Étiquette : Petrarch

 

Quinten Matsys and Leonardo — The Dawn of Carthartic 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
  6. Chambers of Rhetoric and Landjuweel

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”
  7. Liefrinck and Cock

E. Conclusion

Selected Bibliography

Quinten Matsys. Engraving by Wierx, published by Lampsonius 1572.

At the turn of the century, attracting talents from all over the continent as a magnet, Antwerp2, and with some 90,000 inhabitants, had become a growing port and trade center3, outdoing the Medici’s dominated Brugge4in 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 Rotterdam5 , Thomas More6 and Pieter Gillis7, innovative printers such as Dirk Martens8 from Aalst, demanding reformers such as Gerard Geldenhouwer9 and Cornélius Grapheus10, Flemish painters such as Gerard David11 and Joachim Patinir12, or foreign engravers that lived in the city or paid a visit to Antwerp, such as Albrecht Dürer,13 Lucas van Leyden14 and Hans Holbein the Younger15.

Unfortunately, today, large international publishing houses, 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 chapters dealing with the “Antwerp school” . 16

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 primitifs17.

The good news is that since 2007, the Ghent Interdisciplinary Centre for Art and Science (GICAS)18 is working on a new « catalogue raisonné » of his work. The one of Larry Silver19 is hard to find and became largely unaffordable. What remains is the one of Andrée de Bosque20, with very few color prints. As a consolation, readers can access Harald Brising’s 1908 doctoral thesis, in a reprint version of 201521.

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 agapic22 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 book23, 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 Erasmus25 and Dürer26 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. » Phoebus Foundation.

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 jokes27, irony and metaphors which were the very essence of cultural life28 in the Low Countries of that time.29

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 most prominent followers François Rabelais30, Miguel de Cervantes31 and William Shakespeare32, 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.”33 It can be summarized as a “wedding” between the humanist principles summarized in Plato’s Republic34 and the agapic notion of man transmitted by the Holy scriptures and the writing’s of those early fathers of the Church as Jerome35 and Augustine36who 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”37 that had to be overcome by the “Seven Capital Virtues.”

Hieronymus Bosch, The Seven Deadly Sins and the last 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 “Humanitarianism” have been scaled down 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. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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).38

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.39

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 Petrarch’s (1304-1374)40 poetic I Trionfi cycle (1351-1374)41, structured in six allegorical triumphs.

Illustration of Petrarch’s Triomph of Fame over Death, Biblionthèque Nationale de France.

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 (1450-1516)42 depicted with great irony in his triptyche, the Garden of Earthly Delights (1503-1515).43

Leonardo, whose far advanced scientific-religious sentiment was considered a heresy by many in Rome44, 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.

On her blog Angeles Earth, visual artist and art historian Angeles Nieto highlights the intimate connection between humour and creativity:

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 [learned ignorance] by Cusanus46), 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 will47, 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.48

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)49, the Strasbourg humanist poet and social reformer Sebastian Brant (1458-1521), 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)50, a hilarious satirical work illustrated with engravings of Dürer and later Holbein the Younger. 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.51

“Genre-painting,” wrote Georges Marlier in 195452 and more recently the American art historian Larry Silver53, 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. »54

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 Lodovico Guicciardini’s55 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 Elder56 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 possession57. The third one (out of 113), not far away, is greed and avarice.58

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 Brant59 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 Life60 with whom Bosch, 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 peddler61 was very popular among the Brothers of the Common Life and the Devotio Moderna62 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” 63 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.64

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).

6. Chambers of Rhetoric and Landjuweel

One man’s laughter does not make another man happy. It undermines the illegitimate authority of emperors, popes, bankers, dukes and tyrants. Irony, satire and humor are indeed the most powerful political weapons ever devised. Persecution, censorship, intimidation, terror and punishment must extirpate it from minds and souls.

The Ommegang in Antwerp, Erasmus de Bie, Cassel Museum, France.

The wave of cultural emancipation in the Low Countries, to which Erasmus and Matsys made their own contributions, reached its apogee during the second half of the 16th Century and provoked a brutal reaction from the ruling powers.

The “beginning of the end” of the Spanish occupation of the Netherlands was the banning of the Landjuweel65. As early as the 13th and 14th centuries, Landjuwelen were poetry contests organized between the archers’ guilds of the Duchy of Brabant. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the Rederijkers (Rhetoricians) organized competitions between Chambers of Rhetoric along similar lines.

Each contest was organized around a central philosophical question, a zinne, e.g., “What most incites man to art?” (Antwerp, 1561) or ”What most comforts man in the hour of his death? » (Ghent, 1539). The contending Chambers of Rhetoric then had to answer with a play, a zinne-spel (where the zinne is the question asked).

Other contests included entertaining and wacky plays, esbattements, songs and the rebus coat of arms. This was a sort of coat of arms with a rebus on it. The role of « cathartic laughter » (catharsis = purification) deployed in comedy and satire is well known. Faced with the anguish of everyday life or political oppression, humor provides an immediate emotional release, while offering a critical distance. Mockerey and cathartic laughter can be beneficial, although there’s a danger that if they aren’t followed by a call to action, they may demobilize us.

Illustration of a chronicle of the Landjuweel 1561 in Antwerp. Wherever Light (Lux) shines, there is Peace (Pax), Charity (Charitas) and Reason (Ratio). Thanks to Moderation (Prudentia), Poetry (Rhetorica) and Ingenuity (Inventio), Rage (Ira), Envy (Invidia) and Discord (Discordia) are pushed towards the abyss of Eternal Darkness. In the center, the bull (symbol of Saint-Luke the evangelist and the Saint Lukes guild, the painters’ guild) with the epigram “Wt ionsten Versaemt” (Gathered together out of affection [for art]).

The Landjuweel organized by Antwerp’s Chamber of Rhetoric De Violieren in August 1561 goes down in history as the most dazzling. This chamber was in fact nothing but the literary branch of the Saint-Luke’s Guild, i.e. the painters’ guild of which Matsys, Patinir, David and other friends of Erasmus had been members. Fourteen chambers took part. Some 1,400 rhetoricians on horseback, in festive costume, with music and song, made their entrance into the city. The procession included 23 floats and 200 other carriages.

Drama, poetry, music and painting shared the same visual imagery. One of these floats during the Ommegang of Antwerp in 1563 was described as the kind of hay wagon that Bosch put at the center of his painting The Hay Wagon (1501, Madrid), an allegory for the morbid pursuit of “earthly gain” :

The same theme is also at the center of an engraving by Frans Hogenberg of 1559. On this print, the people around the hay wagon are divided into groups and provided with captions. One of these captions reads:

The stage in Antwerp during the Landjuweel of 1561.

Stage performances took place on a beautifully decorated wooden stage in the Grote Markt, in front of the yard of the new City Hall. It was designed by Cornelis II Floris.

The introductory plays are written by Willem van Haecht.

The play of sentences should answer the question “what drives man most to art.”

Three hundred years before Friedrich Schiller, people considered elevated art as an important tool for humanization and political emancipation.

The Landjuweel and the Ommegang were popular festivals where “everything was allowed”, where the “little man” could taunt and mock the oppressor with satires, disguises and songs of mockery and thus, if only for a very short moment, make the yoke of Spain a little more bearable.

Most allegorical plays that were performed were biting satires against the pope, monks, indulgences, pilgrimages and so on. As soon as they appeared, they were considered a threat. , It was not without reason that the Landjuweel of 1561 was later cited as the first to incite both both the people and the literary world in favor of the Protestant Reformation. Because these works were far from favorable to the Spanish regime, the Duke of Alba ordered their abolition by the Index of 1571, and later the government even banned all public and private theatrical performances organized by the Chambers of Rhetoric.

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’ life66 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 legends67 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 project69 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.70

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),71 became painters and members of the Antwerp Guild.

Cornelis made an engraving showing « The Blind guiding the Blind », which Bruegel made later into a painting.

The Blind guiding the Blind, engraving, Cornelis Matsys, 1550.

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 Netherlands72.

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 Maximilian of Austria.

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.73

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 Michelangelo74 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 (c. 1415-1475).75

In 1476, one year after his father’s death, Aelbrecht reportedly left Leuven, perhaps to complete his training with a master outside the city. This master, in my view, was most probably Hugo van der Goes (1440-1482)76, whose influence on Aelbrecht Bouts, but also on Quinten Matsys, seems real.

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 principles77. 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 outstanding 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 Jan van Ruusbroec (1294-1381) and the Brothers of the Common Life78) 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 (1400-1464)79 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 Flemish musician composer Jacob Obrecht80 (1496, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth), as a very late work by Hans Memling, current experts, among which Larry Silver, conclusively demonstrate that in reality, it is far more likely that the portrait is the earliest known work of Quinten Matsys81.

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 Ferrare82 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 Agricola83, 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.84 Renowned Belgian Art Historian Dirk de Vos, considers such a trip to Northern Italy a plausible possibility.85

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 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. 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, 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, paints 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 Joiners’ Guild Altarpiece (c. 1511, Antwerp museum), also known as the Lamentation, clearly inspired by Roger Van der Weyden’s Deposition of the cross (Prado, Madrid) ;
  • the Saint Anne Altarpiece (1507–1509, Brussels museum), painted for the Collegiate Church of St Peter in Leuven and signed “Quinte Metsys screef dit.” (Quinten Metsys wrote this).

