the Triumphant Church on the opposing wall).

The first one, with the Timaeus in his hand, points a finger towards the sky, meaning that beyond the visible, a higher principle exists. The second one extends his arm and his hand horizontally underlining that all truth comes to us from the testimony of the senses, while carrying the Ethics with the other arm.

Strangely, these are the only two books in the stanza whose names appear in Italian (Timeo, Etica) and not in Latin. As the art critic Eugenio Battisti (1924-1989) observed:

If we (…) examine the titles of the works respectively held by Plato and Aristotle, we see the philosopher of the Academy holding the Timaeus, that is to say the most Aristotelian and the most systematic of his works and the Stagirite, the Nicomachean Ethics, that is to say the most Platonic of his works.

Even the choice of the colors of the clothes emphasizes complementarity: Plato is dressed in red (fire) and purple (ether); Aristotle in blue (water) and yellow (earth).

The colors of the clothes of the two philosophers symbolize the four elements: Plato is dressed in red (fire) and purple (ether); Aristotle in blue (water) and yellow (earth).

If the whole fresco cuts the world in two between Platonists and Aristotelians, both walk together towards what is in front of them and behind the spectator who looks: towards the fresco of Theology with the Trinity in the center without forgetting the monstrance and the imposing altar on which is marked « JV-LI-VS PON TI CUS ». How generous of the Church to welcome so many pagans into its midst!

Plato and Aristote walk toward this alter in front of them, on which one can read twice (in the center and on the top): « Julius »

Raphael however communicates a great sense of movement. In the same way that the Dutch painter Rembrandt, in his 17th century masterpiece The Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq, known as The Night Watch, broke with the formal representations of the dignitaries of the city guilds, Raphael here drew a line under the frozen and static representations of the series of « great men » often decorating the palaces and libraries of the great princes and lords in the style of his master Perugino.

His fresco, like Leonardo’s Last Supper in Milan, is organized as a sequence of small groups of three or four people conversing with a great thinker or each other, never out of sync with what is happening around them. In this sense, Raphael translated into images, and thus made accessible to the eyes of the spectators, that harmonic unity transcending the multiple so sought after by the commissioners.

Raphael and Inghirami did not hesitate to use portraits of people living in their time to represent historical figures. In addition to themselves, there are their patrons, colleagues and other personalities whom they hoped to please or charm.

In the foreground, four groups are shown.

Raphael’s impresario, the Pope’s chief librarian, Tommaso Inghirami as Epicurus in Raphael’s fresco. He wears not a laurel wreath, but oak leaves, the coat of arms of Pope Julius II.

On the left, Epicurus (N° 25), here with the features of Inghirami writing the setting of the play. Born in Samos like Pythagoras, he wears here, not a crown of laurels, reward given to great orators, but a crown of oak leaves, symbols that we find in the coat of arms of pope Julius II.

Some historians believe that Inghirami was a Dionysian follower of Orphism, another pre-Socratic current. Dionysus is indeed the brother of Apollo and according to some, their teachings are one and the same.

As mentioned above, shortly after Raphael’s death (1520), Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto published a treatise in which Inghirami defends rhetoric and denies any value of philosophy, his main argument being that everything written is already in the mystical and mythological texts of Orpheus and his followers.

In Rome, the scholars of the time knew Epicurus mainly through their readings of Cicero for whom Epicurus was not a debauchee but someone who sought the noblest pleasure. Cicero had a friendship with an Epicurean philosopher, a certain Phaedrus, as it happens the nickname of Inghirami…

Finally, on the extreme left, there is an old bearded man, the Greek thinker Metrodorus (N° 26), disciple of Anaxagoras and for whom it is « the acting spirit » that organized the World. In front of him, a newborn baby. Together they could symbolize the birth of truth (the child) and wisdom (the old man) and experience.

Pythagoras of Samos, in The Philosophy. On the slate, at the bottom, the famous Tetraktys, at the top, the harmonic ratios of the musical scale.

Next to him, a little more in the center, the imposing figure of Pythagoras (N° 22) (whom the Italian historian Georgio Vasari mistook for the evangelist Saint Matthew), seated with a book, an inkwell and a pencil, writing surrounded by visibly intrigued people. Behind him, seated on the left, an old man, representing Boethius (N° 23), Roman author, in the sixth century, of a treatise on music, the first part of which evokes « the harmony of the spheres », tries to look at what he is writing in his book. Without capturing a moment of potential transformation, as Leonardo knew how to do, the scene is obviously inspired by his unfinished painting, the Adoration of the Magi.

At his feet, a black slate with the famous Tetraktys and a diagram of musical intervals (see our section in this article on Pythagoras).

Since it is totally unthinkable that it is Averroes (banned from the Church, as said, by Aquinas), the turbaned man who seems to admire him could be Avicenna (Ibn Sina) (N° 24). This Persian physician, influenced by the thought of both Hippocrates and Galen, in his Qanûn (of Medecine), operates a vast medico-philosophical synthesis of Aristotle‘s logic (which he corrects) and neo-Platonism, compatible with monotheism.

It could also be Al Fârâbi (872-950), another Arab scientist and musician who sought to reconcile faith, reason and science with the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, whose translations from Greek into Arabic he had made. Avicenna admired him and the title of one of Al Fârâbî’s works leaves no ambiguity: The Harmony of the Opinions of the Two Sages: Plato the Divine and Aristotle.

Moreover, given his position on the side of the Platonists, although he wears a white turban, it is totally excluded that he is Averroes (Ibn Rushd), an author struck down by Aquinas (see the paintings showing The Triumph of Saint Thomas) and then by the Neoplatonists of Florence for having denied the immortality of the individual soul.

More in the center of the fresco, two isolated figures immersed in their thoughts. The first, on the left, appears to have been added later by Raphael and is not in his drawing. The man is dozing on a cube, a Pythagorean volume par excellence. It is thought to be Heraclitus of Ephesus (No. 19) (an Ionian pre-Socratic for whom « there is nothing permanent but change ») with the features of Michelangelo. This sculptor fascinated Raphael, not only for his gifts in drawing, anatomy and architecture, but also for his spirit of independence from a pope he considered tyrannical.

It should be noted that the Moses that Michelangelo sculpted for the tomb of Julius II is said to be looking at him with anger because the artist captured the moment when Moses, coming down from Mount Sinai with the Tables of the Law, noticed that the Hebrew people had returned to worshiping idols, such as « the Golden Calf ». Irritated by this return to idolatry, Moses broke the Tables of the Law.

From Pythagoras to Plato.
One detail raises questions: Anaximander of Miletus places his right foot on a cubic block of marble whose volume seems to be eight times smaller than the one on which Heraclitus of Ephesus rests. However, to solve the problem of Delos (the duplication of the volume of the cube) it is necessary to wait for the Pythagorean and friend of Plato, Archytas of Taranto.

Anaximander of Miletus (N° 20) (and not Parmenides), also a representative of the Ionian school, stands behind Heraclitus and seems to contest the demonstration of Pythagoras (representative of the so-called « Italian » school). Behind him, a young man with long hair, looks at the spectator. Dressed in a white toga, an attribute of the Pythagoreans, he is once again Pico della Mirandola (N° 21), triumphant and surrounded by Pythagoras and two of his disciples. Legend has it that Raphael portrayed Hypatia of Alexandria (c. 370-415), a mathematician who headed the Neoplatonist school in Alexandria. When one of the cardinals examined the painting and knew that the woman depicted was Hypatia, he is said to have ordered that she be removed from it. Raphael is said to have obeyed, but replaced her with the effeminate figure of a nephew of Pope Julius II, Francesco Maria Della Rovere, future Duke of Urbino…

If this is really Pico della Mirandola, it would be a superb piece of praise, for appearing in both Philosophy and Theology, the two images of Pico, reminiscent of the kneeling angel looking at the viewer while pointing at St. John the Baptist in Leonardo’s Madonna of the Rocks, can contemplate each other!

The second isolated figure, nonchalantly spread out on the stairs, is the cynical and hedonistic philosopher Diogenes of Sinope (N° 18), here presented as an ascetic, but in the Aristotelian tradition.

The geometer (Hippocrates of Chios?).
Slate of the geometer.

Then, in the center right, an inspiring group of young people, amazed by their discoveries and exchanging their complicit glances with their comrades, around a surveyor who is examining or drawing with a compass parallel lines inside a hexagonal star on a slate laid on the ground.

This is an illustration of a theorem that neither Euclid (an Aristotelian) nor Archimedes mentioned, although the identity of one or the other is attributed to this figure in the guise of the architect Donato Bramante.

It could be, it is my conviction, the geometer Hippocrates of Chios (N° 17) of which Aristotle speaks in great good. He wrote the first mathematics textbook, entitled The Elements of Geometry. This work precedes Euclid’s Elements by a century. Unless we are talking about the architect Leon Battista Alberti, whose church in Mantua may have inspired Bramante and after all, author, in 1435, of De Pictura, a treatise (of Aristotelian spirit) on perspective.

However, in 1485, in his treatise on architecture De re Aedificatoria, Alberti, in a passage (IX, 5) that may have been of interest to the author of the fresco, stressed that:

“Beauty consists in a harmony and in an agreement of the parts with the whole, in accordance with determinations of number, proportionality and order such as the harmony requires it, that is to say the absolute and sovereign law of the nature.”

On the edge of the tunic: R.V.S.M. (Raphael Vrbinas Sua Manu, meaning: « By the Hand of Raphael of Urbino »).

Finally, to add to the mystery, on the collar of the tunic of this figure can be read: « R.V.S.M. » (Raphael Vrbinas Sua Manu), meaning « By the Hand of Raphael of Urbino »).

For what the surveyor is addressing on the slate is the role played by the diagonals of the hexagon. The answer is provided by the geometrical composition, in the form of a hexagon, which underlies the entire construction of the perspective of the fresco.

The diagonals show a beautiful complementarity between the arithmetic mean and the harmonic mean (see authors diagram below).

It is a masterly demonstration in the field of the visible, of the concept structuring the whole theme of the work: complementarity, the foundation of universal harmony.

By tracing the horizon line and the lines of escape of the perspective from the bottom of the cornices of each arch, the isosceles triangle OAB appears. By inscribing it in a circle whose center is the central vanishing point (O), we obtain a hexagon. By tracing the diagonals (XB) of this hexagon, we obtain both the arithmetic mean (Y) and the harmonic mean (Z). The trick is done! For their complementarity illustrates marvelously the guiding motif of the whole Signature Chamber: the universal harmony that orders the beauty of the proportions of the universe.
Credit: Karel Vereycken

On the right, the geographers Ptolemy (No. 16) and Strabo (No. 15) (in the guise of Baldassare Castiglione, the head of the Pope’s army and a friend of Raphael’s?), who is identified without real evidence with Zoroaster but to whom Pico della Mirandola indeed refers, stand face to face. The first shows the Earth as a sphere, the second a globe of the Heavens.

