Abstract
In the spirit of renewed interest in moral philosophy, Renaissance humanists revived ancient debates as to the importance of philosophy, rhetoric, and poetry. Inasmuch as these disciplines shared the task of representing nature fairly and accurately, their relative ability to do so was much disputed. Unlike its sister arts, however, philosophy had no other claims on public attention. Since it depended on the medium of logical discourse, and on words, which were at best symbols standing for mere ideas of nature (and which were also shared by rhetoric and poetry), it struggled to represent its understandings of nature naturally. Fictional constructions, which might serve as models of nature or put it into conceptual relief, had the advantage of not being limited to actual representations of nature. Plato’s dialogues, for example, depicted nature through the imitation of intellectual argument and discourse. They represented philosophy at one remove from itself through the medium of fiction. Similarly, poetry, which from the time of Plato was thought to be deceptive and riddling, operated through mystification, allegoresis, and occult association and might be said to excite sympathy with nature. Among certain ancients, it was thought to have transcendent properties.
Philosophy is nothing else but a sophisticated poesie: whence have these ancient Authors all their authorities, but from Poets? And the first were Poets themselves, and in their Art treated the same. Plato is but a loose Poet. All highe and more than humane Sciences are decked and enrobed with a Poeticall stile. Even as women, when their natural teeth faile them, use some of yvorie, and in stead of a true beautie, or lively colour, lay-on some artificiall hew; and as they make trunk-sleeves of wyre and whale-bone bodies, backes of lathes, and stiffe bumbasted verdugals, and to the open-view of all men paint and embellish themselves with counterfeit and borrowed beauties; so doth learning (and our law hath, as some say, certaine lawfull fictions, on which it groundeth the truth of justice) which in liew of currant payment and presupposition, delivereth us those things, which she her selfe teacheth us to be mere inventions…
Michel de Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond 1
The Middle Ages had left antiquity unburied and alternately galva nized and exorcised its corpse. The Renaissance stood weeping at its grave and tried to resurrect its soul. And in one fatally auspicious moment it succeeded.
Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art 2
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Notes
Michel de Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond, in Essays, 3 vols., trans. John Florio (London, 1893; reprint, New York: AMS, 1967), 2: 249. I have modernized Florio’s title.
Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 113.
See also Saint Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 2.40.60.
The epigram is cited in George Boas, The Hieroglyphs of Horapollo (1950; reprint, Princeton: Princeton, 1993), 11.
John Holroyd Sheffield, ed., Autobiography of Edward Gibbon (Oxford: Oxford, 1950), 214.
Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J. B. Bury (New York: Heritage, 1946), vol. 3: 2303.
Thomas Browne, “Religio Medici,” in The Works of Thomas Browne, 4 vols., ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), vol. 1: 83.
Michel Jeanneret, A Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance, trans. Jeremy Whiteley and Emma Hughes (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1991), 260, distinguishes between Renaissance and medieval attitudes to imitation as between mimesis and imitation. He defines mimesis as the use of “strategies designed to imitate, in and through the text, realistic effects; it does not reproduce the world, but creates a new one out of words and stories which is realistic enough for the imagination to go along with it, to attribute life-like qualities to it and to recognize in it a universe which is coextensive with the world of actual experience.”
R. Bracht Branham and Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé, eds., The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and Its Legacy (Berkeley: University of California, 1996), 2. For the constructive tenor of Cynicism, see
William Desmond, Cynics (Berkeley: University of California, 2008), 2–5.
Diogenes was exiled from Sinope for defacing its coins; Branham and Goulet-Caze call this the “central metaphor” for Diogenes’ philosophical activity (7–8). For Diogenes and Cynicism, see also Luis E. Navia, Diogenes of Sinope: The Man in the Tub (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998).