Saint Anne Alterpiece

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 “immaculate” conception, allowing Anna to have the virgin Mary as her child, is depicted as a chaste kiss between the couple in front of the Golden Gate of the Jerusalem city wall. This subject was immensely popular and 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 articles87, I have underscored the fact that both Jan Van Eyck88 and Lorenzo Ghiberti89 were quite familiar with “Arab optics”, in particular the works of Ibn-al-Haytham90 (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 Alberti91, 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 Johannes 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 Center 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 investigated92 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.94

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.”95

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

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, 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 the landscape painting, 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 depth96, 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.97 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 of Busleyden (1470-1517, soon to become the financial mecenas of the « Trilingual College »98 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 reports having been able to 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),99 a painter-engraver, diplomat and political exile in Mechelen who painted a portrait of Luca Pacioli (1445-1514), the Franciscan friar that introduced Leonardo to Euclid and wrote the De Divina Proportiona (1509), illustrated by Leonardo. De Barbari was described by his contemporaries, including Dürer, the Venetian art-lover Marcantonio Michiel (1584-1552) and the Antwerp humanist Gerad Geldenhauer.

In 1504, de Barbari met with Dürer in person in Nuremberg, and the pair discussed the canon of human proportions, a core subject of the latter’s research over the nexte 24 years.100

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 the regentess Archduchess Margaret of Austria (1480-1530) 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 and a book of drawings. But when Dürer asked to get a hold on them, she politely declined his request.102

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.103

In the same city, he makes a portrait sketch of Lucas van Leyden104, 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 Provoosst (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 Grapheus, 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), at that time 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 decorative and symmetric motives 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 Dürer presented to him by Quinten Matsys.

Durer and Matsys received by Alderman van de Werve in 1521 (painting by Godfried E. Guffens, Municipal Collection of Schaerbeek.)

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 De Mercede Conductis (The Dependant Scholar105 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, a fellow humanist and chief town secretary of Antwerp. It was Erasmus who suggested that Gillis 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 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, Gillis was an 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. Gillis 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.

Gillis 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 Erasmus’ In 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 and Grapheus, completed with Thomas More’s epistle dedicating the work to Gillis.

Several years after More’s and Erasmus’ death, in 1541, Cornelius 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 Quinten Matsys is the double portrait of Erasmus and his friend Gillis, painted in 1517108. 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 and of which also Leonardo’s pupil Francesco Melzi made a copy/interpretation.

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 respects the great attachment of the believers to 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 Arimathea109 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.110

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 after Leonardo in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle, labeled 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 II111, 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, after Leonardo da Vinci, Royal Library, Windsor Castle.

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 some works of Leonardo and Raphael, and further south 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’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.112

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 Welsers114 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 Bruegel’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).116

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.”117

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 mirror119 (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 does 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-Haytam and studied by Franciscans at Oxford120 such as Roger Bacon) reminds both Van Eyck’s Arnolfini couple (National Gallery, London)121 and Petrus Christus (1410-1475) Goldsmith in his workshop or Saint Eligius (1449, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), with a couple standing behind122, 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.123

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)

After 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 (Antwerp).124

2. His use of Leonardo’s « five grotesque heads, » on the right panel of the same Altarpiece of Saint Anne (Antwerp).

3. His reworking of the Virgin’s pose from Leonardo’s The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (Louvre, Paris), 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. Philippe d’Aarschot, wrote that « Without ever having set foot in Itlie, Matsys was influenced by Leonardo da Vinci. Isn’t his Magdalena a northern answer to Da Vinci’s Gioconda? »125 Also Holbein the Younger, is thought to have mad such a trip and considered by some as strongly influenced by Leonardo in certain of his compositions.126

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, Belgium. 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.127 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 Luca 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:

Leonardo and other humanists questioned the relationship between inner beauty (virtue) and outer, physical beauty. On the back of the master’s portrait of Genivra de’ Benci‘s (Washington DC), you can see a banner with the Latin text Virtutem forma decorat (Beauty adorns virtue). And so, conversely, they wondered how someone’s ugliness could be an expression of his vice.

From her side, Italian scholar Sara Taglialagamba128thinks 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,

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 Erasmus’ Praise 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 Erasmus dedicated in 1529 a colloquium130 to this theme titled The Unequal Marriage.

This Erasmian theme of the “Ill-matched Lovers,” became quite popular. According to art historian Max J. Friedlander131, 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 and philosophically, the central theme of Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly (At the end of the day, it is she that rules the world !).

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 offering her hand to channel 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 (1472-1553), who made a trip to Antwerp in 1508132, 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 (1515-1586).133

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, National Museum, Stockholm, Sweden.

Quinten Matsys’ son, Jan Matsys (1510-1575), 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

The Ugly Duchess (on the left), Quinten Matsys, National Gallery, London.
The old man (on the right), Quinten Matsys, Musée Jacquemart André, Paris.

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. »135

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. National Gallery, London.

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, fresco, Runkelstein Castle, Germany.

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? Quinten Matsys, 1517, Musée Jacquemart-André.

–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.”

King and Queen of Tunis, invented by Leonardo da Vinci, executed by Hollar, engraving from Wenceslaus Hollar, 1645, Metropolitan Museum, New York.

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 after Leonardo da Vinci, Two Grotesque Heads, 1510s? National Gallery, Washington.
Copy after Leonardo da Vinci, possibly by Francesco Melzi, Harvard Art Museum.

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?

Leonardo da Vinci, Uffizi Gallery, Florence.
Leonardo da Vinci for some, Francesco Melzi for others. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice.

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,” (omo sanza lettere)136 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.137 “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 museum’s 2008 exhibit “Renaissance Faces: Van Eyck to Titian,” told The Guardian at that time :

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, » 139 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 ».

7. Liefrinck and Cock

In his commentary, Jan Muylle140 gives interesting information about the work of Antwerp woodcarver-engraver and print publisher Hans Liefrinck (c. 1518-1573). Liefrinck produced the second state of Pieter Bruegel’s drawings The Fat Kitchen and The Thin Kitchen, among others, and collaborated in Antwerp with master printer Christophe Plantin.

He also produced four little-known copper engravings of grotesque heads borrowed from drawings by or after Leonardo da Vinci.

Hans Liefrinck, copperplate engraving, date unknown.

The captions and epigrams on the engravings by Liefrinck and de Cock, continues Muylle, « also provide a valuable aid to interpretation. This is a representative body of work, which is most welcome. »

Hans Liefrinck, copperplate engraving. The epigram reads: “Sordida, deformis sic est coniuncta marito Foemina, quo quaerat quisque sibi similem”. (The ugly woman is as deformed as her husband. This shows that everyone seeks his likeness).

In the cartouche of Liefrinck’s second legend, we read something that Leonardo was not far from thinking: Deformes, bone spectator, ne despice vultus. Sic natura homines sic variare solet. (Dear spectator, don’t despise these deformed faces. This is how nature usually makes men differ from one another).

Hieronymus Cock (c. 1510-1570) also uses the grotesque imagery of the “Ill-matched Couple” (unequal love). Cock’s plate is thought to be a copy of a work by the Italian engraver Agostino Veniziano (1490-1550). Veniziano’s epigram is typical of Venetian “humor”.

It moves from the grotesque to the burlesque: “Chi non ci vol veder si cavi gli occhi” (He who doesn’t want to see us, gouge out his eyes). It’s not clear which version was produced first. Both artists abandon the original theme, but the jester (Folly) who triumphs behind it is a legacy of Matsys and Erasmus.

What is clear is that the epigram at the bottom of Cock’s engraving is far more in the humanist spirit:

The captions in Liefrinck’s and Cock’s engravings are clearly more in line with Erasmus’ humanism and Da Vinci’s vision of mankind.

E. Conclusion

The conclusion (almost) writes itself. The “Seven Deadly Sins” that More and Erasmus tried to contain five centuries ago have become the axiomatic “values” of today’s “Western” system !

Yet they are the very opposite of the universal human values shared by the vast majority of humanity, whether philosophically, religiously, agnostically, progressively or conservatively.

“Freedom” was isolated from « necessity; » « individual rights » decoupled from « civil duties. » Anything goes. Lust, envy, greed, laziness, gluttony, avarice, greed, anger, violence, cruelty, addiction, etc. are portrayed in a positive light and promoted on television and the Internet on a daily basis, including for low age children. All this is allowed and even encouraged, as long as it does not call into question the privileges of the dominant power structures.

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 a Belgian professor has suggested, such scholarships should include a mandatory training period in Erasmus’ thoughts and especially his advanced concepts of peace building141.

Mobilizing Reason alone is not enough. Without humor, the Renaissance, with its unprecedented explosion of discoveries and inventions in science, art and society, would never have occurred. Humor is a catalyst for creativity. As some contemporary Chinese scientists put it: “Effective Ha-ha helps people to A-Ha”. 142

Humor itself is a creative act because creativity, like humor, arouses surprise by breaking certain frames. Both involve establishing non-obvious links between incongruous elements. And what is a joke, if it is not a combination of different and/or contrasting ideas that create an irony, a discrepancy, disobeying conventional expectations. Humor brings awareness of the incongruity between two elements. And the ability to switch from one element to another is a cognitive process identified as enhancing creativity. In other words, humor changes the way we think and facilitates an unexpected way of thinking, like the “thought experience” that prompted Einstein imagining himself “riding a beam” of light.