Finally, on the far right of the first register, with the features of Raphael, the legendary painter of the court of Alexander the Great, Apelles of Cos (N° 13). It should be remembered that, during his lifetime, Raphael was nicknamed « the Apelles of his time ». Next to him, his rival, the Greek painter Protogenes (N° 14) in the guise of Raphael’s colleague, the sulfurous but virtuoso fresco artist Sodoma. Coming from the world of the craftsmen, it is a question here of marking the entry of two painters-decorators into « the court of the big guys » and making their first steps in the world of philosophy.

Raphael, preparatory drawing for Plato and Aristotle. In the final version, their respective sizes have been equalized. Note the absence of the titles of the books.

On the steps, the central subject, as we have said, Plato and Aristotle. Plato‘s features in the fresco have nothing to do with any supposed portrait by Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo was born in 1452 and was only 56 years old when the fresco was painted. Raphael is said to have used the image of a bust of Plato discovered in Athens in the ruins of the ancient academy. In reality, the famous drawing of an old man (Turin), supposed to be a self-portrait of Leonardo and resembling the image of Plato in the School of Athens, has been proven to date from the 19th Century.

In the crowd to the left of Plato is Socrates (no. 6), his teacher, whose face was known to everyone from Roman statues. The identification of the other figures remains largely hypothetical. One thinks of the speakers of Plato‘s dialogues. Close to Socrates, his old friend Crito (N° 4). Behind Socrates, the Athenian intellectual Isocrates (N° 7) who had withdrawn from political life and although close to Socrates, set himself up as Plato‘s rival. Close to the latter, the five interlocutors of Plato‘s dialogue, Parmenides. Among them, Parmenides (N° 8), considered at the origin of the concept of the One and the multiple, and the pre-Socratic thinker Zeno of Elaea, known for his philosophical paradoxes.

The Athenian general (here dressed as a Roman soldier) Alcibiades (N° 3) and the young man in blue could be Phaedo of Elis (N° 5) or Xenophon, both listening to Socrates counting on his fingers, a gesture suggesting his famous dialectic.

All around the Greek thinkers, other figures are stirring. Behind general Alcibiades, a figure (perhaps a librarian) holds back another running figure, begging him not to disturb the ongoing exchanges between philosophers and scientists.

At the far left, a man with a hat enters the stage. It could be Plotinus (N° 2), a founding figure of Neoplatonism admired by cardinal Bessarion, accompanied by Porphyry (N° 1), another Neoplatonist who brought his biography of Pythagoras as a messenger from the ancient world.

In the Renaissance, the realization of a fresco (painted on fresh plaster) was no longer linked to the position of the scaffolding (bridges) but to the decision of the workers and artists as to the surface to be realized in a day (giornata) of work. Generally it was a surface between 1 and 4 m2.
Here the giornata of the School of Athens.

D. JUSTICE

Justice
A. Fortitude, B. Prudence and C. Temperance.
1. Justinian, 2. Tribonian, 3. pope Paul III, 4. Antonio Del Monte,

5. pope Leo X, 6. pope Gregory IX (Julius II), 7. pope Clement VII.

On top, in the lunette (half moon), the three virtues represented would be Fortitude (A), Prudence (B) and Temperance (C). Together with Justice, they constitute the four cardinal (profane) virtues. The central female figure, holding a mirror, refers to Prudence. On the left, Fortitude holds an oak branch, an allusion to the della Rovere family from which Julius II, the pope who commissioned the frescoes, descended.

Below, once again, complementarity is at work. On the left, painted by Lorenzo Lotto, the Roman emperor Justinian I (N° 1) receives the Pandects (the civil law) from the Byzantine jurist Tribonian (N° 2).

On the right, in the guise of Julius II, Pope Gregory IX (N° 6) promulgates the Decretals; a masterly sum of canon law which he had ordered to be compiled and published in 1234.

On his right (thus on the left of the spectator), one sees a cardinal, in purple dress, having the features of the cardinal Jean de Médicis, future pope Leo X (N° 5). The two other cardinals behind him would be Alessandro Farnese, the future pope Paul III (N° 3), and Antonio Del Monte (N° 4). And to his left (right for the viewer) a cardinal representing Cardinal Julius de Medici, the future Pope Clement VII (N° 7). With your image immortalized on a fresco in the right place, your career to become pope would seem to be better engaged!

The fact that Julius II is represented wearing a beard allows to date the fresco beyond June 1511. Indeed, the pontiff, who left Rome beardless to wage war, then let his beard grow and vowed not to shave it off until he had liberated Italy. He returned to Rome in June. Historians point out that the prominence of the pope’s portrait indicates how the theme of the decoration of the Chambers was transformed, around 1511, into that of the glorification of the papacy. Hence, in this way “Justice” becomes the right of Julius II to impose « his » justice.


E. POETRY

(« PARNASSUS”)

Poetry (“Parnassus”).

The poets:
1. Alcaeus of Mytilene, 2. Corinna, 3. Petrarch, 4. Anacreon, 5. Sappho, 6. Ennius, 7. Dante, 8. Homer, 9. Virgil, 10. Statius (Poliziano), 11. Apollo, 12. Tebaldeo, 13. Boccaccio, 14. Tibullus, 15. Ariosto,

16. Propertius, 17. Ovid, 18. Sannazaro, 19. Pindar.

The nine muses:
A. Thalia, B. Clio, C. Euterpe, D. Calliope, E. Polyhymnia, F. Melpomene, G. Terpsichore, H. Urania.
I. Erato.

A window reduces the space available for the fresco to a large lunette where the characters are divided into small groups on a semi-circular line.

The underlying idea here, taken from St. Thomas, is that truth is made accessible to man, either by Revelation (Theology) or by Reason (Philosophy). For the Neoplatonic school, this truth manifests itself to our senses through Beauty (poetry and music).

The scene painted here takes place near Delphi, at the top of Parnassus, the sacred mountain of Apollo and home of the Muses of Greek mythology.

The large window around which the fresco is organized offers a view, beyond the cortile (small circular temple) of Bramante, on the hill of Belvedere (Mons Vaticanus), where shows were given and where, in ancient times, Apollo was honored, which earned him the name of Apolinis.

Apollo is the patron of musicians: « It is through the Muses and the archer Apollo that there are singers and citharists », says Hesiod. He even inspires nature: when he passes by, « the nightingales, swallows and cicadas sing ». His music soothes the wild animals and moves the stones. For the Greeks, music and dance are not only entertainments: they allow to heal men by tuning the discords that eat away at their souls and thus to bear the misery of their condition.

At the top of the hill, seven laurels. Near the Castalia spring, Apollo (N° 11), crowned with laurel leaves and in the center of the composition, is tuning around him the nine muses (A to I) playing on his lyre.

On the left side Calliope (D), the one « who has a beautiful voice » and represents the epic poetry, and on the right, Erato (I), « the lovable one » who represents the lyric and erotic poetry as well as the nuptial song. Each presides over the tuning of the other’s chorus: on the left, behind Calliope, Thalia (A) (« the flourishing, the abundant »), Clio (B) (« who is famous » and represents history) and Euterpe (C) (« the joyful » who represents music). Finally, just behind Erato, Polyhymnia (E) (« the one who says many hymns » and represents rhetoric, eloquence and pantomime), Melpomene (F) (« the singer » who represents tragedy and song); Terpsichore (G) (« the charming dancer ») and Urania (H) (« the celestial one » who represents astronomy).

And you don’t have to be Pythagoras to count 7 laurels on the mountain and remember that nine muses plus Apollo make… ten.

As one of the square frescoes on the ceiling reminds us, Apollo had triumphed over Marsyas in a fight to seize the lyre, considered as the divine instrument capable of leading souls to heaven, better than the flute which only excites the lower passions. By detaching the man from his immediate material concerns, the victorious lyre allowed to arouse the divine love in men. In addition, the Romans knew of a seven-stringed lyre, a Pythagorean legacy, the number seven referring to the seven heavenly bodies orbiting the central fire.

For the Pythagoreans and also Heraclitus, the imitation of the « harmony of the spheres », thanks to the harmonies produced by the seven strings, allows the purification of the souls.
Apollo at Mount Parnassus, woodcut by Hans von Kulmbach, published in 1502.

However, strangely enough, Apollo is not holding a traditional four-stringed lyre, but a lira da braccio. If Apollo plays here the lyre with arms, the muses Calliope, Erato and the sibyl Sappho hold lyres identical to those of the sarcophagus known as « of the Muses » of the Museo delle Terme in Rome.

In many representations of the 16th century, the lyre is played by a group of angels or mythological characters, such as Orpheus and Apollo, but also King David, Homer or the Muses. Among its interpreters, we can count Leonardo da Vinci. The instrument is essentially designed like a violin, but with a wider fingerboard and a flat bridge that allows for chordal playing. The lyre generally has seven strings: four like a violin, augmented by an additional low string (making five), and two strings beyond the fingerboard, which are not played but serve as a drone and resonate in the octave. Now, Raphael, in order to create a perfect harmony with the number of muses around Apollo, will increase the number of strings from seven to nine, that is to say seven adjustable plus two drones. This detail concerning the lyre seems to have been modified in time. Indeed, an engraved reproduction, from 1517, probably from drawings prior to the fresco, or from its preliminary project, by Marcantonio Raimondi, reveals a state quite different from what we see today.

Marcantonio Raimondi, engraving (ca. 1517) after Raphael’s Mount Parnassus in the Signing Chamber.

The composition is less dense and highlights, like the School of Athens, several groups of three figures each. What is striking at first is that the ancient lyre played by Apollo with his fingers rests on his thigh, while in the present version, Apollo vibrates the strings of his lira da braccio with a bow, while looking up to the sky, in accordance with the fresco on the ceiling where are inscribed the words of Virgil: « Inspired by the spirit » (NVMINE AFFLATVR).

All around, eighteen poets are divided into several groups. The identification of some is unequivocal, that of others more doubtful. They are all chained to each other by gestures and looks, forming a kind of continuous crescent.