L. L. Wellborn, Paul, the Fool of Christ: A Study of 1 Corinthians 1–4 in the Comic-Philosophic Tradition (London: T. and T. Clark, 2005), stressing the relationship of learned folly and a tradition of mime, notes that ancient mime was not voiceless theater but an art of depiction of character rather than unfolding of plot. He quotes Diomedes (Ars Grammatica 3, Grammatici Latini) to illustrate faithfulness in the imitation of character: “The mime is an imitation of life encompassing both things accepted and things forbidden” (4).
Pliny the Elder, Historia Naturalis 35.36.60; William K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (London: Methuen, 1970), vol. 1: 19, use this to exemplify the illusion of reality.
See John Hollander, The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1995), 3ff. Hollander distinguishes between “notional” ekphrasis, which enlivens imaginary works of art, and ekphrases that depend on “particular and identifiable works of art” (4ff.). See also
Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), who opens the figure to wider theoretical purposes.
W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1994), provides a comprehensive conceptual framework. On the metaphysics of art doubling nature, see Plato’s Cratylus 432, in Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds., Plato Collected Dialogues (1961; reprint, Princeton: Princeton, 1980), 466 (further quotations from Plato will refer to the internal apparatus in this edition): “… the image, if expressing in every point the entire reality, would no longer be an image.” Wimsatt and Brooks, vol. 1: 20, take this as an indication of Plato’s preference for formalism over illusionism (i.e., the illusion of the real) in poetry.
Philip Sidney, “An Apology for Poetry,” in Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2 vols., ed. G. Gregory Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1904), vol. 1: 158.
Saint Augustine, Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1984), 1073–4. Cf. Psalm 139.14–16. The anatomy metaphor has rich Menippean affiliations, particularly as discussed by Frye.
Gerald Hammond, Fleeting Things: English Poets and Poems, 1616–1660 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1990), 196–7, notes a parallel use of ekphrasis in Herrick’s On Julia’s Picture: “How I am ravished! When I do but see,/The Painter’s art in thy Sciography?/If so, how much more shall I dote thereon,/When once he gives it incarnation?” He invokes a sense of “incarnation” linked to the dyeing process: “The artist incarnates his sciograph by filling it in with a flesh colour.”
John Kerrigan, On Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford, 2001), 23–40, who cites a memorable passage on literary imitation and painting in a moral epistle (84.8) by Seneca the Younger: “Even if there shall appear in you a likeness to him who, by reason of your admiration, has left a deep impression on you, I would have you resemble him as a child resembles his father, and not as a picture resembles its original; for a picture is a lifeless thing” (30).
John Kerrigan, On Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford, 2001), 23–40, who cites a memorable passage on literary imitation and painting in a moral epistle (84.8) by Seneca the Younger: “Even if there shall appear in you a likeness to him who, by reason of your admiration, has left a deep impression on you, I would have you resemble him as a child resembles his father, and not as a picture resembles its original; for a picture is a lifeless thing” (30).
Alciato, “Emblemata (1531),” in The Latin Emblems; Index Emblematicus, 2 vols., trans. and ed., Peter M. Daly, Virginia W. Callahan, and S. Cutter (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1985), vol. 1. All references to Alciato emblems, including figures, default to the emblem numbers in this edition. The word is of Greek and Latin origin, specifically the Latin emblema (OED: “inlaid work; a raised ornament on a vessel”). The idea of the three-part device was probably original with
Alciato. Francis Bacon, The Dignity and Advancement of Learning, in The Physical and Metaphysical Works, trans. and ed. Joseph Devey (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1858), 213, underlines an implicit sense of the emblem as a witty ekphrastic contrivance in a distinct context: “But emblems [one of two parts of the ‘art of memory’] bring down intellectual to sensible things.”
William S. Heckscher and Agnes B. Sherman document variants in Emblematic Variants: Literary Echoes of Alciati’s Term Emblema, A Vocabulary Drawn from the Title Pages of Emblem Books (New York: AMS, 1995). See also
Robert Cummings, “Alciato’s Emblemata as an Imaginary Museum,” Emblematica 10.2 (Winter 1996): 245–76, who argues that Alciato “invites the notion of his collection of emblems as… a splendid addition to a great museum” (245). Cummings establishes a prima facie relationship between emblems and ekphrastic device, drawing on a wide array of ancient and Renaissance texts.
