Philolog

Fig. 1 Glykon's Herakles (also known as Farnese Hercules) Museo Nazionale, Napoli

One of the most thought-provoking sculptures in the Classical world's corpus is the colossal Glykon sculpture of Herakles at the National Museum of Naples (Museo Nazionale Napoli). We know it now as the Farnese Hercules and it is most likely a copy of a more famous Lysippus 4th c. BCE original.(1) Like other Hellenistic sculptures, it is full of pathos as seen plainly in the face of the hero, "the most often copied and imitated Lysippan Herakles in Antiquity" with its "heavy, dramatically exaggerated musculature" of a "weary Herakles leaning on his club". (2) But where Hellenistic sculpture often infuses a new dynamism by contrast into Greek art, this giant statue - in an age when such colossi are popular - does not offer a restless narrative but its antithesis. (3) This is also an era of portrait,(4) where it is the face of Herakles that is at least a rich part part of the narrative here, and certainly the frontal half of the sculpture has a separate narrative than the back side. The kinesis is not external but internal - in his mind. Not normally associated with intellectuality or strength of mind, this Herakles stands out for that very reason. The man of action is slowed to inaction. The brawny hero who has done so much by force instead now does nothing. But here his mind is wrestling with a different specie of activity. In a brief but bold essay I offer a myth excercise that, albeit speculative, grapples with possible sculptural intent. What might the sculptor Glykon suggest here with this unusual colossus of the myth hero? The following is one of many possible myth interpretations.

Herakles' iconography is present but is not so pointed as in prior sculptural formulae where his primary attributes like lion skin and club - visual clues to myth identity - are held or used by his hands, or where they are worn as clothing or other garb, or even where the narrative context is known by association with other myth personae. (5) In this case, Herakles' club and lion skin - emptied of the hero - are almost discarded because the physical rigors of the ordeal - indeed all ordeals - are almost over. Whether there were either ten or twelve labors, depending on sources, and whether or not this is his ultimate or penultimate labor, the net result is the same: he is a mature and even possibly weary hero. Perhaps he is even prepared to put down his weapons and signature club and lion skin forever, ready to retire from his profession of hero after this ordeal. Yet, after having survived all his other labors, this obstacle of obtaining the Apples of the Hesperides may be just about his ultimate hurdle in more ways than one. As mentioned, this is now not a physical labor but a mental one. Having skirted death many times - and defeated Hera's likely intent of having him never return from the Underworld - now he faces a wholly different challenge even more daunting than his previous labors where he had to wrestle external monsters or horrific creatures. Now the monster is mostly within and the ordeal entirely new.

Here Herakles ponders a choice between two kinds of immortality, that of the body or that of the soul. Immortality, as elaborated from Plato via the Symposium, is at least of two kinds and via different routes: there is physical immortality through offspring (Symposium 207a-208e) - the normal human route - or divine immortality because of an incorruptible nature, like that of the gods. For few mortals, there might also be a rare possible deification as with Asklepios, deified son of Apollo. But for humans there is also metaphysical immortality of one's name through fame and glory, the typical kleos of heroes, although this is mostly useless when dead, however useful for one's progeny (6) unless they are fine achievements, "a fairer sort of children" (Symposium 209c-d). Suddenly Herakles is faced with another possibility, probably intended by Hera as his undoing. She has sent him to far Hesperia where the daughters of Atlas tend the sacred tree - her wedding gift from Gaia - guarded by the dragon. She requested him - via Eurystheus - to bring back some fruit ostensbly for her own pleasure.(7) Herakles has almost too easily been received by the Hesperides and the dragon was no challenge along with the maidens' hospitality.(8) He knows that eating the Apples of the Hesperides will confer physical immortality but will also bar him from Olympus because he will then lose kleos, the glory of immortality in an honored name. (9) He also suspects or at least hopes at this mature point of his life that his name will likely also be immortalized for his great deeds and ordeals already gloriously done. There is a powerful ancient curse, however, if one eats the fruit without Hera's permission. Because he has to ironically undertake the labors in the first place due to his having slaughtered his wife and children in the madness Hera sent, thus needing to purge blood guilt, thereby voiding that kind of physical immortality through the normal familial offspring Hera could have blessed, all this personal history passes through the scarred battlefield of his mind.

