This is certainly a fun thread to read.
I hope you get a chance to read the "chariot" section of the
Phaedrus yourself, Robert. It is Plato at his best, very complex and evocative. It was widely read and discussed in the 1440s.The nice thing about pictures is that they are simple, while what they represent can be complex. There are different kinds of chariots, too: the chariots of the gods are different than the chariots of humans. The PMB chariot, with two winged horses, is a goddess's chariot. When you have dark and light, and a man on top, then it's a human's chariot--something that Conver seems to have missed. See my post at
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=31&start=30.
Virtue is a complicated subject in the Renaissance. When Martiano invents his game in c. 1425, the suit of virtues has only male gods: Jupiter, Apollo, Mercury and Hercules, each representing a different type of virtue, and not a chaste one among them. Chaste virgins have their own suit. He means manly virtue, in governance, the arts, eloquence, and heroism (see
http://trionfi.com/martiano-da-tortona- ... -16-heroum, which Ross translated). But he is writing about a deck based on classical mythology, so of course that's what he means. In Greek,
Arete typically means "excellence". It applies to all sorts of things. The virtue of iron is its hardness, of gold its untarnishability and beauty. If the word has a common root with "Ares", that's a fact about the evolution of Greek society from barbarism into civilization. Plato gave it a philosophical meaning, and Aristotle wrote about it in a different context yet. Christianity then redefined the word in its terms. In Renaissance Italy there were Christian Platonists and Christian Aristotelians, bitter enemies.
The online essay that Ross cited, mentioned Stephen Campbell's
Cabinet of Eros, a book I respect a lot. Unfortunately Campbell's rather long and insightful discussion (about 9 pages, pp. 145-154) of the painting does not seem to be on Google books. I have time only to quote a few things.
Who is the Mother of the Virtues? She is imprisoned on the right, behind the wall, outside of view. Campbell says only:
It has been proposed that Pallas herself is the Fourth Cardinal Virtue, Prudence, and that all four are being called by their Mother - that is, by Wisdom - from her prison.
In a footnote he cites Nicholas Webb, "Momus with little Flatteries: Intellectual Life at the Italian Courts," in
Mantegna and Fifteenth-century Court Culture, ed. Francis Ames-Lewis and Anka Bednaraek (London 1993), 69, More specifically, according to Webb, she is "Sapiential Wisdom, Truth or Virtue herself" (Campbell p. 344).
(Wisdom in Latin is Sapientia, which is different from Prudentia. In the
Republic, with its four virtues, Plato is talking about Wisdom, which I assume corresponds to Sapientia. The Middle Ages knew very little Plato, mainly his
Timaeus, and not his
Republic at all. It wasn't until the early 15th century that people read the
Republic and the
Phaedrus, and they did so avidly (I mean, people of means); these works were in Latin translation decades before Ficino. See Hankins,
Plato and the Renaissance. The Middle Ages did have some Neoplatonic works, but not many. Neoplatonism, as philosophy, is really difficult. There's also Middle Platonism, which was at least as influential post-1420: Plutarch, Apuleius (written in Latin), and after 1470 the Chaldean Oracles; the Neopythagoreans were in many respects Middle Platonists, too.)
About the broken lance, Campbell observes that:
Pallas bears a weapon which in Mantua around 1500 would have been fully suggestive of the negotium of a prince and ruler, of her acive engagement in urgent matters of state beckoning beyond the secluded domain of the studiola. Pallas routs the Vices with a broken lance. A broken lance had been presented to Isabella by her husband Francesco Gonzaga following his hard-wpn victory at the battle of Fornovo, the same one depicted in the votive altarpiece, the Virgin of the Victories, ordered from Mantegna (fig. 52).
We have to bear in mind that the painting was for Isabella d'Este's private rooms, and also that she was a consummate stateswoman in a very small city-state. In that vein, it might be significant that the other virtues show no signs of leaving the clouds and descending to earth. Isabella can't expect help from them; she has to use prudence above all. The "broken lance" motif also appears in another of Isabella's paintings, more than 20 years later, Correggio's "Allegory of Virtue". There the lady below Minerva has all four virtues on her.
About the olive tree, Campbell says that although it has reminded several viewers of Daphne, he thinks an epigram in the
Palatine Anthology well-known by 1500 and imitated by Ariosto, has a more direct bearing on the imagery of the painting: "I am the plant of Pallas. Why do you clasp me ye branches of Bacchus? Away with the clusters! I am a maiden and drink no wine."
Campbell concludes, at the end of a long discussion, that the painting is an exercise in Lucianic irony, based on an essay by Alberti called "Virtue" (in
Dinner Pieces; it's an essay I now want to read; Lucian was a Roman satirist). I hope you have been reading about "Socratic irony," Robert. Plato was a master of irony. The
Phaedrus is full of it: for example, it is the loathsome dark horse, not the noble white one, that awakens the charioteer to the memory of true Beauty. That is a point the Estensi appreciated, as Campbell shows in his quotes from Isabella's resident humanist Equicola (pp. 256-262, especially 262; some of this, although not 262, is in Google Books). The Stoics were a subject of irony for the Estensi. (I've written about Equicola and the Estensi recently over at Vitali's site, starting at
http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=317&lng=ENG and continuing on the next page, sections A4, A5, and A6. Isabella is in A5. Equicola is mainly in A6, although he is introduced in A4You can skip the parts before and after, and much of A4, for your purposes.)
In Alberti's satirical essay, Campbell says,
the beleaguered goddess Virtue deplores the fact that the gods only find time to see that plants blossom in season, and that 'they take pains to see that the butterflies have beautifully painted wings.'
Campbell quotes this in connection with the beautiful wings on the flying cupids. In this connection there is also Dosso Dossi's wonderful painting for Alfonso d'Este of Jupiter painting butterflies. In other words, if I read this isolated quote rightly, Virtue might spend less time in the philosophers' lecture halls and more time protecting the environment.
In this same vein, it seems to me, is Durer's engraving of "Hercules at the crossroads," in which Hercules protects Pleasure from being attacked by Virtue. Virtue was not always a subject of unalloyed adoration in the Renaissance, as I suspect I will find when I read Alberti's essay. Another author much admired by the Estensi was Erasmus. His
Praise of Folly is another Lucianic essay in Alberti's footsteps.
