Michelangelo, Pythagoras, and Panofsky

SALINA 39 Loos . TRI ; - > cole a A MICHELANGELO, PYTHAGORAS, AND PANOFSKY 3 li at 7 ur ”, A Pavel Kalina There is probably no doubt that the series of Michelangelo’s late drawings representing the Crucifixion are not only among the most fascinating, but also among the most mysterious works—and not only of Michelangelo, but of European art in general. Two of these drawings—one from the Royal Library, Windsor (12761r), and one from the British Museum (W.81; see Fig. 1), portray Christ hanging on a Y-shaped cross. Recently, I tried to explain the origin of the peculiar shape of these crosses by comparing them to fourteenth-century crucifixi dolorosi, one of which, in Condivi's opinion, inspired the original form of Michelangelo’s lost cross depicted above the head of the Virgin Mary in his famous drawing of the Pierä for Vittoria Colonna. The crucifixi dolorosi often used a cross of this shape; ramis pateo ambiguis.”? The works of Ausonius were first printed by Bartolomaeus Girardinus in Venice in 1472 and thereafter by Julius Aemilianus Ferrarius in Milan (1490), Johannes Tacuinus in Venice (1494 and 1496), and Thaddaeus Ugoletus in Parma (1499). Today, all of these editions are widely accessible in European libraries. In the mid-sixteenth century, when Michelangelo’s drawings were created, the oeuvre of Ausonius was published by Ioannes Tornaesius in Lyon in 1558. Thus, we may conclude that Ausonius’s symbolic reading of Y could have been easily known to Michelangelo. What, then, was actually meant by the term bivium Pythagorae? The reply is practically automatic to each student of art history because the topic was analyzed by no less than Erwin Panofsky in one of his early and although their crosses have generally not been preserved to our own times, it is texts. The bivium of Pythagoras is that mostill possible to guess their former shape ment when one chooses either a materialisaccording to the position of Christ’s hands. The exceptional shape of Michelangelo’s tic or a spiritual way of life. It was, in antiquity no less than in the sixteenth and crosses may be further compared to some crosses by Giovanni Pisano, whose work could be one of the sources for Michelangelo’s dynamic approach to the sculptural volseventeenth centuries, represented by depictions of Hercules at the Crossroads, inspired by Hesiod and by the known narrative of the Sophist Prodicos. The ume, especially in his early period.' There is, however, still another explanation of the strange Y shape of the crosses appearing in Michelangelo’s late period. In the treatise De litteris monosyllabis Graecis et Latinis by Decimus Magnus Ausonius, we may read about the letter Y: “Pythagorae bivium (pseudo- or neo-) Pythagorean motif of a mystical-magical interpretation of the letter Y, inherited from antique authors like Persius (A.D. 34-62), Maximinus (pseudo- Virgil), or the Christian writer Lactantius (A.D. c. 240-c. 320) and known throughout the Middle Ages, became popular among Fig. London Michelangelo, Crucifixion with the Virgin and Saint John. British Museum,