Other than "Glory of Hera" (Hera + kleos), one might wonder about other possible original or obscure lesser meanings of the name of Herakles beyond the traditional etymology of Hera's "glory " in her triumph over him at birth. This usual etymology of his name is full of ironic contradiction because Hera's triumph is not very glorious in its rejection - since Zeus continues lifelong to protect his son who is not her son - and is ultimately not permanent. An added idea is that the one divine breast of Hera nourishing the infant hero by the strategem of Zeus and Aphrodite perhaps confers partial immortality, but then he is cut off or "barred and closed" (Old Attic Greek kles or from the verb kleio "to shut up, close or block") to Hera by her surprised anger yanking him from her breast before he can finish his breastfeeding and assume immortality. He spends the rest of his mortal life thus closed off and blocked by Hera's hatred, but is reconciled to her at his apotheosis in Olympus where iconography shows him restored to the divine milk of Hera's other breast, as in the famous Etruscan mirrors with this vignette (10), thereby becoming fully the "glory of Hera" in the positive sense, assuming his divinity after death. Another possible obscure etymological gloss is the Greek idea of a legal summons or prosecuting klesis by which Hera judges him for the murderous madness she sent and thereby can legally assign his ordeals since he violated her domain of marriage in slaughtering his family. These are of course, only conjectural ironic paronomasic wordplays on his name.

Fig. 2 Apotheosis of Herakles (Ercole-Hercle), Herakles at Hera's breast in Olympus, Etruscan Mirror, Museo Archeologico, Firenze


Fig. 3 Glykon's Herakles (rear view)

From the front of the Glykon sculpture, it is clear that Herakles holds something - the apples of immortality - behind him. Curiously, if his half-hidden arm is instead hypothetically extended in front of him, it would pass over his genitals as the source place of physical immortality. It might also appear from the front with the half-hidden arm that this contact with his loins and resulting physical immortality has been severed because he "cut off" his wife Megara and their children so long ago. From the rear, however, the hand is held slightly higher over the general loin area of the lower torso. Is this illusional placement from the frontal view a suggestion by the sculptor that Herakles is struggling over his options of physical immortality, vacillating between eating the fruit and risking the curse (and losing the kleos "immortality" of his name) or not? His brow is mightily furrowed as if this concentration of thought is almost too much for him.

Here is the sort of scenario he must think through, perhaps a mentally gymnastic agility he finds far more difficult than any prior wrestling. On the one hand, he knows Hera doesn't need to eat the Apples of the Hesperides because she is already immortal. On the other hand, Herakles craves immortality with all the intensity of such a great hero. Although it would be his only likely opportunity as an aging hero, Herakles in myth does not taste the fruit but obediently brings it back uneaten to the goddess (via her agent Eurystheus) and denies himself this kind of physical immortality - immensely difficult for such a hero so conscious of his physicality even in the face of lost youth and the prospect of increased weakening with age and ultimate physical death. This is because he is Herakles, the greatest of mortal Greek heroes. Myth-literate viewers of this sculpture know after the fact that Herakles will make the right decision and his heroic immortality of name will be rewarded with the ultimate immortality of deification. But at this moment of troubled wrestling with an intellectual, volitional and moral quandary memorialized (and also immortalized!) by this sculpture, Herakles does not yet know that hidden truth, his ultimate immortality hidden like the apples from his and temporarily our immediate sight.

Notes

(1) Gisela M. A. Richter. The Sculpture and Sculptors of the Greeks. The Metropolitan Museum Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970, 4th ed., 226, 246. fig. 801.

(2) J. J. Pollitt. Art in the Hellenisic Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986 (1996 repr.) 50.

(3) John Boardman. Greek Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 1985 ed., 190.

(4) Anthony Bulloch, Erich Gruen, A. A. Long and Andrew Stewart. Images and Ideologies: Self-Definition in the Hellenistic World (Hellenistic Culture and Society) Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

(5) Andrew Stewart. Art, Desire and the Body in Ancient Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998 ed., 6. Stewart makes a case for not ignoring iconography as "obsolete" as it is still a valid part of an informed art historical approach.

(6) Antisthenes said, athanatos he psyche, "the soul is deathless."

(7) Eurystheus may be the human intermediary but Hera is always the divine instigator in his Labors that were superficially to absolve his blood guilt. The undercurrent, however, is always that Hera's hatred intends the undoing of her husband's son, not her own offspring. Ironically, if his name means Hera + kleos "glory of Hera", it ought to equally mean Hera + kles "cut off from Hera" as she pushed him off her breast and rejected him in life.