At the top left, the father of Latin poetry Ennius (N° 6), seated, listens raptly to the song of Homer (N° 8), while Dante (N° 7), further back, looks at Virgil (N° 9) who turns towards him, the Roman poet Statius (N° 10), in the guise of Poliziano, at his side. The latter was a disciple of the florentine Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino. To represent the historical figures, Raphael drew inspiration from Roman statuary. For the face of Homer, for example, he adopted the dramatic expression of the Laocoon, which he had found in Rome in 1506.

At the bottom left are the Greek poet Alcaeus of Mytilene (N°1), the Greek poetess Corinna (N° 2), Petrarch (N° 3) as well as the Greek poet Anacréon (N° 4). In the final version, two characters who leave the frame came to enrich the composition. On the left, the sibyl Sappho (N° 5) as indicated by a tablet. Considered the first poetess of ancient Greece, she lived in the seventh and sixth centuries BC. According to the Homeric Hymns, it is her who would have built the first lyre to accompany the poetic recitation. The only woman in entire fresco is painted with a monumentality that is reminiscent of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel.

Sappho is the counterpart of Pindar (N° 19), and not Horace as is claimed, considered one of the greatest lyric poets of Greece and for whom Apollo was the symbol of civilization. Pindar is here in conversation with the Italian poet Jacopo Sannazaro (N° 18), dressed in blue and standing, and above them Ovid (N° 17).

On the right, on the side of the mount, besides Pindar, Sannazaro and Ovid, five other poets and orators : Antonio Tebaldeo (N° 12), with his back turned towards Apollo and under the features of Baldassare Castiglione ? ), Boccaccio (N° 13), behind, Tibullus (N° 14), Ariosto (N° 15), Propertius (N° 16), under the features of the cardinal poet very « Petrarquist » Pietro Bembo, a friend of Inghirami and enemy of Erasmus, and at his sides two unknown poets said « poets of the future judging the past ».

The identification of these characters remains largely hypothetical and controversial. To arrive at satisfactory results, it would be necessary according to the historian Albert Chastel, to find precise correspondences between the nine muses, nine classic poets and nine modern, in addition to the grouping by poetic genre.

After the death of Julius II, Pope Leo X made the Stanza della signatura his music room, replacing the books of his predecessor (which were moved to the large library on the lower floor) with intarsiae. Leo X will also have the pavement completed.


F. THE MOSAIC ON THE FLOOR

Mosaic of the Chamber of the signature:
A. Coat of arms of the pope, B. Spiral arm, C. Star of David, reference to the Jewish heritage.
Detail of the mosaic of the Chamber of Signature. We can read IVLIUS II PONT MAX.

The mosaic decorating the floor is said to be « cosmatesque », after the name of Cosmati, an old family of craftsmen and specialized in mosaics with four colors. Some materials come from Roman ruins, the green marble of the Peloponnese in Greece, the porphyry of Aswan in Egypt, and the yellow marble of North Africa. The white marble comes from the famous marble quarries of Carrara where Michelangelo chose his materials.

As on the ceiling, in the center of the room the coat of arms of the pope (A), this time inside a square (his earthly reign) inscribed in a circle (his theological mission). This first circle is surrounded by four spiral arms, each of which creates a new circular motif (B). This pattern is believed to be of Jewish origin. The Star of David (C) appears several times in this creation vortex. The doctrine of the four worlds, described in cabalistic cosmology, underlines their dynamic unity.

After all, for Giles de Viterbe, the recent discovery of Jewish mystical writings was of the same importance as the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus. Let us recall that for Julius II, like Plato and Pythagoras, Moses, whom Michelangelo sculpted for his tomb, already announced the later triumph of the Church of Rome which would, under his direction, synthesize them.

Conclusion

Thus, the whole theme of the « Chamber of the Signature » finds its full coherence with the idea of harmony and concordance. But when we look more closely, we see that it is only a question of « complementarity » at the level of forms and in the service of a temporal power disguised as a divine mission. Raphael, a talented painter, submitted to this by providing the product for which he was paid. He would end up painting things increasingly decadent by submitting to the pagan whims of the papal banker Agostino Chigi for the decoration of his villa, the Farnesina.

With the « Chamber of the Signature », we are far from the famous « coincidence of opposites » dear to Pythagoras, Plato, Nicholas of Cues and today Schiller Institute’s President Helga Zepp-LaRouche, which allows, in an uncompromising search for truth and for the love of humanity, to overcome paradoxes and solve a great number of problems from a higher point of view.

By piling up allegories and symbols, if it impresses, this masterly work ends up suffocating us. By the rules of its composition, it can only sink into the theatrical and the didactic. In a universe purged of the slightest irony or surprise, no real metaphor will be able to awaken us. And although Raphael tried to bring some life into it, the spectator is fatally left with a vast sediment of fossilized ideas, as dead as the most glorious ruins of the Roman Empire.

Brief bibliography:

  • Julius II, Ivan Cloulas, Fayard, Paris 1990;
  • Léon X et son siècle, Gonzague Truc, Grasset, Paris, 1941;
  • Une histoire des empires maritimes, Cyrille P. Coutensais, CNRS, 2013;
  • L’Humanisme, l’Europe de la Renaissance, André Chastel and Robert Klein, Editions Skira, Geneva, 1995;
  • L’Arétin ou l’insolence du plaisir, Bertrand Levergeois, Fayard, Paris, 1999;
  • Giorgio Vasari, l’homme des Médicis, Grasset, Paris, 1995;
  • Marsile Ficin et l’Art, André Chastel, Droz, Geneva, 1996 ;
  • Raphael and the Pope’s librarian, Nathaniel Silver, Ingrid Rowland, Paul Holberton Publishing, 2019;
  • Raphael’s Stanza della Signatura, Meaning and Invention, Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier, Cambridge University Press, 2002;
  • Pythagoras and Renaissance Europe, Finding Heaven, Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier, Cambridge University Press, 2009;
  • Raphael, Stephanie Buck and Peter Hohenstatt, Könemann, 1998;
  • The Intellectual Background of the School of Athens: Tracking Divine Wisdom in the Rome of Julius II, Ingrid D. Rowland, 1996;
  • Pagans in the Church: The School of Athens in Religious Contex, Timothy Verdon, 1996;
  • Raphael’s School of Athens, Marcia Hall, Cambridge University Press, 1997;
  • Raphael, Konrad Oberhuber, Editions du Regard, Paris, 1999;
  • L’énigme de la Segnatura, Raphael and Sodoma, André-Charles Coppier, Paris, 1928;
  • Raphael, John Pope-Hennessy, Harper & Row, London, 1970;
  • Who was Raphael, Nello Ponente, Editions Skira, Geneva, 1967:
  • Lives and doctrines of the illustrious philosophers, Diogenes Laërtius, La pochothèque, Paris, 1999;
  • Erasmus and Italy, Augustin Renaudet, Editions Droz, Paris, 2000 ;
  • Erasmus among us, Léon Halkin, Fayard, 1987 ;
  • Comment la folie d’Erasme sauva notre civilisation, Karel Vereycken, 2005 ;
  • The egg without shadow of Piero della Francesca, Karel Vereycken, 2007;
  • Albrecht Dürer against neo-platonic melancholy, Karel Vereycken, 2007.

NOTES:

* For an in-depth treatment of the subject, see Karel Vereycken, Albrecht Dürer against Neo-Platonic Melancholy, 2007.

**We can see here where certain sects, notably Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophists, draw their inspiration. Some still insist on demonstrating that Pythagoras, who believed in the transmigration of souls and therefore their possible reincarnation in animals or plants, was a vegetarian. Diogenes Laertius tells us that one day, « passing by someone who was mistreating his dog, it is said that he [Pythagoras, in a joking tone] was moved by compassion and addressed the individual with these words: ‘Stop and do not strike again, for it is the soul of a man who was my friend, and I recognized him by hearing the sound of his voice’ « . A whole series of authors ended up falling into numerology and irrational esoteric mumbo-jubo, in particular Francesco Zorzi, Agrippa of Nettesheim and Paracelsus.

Merci de partager !

Avicenna and Ghiberti’s role in the invention of perspective during the Renaissance

By Karel Vereycken, Paris, France.

Same article in FR, même article en FR.

No visitor to Florence can miss the gilded bronze reliefs decorating the Porta del Paradiso (Gates of Paradise), the main gate of the Baptistery of Florence right in front of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore surmounted by Filippo Brunelleschi’s splendid cupola.

In this article, Karel Vereycken sheds new light on the contribution of Arab science and Ghiberti’s crucial role in giving birth to the Renaissance.

Florentine Baptistery with its bronze doors. On the right, the eastern gates, on the left, the southern ones.

Historical context

The Baptistery, erected on what most Florentines thought to be the site of a Roman temple dedicated to the Roman God of Mars, is one of the oldest buildings in the city, constructed between 1059 and 1128 in the Florentine Romanesque style. The Italian poet Dante Alighieri and many other notable Renaissance figures, including members of the Medici family, were baptized in this baptistery.

During the Renaissance, in Florence, corporations and guilds competed for the leading role in design and construction of great projects with illustrious artistic creations.

While the Arte dei Lana (corporation of wool producers) financed the Works (Opera) of the Duomo and the construction of its cupola, the Arte dei Mercantoni di Calimala (the guild of merchants dealing in buying foreign cloth for finishing and export), took care of the Baptistery and financed the embellishment of its doors.

The Gates of Paradise

The Baptistry, an octagonal building, has four entrances (East, West, North and South) of which only three (South, North and East) have sets of artistically important bronze doors with relief sculptures. Three dates are key : 1329, 1401 and 1424.

  • In 1329, the Calimala Guild, on Giotto‘s recommendation, ordered Andrea Pisano (1290-1348) to decorate a first set of doors (initialy installed as the East doors, i.e. seen when one leaves the Cathedral, but today South). These consist of 28 quatrefoil (clover-shaped) panels, with the 20 top panels depicting scenes from the life of St. John the Baptist (the patron of the edifice). The 8 lower panels depict the eight virtues of hope, faith, charity, humility, fortitude, temperance, justice, and prudence, praised by Plato in his Republic and represented during the XVIth century by the Flemish humanist painter and reader of Petrarch, Peter Brueghel the Elder. Construction took 8 years, from 1330 till 1338.
Andrea Pisano, South Gate of the Baptistery (started in 1329), details. Right: baptism of Jesus. Left : Baptism of the multitude.
  • In 1401, after having narrowly won the competition with Brunelleschi, the 23 year old and inexperienced young goldsmith Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455), is commissioned by the Calima Guild to decorate the doors which are today the North Gate. Ghiberti cast the bronze high reliefs using a method known as lost-wax casting, a technique that he had to reinvent entirely since it was lost since the fall of the Roman Empire. One of the reasons Ghiberti won the contest, was that his technique was so advanced that it required 20 % less (7 kg per panel) bronze than that of his competitors, bronze being a dense material far more costly than marble. His technique, applied to the entire decoration of the North Gate, as compared to his competitors, would save some estimated 100 kg of bronze. And since in 1401, with the plague regularly hitting Florence, economic conditions were poor, even the wealthy Calimala took into account the total costs of the program.

