Civitas Veri

In Paris, in 1609, the printers Ambroise and Jérôme Drouart published a volume entitled Civitas Veri sive Morum (‘The City of Truth; or, Ethics’) on behalf of the recently-deceased Alphonse (or Alfonso) Del Bene (or Delbene: ca. 1538-1608), who had been bishop of Albi. The book comprised an allegorical, philosophical poem in Latin written by Alphonse’s uncle Barthélémy (or Bartolomeo) Del Bene (1515-1595), with a commentary and notes by the humanist scholar Théodore Marcile (1548-1617). Marcile’s introduction bears the date 1585, and it is likely that Del Bene’s verse was written earlier still, at some time in the 1560s, or early 1570s.

The text is illustrated by a few dozen curious engravings: it is not known whether versions of these images adorned Del Bene’s or Marcile’s manuscripts, or whether they were added later by the Drouarts. The decorated title-page was designed by a Dutch-born engraver named Thomas de Leu, so it is quite possible the remainder of the engravings were his work too; although Mario Praz, in mentioning Civitas Veri in his ‘Studies in Seventeenth-Century Literature,’ likens them to the emblems in Jan David’s Veridicus Christianus, which were apparently executed by Théodore Galle.

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Del Bene’s poem is an allegorical recasting of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. It describes a month-long spiritual journey undertaken by his patroness, Marguerite, Duchess of Savoy, who travels through the City of Truth, from its five portals (one for each of the senses: see, for example, the portals of smell and taste, in the details above) through its various palaces, gardens, etc., to the five temples at its heart, culminating in visits to the Temple of Intelligence (where she meets and converses with Aristotle himself) and the Temple of Wisdom.

Del Bene’s City of Truth is presented as both a microcosm, and as an idealised locale, after the fashion of Thomas More’s Utopia and Kaspar Stiblin’s De Eudæmonensium Republica; and anticipating aspects of later works such as Johann Valentin Andreae’s Christianopolis,, Tommaso Campanella’s Civitas Sole, (‘City of the Sun’) and Bacon’s New Atlantis. The image above shows a detail of an elevated view of the City of Truth in its totality, which I spliced together from a pair of engravings on facing pages of the book.

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I learned of the existence of Del Bene’s opus by way of an eye-catching engraving reproduced in John Manning’s book The Emblem: this was the depiction of ‘The Palace of Intemperance’—part of which is shown in the detail immediately above, wherein ‘Intemperance sits in a myrtle grove […] where she is regaled by Cupid and Bacchus. She spurns Right Reason under her naked foot. Before her are prepared three tables: one consecrated to Gluttony, the next to cures for her inevitable hangover, the last is furnished with incitements to Lust… An open grave lies at the foot of the plate.’ This was opposed to the altogether more seemly ‘Palace of Temperance’ as detailed in the first of two the images above.

The poem’s protagonist, Marguerite de France (or Marguerite de Valois), Duchesse de Berry, afterwards Duchesse de Savoie, 1523-74, was the youngest daughter of king François I., and sister to King Henri II. She was intellectually accomplished; conversant in Latin, Greek and Italian; and a defender at court of the Pleiade poets, in particular of Pierre de Ronsard. Praised as a new Minerva, she was seen as a successor to her aunt & namesake, Marguerite de Navarre (or Marguerite d’Angoulême), renowned author of the Heptameron.

Del Bene had entered Marguerite’s service as her secretary in 1554. Five years later, when, at the unusually late age of 36, she was married to Emmanuel-Philibert, Duc de Savoie, he moved with her to the ducal court at Turin. After Marguerite’s death, De Bene returned to the court of Henri III. of France, and was thereafter ‘charged several times with confidential missions for Emmanuel-Philibert and Catherine de Médicis’ (Henri’s mother). Besides his Civitas Veri, he wrote other Latin and Italian poetry, well-esteemed in his day.

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The images above are details of scans from a reprint edition of Civitas Veri published in 2003 by Librissimo / Phénix Éditions, apparently exclusively distributed by alapage.com.

Beresford Egan

About a month ago I ordered a couple more books from the excellent Tartarus Press, who I’ve mentioned in this Giornale a few times before (most recently here). One was their two volume edition of the short stories of Denton Welch, which I’m still working my way through, and the other was Adrian Woodhouse’s book about the graphic artist Beresford Egan (1905-84).

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Egan was the Art-Deco Beardsley. He first attained some notoriety with his illustrations for a satirical account of the scandal following the publication of Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness. He followed this work (‘The Sink of Solitude’) with another on the same theme, ‘Policeman of the Lord,’ and found himself in demand as an illustrator for works variously decadent, erotic, or otherwise disreputable.

