Re: The 15th century understanding of "hieroglyph"

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hiero means sacred in Greek
glyph is short for glyphein which means to carve in Greek

A true hieroglyph is a sacred carving. Literally.

The Chinese have used ideographs for centuries, but if you think about it, every single word in any language is a hieroglyph, or was at some point before paper became available and people still carved words and pictures in wood or stone. A tree is a tree. In order to express it we need a particular word or picture for tree, to represent tree. A word can be a hieroglyph as much as an image.

So art or word in any form, whether depicted on card or carved in stone, is a hieroglyph, or a symbol of what was once a hieroglyph. It is much like us saying "c.c" at the bottom of a business letter, to indicate that you've sent a "carbon copy" of the letter to the person noted. We don't make copies with carbon paper, haven't done for years, but that term is still in use.

Humans in any culture, in fifteenth century Europe or in ANY time period, with or without nobility or education, understand hieroglyphs as words and images, because they once used to be carved, they once used to be sacred.

Sometimes the simplest answer is the one that makes sense.

Re: The 15th century understanding of "hieroglyph"

12
Cadla wrote
Humans in any culture, in fifteenth century Europe or in ANY time period, with or without nobility or education, understand hieroglyphs as words and images, because they once used to be carved, they once used to be sacred.

Sometimes the simplest answer is the one that makes sense.
The 15th century Florence-centered humanists had a more specific context of sacred carvings in mind, from their readings in Greco-Roman texts: that of one or more kinds of writing used in Egypt, in which pictures stood for whole words or phrases, writing that was explicitly non-phonetic and so non-readable by someone who only knew the local spoken language and the local phonetic alphabet.[/quote]

Huck wrote,
His "Winged Eye" ... whatever he attempted to explain with it, likely his finishing result was to teach perspective. At least some has realized it this way: The "Winged Eye" as a personal symbol expressed Alberti's successes in this specific development.
Well, I spent some time reading Alberti and the literature on "On Painting" before answering; the "Arrow in the Eye" pages were in fact an excellent summary, as it happened. I think that what Alberti is doing in "Rings" is as close to what he is doing in "On Painting" as architecture is to painting. In fact, he is always an architect, even when he is writing on painting. (He dedicated "On Painting" to one architect, two sculptors, and a dead painter he admired who died prematurely without artistic heirs.) One-point perspective is most useful when doing architectural drawings, as of course he would have done. Mantegna's use of Alberti is most evident in his magnificent buildings. For a painter, the book is only useful as an approximation (a point that the 17th and 18th century academicians missed); there are many other considerations. In "Rings" he gives multiple perspectives on a single image, like someone walking around a sculpture or around and inside a building. It is most like an architect showing his drawings to his patron, for a building not yet built. Painters usually show one perspective, not so meticulously as the geometry would indicate; rarely they have two, to marvelous effect. Cubism tried for multiple perspectives, but it was too cerebral to give the immediacy of effect required. (Perhaps the desire for multiple perspectives is what makes tarot cards later resemble cubism.) Visual puns sometimes work (as in Dali), and multiple symbolic references for a single image.

Huck wrote,
Naturally there were persons, who took influence on the "work of encryption", and likely Alberti belonged to them with "de pictura". This process one might call "creating hieroglyphs" ...
Diodorus's explanation of hieroglyphics is indeed like a cryptographer's explanation of deciphering. You make conjectures and try to piece them together. Alberti follows Diodorus up to a point but goes further. Cryptographic painting, which fascinates as long as we don't understand it, is boring as soon as we do. Wind cites E. M. Forster, who said that if a work of art parades a mystifying element, it is to that extent not a work of art,"not an immortal Muse but a Sphinx who dies as soon as her riddles are answered." Wind gives the example of Filarete's winged eyes and ears fluttering around an Allegory of Fame (Wind's reference is M. Lazzaroni and A. Munoz, Filarete pl. xiii, 5) ; Filarete associated them to the "winged words of Homer." Once we know what it is, it's a boring image. But Alberti's "winged eye" is not like that. "It shows that a great symbol is the reverse of a sphinx; it is more alive when its riddle is answered" (Wind, Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance, p. 235).

Besides Diodorus, there was Apuleius, who talked about two kinds of hieroglyphics, in the quote I gave. One kind translated into ordinary speech and was just a code, a way by which the priests protected traditional sayings so that they would be the priests' property, to be delivered to the masses in what the priests considered a proper context. The other kind had as its content things that were themselves enigmatic, so that translating the code only enhanced the wonder of its content. This was even more secret than the first kind. The priest read from it to to prepare Lucius for the initiation to follow.