    The bronze doors are comprised of 28 panels, with 20 panels depicting the life of Christ from the New Testament. The 8 lower panels show the four Evangelists and the Church Fathers Saint Ambrose, Saint Jerome, Saint Gregory, and Saint Augustine. The construction took 24 years.
Ghiberti’s North Gate
Lorenzo Ghiberti, North gate (started in 1401) during recent restoration.
  • In 1424, Ghiberti, at age 46, was given—unusually, with no competition—the task of also creating the East Gate. Only in 1452 did Ghiberti, then seventy-four years old, install the last bronze panels, since construction lasted this time 27 years! According to Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) later judged them « so beautiful they would grace the entrance to Paradise ».
Lorenzo Ghiberti, « Gates of Paradise » (started in 1424, finished in 1452)

Over two generations, a bevy of well paid assistants and pupils were trained by Ghiberti, including exceptional artists, such as Luca della Robbia, Donatello, Michelozzo, Benozzo Gozzoli, Bernardo Cennini, Paolo Uccello, Andrea del Verrocchio and Ghiberti’s sons, Vittore and Tommaso. And over time, the seventeen-foot-tall, three-ton bronze doors became an icon of the Renaissance, one of the most famous works of art in the world.

In 1880, the French sculptor Auguste Rodin was inspired by it for his own Gates of Hell on which he worked for 38 year

Revolution

Lorenzo Ghiberti’s self-portrait, like his panels, proud to emerge out of a flat surface. Bronze bust of the Gates of Paradise.

Of utmost interest for our discussion here is the dramatic shift in conception and design of the bronze relief sculptures that occurred between the North and the East Gates, because it reflects how bot the artist as well as his patrons used the occasion to share with the broader public their newest ideas, inventions and exciting discoveries.

The themes of the North Gate of 1401 were inspired by scenes from the New Testament, except for the panel made by Ghiberti, « The Sacrifice of Isaac », which had won him the selection competition the same year. To complete the ensemble, it was therefore only logical that the East Gate of 1424 would take up the themes of the Old Testament.

Originally, it was the scholar and former chancellor of Florence Leonardo Bruni (1369-1444) who planned an iconography quite similar to the two previous doors. But, after heated discussions, his proposal was rejected for something radically new. Instead of realizing 28 panels, it was decided, for aesthetic reasons, to reduce the number of panels to only 10 much larger square reliefs, between borders containing statuettes in niches and medallions with busts.

Order of the panels.

Hence, since each of the 10 chapters of the Old Testament contains several events, the total number of scenes illustrated, within the 10 panels has risen to 37 and all appear in perspective :

  1. Adam and Eve (The Creation of Man)
  2. Cain and Abel (Jalousie is the origin of Sin)
  3. Noah (God’s punishment)
  4. Abraham and Isaac (God is just)
  5. Jacob and Esau
  6. Joseph
  7. Moses
  8. Joshua
  9. David (Good commandor)
  10. Solomon and the Queen of Sheba

The general theme is that of salvation based on Latin and Greek patristic tradition. Very shocking for the time, Ghiberti places in the center of the first panel the creation of Eve, that of Adam appearing at the bottom left.

After the first three panels, focusing on the theme of sin, Ghiberti began to highlight more clearly the role of God the Savior and the foreshadowing of Christ’s coming. Subsequent panels are easier to understand. One example is the panel with Isaac, Jacob and Esau where the figures are merged with the surrounding landscape so that the eye is led toward the main scene represented in the top right.

Many of the sources for these scenes were written in ancient Greek, and since knowledge of Greek at that time was not so common, it appears that Ghiberti’s “theological advisor” was Ambrogio Traversari (1386-1439), with whom he had many exchanges.

Traversari was a close friend of Nicolas of Cusa (1401-1464), a protector of Piero della Francesca (1412-1492) and a key organizer of the Ecumenical Council of Florence of 1438-1439, which attempted to put an end to the schism separating the Church of the East from that of the West.

Perspective

The bronze reliefs, known for their vivid illusion of deep space in relief, are one of the revolutionary events that epitomize the Renaissance. In the foreground are figures in high relief, which gradually become less protruding thereby exploiting the full illusionistic potential of the stiacciato technique later brought to its high point by Donatello. Using this form of “inbetweenness”, they integrate in one single image, what appears both as a painting, a low relief as well as a high relief. Or maybe one has to look at it another way: these are flat images traveling gradually from a surface into the full three dimensions of life, just as Ghiberti, in one of the first self-portraits of art history, reaches his head out of a bronze medal to look down on the viewers. The artist desired much more than perspective, he wanted breathing space!

This new approach will influence Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1517). As art historian Daniel Arasse points out :

(…) It was in connection with the practice of Florentine bas-relief, that of Ghiberti at the Gate of Paradise (…) that Leonardo invented his way of painting. As Manuscript G (folio 23b) would much later state, ‘the field on which an object is painted is a capital thing in painting. (…) The painter’s aim is to make his figures appear to stand out from the field’ – and not, one might add, to base his art on the alleged transparency of that same field. It is by the science of shadow and light that the painter can obtain an effect of emergence from the field, an effect of relief, and not by that of the linear perspective.

Donatello

Herod’s Banquet, bas relief of Donatello, Sienna.

At the beginning of the 15th century, several theoretical approaches existed and eventuall contradicted each other. Around 1423-1427, the talentful sculptor Donatello, a young collaborator of Ghiberti, created his Herod’s Banquet, a bas-relief in the stiacciato technique for the baptismal font of the Siena Baptistery.

In this work, the sculptor deploys a harmonious perspective with a single central vanishing point. Around the same time, in Florence, the painter Massacchio (1401-1428) used a similar construction in his fresco The Trinity.

As we will see, Ghiberti, starting from the anatomy of the eye, opposed such an abstract approach in his works as well as in his writings and explored, as early as 1401, other geometrical models, called « binocular ». (see below).

Then, as far as our knowledge reaches, in 1407, Brunelleschi had conducted several experiments on this question, most likely based on the ideas presented by another friend of Cusa, the Italian astronomer Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli (1397-1482), in the latter’s now lost treaty Della Prospettiva. What we do know is that Brunelleschi sought above all to demonstrate that all perspective is an optical illusion.

Finally, it was in 1435, that the humanist architect Leon Baptista Alberti (1406-1472), in his treatise Della Pictura, attempted, on the basis of Donatello’s approach, to theorize single vanishing point perspective as a representation of a harmonious and unified three-dimensional space on a flat surface. Noteworthy but frustrating for us today is the fact that Alberti’s treatise doesn’t contain any illustrations.

In the Codex Madrid II, Leonardo demonstrated the limits and principled dysfunctionality of Alberti’s perspective.

However, Leonardo, who read and studied Ghiberti’s writings on, would use the latter’s arguments to indicate the limits and even demonstrate the dysfunctionality of Alberti’s “perfect” perspective construction especially when one goes beyond a 30 degres angle.

In the Codex Madrid, II, 15 v. da Vinci realizes that « as such, the perspective offered by a rectilinear wall is false unless it is corrected (…) ».

Perspectiva artificialis versus perspectiva naturalis

The minimum anatomical precondition to use Alberti’s abstract perspective model.

Alberti’s “perspectiva artificialis” is nothing but an abstraction, necessary and useful to represent a rational organization of space. Without this abstraction, it is fairly impossible to define with mathematical precision the relationships between the appearance of objects and the receding of their various proportions on a flat screen: width, height and depth.

From the moment that a given image on a flat screen was thought about as the intersection of a plane cutting a cone or pyramid, a method emerged for what was mistakenly considered as an “objective” representation of “real” three dimensional space, though it is nothing but an “anamorphosis”, i.e. a tromp-l’oeil or visual illusion.

What has to be underscored, is that this construction does away with the physical reality of human existence since it is based on an abstract construct pretending:

  • that man is a single eyed cyclops;
  • that vision emanates from one single point, the apex of the visual pyramid;
  • that the eye is immobile;
  • that the image is projected on a flat screen rather than on a curved retina.

Slanders and gossip

The crucial role of Ghiberti, an artist which “Ghiberti expert” Richard Krautheimer mistakenly presents as a follower of Alberti’s perspectiva artificialis, has been either ignored or downplayed.

Ghiberti’s unique manuscript, the three volumes of the Commentarii, which include his autobiography and which established him as the first modern historian of the fine arts, is not even fully translated into English or French and was only published in Italian in 1998.

Today, because of his attention to minute detail and figures « sculpted » with wavy and elegant lines, as well as the variety of plants and animals depicted, Ghiberti is generally presented as “Gothic-minded”, and therefore “not really” a Renaissance artist!

Giorgio Vasari, often acting as the paid PR man of the Medici clan, slanders Ghiberti by saying he wrote « a work in the vernacular in which he treated many different topics but arranged them in such a fashion that little can be gained from reading it. »

Admittedly, tension among humanists, was not uncommon. Self-educated craftsmen, such as Ghiberti and Brunelleschi on the one side, and heirs of wealthy wool merchants, such as Niccoli on the other side, came from entirely different worlds. For example, according to a story told by Guarino Veronese in 1413, Niccoli greeted Filippo Brunelleschi haughtily: « O philosopher without books, » to which Filippo replied with his legendary irony: « O books without philosopher ».

For sure, the Commentarii, are not written according to the rhetorical rules of those days. Written at the end of Ghiberti’s life, they may have simply been dictated to a poorly trained clerk who made dozens of spelling errors.

The humanists

Lorenzo Ghiberti, Gates of Paradise, the story of the Queen of Sheba visiting King Solomon. There is a lively crowd of people jostling to catch a glimpse casual of the symbolic bonding of Eastern and Western churches, via the meeting of Solomon and the Queen. It is believed that this scene represents the meeting on July 9, 1439 on the steps of Il Duomo in Florence, and was created at the demand of Ambrogio Traversari, the driving force behind the Ecumenical Council if Florence.

The Commentarii does reveal a highly educated author and a thinker having profound knowledge of many classical Greek and Arab thinkers. Ghiberti was not just some brilliant handcraft artisan but a typical “Renaissance man”.

