Hollow Men: Writing, Objects, and Public Image in Renaissance Italy

Afterword

Afterword The idea of proposing images of ancient heroes as models for the viewer was by no means new in the fifteenth century, but it was the foundation for much humanistic rhetoric of imitation. Following the fame of Giotto’s 1332 fresco cycle of ancient heroes for King Robert of Anjou, the fashion spread across Italy for the display of visual exemplars in public spaces. In Milan, Azzo Visconti ordered a series of images of ancient princes, while Francesco da Carrara in Padua commissioned frescoes illustrating Petrarch’s De viris illustribus. While such cycles generally represented exemplary men, in the 1480s Eleonora d’Este commissioned a series of paintings of classical suicidal heroines to illustrate the motto of her father, Ferrante of Naples: malo mori, quam foedari (i prefer dying over dishonor). This kind of display was advocated by many humanists, the most famous of whom (although not the first) is Paolo Cortesi, who in the later fifteenth century suggested that such decoration would be useful in a cardinal’s palace. Just as Petrarch had urged following the example of Roman emperors depicted on coins, so scholars like Cortesi and Pontano suggested that images of great people—the Caesars, the Fabii, the Scipios—were worthy of reverence as both representations of greatness and examples for modern men to follow. At the same time, ancient images of heroes seemed to be inspirited by the genius of the artist, and so conferred authority on the writer who appropriated such artifacts in his own self-construction. Afterword 288 The idea of the accessible, reproducible exemplar in literature recalls Nagel and Wood’s “substitutional” paradigm of art, according to which churches could reproduce and literally “partake of” the model of Jerusalem’s temple, and paintings of the Madonna could “participate in” both a much earlier icon and the Madonna herself—so that medieval artworks defied the chronology of artistic production by conveying the “presence” of their models.1 In the same way that Renaissance artists “invented” the idea of timeless substitution by staging it in tension with a chronologically specific performative paradigm—with artists and architects simultaneously drawing on the notion of a transhistorical artwork and producing something specific to themselves—so too the humanistic theory of exemplarity necessarily performed a similar contradiction as it had, as its ultimate goal, exceptionalism. Authors like Petrarch, Pontano, and Bembo emphasized that a man who followed models from history would be memorialized—both as one in a timeless series of virtuous heroes, and as an exceptional instance of the spirit of the ancients. Quattrocento and early Cinquecento commentators on imitation, like Gianfrancesco Pico, frequently advocated imitating the ancients in such a way as to create something that could make the old new again—an idea modeled visually by the combination of classical and Quattrocento elements in Ghirlandaio’s frescoes. This divergence between reproducing a model and striving for exceptionalism echoes, in literary terms, the tension between substitutional and authorial modes of art, which Nagel and Wood argue produced unique forms of creativity in the Quattrocento and early Cinquecento. In fact, Pontano’s own text undercuts the notion that images of kings and rulers are a readable and reproducible series of gesta: Pontano posits a prince who will follow in the footsteps of his forebears , and attempts to collapse historical distance so as to create a chain of exemplarity linking the prince directly with Scipio and Cyrus—with the ancients made present again in the person of the prince. Yet at the same time, Pontano’s text clearly stages the tension between this ideal and the reality, as the prince’s exemplarity exists on the surface, threatening to become mere representation. Together with Ghirlandaio’s frescoes of exemplary men, Pontano confirms that what is required is a pose that appears classicizing and Afterword 289 authoritative—seeming to reproduce ancient models—but is in fact enigmatic and ambiguous. Bembo’s De Virgilii Culice restates this problem, clarifying that the exemplary function of monuments has failed because all monuments from the past—both tactile and textual —are irreparably broken, “castrated” and unreadable. Bembo’s eventual solution to this problem—the reconstruction of an imagined ideal—contradicts his statements earlier in the same text about the irrecoverable nature of ancient monuments. Yet this contradiction instantiates the tension between substitutional and performative paradigms in the most dramatic way: The only possible performance available to the emasculated philologist is nostalgic substitution...