By developing our sense of humor, we develop a new ability to understand problems from different angles, and this type of thinking leads to greater creativity. Tackling problems in a linear and traditional way provides conventional, if not trivial, solutions. However, as Albert Einstein suggested: “In order to stimulate creativity, one must develop a childish inclination for play.”

And man’s “instinct for play”, as Friedrich Schiller underscores in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (1795), as the first encounter with an absence of constraints, serves a broader project of human progress, in which the freedom necessary for men to govern themselves adequately is exercised through the interplay of faculties that occur during aesthetic experience. In sum, the development of man’s “instinct for play” and humor, are essential for creativity and art, including the art of statecraft.

In short, to make a new renaissance a reality, we have to liberate our fellow citizens from Angst (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.

Jan Massys, Rebus. Phaebus Foundation.

I end here with a painting of Matsys’s son, Jan, presenting the 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

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    Sandra Accatino, Quentin Massys, Anciana grotesca o La duquesa fea, in « El Arte del Mirar », Academia.edu.
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    Rudolf Agricola, Brieven, Levens en Lof, Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam.
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    Maryan W. Ainsworth, Maximiliaan P. J. Martens, Petrus Christus, Ludion and Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gent-New York.
  • ALBERTI, 1435
    Leon Baptitta Alberti, De Pictura, Macula Dédale, 1992, Paris.
  • ANOUILH, 1987
    Jean Anouilh, Thomas More ou l’Homme libre, Editions de la Table ronde, Paris.
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    Daniel Arasse, Léonard de Vinci, Hazan, Paris.
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    Boudewijn Bakker, Landschap en Wereldbeeld, van Van Eyck tot Rembrandt, Uitgeverij Thoth, Bussem.
  • BATAILLON, 1998
    Marcel Bataillon, Erasme et l’Espagne, Droz, Genève.
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    Dirk Bax, Bosch, his picture-writing deciphered, A.A.Balkema, Rotterdam.
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    Jan Bialostocki, L’Art du XVe siècle des Parler à Dürer, Librairie générale française, Paris.
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    Amy R. Bloch, Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise: Humanism, History, and Artistic Philosophy in the Italian Renaissance, Cambridge University Press.
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    Till-Holger Borchert, Cranach der Ältere und die Niederlande, in DIe Welt von Lucas Cranach, editions G. Messling.
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    Andrée de Bosque, Quinten Metsys, Arcade Press, Brussels.
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    Sébastien Brant, La Nef des Fous, Editions Seghers et Nuée Bleue, Paris, 1979.
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  • ENENKEL, PAPY, 2006
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    Desiderius Erasmus, La Correspondance d’Érasme (XII volumes), translation and notes after Opus Epistolarum of P.S. Allen, H.M. Allen and H.W. Garrod; french translation under the direction of Alois Gerlo and Paul Foriers, Bruxelles, Presses académiques européennes, Bruxelles
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    Desiderius Erasmus, Oeuvres choisies, annotations by Jacques Chomarat, Livre de Poche, Paris.
  • ERASMUS, 1992
    Desiderius Erasmus, Erasme, Collection Bouquins, Robert Laffont, Paris.
  • ERASMUS, 1992
    Desiderius Erasmus, Erasme, Colloques (II volumes), Imprimerie nationale éditions, Paris.
  • ERASMUS, 1997
    Desiderius Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, Cambridge University Press.
  • ERASMUS, LUTHER, 2000
    Erasmus-Luther, Discours on Free Will, The Continuing Publishing Company, New York.
  • ERASMUS, 2013
    Desiderius Erasmus, Les Adages, sous la direction de Jean-Christophe Saladin, Le Miroir des Humanistes, Les Belles Lettres, Paris.
  • ESTAMPES, 1977
    Cabinet des Estampes, Diables et diableries, La représentation du diable dans la gravure des XVe et XVIe siècle, Genève.
  • EWING, 1990
    Dan Ewing, Marketing Art in Antwerp, 1460-1560: Our Lady’s Pand, The Art Bulletin, Vol. 72, N° 4, pp. 558-584.
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    Reindert L. Falkenburg, Joachim Patinir, Het landschap als beeld van de levenspelgrimage, Nijmegen.
  • FALKENBURG, 2015
    Reindert Falkenburg, Bosch, le jardin des délices, Hazan, Paris.
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    Marina Ferretti-Bocquillon, L’horrible et l’exquis, les portraits, in Léonard de Vinci, dessins et manuscrits, Connaissance des Arts, Louvre, Paris.
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    Pavel Florenski, La Perspective inversée, Editions Allia, Paris.
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    Joséphine Le Foll, Raphaël, sa vie, son oeuvre, son temps, Editions Hazan, Paris.
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    Piero della Francesca, De la Perspective en Peinture, In Medias Res, Paris.
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    Wilhelm Fraenger, Hieronymus Bosch, new edition, G&B Arts International.
  • FRIEDLANDER, 1971
    Max J. Friedländer, Early Netherlandish Painting. volume 7, Quentin Massys, Editions de la Connaissance, Bruxelles.
  • GALASSI, 2024
    Maria Clelia Galassi, Jan Massys (c. 1510-1573): Renaissance Painter of Flemish Female Beauty, Brepols.
  • GASSIER, WILSON, 1970
    Pierre Gassier and Juliette Wilson, Goya, Office du Livre, Editions Vilo, Paris.
  • GEERTS, 1987
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    Jo Gérard, Bruegel l’ancien et son époque, Editions Paul Legrain, Bruxelles.
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    Alois Gerlo, Erasme et Ses Portraitistes: Metsijs, Durer, Holbein, Hes & de Graaf Publishers bv.
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    Michael Gibson, Bruegel, Nouvelles Editions française, Paris.
  • GILBERT, 1905
    Felix Gilbert, The Pope, His Banker and Venice, A vivid account of men, money, and states in the High Renaissance, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massasuchusetts, London, England.
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    Eliane Gondinet-Wallstein, Un retable pour l’Au-delà, Editions Mame.
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FOOTNOTES:

  1. The artist’s name spelling differs over time and according to language cultures. In French, he is named Quentin Metsys, in English Quinten Massys and in Dutch Quinten (Kwinten) Matsijs. In Grobbendonk, he is called Matsys. Since the « ij » didn’t exist at the end of the XVth century, the author chose « Quinten Matsys » for this text, identical to the spelling used by Harald Brising in 1908 and Matsys himself for signing his 1514 painting, The Banker and his Wife, Louvre. ↩︎
  2. In La peinture dans les Anciens Pays-Bas, XVe et XVIe siècle (1994), Paul Philippot underscores: « Les grandes découvertes déplaçant l’activité mondiale de la Méditerranée vers l’Atlantique, Anvers devient, dès le début du XVIe siècle, le principal lieu d’échange entre le Nord et le Sud. Les marchands portugais y échangent des épices apportées des Indes avec les métaux d’Europe centrale et les draps anglais, qui repartent aussi vers l’Allemagne après avoir reçu leur finition à Anvers. »; Antwerpen, Twaalf eeuwen geschiedenis en cultuur, Karel Van Isacker and Raymond van Uytven, Mercatorfonds, Antwerpen, 1986. ↩︎
  3. L’âge d’or d’Anvers, Léon Voet, Fonds Mercator, Anvers, 1976. ↩︎
  4. Brugge, duizend jaar kunst, Valentin Vermeersch, Mercatorfonds, Antwerpen, 1981. ↩︎
  5. Complainte de la Paix, in Erasme, guerre et Paix, selected quotes annotated by Jean-Claude Margolin, Bibliothèque sociale, Aubier Montaigne, 1973, Paris. ↩︎
  6. How Erasmus Folly Saved Our Civilization, Karel Vereycken, website Schiller Institute, Washington, 2005. ↩︎
  7. Pieter Gillis (1486-1533), known as Petrus Aegidius. Pupil of Erasmus friend and printer Dirk Martens, he worked as a corrector in his company before becoming Antwerp’s chief town clerk. Friend of Erasmus and Thomas More, he appears with Erasmus in the double portrait painted by Quinten Matsys, another friend of both. ↩︎
  8. Dirk Martens, l’imprimeur d’Erasme qui diffusa le livre de poche, Karel Vereycken, webpage of Solidarité & Progrès, Paris. ↩︎
  9. Also known as Noviomagus, the Dutch historian Gerardus Geldenhouwer (1482-1542) of Nijmegen, gave up his catholic faith to join Luther’s and rapidly Melanchthon’s moderate reformation. Initially, just as Erasmus, he was trained at the famous Latin school created by the Modern Devotion (Brothers of the Common Life) in Deventer. In Leuven he wrote his first publications, amongst which are a collection of Satires in the trend of Erasmus’ Praise of Folly. In this period, (working with Dirk Martens?), he also oversaw the printing of several works of Erasmus and Thomas More. ↩︎
  10. Cornelius Grapheus (1482-1558), latinized from Cornelis De Schryver, was a Flemish writer, translator, poet, musician and friend of Erasmus. He traveled as a young man to Italy. The first edition of More’s Utopia in 1516 included some of Grapheus liminary verses. By 1520 he became chief town clerk of the city of Antwerp, writing a Latin panegyric to greet Charles V’s arrival. In 1522 he was arrested on accusation of heresy, was taken to Brussels for questioning, and made a full recantation. In 1523 he was set at liberty and returned to Antwerp, where he became a teacher. In 1540 he was reinstated as secretary to the city. ↩︎
  11. Upon the death of Hans Memling in 1494, Gerard David (1460-1523) became Bruges’ leading painter. He became dean of the guild in 1501. Notwithstanding his success in Bruges, he registered jointly with Patinir as a master in Antwerp which allowed him to sell his work also on that city’s rising art market, notably at the Our Lady’s Pand. ↩︎
  12. Patinir ou l’harmonie du monde, Maurice Pons and André Barret, Robert Laffont, Paris, 1980. ↩︎
  13. Dürer lived in Antwerp for eleven months: from Aug. 2, 1520, till July 2, 1521. His travel journal informs us about whom he met in Antwerp, among them the famous artists Quinten Matsys, Bernard van Orley and Lucas van Leyden. His return to Nuremberg coincides with the announcement of Charles V’th « placards » (decrees), forbidding Catholics to read the Bible. Since Dürer’s income came largely from Bible illustrations, prospects to live from that profession became close to zero. ↩︎
  14. In 1510, Lucas van Leyden (1489-1533), born in Leiden, influenced by Dürer, produced two masterpieces of engraving, The Milkmaid and Ecce Homo, the latter much admired by Rembrandt. Lukas met Dürer in Antwerp in 1521 and profited again from his influence, as can be seen in the Passion series of the same year. Lucas may have improved his etching skills with Dürer’s help, for he produced a few etchings after their encounter. ↩︎
  15. Holbein the Younger (1497-1543) was a Swiss painter. As an adolescent, he was asked, and succeded with great success, to annotate with drawings a copy of Erasmus’ Praise of Folly. They met in person, when Erasmus went into exile to Basel. Holbein made several oil portraits of the humanist and came to Antwerp to meet Pieter Gillis. ↩︎
  16. The Antwerp Mannerists’ style is accused of lacking character and individual expression. It is said to be « mannered », and, worse, characterized by artificial elegance. In Les Primitifs flamands et leur temps, pages 621-622-623-624, Editions Renaissance du Livre, 1994. ↩︎
  17. L’art flamand et hollandais, le sièce des primitifs (1380-1520), pages 178, 221, Editions Citadelles et Mazenod, 2003. ↩︎
  18. The research group Ghent Interdisciplinary Centre for Art and Science (GICAS) is a collaboration between members of the Faculties of Arts and Philosophy (Art History, Archaeology, History), Sciences (Analytical Chemistry) and Architecture and Engineering (Image Processing). Research concentrates on material aspects of works of art, with special focus on painting from the Low Countries (15th -17th centuries). The Centre applies both imaging as image processing techniques, as well as material analysis with respect to art historical questions and applications in conservation and restoration. ↩︎
  19. The Paintings of Quinten Massys with Catalogue Raisonné, Larry Silver, Allanheld & Schram, 1984. ↩︎
  20. Quentin Metsys, Andrée de Bosque, Arcade Press, Brussels, 1975. ↩︎
  21. Quinten Matsys; essai sur l’origine de l’italianisme dans l’art des Pays-Bas, Brising, Harald, 1908, Leopold Classic Library, reprint 2015. ↩︎
  22. Martin Luther King, in a sermon, reminds us that in ancient Greece they distinguished three different qualities of love: eros, for gendered love, philia for (brotherly) friendship and agape, translated in Latin as caritas for boundless charity. Agape chooses to regard the other as it does in 1 Corinthians 13: always ready to think the best of the other, ready to forgive, ready to seek the best for the other. An important characteristic of agape, is that it is not based on one’s own needs.
    ↩︎
  23. Erasme et la peinture flamande de son temps, Georges Marlier, Editions van Maerlant, Damme, 1954; ↩︎
  24. Marlier, Georges, op. cit. p. 163. ↩︎
  25. How Erasmus folly saved our civilization, Karel Vereycken, Schiller Institute archive webpage, 2005. ↩︎
  26. Albrecht Dürer’s fight against Neo-Platonic Melancholia, Karel Vereycken, Solidarité & Progrès webpage, 2007. ↩︎
  27. De Eeuw van de Zotheid, over de nar als maatschappelijke houvast in de vroegmoderne tijd, Herman Pleij, Uitgeverij Bert Bakker, Amsterdam, 2007. ↩︎
  28. Le bas Moyen Âge et le temps de la rhétorique, Hanna Stouten, Jaap Goedegebuure and Frits Van Oostrom, in Histoire de la littérature néerlandaise, Fayard, 1999. ↩︎
  29. De vergeten beeldentaal van Jheronimus Bosch, Dr Eric de Bruyn, Heinen, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, 2001; Bosch, his picture-writing deciphered, Dirk Bax, A.A.Balkema, Rotterdam, 1978. ↩︎
  30. French writer and Christian humanist François Rabelais (1583-1553), in his letter to Salignac (in reality, Erasmus), calls him his « father » and even his « mother » and affectionately compares himself to a kind of baby that has grown in his womb, Rabelais, Oeuvres complètes, p. 947, Editions du Seuil, 1973. ↩︎
  31. Spanish literary genius Miguel de Cervantès (1547-1616) was trained by his schoolmaster Juan Lopez de Hoyos (1511-1583), an enthusiastic follower of Erasmus of Rotterdam, whose spirit he breathed into his most beloved disciple. ↩︎
  32. It has been convincingly argued that the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare (1564-1616) wrote, or at least was a major contributor to the 1595 theater play Sir Thomas More, Erasmus’ « twin brother » in spirit and action. ↩︎
  33. Erasmus of the Low Countries, James D. Tracy, p. 104. Erasmus began speaking of “the Philosophy of Christ” in works about 1515. Already in Julius Exclusus (Pope Julius II Excluded from Heaven, 1514) he introduces the idea when St. Peter contrasts the divine simplicity of Christ’s teaching with the worldly arrogance of « warrior » Pope Julius II. “This kind of philosophy” was expressed “more in the emotions [affectibus] than in syllogisms,” it was a matter of “inspiration more than learning, transformation more than reasoning.” ↩︎
  34. On Plato’s humanism: Bierre, Christine, Platon contre Aristote, la République contre l’oligarchie. Webpage of Solidarité & Progrès, 2004. ↩︎
  35. Between 339 and 397 AD, the church father Jerome of Stridon studied and wrote, utilizing many works of history and philosophy from his own library. Jerome’s use of his classical scholarship in the service of Christianity was continued and the intellectual discipline involved valued so long as it could serve the Christian purpose–and without endangering the new Christian Society. ↩︎
  36. Saint Augustine of Hippo‘s epistemology was clearly platonic. For him, in spite of the fact that God is exterior to humans, human minds are aware of him because of his direct action on them (expressed in terms of the shining of his light on the mind, or sometimes of teaching) and not as the result of reasoning or learning from mere empirical sense experience. ↩︎
  37. Among Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s greatest commercial successes stands The Seven Deadly Sins and The Virtues, two series of drawings, engraved and printed by collaborators at the Vier Winden printshop of Jerome Cock in Antwerp, in visual language adopted from his inspirer, the painter Hieronymus Bosch. ↩︎
  38. The Life and Art of Albrecht Durer, Erwin Panofsky, Princeton University Press, 1971. ↩︎
  39. Vanitas (Latin for « vanity », in this context meaning pointlessness, or futility, is a genre of memento mori or symbolic trope acting as a reminder of the inevitability of death, symbolizing the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and thus the vanity of an existence defined by the permanent quest for earthly pleasure. ↩︎