Mottoes and epigrams are veiled forms in themselves. Since they are open to interpretation, they are ideally suited to heuristic education; see Mary Thomas Crane, “Intret Cato: Authority and the Epigram,” in Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1986), 164. Lesser-known and cryptic apothegms, such as those drawn from the Greek Anthology, and familiar proverbs, implying ancient wisdom by definition, are prominent among emblem mottoes. By the end of the sixteenth century, mottoes were often quotations from Scripture suitable for further elucidation in the epigram, and, not unlike sermons, the emblem form served the purpose of religious sentence. The introduction to
William Barker, trans., The Adages of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2001), xxv–xxxv, and Erasmus’ introduction to the Adages (in Barker, esp. 5–9) give useful accounts of the function of proverbs.
Patrick Mauries, Cabinets of Curiosities (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 116–9, discusses related enthusiasm for automota, which he calls “Hybrids between art and nature” (116), reflecting on the “dialectic between life and death” as found in such machines and in the cabinets in which they were stored: “Marshalling these secret impulses in the private theatre of his cabinet, the collector was never far from the realm of necromancy, engaged as he was in bringing the dead back to life or consigning living things to death” (119).
Claude Mignault of Dijon, “Treatise on Symbols” (1577), in Theoretical Writings on the Emblem: A Critical Edition with Apparatus and Notes, trans. and ed., Denis Drysdall, University of Glasgow Emblem Site, 15, par. 41 (http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/Mignault_intro.html). Mignault recalls Maximus of Tyre on the function of poetry in relation to the soul: “It was their realization of this truth that led the poets to invent the device by which they play on the soul in their discussion of the gods: namely, the use of myths, that are less clear than explicit doctrine, yet more lucid than riddles, and occupy the middle ground between rational knowledge and ignorance. Trusted because of the pleasure they give, yet mistrusted because of their paradoxical content, they guide the soul to search for the truth and to investigate more deeply…. A philosopher is a difficult and unpleasant thing for most people to listen to…. A poet on the other hand makes more soothing and popular listening… ” [M. B. Trapp, trans., Maximus of Tyre: The Philosophical Orations (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997); Drysdall, Note 11].
E. H. Gombrich, Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (Oxford: Phaidon, 1978), 102ff., discusses the fusion of narrative, architecture, and mystery in the Hypnerotomachia; for example, on Bramante’s understanding of the obelisk as a religious symbol: “Only by contemplating this symbol could the mind be properly attuned to the mystery that awaited the pilgrim within. Once more such a conception strongly recalls the atmosphere of the Hypnerotomachia with its feeling of religious awe surrounding the symbols of Egyptian wisdom and its stages of initiation marked through obelisks and sacred buildings” (104). Gombrich quotes Colonna on the obelisk of the Vatican: “In itself it contained such a store of wonders that I stood and contemplated it in an insensible stupor” (104).
George Wither, A Collection of Emblemes (1635; reprint, Menston, England: Scolar, 1968), 2–3; see also Penn State On-Line Emblem Books (http://emblem.libraries.psu.edu/withetoc.htm).
Quotations are from Sylvester’s translation, in The Complete Works of Josuah Sylvester, 2 vols., ed. Alexander B. Grosart (1880; reprint, New York: AMS, 1967). References to the French text are to U. T. Holmes, J. C. Lyons, and R. W. Linker, eds., The Works of Guillaume de Salluste Sieur Du Bartas, 3 vols. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1935–38). Sylvester’s translations date from 1592 to 1608; for the dating, see Susan Snyder’s edition of Sylvester, The Divine Weeks and Works of Guillaume de Saluste Sieur du Bartas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), vol. 1: 67, 106–7. For his book metaphor, Du Bartas may have drawn on Isaiah’s metaphor of the sealed book: “And the vision of all is become unto you as the words of a book that is sealed” (29.11). The topos of the book of the world is ancient and often represented in the emblem tradition; see
Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard Trask (London: Routledge, 1953), 303–47.
