When Troy Fell: Shakespeare’s Iconography of Sorrow and Survival

When Troy Fell: Shakespeare’s Iconography of Sorrow and Survival John Doebler In a theater without curtains, clearing the stage of a dead body is always a problem. Shakespeare turned his solution toward the iconic in 2 Henry VI. When Young Clifford finds his aged father newly slain by York, he lifts the body upon his shoulders: Come, thou new ruin of old Clifford’s house: As did Aeneas old Anchises bear, So bear I thee upon my manly shoulders; But then Aeneas bare a living load— Nothing so heavy as these woes of mine. (V.ii.61-65) .1 Well known to scholars is the first English emblem book, Geffrey Whitney’s Choice of Emblemes and other Devices (1586). The emblem of Aeneas carrying his father Anchises out of a captured and burning Troy (fig. 1) is based on one of the most insistent images of loyalty in the Renaissance.2 The specific interpretation of the episode is filial piety, and the motto above the woodcut drives the point across: pietas filiorum in parentes. The poem printed beneath Whitney’s woodcut de­ scribes the event in the first stanza and moralizes it in the second. The example of Aeneas risking his life for his father, which brought Anchises such great joy, teaches us all to protect and reverence our parents in spite of the commonplace indifference of children toward their biological origin. Added to this call to duty is a comparatively understated promise of reward. For sons who imitate Aeneas, “God their daies maie blesse.” The emblem tradition behind this subject may be traced to JOHN DOEBLER, Professor of English at Arizona State University, has published widely on Shakespeare and iconography, including the book Shakespeare’s Speaking Pictures (1974). 321 322 Comparative Drama Andreas Alciatus. His collection of 1531, the first of some one thousand Renaissance emblem books by various authors, con­ tains an Aeneas and Anchises emblem (fig. 2) which is Whitney’s ultimate source. The Alciatus motto is printed at the bottom of the preceding page in a carelessly produced volume which is known to have caused the author severe disappointment.3 Sub­ sequent French publishers, however, served Alciatus far better than the original German printer. The many additions, transla­ tions, recast woodcuts, and commentaries added to the collection over the next half century are well exemplified in the famous edition annotated by Claude Mignault (1571). The Plantin edition of Mignault prints a woodcut illustrating Aeneas and Anchises which is identical to the one later reproduced in Whitney.4 The positive image of Aeneas is the subject of countless works of Renaissance art in a broad range of media outside the emblem tradition—illuminated manuscripts, illustrations, and title pages of Vergil’s Aeneid; mid sixteenth-century Italian majolica dishes; Brussels tapestries; drawings, such as that by Luca Cambiaso (1527-85); copper engravings by Schonbroeck (signed and dated 1605) and Jan Brueghel (1568-1625); and paintings by Girolamo Genga (71476-1551), Federico Barocci (c.1526-1612), Lodovico Carracci (1555-1619), Adam Elsheimer (1578-71610), and Keuninck (d. 1635). Genga, Barocci. and Carracci focus on the immediate family of Aeneas—his father, Anchises; his wife, Creusa; and his son, Ascanius or Julus. The baroque style of the engravers and the paintings by Elsheimer and Keuninck, however, enlarge the com­ position to a panoramic scale emphasizing the full destruction of Troy. At a midpoint of scale is the fresco designed by Raphael and known as the Burning of the Borgo (1514-17). This fresco gives its name to the Stanza dell’Incendio, one of the three rooms comprising the Stanze Vaticane. Possibly, Castiglione originated the scheme for designing the four sides of the room. The osten­ sible theme of the major fresco is the miraculous extinguishing of a fire in the crowded Roman district of the Borgo by the ninthcentury pontiff Leo IV, who raises his hand in benediction as he watches the flames race toward the Vatican (fig. 3). However, what Raphael has done to fulfill a humanistic ideal is in fact to populate Rome with episodes from the Fall of Troy, including the rescue of Anchises in the lower left-hand comer of the lunette. The full topic...