In dialogue with Bruni, Traversari and the “manuscript hunter” Niccolo Niccoli, Ghiberti, who couldn’t read Greek but definitely knew Latin, was clearly familiar with the rediscovery of Greek and Arab science, a task undertaken by Boccaccio’s and Salutati’s “San Spirito Circle” whose guests (including Bruni, Traversari, Cusa, Niccoli, Cosimo di Medici, etc.) later would convene every week at the Santa Maria degli Angeli convent. Ghiberti exchanges moreover with Giovanni Aurispa, a collaborator of Traversari who brought back from Byzantium, years before Bessarion, the whole of Plato’s works to the West.

Amy R. Bloch, in her well researched study Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise, Humanism, History, and Artistic Philosophy in the Italian Renaissance (2016), writes that « Traverari and Niccoli can be tied directly to the origins of the project for the Gates and were clearly interested in sculptural commissions being planned for the Baptistery. On June 21, 1424, after the Calima requested from Bruni his program for the doors, Traversari wrote to Niccoli acknowledging, in only general terms, Niccoli’s ideas for the stories to be included and mentioning, without evident disapproval, that the guild had instead turned to Bruni for advice. »

Palla Strozzi

Ghiberti’s patron, sometimes advisor, and close associate was Palla Strozzi (1372-1462), who, besides being the the richest man in Florence with a gross taxable assets of 162,925 florins in 1427, including 54 farms, 30 houses, a banking firm with a capital of 45,000 florins, and communal bonds, was also a politician, a writer, a philosopher and a philologist whose library contained close to 370 volumes in 1462.

Just as Traversari and Bruni, Strozzi learned Latin and studied Greek under the direction of the Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras, invited to Florence by Salutati.

Ghiberti’s close relationship with Strozzi, writes Bloch, « gave him access to his manuscripts and, as importantly, to Strozzi’s knowledge of them. »

But there was more. « The relationship between Ghiberti and Palla Strozzi was so close that, when Palla went to Venice in 1424 as one of two Florentine ambassadors charged with negociating an alliance with the Venetians, Ghiberti accompanied him in his retinue. »

Strozzi was known as a real humanist, always looking to preserve peace while strongly opposing oligarchical rule, both in Florence as in Venice.

In fact it was Palla Strozzi, not Cosimo de’ Medici, who first set in motion plans for the first public library in Florence, and he intended for the sacristy of Santa Trinita to serve as its entryway. While Palla’s library was never realized due to the dramatic political conflict knows as the Albizzi Coup that led to his exile in 1434, Cosimo who got a free hand to rule over Florence, would make the library project his own.

A bold statement

Ghiberti begins the Commentarii with a bold and daring statement for a Christian man in a Christian world, about how the art of antiquity came to be lost:

The Christian faith was victorious in the time of Emperor Constantine and Pope Sylvester. Idolatry was persecuted to such an extent that all the statues and pictures of such nobility, antiquity an perfection were destroyed and broken in to pieces. And with the statues and pictures, the theoretical writings, the commentaries, the drawing and the rules for teaching such eminent and noble arts were destroyed.

Ghiberti understood the importance of multidisciplinarity for artists. According to him, “sculpture and painting are sciences of several disciplines nourished by different teachings”.

In book I of his Commentarii, Ghiberti gives a list of the 10 liberal arts that the sculptor and the painter should master : philosophy, history, grammar, arithmic, astronomy, geometry, perspective, theory of drawing, anatomy and medecine and underlines that the necessity for an artist to assist at anatomical dissections.

As Amy Bloch underscores, while working on the Gates, in the intense process of visualizing the stories of God’s formation of the world and its living inhabitants, Ghiberti’s engagement « stimulated in him an interest in exploring all types of creativity — not only that of God, but also that of nature and of humans — and led him to present in the opening panel of the Gates of Paradise (The creation of Adam and Eve) a grand vision of the emergence of divine, natural, and artistic creation. »

Lorenzo Ghiberti, Gates of Paradise, Adam and Eve (The Creation of Man).

The inclusion of details evoking God’s craftmanship, says Bloch, « recalls similes that liken God, as the maker of the world, to an architect, or, in his role as creator of Adam, to a sculptor or painter. Teh comparison, which ultimately derives from the architect-demiurge who creates the world in Plato’s Timaeus, appears commonly in medieval Jewish and Christian exegesis. »

Philo of Alexandria wrote that man was modeled « as by a potter » and Ambrose metaphorically called God a « craftsman (artifex) and a painter (pictor) ». Consequently, if man is « the image of God » as says Augustine and the model of the « homo faber – man producer of things », then, according to Salutati, « human affairs have a similarity to divine ones ».

The power of vision and the composition of the Eye

Concerning vision, Ghiberti writes:

I, O most excellent reader, did not have to obey to money, but gave myself to the study of art, which since my childhood I have always pursued with great zeal and devotion. In order to master the basic principles I have sought to investigate the way nature functions in art; and in order that I might be able to approach her, how images come to the eye, how the power of vision functions, how visual [images] come, and in what way the theory of sculpture and painting should be established.

Now, any serious scholar, having worked through Leonardo’s Notebooks, who then reads Ghiberti’s I Commentarii, immediately realizes that most of Da Vinci’s writings were basically comments and contributions about things said or answers to issues raised by Ghiberti, especially respecting the nature of light and optics in general. Leonardo’s creative mindset was a direct outgrowth of Ghiberti’s challenging world outlook.

In the Middle Ages, three geniuses were the sources of medical science: Galen, Avicenna and Hippocrates.

In Commentario 3, 6, which deals with optics, vision and perspective, Ghiberti, opposing those for whom vision can only be explained by a purely mathematical abstraction, writes that “In order that no doubt remains in the things that follow, it is necessary to consider the composition of the eye, because without this one cannot know anything about the way of seeing.” He then says, that those who write about perspective don’t take into account “the eye’s composition”, under the pretext that many authors would disagree.

Ghiberti regrets that despite the fact that many “natural philosophers” such as Thales, Democritus, Anaxagoras and Xenophanes have examined the subject along with others devoted to human health such as “Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna”, there is still so much confusion.

Indeed, he says, “speaking about this matter is obscure and not understood, if one does not have recourse to the laws of nature, because more fully and more copiously they demonstrate this matter.”


Avicenna, Alhazen and Constantine

Therefore, says Ghiberti:

it is necessary to affirm some things that are not included in the perspective model, because it is very difficult to ascertain these things but I will try to clarify them. In order not to deal superficially with the principles that underlie all of this, I will deal with the composition of the eye according to the writings of three authors, Avicenna (Ibn Sina), in his books, Alhazen (Ibn al Haytham) in his first volume on perspective (Optics), and Constantine (the Latin name of the Arab scholar and physician Qusta ibn Luqa) in his ‘First book on the Eye’; for these authors suffice and deal with much certainty in these subjects that are of interest to us.

This is quite a statement! Here we have “the” leading, founding figure of the Italian and European Renaissance with its great contribution of perspective, saying that to get any idea about how vision functions, one has to study three Arab scientists: Ibn Sina, Ibn al Haytham and Qusta ibn Luqa ! Cultural Eurocentrism might be one reason why Ghiberti’s writings were kept in the dark.

Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) made important contributions to opthalmology and improved upon earlier conceptions of the processes involved in vision and visual perception in his Treatise on Optics (1021), which is known in Europe as the Opticae Thesaurus. Following his work on the camera oscura (darkroom) he was also the first to imagine that the retina (a curved surface), and not the pupil (a point) could be involved in the process of image formation.

Avicenna, in the Canon of Medicine (ca. 1025), describes sight and uses the word retina (from the Latin word rete meaning network) to designate the organ of vision.

Later, in his Colliget (medical encyclopedia), Ibn Rushd (Averroes, 1126-1198) was the first to attribute to the retina the properties of a photoreceptor.

Avicenna’s writings on anatomy and medical science were translated and circulating in Europe since the XIIIth century, Alhazen’s treatise on optics, which Ghiberti quotes extensively, had just been translated into Italian under the title De li Aspecti.

It is now recognized that Andrea del Verrocchio, whose best known pupil was Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1517) was himself one of Ghiberti’s pupils. Unlike Ghiberti, who mastered Latin, neither Verrocchio nor Leonardo mastered a foreign language.

What is known is that while studying Ghiberti’s Commentarii, Leonardo had access in Italian to a series of original quotations from the Roman architect Vitruvius and from Arab scientists such as Avicenna, Alhazen, Averroes and from those European scientists who studied Arab optics, notably the Oxford Fransciscans Roger Bacon (1214-1294), John Pecham (1230-1292) and the Polish monk working in Padua, Erazmus Ciolek Witelo (1230-1275), known by his Latin name Vitellion.

Vitellion’s diagram of binocular vision

As stressed by Professor Dominque Raynaud, Vitellion introduces the principle of binocular vision for geometric considerations.

He gives a figure where we see the two eyes (a, b) receiving the images of points located at equal distance from the hd axis.

He explains that the images received by the eyes are different, since, taken from the same side, the angle grf (in red) is larger than the angle gtf (in blue). It is necessary that these two images are united at a certain point in one image (Diagram).

Where does this junction occur? Witelo says: « The two forms, which penetrate in two homologous points of the surface of the two eyes, arrive at the same point of the concavity of the common nerve, and are superimposed in this point to become one ».

The fusion of the images is thus a product of the internal mental and nervous activity.

The great astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) will use Alhazen’s and Witelo’s discoveries to develop his own contribution to optics and perspective. “Although up to now the [visual] image has been [understood as] a construct of reason,” Kepler observes in the fifth chapter of his Ad Vitellionem Paralipomena (1604), “henceforth the representations of objects should be considered as paintings that are actually projected on paper or some other screen.” Kepler was the first to observe that our retina captures an image in an inverted form before our brain turns it right side up.

Out of this Ghiberti, Uccello and also the Flemish painter Jan Van Eyck, in contact with the Italians, will construct as an alternative to one cyclopic single eye perspective revolutionary forms of “binocular” perspective while Leonardo and Louis XI’ court painter Jean Fouquet will attempt to develop curvilinear and spherical space representations.

What « appears » as a construction « error » of a central vanishing point perspective, is in realty a « binocular » perspective construction.
Jan van Eyck, The Canon Van der Paele, Groeningemuseum, Bruges. What appears at first glance to be a « fishbone perspective » (left) (dixit Panofsky), is explained by a binocular perspectivist method inspired by Arabic natural scientists.

In China, eventually influenced by Arab optical science breakthrough’s, forms of non-linear perspective, that integrate the mobility of the eye, will also make their appearance during the Song Dynasty.

