Bernard Salomon's illustrations to Petrarch's Trionfi (5)

continued from Part IV

In the preceding section we have seen how Bernard Salomon’s series of six emblematic images for the Triumphs of Petrarch embody Lyonnais neo-Platonic thought. [Is it missing?] In addition, it has been shown that the iconography of these images fuses two strands of previous Petrarchan trionfi cycles: 1) a French medieval emblematic tradition of the sort commonly used to depict the triumph of the Virtues over the Vices, and 2) a newer, humanistic, classical tradition of the sort that had developed in Italy during the fifteenth century. This peculiar blend of medieval pietistic and modern humanistic content is typical of the work of the Lyonnais Renaissance humanist poets and their group under the patronage of Marguerite de Navarre (1492-1549).

Compared to earlier images, Salomon’s give the sequence of Triumphs new life; the complex and encyclopedic iconography of the earlier programs is cast off and replaced by an emblematic program that emphasizes the sequential relationships and the mystical, anagogical and teleological progression from triumph to triumph. As such, the graduated sequence of Salomon’s images is clearly cast in a neo-Platonic mold; it turns Petrarch’s poem into the form of the Platonic Chain of Being that bridges the gap between the most terrestrial and the most celestial, thus leading the way to the return to the "First Cause," and closing the circular path leading to Man’s redemption.

For the neo-Platonists the world is divided into antitheses; at the lover extent is the sensible world and at the highest pole is the intelligible world. Although opposites, these poles are bridged by a bond leading from the finite to the infinite, from the material to the spiritual, from appearance to the idea. This path, from lower to higher, parallels the Christian scheme of redemption. Turning to Petrarch’s Triumphs, we see that they too, embody this motion. From the concreteness of Love, Chastity, and Death, Petrarch forces the reader to ~~tome~~ [come?] to the abstractness of Fame, Time and Eternity. This graded path from the sensibility of love and desire to the universality of Eternity is essentially the same as the path to God and replicates the paths hewn in the neo-Platonic cosmos.

NOTE: See especially Ernst Cassirer. The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy. Trans., Mario Domandi. New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1963, p. 9.

And yet, in spite of this neo-Platonic overlay, there is something undeniably medieval in Petrarch’s parade of allegorical personages and essences, a medievalism of the sort that must have been attractive and comfortable to French Renaissance thinkers. Salomon’s version of the Triumphs serves this taste for the medieval; in his scheme man is not central to the chain of Petrarchan emblems. In fact, considering the iconography of earlier images, one might say that man has been purged altogether in Salomon’s. Even in the first conquest, Cupid’s victory over mortal lovers, no man appears. In Salomon’s Petrarchan images man is represented only by the attributes of his stations in life. Only allegorical humans and personification can exist in these images. In his role as prey to Cupid, in Trionfi iconography, man is vulnerable and weak; he is the first to fall. In this scheme man is not intermediate in the chain of creation, but is placed at the lowest point of succession. Nor does it seem that in the inexorable sequence of illustrations to the Triumphs that man has power to exert free will, to choose his level of divinity, as it were, a concept vital to Petrarch’s idea of the human condition, and, indeed, a major theme of the text. [Margin: In the second and third triumph this image of man prevails: Thus, man’s weakness to the powers of Cupid is followed by the weakness of Chastity and by the ultimate defeat in the hands of Death. If the first three triumphs are devoted to man’s life on earth -- the mood is assuredly pessimistic -- the final three are devoted to the afterlife, and the mood is reversed, ending on an optimistic note. Indeed, in many of the images of the Trionfi dotting the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the humanist, neo-Platonic vision of man as defined by Ficino and by Pico, has succumbed to the rather medieval notion of an inhuman, even abstract God who overwhelms ordinary mortals; but never is this image more apparent than in Salomon’s "Triumph of Divinity" or in the corresponding emblematic woodcut of Janot’s editions of Petrarch’s Triumphs. In these versions man’s role is diminished and replaced by allegorical abstractions that mark the steps leading from man’s weakness to the triumph of the divine. Are the resulting schemes essentially medieval in substance, but wrapped in an elegant mantle of neo-Platonism, or, are they to be perceived as modern, but phrased in a language of conventional allegorical wisdom?

