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Overview | Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five | Part Six | Part Seven | Part Eight Robert
A. Baron
Petrarch’s Triumphs ~~~~~~ Part Two of Eight
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[In Margin: --Scheme for restructuring Petrarch Chapter.] Quote from Gombrich, Icones Symbolicae, p. 131-132. ...for Rubens [in his Horrors of War, Florence, Pitti] Famine and Pestilence are the "inseparable companions" of War, and two thousand years earlier a Greek vase painter represented Aphrodite with her companions or handmaidens and servants (Fig. 142), inscribed as Eros, Harmonia, Peitho (Persuasion), Kore (Maiden), Hebe (Youth) and Himeros (Longing). Unlike Rubens, though, the Greek painter has made little effort to place these concepts before our eyes. ... Without labels [however] it would remain mute. It needs the text more than Rubens does. The same was probably true of the earliest composition of this kind of which we have knowledge in Greek art, the so-called Chest of Kypselos, which Pausanias described as standing in the Temple of Hera in Olympia and which is believed to have dated from the seventh century B.C. Characterization can not have been very vivid in this period of archaic art, but if we can trust the author the meaning was conveyed not only by inscription but also through the appearance of personification: "On the second zone of the chest ... a woman is represented holding a white sleeping boy on her right arm, on her other arm a similar black boy ... the captions say, and indeed one might have hold so without captions--that it is Death and Sleep and Night the foster-mother of both. "A beautiful woman drags an ugly one along, throttling her with her right hand, while hitting her with a stick she holds in her left. This is Justice fighting Injustice. Here we have the earliest example of a syntactical form [all underlines are mine] even more widespread than that of kinship and amity. The opposition of concepts has been expressed time and again by their personifications which are shown to be in conflict as in a physical fight. The Middle Ages inherited this mode through the Psychomachia of Prudentius, in which the Virtues and Vices fight a number of set battles, but neither Prudentius nor his medieval illustrators (fig. 146 [Pudicita and Libido, from an 11th C. illustrated Prudentius ms., London, B.M. ms. Add 24199, fol. 6r]) went much beyond naming and labeling the protagonists of his fights. [See Katzenellenbogen.] True, the virtues are more dignified and perhaps more beautiful than their wicked opponents--a contrast already remarked by Pausanias--but the whole epic is still closer to a diagram of moral theology than to the dramatic embodiment of psychological conflicts [as in the Rubens allegory]. That masterpiece of criticism, C.S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love, makes it unnecessary to discuss this aspect of the medieval tradition, which is in any case more relevant to the history of literature than it is to that of art. Not that artists were not called upon time and again to represent personifications in conflict. The point is rather that in this particular tradition the label or the scroll could rarely be dispensed with. Even so it would be interesting to explore the resources of this symbolic language for the expression of relationships more complex than those of simple kinship, friendship or hostility. Petrarch used a succession of triumphs to establish a hierarchy of values, with triumphant Love triumphed over by Chastity, Death, Fame, Time and Eternity in their turn (Fig. 143). Rubens reminds us that a dramatic action can express even richer ideas, such as Venus trying to restrain Mars, whose progress causes Europe to mourn. But even Rubens, it will be remembered, could not quite dispense with that other resource of symbolic art, the emblem or attribute, witness that bundle of arrows lying broken and useless since concord had disappeared. According to Gombrich [Icones Symbolicae, p. 131-132] there are two syntactical systems for the interaction of personifications. On the level of the diagram are such combinations as are found in the Psychomachia illustrations. These take concepts and produce simple hieratic oppositions between their personifications. On the other hand personifications may interact dramatically and be given the ambiance of human dramatic narrative action such as is found in Rubens’ allegory known as the Horrors of War, to cite Gombrich’s example. Here attributes such as a bundle of arrows (usually an emblem of concord or unity, as seen on the old Liberty Dime) become subject to a narrative impulse and are transformed by it. In Rubens’ picture the arrows, untied and scattered in disarray, now signify the effects of the war--an emblem merged into the narrative drama. The tradition of illustrations to Petrarch’s Triumphs may be understood within the bounds of this dichotomy of allegorical means. The Italian Petrarch tradition, now willing to use the diagrammatic approach of the Northern Psychomachia manuscripts, posed the hierarchy of conquests in the form of the pomp of triumphal processions, symbolizing the fait accompli of the conflict that is in the outward ceremony of the festivity. The cue for this device must have been taken from the triumphal procession of Cupid as described by Petrarch in the text of the Trionfi, yet the visual tradition, at the outset, ignored the text and offered a complex iconography which gave a methodological regularity to the theme of Petrarch’s verses and loaded the images with contemporary visual symbolic references. [Note to myself: Insert history of Italian Trionfi illustrations. Discuss narrative and early and later tendencies which produced emblematic interpretations of the theme.] Although the Italian tradition can be seen to have had a strong effect upon the way Petrarch’s triumphs were depicted in the North [RAB: Note major examples], a separate medieval Northern tradition can be isolated in some works. [RAB: Name them.] It is not necessary to show a direct link between the Psychomachia illustrations and the Petrarch images, the system was quite universal and common. [RAB: See Katzenellenbogen.] Bernard Salomon’s illustrations seem to be the first of the Petrarch illustrations to try to come to terms with both traditions. The first illustration of the seven which appear in this series is, indeed, a triumphal procession, after the manner of the Italian examples, but it is only a visual preface to the six that follow, [deleted: and presumably represents Petrarch himself, as the poet crowned laureate, and is not a part of the text itself.] The following six cuts, comprising the traditional series of triumphs, embrace the diagrammatic hierarchic system of the Prudentius tradition, probably acknowledging the precedence of the earlier edition of Petrarch’s Triumphs presented by Janot in Paris. The Janot set, used like Salomon’s cuts, to preface Petrarch’s text, like little title-page emblems--turn the conventional series of subjects into a set of hieroglyphic emblems. [RAB: Reference to the Robertet couplets and associated iconography; tapestries, etc.] The diagrammatic hierarchy of the medieval tradition (as purified by Janot) is followed by Salomon. Thus one sees Cupid posed above a pile of objects, emblems actually, signifying the human states of which he has domain. [RAB: Compare Caravaggio’s Victorious Earth Love, Berlin.] Similarly, in the next cut Chastity is poised over a defeated Cupid, then Death over Chastity, and so on. But there is an important distinction between these and the hierarchic tradition of the Psychomachia, via Janot. Salomon’s personifications take on a sense of life and activity as they dramatically relate to their opponents. First Cupid aims his bow downward; his falling flames ignite the rubble of symbols; then Chastity vanquishes Amor with her candle; Amor lies prostrate, his symbols shattered, his bow broken, his quiver upturned. In her own turn Chastity lays defeated upon a barren landscape, her frond fallen from her hand, her taper torn, her tiara untied while a skeletal Death [RAB: Note on iconography of skeleton in Petrarch Triumph illustrations here.] sits in glorious victory, triumphantly holding the trident and the scythe [RAB: Note to Panofsky, Father Time.], and so on. The means by which Salomon manipulates his symbols is reminiscent of the dramatic personifications that Rubens later used in the Horrors of War. [And in other pictures as well, notably in the Medici cycle: See how three water nymphs tie Marie de Medici’s barque to the moorings; as they pass the tie-line from one to the other the observer suddenly becomes aware that these three nymphs are the three fates and thus participate in the narrative as personifications of abstract concepts. But more, the traditional emblem of the fates passing the thread from one to another, is made part of the dramatic narrative; the narrative itself however includes the concept which the fates lend it. The dual function of allegory and history become fused into a single poetic truth.] But in the Salomon images this dramatic, and, one might say, narrative treatment follows the syntax of diagrammatic emblems and have not yet been consumed by the full-fledged narrative to which Rubens later would submit his symbols. If the hieroglyphic astringency of the Janot emblems represents one pole of the emblematic ideal, then the full-bodied personifications of Salomon’s Petrarch illustrations might be considered the opposite pole. This balance in Salomon between an older, more archaic system of symbolic communication and a more progressive narrative system may be understood as visually epitomizing that peculiar blend of medieval and modern ideas current in Lyon at that time. [RAB: Discuss Marguerite de Navarre, Maurice Scève, Pontus de Tyard, Neo-Platonism, and Petrarchism in France and Lyon, here.] It may be that the dramatic or narrative nature of Salomon’s Petrarchan emblems is meant to give a tangible form to the sequence of triumphs which were to be interpreted allegorically in a neo-Platonic manner: mundane life is a corrupted version of the divine perfection. [In margin: The binding theme of the Triumphs is Love: from Earthly to Divine. cf. Caravaggio’s Victorious Amor.] The neo-platonic theory of Love, as articulated by Scève and Tyard, states that earthly love is a preliminary step to understanding divine love. [See Frances Yates, Academies, on Pontus de Tyard’s ideas.] Pontus de Tyard, whose philosophical works were first published by de Tournes [The portrait of Tyard which accompanies his works is attributed to Salomon.] and with whom Salomon worked on the Entry of Henri II at Lyon in 1548, postulates several stages of perfection achievable on the path from earthly to the divine. [Filched from Ficino says Yates.] The parallel provided by Petrarch’s triumphs to contemporary neo-Platonic thought perhaps could not be resisted, and it is possible that Salomon’s illustrations were purposefully fashioned to emphasize this notion of sequential anagogical elevation. Interestingly, the end point of this sequence is not the image of the Trinity, as had become usual in Petrarchan iconography, but the triple-headed image of Eternity (Past, Present, and Future). The reference seems to secularize the meaning somewhat and, in the process, restores Petrarch’s poem to its original meaning. (Perhaps this revision reflects Humanist interest in the original text and compliments the work done on revisions of the Bible.) [In margin: See elaboration of June 1979.] Although the northern hierarchic system of emblematic communications has been used here, it is important to note that the specific iconography developed in the 15th century in France to represent the Triumphs of Petrarch has been abandoned, and, instead, the developed classical embodiment of the allegorical subjects, in accord with the revival of the forms of classical allegory, has been substituted. [This visual tradition in France parallels the intellectual tradition. See Franco Simone, The French Renaissance.] [END OF TYPESCRIPT COPY.] [START OF MANUSCRIPT COPY:] Petrarch’s Triumphs in France: The Moral and Emblematic Tradition A study of French Renaissance illustrations to Petrarch’s Trionfi must begin by assessing the peculiar relationship between image and text as apparent in the earliest French representations of Petrarch’s theme. Unlike Italy, where the Trionfi customarily made their appearance on cassoni and other decorative works, in France the Trionfi hardly ever appear out of a literary context. Indeed, in France there are two independent textural traditions which formed the fortune of Petrarch’s poem during the Renaissance. Each seems to have produced its own iconography. First, of course, is Petrarch’s Italian text, making its appearance in numerous imported manuscripts and in translation. More interesting, however, for the present purposes, is the second tradition which presented verse summaries of Petrarch’s poems, appearing sometimes in Latin and sometimes in French. Thus Jean Molinet produced both Latin and French versions (Tournai 105, etc.); Jean Robertet condensed Petrarch’s theme into French Rondeaux, and his son François developed his own French verse renditions. [RAB: add mss. references.] Usually these verses appear as part of collections of short poems and sayings meant to be adapted into tapestries. Some of these manuscripts couple texts and images to form what must be considered the progenitors of the sixteenth century Emblem book. For example, Chantilly, Musée Condé Ms. 509; Arsenal ms. 5066 and B.N. ms. 24461 each contain Jean Robertet’s Trionfi verses and each ally them with images of a prototypical emblematic nature. These manuscripts contain other poems as well, and likewise, offer appropriate images to give visual substance to poetic ideas, to "Dictz moraulx" as they are called in Chantilly 509. [Add note on these mss.] The author of the Chantilly catalogue, no. 509, pp. 107 ff. notes the similarity between their manuscript and later published emblem books, specifically those of Alciati, Corrozet and Guillaume de la Perrière. It would seem that in France the iconography of Petrarch’s Triumphs and the sixteenth century emblem book share similar roots. It is important to bear this curious phenomena in mind when surveying the development of Petrarchan Trionfi iconography in France from its origins to Bernard Salomon’s versions, for, by exempting those "emblematic" approaches from the (or from a) mainstream of development, as the monumental survey of Prince d’Essling and Eugène Müntz did, one must fail to see how the images of Bernard Salomon, for example, are part of an iconographical continuum linking the sixteenth century back to medieval France. Instead, one would be forced to see such emblematic forms as merely curious anomalies outside of the force of tradition. [END OF MANUSCRIPT COPY] Tapestries and Emblems [Idea draft for first discussion of French Trionfi tapestries.] That some of the earliest French images of Petrarch’s triumphs were placed upon tapestries cannot, in itself, be considered unusual. Indeed, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a close relationship existed between literature and tapestries. Poets commonly were asked to compose "dictz moraulx" specifically for use on tapestries.
In this way verses composed by Jean Molinet (on the V & A tapestries?), by Jean Robertet, and other verses such as those by his son François, all abridging Petrarch’s triumphs, found their way onto tapestries. [RAB: sort out which verses are on which tapestries.] Some of the manuscript illustrations too, were intended as preliminary designs for transformation into weavings. Those, for example, appearing in Arsenal ms. 5065 and in B.N. ms. fr. 1717 (check this) specifically state that their purpose is for adaptation into the tapestry medium. The image of Cupid, for example, in one of the Chaumont tapestries, now at the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the tapestry of the three Fates (triumph of Death) (London, V&A) (Göbel, no. 85) attest to the fact that these designs were so used. NOTE: Mss. such as Chantilly 509, & BN ms. fr. 2246 [2240?] contain collections of sayings and mottoes meant for use in tapestries. The author of Chantilly ms. cat, vol II, p. 107 notes the similarity in design between Ms. Chantilly 509 and later emblem books popular in the sixteenth century--such as Corrozet, Alciati and La Perrière. Too, the long-time association between literature and images which forges a wide path through the development of French art can tract its roots back to the French fifteenth-century passion for illustrating tapestries with literary themes. Thus tapestries received scenes derived from the Roman de la Rose, from the chansons de geste, from the story of Troy, and so on. NOTE: Pierre Champion, ibid. A study of French Renaissance illustrations to Petrarch’s Trionfi must consider the relationship that existed between the images and the text, because, unlike the use of the trionfi on cassoni and similar objects in Italy, in France the Trionfi hardly ever appeared outside its literary context, even tapestries usually incorporated some text. Indeed, in France during the sixteenth century there are at least two independent text traditions attributed to Petrarch. In addition, in France, Petrarch’s Triumphs had a different function during the Renaissance than they did in Italy. In France Petrarch’s triumphs were instrumental in introducing Italian literary style to a society still entranced by the formal structural maneuverings of the Rhétoriqueurs, [in margin: but seem as a means of reconciling the Italian Renaissance to the native gothic tradition.] The following summary of the pictorial history of Trionfi illustrations in France uses Franco Simone’s analysis of the literary history of the Trionfi as a means of comprehending the relation between the textural and pictorial tradition. NOTE: Franco Simone. The French Renaissance: Medieval Tradition and Italian Influence in Shaping the Renaissance in France. Trans. H. Gaston Hall. London: Macmillan, 1969 (Orig. Italian edition, 1961). The Moral Tradition Professor Simone suggest that the particular aesthetics of Petrarch’s style, which are so evident in his Italian works, and which had such profound influence in the France of the mid-sixteenth century amongst members of the Lyon school beginning with Marguerite de Navarre and including Maurice Scève, were not appreciated in the early years of that century; the learning process was slow and gradual. In his analysis of the several French translations of the Trionfi which appeared within the first four decades of the sixteenth century, he demonstrates that the Trionfi were first valued for their moralistic, scholarly or erudite and classical content. [The following to be deleted: That is, they were held in esteem for much the same reasons as were Petrarch’s Latin works, the fame of which in France preceded that of the Trionfi, and the subject of which most closely corresponded with traditional French Medieval concerns.] Petrarch’s discussion of fate and fortune, de remediis, was probably the most important of these works in this regard. The Translations Simone maintains that the overriding concern of most of the earlier French translators of the Trionfi was its usefulness for moral, ethical and classical instruction. Its stylistic sophistication and its theological profundity seems to have been less important. These concerns can be appreciated in the translation of George de la Forge which, although first appearing in manuscript form, was the first to be published in France, appearing in the illustrated edition of 1514, published in Paris by Vérard; and again in other editions, including Denys Janot’s of 1538; in the translation of Simon Bourgouyn which was used in the manuscript in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, perhaps more famous for its illumination by Godefroy le Batave (Ms. fr. 6480); and the translation of Jean Meynier, published in Paris by Denys Janot in 1538 (in addition to his edition of the Georges de la Forge translation). For example, for Meynier the Triumphs are reminiscent of the triumphs of the ancients and signify the triumphs of "reason and virtue," as if the intent of Petrarch’s poem was an extension of the medieval theme of Virtue overcoming Vice. NOTE: Simone, p. 257. The Summarizations The other literary tradition in France which was identified with Petrarch’s theme, strictly speaking, is not the Triumphs at all, but, rather, constitutes summarizations of the Trionfi. These distill the essence of the moral content of each of Petrarch’s episodes of the Trionfi and omit the classical erudition and the love motifs. The most common form taken by these "quasi-Triumphs" is a set of Latin verses appearing in French manuscripts of the fifteenth century. Simone speculates that these verses--"argumenta"--originally prefaced Petrarch’s complete text, but, somehow grew separate from it and developed, thereby, an independence of their own. Paraphrases in French of the Latin verses were produced by Jean Robertet (d. 1503) (B.N. ms. fr. 1717, and Arsenal, ms. fr. 5066)
and others, including his son François (B.N. ms. fr. 1721).
These verses are clearly moralistic. They do not, actually cannot reproduce Petrarch’s vast learning, but they do transform Petrarch’s content into brief epigrammatic statements. At the end of each stanza Jean Robertet further condenses the overall moral into a brief motto: "Amour vainc le munde," "Chasteté vainc Amour," "La Mort vainc Chasteté," "Bonne Renommée vainc la Mort," "Le Temps vainc Bonne Renommée," and finally "Eternité vainc tout." In this way Petrarch’s poems have been turned into brief mottoes suitable for use with emblems. In France, therefore, the reputation and the meaning of the Trionfi which greeted the importation of the Italian texts at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, is primarily a moralistic one. [In margin: The Triumphs, like fortune itself, recalling Petrarch’s de remediis fortune. See Abaris Bartsch. 33: Wheel of Fortune 107 (282) 116.] It was only when the fifteenth turned into the sixteenth century that France had opportunity to renew its acquaintance with Petrarch’s Trionfi in Italian. Gloriously illustrated manuscripts of the Trionfi were among the treasures brought to France following Charles V’s successful Italian campaign. Simone believes that of the dozen or so fifteenth-century Italian manuscripts of Petrarch’s Trionfi in France today, about seven probably can be proven to have been in France in the late fifteenth century, and, of these, four with absolute certainty. [RAB: list them.] Not only did these manuscripts transport Petrarch’s text to France, but some of them were elaborately illuminated after the Italian fashion of depicting the triumphs, and some contained the lengthy commentary of Illicino. [RAB: Note here.] It might be noted, in addition, that although such sumptuous objects had to have had an effect in their own right, by the last decades of the fifteenth century, both in Venice and in Florence, editions of the Trionfi were being produced; these editions were fully illustrated, and some even contained the Illicino commentary. One need not posit manuscripts alone as the path through which the influence of Italian Trionfi were felt in France. NOTE: For a bibliography of the Italian illustrated editions see Max Sander. Le Livre a Figures Italien, depuis 1467 jusqu’a 1530. Volume II, Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1942, nos. 5599-5633. [The following materials are inserted from manuscript copy appended to the typescript materials.] [Paragraph deleted: Although the development and evolution of images for the Triumphs of Petrarch during the Fifteenth century was an event accomplished in Italy, and the subsequent elaboration of this theme in France during the sixteenth century assumes and relies upon the Italian processional images, one must understand that for France the Italian precedent was but little more than a stimulus for a varied tradition of Petrarchan images which delighted in invention and [adaptation ?] and revised the Italian theme to the needs and tradition of a French society just emerging from its medieval customs. ] One may document several methods of translation in this respect: the first of these imposes upon Petrarch’s themes images of French courtly life and symbols of French bucolic society, e.g. the Chaumont tapestries [...fill in.] A second method begins with the triumphal procession that had developed in Italy, but transforms it into a romantic epic, borrowing imagery and motifs from medieval literature such as the Romance of the Rose (1514 Vérard; and Rouen mss.0 or turning the sequence of images into a complex pictorial narrative, multiplying the stages of development (V&A tapestries) (Rouen ms.) and crowding the picture plane with the multitude of figures mentioned by Petrarch and his commentators, forming a cacophonous catalogue of classical characters. [ugh.] A third tradition assumes a different course. It rejects the Italian triumphal tradition altogether and refuses to turn the program into a continuous narrative. Instead, turning into the French Medieval images it forges a non-narrative language among the iconography of the Virtues and Vices with which to bring into focus a moralized understanding of the trionfi which had become submerged or diffused in the other renditions. Salomon’s images for Petrarch’s triumphs is a direct descendent of this third tradition, yet without being wholly part of it. It shall be demonstrated that while embracing the roots of the French Renaissance tradition of abstract moralizings Salomon’s Petrarchan triumphs rephrase this language into terms more suitable to the Italian Renaissance. [End of manuscript insert.] Significantly, when the French and Latin verses of Jean Robertet and his countrymen do appear, they are often presented as captions to illustrations, analogous to the way that they may have once stood against Petrarch’s own poem. French images appearing in this context are decidedly different from images in the Italian tradition. Rather than representing Petrarch’s poem through a series of triumphal processions, the moralized version of the Trionfi is imaged in one of the forms used to picture conflicts of the Virtues and Vices, that is, as images in which the victor stands in conquest over the crumpled body of the vanquished. This scheme has a long history; it can be traced back to Roman triumphal imagery, but more recently can be found in medieval manuscripts of the Psychomachia of Prudentius, in medieval cathedral sculpture such as Chartres, and in many other locations. [In the margin: The presence of ancient triumphal iconography in medieval north Europe must explain the use of the image in Petrarch trionfi iconography there.] In actuality
the scheme had become a kind of cliché which allowed the moral state of its subject matter to be articulated in the form of a pictorial metaphor in which moral states were identified with physical relationships and conditions. In the Psychomachia manuscripts active battles are most common, later the scheme crystallizes into a sort of emblematic structure, the battle gives way to a fait accompli. Ervy One finds this system of emblematic triumphs applied to Petrarch’s allegorical presences in France as early as 1502, in a series of six stained glass windows for the Church of Ervy, near Troyes. NOTE: See Essling-Müntz, Petrarque, p. 201-06. L’abbe Noiré. Vertical in format, these windows contain the conventional allegories of Cupid, Chastity, Death, etc. Although the style is northern, all commentators make a point of mentioning their crude uninformed workmanship. Under most of the standing allegories appear chariots, to be sure, but not the elaborate processional floats common to Italian depictions. These are simply rudiments, servile references to the designers’ familiarity with the southern tradition. Considering the Petrarchan triumph tradition as a whole one might call these chariots vestigial. Under foot, or under wheel, in each case lies the appropriate trampled personification. The teams which pull the [? images] have been moved to the upper corners. Further below, indicating the sens morale are French verses. These bear little resemblance to Petrarch’s imagery, but they do interpret the theme in conventional theological terms and images. For example, under the Triumph of Eternity one reads the following: En souveraint
éternité NOTE: Quoted from Essling-Müntz, Petrarque, p. 202 ff. This shows us that the entire of Petrarch’s secular theme has been discarded and replaced by the more conventional theme of Christian redemption. Not only does the composition differ from Italian examples, but in general, the iconography displays the independence from the southern system which shall come to typify these northern cycles. Thus, in the image of Death one finds an idea completely foreign to the Italian Trionfi images. Petrarch described Death as a woman dressed in a black robe (line 31: una donna involta in vesta negra). She appears this way in some Italian cycles, and in others appears as skeletal death, but in the Ervy windows Death is represented in the guise of the three Fates, and is so represented in numerous French examples. NOTE: Other French works use the three fates for death, the Jean Robertet manuscripts, the MMA and Vienna Tapestries, for example. [In margin: probably reflecting association with Petrarch’s work on fate; the images recall images of the wheel of fortune.] Essling and Müntz note how unusual it is that this image appears in France before it emerges in Italy (p. 204). Strange as this classical image appears to be, it is not given classical form, the fates have a gruesome and horrible nature, not classical fates, but the northern witches of the Macbeth tradition. This medieval quality of the Ervy windows is perhaps most obviously manifest in the image and verses for the figure of time. The verse contains the common medieval lament for the swiftness by which Time consumes all things. Here one finds a theme reminiscent of the Oú sont theme of Jacques Villon--a typical medieval lament. It reads in part: Le Temps, par traict
et longue espace Although there are some acknowledgements of classical ideas (Cupid and Venus, and the Three Fates are represented), the images in the Ervy windows do not display the new understanding of classical types and classical iconography developing in Italy. The figure of Time, to continue with our example, appears as a medieval king, yet in one hand he holds a child and in the other a dragon. Essling and Müntz report that the Abbot Noiré suggests that the child is Cupid and that the dragon signifies Death. NOTE: In Mémoires de la Société académique d’Argriculture, des Sciences, Arts et Belles-Lettres de département de l’Aube, 1897, vol. 61, p. 145-70. Today it seems obvious that these attributes identify this figure of Time as Saturn who devours his own sons, and who, as Panofsky has shown, had come to signify Time. (This is very early for the symbolism, that is considering the later appearance of these motifs in Italian book illustration.) [?] NOTE: Panofsky, "Father Time," in Studies in Iconology. Such an image was used as an attribute of time in the 1508 edition of the Triumphs published in Trieste by Gregorio de Gregorii. (Sandler, No.___) Significantly, in the Ervy windows classical form had yet to catch up with classical content, to borrow Panofsky’s neat formula. The image of a medieval king here is the most appropriate (i.e. relevant) form for the figure of time. Simone’s thesis that the "aesthetic" of classical literature (meaning Petrarch) in France followed in the tracks of classical erudition and that classical content was made to conform to reigning moralistic principles of the time, is here provided with a pictorial analogy. To the moralizing verses which subscribe the images of the Ervy windows are added appropriate biblical passages. Banderoles with Biblical quotations are attached to each major figure in an effort to associate the unusual non scriptural subject matter of the windows to the religious tradition. For example, in the window devoted to Time, one finds a reference to the speed of time and the manner it makes human life short and miserable: "Eriquum et cum taedio est tempus vitae nostrae" (Wisdom II, 1). [In margin: See Wisdom V, 8-15: Où sont. ref. F.Simone, p. 19.] The cumulative effect of the above-described system is to create a moral conceit for each triumph that may well be an emblem in prototypical form. [In margin: Corresponds to the Fine Manner Prints?] The combined effect is to crystallize the shape of the image and meaning of the text into a single moral principle which circumvents Petrarch’s secular meaning. In this fashion Petrarch’s Triumphs are converted into a literature suitable to French medieval and pietistic concerns. This "emblematic structure," as I shall call it, occurs in unadulterated form in only a few examples of French Petrarchan art, but it does have a decided influence upon contemporary and subsequent images developed in France for the Trionfi theme.
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