There are many analogues. M. A. Screech, Ecstasy and the “Praise of Folly” (London: Duckworth, 1980), 22, cites Erasmus’ metaphor on human childishness: “The divine Wisdom lisps to us and, like a dutiful mother, accommodates his words to our infantiam.”
Robert Burton, “Democritus Junior to the Reader,” The Anatomy of Melancholy, 2 vols., ed. Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicholas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L. Blair (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), vol. 1: 6, by contrast, stresses human inability to read judiciously through the metaphor of the simple narrative of a picture: “Howsoever it is a kinde of pollicie in these daies, to prefixe a phantasticall Title to a Booke which is to be sold: For as Larkes come downe to a Day-net, many vaine Readers will tarry and stand gazing like silly passengers, at an anticke Picture in a Painters shop, that will not looke at a judicious peece.”
Geffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes (1586; reprint, Menston, England: Scolar, 1969), 55, satirizes little boys chasing after bubbles, and the image suggests literary fancies among others: “The little boyes, that strive with all theire mighte,/To catche the belles, or bubbles, as they fall:/In vaine they seeke, for why, they vanishe righte,/Yet still they strive, and are deluded all:/So, they that like all artes, that can bee thoughte,/doe comprehende not anie, as they oughte.” The epigram is ironic in that the work pursues “all artes.”
Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale, 1982), 54, evidences the antique habit of distinguishing different orders of imitation, the most basic of which were the imitations of children; he thus quotes Quintilian: “It is for this reason that boys copy the shapes of letters that they may learn to write, and that musicians take the voices of their teachers, painters the works of their predecessors… ” (54). Nicholas of Cusa’s vivisection of the page in Of the Vision of God illustrates the admiratio of the antiquary, who marvels in wonderment at the sheer multiplicity of symbols (Kerrigan and Braden, 99). For Nicholas, the reading of the book of nature is by no means a trivialization of human achievement into schoolboy buffoonery, but a fact of life, a diminishment only in relation to God’s eternity: “Teach me, O Lord, how it is that by a single viewing You discern all things individually and at once. When I open a book, for reading, I see the whole page confusedly. And if I want to discern the individual letters, syllables, and words, I have to turn to each individually and successively. And only successively can I read one letter after another, one word after another, [one] passage after another. But You, O Lord, behold at once the entire page, and You read it without taking any time” (De Visione Dei 8.31, trans. Jasper Hopkins, 3rd edition [Minneapolis, 1988], 694; http: www.cla.umn.edu/jhpkins/dialecticalmysticismq(1).pdf).
A. C. Guthkelch and D. N. Smith, eds., A Tale of a Tub (Oxford: Oxford, 1920), 145.
Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (1966; reprint, London, 1992), 358.
See Geoffrey Bullough, Mirror of Minds: Changing Psychological Beliefs in English Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1962), 18–20; Bullough comments on how “trivial and forced” the allegory seems by today’s standards, but the allegory is a good deal less “hard” and “diagrammatic” than he alleges.
Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), 96–7, discussing the same conceit, finds Du Bartas stumbling on the internal mystery of the body. Remarking the poet’s lapse into unanswered questions about the body, Sawday misses the point, which is not to draw conclusions but to use the interiority of the body to illustrate an Augustinian point about the complexity of the macrocosm (through the complexity of the microcosm). Still later, Sawday remarks that while “Du Bartas had recoiled,” Traherne evoked the body as “continually evading linguistic order” (262). For full discussions of the passage, see
Leonard Barkan, Nature’s Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World (New Haven: Yale, 1975), 156–74;
Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1999), 51–69. Schoenfeldt’s opening chapter lays out a substantial recent body of scholarship on the relationship between the body and mind, or “inwardness” as he describes it, in English literature of the period.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. MacPherson (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1968), 81.
See Note 19 above for Agrippa’s belief in the ability of painting to represent the voice. Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven: Yale, 1999), Chapter 4, stresses the role of ekphrasis and voice in interpreting the fragmentary past, especially in relation to sculpture; for example, “If language and voice are fundamental systems of recuperation for fragmentary ancient sculpture and ekphrasis and prosopopoeia the fundamental tropes, then the Pasquino deserves to stand as paradigm for a cultural encounter in which art object and observer reconstruct each other in a kind of mutual conversation” (231). Cf. Cummings’ analysis: “The transfer to paper of material antiquity (marble, metal, or whatever) is one of the triumphs of the humanist enterprise, and poets may comfort themselves that their song will outlast marble and brass” (265). Cummings regards emblems as specimens of “a lost art,” in fragments of stone or brass, sculptural remnants of antiquity, or in relief representations, such as coins.
In the Purgatorio, Dante and Virgil encounter images carved into a rock face whose art somehow betters nature; among the carved images is an Annunciation (10.34–45) in which the Angel Gabriel is carved so realistically that it seems impossible for him to be silent, and the Virgin’s actions in response are somehow impressed with the words Ecce ancilla Dei, like a shape formed in wax. Dante was familiar with such metamorphic imagery from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, whose myths of change bespeak a relationship between human animation and material form. Many provide semblances of speaking pictures—a popular motif. In an ekphrasis in Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece, “gaping faces” in one image are seen to suppress the unvoiced voice of Nestor, seeming “to swallow up his sound advice” (408–9). Another example is Du Bartas’ image of the metamorphosis of Lot’s Wife: “Fain would she speak: but (forced to conceal)/In her cold throat, her guilty words congeal;/Her mouth yet open, and her arms a-crosse,/Though dumb, declare both why, & how she was/Thus Metamorphos’d” (Vocation 1382–1427). There are also ekphrases emphasizing nonverbal communication, including an Alberti fable, One Hundred Apologues 68, in David Marsh, trans., Renaissance Fables: Aesopic Prose by Leon Battista Alberti, Bartolomeo Scala, Leonardo da Vinci, Bernadino Baldi (Tempe, AR: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2004), 67, a vivid instance of Plato’s notion of a one-way discourse, in which Praxiteles is so distracted by the indecent leering of his Venus statue that he fixes the problem with a chisel; cf. Greek Anthology 16.159–70.
Theodor E. Mommsen’s Introduction to Petrarch: Sonnets and Songs, trans. Anna Maria Armi (New York: Pantheon, 1946), xxxviii-xxxix, suggests that the novelty of Petrarch’s Canzoniere was paradoxically attributable to his lifelong study of antiquity. For related ideas, see John Freccero, “The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch’s Poetics,” Diacritics 5 (1975), reprinted in
Patricia Parker and David Quint, eds., Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1986), 20–32.
Joachim Du Bellay, Les Regrets et Autres Oeuvres Poëtiques, introduction by M. A. Screech, 2nd edition (Geneva: Droz, 1974);
Edmund Spenser, Complete Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (1912; reprint, Oxford: Oxford, 1977); references to the Faerie Queene are to A. C. Hamilton’s edition (London: Longman, 1977).
Edmund Gosse, Sir Thomas Browne (London: Macmillan, 1905), 105.