Petrarch’s poem, of course, belies its illustrators. It is, after all, a journey; in it is man himself who is offered a vision culminating in the "Triumph of Eternity." The "I" of the poem is the subject, and it is by virtue of his love that the narrator is led through its successive stages. However, it is the nature of the illustrations to ignore the presence of the first person narrator and to experience the vision as within a framework of direct and primary experiences. True, some cycles, notably French cycles, begin with the poet asleep in the garden,

NOTE: E.g. Paris, B.N. ms. fr. 594 and the edition of B. Verard (Paris, 1514).

but, to judge from the images made to illustrate the cycle, the progression of the narrator plays little importance, unlike, for example, contemporary cycles illustrating the Divine Comedy, where the persons of Dante and Virgil maintain their importance. Indeed, some observers have perceptively suggested that the early cycles of the Trionfi may record, not Petrarch’s text at all, but an otherwise unrecorded pageant bases upon the poet’s scheme.

NOTE: H. Mayor, Prints and People.

It seems safe to conclude, however, that the vast majority of illustrations, French as well as Italian, although they borrow from the revival of classical forms and content of their own time, in one important respect dehumanize, or rather, in a medieval way, intellectualize the content of the poem, that is to say, in so much as they ignore the primary role of the poem’s narrator. It is the narrator, of course, who shows that man is free to choose his own location in the neo-Platonic cosmos. In the pictorial tradition Petrarch’s personal content has been forced to submit to a parade of abstractions.

Although, in Italian cycles the parade of personifications is often given the paraphernalia and poise of a Florentine pageant, and the resulting images follow the passing modes of Renaissance fashion, one detects in these images a residue of an underlying medieval purpose. It is in this medieval theme, not so much the journey of man’s soul, but the progression of levels and stages abstractly leading to the "Triumph of Eternity," that must have fascinated French illustrators of Petrarch’s Triumphs. French cycles on the whole are concerned with problems of narrative and sequence that never seem to bother the Italian illustrators of the Triumphs, and therefore freely experiment with methods to develop a cycle that logically culminates in the "Triumph of Eternity" (or Divinity). In French Petrarchan cycles (unlike in real life); pageant for the sake of display is rare.

To this point Salomon’s image of the "most celestial" -- "The Triumph of Divinity" (or Eternity) -- deserves investigation in its own right, for it is unique among images of this triumph in Petrarch’s cycle. Indeed, investigation of this final image can show us to what extent the Lyonnais poets, but most notably Maurice Scève, were concerned with iconographical problems and the problems pursuant to the relationship between images and the texts they were fashioned to illustrate. Indeed, one should view Salomon’s cycle not as an attempt to pursue Petrarch’s meaning for its own sake, but rather as a revision of Petrarch’s content as reinterpreted by the evolved neo-Platonist tradition built upon Pseudo-Dionysus, Augustine, and Petrarch, including as well more modern currents, notably Nicholas of Cusa (1400/1 - 1464), the Florentine neo-Platonists, and, Maurice Scève, whose importance for the revival of Petrarch in Lyon cannot be undervalued in this respect.

The key to this aspect of Salomon’s Petrarch cycle lies in its altogether unique image of "Eternity." In this image, it intended to direct the reader’s attention to a convergence of the themes of man’s freedom, the relationship between man and the Divine, and the correspondence between the multiplicity of earthly things and the unity of the Divinity.

Although man is indeed absent from Salomon’s personifications, it is implied that he is still subject to them. The journey by emblem that passes from essence to essence in Salomon’s images reveals a theology that conceives of the Divinity as a force that transcends all human attributes. Whereas Petrarch’s evocation of Eternity stems most directly from Augustine, it is possible to speculate here that Salomon’s tri-cephalic image has more to do with ideas stemming from Nicholas of Cusa, whose concept of man’s freedom and whose definition of God’s transcendent essence had such a profound effect upon Ficino and Pico della Mirandola as well as upon Maurice Scève.

NOTE: Cassirer. Individual and Cosmos, Ch. 2, passim. See Hans Staub for influence of Cusa on Scève.

Time and Eternity

in French Trionfi cycles.