Denis Drysdall, in an essay I finally managed to get today ("The Hieroglyphs at Bologna," Emblematica 2:2 (1987), pp. 225-248), distinguishes two senses of "hieroglyph" in the Renaissance. One, emphasized by Pio (1490s), Boroaldo (1490s), Erasmus (1508), and Alciato (1531), is that taken from Diodorus and certain remarks early in Alpeius's [/i]Metamorphoses[/i]. In that view hieroglyphs are "metaphorical figures, universally recognizable to the learned through the properties of the objects portrayed, unlike letters whose phonetic significance is arbitrary and may easily be lost or forogotten." Alberti's wording in The Art of Building also is close to this definition. The other he calls "the Florentine view," that of "the esoetirc concept of the hieroglyphs." He says
In Florence Ficino reads Herapollo in the light of Plotinus and Iambichus. He finds that the Egyptian priests imitated divine thought by means of signs which do not represent, like verbal langauge, a discursive linear account of the meaning, but provide a total, unmediated access to its reality, which i s the platonic idea itself and is beyond words. To this sort of sign, Ficino and Pico also relate magical hermetic and mystical cabalistic signs. (p. 226).
The first conception of hieroglyph depends on the ability of "natural signs" to function as words, which then acquire a conventional meaning, which the priest remembers and the "learned" can discover. Drysdall labels this as the "Aristotelian" conception. The other, of course, is the "Neoplatonic."

There, that's simple so far: just two senses, or kinds, of "hieroglyph." Clement of Alexandria has at least five kinds. Fortunately, the 15th century didn't read what he said.

Hieroglyphs in both senses (or kinds) are amenable to access, as Alberti says in On the art of building, only "by expert men" (Curran's translation), "by experienced men" (Wind's translation), "per peritis viris" (original). But to the extent that, in the first sense of "hieroglyph," images are cyphers for ordinary words; so the "expert men" could write code books. That is essentially what the emblem writers provided, for the hieroglyphs (now = emblems) that they fashioned, out of the raw material of ancient texts and images.

Alberti, unlike the later Bolognese, is hard to put in either camp. For the Neoplatonists, the meaning was only approximated in language, in an open-ended series of analogies. It is the same with Alberti in "Rings": however it is not clear that his series is intrinsically open-ended or just so long that one person can't think of them all. His explanations are like a series of two-dimensional architectural drawings that show what a three-dimensional edifice would look like. However if the word signifies a divine archetype, the edifice can never be described adequately in discursive (two-dimensional) language; it is a kind of super-edifice. I think that the early Renaissance emanating from Florence, from the 1440s, was fascinated by this second sense. The first sense existed earlier, from at ;east the 1410s.

I am not sure where Mantegna, as presented in the essay you cited on "the arrow in the eye," was in relation to the two senses of "heiroglyph." In his St. Cristopher, Mantenga was doing as much homage to Alberti as he could in a two-dimensional field. "On Painting" seems to be Aristotelian, in Drysdall's sense (it is based on his studies of geometry, optics, and Aristotelian rhetoric in Bologna). "Rings" is more Platonic, as I have said. But the quote from Welliver on page 7 of your link (http://www.webexhibits.org/arrowintheeye/arrow7.html) hits the nail on the head, so to speak, about the "Florentine" sense, which I think applies to some tarot decks as well.
One very strong manifestation of the tendency of Florentine art to be intellectual was the Florentine penchant for the subtle and the esoteric. The Florentine artist or poet frequently spoke a much different message to the initiate from that received by the profane; indeed it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the most typical kind of Florentine work was a riddle concealed from the profane by the trappings of innocence. This was a tradition sanctified by the example of Dante and increasingly reinforced, throughout the fifteenth century, by the rediscovery of Plato. It was the consistent element in Florentine nature which impelled the observant Jew from abroad, Joachim Alemanni, to write in 1490 that no people had ever been so given to communication by parable and riddle as the Florentines. (Welliver, 1973, p. 20)
Yes, this is an overstatement. But I love how he goes all the way back to Dante. Hieroglyphs are just a subset of this tendency. And as Kubovy says immediately after, the Florentines took this perspective wherever they went. Then there is Kubovy's final comment
We will show in the following chapters that Renaissance painters deliberately induced a discrepancy between the spectator's actual point of view and the point of view from which the scene is felt to be viewed. The result is a transcendent experience that cannot be obtained by any other means.
Very interesting! I will read further. It suggests also what I think the tarot designers were after, to the extent that they made the cards as or like hieroglyphs: the effect of transcendence, brought about by the simultaneous juxtaposition of mutually exclusive perspectives (in both the signified and the signifier: witness the bateleur's later table, the tendency toward cubism; and the distinction, introduced at some point, between upright and reversed meanings). That is what Bessarion preached, perhaps what Pletho preached, and so understood by Ficino and Pico, probably less so by Alberti.