Light

Ghiberti will add another dimension to perspective: light. One major contribution of Alhazen was his affirmation, in his Book of Optics, that opaque objects struck with light become luminous bodies themselves and can radiate secondary light, a theory that Leonardo will exploit in his paintings, including in his portraits.

Already Ghiberti, in the way he treats the subject of Isaac, Jacob and Esau (Figure), gives us an astonishing demonstration of how one can exploit that physical principle theorized by Alhazen. The light reflected by the bronze panel, will strongly differ according to the angle of incidence of the arriving rays of light. Arriving either from the left of from the right side, in both cases, the Ghiberti’s bronze relief has been modeled in such a way that it magnificently strengthens the overall depth effect !

While the experts, especially the neo-Kantians such as Erwin Panofsky or Hans Belting, say that these artists were “primitives” because applying the “wrong” perspective model, they can’t grasp the fact that they were in reality exploring a far “higher domain” than the mere pure mathematical abstraction promoted by the Newton-Galileo cult that became the modern priesthood ruling over “science”.

Much more about all of this can and should be said. Today, the best way to pay off the European debt to “Arab” scientific contributions, is to reward not just the Arab world but all future generations with a better future by opening to them the “Gates of Paradise”.

See all of Ghiberti’s works at the WEB GALLERY OF ART

Short Biography

  • Arasse, Daniel, Léonard de Vinci, Hazan, 2011;
  • Avery, Charles, La sculpture florentine de la Renaissance, Livre de poche, 1996, Paris;
  • Belting, Hans, Florence & Baghdad, Renaissance art and Arab science, Harvard University Press, 2011;
  • Bloch, Amy R., Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise; Humanism, History and Artistic Philosophy in the Italian Renaissance, Cambridge University Press, 2016, New York;
  • Borso, Franco et Stefano, Uccello, Hazan, Paris, 2004 ;
  • Butterfield, Andrew, Verrocchio, Sculptor and painter of Renaissance Florence, National Gallery, Princeton University Press, 2020 ;
  • Butterfield, Andrew, Art and Innovation in Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise, High Museum of Art, Yale University Press, 2007;
  • Kepler, Johannes, Paralipomènes à Vitellion, 1604, Vrin, 1980, Paris;
  • Krautheimer, Richard and Trude, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1990;
  • Martens, Maximiliaan, La révolution optique de Jan van Eyck, dans Van Eyck, Une révolution optique, Hannibal – MSK Gent, 2020.
  • Pope-Hennessy, John, Donatello, Abbeville Press, 1993 ;
  • Radke, Gary M., Lorenzo Ghiberti: Master Collaborator; The Gates of Paradise, Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Renaissance Masterpiece, High Museum of Atlanta and Yale University Press, 2007;
  • Rashed, Roshi, Geometric Optics, in History of Arab Sciences, edited by Roshdi Rashed, Vol. 2, Mathematics and physics, Seuil, Paris, 1997.
  • Raynaud, Dominique, L’hypothèse d’Oxford, essai sur les origines de la perspective, PUF, 1998, Paris.
  • Raynaud, Dominique, Ibn al-Haytham on binocular vision: a precursor of physiological optics, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2003, 13, pp. 79-99.
  • Raynaud, Dominique, Perspective curviligne et vision binoculaire. Sciences et techniques en perspective, Université de Nantes, Equipe de recherche: Sciences, Techniques, et Sociétés, 1998, 2 (1), pp.3-23.;
  • Vereycken, Karel, interview with People’s Daily: Leonardo Da Vinci’s « Mona Lisa » resonates with time and space with traditional Chinese painting, 2019.
  • Vereycken, Karel, Uccello, Donatello, Verrocchio and the art of military command, 2022.
  • Vereycken, Karel, The Invention of Perspective, Fidelio, 1998.
  • Vereycken, Karel, Van Eyck, un peintre flamand dans l’optique arabe, 1998.
  • Vereycken, Karel, Mutazilism and Arab astronomy, two bright stars in our firmament, 2021.
  • Walker, Paul Robert, The Feud That Sparked the Renaissance, How Brunelleschi and Ghiberti changed the World, HarperCollins, 2002.
Merci de partager !

The Greek language project, Plato and the Renaissance

By Karel Vereycken

Some friends asked me to elaborate on the following:

It is sometimes said that the introduction of Plato in the context of the Councils of Ferrara and Florence (1439) “triggered the explosion of the Italian Renaissance”.

And of the great humanist, the German Cardinal-philosopher Cusanus, it is said that he “brought to Florence Bessarion and Plethon, who were both Greek scholars of Plato and brought the entire works of Plato which had been lost in Europe for centuries”.

At the same time, goes the narrative, “the Medicis financed a crash program to translate the works of Plato. This excitement made the Italian Renaissance what it became”.

While Plato’s ideas and the renewal of greek studies did play a major role in triggering the European Renaissance, the preceding affirmations, as we shall document here, require some refinement.

Was the Italian Renaissance “triggered” by the Council of Florence?

The chancellor of Florence, Coluccio Salutati.

Not really. It was rather –40 years earlier–, the “Greek language revival project” project of Coluccio Salutati (1332-1406), who would become the chancellor of Florence and invite the Greek scholar Manuel Chrysoloras (1355-1415) to his city, that “triggered” a revival of Greek and Hebrew studies, which in return lead to the unification of the churches at the Council of Florence (1439).

The idea had regained interest from Petrarch and Boccaccio, which Salutati admired. Along with Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), it is undoubtedly the Italian poet Petrarch (1304-1374) who best embodies the ideals guiding the humanists of the Renaissance.

All his life, it is said, Petrarch tried to

« rediscover the very rich teaching of classical authors in all disciplines and, starting from this sum of knowledge, most often scattered and forgotten, to revive and pursue the research that these authors had begun. »

After following his parents to Avignon, Petrarch studied in Carpentras where he learned grammar, then in Montpellier, rhetoric, and finally in Bologna, where he spent seven years at the school of jurisconsults.

However, instead of studying law, which in those days paved the way to a brilliant career, Petrarch secretly read all the classics hitherto known, including Cicero and Virgil, despite the fact that his father occasionally burned his books.

Petrarch and Barlaam of Samara

Barlaam of Seminara crossing a river. XVth century manuscript.
Petrarch

Under the pontificate of Benedict XII, Petrarch tried to learn Greek language with the help of a learned monk of the Order of St. Basil, Barlaam of Seminara (1290-1348), known as Barlaam the Calabrian, who came to Avignon in 1339 as ambassador of Andronic III Paleologus in an unsuccessful attempt to put an end to the schism between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches.

A philosopher, theologian and mathematician, Barlaam, while having limited knowledge of Greek and Latin, was one of the first to wish that the study of the Greek language and philosophy be reborn in Europe.

In his Treatise On my own ignorance and that of many others (1367), Petrarch declared himself proud of his Greek manuscripts – and of his library in general – and expressed his deep admiration for Barlaam:

« I have at home sixteen works of Plato. I don’t know if my friends have ever heard the titles […]. And this is only a small part of Plato’s work, for I have seen, with my own eyes, a large number of them, especially in possession of the Calabrian Barlaam, a modern model of Greek wisdom who began to teach me Greek while I was still ignorant of Latin, and who might have done so successfully if death had not taken him away from me and hindered my honest plans, as usual.« 

In 1350, two years after Barlaam’s death, Petrarch met the son of a banker, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375). The latter, like Petrarch, fell in love with the Greek culture and language. In his youth, in Naples, he too had met Barlaam and learned a few words of Greek, meticulously copying alphabets and verses, adding the Latin translation and pronunciation indications.

Boccaccio and Leontius Pilatus

Leontius Pilatus

To increase his mastery of Greek, Boccaccio then called from Thessaloniki a disciple of Barlaam, Leontius Pilatus (died in 1366), an austere, ugly and very bad-tempered character. But this Calabrian lectured him on Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and translated sixteen of Plato’s dialogues. How could one get angry with him?

Boccaccio offered him shelter and food for three years in his home and had a chair of Greek created for him in Florence, the first time ever!

Unfortunately, Pilatus did not really master this language. Although posing as a native Greek, the man had poor knowledge of ancient Greek and his translations never got beyond the level of word-for-word. As for the lessons he gave Petrarch, they were so brutal that he disgusted him forever.

This did not prevent Pilatus, at the insistence of Boccaccio, from translating Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey into Latin from a Greek manuscript sent to Petrarch by Nicolaos Sigeros, the Byzantine ambassador to Avignon.

Hence, history being what it is, it was thanks to this highly imperfect translation that Europe rediscovered one of the great founding works of its culture!

Boccaccio’s book on famous women.

And on this fragile ground will rise a flame that will revolutionize the world.

« Was it not I, » writes Boccaccio in his Genealogy of the Gods, « who had the glory and honor of employing the first Greek verses among the Tuscans? Was it not I who, through my prayers, led Pilatus to settle in Florence and who housed him there? I brought at my own expense copies of Homer and other Greek authors when none existed in Tuscany. I was the first of the Italians to whom Homer, in particular, was explained, and then I had him explained in public.« 

The hunt for manuscripts

What is important is that during these encounters Petrarch created a cultural network covering the whole of Europe, a network reaching into the East.

He then asked his relations and friends, who shared his humanist ideals, to help him find in their respective country or province, the Latin texts of the ancients that the libraries of abbeys, individuals or cities might possess. In the course of his own travels, he found several major texts that had fallen into oblivion.

It is in Liege (Belgium) that he discovered the Pro Archia and in Verona, Ad Atticum, Ad Quintum and Ad Brutum, all by Cicero. During a stay in Paris, he got his hands on the elegiac poems of Propertius, then, in 1350, on a work by Quintilian. In a constant concern to restore the most authentic text, he subjected these manuscripts to meticulous philological work and made corrections by comparing them with other manuscripts. This is how he reconstructed the first and fourth decades of the Roman History of Titus Livius from fragments and restored some of Virgil’s texts.

These manuscripts, which he kept in his own library, later came out in the form of copies and thus became accessible to the greatest number of people. While acknowledging that the pagans lacked the « true faith, » Petrarch believed that when one speaks of virtue, the old and new worlds are not at war.


The « Circolo di Santo Spirito »

Florence: the Augustinian Convent Santo Spirito.

From the 1360s onwards, Boccaccio gathered a first group of humanists known as the « Circolo di Santo Spirito » (Circle of the Holy Spirit), whose name was borrowed from the 13th century Florentine Augustinian convent.

An embryonic form of a university, its Studium Generale (1284) was then at the heart of a vast intellectual center including schools, hospices and refectories for the needy.