(8) H. J. Rose. A Handbook of Greek Mythology. London: Routledge. 1991 ed., 216 ff. In a range of myth variants Herakles either slays the dragon or somehow puts it to sleep.

(9) Showing he understands well the deep meaning, C. S. Lewis alludes to this myth and offers yet another retelling of a similar encounter with the Tree of Life, where in The Magician's Nephew, the young hero Digory must choose between obedience and selfishness in Aslan's Garden; whether to eat of the tree's fruit of immortality or bring it back uneaten to Aslan. Spurning the wicked example of Jadis, Queen of Charn, who has climbed over the high hedgy wall and thus eaten - she becomes immortal but will as predicted hate its taste forever afterward - Digory has come invited by a now absent Aslan through the gate. Yet the fruit is not for him but for protecting the new world. That C. S. Lewis' modern narrative also alludes to a generic Greek myth hero is underscored by Digory's Pegasus-like steed that only heroes ride.

(10) Larissa Bonfante. Etruscan Life and Afterlife. Wayne State University Press, 1986, plates VIII.13 & VIII.14, 240-3, mirrors respectively from the Museo Civico in Bologna (published in Corpus Speculorum Etruscorum Italia I.1.15) and Museo Archeologico Firenze, as well as related to a study in E. Gerhard, A. Klugman and C. Korte. Etuschische Spiegel 5.60 (Berlin, 1849?).

Classics Department, Stanford University

(phunt@stanford.edu)
(http://www.patrickhunt.net)

Patrick Hunt © 2005

Posted by Patrick Hunt at 10:58 AM | Permalink

This famous Pompeiian wall painting quoting the Aeneid is one of the highlights of the Museo Nazionale in Naples. From the House of P. Vedius Nummianus done in Third Style in the first half of the first century CE, it has been noted as a "singular case of literary illustration", (1) no doubt because for the most part it appears to closely follow Virgil's text. But it is not ekphrasis (verbal description of a work of art), rather it is the opposite, which proves the practice flowed in both directions. Another even earlier and more famous example of paintings derived from ancient literature - in this case Homer - are the Hellenistic Odyssey (Books X-XII) series in the Vatican,(2) about which practice at the end of the first century BCE Vitruvius writes that "ancient" artists painted "pictures of Odysseus wandering through countrysides".(3) As a painting style favored by Augustus in Rome where it originates, (4) what Third Style subject could be more evocative of equal Augustan patronage than the Aeneid? The primary questions briefly addressed here are how closely does this painting follow its literary source and how does it deviate? Also, why might this scene in Aeneid XII.383-440 of a wounded Aeneas about to be healed be chosen as a subject?

Here are some of the bridges - a few obvious; others subtle - between Virgilian text and painted image. Pictorial allusions include the close sequence of events briefly described below. First, in both media the wounded Aeneas (vulnus XII.389) leaning on his spear (stabat ...fremens ingentem nixus in hastam XII.398). Second, in both media he is attended by the hands of the old physician Iapyx, here balding and with graying beard (Iapyx...manu medica XII.391-402). Third, in both media the hero is resolute in the presence of his weeping son Iulus and his soldiers (maerentis Iuli concursu, lacrimis immobilis XII.399-400). Fourth, in both media Venus herself arrives, bringing with her the healing Cretan herb dittany (Venus...dictamnum...carpit ab Ida...detulit XII.411-417), although in the slightly deteriorated painting it is difficult to see what she holds in her left hand. But it can only be Venus here, not the least of which iconographic clues are her bare-breastedness and her pearl diadem symbolic of her marine birth. (5) On the subtler side, the surgeon Iapyx kneels with his outer garments wrapped around his thighs and not impeding his exploratory surgery, like a good doctor "in Paeonian fashion" following bedside medical precedent (Paeonium in morem XII.401).