Now I am getting into Cusano territory. I wonder if he attended Pletho's lectures, instead of his Council meetings. He is a kindred spirit to the Florentines, with his explication of God as "the coincidence of opposites." But I haven't studied him as I ought.

This transcendence-effect also, for those who were interested in such things, would have made the cards suitable for seeing into the future, by allowing their reader one foot in the divine. In 1517, there is Fasanini, in the explanation of hieroglyphs he attached to his translation of Horapollo. (Fasanini, while a product of Bologna, quotes from all the sources, including those on the "Florentine" side, as Drysdall admits.) He says of Chaeremon, as cited by Suida
There were among the Egyptians also men called Hierogrammates, who indeed made prophecies about the future, and he recalls that one of them foretold marvelously to the king many great things about Moses who was yet to be born. (Drysdall p. 137.)
Earlier he had explained the term "Hierogrammates":
Hieroglyphic characters, called “hieroglypha grammata” by the Greeks, were the sacred writing of the Egyptians, so called because they expressed the mysteries in religion.
The hierogrammates, then, are the readers of the sacred words (grammata), hieroglyphs. Their use in prophecy would have fit in with Ficino's doctrines about the melancholic humor, as in some cases a prophetic state )my reference is in the footnotes to the modern edition of Agrippa, but I cannot find my copy at the moment). So even then, orally c. 1460s Florence, in print 1490s, and clearly in 1517 Bologna, there would have been scholarly authority for the use of hieroglyphs, and hence tarot if so considered, in cartomancy.

Huck wrote
So, do we have now the same understanding of hieroglyphs?

If yes, then could we assume, that Alberti's use of the terminus hieroglyphs [which, as you say, didn't happen] tells us something about the general use of this word? Or do we have to assume a specific-scholar-terminus, only used in specific context by very few people only?
I would say that we are 50% there. You acknowledge the AristoteliaDiodoran/Bolognese sense of the term. But I don't see the Neoplatonic/Florentine. There is also the question of whether we have two senses of the word, in two world-views, or, as Apuleius clearly indicates, just two kinds of Hieroglyphs in a world-view in which there was no contradiction between Plato and Aristotle.

As to whether there was a general use of the world, or just scholar-specific, I would say, two tendencies, one toward the Neoplatonic, the other toward the Aristotelian. I think that the people who attended Pletho's lectures and associated with Bessarion would be in the Neoplatonic. I think the Florentine circle in general tended toward the Neoplatonic, even outside of Florence. Others, especially in conservative Bologna, tended toward the Aristotelian. Scholasticism was still very strong, even among those who considered themselves humanists. Then, too, many, especially non-intellectuals, did not make a distinction. Others perhaps did, but saw them as two kinds of hieroglyphs, and when writing for the general Latin-reading public did not make the distinction, for the simple reason that it wasn't what they were mainly writing about.

Re: The 15th century understanding of "hieroglyph"

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I see, from following out Huck's reference to Toscanelli, that my time-line left out some important stuff. Besides what Huck pointed out, I left out Cusa, whose On Learned Ignorance would have had its impact, at least in general terms. And the election of Rodrigo Borgia is worth mentioning for its connection to Ascanio Sfoza, his chief supporter against della Rovere and later Borgia's vice-chancelor.

1420-1424: Cusa (til 1423) and Toscanelli at University of Padua, Alberti at Bologna. 1424 is when St. Bernardino was having his bonfires of cards, etc., in Bologna and elsewhere. I don't know if he came to Padua. At Padua Toscanelli becomes a lifetime friend of Cusa.

1424: Alberti writes Philodoxus, with 20 scenes plus an introduction, and 20 characters, plus a narrator (per Huck's posts).

1433: Toscanelli reportedly meets Chinese ambassador in Florence (http://www.gavinmenzies.net/pages/evide ... denceID=11). Many Chinese living in Florence, using their ideogram-based letters..

1430s. Alberti dedicates Book I of his Dinner Pieces to Toscanelli.

1437. Cusa goes to Constantinople to bring back representatives of the Eastern Church, e.g. Bessarion and Pletho; he also hunts for manuscripts. On return journey, Wikipedia says "Nicholas had a shipboard experience that led to his writing thereafter on metaphysical topics," reputedly referred to in the beginning of On Learned Ignorance.

1438-1445. Cusa attends Council of Ferrara/Florence. [Note added after Huck challenged: this should be: 1438: Cusa arrives in Venice, then in Ferrara briefly for Council, then mostly in Germany June 1438-1448.]

1440. Cusa finishes On Learned Ignorance and presents it to the Pope. [Note added after Huck's reply following this post: this should be: Cusa finishes On Learned Ignorance in February, comes to Florence March-April. I am still researching whether it was presented to the Pope and where in 1440 it was published.]