Before his death in 1375, Boccaccio, who had recovered part of Petrarch’s library, bequeathed to the convent his entire collection of precious ancient books and manuscripts.

Then, in the 1380s and early 1390s, a second circle of humanists met daily in the cell of the Augustinian monk Luigi Marsili (1342-1394). The latter, who had studied philosophy and theology at the universities of Paris and Padua, where he already established contact with Petrarch in 1370, became friends with Boccaccio. Hence, by attending the Cercle Santo Spirito from 1375 onwards, Coluccio Salutati in turn fell in love with Greek studies.

By inviting the Greek scholar Manuel Chrysoloras (1355-1415) to Florence to teach Ancient Greek, it was Salutati who gave the decisive impulse leading to the end of the schism between East and West and thus to the unification of the Churches, consecrated at the Council of Florence in 1439.

Roger Bacon

A century before Salutati, the English philosopher and scientist Roger Bacon (1214-1294), a Franciscan monk residing in Oxford, author of one of the first Greek grammars, already called for such a « linguistic revolution ».

As wrote Dean P. Lockwood in Roger Bacon’s Vision of the Study of Greek (1919):

« Obviously, Greek was the master-key to the great storehouse of ancient knowledge, Hebrew and Arabic to lesser chambers. Furthermore, we must not forget that in Bacon’s day the superiority of the ancients was an indisputable fact. The modern world has outstripped the Greek and the Romans in countless ways; the medieval thinkers were still climbing toward the Hellenic standard.

« Three things were clear to Roger Bacon: the need of Greek, the contemporary ignorance of Greek, and the feasibility of acquiring Greek. The same may be said of Hebrew, but Bacon rightly put Greek first. Bacon’s program was simple:

« 1. Seek out the native Byzantine Greeks resident in Europe, preferably grammarians. The latter were very few, of course, but might be found in the Greek monasteries of Southern Italy.

« 2. From these and from any other available sources let Greek books be sought. If this program were to be carried out, Bacon confidently prophetized that results would not be long in forthcoming.« 


Leonardo Bruni

Leonardo Bruni.

Manuel Chrysoloras, arrived in winter 1397, an event remembered by one of his most famous pupils, the humanist scholar Leonardo Bruni (1369-1444) and later chancellor of Florence at the time of the Council of Florence, as a great new opportunity: there were many teachers of law, but no one had studied Greek in northern Italy for 700 years.

Thanks to Chrysoloras, Bruni and Pier Paolo Vergerio the Elder were able to read Aristotle and especially Plato in the original Greek version.

Aristotle (Logic) versus Plato (Dialectics).

Until then, in Europe, Christians knew the names of Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato by their reading of the church fathers Origen, St. Jerome and St. Augustine.

The latter, in his City of God, did not hesitate to affirm that the « Platonists », that is Plato and those who assimilated his teaching (Plato et qui eum bene intellexerunt), were superior to all other pagan philosophers.

As we have demonstrated elsewhere, in particular in our study on Raphael and the School of Athens, it is to a large extent Plato’s optimistic and Promethean philosophical approach, for whom knowledge comes above all from the capacity for hypothesis and not from the mere testimony of the senses as Aristotle claims, that clearly provided the sap that allowed the Renaissance tree to offer humanity so many wonderful fruits.

Traversari’s humanist circle

Bust of d’Ambrogio Traversari.

The most famous pupil of Chrysoloras was Ambrogio Traversari (1386-1439), who became general of the Camaldolese order. Today honored as a saint by his order, Traversari was one of the first to conceptualize the type of “Christian Humanism” that would be promoted by Nicolaus of Cusa (Cusanus) and later Erasmus of Rotterdam (who framed the concept of “Saint-Socrates”) and the latter’s admirer Rabelais, uniting Plato with the Holy Scriptures, and the fathers of the Church.

Traversari, a key organizer of the Council of Florence, was also the personal protector of the great Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca and of the architect of the Dome Filippo Brunelleschi.

Traversari’s circle of humanists, which included Cusanus and Toscanelli, regularly met at the Florentine Santa Maria degli Angeli convent.

According to Vespasiano de Bisticci, the court historian of the Court of Urbino, Traversari had weekly working sessions on Plato and Greek philosophy at the Santa Maria degli Angeli convent with the crème de la crème of European humanism in the fields of literature, theology, science, politics, architecture, infrastructure, urban planning, education and the fine arts. Among those :

  • The German cardinal-philosopher Nicholas of Cusa (Cusanus);
  • Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, the great physician and cartographer, also friend and protector of Piero della Francesca and Leonardo da Vinci.
  • The erudite manuscript collector Niccolò Niccoli, adviser to Cosimo the Elder, heir to the Medici’s industrial and financial empire. Considered at the time to be the richest man in the West, Cosimo was one of the patrons of the sculptor Donatello;
  • Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, the future humanist pope Pius II;
  • Leonardo Bruni, the apostolic secretary of Pope Innocent VII and his three successors. He succeeded Coluccio Salutati at the chancellery of Florence (1410-1411 and 1427-1444).
  • The Italian statesman Carlo Marsuppini, passionate about Greek Antiquity, and successor of Bruni as Chancellor of the Republic of Florence after the latter’s death in 1444.
  • The philosopher, antiquarian and writer Poggio Bracciolini. After having advised no less than nine popes (!), he was appointed Chancellor of the Republic of Florence following the death of Marsuppini in 1453;
  • The politician and ambassador Gianozzi Manetti. In love with ancient Greek and Hebrew, his circle includes the éducator Francesco Filelfo, the banker Palla Strozzi and the founder of the Vatican library Lorenzo Valla ;

Chrysoloras in Florence

The Greek scholar Manuel Chrysoloras

Chrysoloras remained only a few years in Florence, from 1397 to 1400, teaching Greek, starting with the rudiments. He moved on to teach in Bologna and later in Venice and Rome. Though he taught widely, a handful of his chosen students remained a close-knit group, among the first humanists of the Renaissance. As said before, among his pupils one could count some of the foremost figures of the revival of Greek studies in Renaissance Italy.

Aside from Bruni and Ambrogio Traversari, they included Guarino da Verona and the Florentine banker Palla Strozzi (1372-1462), later the friend and protector of the sculptor and translator Lorenzo Ghiberti. It is worth noting that Strozzi paid part of Chrysoloras’ salary and had the books necessary for the new teaching brought from Constantinople and Greece.

Chrysoloras went to Rome on the invitation of Bruni, who was then secretary to Pope Gregory XII. In 1408, he was sent to Paris on an important mission from the emperor Manuel II Palaeologus (1350-1425). In 1413, he went to Germany on an embassy to the emperor Sigismund, the object of which was to decide on the site for the church council that assembled at Constance in 1415. Chrysoloras was on his way there, having been chosen to represent the Greek Church, when he died that year.

Chrysoloras translated the works of Homer and Plato’s Republic from Greek into Latin. His Erotemata (Questions-answers), which was the first basic Greek grammar in use in Western Europe, circulated initially as a manuscript before being published in 1484.

Widely reprinted, it enjoyed considerable success not only among his pupils in Florence, but also among later leading humanists, being immediately studied by Thomas Linacre at Oxford and by Erasmus when he resided at Cambridge. It’s text became the basic manual used by pupils of the Three Language College set up by Erasmus in Leuven (Belgium) in 1515.

Study during the Renaissance

Traversari meets Chrysoloras during his two stays in Florence in the summer of 1413 and in January-February 1414, and the old Byzantine scholar is impressed by the bilingual culture of the young monk; he sends him a long philosophical letter in Greek on the theme of friendship. Ambrogio himself expresses in his letters the highest consideration for Chrysoloras, and emotion for the benevolence he showed him.

It should also be noted that the rich humanist scholar Niccolò Niccoli, a great collector of books, opened his library to Traversari and put him in constant contact with the scholarly circles of Florence (notably Leonardo Bruni, and also Cosimo de Medici, of whom he was advisor), but also of Rome and Venice.

In 1423, Pope Martin V sent two letters, one to the prior of the Convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Father Matteo, and the other to Traversari himself, expressing his support for the great development of patristic studies in this establishment, and especially for the work of translation of the Greek Fathers carried out by Traversari.

The Pope had in mind the negotiations he was conducting at the time with the Greek Church: at the beginning of 1423, his legate Antonio de Massa returned from Constantinople and brought back with him several Greek manuscripts which were to be entrusted to Traversari for translation: notably the Adversus Græcos by Manuel Calécas, and for the classics the Lives and Doctrines of the Illustrious Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius, a text which circulated for a long time only in Traversari’s Latin translation.

It was following these undertakings that Traversari expressed his great interest in seeing the schism between the Latin and Greek Churches resolved. At the end of 1423, Niccolò Niccoli provides Traversari with an old volume containing the entire corpus of the ancient ecclesiastical canons, and the learned monk expresses in his correspondence with the humanist his enthusiasm for being able to immerse himself in the life of the then united ancient Christian Church, and in the process, he translates into Greek a long letter from Pope Gregory the Great to the prelates of the East.

Arrival of Plato’s mind

Were Bessarion and Plethon the first to bring the entire works of Plato to Europe?

Not really. While John Bessarion did indeed bring his own collection of the “complete works of Plato” in 1437 to Florence, they had already been brought to Italy earlier, most notably in 1423 by the Sicilian Giovanni Aurispa (1376-1459), who was the teacher of Lorenzo Valla (another collaborator with whom Cusanus exposed the fraud of the “Donation of Constantine” and a major source of inspiration of Erasmus).

In 1421 Aurispa was sent by Pope Martin V to act as the translator for the Marquis Gianfrancesco Gonzaga on a diplomatic mission to the Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Palaiologos.

The Byzantine Emperor John VIII Paleologus, here portrayed as King Balthasar.

After their arrival, he gained the favor of the emperor’s son and successor, John VIII Paleologus (1392-1448), who took him on as his own secretary. Two years later, he accompanied his Byzantine employer on a mission to the courts of Europe.

Giovanni Aurispa, the first Italian, in coordination with Traversari, to bring the complete works of Plato to the West.

On 15 December 1423, 16 years prior to the Council of Florence of 1439, Aurispa arrived in Venice with the largest and finest collection of Greek texts to reach the west prior to those brought by Bessarion. In reply to a letter from Traversari, he says that he brought back 238 manuscripts.

These contained all of Plato’s works, most of them hitherto unknown in the West.

Plato’s works so far were only known very partially. In Sicily, Henry Aristippus of Calabria (1105-1162) had translated into Latin Plato’s Phaedo and Meno dialogues as early as 1160.