  40. On Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s fight for the introduction of classical Greek in Europe: The Greek Language Project. Plato and the Renaissance, Karel Vereycken, Artkarel, 2021. ↩︎
  41. One cannot underestimate the immense popularity, and therefore the historic importance, of these cycles, notably in France. In the Netherlands, Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s imaginary for his painting The Triomph of Death, often misunderstood, are nearly directly taken from Petrarch’s poetic cycle. Translations in English exist such as The Triumphs of Petrarch, ‎Francis Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), Legare Street Press, 2022. ↩︎
  42. With Jeronymous Bosch on the track of the Sublime, Karel Vereycken, Archive webpage, Schiller Institute, Washington. ↩︎
  43. Bosch, le jardin des délices, Reindert Falkenburg, Hazan, Paris, 2015. ↩︎
  44. In his main literary work, Il Cortegiano (The courtier), Book XXXIX, Baldassar Castiglioni (1478-1519) mocks Leonardo da Vinci, regretting « that one of the prime painters of the word despises the art in which he is unique and started learning philosophy, in which he has forged so strange conceptions and chimeras that he could never paint them in his work ». ↩︎
  45. Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, Richter, 1888, XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations, N° 1178, Dover Editions, Vol. II., 1970. ↩︎
  46. De Docta Ignorantia (On learned ignorance/on scientific ignorance), Cusanus (Nicolaus of Cusa), 1440. Cusanus was a follower of Socrates who, according to Plato said « I know that I know nothing » (Plato, Apology, 22d). ↩︎
  47. With his De Servo Arbitrio (The Enslaved Will), Martin Luther responded extensively in 1525 to Erasmus’ De libero arbitrio diatribe sive collation (On The Free Will) published one year earlier, in 1524. ↩︎
  48. On 31 October 1517, Luther wrote to his bishop, Albrecht von Brandenburg, protesting against the sale of indulgences. He enclosed in his letter a copy of his « Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences », which came to be known as the 95 Theses. Among others, Erasmus had already exposed this scam extensively, including in his 1509 Praise of Folly. ↩︎
  49. Written in a couple of days in the residence of Thomas More at Bucklersbury close to London, the work expresses the deep shock Erasmus experienced when discovering the pitiful state in which
    he found « his » Church and « his » Italy, when he traveled to Rome in 1506. For Erasmus, opposite to the Scholastics, emotion should not be ignored or suppressed, but elevated and educated, a theme later developed by Friedrich Schiller in his Letters on the esthetical education of Man (1795). Stultitia (the Latin name for Folly) is the personification of Folly that oscillates permanently between apparent madness=real wisdom and apparent wisdom=real madness, speaks out and firmly claims her paternity and authorship of everything. From the “soft” folly of the weak, of women and children, of men who through sin have abandoned reason, Erasmus transitions to mobilize all his irony and wit to lambaste the “hard” criminal madness of the powerful, of “folly-sophers, » merchants, bankers, princes, kings, popes, theologians and monks. ↩︎
  50. La Nef des Fous, Sébastien Brant, Editions Seghers et Nuée Bleue, reprint, 1979, Strasbourg. ↩︎
  51. Sebastian Brant, Forschungsbeiträge zu seinem Leben, zum Narrenschiff und zum übrigen Werk, Thomas Wilhelmi, Schwabe Verlag, p. 34, 2002, Basel. ↩︎
  52. Ibid, note N° 22. ↩︎
  53. Massys and Money: The Tax Collectors Rediscovered, Larry Silver, JHNA, Volume 7, Issue 2 (Summer 2015), Silver writes: « Yet the influence of Massys’s picture in the history of genre paintings—the subject was taken up almost immediately by the painter’s son Jan Massys, by Marinus van Reymerswaele, and by Jan van Hemessen–has been recognized for some time. » ↩︎
  54. Durer made this engraving to illustrate a popular collection called The Book of the Knight of the Tower, a manual for decent conduct for young ladies. According to the story, the wife of the cook ate an eel meant for a special guest, but rather than admitting it to her husband, she told a lie. A magpie revealed the woman’s secret to her husband, and was punished by having its feathers plucked by the vengeful wife. The cook, represented with all the attributes of his trade: knife, pan and a spoon, is listening to the bird with a growing expression of surprise on his face, whereas his wife turns her gaze to the side in anticipation, which verges on resolute. ↩︎
  55. The fact that the Florentine writer and merchant Lodovico Guicciardini (1521-1589) lived for most of his life in Antwerp, even if that is after 1542, makes him a valuable source of information. ↩︎
  56. For Bruegel, his World is Vast, Interview of the author with Bruegel expert Michael Gibson, art critic of the International Herald Tribune, Fidelio, Vol. 8, N° 4, Winter 1998. ↩︎
  57. Sebastian Brant, op. cit., p. 23. ↩︎
  58. Sebastian Brant, op. cit., p. 27. ↩︎
  59. Dendrochronological study has dated the wood to 1491, and it is tempting to see the painting as a response to Brant’s Ship of Fools or even the illustrations of the first edition of 1493. Another possible source for the ship allegory is the XIVth-century Pilgrimage of the Soul of Guillaume de Deguileville, printed in Dutch in 1486. ↩︎
  60. See Moderne Devotie et Broeders en van het Gemene Leven, bakermat van het Humanisme, lezing van Karel Vereycken, 2011, Artkarel.com. ↩︎
  61. This theme, powerfully developed by Joachim Patinir, Herri met de Bles and others, forcefully appears in The Pilgrimage of Man (The Soul), Guillaume De Deguileville, XIVth Century. ↩︎
  62. De Moderne Devotie, Spiritualiteit en cultuur vanaf de late Middeleeuwen, collective work, WBooks, Zwolle, 2018. ↩︎
  63. That is the vision of Denis the Carthusian (1401-1471), who wrote a treatise on theological aesthetics under the title of De Venustate Mundi and Pulchritudine Dei (About the Attractiveness of the World and the Beauty of God). ↩︎
  64. One has to congratulate here the groundbreaking insights of Pr. Eric de Bruyn in his remarkable book De vergeten beeldentaal van Jheronimus Bosch, Heinen, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, 2001, where he conclusively demonstrated that the subject of the backside of Bosh’s painthing « The Haywagon, » was not the « Return of the Prodigal Son », as was thought for years, but « The Peddler. » ↩︎
  65. Les Flamands de France, Louis de Baecker, Messager des sciences historiques et archives des arts de Belgique, p. 181, Gent, Vanderhaeghen, 1850. ↩︎
  66. For a detailed account of Matsys’ youth, see Quinten Metsys, Andrée de Bosque, p. 33, Arcade Press, Brussels, 1975. ↩︎
  67. The legend started with Dominicus Lampsonius (1536-1599) who included, in his Effigies of some celebrated painters of Lower Germany, published in 1572 by the widow of Hieronymus Cock in Antwerp, an engraved portrait of Matsys done by Wierx, accompanied by a poem about how Matsys’ girlfriend preferred the quiet paintbrush to the heavy noise of a blacksmith’s hammerings. The story was taken up in 1604 by Karel van Mander in his Schilder-Boeck and later by Alexander van Fornenberg (1621-1663) in his enthusastic presentation of Matsys, Den Antwerpschen Protheus, ofte Cyclopshen Apelles; dat is; Het Leven, ende Konst-rijcke Daden, des Uyt-nemenden, ende Hoogh-beroemden, Mr. Quinten Matsys: Van Grof-Smidt, in Fyn-Schilder verandert, Antwerpen, published by Hendrick van Soest, 1658. ↩︎
  68. The Book of Painters, Karel Van Mander, 1604. ↩︎
  69. Architectural Drawings from the Low Countries: Fifteenth to Sixteenth Centuries, Oliver Kik, CODART eZine, no. 8, Autumn 2016. ↩︎
  70. Quinten Metsys, Edward van Even, in Het Belfort, Jaargang 12, 1897, Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlands letteren, webpage. ↩︎
  71. For more: Cornelis Matsys 1510/11-1556/57: Grafisch werk, Jan Van der Stock, Tentoonstellingscatalogus. ↩︎
  72. Les Pays-bas bourguignons, Walter Prevenier and Wim Blockmans, Fonds Mercator et Albin Michel, 1983. ↩︎
  73. For at detailed account, see The Age of the Fuggers, Franz Herre, Presse-Druck- und Verlag-GmbH Augsburg, 1985. ↩︎
  74. In 1548, Francisco de Hollanda (1517-1585) recorded a conversation in his De Pinture Antigua between Vittoria Colonna and the well-known painter Michelangelo in which they were discussing the art from the north. Michelangelo expressed his viewpoint on Flemish painting as follows: « Flemish painting will generally speaking, Signora, please the devout better than any painting of Italy, which will never cause him to shed a tear, whereas that of Flanders will cause him to shed many; and that not through the vigor and goodness of the painting, but owing to the goodness of the devout person. In Flanders they paint with a view to external precision or such things as may cheer you and of which you cannot speak ill, as for example, saints and prophets. They paint objects and masonry, the green grass of the fields, the shadows of trees, and rivers and bridges, which they call landscapes, with many figures on this side and many figures on that one. And all this, though it pleases some persons, is done without skillful choice of boldness and, finally, without substance or vigor. » ↩︎
  75. On this artist: see Thierry Bouts, Catheline Périer D’Ieteren, Fonds Mercator, Bruxelles, 2005. ↩︎
  76. On this artist: see Hugo van der Goes, Elisabeth Dhanens, Mercatorfonds, Antwerpen, 1998. Also Hugo van der Goes and the Modern Devotion, Karel Vereycken, Artkarel.com. ↩︎
  77. See Schilderkunst in de Bourgondische Nederlanden, Berhard Ridderbos, Davidsfonds, Leuven, 2014. ↩︎
  78. Les trois degrés de la vision selon Ruysbroeck l’Admirable et les Bergers du triptyque Portinari de Hugo van der Goes, Delphine Rabier in Studies in Spirituality, N° 27, pp. 163-179, 2017. In his second work in Brussels, Die geestelike brulocht (c. 1335/40) (the spiritual wedding), Ruusbroec explains that the spiritual life proceeds in three stages in which the love of God deepens each time: the working life, the inward life and the God-reflecting life. Ruusbroec emphasizes that the mystic who has reached the highest stage never abandons the previous two, but practices them from union with God. This Ruusbroec calls the “Common” life. ↩︎
  79. On this artist: see Rogier van der Weyden, Dirk De Vos, Mercatorfonds, Antwerpen, 1999. ↩︎
  80. On the musical compositions of Jacob Obrecht (1457-1505), see Flemish Music, Robert Wangermée, Arcade, Brussels, 1968. ↩︎
  81. Metsys’s Musician: A Newly Recognized Early Work, Larry Silver, Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art (JHNA), Volume 10, Issue 2, Summer 2018. ↩︎