With the history of illustrations of Petrarch’s Trionfi in mind, it is clear that Bernard Salomon’s version of the Triumphs owe to two trends. "Emblematic" triumphs of works such as the Arsenal manuscript (ms. fr. 5066) or the Janot edition of the Trionfi have combined in Salomon’s images with the personifications developed for Petrarch’s allegories in Italian Trionfi cycles. The result is a humanistic but moralized cycle. But within Salomon’s Triumph images one stands out from both the "emblematic" and the "processional" tradition, that is, Salomon’s depiction of the "Triumph of Divinity." As noted above, Italian representations of this final scene give no direct clue to help us understand the meaning of Salomon’s tri-cephalic Divinity. Nor, for that matter, do the corresponding images in Arsenal ms. fr. 5066 and the Janot edition, both of which have been so revealing thus far. [Margin: Eternity in Arsenal 5066 sits on the Zodiac?] The latter, it will be remembered, proposes its own rather independent version of the "Triumph of Divinity" which, not surprisingly, is labelled "Divinité vaincq toutes choses," instead of the "Eternité vainc tout" of Jean Robertet’s verse. The Janot Divinity manifests itself as a heavenly burst. This motif may be explained by a reading of the La Forge translation that accompanies the illustration, but, outside of its uniqueness, it does not explain the striking emblem of the triune god of Salomon's image of Divinity.

In the "emblematic tradition" more than in the "processional tradition" the "Triumph of Divinity" is identified as a victory over "time." In order to understand the meaning of Salomon’s tri-cephalic image and the nature of the contest between "Time" and "Divinity" (or "Eternity") it might prove helpful to investigate how "time" was understood and depicted in French Trionfi imagery.

[Margin: The image of Saturn as an emblem of Time in the southern works was discussed above. There we saw... The French cycles on the other hand express a more cosmological solution to the representation of Petrarchan time:]

Time and its antithesis--Eternity--as presented in French Trionfi cycles is best understood by investigating a second French tradition of illustrations of the Trionfi, one in which it is possible to discern a fusion of the so-called Italian "processional" and the French "emblematic" types. In these examples one finds an elaborate system developed to render Petrarch’s next-to-last image. The tradition for such fusion of northern and southern types may well be traced back to the Ervy windows discussed above. There, we remember, vestigial chariots were placed under personifications that were otherwise formed in the shape of conventional battles of the Virtues and Vices. In several well known versions of Petrarch’s Triumphs of French origin the chariot or processional motif assumes a prominence equivalent to that in the cycles of Italian origin, without, altogether, abandoning the emblematic structure seen in monuments such as the Arsenal ms. fr. 5066. Only two of these monuments need be discussed in detail: 1) A series of tapestries in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, versions of which are in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, dating from the early sixteenth century, and, 2) a manuscript in the Bibliothèque nationale (ms. fr. 594) made in Rouen for Louis XII, thus placing it between 1498 and 1515.

NOTE: On the Vienna tapestries see Essling-Müntz, Petrarque, p. 212-13; Göbel, Tapestries, p. 31-32; Rorimer, J.J. "The Triumph of Fame and Time," M.M.A. Bulletin, vol. 35, 1940 (Dec.), p. 242. On the B.N. ms. fr. 594 see Essling-Müntz, p. 226 ff.; Franco Simone, Fr. Ren., p. 229 ff.; Georges Ritter and Jean Lafond, Manuscrits a peintures de l’école de Rouen: Livres d’Heures normands, Rouen and Paris: 1913, p. 15, 33 ff.

[Manuscript copy: Insert in French manuscript tradition.]

French manuscript B.N. Paris no. 594, dating from the early sixteenth century (probably more or less contemporary with the Vérard edition of Petrarch Triumphs of 1514), introduces two scenes for each one of the traditional episodes. [Essling-Müntz, p. 226 ff.] Here one finds scenes of victory and triumph. The illuminator must have understood that the single illustration of triumphal procession, that had become traditional for the illustration of the Trionfi, in effect fused two separable understandings of content: [awk] the fact of victory and the ritual celebration of victory in the form of a triumphal procession. The separation of the victory from the triumph has introduced an improved narrative logic and has doubled the sumptuousness of the manuscript. Salomon’s emblematic method solves the narrative problem in another way. Previous illustrators of the variety seen above presented the allegory as a narrative in time, whereas Salomon's allegory is a narrative outside of time. He forgoes representing the triumphs as a series of events. There is no action, no triumphal procession, no conquests; instead, each of his emblems borrows the logic of the hieroglyph and applies it to its allegorical content in such a way as to induce a continuous narrative leading step by step from terrestrial Love to a conclusion in a celestial Divinity.