Elaborating on the subtler side, Paeon is an old god of medicine, and Iapyx was a son of Iasus and a favorite of Apollo who was his patron and source for his gift of medicine.(6) Iapyx chose "healing arts" rather than Apollo's arrows, ironically possibly alluded here by antithesis since Aeneas was wounded by a random arrow (sagitta XII.319) or ambiguously a spear (see below), almost like Achilles except not shot by anyone known and not a mortal wound, although if Venus does not come soon to her son's aid, the Latins and Turnus may triumph against Aeneas and the Trojans. Virgil, in typical fashion, interconnects his thematic use of arrow wounding from a divine Apollo (smitten by Love's arrows for a mortal Iapyx) to Iapyx himself (out of filial love) rejecting far-shooting archer god Apollo's arrows for healing human (in this case Aeneas) arrow wounds where divine maternal love of Venus for Aeneas provides the ultimate healing. The medicinal blood-congealing herb dictamnum is also named after Mt. Dicte (also Diktys among other variants), the alternate Cretan locus along with Mt. Ida of Jupiter's birth. Cretan dittany (Origanum dictamnus), accurately described by Virgil as having purple flowers, was extolled by doctors from Hippocrates to Dioscorides and beyond for healing wounds and was also called artemidion in Greece in respect to the goddess whose arrows caused the very wounds her plant would also heal if she so chose.(7) Here dittany is also symbolic of Jupiter's hand in the destiny of Aeneas both in overall as well as small incremental details as Virgil alludes here. More on Paeon follows shortly.

Here are some of the differences - again a few obvious and others subtler - between Virgilian text and almost contemporary Pompeiian image. One artistic innovation includes the exchange of a surgeon's scalpel (scalpellum) - a known surgical tool that regularly shows up in archaeological examples of Roman surgeon's kits (8) - that we see instead of the forceps mentioned in the text (forcipe XII.404). Modern medical mention of the painting quotes Virgil's text in its use of forceps where the painting clearly shows a scalpellum.(9) Yet Rolfe Humphries translates this section of the work of Iapyx to "cut around it [the iron arrow shaft head embedded in the wound]", to "probe" for the iron (ferrum) spearpoint or arrowhead (spicula XII.403).(10) This modern "translation" may be expanded because the text is ambiguous about the weapon used against Aeneas, but clearly a scalpel (rather than a swordpoint as Humphries adds) would better assist in probing for the embedded iron projectile. Humphries seems to be either stretching the poetic text here - no sword is mentioned - or is possibly even influenced by the Pompeiian painting here ( a modern ekphrasis!).

A few additional textual points are perhaps interesting but not necessarily important for elucidating the painting. Divine conflict and resolution is one of Virgil's underlying plot impellers.(11) The random weapon projectile injuring Aeneas may symbolize Juno's simultaneously hidden but revealed enmity, shielded by the narrator for the sake of indemnifying silence and similar to the oak-clasped weapon later withheld from Aeneas until the very end, but here balanced by Jupiter's equally-invisible presence in the symbolic dittany. On the o0ther hand, in keeping with the tradition of dittany (or artemidion), has Aeneas somehow offended Diana (Artemis) whose arrow it might have been that wounded him or is it "merely" a Jupiter allusion? Also, although Virgil uses a variant of it earlier in Aeneid VII.769, Paeonium is an obscure word, possibly here also a trope for Apollo Medicus,(12) but the name Paeon is much older and originally Greek. In the Odyssey (IV.232), Homer calls doctors Paionoi, as the sons of Paion. Paeon was thus an older Olympian god of medicine than even the initially mortal but later divine Asklepios-Aesculapius himself. (13) That Virgil makes Iapyx aged is a subtle allusion to this Homeric tradition. Appropriate here, Edelstein differentiates that when physicians were under divine tutelage, they were sons of Paeon; when healing crafts were merely under "human exertion", they were sons of Asklepios (Aesculapius). (14) This subtlety is borne out by Venus' appearance with dittany and Iapyx's declaration that it was a divine healing (XII.425 & ff).

In conclusion, this well-known Roman painting is directly inspired by the Aeneid and is a fairly faithful quotation thereof, demonstrating the popularity of Virgil not long after his own lifetime, probably within half a century. Its overall fidelity to the poetic text also suggests how much Virgil's literary reputation had accrued within little more than a generation, "at the height of popularity". (15) Perhaps the most difficult question to answer is why this particular Aeneid vignette was chosen for a painting subject, because it is apparently the only surviving example in Roman art. Was it the choice of the artist or a Vedius family member (possibly a doctor with humility)? Does it somehow glorify human medicine as a semidivine art or more the divine hand behind all healing, which Iapyx certainly acknowledges in the Aeneid as a mouthpiece of Virgil himself.

Notes

(1) Eleanor Winsor Leach,Classical Studies, Indiana University (Bloomington). "Money, Social Class and Decorative Taste in Flavian Pompeii." Symposium Celebrating the 90th Anniversary of the St. Louis Chapter of the Archaeological Institute of America. St Louis: Washington University, April 24-25, 1997, 6.