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Besides more conventional commercial and journalistic work, Egan produced illustrations for the Fleurs du Mal of Beaudelaire, for a volume about de Sade, and for Pierre Louÿs’s Aphrodite and King Pausole. He also designed the original jacket illustration for Aleister Crowley’s Moonchild. In 1932 he wrote and illustrated a ‘determinedly decadent and almost wholly autobiographical novel,’ entitled Pollen.

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A second, less successful novel followed, and then a third, a prequel to Pollen, tracing the fortunes of ‘Anna Beryl’ (Egan’s first wife, Catherine ‘Caterina’ Bower Alcock) before her fateful meeting with ‘Lance Daurimer’ (Egan). The present images are details of the illustrations to this book: When the Sinners Triumph. These are just about my favourite of Egan’s works, which are copyright © the estate of Beresford Egan, and have been reproduced without permission, only for as long as no-one objects to their presence on this site. Clcik on the images to see the designs in full.

Faces of the Grotesque

The adjective grotesque (as Michelangelo kindly explained in a comment further to the previous entry here), was originally applied to the style of the decorative frescoes found in the buried ruins of Nero’s Domus Aurea at Rome. These long-buried chambers were rediscovered in the last two decades of the 15th Century. The strange ornamental designs that were found there ‘featured elaborate fantasies with symmetrical anatomical impossibilities, small beasts, stylised human heads, and delicately-traced, indeterminate foliage all merged into one unified decorative whole.’ Pliny, in his Natural History, recorded the principal artist’s name: Fabullus; recounting how the painter went ‘for only a few hours each day to the “Golden House” to work while the light was right…’

By the turn of the sixteenth century, some artists had begun to incorporate elements of grotesque decoration into their own, contemporary works. The earliest known examples are Perugino’s ceiling of the Cambio in Perugia (about 1500) and Pinturicchio’s cathedral library ceilings at Siena (1502). Other artists were likewsie inspired, among them Filippino Lippi, and Signorelli. Perhaps more importantly, the Chief Architect and Prefect of Antiquities at the Vatican, Raffaello Sanzio, studied and copied these designs, and directed that they be incorporated into the decorative schemes of the Vatican Loggia, the Loggetta of Cardinal Bibiena, and of the Loggia of Psyche at the Villa Farnesina. Much of the work on these projects was executed by Raphael’s assistants Giulio Romano, and Giovanni da Udine. Romano, as noted below, was later a mentor of Giulio Clovio’s… The image above shows a pair of stylised heads from the decorative borders of a pair of pages in Clovio’s Farnese Hours.

In the 1530s, a number of Italian artists were persuaded to join the French court at Fontainebleau, bringing with them a taste for grotesque ornamentation. In the same decade, the first album of prints of grotesque designs was printed. This new style of decoration spread to Germany, and flourished in the major centres of ornamental engraving at Augsburg and Nuremberg. By mid-century, the grotesque had established itself at Flanders, where, ‘in 1555, an artist called Cornelis Floris designed 18 sheets with human faces made up from vegetal elements, some highly stylized, others still recognizable as leaves and fruits,’ which were engraved by Frans Huys in Antwerp. These designs intermixed a dash of Gothic drôlerie into the Classical grotesque. The pair of images above show two of Floris’s designs.

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It seems plausible that such stylised faces were one of the inspirations behind Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s famous paintings of ‘composed heads’ the first of which date from the late 1560s. The grotesque came to be applied to all manner of decorative arts: ceramics, tapestry, embroidery, furniture-making, jewellery, and so on. Its later, more exaggerated variant found its way back into manuscript-decoration too, notably in the illuminated alphabet in Joris Hoefnagel’s Mira Calligraphiæ Monumenta, exemplified by the pair of images above. More outlandish still were the designs of Christoph Jamnitzer’s Neuw Grottessken Buch of 1610, in which the standard grotesque ‘mask’ is pushed almost beyond recognition, as in the pair of designs shown below.

The vogue for the grotesque extended well into the later 17th century, and, to a lesser extent, into the 18th. The final set of images, below, are from a reprint of an architectural treatise published in Prague, in 1677, by a master-builder named Abraham Leüthner. At least one of these designs is a direct copy of one of Cornelis Floris’s, then over a century old… I scanned both the Leüthner and Floris images from a book entitled Barocke Architektur in Böhmen, published in 1998 by Akademische Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt, as part of their Instrumentum Artium series, a previous volume from which, their reprint of Jamnitzer’s Neuw Grottessken Buch, I used for the images immediately above.

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I scanned the Hoefnagel images from the facsimile edition of the Mira Calligraphiæ Monumenta previously mentioned here, while the details from Clovio’s Farnese Hours are from the 2001 facsimile edition mentioned in the entry below.

Clovio, and the Farnese Hours

Although the painter Giorgio Giulio Clovio (1498–1578) spent most of his life in Italy, he was born in Croatia: his given name has not been recorded, but was probably Juraj Julije Klović. Clovio first came to Italy at the age of 18, arriving at Venice, where he spent several years in the service of Cardinal Domenico Grimani and the Cardinal’s nephew Marino Grimani. During this period, he visited Rome for the first time, where he met (and studied with) the renowned Giulio Romano. In 1523, Clovio left Venice for Buda, to work at the court of Louis II, the king of Bohemia and Hungary-Croatia. After Louis’s death at the battle of Mohács in 1526, Clovio returned to Rome, where he entered the service of Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio, and where he resumed contact with Giulio Romano, and studied the work of Michelangelo.

During the 1527 sack of Rome, Clovio had the misfortune to be captured and imprisoned by the ‘the Constable Bourbon’s banditti’ and apparently vowed to devote his life to religion should he be allowed to escape. Later that year he moved to Mantua, where he entered the Benedictine Abbey of St. Ruffino. Not long afterwards, he was released from his vows, owing to the intervention of his former patron Marino Grimani, who had become a Cardinal in 1527: even so, Clovio apparently continued to follow a somewhat monastic lifestyle. He remained in Grimani’s service until about 1538, after which he was lured back once again to Rome, where he is supposed to have spent nine years completing his masterpiece, the paintings that decorate the so-called Farnese Hours.

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In this manuscript, commissioned by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, and completed in 1546, Clovio painted twenty-six lavishly-detailed full-page miniatures, and illuminated a few dozen more pages with elaborate border-decorations. The present images reproduce sections of the latter type of painting. The two images above, and the four that follow below, are details which juxtapose sections of both the left and right-hand borders from pairs of facing pages: click on these details to see them in the context of the relevant page-spreads as scanned from my copy of the 2001 facsimile edition of the Hours published by the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, in association with Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt (ADEVA) of Graz, Austria. The manuscripts’s calligraphic text was written by Francesco Monterchi, secretary to Pier Luigi Farnese, Alessandro’s father.

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In his will, Alessandro stipulated that the Hours be kept at the Palazzo Farnese in perpetuity, and that the manuscript should never be sold or given away by his heirs or successors. The first of these conditions had been broken by the turn of the eighteenth century, by which time the Hours had descended to Francesco Farnese, the seventh duke of Parma and Piacenza, who kept the manuscript in the cabinet of the ducal gallery at Parma. Francesco’s son Don Antonio died without issue, and the book then passed, by way of his niece, into the possession of the Bourbon kings of the two Sicilies, who kept it at their court in Naples. Alessandro’s second stipulation was only broken at the very end of the nineteenth century, when it was sold in Vienna by the half-brother of the deposed Bourbon king, Francis II. The Frankfurt-based firm of J. & S. Goldschmidt later aquired the volume, and sold it to John Pierpoint Morgan in 1903, for the sum of £22,500. Today, it is housed in the Morgan Library & Museum in New York.

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Clovio was greatly esteemed by his contemporaries. Vasari devoted a chapter in the second edition of his Vite to Clovio, praising him as a ‘piccolo e nuovo Michelangelo.’ Vasari described the Farnese Hours at length, claiming that it seemed to him a divine rather than a human production (che ella pare cosa divina e non umana). Other painters sought to meet Clovio: in 1553, Pieter Bruegel the Elder collaborated with him during his sojourn in Rome. And in 1570, Clovio petitioned his patron to let ‘a young man from the island of Candia [Crete]’ stay at the Farnese palace: this was Domenikos Theotokopoulos, El Greco. One of the earliest surviving works of El Greco’s is his portrait of Clovio, in which the older artist is portrayed holding the Farnese Hours…

Clovio’s postumous reputation has suffered, in part, owing to the fact that the best of his work has been kept enclosed between the covers of small books, away from public view. Beyond that, his style has been criticised as hyper-elaborate & over-ornamented, and it has even been suggested that his example ‘contributed largely to the decadence of the charming art of miniature-painting,’ I would have to admit that I find some of his miniatures, more especially the full-page scenes, a little too crowded for my taste, but elsewhere, conversely, some of his page-decorations are among the most beautiful I have seen.