[Margin: Rewrite.] In Ms. 594, however, there are surprising indications that the traditional manifestations of the personifications were no longer sufficient. French productions in general were not bound by the usages developed in the Italian triumph illustrations. Thus, for example, it is not unusual to see the three Fates substituted for the image of Death. In Italy "Time" is usually represented as an old man on crutches, or perhaps as Saturn devouring his own child. In the North the signs of the Zodiac become popular as representations of Time. In the Vienna and MMA tapestries, and "Old Man Time," is seen seated in his triumphal chariot. His traditional hour glass has been replaced by a clock and the signs of the Zodiac float above his head. In the manuscript attributed to Godefroy de Batave (Bib. de l’Arsenal ms. fr. 6480) the signs of the Zodiac are made even more prominent (fols. 198^v and 109^v). In fol. 108^v they bridge the heavens like a rainbow (compare Arsenal 5066) and accompany the heavenly path of the chariot of Time. In ms. 594 the chariot is finally abandoned (fol. 384^v). The signs become the path of the sun as it journeys through the sky and defeats the personification of Fame. The conquest is gaining a cosmic proportion here and is separating itself from the courtly ceremonial, yet terrestrial representations of the Italian fifteenth century tradition. It is not very far from the approach taken in Ms. 594 toward the taciturn devices of the Janot edition or the emblematical constellations of Salomon’s versions, in which physical narrative has morphed into a narrative composed of a sequence of individual emblems.

[Manuscript copy ends.]

[Type script begins. note missing text.]

[Following marked as deleted:

NOTE: See Émile van Moé, "Les ‘Triomphes" de Pétrarque d’apres le manuscrit italien 545 de la Bibliothèque nationale," in Les Trésors des Bibliothèque de France, vol. XIII, 1931, p. 3 ff.

Strictly speaking this last scene is not a Trinity; there is no Holy Ghost.

The cross is supported at its foot by a diagram of the newly created world which is crossed by the four rivers of Paradise. This sphere in turn is supported by the four Evangelists who form a stable platform for the entire composition. None of the above, save perhaps the image of a new world, is suggested by Petrarch’s text. [End of part marked as deleted.]

Time in Petrarch Trionfi Illustration in France.

In France some illustrations of Petrarch’s "Triumph of Eternity" take a different turn. Even rather late examples such as the sixteenth-century manuscript of Petrarch’s Triumphs in Paris (Bibl. de l’Arsenal ms. fr. no. 5066) preserve an iconography suggested, not by Petrarch, but by the late medieval reductions of Petrarch’s ideas attributed to Jean Robertet.

NOTE: For a series of Petrarchan tapestries based upon these verses see, Bull. Cleveland Museum, Chaumont tapestries. Also, See Berlin ms. Phil 1926. For the literary tradition of Petrarch’s Triumphs in France see Franco Simone, The French Renaissance, p. 217 ff.

[Marked as deleted: The illustration in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal ms. 5066 for the last triumph cannot be understood by referring to Petrarch.]

Here a crowned woman holds a frond in one hand and a crown in another. She sits upon a Zodiac [?] rainbow triumphant over a defeated image of Time, an unusual personification, that lies prone at her feet. He can be identified by the hourglass in the distance.

NOTE: According to Margaret Zsuppán (Jean Robertet, Oeuvres, Genève, Droz, 1970, p. 19) Arsenal ms. fr. 5066 is a copy of Paris, B.N. ms. fr. 24461, and contains the same text and the same drawings. The following represents the appropriate text of Robertet’s "Triumph of Eternity from Paris, B.N. ms. fr. 2441 as rendered by Zsuppán:

Le Temps vainc Bonne Renommée.
Je suis seant au hault triumphal shrosne;
Du Temps passß port palme et couronne
Joyeusement comme victorieuse,
Sur les choses crééglorieuse;
Mondaine Amour et Chasteté pudicque,
Mort, Fame et Temps, tant soit vieil et anticque:
Tour prandra fin, mais j’ay ma mention
Eterne au ciel en clere vision.
Eternité vainc tout.

[Margin: Should be proven in earlier section. Delete this paragraph.] This arrangement of victor over vanquished is adapted by Salomon for his own scheme; but, of course, in the latter, the image of Eternity has been replaced by the tricephalic being whose significance in this setting is the subject of our present concern. As for the remainder of Salomon’s triumph images, in short it may be said that they replace the types offered in Arsenal ms. 5066 with the images of the gods as developed in the humanistic atmosphere of the Renaissance in Italy.