(2) George M. A. Hanfmann. Roman Art. New York: Norton, 1975, 268.

(3) Vitruvius De Architectura VII : 5,2.

(4) Joan Liversidge. "Wall Painting and Stucco" in Martin Henig, ed. A Handbook of Roman Art. London: Phaidon, 1995 repr, 101.

(5) I. Aghion, C. Barbillou and F. Lissarrague. Gods and Heroes of Classical Antiquity. Flammarion Iconographic Guides. Paris: Flammarion, 1996, cf. "Aeneas", 19-21.

(6) Cyril Bailey. Religion in Virgil. Oxford: Clarendon press, 1935, 170.

(7) Hellmut Baumann. The Greek Plant World in Myth, Art and Literature. tr. W. T. & E. R. Stearn. Portland: Timber Press, 1993 (Die griechische Pflanzenwelt in Mythos, Kunst und Literatur, Munchen: Hirmer Verlag, 1993), 119-20. Baumann notes the Dioscorides passage is in the Greek Herbal 3.37.

(8) Ralph Jackson."Roman doctors and their instruments: recent research into ancient practice". Journal of Roman Archaeology 3 (1990) 5-27; also Ralph Jackson. "The Domus 'del Chirurgo' at Rimini". Journal of Roman Archaeology 16 (2003) 312-21, esp. Fig. 1.1-3 & Fig. 3. 4 scalpels, 316-17.

(9) "(Aeneid XII.383-440), Aeneas is wounded in the thigh by an arrow shaft hurled from the enemy camp. After the wounded Aeneas is helped back to camp, the surgeon Iapyx attempts to remove the arrow with forceps." cf. (http://www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/internet/library/historical/artifacts/antiqua/military.cfm)

(10) Rolfe Humphries. The Aeneid of Virgil, edited with notes by Brian Wilkie. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1987, 306.

(11) Viktor Poschl. The Art of Vergil. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962, esp. 16 & ff in the dramatic tension between Jupiter and Juno as opposing forces in the Aeneid.

(12) Lesley and Roy Adkins. Dictionary of Roman Religion. New York: Facts on File, 1996, 14. Iapis is also another variant of Iapyx.

(13) E. J. and Ludwig Edelstein. Asclepius: Collection and Interpretation of the Testimonies. Volume II: Interpetations. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998 edition, 56

(14) Edelstein (idem), 57.

(15) Amedeo Maiuri. Roman Painting. New York: Skira, 1953, 109. Maiuri notes Aeneid's populraity even gives rise to art burlesques by comedian-painters, e.g., Aeneas' flight with Anchises and Ascanius in comic bear travesties.

Classics Department, Stanford University

(phunt@stanford.edu)
(http://www.patrickhunt.net)

Patrick Hunt © 2005

Posted by Patrick Hunt at 4:32 PM | Permalink

It was brought to my attention today that there are a number of films which play with the idea of an ambulatory logography device of sorts. The first, Omar Naim's Final Cut (2004) starring Robin Williams and Mira Sorvino, is taglined, "Every moment of your life recorded. Would you live it differently?" In the near future, implanted microchips record every second of an individual's life, and are then removed upon death so that professional cutters can edit that life into a highlight reel--a "rememory"--for the families of the deceased. Cutters cannot have implants for liability reasons as their memories consist not only of their past experiences but also the past experiences of those whom the cutter has edited. The second film: Albert Brooks's Defending Your Life (1991) starring Albert Brooks and Meryl Streep, taglined, "The first true story of what happens after you die." Again, all of your life has been recorded, and after death, while in Judgement City, your defense attorney and a prosecutor review episodes as they respectively argue that you either made the most of your life by overcoming fear or did not. Those who do not make it through the life and review successfully must try again until they get it right.

I still cannot think, however, of any films which play with the idea from the previous post of a simultaneous performance, review, and critique of daily life within the limits of a totalizing account, of looking for your glaring inconsistencies and subtle coherence daily, although Final Cut apparently also asks the question of how your daily performance might change were you to be informed that it was being continuously recorded for review; and Defending Your Life also makes much of both interpretive problems (arguments coming from the prosecution and the defense regarding the same episodes) and the process of learning from this trial and giving it a better go the next time around. Any other films we might include here? One day, I might have time to see these movies. And perhaps a cutter can enjoy them too.

