Images of the Gods of the Ancients

While Vincenzo Cartari’s book Imagini delli Dei de gl’Antichi (‘Images of the Gods of the Ancients’) was neither the earliest nor the most erudite treatise on the Græco-Roman pantheon to be published in 16th Century Italy, in time it came to be the most popular and influential. The book focused on the iconography of the gods, explaining the guises in which they were portrayed, and detailing their several attributes and accoutrements. The book’s success was bolstered by the vivid woodcut illustrations accompanying the text, which first appeared in its third edition, published in Venice in 1571. The designs are said to be by one Bolognino Zaltieri. Details from some of these woodcuts follow below.

Very little is known about Cartari. He was probably born in Reggio Emilia in the early years of the 16th Century. According to Jean Seznec, he was probably a protégé of the dukes of Ferrara. He wrote in Italian rather than Latin. His name is seldom found in the works of his contemporaries. In his book, Cartari acknowledged the influence of Lilio Gregorio Giraldi’s ‘History of the Gods’ (De deis gentium varia et multiplex historia…), which had been published in 1548; Cartari indeed was later accused of plagiarizing the older scholar’s work. Cartari’s writings were borrowed in turn by later writers, notably by Gian Paolo Lomazzo.

Given that the present revels derive in part from the ancient Saturnalia, I have reproduced a pair of images (the first two, above) of the god Saturn. The first of them represents the sad effects supposedly brought by the planet Saturn, and by the renewal of the year. The three-headed personification of the god in the second image refers to time past, present and future, and again represents the malign nature of the planet, and its distant frigidity. The third of the present images shows Janus, another deity readily brought to mind at the turning of the year, while Jove is shown together with Pan in the fourth image.

The fifth image, the first of the pair immediately above, shows the goddess Angerona, a deity whom, I must admit, I had not heard of before. Apparently, though, she is a goddess of secrecy, and of the winter solstice. If I’m construing the text in the book correctly, she is shown alongside the figure of Harpocrates, ‘god of silence.’ Later editions (from 1615 onward) of the Imagini were augmented with annotations by the antiquarian and philologist Lorenzo Pignoria: the sixth image is taken from this appendix, and depicts Hercules in the guise of Mercury.

Pignoria also appended a Seconda Parte delle Imagini de gli Dei Indiani (‘Second Part of the Images of the Indian Gods’), a short and rather perfunctory selection of images of Mexican and Japanese divinities. The final pair of details above were scanned from this final section of the book, more specifically from a reprint of the 1647 edition of the Imagini issued by Editrice Luna of Milan, in 2004.

Mažulis

Rytis Mažulis is an ‘intellectual, neo-avant-garde’ Lithuanian composer, some of whose striking works have been released on a couple of CDs from the Belgian Megadisc label. The first release, Cum Essem Parvulus comprises four choral works, and the second, Twittering Machine, a further quartet of pieces, this time for ‘computerised piano.’

The pieces on Cum Essem Parvulus range from Canon Solus, an opus modelled on mediæval liturgical music & composed for the Hilliard Ensemble, to ajapajapam, an austere 35-minute composition for 12 voices, string quartet and electronics, which struck my ears as vaguely reminiscent of some of Giacinto Scelsi’s works, with a vocal texture not unlike that in Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna. My favourite piece on this disc is Sybilla in which ‘a brief stanza from Petronius’s Satyricon is set to a shimmying microtonal palindromic canon which gradually mutates, widening in intervallic range before retreating.’

Twittering Machine, on the other hand, necessarily evokes the player-piano works of Ligeti and Nancarrow. The titular composition is one of Mažulis’s earliest works in this vein, having been composed between 1984-86, and seems to have been ‘futurist’ in conception, intended to celebrate the urban and the industrial. In the piece Clavier of Pure Reason, we are invited to listen to a ‘computer-age super-pianist playing with 48 hands.’ The recentest work on this disc, Hanon Virtualis, is the most uncompromising: almost twenty minutes of incessantly percussive music.

Mažulis creates graphic prototypes for his scores, often on a single page, which exemplify the symmetrical (and even palindromic) nature of his compositions. The two images above are details of scans of a couple of these scores as reproduced in the Megadisc CD booklets. Megadisc plan to release one further CD of Mažulis’s music next year…

Typotius

Even though his name takes precedence on the first title page of the emblem-book Symbola divina & humana pontificum imperatorum regum…, first published in three volumes in Prague between 1601 and 1603, Jacobus (or Jakob) Typotius was just one of at least four men responsible for this work. Its designs had been collected by Ottavio Strada, antiquarian to the emperor Rudolf II, and were reproduced for the book by the print-maker Aegidius (or Gilles) Sadeler. Typotius, who was Rudolf’s court historiographer, wrote Latin commentaries upon the images, except in the third of the volumes, where this task was undertaken by one Anselm Boethius de Boodt, an alchemist, gemmologist and a physician to the emperor.

The Symbola is, more specifically, a book of imprese, an impresa being a badge-like mini-emblem combining a fairly small and simple image with a motto, oftenest in Latin. The English historian William Camden, writing in 1605, defined an impresa as ‘a device in picture with his Motte, or Word, born by noble or learned personages, to notifie some particular conceit of their owne.’ ‘There is required in an Impresa,’ continued Camden, ‘a correspondence of the picture, which is as the body, and the Motte, which as the soul giveth it life. That is, the body must be of fair representation, and the word […] wittie, short, and answerable thereunto neither too obscure nor too plaine.’ The Symbola begins with two sets of religious imprese, the first section concerned with the Santa Eucharista, the Holy Eucharist, and the second with the Santa Crucis: the Holy Cross. The latter of these sections begins with an elaborate and quite abstruse oval emblem, a detail of which is shown above, before continuing with a sequence of smaller, coinlike imprese. The first quartet of devices detailed below are also from this section of the book.

Next are sets of imprese representing various Popes, Emperors and Kings. The first pair of images below, for example, respectively emblematise the French kings Philip I and Louis VII, while the second pair are both concerned with Henry VIII of England. Oddly, these last are followed in the book by two imprese representing two of Henry’s queens: Anne Boleyn and Anne of Cleves; while neither Queen Mary or Queen Elizabeth are represented at all. James VI of Scotland, (soon to be James I of England), on the other hand, is included. Some rulers have several imprese applied to them: Philip II of Spain, for example; as likewise, unsurprisingly, Rudolf II himself does. The second volume of the Symbola is concerned with devices representing cardinals and notable princes, dukes, and so forth, while the third volume is almost entirely devoted to the Italian nobility: the doges of Venice, the Medici, the Gonzaga, etc. etc.

I could find little information about Typotius on-line. He was apparently born in the Flemish town of Diest. According to Eliška Fučikova, in her long essay ‘Prague Castle under Rudolf II,’ Typotius had studied in Italy, and had published several books on questions of government, law, and ethics, before arriving at Prague in 1598. Nicolette Mout, in her essay on ‘The Court of Rudolf II and Humanist Culture,’ mentions that Typotius had also written treatises advocating escalation of the on-going ‘Long War’ against the Turks. Typotius is known to have collaborated with the physician, politician and philosopher Jan Jesenius, and was an associate of Jiri Barthold of Breitenberg, known as Pontanus, who features as a minor side-character in the history of the Voynich manuscript. Typotius died in 1604: a particularly morbid engraving designed by Aegidius Sadeler commemorating that event was inserted into later editions of the Symbola at the end of its second volume: see the detail below.

Click on the images to see them enlarged and in full. They were scanned from a reprint edition of the Symbola published by ADEVA, Graz, in 1972. A few other images from the book can be found at this site.