1444-1445. Isis celebration in Ferrara, with Beatrice d'Este as "queen of the feast."

1492. Rodrigo Borgia elected Pope. The Catholic Encyclopedia observes, "All we can affirm with certainty is that the determining factor of this election was the accession to Borgia of Cardinal Ascanio Sforza's vote and influence."


Now that I have laid out the 15th century's understandings of hieroglyphs, I will try out that understanding on some actual tarot cards. I am only dealing with extant cards, of course.

First, the Cary-Yale. What I see is heraldics rather than hieroglyphs. Heraldics answer "who" questions, about actual people; hieroglyphs answer "what" question.It's not important, for example, what the red man being eaten by the dragon or snake means, but rather what family it represents.(If anyone knows Frege's "Sinn und Bedeutung," that's roughly the distinction I have in mind.) Often the heraldics are ambiguous even on that account, certainly from the vantage point of the 21st century if not then as well. In the Love card, is the white cross on red background the heraldic of Maria of Savoy (1428), Bianca Maria Visconti (1441), or Francesco Sforza (1450)? All are possible--and the first is not ruled out even if, as is likely, the card is post-1440. Maria of Savoy was still Duchess of Milan,the latest to arrive there in a grand procession; also, the card might be a copy of an earlier version.

Other examples: Are the people on the Chariot card Filippo and Maria of Savoy, Filippo and Bianca Maria, or Francesco and Bianca Maria? And on the World/Fama card, is it Piccinino in the boat, or Filippo (visiting his mistress), or the Fisher King in the Arthurian romances, lame and reclusive like Filippo? (I still maintain that as a possibility, given the Arthurian illustrations done by the Bembo workshop around that time.) If the Fisher King, then the World card is becoming hieroglyphic, pointing perhaps even to a mystical allegory. And who are the three kings on the theological virtue cards? Perhaps it was clearer when the words could be made out. Otherwise, besides these "who" questions, everything is straightforward, employing iconographic conventions known to all. (I am assuming that the strip of cloth dangling from Death is a familiar wrapping of the dead, either from medieval practice, from accounts of Jesus's burial, or from accounts of Egypt already known among the people.)

When we get to the PMB, the "What?" question is more prominent, and the "Who?" is on the mythic level (as in the Fisher King, or the three kings), not the level of an actual contemporary person.

The PMB Fool looks like a fool, yet his feathers suggest a halo and the seven weeks of Lent (as I think Moakley pointed out). There was the tradition of the wise fool, which jesters were considered, and Cusa's "learned ignorance."

Then comes the PMB Bagatto. His table has a cloth covering something, but what? It looks like a Eucharistic cloth, but that doesn't fit the rest of the card. And do the objects represent the four elements as well as the four suits, and so the creator-god of this world of illusion and literary imagination? This is a question the common people would not be prepared for.

Next is the Popess. Is she a positive or negative character? Is she the Church positive or the Church negative? Is she Pope Joan, and if so, is that positive or negative? And for the Sforza family, there is also the ancestress, a more heraldic type of "who" in that it is a particular actual person, wearing a particular brown habit. Again, is she positive or negative? The answer is likely to be "both" in all cases, examples of Cusa's "coincidencia oppositorum.".It is hard to say what the common people would make of this card.

Empress, Emperor, Pope, and Love are like the Cary-Yale, but with fewer heraldic features. But the Empress and female Lover have their green glove, which might qualify as a hieroglyph, if the color was not known by all as a symbol of fertility.

The Chariot-lady is now not any of the particular people we might have imagined for the CY (although she still could be them, too). The wings on the horses identify her as ideal Beauty or one of the other idealized virtues in Plato's Phaedrus (247a-253c), upon whom the noble charioteer gazed before his own horses lost their wings, and which he remembers even after. For the Zeus-like nature, disposed to the "leading of men," she would be identified with Minerva, Wisdom (Phaedrus 252e); indeed, the orb and scepter were sometimes given to Minerva; she would be the "Minerva Pacifica" bringing peace after a hard-won victory. Whoever it is, it is an allegory known to the learned, although the unlearned would not be wrong in taking her as Chastity in the Petrarchan parades. Both goddesses--Celestial Venus as ideal Beauty, and Minerva as Wisdom--were chaste.

The Hanged Man is a beautifully ambiguous figure, like the Popess. Is he a traitor or someone unjustly accused, like the Sforza ancestor (who in fact did no wrong in deserting the anti-pope)? Is he Judas or Jesus, both considered traitors in their time, by the different sides? There is also a heraldic-like element in the reference to the Sforza ancestor.