  82. On the Renaissance in Ferrare: Une Renaissance Singulière – La Cour Des Este À Ferrare – Bentini Jadranka, Quo Vadis, 2003. ↩︎
  83. The Latin School of the Brothers of the Common Life in Deventer was directed at Erasmus time by Alexander Hegius (1433-1498), pupil of the famous Rodolphe Agricola (Huisman) (1442-1485), follower of Cusa and enthusiastic defender of the Italian renaissance and classical literature. Erasmus called him a “divine intellect.” At the age of 24, Agricola made a tour of Italy to give organ concerts and meets Ercole d’Este I (1431-1505) ruler of the court of Ferrara. At the University of Pavia, he also discovered the horrors of Aristotelian scholasticism. When teaching in Deventer, Agricola would start his class by saying: “Do not trust anything you have learned until this day. Reject everything! Start from the standpoint that you have to unlearn everything except what you can re-discover based on your own authority or on decrees by superior authors.” ↩︎
  84. The hypothesis that Quentin Matsys went for a trip to Italy has also been suggested by italian author Limentani Virdis, who even gives the painter the authorship of a fresco of the Milan Oratory of Santa Maria di Rovegnano Abbey. ↩︎
  85. Dirk de Vos in L’Art flamand, p. 261, Fonds Mercator, 1985. The text in French reads: « Les styles précoce et mur de Metsys contrastent si forts que l’on ne saurait les expliquer ce qui les sépare qu’en faisant appel à l’hypothèse d’une fréquentation assidue des oeuvres de la Renaissance italienne, et plus précisément celles de Léonard de Vinci et de ses disciples du XVe siècle finissant. Car on note chez Metsys des emprunts immédiats à Léonard, si bien qu’une autre source d’inspiration semble exclue. S’il n’existe aucune preuve tangible d’un voyage en Italie, la présence à Anvers de Metsys présente néanmoins des solutions de continuité compatibles avec une absence prolongée, par exemple entre 1491 et 1507. Un voyage en Italie n’est par conséquent nullement improbable. » ↩︎
  86. Discourse on Free Will, Desiderius Erasmus, Bloomsbury Revelations, 2013. ↩︎
  87. Van Eyck, a Flemish Painter using Arab Optics, Karel Vereycken, lecture on the subject of “Perspective in XVth-century Flemish religious painting” at the Paris Sorbonne University on April 26-28, 2006. ↩︎
  88. Van Eyck, une révolution optique, Maximiliaan Martens, Till-Holger Borchert, Jan Dumolyn, Johan De Smet and Frederica Van Dam, Hannibal, MSK Gent, 2020. ↩︎
  89. Avicenna and Ghiberti’s role in the invention of perspective during the Renaissance, Karel Vereycken, Artkarel, 2022. ↩︎
  90. Ibn al-Haytham on binocular vision: a precursor of physiological optics, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, pp. 79-99, Raynaud, Dominique, Cambridge University Press, 2003. ↩︎
  91. Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) published in 1435 his De Pictura. While the book develops important geometrical concepts employed in perspective representation, it lacks any form of illustration or image and doesn’t inquire into the formation of images in the mind of the viewers. Leonardo took time to demonstrate the limits of the Albertian system and presented some alternatives. ↩︎
  92. Foundations of Renaissance, Architecture and Treatises in Quentin Matsys’ S. Anne Altarpiece (1509), Jochen Ketels and Maximiliaan Martens, European Architectural Historians Network, EAHN: Investigating and Writing architectural history: subjects, Methodologies and Frontiers. p.1072-1083. ↩︎
  93. Ibid, note N° 92. ↩︎
  94. De prospectiva pingendi (On the Perspective of Painting), written by Piero della Francesca (1415-1492) is the earliest Renaissance treatise in italian devoted to the subject of perspective. See The Egg without shadow of Piero della Francesca, Karel Vereycken, Fidelio, Vol. 9, N° 1, Spring 2000, Schiller Institute, Washington. ↩︎
  95. Ibid, note N° 92. ↩︎
  96. Joachim Patinir, Het landschap als beeld van de levenspelgrimage, Reindert L. Falkenburg, Nijmegen, 1985. ↩︎
  97. More on this in Albrecht Dürer, Anja-Franziska Eichler, Könemann, 1999, Cologne, p. 112. ↩︎
  98. More on this in Le Collège des Trois langues de Louvain (1517-1797), Pr. Jan Papy, Editions Peeters, Louvain, 2018. ↩︎
  99. Jacopo de’ Barbari and Northern Art of the Early Sixteenth Century, Jay A. Levenson, New York university, 1978. ↩︎
  100. Four Books on Human Proportions, Albrecht Dürer, 1528. Noteworthy for our subject here, the fact that the artist, in the third book, gives principles by which the proportions of the figures can be modified, including the mathematical simulation of convex and concave mirrors. ↩︎
  101. Quote from Italian Engravings from the National Gallery of Art, Jay A. Levenson, Konrad Oberhuber, Jacquelyn L. Sheehan, National Gallery of Art, 1971. ↩︎
  102. Les premières gravures italiennes, Quattrocento-début du cinquecento. Venise, Vicence, Padoue : Jacopo de Barbari, Girolamo Mocetto, p. 312-348, Inventaire de la collection du département des Estampes et de la Photographie, Éditions de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2015. ↩︎
  103. Albrecht Durer; Diary of His Journey to the Netherlands 1520-1521. Accompanied by the Silverpoint Sketchbook and Paintings and Drawings Made During His Journey, New York Graphic Society, Greenwich, 1996. ↩︎
  104. Ibid, Note N° 14. ↩︎
  105. De Mercene Conductis (The Dependant Scholar), Lucian of Samosata. Translated by Fowler, H W and F G. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. 1905. ↩︎
  106. Ibid note N° 105. ↩︎
  107. Ibid note N° 105. ↩︎
  108. Erasme parmi nous, p. 72-73, Léon E. Halkin, Fayard, Paris, 1987. ↩︎
  109. Joseph of Arimathea is a Biblical figure who assumed responsibility for the burial of Jesus after his crucifixion. ↩︎
  110. Herod the Great (c. 72 – c. 4 BC) was a Roman Jewish « client King » (satrap) of the kingdom of Judea. He is known for his colossal building projects, notably the rebuilding of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. ↩︎
  111. On Julius II’s role in the rebuilding of Rome, see What the What Humanity can learn from Raphael’s School of Athens, Karel Vereycken, Artkarel.com, 2022. ↩︎
  112. Ibid, note N° 82. ↩︎
  113. Marlier, Op. cit, p. 252. ↩︎
  114. On the role of the Fuggers and Welsers in financial and physical slavery in the XVIthe century, see Jacob the Rich, father of financial fascism, Karel Vereycken, Artkarel, 2024. ↩︎
  115. Quoted in Marlier, Op. cit. ↩︎
  116. For a detailed analysis: Le prêteur et sa femme de Quinten Metsys, Emmanuelle Revel, Collection Arrêt sur œuvre, Service culturel, Action éducative, Louvre, Paris, 1995. ↩︎
  117. Les primitifs flamands, Erwin Panofsky, Harvard University Press, 1971, traduit de l’anglais par Dominique Le Bourg, Hazan, collection « 35/37 », Paris, 1992, pp. 280-282. ↩︎
  118. Le siècle de Bruegel. La Peinture en Belgique qu XVIe siècle, catalogue d’exposition 27 septembre – 24 novembre 1963, Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Bruxelles, notice dirigé par Georges Marlier. ↩︎
  119. For an in depth analysis, see opposing views: on the one side, the diabolical nature of mirrors, in Histoire du miroir, Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, Imago, Paris, 1994, and on their role as a mediator to the divine, Nicolaus of Cusa’s De Visione Dei, 1453. ↩︎
  120. L’hypothèse d’Oxford, Dominque Raynaud, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1988. ↩︎
  121. Jan van Eyck, a Flemish painter using Arab Optics, lecture of Karel Vereycken in 2006 at la Sorbonne University, Artkarel, France. ↩︎
  122. For a complete analysis: Petrus Christus, Maryan W. Ainsworth and Maximiliaan P. J. Martens, p. 96. ↩︎
  123. Iconographie de l’art chrétien, Louis Réau, Presses Universitaires de France, 1958, tome III, Iconographie des saints, pp. 927-928. ↩︎
  124. Ibid, note 92. ↩︎
  125. Philippe d’Aarschot, in Gids voor de Kunst in België, p. 105, Spectrum, 1965. ↩︎
  126. Holbein’s Lais of Corinth, 1526, reveals the influence of Leonardo. Also Pierre Vays, honorary professor of Art History at the Geneva Faculty, points to the « leonardesque touch of certain of his compositions », in Holbein le Jeune, on https://www.clio.fr.
    ↩︎
  127. Da Vinci likely painted part of Belgium’s ‘The Last Supper’ replica, Maïthé Chini, The Brussels Times, May 2, 2019. ↩︎
  128. In Les grotesques et mouvements de l’âme, Léonard de Vinci conçu par Wenceslaus Hollar à la Fondation Pedretti, Federico Giannini, Finstre Sull’Arte, 26 mars 2019. ↩︎
  129. The Ten Books on Architecture, 1.3.2, Vitruvius. ↩︎
  130. The Colloquies of Erasmus, Translated by N. Bailey, Gibbing & Company, London, 1900. ↩︎
  131. Early Netherlandish Painting. volume 7, Quentin Massys, Max J. Friedländer, Editions de la Connaissance, Bruxelles, 1971. ↩︎
  132. Cranach der Ältere und die Niederlande, Till-Holger Borchert, in DIe Welt von Lucas Cranach, editions G. Messling, 2010. ↩︎
  133. Les couples mal assortis – Lucas Cranach, Perceval, eve-adam.over-blog.com, 2016, ↩︎
  134. The Ugly Duchess by Quinten Massys, An Analyses, Katie Shaffer, Academia.edu, 2015. ↩︎
  135. Picturing women in late Medieval and Renaissance art, Christa Grössinger, Manchester University Press, 1997. p. 136. ↩︎
  136. Léonard de Vinci, Daniel Arasse, p. 36, Hazan, Paris, 1997. ↩︎
  137. L’Encyclopédie Larousse notes that « L’influence de Léonard apparaît dans une Vierge à l’Enfant (musée de Poznań), inspirée de la Vierge et sainte Anne, et se lit également dans la facture de la Vierge Rattier (1529, Louvre) ou de la Madeleine (musée d’Anvers). Elle a peut-être suscité la tendance caricaturale du Vieillard (1514, Paris, musée Jacquemart-André), de la Femme laide (copie à Londres, N. G.) et peut-être même indirectement des scènes de genre comme le Vieux galant (Washington, N. G.) ou l’Usurier (Rome, Gal. Doria-Pamphili). » ↩︎
  138. Solved: mystery of The Ugly Duchess – and the Da Vinci connection, Mark Brown, The Guardian, Oct. 11, 2008. ↩︎
  139. Ibid. note N° 138. ↩︎
  140. Groteske koppen van Quinten Metsijs, Hieronymus Cock en Hans Liefrinck naar Leonardo da Vinci, Jan Muylle, De Zeventiende Eeuw, 10th year, 1994. ↩︎
  141. Ibid. note N° 5. ↩︎
  142. Creativity and Humor, Chapter 4 – Why Humor Enhances Creativity From Theoretical Explanations to an Empirical Humor Training Program: Effective “Ha-Ha” Helps People to “A-Ha”, Ching-Hui Chen, Hsueh-Chih Chen, Anne M. Roberts, pages 83-108, Explorations in Creativity Research, 2019. ↩︎
  143. De Eeuw van de Zotheid, over de nar als maatschappelijke houvast in de vroegmoderne tijd, Herman Pleij, p. 11, Uitgeverij Bert Bakker, Amsterdam. ↩︎