humanists as early as the fourteenth century, a fact recorded by Petrarch. In a woodcut gelo lived when the printed book became an integral part of western European civilizaillustration from the Latin translation of the most popular work by Sebastian Brant, whose Das Narrenschiff (1494) was made accessible to the broader European audition.’ He could assume that the “reader” of -ence as Stultifera Navis in 1497, we can find the Y form inscribed into the landscape where Hercules’ decision takes place.’ It was typical for Panofsky, in his broadly based study, to almost completely omit the medieval tradition of the bivium motif, although we find it both in medieval Latin treatises and in such fundamental texts of European vernacular literature as Wolfram expect the viewer to read his drawings from left to right. The Pythagorean interpretation form. Stillness is replaced by movement, stressed by the dynamic postures of the Virgin Mary and Saint John, whose bodies rotate toward the spectator. Such a reading is made stronger by the fact that we—just like sixteenth-century viewers—are used to ing the Lutheran dismissal of good deeds “Renaissance” art, with its supposed connection to the new, “humanist” literature of tion for both Ausonius (and Persius, Lactanthe fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Given tius, Brant, et al.) and Michelangelo. Taken the aforementioned conclusion, nothing seems easier than to suppose that Michelangelo chose the Y form for his late Crucifixion drawings merely to convey the idea that Christ’s Cross represented a crucial moment of decision for the viewer: looking at these pictures, the spectator could either choose to dedicate his or her life to sensual pleasures or devote it to moral deeds. Michelanas a purely geometrical form, the cross is view in a circle, a closed geometrical figure, but rather in an oval—a dynamic and unstable to choose either good or bad—an idea that would conform to Catholic doctrine, opposconsider the reasons why Y serves as a prevailing the ends of its arms should not be inscribed human being is endowed with the free will of the meaningful form—why it was an inspiraboth a sign and a tool of an absolute division of space or pictorial surface. Historically, the Cross was a variant of the world tree: it is an arbor mundi, which represents the axis mundi.’ The mythological roots of the Cross determined its psychological value, which is currently capitalized in the famous Baumtest: the way a person sees/ the actual subject. ceive its diagonals as an expressive form: of Ÿ may serve to support the idea that a sary to correct tal state. By changing the shape of the Cross, Michelangelo not only added a new verbal meaning to the scene, but altered our subliminal reading of his drawings. If a “normal,” stable Cross is suddenly replaced by a Y-shaped one, we automatically pertify the extraordinary form of the Cross as referring to the letter Y just as he might last but far from least, Dante’s Divine Comedy, which was in fact the only one of the above-mentioned texts known with all certainty to Michelangelo.‘ It seems that Michelangelo’s late drawings (as well as other works by the master) should not be interpreted solely on the basis of humanist culture, but rather as the result of an undisturbed continuation of what we call “medieval” tradition, in which the bivium served as a metaphor for an individual’s free will (arbitrium liberum) to choose between good and evil. Taking this into consideration, it is necesvon Eschenbach’s Parzival, Lancelot, or, climate, exposed to all possible readings by viewers from varied social groups and with different educations, but always reacting to crown can be used to diagnose his/her menhis drawing would be perfectly able to idenand the Calvinist teaching of predestination. At this point, it is necessary to introduce a substantial correction to what has been written above. Despite the fact that modern texts on Michelangelo abound with hints of his literary inspirations, the artist did not, in fact, read Latin.* It seems evident that we cannot consider this sculptor capable of a convoluted interpretation of ancient authors in his works. Moreover, we do not know the purpose of his late drawings, and nothing indicates that they were to be intepreted by highly educated men or women. What can we do if a logical, rational interpretation of a work—based on the unspoken presupposition that the Florentine giant was versed in I atin texts—disappears? We can exposed to all imaginable freaks of social perceives a tree with its roots, trunk, and Latin crosses. The neo-Pythagorean symnrte bolization of the letter Y omits this broader potential of its form—it is a typical postinterpretation, playing with the rich context of ancient literary tradition, but neglecting all nonliteral contents. As such, this interpretation is similar to Panofsky’s science of iconology, playing mainly with literary meanings of a scene whose psychological content becomes completely unimportant: the complex pictures are reduced to emblems. Such an approach was comfortable for art historians, writing their texts in cozy, air-conditioned libraries, but devastating for the arts, which was now In this context, it may be useful to recall that Panofsky himself still spoke about the Wechselverhältnis zwischen Textiiberlieferung und Bildüberlieferung in 1930. It is a pity that the great art historian, and particularly his countless followers of the second half of the twentieth century, abandoned this dialectical approach in favor of a more rigid search for verbal equivalents to visual realities. Whereas literary theoreticians have stressed long ago the difficulties relating to the unclear mixture of systematic and nonsystematic elements in a work of art, the tension between the rational decoding and mainly sensual perception of a work, and so forth,’ it seems that art history fortified itself with the convenience of once-and-for-all given meanings of one-dimensional works. Standing in front of Michelangelo's late Crucifixion, we do find ourselves at the crossroads, as if the old master wanted to warn us about not reducing a picture or sculpture to its potential literary source, to advise us to study not only the verbal sources of images, but the connections between the literary texts and the psychological meanings that are implied in the overall organization of pictures. NOTES 1. P Kalina, “Crucifixus dolorosus: Zur Forschungslage und zur Begriffsbestimmung, mit einem Exkurs zum späten Michelangelo,” Umënf 49 (2001): 398-410. The same opinion was simultaneously expressed by A. W. G. Posèq, “Aspects of Laterality in Michelangelo,” Artibus et historiae 40 (1999):96. 2. Decimi Magni Ausonii Burdigalensis Opuscula, ed. S. Prete (Leipzig: 1978), p. 135. D. Magni Ausonii . . opera, ed. loannes Tornaesius (Lyon: 1558), p. 112. 3. E. Panofsky, Hercules am Scheidewege und andere antike Bildstoffe in der neueren Kunst (Leipzig and Berlin: 1930). For the Pythagorean Y, see esp. pp. 44, 64-68. The most important literary sources

Saturae 111.55; Petrarca, Epistolae 1.8. Cf. further A. rae was mediated by Isidore of Seville and used by Arnold of Lúbeck, Bruno of Magdeburg, Guillaume Brinkmann, “Ein Denkmal des Neupythagoreismus,” de St, Thierry, Richard de Bury, and others; see W, were Lactantius, Divinae Institutiones VI.3.1; Persius, Rheinisches Museum für Philologie N.F. 66 (1911): Harms, Homo viator in bivio: Studien zur Bildlichkeit 616-625; F. Cumont, After Life in Roman Paganism: des Weges (Munich: 1970). Lectures Delivered at Yale University on the Silliman 5. For the rapid diffusion of printed books in the sixteenth century, see esp. L. Febvre and H.-J. Martin, L'Apparition du livre (Paris: 1958). Foundation (New Haven: 1922), pp. 150-153. /d., Recherches sur le symbolisme funéraire des Romains - (Paris: 1942), pp. 422-431, describes a row of ancient 6. The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Annotated cryplo-Pythagorean epitaphs using the symbolism of Translation, ed. and trans. J. M. Saslow (New Haven: Y. F. Dornseiff, Das Alphabet in Mystik und Magie, 1991), pp. 352-353. 2nd ed. (Leipzig and Berlin: 1925), gives an extreme- 7. A brilliant semiotic interpretation of the univerly valuable overview of mystical interpretations of letsal tree was given by V. N. Toporov, “Drevo miroters in various cultures. li is characteristic that the voje,” in Mify narodov mira (Moscow: 1987), pp. 398-406, with bibliography. Greeks did not consider the idea of the divine origin = of the alphabet, which was typical for the majority of ancient cultures (see pp. 5-7; on the Pythagorean Y, see p. 24). 4, The motif of the Pythagorean Ybivium Pythago- IN, 8. Panofsky, foreword (without pagination). 9. See, for example, J, Lotman, The Structure of Artistic Text, trans. Ronald Vroon (Ann Arbor, Mich.: