Bernard Salomon's illustrations to Petrarch's Trionfi (3)

continued from Part II

Arsenal Manuscript Fr. 5066
Of great importance in this regard is Ms. fr. 5066 in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal and other manuscripts mentioned above as containing Jean Robertet’s French rendition of the Latin moralized summary of the Trionfi. The manuscript is well known for its drawings loosely based upon Mantegna’s designs for the Tarocchi (1465) in which medieval images of the Gods have been subjected to a classicizing influence.

NOTE: See Seznec. Survival, p. 199-201. especially, p. 201, n. 45. (additional bibliography.)

The Triumphs in Arsenal ms. fr. 5066 are in the tradition of the Ervy windows, that is, allegorical figures stand in victory over the newly defeated conqueror of the previous episode. But this sixteenth-century French manuscript is distinct from the Ervy windows, for now all resemblance to the usual Italian iconography has disappeared -- unusual in the light of the classicizing tendencies of the remainder of the manuscript. [In margin: See the fine manner Florentine Engravings of the Triumph of Death.] True, the style of the figures acknowledges classical forms and the spatial relationships are clearer than might be expected, but in the structure of the allegorical relationships and in the freedom from conventional processional Italian imagery of Petrarch’s triumphs, in this manuscript one perceives a deeper medieval method.

The "Virtue-Vice" syntax, already apparent in the Ervy windows, in Arsenal ms. fr. 5066 is clarified by the complete disappearance of the chariots. There is no procession, no panoply of victory, just the rather emblematic images which illustrate the French text, or, perhaps, conversely, which the text explains. One hall-mark of this northern formula is here--the three fates signifying death; but there are other indications as well that the imagery is free from the Florentine triumphal iconography. For example, in the "Triumph of Eternity" the usual Italian image of the Trinity or of God-the-Father is not shown; instead, a female personification sits on a rainbow. On one hand she holds a crown and in the other a palm frond. These details are not explained by Petrarch, but they are by Jean Robertet whose verses appear next to each image.

Je suis seant au hault triumphal throsne;
Du Temps passé porte palme et couronne
Joyeusement comme victorieuse,
Sur les choses créées glorieuse; ...

Below this female Eternity lies defeated Time, his walking stick broken, his hour-glass cast aside. This image of Time is cast neither as Saturn nor as the winged old man on crutches whose chariot is pulled by swift stags in Italian Trionfi images. Rather, he is a monk or a medieval traveler whose purse and astrolabe (?) hang from his belt.

Ms. Phill. 1926
The same "emblematic" solution to the problem of illustrating Petrarch’s Trionfi may be seen in a manuscript dating from the second half of the sixteenth century. Once belonging to the vast Thomas Phillips collection, and now in Berlin (Deutsche Staatsbibliothek, Ms. Phill. 1926), this manuscript uses the same "Virtue-Vice" formula for each triumph as in the previous examples; but, to judge from the illustration of the "Triumph of Death," the iconography has been modernized.

NOTE: See Kirchner, Joachim ... Phillipps Handschriften, Leipzig, 1926, p. 120 (Phill. 1926) and Rothe, Edith. Medieval Book Illumination in Europe: The Collection of the German Democratic Republic, N.Y., Norton, p. 275, pl. 153. and Essling-Müntz, Petrarque, p. 241, 242. the manuscript is dated by virtue of a dedication to a Madame de l’Aubespine, supposedly the Madeleine d’Aubespine known as a poet in the courts of Charles IX, Henri III and Henri IV.

For example, the three Fates are not found in this manuscript, but there is a cadaverous Death triumphantly floating over Chastity. He is bedecked with attributes: arrow, palm, and scythe. As in Arsenal ms. fr. 5066, Petrarch’s text is no part of this work, instead French paraphrases are placed beneath each image. The moral intent can be gleaned from the first two lines of the verse for Death’s triumph:

L’arc Cupido par ma faulx romps & prise
Vice & vertu tant lung que lautre prise

The style of these miniatures does not admit of any significant Italianism, nor do they show any lingering effects of the School of Fontainebleau. Rather, they have a somewhat Flemish air while the mildly gothic cadaver and Chastity’s often reversing draperies might evoke a German model.

Other images of the series seem to have been modernized, too. For instance, the "Triumph of Eternity" shows a Throne of Grace (Gnadenstuhl) placed in a glory. Beneath this "Eternity" lay all of the previously defeated figures. The presence of Cupid, Chastity, Death, Fame and Time in this last image is very unusual, but may reflect the lingering importance of Robertet’s verses and the Latin versions from which they sprung. Robertet concludes the "Triumph of Eternity" in this manner:

Montaine Amor et Chastité pudicque,
Mort, Fame et Temps, tant soit vieil et anticque:
Tout prandra fin, mais j’sy ma mention
Eterne au ciel en clere vision.
Eternité vainc tout.

For our purposes it is sufficient to admit that there is a significant connection existing between the moralized versions of Petrarch’s poem appearing in these French renditions and the emblematic "Virtue-Vice" images developed to illustrate them. [In the margin: But they also appear in the tapestries that are narrative or triumphal in character!!]

Franco Simone has shown how translators of Petrarch’s Trionfi refused to relinquish the need to moralize on Petrarch’s meaning, as set forth above. It is suggested here that the illustrators’ reliance upon the "Virtue-Vice" formula connotes a similar phenomenon--namely that this sort of illustration efficiently communicated the sens morale by using a cliché of ancient authority -- in much the same manner as some of the manuscripts borrow the French iconography developed earlier to illustrate the Roman de la Rose. This meaning had been originally carried by the Latin verse condensations, then by Robertet’s French verses and other verses dependent upon Robertet’s.

The Janot edition
However, when Petrarch’s Trionfi began to warrant new interest--humanistic interest in the first few decades of the sixteenth century--the moralizing message continued, but in a different fashion. One way of insuring that the moralizing content was understood, was to place separate verses before a translation of the Trionfi. Thus Latin couplets are placed before Simon Bourgouyn’s French translation of the Trionfi (c. 1530, B.N. ms. fr. 12423). When the translation attributed to Georges de la Forge (appearing in manuscript earlier (ms._____), but published in 1514 in Paris by Vérard) was picked up again and published in Paris by Denys Janot in 1536, it was felt necessary to attach, not preliminary verses, precisely, nor illustrations, per se, but emblems. These emblems serve as a visual gloss, a pictorial rubric, substituting for the moralized verses that had traditionally conveyed the French understanding of Petrarch’s content. These emblems clarify the moral that the reader is to derive from the text, which, says Simone, George de la Forge had altered to make quite clear. [Note: Give examples.] The emblems head each chapter. Although their form follows the then current rage for hieroglyphic images, and lends a sense of obscure secrecy to each chapter, the basic scheme is not new, not just part of the current fad for emblems, but derives directly, it seems, for a source quite similar to Arsenal ms. fr. 5066. [In margin: Cf. Medallions with mottoes on Buildings: Essling-Müntz.] That is, the metaphorical language of "victor and vanquished" is preserved, embalmed, one can almost claim, in the emblems of the Janot edition, but they are preserved in the new hieroglyphic form made popular by such works as the Hypnerotomachia and the Horapollo. [In margin: The style may have been all the rage, but the function continued a pattern of old imagery. Indeed, one may wish to hypothesize that one cause for the popularity of the Renaissance emblem in France was due to its ability to merge a Renaissance vocabulary of images with a Gothic moralizing tradition. The wisdom of the former age becomes the aphorisms of the current one.] The Janot images (emblems) have been dehumanized or, better, de-personified, turned into symbols that inherit their meanings from the symbolic attributes associated with the original personifications. For example, in the first of the Janot triumphs, Cupid’s wings, torch, bow, quiver and fillet are arranged into a trophy situated over the scattered remains of tiara, crown, sword and scepter -- symbols of the great and noble over whom Cupid always triumphs. In Arsenal ms. fr. 5066 Jove, Neptune and Pluto wear crowns, and they lie in defeat before Cupid. Their presence is explained less by Petrarch than by Jean Robertet’s verses which appear in the manuscript:

Cupido a de son dart prosternez
Iovis, Neptunne et Pluton couronnez
Roys ...

In fact, of these three deities Petrarch names only Jove and Pluto; Neptune seems to be an addition. The image follows Robertet, not Petrarch.

The crowns are not identified in the Janot hieroglyph, nor, to judge form their specificity, does it seem that the artist meant to imply the same personages as in the Arsenal manuscript. the references are, perhaps, more contemporary. Can one identify a Papal Tiara and the crown of the Holy Roman Emperor, the Eastern Emperor, the Paleologus crown? Be that as it may, the Janot editor did not fail to insure that the reader understood the moral significance of the illustration. We read in Latin and in French beside each emblem, not the title of the episode, but the specific moral, not Robertet’s full verses, but condensations, only the conclusions: "Amor vincit mundum," and "Amour vaincq le monde." Hence the medieval moralizations here are maintained as the conditioning preface, placed on the face of Petrarch’s translated text. They preserve their medieval heritage, but have been turned into hieroglyphic pictures, the visual aphorisms of the pre humanist past. [In margin: RAB: Work in Janot material from the old version.]

Bernard Salomon’s Trionfi images
Bernard Salomon’s illustrations to Petrarch’s Trionfi appear only ten years or so after those of the Janot edition. When the latter was published there had been great renewed interest in Petrarch, but now Petrarch was revered for his vernacular works and his humanistic and psychological insights were revered. Francis I had already commissioned Maurice Scève to attempt to find Laura’s tomb in Avignon.

NOTE: The story of the search for Laura’s tomb is told in the preface to the 1545 (unillustrated) and subsequent (illustrated) editions of Il Petrarca which de Tournes published and dedicated to Scève. Gabriele Simeoni, in his Les illustres observations antiques (Lyon, J. de Tournes, 1558, p. 13), mentions that the search for Laura’s tomb was commissioned by the king.

No doubt the republication in 1536 by Janot of the Georges de la Forge translation of the Triumphs was also a byproduct of this renewed interest. The same must be said of a new translation, in verse, of the Trionfi which appeared in 1538. This translation, by Jean Meynier, as Franco Simone has demonstrated, continues the tradition of putting Petrarch’s secular poetry in a moralized light. [In Margin: RAB: provide examples.] But, of especial importance in the present context, is the fact they Meynier is closely connected to François I^er. It is he who compiled Francis’ argument to claim the title of the thrones of Naples and Sicily.

NOTE: In his Déclaration de la généalogie et succession des roys de Naples et Sicille. See Franco Simone, p. 255 ff.

In addition, Meynier was active in the government of Provence; he held a post in the parliament there from 1522 through 1546, and became its president in _____.

It is tempting to speculate that the bond connecting the Janot hieroglyphics to Bernard Salomon’s illustrations of the Trionfi is more than merely a conceptual or formal bond. In the flurry of Petrarchan activity of that time there was also developing interest in the romantic chivalric tales of love which came out of Spain. One of these stories, a rather pedestrian novel by Jehan de Flores, was printed by Janot in 1536, in a translation prepared by Maurice Scève, only two year before Janot was to produce his first edition of the Trionfi in translation. In fact, in 1538 Janot actually produced two separate editions of the Trionfi, the republication of the older La Forge translation which was in prose, and the new Meynier verse translation. [In Margin: First appeared in Giunta shop, Lyon--Guillaume Scève. --Which edition?]

NOTE: In 1544 Denys Janot published an alphabetical list of the works which came from his presses. He lists a "Triumphe Petrarque, en prose" (the La Farge translation), and a "Triumphe Petrarque, en Rithme" which, according to H. Omont ("Catalogue des Éditions Françaises de Denys Janot, Libraire parisien (1529-1545)," in Mémoires de la Société de l’Histoire de Paris et de l’Ile-de-France, vol. 25 (1893), p. 288, no. 156) is to be identified with the following work: Les Triumphes de Petrarque, traduction en vers français par le paron d’Opede, Jean Meynier. Paris, Les Angeliers, 1538. Copy in Spencer Coll., NYPL.

It does not seem impossible, given Scève’s demonstrated interest in Petrarch, and the interest he was soon to display in the relationship between poetry and images (in his Délie, 1544, and in the Entry of Henri II into Lyon, 1547) that a path leading from the Janot illustrations could be traced through Maurice Scève to the illustrations produced by Salomon for the 1547 edition of de Tournes’ compilation of Petrarch’s Italian works, the first edition of which (1545, the unillustrated edition) was dedicated to Scève by the publisher. In fact, there should be little doubt that Scève’s expertise played a major role in the preparation of de Tournes’ edition. Scève’s Délie had already shown that the author was interested in Petrarch’s style and images. The following year (1545) de Tournes included pieces by Scève in his edition of the poems of Pernette du Guillet (Cartier, No. 31). There are numerous references to Scève in de Tournes’ works from these years, including a dedication to Scève in de Tournes’ edition of Dante (1547, Cartier, No. 79), the Saulsaye (by Scève with illustrations by Salomon), and the edition of the poems of Marguerite de Navarre, the kings sister, to which Scève contributed a sonnet. De Tournes’ patronage of Scève culminates with the publication of the poet’s last great poem, Micrososme, in 1562. Admittedly any connection binding the Janot illustrated edition of the Trionfi to Scève and through Scève to the Salomon edition is an idea more attractive than verifiable. However, one need not depend upon these links to connect the illustrations in these two editions.

Salomon’s figures for the Triumphs of Petrarch clearly fall into the "Virtue-Vice" structure we have traced from the Ervy windows, through the Arsenal manuscript to the Janot hieroglyphs. But the Salomon set manifests an increasing degree of humanistic interest. Curously, Salomon’s version of this theme contains seven illustrations, not six. As a prologue, the sequence begins with a triumphal procession. In this case the victor seems to be Victory herself. She appears atop her column, and offers a laurel wreath to, one can only assume, Petrarch -- a clever pun, no doubt, on Laura.

In this image one detects evidence of a new stage of humanistic interest. First, new blood has been pumped into the rather astringent formulations of the Janot edition -- the emblems have been "fleshed out." Once banished from the Janot, personifications as emblems have returned to Salomon’s, but, in the process of returning, they do not echo the formulation found in Arsenal ms. fr. 5066. Moreover, the sensation of life, as evident in so many of Salomon’s designs, is not restricted by miniaturization. In these the artist has become quite at ease with the classical types; they retain none of the stony intellectualism that distinguish the way classical symbols were employed in the Ervy windows and the Arsenal manuscript. In the latter, Cupid stands triumphantly, dart in hand, over those who have fallen to his universal power. In Salomon’s image Cupid is about to release his arrow into the collection of attributes piled upon the ground. Fire follows in Cupid’s wake and lays ruin to earthly symbols. For the first time in the history of illustrations to Petrarch’s "Triumph of Love" one has the feeling that the artist intended to express the frailty of the human state, and not simply the fact that Cupid brings all men, even the most powerful into his tow. One recognizes among the heap of objects the triple-tiara and the crown of the Holy Roman Emperor just as they appeared in the Janot hieroglyph -- indicative of Salomon’s debt to Janot’s illustrations. Indeed, not limited to the publication at hand, a number of Salomon’s earliest works depend directly upon Janot’s catalogue.

NOTE: For example, Guillaume de la Perrière and others. See elsewhere.

Salomon’s humanizing process has not reversed the trend leading from Arsenal ms. fr. 5066 to Janot; rather, it develops a new content. The symbols, which in the Arsenal manuscript and in the Janot emblems once referred to the French or Latin moralizing verses, have acquired a new and independent meaning in Salomon’s "Triumph of Cupid." One might say that Salomon has democratized them: to the earlier attributes of the victims of Love are added military gear, musical instruments, books, spinning implements and ecclesiastical symbols, all tokens of man’s passions on earth. In addition, Salomon revises the iconography of the hieroglyphic emblem of the Janot editions and the symbolic formula of the Trionfi manuscripts. He gives movement and motive to the actors and substitutes narrative for the fixed constellation of emblematic meanings that had developed out of the tradition established by the success of the emblematic language of the Hypnerotomachia. In his own small way, Salomon has inaugurated a process of adding narrative to symbol that matured into Rubens’ technique of using symbol to expand the meaning of his narrative works, as in the Horrors of War discussed earlier.

NOTE: Piles as symbols of worldly vanities, appear in Breughel’s famous drawing called "Elk" dating from 1558. Cf. Castiglione Et in Arcadia Ego, Getty Coll. and Caravaggio, Triumph of Cupid, Berlin.

In the sequence of images spanning from Arsenal ms. fr. 5066 to Salomon’s Trionfi illustrations, classical or Renaissance symbols become more and more prominent and conventional. For example in the Arsenal manuscript, Fame (Bonne Renomée) holds a mirror, an unusual attribute, and a book; in the Janot hieroglyph the book reappears with crossed trumpets, actually, oliphants or hunting horns. Salomon uses similar attributes, but integrates them into a kind of narrative: the book is held as if being read, and Fame’s trumpet, now modern, is being blown.

NOTE: The trumpet did not appear as an attribute of Fame in classical antiquity. See Guy de Tervarent. Attributes et Symboles dans l’art profane: 1450-1600. Geneva, Droz, 1958, co. 387-88.

Likewise, Death, in Arsenal ms. fr. 5066 is presented as the three Fates; in Janot’s edition Death is a Death’s head crossed by a scythe, a shovel and a sarcophagus; but in Salomon’s image, a skeletal death, not the decaying corpse so popular in medieval imagery and perpetuated in Ligier Richier’s figure for the tomb of René de Châlons (after 1544, Blunt, pl. 57), but the full skeleton holding scythe and pitch-fork in triumph. Holbein had published his Les simulachres & historiees faces de la mort in Lyon in 1538; perhaps the dynamism of Salomon’s image of Death owes to this famous and influential series. The classical or Renaissance qualities of Salomon’s images are best shown by his image of Time as he appears in the guise developed in the Renaissance and bequeathed to modern times.

NOTE: See Panofsky on Father Time. Studies in Iconology.

If one admits to the degree of modernization and humanization of these images in Salomon’s Trionfi illustrations, one should not forget that their pedigree returns not to the Italian triumphal processions, but to the French tradition of moralizing images of Petrarch’s Trionfi. Like the other cycles we have considered, these illustrations are not "illustrations" of a text, but rather "characterizations" of a text whose purpose is to point the reader in the direction he is to understand the text. It seems likely that Salomon’s emblems are meant to prepare or condition the reader’s point of view, in much the same way as the devices Scève published in Délie are meant to guide the reader. In Salomon’s edition of the Triumphs, unlike every other illustrated edition previously printed in France, the text is not presented in translation, but in the original Italian.

NOTE: The text therefore cannot be molded, as it could in translation, to highlight and emphasize the editor’s point of view. The translations (see above) always emphasized the moralizing content of the Triumphs. The title Il Petrarcha is the same as Giolito’s 1544 edition.

This could be the first Italian illustrated edition produced in France. Finally, the text of the Trionfi has been liberated from the longstanding tradition of moralized content. No longer are mottoes juxtaposed with the illustrations or moralized couplets prefaced to the text as they were as late as 1530 when Simon Bourgouyn’s translation of the Trionfi appeared (B.N. ms. fr. 12423). In the de Tournes/Salomon edition this last remnant of French medieval tradition has been expunged – all that remains as witness to the long tradition of moralization are Salomon’s emblem woodcuts which now appear without legends or mottoes. It is they who mutely bear the ancient burden of conveying moral content -- once more explicitly defined in earlier illustrated cycles and prose and verse reductions and French translations.

In short, what we witness here is that peculiar confluence of medieval and Italian Renaissance traditions that constitute the French Renaissance. These emblems, conceived in an Italianizing style and reproducing the most advanced humanistically conceived personification of classical and allegorical vocabularies, nonetheless are built upon French medieval foundations which then manifest themselves as a persistent desire to moralize the human condition. It is this purpose, inherited from the middle ages, metamorphosed by contact with Italian humanism, that emerges in the seventeenth century and forms the basis for the stoicism of French intellectual society, especially strong in Lyon. This is the philosophical underpinning of French seventeenth-century bourgeois society--so well documented in Anthony Blunt’s monograph on Poussin. One may look at Salomon’s little Petrarchan images as one of many pivotal works of the sixteenth century that compresses the ideas of the fifteenth century while translating them into an idiom that can be understood and used by the seventeenth.

-----from 5x8--cards-------------------.

(This seems to repeat some previous materials.)

According to Simone (French Renaissance, 1969, p. 184) the interest of sixteenth-century France in Petrarch’s works was constant and not revived during the course of that century.

Interestingly, among the illustrated manuscripts of Petrarch’s Triumphs produced during the sixteenth century, one finds a preponderance of illustrations that adopt the iconography developed for the Triumphs in Italy, and the same can be said for the earliest printed edition of the Trionfi in France.

Bernard Salomon’s illustrations and the Janot editions illustrations are therefore the more interesting because, although the Salomon illustrations are appended to an edition of Petrarch in Italian, published in France, and therefore seemingly a testament to the influence of the Italian poet’s influence there and the interest of France in things Italian, the Salomon illustrations, as do those of Janot, convey a decidedly French flavor, mingled, however, with Italian reminiscences. The emblematic formula used by Salomon certainly returns to the devices of the Janot edition, which, itself, must depend upon the medievalizing iconography devised for the Triumphs--without triumphal procession--as can be seen in the Arsenal and Berlin manuscripts as well as in a few isolated tapestries.

These images, recalling, if nothing else, the battle between virtues and vices of medieval iconography and the Psychomachia illustrations. thematically recalled in Erasmus’ Enchiridon militis christiani (1504), refuse to admit the Italian origin of Petrarch’s moralizing poems. Instead, they appear to correspond to the epigrammatic purity and abstraction of the Trionfi paraphrase popular in 15th-century France and attributed to Jean Robertet. That is, all these aforementioned versions, save perhaps the Bernard Salomon illustrations that are related to them conceptually. Indeed, Salomon’s do acknowledge the Italian iconographic precedent--he banished medieval attributes of the emblematic tradition and substituted the classicizing allegorical attributes developed during the Renaissance to illustrate the Italian versions of Petrarch’s Triumphs cast in the form of processions. For example, the three Fates of the northern tradition are replaced in the "Triumph of Death" by a skeleton.

NOTE: In Jean Mignon’s engraving (after Peni) of the women’s bath at Fontainebleau, in the upper left corner, there seems to be a string running from near the center of the sheet across the scene of depilation [?] in the far rear. Not having seen the original print, it is impossible to rule out that this line is just a tear in the sheet, but it does appear to hang under the force of gravity. What could it signify, a reference to the three fates perhaps? If so, it is interesting to remember that the three fates were used in the early French depictions of the triumphs of Petrarch as the image of Death. Might this be a synecdochic reference to death -- injecting a moralizing allusion into a scene of overt erotic contents? [3/2/09]

Thus Salomon manages to give his emblems a currently fashionable Italianate appearance without sacrificing the pithy and emblematic content admired by French intellectuals. He neither slavishly adopts Italian precedent nor rejects it. Rather, to my mind, Salomon does with his illustrations what contemporary French humanists, Erasmus included, had achieved in their revival of classical sources--instead of resurrecting "pagan" culture for its own sake, as one might claim was done in Italy (although, of course there were complex nationalistic motives at work there), the French humanist and reform thinkers only revive those works that are analogous to their own desire for a moralistic literature, that is to say, the classicism of the north is not wholly distinct from the desire for moralistic reform.

NOTE: See further Simone, Fr. Ren., 1969, on the reform.

In this view Salomon’s emblems for Petrarch’s Triumphs are not to be taken as mere illustrations of or correspondences to the text, but rather, as images that moralize (as in a text moralizée) the text and act as visual commentaries by isolating, purifying, and rephrasing Petrarch’s original text without doing damage to the text itself. The scholar’s method is reconciled to the reformer’s purpose. Such an endeavor is in the strict medieval tradition of exegesis but now resides under the cover of a "mute image" which compliments and comments upon the "speaking poesie" of the author of the verses. As a whole, this issue comprises one chapter of the period’s infatuation with the concept of Ut pictura poësis.

Such, indeed, is the method and means used by Salomon in all his greater illustrations, specifically the Ovid series and the Bible series. The images comment and supply meanings to those initiated in understanding the principles that could not be introduced in the text itself. Perhaps this method is a game for a sophisticated audience, but it may also have been introduced to disguise the reformist intentions of the publishers, out of fear of religious sanctions, a fear well founded in fact. Cf. Jean Dorat, Michael Servetus. These issues were no mere intellectual exercise of poetic theory, but could be a matter of life or death, and could address the central questions of life’s purpose and life’s rules: The very substance of Petrarch's Trionfi.