Death remains non-enigmatic, and also Temperance and Star, except for who in the Sforza family the lady on these cards might have been meant to be--what I would call a "heraldic" issue; yet such identification is quite incidental to the meaning. But Moon is quite puzzling. It is like what would later be called an emblem, but without the verse to clarify things. The Sun card is not of a conventional figure known to all, nor is World/Fama (is the city supposed to be in this world or the next?); hence they are problematic, and I'm not sure which kind of enigma; whether they have a straightforward decoding or hint at deeper mystereis. Judgment is non-enigmatic.

The many-faceted, enigmatic cards (Fool, Bagatto, Popess, Chariot, Hanged Man, Moon, World, probably ohers), whose enigmas have to do with "what?", are now in the realm of hieroglyphs, like them if not hieroglyphs themselves. Some fit the "coincidentia oppositorum" of Cusa, perhaps suggesting divine mysteries and a God beyond language.

When we get to the Cary Sheet, the enigmatic allegories are further developed. There is still the "who" for the Empress, referring to Bianca Maria Sforza, bride of Maximilian. But the wing-like drapery on the back of her chair is enigmatic. The two horses of the Chariot are now wingless, facing opposite directions but looking the same way, suggesting the "Marseille" card of Noblet and the Chariot of the Phaedrus (253d-257a) now descended to earth, its horses without wings, their direction a matter of contention between noble and ignoble horses.

Image


Star and Moon are both quite enigmatic, and with Egyptianate features. In the Star card we have high terrain in the East, like the Ethiopian source of the Nile, a sexually ambiguous Aquarius (in the Dendera zodiac, the two-jugged person was sometimes male, sometimes female); also, the five star-like planets of Fate, dominated by one star, suggest Sirius or Sothis, herald of the Nile flood, thereby also an anticipation of Christ. For the Moon we have crocodiles, pool, temple, obelisks. The crocodile, in the Greek sources about Egypt, was sometimes portrayed as evil and sometimes not. He has in his mouth the treasure typically guarded by dragons. The Bagatto's and Fool's hats both suggest Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary Egyptian sage. These are mysteries that can be unraveled by scholarly cryptography, sometimes pointing to deeper mysteries, and of which the ordinary person is in no position to know.

Image


I don't have a sufficient feel for the other 15th century decks, as to how hieroglyphic they are and what type of hieroglyph, except to say that the Sola-Busca pips are all hieroglyphs of a more enigmatic kind. I tend to think that decks like the Charles VI are mostly a matter of understanding the cards' imagery in terms of the conventions, persons, and events of the times, some of them quite localized (i.e. "Star" in terms of particular astronomers). They mostly reflect a popular tarot, in which there is no need for subtlety. Even here, there are exceptions: I continue to find the d'Este Fool enigmatic, for example, as I have mentioned in "Bianca's Garden."

The "Marseille" designs, from Noblet to Conver, seem to me a development out of the Milan tradition. Here the cards specify further enigmas, as I have been trying to suggest in the "Bianca's Garden" section here, enigmas that only the learned can grasp. Here also, while Ficino's sense of hieroglyphs continues to exert its presence, I think a more important influence is that of Erasmus's Adagia, in the account of his first adage, "Festina lente," starting in the 1508 edition. There is one sentence in particular that sums up the method of constructing hieroglyphs that I see in the "Maseille" designs, at the end of paragraph 11. That paragraph is about a hieroglyph in the Hypnerotomachia, there rendered as "Semper festina tarde" (see below, from p. 69 of Godwin translation).

Image


In Erasmus, I give the Latin in addition to the English because certain words may have more than one possible translation. And I encourage people to read Erasmus's whole discussion of hieroglyphs, which starts in paragraph 8 and goes to at least 14:
Porro hoc scripturae genus non solum dignitatis plurimum habet, verum etiam voluptatis non parum, si quis modo rerum, ut dixi, proprietates penitus perspectas habuerit: id quod partim contingit solerti contemplatione rerum, causarumque naturalium, partim liberalium cognitione disciplinarum. (http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/speude/text.html)

Furthermore, this symbolic method of writing possesses not only the greatest dignity, but also provides a great deal of pleasure to a person who can look deeply into the qualities of things; because this symbolic representation mingles the scientific contemplation of things and natural causes with the study of literature. (http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/speude/trans.html)
In the Latin, is it just literature, or the liberal arts in general, that are the "liberalium,", that enables one to read the symbolism of hieroglyphs? Either way, it is mainly books. Even the "scientific contemplation of things and natural causes" is for Erasmus primarily a matter of studying the classical literature about the thing in question, as is clear in his subsequent discussion (see link) of the circle, anchor, and dolphin of the Hypnerotomachia's hieroglyph. It is exactly that approach, I think, that the designers of tarot cards expected from one who would interpret them.
Last edited by mikeh on 04 Oct 2010, 12:15, edited 2 times in total.

Re: The 15th century understanding of "hieroglyph"

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BIG MISTAKE

"1438-1445. Cusa attends Council of Ferrara/Florence."

... as far I know it, Cusa left the delegation already in Venice, with new missions in Germany. And the council took place 1438/39 with some extensions later, but most attendants were already gone in autumn 1439. The papal bureaucracy worked over it.

"1440. Cusa finishes On Learned Ignorance and presents it to the Pope."

I don't know ... are you sure?

********************

http://books.google.de/books?id=MtQ-APA ... 38&f=false

This seems to be a good source. According this ... Indeed he was very short in Ferrara. He arrived 8th of February in Venice. After this .. slow journey ... he went with the emperor to Ferrara ("The solemn sessions of the council began on 9 April, 1438").
In April he was send to Germany (likely to Basel, southern Germany, not too far), but soon called back. Then he was send again (6th of June 1438). The following time he was mainly in Koblenz, Mainz and Frankfurt, so near to his home region Cues at the Mosel.

Cusanus was still young and he was known as quick and experienced on his travels, but anyway, the journeys took generally some time.
Then he was in Florence in March/April 1440, maybe the time, when he dedicated the book to Eugen ... so after the council had slowed down.
Anyway, Cusanus and the "active" council 14438/39 ... this might have been a matter of a few weeks only ... surely not 1438-1445. Cusanus was mainly of importance in Germany, fighting as papal legate and near to be taken prisoner by his political opponents (he had been earlier at the side of the Konziliarismus, and was regarded as a traitor, bought by the pope with promises of a great career).

*************
Another earlier source had it, that Cusanus left the delegation already in Venice ... but there are a lot of wrong messages about Cusanus in this time, especially English sources seem to love it to have Cusanus at the council ... .-)
Huck
http://trionfi.com

Re: The 15th century understanding of "hieroglyph"

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Well, I can't locate my source for his periods of attendance in Florence. I will keep looking. What I thought I read was that he was back and forth between Germany and Florence. I didn't mean to imply that he was there the whole time. (I'm afraid I don't have a good sense of what information people need to know and what they don't. So I usually err in the other direction.) I knew he was in Germany a lot. I had the impression he was in Florence more than just the one time, that he was coming and going. As I say, I will keep looking. Thanks for the red flag, Huck.

The important issue, for me, is whether On Learned Ignorance was circulating among humanists in the various cities after that time, over the next 10 or 15 years. If it wasn't, there's no point in my putting him in at all, except as a "sign of the times"--and given Cusa's uniqueness, probably not even that. I was seeing it as an early Neoplatonist, pseudo-Dionysus-reflecting document 25 years before Ficino, and so in time to influence the humanists in Milan and Ferrara before the time of the PMB. Since the book was already finished and published (whatever that meant then), it doesn't really matter to my concerns how much he was there.

I did find, while looking for information, a statement about how Cusa and Alberti were friends and like-minded, That would be important information for me, too, if true. Having friends in Italy while in Germany helps to spread one's influence.

All sources say the book was published in 1440. But where, Was it Florence, or Cusa, both, or neither? And what exactly did that mean then?

Re: The 15th century understanding of "hieroglyph"

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mikeh wrote:Well, I can't locate my source for his periods of attendance in Florence. I will keep looking. What I thought I read was that he was back and forth between Germany and Florence. I didn't mean to imply that he was there the whole time. I knew he was in Germany a lot. I had the impression he was in Florence more than just the one time, that he was coming and going. As I say, I will keep looking. Thanks for the red flag, Huck.

The important issue, for me, is whether On Learned Ignorance was circulating among humanists in the various cities after that time, over the next 10 or 15 years. If it wasn't, there's no point in my putting him in at all, except as a "sign of the times"--and given Cusa's uniqueness, probably not even that. I was seeing it as an early Neoplatonist, pseudo-Dionysus-reflecting document 20 years before Ficino and Poliziano, and so in time to influence the humanists in Milan and Ferrara.. Since the book was already finished and published (whatever that meant then), it doesn't really matter to my concerns how much he was there.

I did find, while looking for information, a statement about how Cusa and Alberti were friends and like-minded, That would be important information for me, too, if true. Having friends in Italy while in Germany helps to spread one's influence.