Graham Parry, “In the Land of Moles and Pismires: Thomas Browne’s Antiquarian Writings,” in English Renaissance Prose: History, Language, and Politics, ed. Neil Rhodes (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), 247, views Browne as “an honorary citizen of the ancient world.” Browne did not have the morbidity of Petrarch, who claimed to be “happier with the dead than the living” (Greene, Light in Troy, 8; Greene reflects on the tragic impermanence of history—the sense of desolation and loss felt by Petrarch as he addressed the ghosts of the past). Montaigne, in “Of Coaches,” Essays, vol. 3: 141–2, draws on the contradictory opinions of Lucretius in the De Rerum Natura to represent the fashions of his time: “How vainely do we now-adayes conclude the declination and decrepitude of the world, by the fond arguments wee drawe from our owne weaknesse, drooping and declination:… ‘And now both age and land/So sicke affected stand’ [Lucretius 1.2.1159]. And as vainly did another conclude its birth and youth, by the vigour he per-ceiveth in the wits of his time, abounding in novelties and invention of divers Arts:… ‘But all this world is new, as I suppose,/World’s nature fresh, nor lately it arose:/Whereby some arts refined are in fashion,/And many things now to our navigation/Are added growne to augmentation’ [Lucretius 1.5.330]. Our world hath of late discovered another… no lesse-large, fully-peopled, all-things-yeelding, and mighty in strength, than ours; neverthelesse so new and infantine, that he is yet to learne his A B C.”
The subject is discussed by Mauries; see Steven Mullaney, “Strange Things, Gross Terms, Curious Customs: The Rehearsal of Cultures in the Late Renaissance,” in Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley: University of California, 1988), 65ff.;
E. H. Gombrich, “The Museum: Past, Present, and Future,” Critical Inquiry 3 (1977): 449ff.;
Niels von Holst, Creators, Collectors, and Connoisseurs: The Anatomy of Public Taste from Antiquity to the Present Day (New York: Putnam, 1967), 103–7. Mauries, citing the Pillars of Hercules in the frontispiece of the 1620 edition of Bacon’s Instauratio Magna (“A ship in full sail upon a boundless sea”), finds an elaborate containment theme: “The twin pillars that mark the frontiers of the known world also provide a frame for the unknown. Similarly, the cabinet of curiosities finds its raison d’etre in a multiplicity of frames, niches, boxes, drawers and cases, in appropriating to itself the chaos of the world and imposing upon it systems—however arbitrary—of symmetries and hierarchies. It is like a shadow cast by the ‘unknown,’ an unknown that dissolves into a shower of objects. It offers an inexhaustible supply of fragments and relics painstakingly slotted and fitted into the elected space, heavy with meaning, of a secret room” (12).
Greene cites an earlier humanist discovery of fraudulent antiquity: Petrarch insisted that two letters allegedly written by Julius Caesar and Nero were not (Light in Troy, 36). Greene argues that the spirit of antiquarianism lay in a self-conscious revival of the past, partly in relation to rhetorical imitation (1–53). He suggests that the concept of “rebirth” assumed the status of etiological myth (30ff.). Imitation is thus self-consciously “anachronistic” and “heuristic.” On antiquarianism and imitation, see also John M. Steadman, The Lamb and the Elephant: Ideal Imitation and the Context of Renaissance Allegory (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1974), 25–52.
See Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton: Princeton, 1966), 227. Some of the curiosities gathered by Browne are emblazoned with ekphrastic carvings or images, suggesting that sublime effects flow from the combination of art and material artifact: item 8—“A large ostrich’s egg, whereon is neatly and fully wrought that famous battle of Alcazar, in which three kings lost their lives”; item 11—“A neat painted and gilded cup made out of the confiti di Tivoli and formed with powdered eggshells, as Nero is conceived to have made his piscina admirabilis… ”; item 22—“A large agate containing a various and careless figure, which looked upon by a cylinder representeth a perfect centaur… ”; item 23—“Batrachomyomachia, or the Homerican battle between frogs and mice, neatly described upon the chizel bone of a large pike’s jaw”; item 24—“Pyxis Pandorae, or a box which held the unguentum pestiferum, which by anointing the garments of several persons begat the great and horrible plague of Milan” (Musaeum Clausum, Works, vol. 3: 116–9).
