For the Duerer, I'd guess that the pair at the bottom are Mars and Venus. Think of Botticelli's "Mars and Venus" (
http://hoocher.com/Sandro_Botticelli/Ve ... a_1483.jpg), which he would have had described to him or shown imitations. But the "Venus Victorious" theme was common enough, for example in Cossa's April panel at the Schifanoia in Ferrara (
http://www.artecultura.fe.it/pix/anticarte/home.jpg). One with a helmet rather like that of the sketch and SB-master engraving is the sketch on the right below, c. 1470 by Marco Zoppo. Mars is represented by the appropriated cuirass, lower left. (I think I got this image from Wind,
Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance. The one on the left is a
Minerva pudica, considerably later.) The putti also get carried over into the later works.
In the Duerer engraving, the ladies on the fish seem to me a combination of the Botticelli-type Birth of Venus and her Graces, if a variation on the normal pose is allowed (
http://grandiopere.fcp.it/mirabilia-ita ... oia-05.jpg). The fish was a symbol of Venus, I think, not just connoting the sea, but it was what she and Cupid turned into escaping Typhon.
And the lady sitting above and to the left of the couple is perhaps our prophetess, rather more prophetess-looking than the ladies with the sails. She seems to be looking at the "Birth of Venus" scene. She is reminiscent of the old lady in Dosso Dossi's so-called "Myth of Pan" (below), in which a crone is in the act of prophecying, on one standard interpretation. It was done in Ferrara c. 1824, some years after the Duerer, but she might derive from some painting or sketch now lost from when Duerer was in Italy. She (as well as the nude) gives the sketch a kind of Giorgione quality. I could swear I've seen a similar old lady sitting in a similar place in some Renaissance painting, but I'm probably wrong.
As for the engraving by the Master of the Sola-Busca, it would seem, as Zucker says, to be just a relaxed Venus, to me reminiscent of Botticelli's Venus in "Mars and Venus" and Zoppo's sketch, but I' don't know a source of the finger around the basin. (However see below, when I discuss Hungary.) Again, the helmet and putti seem to be a variations on Zoppo's. Since the designer of the SB is said to have been a student or follower of Zoppo, that fits.
"Pupila Augusta" is a conventional epithet of Venus. I will mention the ox-skull at the end of this post.
The relationship of either the Duerer sketch or the SB-master's engraving to the epigram is difficult. I have "read", in a fashion, some of the Hungarian-language monograph by Agnes Ritookne Szalay that Huck linked to, using Google Translate. The most relevant part is pp. 67ff. There was a lot of connection between Hungarians and Italians in the 15th century, and not just with Naples. Several came down to study with Guarino in Ferrara. (And, if I may add, at least one painter went there as well, painting one of the original Belfiore Muses--a couple of which, interestingly enough, after a few centuries ended up in Budapest!) Then at least one of these students, a Kara Laszlo, went to Rome and probably hung out with the Leto crowd in the 60s. And there really were some Roman marbles found on the Danube and brought to Buda, where a Florentine humanist inspected them, the monograph says. Apparently one was of a nymph at a spring. (I am not clear if this was a statue or a stele. Google Translate says "statue", but who knows.) So Laszlo would have talked about it, and the epigram would have been written.
It is also possible that the epigram then was engraved on the statue or stele, or separately, in Buda by Felice Feliciano, the expert on Roman calligraphy (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felice_Feliciano). Feliciano went to Buda, Szalay says. He was a spare-time alchemist on the side (confirmed by Wikipedia in their article just cited), and the Romans had written that antimony, in their domains, was to found in just Spain and Hungary. In addition, Szalay quotes a poem of Feliciano's with the words, "Super Ripa Danuvia dicitur esse hoc.”
Then Ferrarinus, a collector of manuscripts, would have heard about it. I would be interested in knowing exactly what he said in his book. He might have just said that the inscription was on the marble, without saying when it was put there!)The statue became well known and was exhibited in the courtyard of the University Library. I'm not clear what happened to it. I think she says that the Turks came and, so the story goes, broke the marble up and used it as tiles in building their baths (suggesting, too, that we're talking about stelae). Archeologists have found what might have been the marble but can't piece enough together.
It is possible that Cranach saw the statue or stele, Szalay says, as he lived in Vienna in 1502-1503 and had a Hungarian friend. If so, it seems to me, it would have been of the "Hypnerotomachia" type, if I may use that term to designate the first use I know of (published 1499) for that pose, with the upper arm bent back instead of lying at the nymph's side.
That's what Cranach, 1515, painted. (And Giorgione, more daringly, 1510:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_Venus_(Giorgione)).
However Cranach might simply have heard about the nymph (indicated in the writing on the upper left) but used the image he saw in the
Hypnerotomachia, as I see Charles Sterling suggesting in
Fifteenth to Eighteenth Century European Paintings in the Robert Lehman Collection, in his section on Cranach. See
http://books.google.com/books?id=7BU-36 ... us&f=false.
But then where did the
Hypnerotomachia get its image? I will defer that question until later in this post.
The monograph goes on to say that in the 16th century, the theme of peace somehow became associated with it. That fits in well with the "Venus Victorious" theme and the mood of Duerer's sketch. Even without the disarmed Mars, the gesture of stirring the basin absent-mindedly conveys the theme of tranquility. Then the "cave marble" of the epigram gets explained as the basin, which is really a spring. But I don't quite understand what Szalay is saying. For what it's worth, here is the whole passage, as Google Translate has it (p. 74 of the original). I have highlighted the most relevant bits:
If the nymph is based representation of the XVI took on new forms. century, relaxation, slightly radiate essentially retained. How many has become meaningful to motivated somewhere still common, we could cite many examples. Who vitathatná a Pilgrimage slightly at the end of the tax function well? St. Wolfgang (Austria) Monastery courtyard of the abbey was built in 1515 for ordering the kútszobor. This nymph, a forehand-footed woman, an adjacent dézsából grown trees lying in the company of naughty toys. For the pious pilgrims was assigned to serve with wine could not afford to fölüdítsék long tiring journey. 31 31 Cite another example, that over time, even destiny away from. Melanchthon in Wittenberg in 1560 Praeceptor placed in the tomb of eternal Muse was inspired by a series of peace: "Do not Somnum Rumpel, quiesco 'disciples, the orphaned, intellectual spiritual community, who came to the tomb as "Fons et dogmatum piorum eloquentiae" monumentumához contributed. 32 32
More or less inspired by the Muse community, place of worship had been a slight tax from antiquity to the nimfaszobor. It features a lot of content over the centuries in various forms and preserved. When XVI. At the end of the century, two from the home country of our compatriots were recorded on a Bygone memories of Buda statue, it is certainly not just say iconographic was due. The traditional path leading to them are not known. Perhaps from Buda families brought with them. The Andras Dudith of their company was the same way. That it is not written traditions, but the oral was up there, shows a fragmentary George Henisch version. This community holds the commemorative fölidézése meant that the known to be so many variations on living a perfect reproduction of the original formation of the real, Buda stood. Those who have subscribed, to this statue was a symbol of peace, the beauty creating wealth and tranquility, all that for them the time and space.
Admittedly, this is not much of a connection, whatever the precise translation.Maybe the SB-master thought up the gesture with the basin on his own. (In general, Google Translate's version is not this bad.)
It seems to me unlikely that the "sleeping Ariadne" poses in post-Medieval art were originally inspired by the "Cleopatra" that Ross kindly showed us. The pose is most famously seen in the great Dionysian paintings in Isabella d'Este's Studiola in Mantua and her brother's in Ferrera, Costa's "Myth of Comus", Giovanni Bellini's "Feast of the Gods", and Titian's "Bacchanal of the Andreans". Although these were done after the "Cleopatra" was known, that statue then was identified with Cleopatra, while the paintings were intended as allusions to Ariadne. They were inspired by the Roman-era Dionysian sarcophagi, mostly depicting, yes, sleeping Ariadne.
Here are a few such sarcophagi, some of which are already in articles that have been cited. I want to direct attention primarily to the last image.
The last of these of course is not a photo, but rather a nielo print, which Wendy Sheard in
Titian 500, p. 317f, says was inspired by a sketch done around 1480 by a "Mantuan artist." The print looks quite similar in style, although more documentary than artistic, to the Mantegna's school's Dionysian procession prints of that era, which are also inspired by sarcophagi (you might notice some relationship here to the Sola-Busca's fat people, Marco).
Sterling says that the
Hypnerotomachia image, too, was inspired by these sarcophagi. He does not say why the arm is different. Perhaps it was just easier to draw. In every other respect, it looks like a copy of the light-colored sarcophagus, which gives us the scene of Pan showing the off-stage Dionysus the sleeping Ariadne after she has been abandoned by Theseus on Naxos.
The
Hyperotomachia is very much part of the same milieu as the works we are trying to understand: Zoppo's cuirass is there, though not in the same context, and so is the ox-skull (symbolizing patience and hard-work, which indeed peace requires), which of course also makes its appearance in the Sola-Busca.
In the original: "PATIENTIA EST ORNAMENTVM CVSTODIA ET PROTECTIO VITAE." The interpretation as labor probably derives from Horapollo: "A bull's horn means work," reads Boas's translation (p. 75, in Google Books). The word for "horn" might have been taken to include "skull." Another interpretation comes from Diodorus, repeated by Alberti in
The art of building, published 1485, in which the Apis bull is seen "as a symbol of the peaceful arts of agriculture instituted by Osiris" (I am quoting from Curran,
The Egyptian Renaissance, p. 74). Although a bull is not its skull, perhaps the one can represent the other; this interpretation fits the theme of peace quite well.
In summary, I think most of the elements in the drawing and engraving are accounted for: Duerer gives us a composite hieroglyph, like those of the
Hypnerotomachia, of Venus's peace. But Venus's pose, with a finger in the basin, I can't find a precedent for, beyond the SB-master's engraving. To be sure, nymphs and springs go together, and Venuses, sleeping Ariadnes, and nymphs are interchangeable. But the pose, which Duerer copied, I don't recognize. Perhaps there is a lost antique source, such as the Buda image. More likely the SB-master made it up. He certainly was inventive with his cards. But it is possible that the epigram's "cave marble" was also a stimulus, and news of a discovery in Hungary. However prompted, he hit upon the idea of a spring encased in marble, over which lies a clad Venus rather than a nude nymph, an idea which Duerer copied and expanded upon.
Note: About an hour or two after I originally did my post, I rewrote a few sections, mainly those pertaining to the Cranach and
Hypnerotomachia pose, and I added the last paragraph.