There's suspicion (not evidence), that Alberti made a journey with Albergati to the North. In our older, not updated, Alberti collection
http://trionfi.com/0/d/22
there's the note:
"1431: It's speculated, that Alberti accompanied cardinal Albergati on a journey to Northern Europe (in his function as a leader at council of Basel). It's assumed, that Albergati was during the journey painted by Peter van Eyck in Bruges."
confirmed here ...
http://books.google.com/books?id=Jkb7a2 ... ti&f=false

It can't be excluded, that there were meetings between Cusanus and Albergati ... if there were meetings between Albergati and Cusanus, then likely there were meetings between Cusanus and Alberti. But in 1431 Cusanus still was on the side of the Konziliarismus.

A biography of Albergati
http://www2.fiu.edu/~mirandas/bios1426.htm#Albergati
... his position in Bologna was not always stable, and he also had other missions. He was not accepted as leader in Basel 1432 by other cardinals.

It seems general given, that Alberti became a sort of secretary to Albergati in 1428. Albergati had then just one of his Bolognese crises (see biography), the Alberti was that year allowed to return back to Florence (I've difficulties to confirm the relationship for this time).

Generally Albergati had a strong teacher role for the later pope Nicholas V.
http://www2.fiu.edu/~mirandas/bios1446.htm#Parentucelli
... which might explain some sponsorship for Alberti in the time after 1447 (cause then a youth relation existed between pope Nicholas and Alberti ... Nicholas just 7 years older than Alberti).

I stumbled about this note ...
http://books.google.com/books?id=75CBnl ... us&f=false
... and can't interpret it with security ...
It seems, as if Cusanus short before his death wrote a meditative letter to the long passed Albergati, whom he had met in youth in the monastery in Monte Oliveto in a very deciding moment of his personal development.

Possibly this referred to the moment, when Cusanus changed the political sides, which determined his later "great career". Alergati would have then have been disappointed by his engagement in Basel.

... a special optical problem problem is common for Cusanus and van Eyck
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/01/hbc-90004060
http://books.google.com/books?id=9V1eCk ... ck&f=false

... and somehow the writer Kapoore had the information or suspicion "Cusa may have lived for awhile in the same household as the Van Eycks who may have painted his father, sister, and Cusa himself."

http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.ph ... ge=6&pp=10

Well, "about painting" is about optical problems.

Albergati became bishop in Bologna (1417) and likely was inspired by the Jerome societies in Germany and the Netherlands (actually a model of schools for poor people, expression of the growing reading interests). Also he wished to do something against evil habits of his time (gambling) and he formed youth societies with religious-theater-interests. Alberti studied in Bologna and wrote a theater play, "Philodoxus" in 1424 (though, he claimed, that he found an old manuscript).
So, there's the logical early connection between Albergati and Alberti. Naturally Albergati should have noted, that Alberti was very talented. So possibly he took him with him.
Italian painting around 1430 had still a lot to learn from Northern painting. Possibly Alberti just made a few things available for the Italian market with "De Pictura" in 1434.

There's a reported "ice-skating observation", which Alberti could only have made in Northern countries.
http://books.google.com/books?id=OFGTd1 ... ti&f=false

***********

It seems very sure, that Alberti knew Toscanelli at the begin of the 30's from Florence. Also it's said, that Alberti knew the poetical barber shop of
http://trionfi.com/0/e/00a/
... where a lot of the literary hopes of Florence were hanging around. He was just the type of talented young man without too much influence running around and looking for chances, who by their activities somehow connect a lot of people.
Huck
http://trionfi.com

Re: The 15th century understanding of "hieroglyph"

17
I was searching through my notes and found the The Preacher Savonarola used the term for paintings in his XXV11 Sermon.
I have not the Latin but the translation.......
Children and women respond like plants do, with their bodies, and through physical stimulation.Paintings in Churches are their books and we should provide for them better than the pagans did. The Egyptians did not allow indecent figures (hieroglyphs) to be painted. The first thing we should do is remove the dishonest images.....
Source : Prediche sopra i salmi, 3rd Sunday in Lent 1497.
The Universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
Eden Phillpotts

Re: The 15th century understanding of "hieroglyph"

18
Lorredan wrote:I was searching through my notes and found the The Preacher Savonarola used the term for paintings in his XXV11 Sermon.
I have not the Latin but the translation.......
Children and women respond like plants do, with their bodies, and through physical stimulation.Paintings in Churches are their books and we should provide for them better than the pagans did. The Egyptians did not allow indecent figures (hieroglyphs) to be painted. The first thing we should do is remove the dishonest images.....
Source : Prediche sopra i salmi, 3rd Sunday in Lent 1497.
It is essential for sound scholarship that you check back to the original source rather than quote your notes, unless 1) you are in the habit of only quoting EXACTLY what the source says, and 2) you are not in the habit of introducing personal notes into the text quoted.

Here is the text you have quoted, and it doesn't contain the word "hieroglyphs" anywhere, nor is there a footnote to the word "figures" that might indicate it existed in the original text.