C. S. Lewis, Fern-seed and Elephants (London: Fontana, 1975), 35.
The commonplace is the central preoccupation of Hadot’s essay, extending from antiquity to the present, beginning with Heraclitus’ mysterious formulation “Nature loves to hide” (1). On truth lying buried, see Petrarch’s On His Own Ignorance: “There are men who pretend that truth is buried in the depths and, as it were, sunk into a profound pit, as if it were to be dug up from the inner-most hiding-place in the earth and not rather brought down from the highest summit of heaven; as if it were to be extracted with grappling hooks and hauled up with ropes and not rather approached with the steps of genius on the ladder of grace” (125–6). The metaphor is usually attributed to Democritus, as by Bacon: “as it is well said by Democritus, that ‘the knowledge of nature lies concealed in deep mines and caves’… ” (Advancement of Learning, 122). The related topic of poetry emanating from a well-spring is treated in detail by David Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source (New Haven: Yale, 1983).
Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, Works, 1: 25. For the implications of this image, see Brendan O’Hehir, “The Balance of Opposites,” in Expans’d Hieroglyphs: A Critical Edition of Sir John Denham’s Coopers Hill (Berkeley: University of California, 1969), 165ff. Hadot notes Browne’s concern with “Nature’s Hieroglyphic Language”—its communication by “signature” rather than word or letter, as a way of underlining the enigmatic, poetic aspect of nature (202–5).
For the formal status of the woodcut, see James A. Knapp, “The Bastard Art: Woodcut Illustration in Sixteenth-Century England,” in Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England, ed. Douglas A. Brooks (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2005), 151–72. Perhaps the overelaborated images in later emblem books spelled the end of the magic. For emblems and crude art, see
Michael Bath, Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture (London: Longman, 1994), 12ff.
Samuel Johnson, “Life of Cowley,” in Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets: A Selection, ed. J. P. Hardy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 12: “If by a more noble and more adequate conception that be considered as wit which is at once natural and new, that which, though not obvious, is, upon its first production, acknowledged to be just; if it be that which he that never found it wonders how he missed…. But wit, extracted from its effects upon the hearer, may be more rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.”
D. A. Russell and M. Winterbottom, eds., Ancient Literary Criticism: the Principal Texts in New Translations (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 150, exemplify Aristotle’s sense of wit through Dr. Johnson’s account of metaphysical wit.
Petrarch disparages Epicureanism in On His Own Ignorance: “Who has not heard of the crowd of atoms and their chance combinations? Democritus and his follower Epicurus try to make us believe that heaven and earth, and all things in general consist of atoms which have gathered in one spot. Both these men, wishing to leave not a single bit of madness untold, established the innumerable worlds” (92–3). After the rediscovery of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura in 1417, the theme evolved into a topos. See, for example, Lorenzo Valla, On Pleasure (De Voluptate), trans. and ed. A. Kent Hieatt and Maristella Lorch (New York: Abaris, 1977), 267. By Giordano Bruno’s time the metaphor was in widespread use. But Bruno took Epicureanism seriously;
Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1964), 318–9, cites his De immenso and De minimo; see also
Dorothea Singer, Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought (New York: Greenwood, 1968), 91. Montaigne, unpersuaded, liked the metaphor as an expression of curiosity and wit: “I can not easily be perswaded, that Epicurus, Plato, or Pythagoras have sold us their Atomes, their Ideas, and their Numbers for ready payment. They were over wise to establish their articles of faith upon things so uncertaine and disputable. But in this obscuritie and ignorance of the world, each of these notable men hath endeavoured to bring some kinde of shew or image of light; and have busied their mindes about inventions that might at least have a pleasant and wylie appearance … ” (Apology for Raymond Sebond, 218).
Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly and Other Writings, trans. and ed. Robert M. Adams (New York: Norton, 1989), 58.
Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, On Being and the One, Heptaplus, trans. Charles Glenn Wallis (London: Macmillan, 1985), 5–6.
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Lepage, J.L. (2012). Introduction: Containers. In: The Revival of Antique Philosophy in the Renaissance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316660_1
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