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

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:

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:

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

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:

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:

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:

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

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:

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 Aristotlefound 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:

And he continues:

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:

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 »:

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:

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:

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

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:

And Jerome invokes the « Precepts of Pythagoras » :

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

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:

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

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 :

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 :

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:

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 :

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

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

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

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:

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.

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Bruegel, Petrarca and the « Triumph of Death »

The Triumph of Death, Peter Bruegel the Elder, oil on panel, 1562, Prado, Madrid.

By Karel Vereycken, april 2020.

The Triumph of Death? The simple fact that the heir to the throne of England, Prince Charles, and even the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, have tested positive to the terrifying coronavirus currently sweeping the planet, tells something to the public.

As some commentators pointed out (no irony) it “gave a face to the virus”. Until then, when an elderly person or a dedicated nurse died of the same, it “wasn’t real”.

Realizing that these “higher-ups” are not part of the immortal Gods of Olympus but are mortals as all of us, brings to my mind “The Triumph of Death”, a large oil painting on panel (117 x 162 cm, Prado, Madrid), generally misunderstood, painted by the Flemish painter Peter Bruegel’s the elder (1525-1569), and thought to be executed between 1562 and his premature demise.

In order to discover, beyond the painting, the intention of the painter’s mind, it is always useful, before rushing into hazardous conclusions, to briefly describe what one sees.

« Below, some people are crawling on their knees, hoping to remain unnoticed ».

What do we see in Bruegel’s « Triumph of Death« ? On the left, a skeleton, symbolizing death itself, holding a sand-glass in its hand, carries away a dead King. Next to him, another skeleton grabs the vast amounts of money no one can take with him into the grave. Death is driving a chariot. Below the charriot some people are crawling on their knees, hoping to remain unnoticed.

People are gambling and amusing themselves…

On the right, at the forefront, people are gambling and amusing themselves. A skeleton playing a musical instruments joins a prosperous young couple engaged in a musical dialogue and clearly unaware that Death is taking over the planet.

The message is simple and clear. No one can escape death, poor or rich, young or old, king or peasant, sick or healthy. When the hour comes, or at the end of all times, all mortals return to the creator since “physical” death triumphs over all of them.

Immortality

Lyndon LaRouche (1922-2019)

American thinker Lyndon LaRouche (1922-2019), in his speeches and writings, used to remind us, with his typical loving impatience: all human wisdom starts by a personal decision to acknowledge a fact proven without contest: we are all born and each of us, sooner or later, will die. So far, our bodies have all been proven mortal.

The duration of our mortal existence on the clock of the universe, he reminded, is less than a nanosecond.

Therefore, knowing this boundary condition of our mortal existence, we, each of us, have to make a personal sovereign decision: how will I spend the talent of my life ? Will I spend that talent chasing the earthly pleasures of the flesh, or dedicate my life to defending the truth, the beautiful and the good, to the great benefit of humanity as a whole, living in past, present and future ?

In 2011, in a discussion, LaRouche explained what he meant by saying that humanity has the potential to become an “immortal” species:

I live; as long as I live, I may generate ideas.
These conceptions give mankind a chance to move forward.
But then the time will come when I will die.
Now, two things happen: First of all, if these creative principles,
which have been developed by earlier generations,
are realized in the future, that means that mankind is an immortal species. We are not personally immortal;
but to the extent that we’re creative, we’re an immortal species.
And the ideas that we contribute to society
are permanent contributions to the human society.
We are therefore an immortal species,
based on mortal beings. And the key thing in life is to grasp that connection.
To say that we’re creative and die,
doesn’t tell us the story. If we, in our own lives, who are about to die,
can contribute something that is permanent, which will outlive our death, and be a benefit to mankind in future times, we have achieved the purpose of immortality.
And that is the crucial thing.
If people can actually face, with open minds, the fact that we’re each going to die—but look at it in the right way,
then we are impassioned to make the contributions,
to discover the principles, to do the work that is immortal.
Those discoveries of principle which are immortal, which pass on from one generation to the other. And thus, the dead live in the living;
because what the dead do, if they have done that in their lifetime, they are alive, not as in the flesh, but they’re alive in principle.
They’re part, an active part, of human society.

Christian humanism

LaRouche’s outlook, the “moral” obligation to live a “creative” existence on Earth in the image of the Creator, was deeply rooted in the philosophical outlook of both the Platonic and the Judeo-Christian tradition, whose happy marriage gave us the beautiful Christian humanism which, in the early XVth Century, ignited an unprecedented explosion, on a mass-scale and of unseen density of economic, scientific, artistic and cultural achievements, later qualified as a “Renaissance”.

In Plato’s Phaedon, Socrates develops the idea that our mortal body is a constant impediment to philosophers in their search for truth: “It fills us with wants, desires, fears, all sorts of illusions and much nonsense, so that, as it is said, in truth and in fact no thought of any kind ever comes to us from the body” (66c).  To have pure knowledge, therefore, philosophers must escape from the influence of the body as much as is possible in this life. Philosophy (Literally “The love of wisdom”) itself is, in fact, a kind of “preparation for dying” (67e), a purification of the philosopher’s soul from its bodily attachment.

Also the Vulgate’s Latin rendering of Ecclesiastics 7:40 stresses: « in all thy works be mindful of thy last end and thou wilt never sin”. This passage finds expression in the christian ritual of Ash Wednesday, when ashes are placed upon the worshippers’ heads with the words: “Remember Man that You are Dust and unto Dust You Shall Return.”

Is this a morbid ritual? No, it is a philosophy lesson. Christianity itself, as a religion, cherishes God’s own son made man, Jesus, for having renounced to his mortal life for the sake of mankind. It put Jesus’ death at the center. And in the XIVth century, Thomas a Kempis (1380-1471), one of the leading intellectuals and founders of the Brothers of the Common Life, wrote that every Christian should shape his life in the “Imitation of Christ”. Both Nicolaus of Cusa (1401-1464) and Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466-1536) were powerfully influenced and trained by this intellectual current.

Concedo Nulli

Medal with Erasmus portrait, casted by Quinten Matsijs in 1519.

Erasmus’ personal armory was the juxtaposition of a skull and a sand-glass, referring to death and time as the boundary conditions of human existence.

In 1519, his friend, the Flemish painter and goldsmith Quentin Matsys (1466-1530) forged a bronze medal to the honor of the great humanist.