Two important French manuscripts of Petrarch’s Triumphs drop or adapt the medievalizing iconography of Arsenal ms. 5066 and present a more obviously Italianate scheme. In these examples, however, we can detect as well important differences in emphasis from any Italian version of the subject, namely, that in the final triumphs the illustrators render time passing in its astrological scenes; they show the victory of time and its eventual defeat by the Trinity.

One of these (Paris, B.N. ms. fr. 594) an elaborately illuminated manuscript in a northern style was made for Louis XII (1498-1515) in Rouen. In this manuscript the normal number of subjects has been doubled.

NOTE: See George Ritter and Jean LaFond, Manuscrits a Peintures de l’École de Rouen, Rouen and Paris, 1913, p. 15, 34 ff.

Each episode is presented in two scenes placed on facing pages: first the victory, then the triumph. The allegorical system combines elements of the Italian triumphal procession as seen in countless cassone, printed books and engravings of fifteenth century Italy, with elements that are quite new, but reminiscent of the theme of conquest seen in the later Arsenal manuscript mentioned above. In other words, B.N. ms. fr. 594 integrates northern and southern methods of illustrating the Trionfi.

It’s representation of the "Triumph of Time" is striking. Instead of the usual variation on Kronos, Father Time or Saturn, which one sees so often in the Italian works, in the Paris manuscript the heavens are given over to the zodiac, the sun, the hours of day and night. Day and Night are represented by personifications; prominent among them is Aurora. The maidens who stand for Day are dressed in white; those of night are in dark clothing. The use of this imagery of the sun and hours, instead of the conventional personifications, must derive from a re-reading of Petrarch’s text. The poet uses these elements to refer to time passing and does not refer to any classical or allegorical personifications of Time. For example: "For days and hours and years and months fly on ... The flying and fleeing of the sun ...

NOTE: Petrarch, "Triumph of Time," Wilkins, trans. ed. cit. p. 98.

This revisionist iconography must be attributable to the new French interest in Petrarch’s vernacular, including the Triumphs, but the scheme must have found favor because the cosmological iconography for these programs had already been prepared for use by the tradition of including these features in manuscript Books of Hours, where it is common to see the heavenly chariots pass by, as for example in the Très Riches Heures of the Duke de Berry. Nonetheless, when used in a manuscript of the Trionfi, this cosmological iconography might be considered revisionist, and yet for France, revisionist or not, it is traditional.

NOTE: See Franco Simone, and Essling-Müntz, p. 226.

In France there might have been greater freedom to develop a variant iconography for the Trionfi since an isolated and longstanding tradition such as that found in Italy and spread elsewhere, had not fully taken root. Indeed, French manuscripts and printed books offer a wide variety of solutions to the problem of illustrating the Trionfi.

Strangely, the zodiacal signs accompanying "The Victory of Time over Fame (fol. 348^v) and "The Triumph of Time" (fol. 349^r) in Paris, B.N. ms. fr. 594 are not represented in correct sequence, as if to suggest that in the world governed by real time, time, itself, is out of joint or the idea of a fixed sequence has been abandoned. The correct sequence is restored, however, in the images representing "The Triumph of the Trinity over Time." Here the sun appears between Pisces and Aries, that is, at the vernal equinox -- the beginning of the new year, Easter -- but more significantly, in the same arrangement the heavens were thought to have assumed at the moment of the first Creation.

NOTE: Illustrations to Dante’s Il Paradiso, Canto 1, use similar astronomical indicators. In a Venetian Divina commedia (Giolito, 1555) the woodcut for Canto 1 shows Dante and Beatrice ascending to the heavens, as represented by the sun poised under Aries. (Illustrated in Ruth Mortimer, Harvard College Library, Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, Catalogue of Books and Manuscripts, Part II: Italian 16th-century Books, No. 147.) Dorothy Sayers (The Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Paradise, Baltimore, Md., Penguin Books, 1962, p. 57-9), commenting upon Canto One, notes that Dante places its events at the time of the spring equinox when the sun is in the constellation Aries. (Cf. lines 37-42.) She maintains that according to tradition the sun was in Aries at the moment of creation.