Evil neo-Platonist

Platonists (such as Petrarch, Traversari, Cusanus or Erasmus), have nothing to do and even violently opposed “Neo-platonist” (such as Plotinus, Proclus, Iamblicus, Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola) whose influence would create what could and should be called a “counter-Renaissance”.

Already Leibniz strongly warned against the “neo-Platonists” and demanded Plato be studied in his original writings rather than through his commentators, however brilliant they might be:

“non ex Plotino aut Marsilio Ficino, qui mira semper et mystica affectantes diceren tanti uiri doctrinam corrupere.”

[In English: Plato should be studied, but “Not from Plotinus nor Marsilio Ficino, who, by always striving to speak wonderfully and mystically, corrupt the doctrine of so great a man. »]

George Gemisthos « Plethon »

George Gemistos « Plethon » in the mural painting of Benozzo Gozzoli.

Now, let us enter Plethon, who thought Plato and Aristotle could each one play their own role. George Gemistos « Plethon » (1355-1452), was a follower of the radical “neo-Platonist” Michael Psellos (1018-1080). Around 1410 Gemistos created a “neo-Platonic” academy in Mistra (near the site of ancient Sparta) and added “Plethon” to his name to make it resemble to « Plato ». He was also an admirer of Pythagoras, Plato, and the “Chaldean Oracles”, which he ascribed to Zoroaster.

Gemistos came for the first time to Florence when he was fifteen years old and became an authority in Mistra. So at the time of the Council, the Emperor, John VIII Paleologus, knew they were going to face some of the finest minds in the Roman Church on their own soil; he therefore wanted the best minds available in support of the Byzantine cause to accompany him. Consequently, the Emperor appointed George Gemistos as part of the delegation. Despite the fact that he was a secular philosopher — a rare creature at this time in the West — Gemistos was renowned both for his wisdom and his moral rectitude. Among the clerical lights in the delegation were John Bessarion, Metropolitan of Nicaea, and Mark Eugenikos, Metropolitan of Ephesus. Both had been students of Gemistos in their youth. Another non-clerical member of the delegation was George Scholarios: both a future adversary of Gemistos and a future Patriarch of Constantinople as Gennadios II. Initially, Gemistos was opposed to the unity of the western and eastern churches.

Not assisting at every theological debate during the Council of Florence of 1439, he went in town to give lectures to intellectuals and nobles on the essence of Plato and Neo-platonic philosophy. Plethon also brought with him the text of the “Chaldean Oracles” attributed to Zoroaster.

While most of Plethon’s writing were burned, since he was suspected of heresy, a large number of Plethon’s autograph manuscripts ended up in the hands of his former student Cardinal Bessarion. On Bessarion’s death, he willed his personal library to the library of San Marco in Venice (where over 4000 Greeks resided). Among these books and manuscripts was Plethon’s Summary of the Doctrines of Zoroaster and Plato. This Summary was a summary of the Book of Laws, which Plethon wrote inspired by Plato’s laws. The Summary is a mixture of polytheistic beliefs with neo-Platonist elements.

While John Bessarion (1403-1472), a real humanist, took part in the Council in Ferrara (1437) and Florence (1439), and as the representative of the Greek, signed the decree of the Florentine Union, he held nevertheless to the principle: “I honor and respect Aristotle, I love Plato” (colo et veneror Aristotelem, amo Platonem). For him Platonic thought would have the right of citizenship equal to Aristotelian thought in the Latin world only when it appeared in an irenic interpretation to Aristotelianism and as not in contradiction with Christianity, since only such an interpretation of Platonism could succeed at that time.


Cosimo di Medici and Ficino

Giovanni di Bicci de Medici

Did the Medicis finance a crash program to translate the works of Plato?

In 1397, Giovannni « di Bicci » de’ Medici (1360-1429) set up the Medici Bank. Giovanni owned two wool factories in Florence and was a member of two guilds: the Arte della Lana and the Arte del Cambio.

In 1402, he was one of the judges on the jury that selected Lorenzo Ghiberti’s design for the bronzes for the doors of the Baptistery of Florence.

In 1418, Giovanni di Bicci, wishing to endow his family with their own church, entrusted Filippo Brunelleschi, future architect of the famous dome of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fioro, the Duomo, with the task of radically transforming the basilica church of San Lorenzo and ordered Donatello to execute the sculptures.

Politically, the Medici family did not come to power until 1434, three years before the Council of Florence and at a time when the Renaissance was already in full swing.

Cosimo di Medici, the elder

Admittedly, Giovanni’s son and inheritor of his financial empire, Cosimo di Medici (1389-1464), known as the richest man of his epoch, became so inspired by Plethon that he acquired a complete library of Greek manuscripts. He bought a copy of the Platonic Corpus (24 dialogues) from Plethon, and a copy of the Corpus Hermeticum of Hermes Trismegistus, acquired in Macedonia by an Italian monk, Lionardo of Pistoia. Cosimo also decided to initiate a project to translate from the Greek into Latin, the totality of Plato’s works.

However, as said before, Leonardo Bruni (1369-1444), who after having been papal secretary became chancellor of the Florentine republic from 1427 till 1444, had already translated close to all of Plato’s works from Greek into Latin.

It should be underlined that the translator chosen by Cosimo was Marsilio Ficino (1433-99), the son of his personal physician and only five years old at the time of the Council of Florence in 1439. Cosimo had some severe doubts concerning Ficino’s capacities as translator. When the latter offers in 1456 his first translation, The Platonic Institutions, Cosimo asks him kindly not to publish this work and to learn first the Greek language… which Ficino learns then from Byzantine scholar John Argyropoulos (1415-1487), an Aristotelian pupil of Bessarion who rejected the Council of Florence’s epistemological revolution.

But seeing his age advancing and despite his unfortunate descent into corruption, Cosimo finally gave him the post. He allocates him an annual stipend, the required manuscripts and a villa at Careggi, close to Florence, where Ficino would set up his “Platonic Academy” with a handful of followers, among which Angelo Poliziano (1454-94), Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) and Cristoforo Landino (1424-1498).

The evil « neo-Platonic » Marsilio Ficino (left) with some followers of his fake Platonic Academy: Cristoforo Landino, Angelo Poliziano and Demetrios Chalkondyles.

Ficino’s “Academy”, taking up the ancient neo-platonic tradition of Plotinus and Porphyry (as Ficino states himself) would organize each year a ceremonial banquet “neglected since one thousand two hundred years” on November 7, thought to be simultaneously the birthday of Plato and the day of his death.

After the dinner, the attendants would read Plato’s Symposium and then each of them would comment on one of the speeches. The comments are demonstrations, without any real dialogue and void of the essence of real platonic thinking: irony. On top of that it is remarkable that most gatherings of Ficino’s academy were attended by the ambassador of Venice in Florence, notably the powerful oligarch Bernardo Bembo (1433-1519), father of “poet” cardinal Pietro Bembo, later special advisor to the evil Genovese “Warrior Pope” Julius II.

It was this alliance of the increasingly more degenerated Medici family, the Venetian Empire’s maritime slave trade and the anti-Platonic neo-Platonists that gained dominant influence over the Curia of the Roman Catholic Church. The Medici’s clearly disliked Da Vinci (who never got an order from the Vatican and subsequently left Italy), and through their propaganda man Vasari made the world belief that the Renaissance was exclusively their baby.

But before translating Plato, and at the specific demand of Cosimo, Ficino translated first (in 1462) the Orphic Hymns, the Sayings of Zoroaster, and the Corpus Hermeticum of Hermes Trismegistus the Egyptian (between 100 and 300 after BC).

It will be only in 1469 that Ficino will finish his translations of Plato after a nervous breakdown in 1468, described by his contemporaries as a crisis of “profound melancholy”.

In 1470, and with a title plagiarized from Proclus, Ficino wrote his “Platonic Theology or on the immortality of the Soul.” While completely taken in by esoteric neo-Platonism, he became a priest in 1473 and wrote “The Christian Religion” without changing his neo-platonic pagan outlook, producing an entire new series of translations of the neo-Platonists of Alexandria: he translated the fifty-four books of Plotinus “Enneads”, Porphyry and Proclus.

Ficino, in his “Five Questions Concerning the Mind” explicitly attacks the Promethean conception of man:

« Nothing indeed can be imagined more unreasonable than that man, who through reason is the most perfect of all animals, nay, of all things underheaven, most perfect, I say, with regard to that formal perfection that is bestowed upon us from the beginning, that man, also through reason, should be the least perfect of all with regard to that final perfection for the sake of which the first perfection is given. This seems to be that of the most unfortunate Prometheus. Instructed by the divine wisdom of Pallas, he gained possession of the heavenly fire, that is, reason. Because of this very possession, on the highest peak of the mountain, that is, at the very height of contemplation, he is rightly judged most miserable of all, for he is made wretched by the continual gnawing of the most ravenous of vultures, that is, by the torment of inquiry…” (…) “What do the philosophers say to these things? Certainly, the Magi, followers of Zoroaster and Hostanes, assert something similar. They say that, because of a certain old disease of the human mind, everything that is very unhealthy and difficult befalls us…« 

The Florentine Neo-Platonic Academy, backed by the libido-driven Lorenzo de Medici (1449-1492) “The Magnificent”, will serve as a “Delphic” operation: defend Plato to better destroy him; praise him in such terms that he becomes discredited. And especially destroying Plato’s influence by opposing religion to science, at a point where Cusanus and his followers are succeeding to do exactly the opposite. Isn’t it bizarre that Cusa’s name doesn’t appear a single time in the works of Ficino or Pico della Mirandola, so overfed with all-encompassing knowledge?

Lorenzo did protect artists such as Sandro Botticelli, whose Birth of Venus exemplifies Lorenzo’s neo-platonic symbolism.

Infected with this evil neo-Platonism, Thomaso Inghirami (1470-1516), the chief librarian of pope Julius II, will accomplish nothing but this when dictating to the painter Raphaël the content of the Stanza in the Vatican some decades later.

Neo-platonic “melancholy”, which Albrecht Dürer went after in his famous engraving, will become the matrix for the romantics, the destructive virus affecting the symbolists and the so-called modern school. As for the revolution that Greek studies will bring about in the sciences, I refer you to our article on this website: 1512-2012: From Cosmography to Cosmonauts, Gerard Mercator and Gemma Frisius.

To conclude, here is a short list of translators, and I certainly forgot some of them, and their mastery of foreign languages. Even if some of them can’t be called « humanists », let’s thank them for everything they allowed us to discover. I’m profoundly convinced that without them, man would certainly not have set foot on the Moon!

Merci de partager !