On one side of the medal there is an efigee of Erasmus and a Latin inscription informs us that this is “an image taken from life”. At the same time we are told in Greek, « his writings will make him better. known »

The reverse side of the medal shows solemn inscriptions surrounding an unusual image. At the top of a pillar that stands in rough, uneven ground, emerges the head of a young man with a stubbly chin and wild, flowing hair. Like Erasmus on the other side of the medal, he seems to have a faint smile upon his face. On either side of the head are the words “Concedo Nulli”– “I yield to no one.” On the pillar is inscribed Terminus, the name of a Roman god who presided over boundaries. Again bilingual quotations surround a profile. On the left, in Greek, is the instruction, « Keep in mind the end of a long life. » On the right, in Latin, is the stark reminder, « Death is the ultimate boundary of things. »

Verso of the medal

Adapting as his own motto “I yield to no one”, Erasmus took the great risk of using such a daring metaphor. Accused of intolerable arrogance by his sycophants, he underlined that “Concedo Nulli” had to be understood as death’s own statement, not his own. And who could argue with the assertion that death is the terminus that yields to no one?

Mozart, Brahms and Gandhi

Centuries later, the great humanist composer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, was the exact opposite of a morbid cynic. Revealing his inner mindset, Mozart once said that the secret of all genius, was love for humanity: “neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius”.

But on April 4, 1787, Mozart wrote to his father, Leopold, as he lay dying :

I need hardly tell you how greatly I am longing
to receive some reassuring news from yourself.
And I still expect it ; although I have now made a habit of being prepared in all affairs of life for the worst.
As death, when we come to consider it closely,
is the true goal of our existence,
I have formed during the last few years such close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind,
that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me,
but is indeed very soothing and consoling !
And I thank God for graciously granting me
the opportunity (you know what I mean)
of learning that death is the key
which unlocks the door to our true happiness.
I never lie down at night
without reflecting that –young as I am– I may not live to see another day.

Johannes Brahms 1865 German Requiem, quotes Peter 1:24-25 reminding us that


“For all flesh is as grass,
and all the glory of man as the flower of grass.
The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away.
But the word of the Lord endureth for ever.”

Also Mahatma Gandhi, expressed, in his own way, somthing similar, about how one has to live simultaneously with mortality and immortality:

« Live as if you were to die tomorrow.
Learn as if you were to live forever. »

Memento Mori and Vanitas

Hieronymus Bosch, detail of « The Garden of Earthly Delights ».

Just as Hieronymus Bosch’s (1450-1516) painting of the “Garden of Earthly Delights” (Prado, Madrid), where the great Dutch master uses the metaphor of naked humans incessantly chasing delicious fruits, calls on the viewer to become aware of his close-to-ridiculous, animal-like attachment to earthly pleasures and calls on his free will and his sens of humor to free himself, Bruegel’s “Triumph of Death” painting, on a first level, is fundamentally nothing else than a complex Memento Mori (Latin “remember that you must die”).

With this painting, Bruegel pays tribute to his intellectual godfather’s motto Concedo Nulli, that is, as Erasmus did in his writings, Bruegel paints the ineluctability of death, not by praising its horror, but with the aim of inspiring his fellow citizens to walk into immortality. In the same way Erasmus’ « In praise of folly » was in fact an inversion of his praise of reason, Brueghel’s « Triumph of Death » was conceived as a triumph of (immortal) life.

For the Catholic faith, the aim of a Memento Mori was to remind (and eventually terrorize) the believer that after death, he or she might end up in Purgatory or worse in Hell if they did not respect the Church and her rites. With the invention of oil painting in the early XVth century, panel paintings of this genre for private homes and small chapels were considered aesthetic objects crafted for the sake of religious and philosophical contemplation.

Hence, starting with the Renaissance, the Memento Mori painting became a much demanded artifact, re-branded in the following centuries as “Vanitas”, Latin for « emptiness » or « vanity ». Especially popular in Holland and then spreading to other European nations, Vanitas paintings typically represented assemblages of numerous symbolic objects such as human skulls, guttering candles, wilting flowers, soap bubbles, butterflies and hourglasses.

Iconography

The aristocrat, Holbein the Younger, Dance of Death.

A first source is of course, the famous designs and woodcuts executed by Erasmus intimate friend and illustrator of his “In Praise of Folly”, Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543), for his satirical “Dance of Death” (1523), which –breaking with the way the “Dance macabre” was used before by the Flagellants and other madmen to desensitize the population in order to push them into a fatalistic retreat of the outer world– introduces the new philosophical dimension that Bruegel will develop.

vanitas
Vanitas, Philippe de Champaigne, 1671.

The close-to-embarassing anamorphosic representation of a giant skull in Holbein’s work « The Ambassadors » (1533), demonstrates his profound understanding of the Memento Mori metaphor.

Erasmus’ friend Albrecht Dürer‘s engraving « Knight, Death and the Devil » (1513), or his « Saint Jerome in his study » (1514) (with skull and hourglass) are two other examples.

The Ambassadors (1533), Hans Holbein the Younger. On the right, the « anamorphosic » skull on the floor, when seen from a tangent viewpoint.

Bruegel and Italy

Ironically, Peter Bruegel the elder has always been presented as a painter of the Northern School who was completely closed to the “Italian” Renaissance.

The reality is that while rejected the transformation of the Renaissance into a form of mannerism in the XVIth century, he took most of his inspiration directly from two Italian Renaissance sources.

Triumph of Death, fresco (1446) from the Palazzo Sclafini in Palermo, Sicily.

First, of course, the image of Death riding a horse, and even a group of persons such as the young couple engaged in their musical embrace, appear incontestably as taken from the Triumph of Deat”, a vast fresco from 1446 which decorated the walls of the Palazzo Sclafani in Palermo, Sicily. Bruegel’s trip to Southern Italy is a well documented fact.

The second source, which undoubtedly also inspired the painter of the fresco, is a series of allegorical poems known as “I Trionfi” (“The Triumphs”: Triomph of Love, of Chastity, of Death, of Fame, of Time and of Eternity), composed by the great Italian poet Francesco Petrarca, most likely following the “Black Death”, a pandemic outbreak which, starting with the 1345 banking crash, decimated a vast portion of the population of Europe.

Petrarca’s genius was precisely to offer to those terrified with the very idea of having to face their physical mortality, a philosophical answer to their anxiety.

As a result, his Trionfi became rapidly popular, not only in Italy but all over Europe. And for most painters, working on Petrarca’s themes became part of their common repertoire.

BNF
The Master of Petrarca’s Triumphs. Manuscript of the BnF. On the left, The Triumph of Love shows Laura on top of a charriot. On the right (The Triumph of Death) Death stands on Laura’s mortal remains.

To conclude, here is an excerpt (English) of the poem, where Petrarca blasts the mad lust of Kings and Popes for wealth, pleasure and earthly power. In the face of death, he stresses, they are worthless. Petrarca’s wording fits to the detail the images used by Bruegel in his painting The Triumph of Death :

(…) afar we might perceive
    Millions of dead heap’d on th’ adjacent plain;
    No verse nor prose may comprehend the slain
    Did on Death’s triumph wait, from India,
    From Spain, and from Morocco, from Cathay,
    And all the skirts of th’ earth they gather’d were;
    Who had most happy lived, attended there:
    Popes, Emperors, nor Kings, no ensigns wore
    Of their past height, but naked show’d and poor.
    Where be their riches, where their precious gems,
    Their mitres, sceptres, robes, and diadems?
    O miserable men, whose hopes arise
    From worldly joys, yet be there few so wise
    As in those trifling follies not to trust;
    And if they be deceived, in end ’tis just:
    Ah! more than blind, what gain you by your toil?
    You must return once to your mother’s soil,
    And after-times your names shall hardly know,
    Nor any profit from your labour grow;
    All those strange countries by your warlike stroke
    Submitted to a tributary yoke;
    The fuel erst of your ambitious fire,
    What help they now? The vast and bad desire
    Of wealth and power at a bloody rate
    Is wicked,–better bread and water eat
    With peace; a wooden dish doth seldom hold
    A poison’d draught; glass is more safe than gold;

Whether Bruegel, who saw undoubtedly the fresco in Palermo during his trip in the 1550s, had read Petrarca’s poem remains an open question. It can be said that many of his direct friends were familiar with the Italian poet.

In Antwerp, the painter was a frequent guest of the Scola Caritatis, a humanist circle animated by one Hendrick Nicolaes, where Brueghel met poets, translaters, painters, engravers (Cock, Golzius) mapmakers (Mercator), cosmographers (Ortelius) and bookmakers such as the Antwerp printer Christophe Plantijn, who’se renowned printing shop would print Petrarca’s poetry.

Also in Antwerp, indicating how popular Petrarca’s poetry had become in the Low Countries and France, the franco-flemish Orlandus Lassus (1532-1594) published his first musical compositions, including his madrigals on each of the six Trionfi of Petrarca, among which the « Triumph of Death ».

Conclusion

All evil, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) hoped, can give birth to something good, far bigger and superior to the evil that provoked it. Therefore, we can hope that the current pandemic breakdown crisis will lead some of the leading decision-makers, with our help, to reflect on the sens and purpose of their lives. The worst would be to return to yesterday’s “normalcy” since that kind of “normal” is exactly what drove the planet currently to the verge of extinction.

At last, it should be stressed that in the same way Lyndon LaRouche, by his ruthless (Concedi Nulli) commitment to defend the sacred creative nature of every human individual, contributed to the enduring immortality of Plato, Petrarca, Erasmus and Bruegel, it is up to each of us to carry even further that battle.

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Saint-Jerome (1521), Lucas Van Leyden (1494-1533)
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