Posted by James Collins at 9:34 PM | Permalink

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
c. 1558. Oil on canvas, wood-mounted (73.5 x 112 cm)
Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels

Ekphrasis or description of a work of art by a verbal text is an ancient literary practice. In antiquity, Philostratus’ Imagines or Pliny’s Historia Naturalis - where he describes the paintings of Zeuxis (1) - are usually the first examples that come to mind of ekphrasis. Although millennia later, W. H. Auden has also done just that modern version of an ekphrasis in his poem “Musée des Beaux Art” (1938) describing Bruegel’s painting of the fall of Icarus. But here it is rather the opposite that is the subject of this brief commentary: when an artist like Bruegel makes a visual description of a literary text as in Ovid’s narrative, apparently also a common practice since antiquity if we remember Pompeiian wall paintings of Homer’s Odyssey or Vergil’s Aeneid. If there is a term for this other process of visualizing text (reverse ekphrasis?) other than the Latin descriptio, it is elusive to date. So this is not really ekphrasis but perhaps visual imaging (Greek eidetikos?) of a text, to borrow an idea from Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (2). Some examples of the fall of Icarus have survived in ancient Roman art; perhaps the most famous or noteworthy is the wall painting in the House of the Priest Amandus in Pompeii (3).

Pieter Bruegel’s painting, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus dating from around 1558, has been much discussed in relation to its primary source in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8.183-235). While many of the critical comments center around the differences Bruegel innovatively highlighted in contrast to his Ovidian quotation, with Faber’s recent careful analysis coming immediately to mind, (4) it is almost universally agreed that the painter’s allusions were deliberate, especially in the triple appearances of the fisherman angling (harundine pisces), shepherd (pastor) and plowman (arator) as a motif in Met. 8.217-18:

hoc aliquis tremula dum captat harundine pisces,
aut pastor baculo stivave innixus arator

“Now someone angling with his tremulous rod
or a shepherd leaning over his crook or a plowman on his handle…”

where each is holding or leaning exactly on or over in Bruegel’s painting what Ovid takes care to mention: flexible fishing reed, crook and plow handles respectively. The liberties Bruegel took with the text are not as radical as might first appear. Where in Ovid all look up at the flying Icarus, only the plowman is looking up but with the plummeting Icarus disappearing behind him. This is nonetheless a quotation with a different intent. Taplin has noted that one of the myriad ways in which the Metamorphoses can be seen is as a “store of philosophical and ethical profundity” (5) and it is just this ethical element which must have appealed to Bruegel whose illustration of moral proverbs is justifiably famous.

Storchow points out that the parallel painting of this scene in a private collection has Daedalus still flying overhead (6) – what the shepherd notes – which makes Bruegel’s change less dramatic. Gibson also notes that the absence of Daedalus and the direct sun in the Brussels version of the painting are more likely due to subsequent repainted (pentimenti) than Bruegel’s omission. (7) Many have suggested the sun is too low on the horizon to melt waxy wings, but if the painting has been trimmed or overpainted, this would be less problematic. The old Flemish proverb most usually identified with Bruegel’s scene is “no plough stands still just because a man dies”. (8) Riemer has judiciously connected the immediately following Ovidian account of Perdix (8.236-59) to the partridge in the low tree branch just above the angler and just below the disappearing bare legs of Icarus, with the bird being the sole observer of the boy’s fall because it – transformed by a sympathetic Minerva into the partridge - is the object of Daedalus’ attempted homicide after his nephew Perdix invented saw and compass only to be jealously cast over a cliff by his uncle. Both boys, Perdix and Icarus, are flung down, one by another’s hate and the other by his own pride, but only one – Perdix - is really a victim and only one survives. Bruegel seems to assent to Ovid’s moralizing by the obvious proximity between branched bird and beached boy below a cliff similar to the crime scene of Daedalus and Perdix.