Image


From Carol M. Richardson, Kim Woods, Michael W. Franklin, eds., Renaissance Art Reconsidered: An Anthology of Primary Sources (Wiley Blackwell, 2007, p. 313).

(grotesquely long Google Books link omitted - search for phrases in the text quoted. I searched for +savonarola +salmi +1497. It is the first result).

The text the editors quote was only published in 1955, so it is unlikely we'll find the original unless it was previously published in an edition they don't note in the sources they list on page 311.
Image

Re: The 15th century understanding of "hieroglyph"

19
Children and women respond like plants do, with their bodies, and through physical stimulation.Paintings in Churches are their books and we should provide for them better than the pagans did. The Egyptians did not allow indecent figures ( MY WORD hieroglyphs) to be painted. The first thing we should do is remove the dishonest images.....
because in reading about Lorenzo di Credi in this book and his attachment to Savonarola - he destroyed his earlier pagan works (except his' Venus') because of this sermon and his pagan hieroglyphs in the background scenery? He copied other backgrounds from other artists after that apparently. I wanted to know what the drawing in this book was about. That is why I inserted the word when it should have been Barbaro. I was interested in why his painting of Savonarola was considered by some critics to be Adam-like with red skin- or Arabic; it was a copy of the famous Fra Bartolemo -but with red complexion.The indecipherable things in his earlier works was due to his Goldsmith background/profession apparently.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images ... ooks&img=1
I have not been able to find out who the third figure is beside Justice/Temperance.
Which is where my notes came from with my habit of 2 in your text.
Which of course has not answered why and where Savonarola saw Barbarous Egyptian images when he clearly knew the difference between Pagan Greek images and Pagan Egyptian ones.
~Lorredan
The Universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
Eden Phillpotts

Re: The 15th century understanding of "hieroglyph"

20
This is not a reply to anyone, just some more information, this time about how hieroglyphs were understood in the late 16th-early 17th century, in the account by Cesare Ripa, first published Rome 1593 (without illustrations; illustrations first appeared in 1603 Rome, "with woodcuts adapted for the most part from the Cavalier d'Arpino," according to the preface to a 1976 facsimile of the Padua 1611 edition). This account, "An Introductory Discourse upon the Science of Iconology," seems not to be included in the on-line version of the English translation of Ripa (http://emblem.libraries.psu.edu/Ripa/Images/ripatoc.htm), so I quote from it here. It is from the translation by George Richardson, London 1777-1779, pp. ii-iii.
The knowledge of hieroglyphicks sprung from the sages of Egypt, who invented them to express the doctrines of their religion, as also their moral and political sciences. The hieroglyphicks were sometimes representations of human figures, but more frequently those of different animals, of fruit or flowers, according to the subject they meant to exhibit. They also made use of various geometrical figures, which were all well known by the wise men of that ingenious nation, whose employment it was to explain them: for this purpose they weer engraven upon their pyramids and obelisks which the people held in great veneration.

The invention of emblems took its rise from the study of hieroglyphicks; an emblem being propertly an hieroglyphick device, by which some moral instruction is understood; for example, the Pelican nourishing her young, is an emblematical device, moral and instructive, which denotes, the love of parents to their children, or that of a sovereign to his subjects. Peace setting fire to a trophy of arms, and shutting the gates of the temple of Janus, while Discord stands chained and frantick, are historical emblems, because they serve for monuments that are erected, or for medals which are struck, on account of some memorable action interesting to a whole nation.

An emblem frequently explains itself without the help of writing, but sometimes has need of a motto or inscription to explain it.
He then goes on to define attributes, symbols, and allegory. "Attributes are distinctions, invented to render every figure the more easily known." And "Symbols are those attributes which have relation to mystery, to morality and to dogma..." Of course he says a lot more, in terms of examples.

Allegory occurs first in poetry, and secondly in painting.
Allegory in Poetry is a figurative manner of describing by choice expressions, a sense different from what is wrote, the truth of which is hid and under a transparent veil.

Allegory is made use of in painting for the more clearly expressing a great subject when the most interesting and pathetick circumstances cannot be described in the gesture or countenance, or when they cannot be intoduced at one point of time: this enables an artist to illustrate an extensive grand subject with few figures, and sometimes with one only; the ancients observed this in the compositions of their medals; on one side was the name and portrait of the hero; on the reverse was one or two allegorical figures, sometimes only one simple emblem, explaining upon what account they were struck. By this means, the greatest events have been allegorically characterized and come to our knowledge, by the help of the judicious interpretation of the learned.
He then goes on for more than two pages elaborating on these points with examples.

Of course this is just one person's view, Ripa's. But he was influential.
cron