In the text of the "Triumph of Eternity" Petrarch says that "The Sun no more will pause in the Bull or the Fish,"

NOTE: Wilkins, tr. op. cit.,

that is, in those signs surrounding Aries, the first sign of the year. The flow of the years will pause. Strictly speaking, Aries is chronologically between the Fish and the Bull, in that order. Why does Petrarch reverse the sequence of the signs, except, perhaps to suggest that this "pause" means that time will halt in a state of continuous beginning where the order of time will have no meaning.

Interestingly, the disposition of this scene in B.N. ms. 594 evokes traditional apocalyptic imagery; it contains a resurrection of the dead, including the animals of the land and the sea, a chariot drawn by four horses, angels blowing trumpets and a (truncated) Trinity posed upon a heavenly rainbow. The idea for an image of this type must have derived from Petrarch, for his description of the re-creation of the world at the Triumph of Eternity, although it mirrors the first creation, is portrayed in definite eschatological terms: "If all things that are beneath the heavens are to fall, How, after many circlings, will they end?"

NOTE: Petrarch, "Triumph of Eternity," Wilkins, tr. ed.cit., lines 16-18.

The next and final illustration of B.N. ms. fr. 594 shows the Trinity supported by the four doctors of the Church: Ambrose, Gregory, Augustine and Jerome. They stand on a chariot pulled by the evangelical symbols. References to Time have been banished. Although this last scene is more elaborate than earlier examples, it is not substantially different from them; it is not independently conceived.

Another, later French manuscript of the Triumphs of Petrarch by Godefroy le Batave (Paris, Bibl. de l’Arsenal ms. 6480) continues the zodiacal imagery of B.N. ms. fr. 594 and the duplicate system of Victory and Triumph, but compacts it all into a miniature format which, incidentally, did much to established the vogue for the small that made Salomon’s works so popular. Myra Orth dates Godefroy’s work between 1522 and 1526.

NOTE: Myra Dickman Orth, "Progressive Tendencies in French Manuscript Illumination: 1515-1530. Godefroy le Batave and the 1520’s Hours Workshop," Ph.D. Diss. New York, N.Y.U. (I.F.A.), 1956. H. Martin and Ph. Lauer, Les Principaux Manuscrits a Peintures de la Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal a Paris, Paris, 1929, p. 63, Pl. LXXXVI. Henry Martin, Catalogue des Manuscrits de la Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris, Plon, 1889. Unlike Paris, B.N. ms. fr. 594, Godefroy’s "Triumph of Time" presents the entire zodiac and places the signs in correct order, beginning with Aquarius.

In the above two manuscripts, the "Triumph of Time" and the "Triumph over Time" are given special prominence by their iconographical uniqueness. On the other hand, the image of the world made new (as seen appropriately in early cassone) does not appear to be an important element of French Trionfi imagery. (Myra Orth does state that such a scene occurs in Godefroy’s manuscript, but she also notes that these small precious illustrations had little or no influence.)

NOTE: Myra Orth, op. cit., p. _____.

It may be significant that although the presence of the three-faced Trinity is very rare in French fifteenth and sixteenth century art, and save for Salomon’s "Triumph of Divinity," entirely absent from French Petrarch illustrations, when it does occur, such as in the Henri II manuscript discussed above [RAB was it discussed above?], it connotes an image of God as Creator working on his creation, a scene appropriate to and adapted by the tradition of Trionfi illustrations. Or, when it appears in an illustrations such as in the Simon Vostre Hours, its connotation is that of an abstract, mathematical, intellectual and allegorical, or rather, emblematic presence, also suitable for use in Petrarch’s poem; [deleted: that is given the strong tradition of using the more usual depiction of the Trinity to serve as illustration.] But, certainly Salomon’s tri-cephalic Trinity could not have been used arbitrarily as a convenient emblem to indicate the more conventional Trinitarian image, or even as an emblem of such an image. The abstract associations of the three-headed device were too deeply implanted in the pictorial repertoire of Medieval and Renaissance Europe for the image to have been used blindly. Rather, its presence in Salomon’s version of the Triumph refers to its earlier uses, which the artist means to associate with Petrarch’s text; one of these is a reference to the triune god who oversees both the first and subsequent creations of the earth. Other allusions will be discussed below.

Eternity and St. Augustine

[Is this the topic of the next section?]