Ovid suggests many allegorical allusions and intertextualizations here (9) between the two related stories of Daedalus, Icarus and Perdix. The earthy humans - plowman, shepherd, angler - all hold something useful and practical in their hands as extensions of these same hands and instruments of livelihood, whereas Daedaus “changes the laws of nature” (naturamque novat 8.189) even in unnaturally “placing feathers in order” (ponit in ordine pennas 8.189) and Icarus ends with flailing bare arms (here appropriately invisible because they are useless compared to those of the workers) (nudos qualit ille lacertos 8.227) after pride brings him down. Bruegel may intend this as well with his humble toil-preoccupied workers in contrast to the upside-down youth whose feathers are now anything but ordered as they flutter down around him in deathly chaos. Even Bruegel’s ship seems headed for the ruin-reminding island rocks with full sails, possibly evoking the Aegean marine journeys Ovid notes passing by the islands of Samos, Delos, Paros and the like. There is no mention in Ovid about the enigmatic knife and sack lying just below the horse on the yet-unplowed tussock, nor is there anything about the equally-enigmatic pale head sticking out of the bushes around a field corner above the horse. Whatever clues may be possible for explicating these likely allegorical images, they are more likely from unknown contemporary proverbs than any Ovidian literary detail.

Some critics and historians maintain Bruegel is not making a “straightforward exposition” as much as a visual “commentary” on Ovid. (10) While it is nowhere denied that Bruegel’s primary referent is Ovid, the Flemish retelling is nonetheless filled with Bruegel’s personal moralizing about the insignificance of human life – also seen in his other later landscapes such as Hunters in the Snow (1565) - as well as the penalty of hubris. Why Bruegel’s plowman is so magnified and Icarus diminutized in contrast to Ovid is more a curious idiosyncrasy than a narrative dilemma, however, it is mostly unanswerable other than to point out, as others have also mentioned, Bruegel’s Christian tendency to elevate the community of common men over the almost-Luciferian individual who tries to become independent of God and nature. It is easy to see Bruegel’s extraction of Ovid’s stress on how Daedalus “changes the laws of nature” (naturamque novat 8.189). More to come shortly about the “monumental” size of the plowman.

Other details where Bruegel may have been inspired by Ovid can be suggested, all of them seemingly more than coincidental, although most likely requiring an erudition Bruegel may not have possessed.

First, Ovid begins his text with an excursus on earth, sea and sky (8.185-6), with Minos having blocked the former two ways of escape from Crete for Daedalus. Bruegel’s painting creates such a composite landscape with earth in the left foreground, and with sea and sky joining at the horizon at upper right center and land meeting sea at the bottom right. The mutual emphasis of both Ovid and Bruegel on the realms of nature and these three landscape elements is strengthened by the triple light: seen in the sky but also reflected on both the sea and land under the plowman’s shadow.

Second, Bruegel has likely also noted Daedalus wreaked all this havoc in his family by “unknown arts” (ignotas…artes 8.188), which he may have taken as a self-reflexive admonition to his own artistry. In Ovid, Minerva - as goddess of techne – herself feathered Perdix (8.253) like a foster mother whereas father Daedalus feathered Icarus (8.187ff) who is now defeathered (8.227-8). This Daedalian act of unnatural or imitative "feathering" may also engage Bruegel in an interesting reflection as an artist himself (who imitates and even changes nature for an audience) pondering the meaning of opifex (8.201) as "artisan" (or skilled "craftsman") in contrast to the other earthy laborers here.

Third, Ovid’s sequential order of visible humans is followed yet in reverse by Bruegel: Ovid moves from Icarus flying to the fisherman to the shepherd to the plowman to Icarus fallen. Yet Bruegel cleverly enlarges and then shrinks in opposite order from the central foreground rightward and downward in his “monumental” plowman to small shepherd, tinier angler and finally to an almost invisible Icarus on the right.

Finally, perhaps one of the most interesting crux elements in Bruegel’s painting likely derived from Ovid is just this emphasis on Ovid’s Latin verb novare (in novat 8.189). In the context of the Metamorphoses, its surface meaning is “to alter or change” where, as mentioned, Daedalus “changed nature” (naturamque novat 8.189)- the best reading for Metamorphoses according to Anderson (11) - by making humans fly even if only temporarily. But a fascinating connotation Bruegel may intend as a gloss is the meaning of ager novatus, “to break up fallow ground in a field prepared by plowing” which is exactly the main visual image, especially where we cannot miss the dramatic light that falls on the freshly turned furrows under the plowman’s feet.

Is this why Bruegel has visually magnified the role of the plowman? Has he attached greater value to a “renewal” of nature (yet another connotation of novat) in plowing (ager novatus) than to Daedalus’ aggressive “altering” of nature which results in his son’s punitive death, also caused or at least compounded by his treatment of Perdix?

Although it is a given that he was a close reader of biblical literature and elsewhere often employed a Netherlandish proverb as crux to a painting, it is only fair to suspect Bruegel’s compass of the classical literature might not stretch to such a close reading of Ovid. Bruegel’s closest Antwerp friends, however, included Abraham Ortelius, the noted Humanist geographer and erudite appreciator of classical landscapes and antiquities. Subsequent author of Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570), the Western world’s first serious and comprehensive atlas since the Roman Ptolemy. Ortelius was himself a very learned man, a “collector of antiquities” with a “passion for the Classical world” – familiar in “years-long intimacy with Herodotus and Strabo” (12) and almost certainly Ovid - thus possibly even one of several intended patrons or commissioners of this painting. Regardless of patronage, it would be likely that just such discursive conversations on Icarus would have transpired between friends like the Humanist Ortelius and the artist Bruegel.

In conclusion, whether or not Bruegel can be directly credited for much of the possible erudition in this painting, his Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is one of the most involved reverse ekphrases - here suggested as an eidetikos “imaging” quotation with multiple allusions - in art so inspired by a famous classical text of which it amply serves as a visual commentary.

Classics Department, Stanford University
Patrick Hunt © 2005
(phunt@stanford.edu)
(http://www.patrickhunt.net)

Notes

(1) Pliny, Historia Naturalis XXXV.36,35; Philostratus (mostly 3rd. c.), Imagines (also known as Eikones) e.g., 1.15 (among many others) describes Dionysian imagery; Pausanias (2nd c.), Description of Greece also describes many ekphrasis contexts. Additionally, Callistratus (3-4th c) wrote Ekphraseis (descriptions) of 14 statues (also known as Statuarum Descriptiones).

(2) Coleridge employs the term eidetic for the imagination's internal envisioning of objects (Biographia Literaria quoted in F. C. Prescott, The Poetic Mind, Macmillan, 1926, 153). Other than Coleridge, one of the few uses of eidetikos is late (6th c. CE ) in Olympiodorus, Platonis Alcibiadem commentarii, P. 18.c, where its mention and meaning are obscure. Perhaps another word with a more substantive application is delosis or delotikos in "pointing out", "explanation" as in Plato Minos 314a or delotos as " visible" and "able to be shown" in Aristotle's de Xenophane 979a13, although admittedly most of these connotations apply more to philosophy than visualizing. On the other hand perhaps Aristotle's phantasia as "imagination" is most applicable as the faculty of forming mental images (Rhetoric I.XI.6).

(3) Mary Beard and John Henderson. Classical Art: From Greece to Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, 45, pl. 36d. cf. Triclinium of the House of the Priest Amandus, Pompeii. Also see Lucilla Burn. The British Museum Book of Greek and Roman Art. London: British Museum Press, 1999 repr., 198, figure 167a (BM Roman Paintings 28).

(4) Riemer Faber, “The Little Bird in the Big Picture: Bruegel’s Reading of the Daedalus and Icarus Myth” Labyrinth 86 (September, 2005). Classics Dept., University of Waterloo. http://www.classics.uwaterloo.ca/labyrinth/issue86/Thelittlebirdinthebigpicture.htm. Riemer Faber. “Daedalus, Icarus, and the Fall of Perdix: Continuity and Allusion in Metamorphoses
8.183-259,” Hermes 126 (1998) 80-89. Riemer Faber, “‘A Splash Quite Unnoticed’?: W. H. Auden, Brueghel, and Ovid on the Fall of Icarus,” International Society for the Classical Tradition Conference, Tübingen, July, 1998. Cf “perdix” Met. 8.236-244.

(5) Oliver Taplin, ed. Literature in the Roman World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, 142.

(6) Wolfgang Stechow. Pieter Bruegel the Elder. New York: Abrams, 1990, esp. 50-1.

(7) Walter Gibson. Bruegel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, esp. 38-40, pl.16-7.

(8) H. Arthur Klein and Mina C. Klein. Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Artist of Abundance. New York: Macmillan Co., 1968.

(9) Stephen Hinds. Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, esp. 106-11. Hinds makes a huge point about Ovidian allusions and “reflexive annotations” forward and backward through his poetry

(10) Ethan M. Kavaler. Pieter Bruegel: Parables of Order and Enterprise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 57.

(11) W. S. Anderson. Ovid's Metamorphoses, Books 6-10. University of Oklahoma Press, 1972, 350.

(12) Paul Binding. Imagined Corners: Exploring the World’s First Atlas. London: Review/Headline Books, 2003, esp. 29-30.

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