HoP 450 - Depicting What Cannot Be Depicted - Philosophy and Two Renaissance Artworks
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Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Depicting What Cannot Be Depicted, Philosophy and Two Renaissance Artworks.

Faithful listeners will know that I have an identical twin brother named Glenn Adamson, who studied art history and still works in the art world as a freelance author and curator. If you caught the bonus episode I did with him back in 2018, you'll know that philosophical ideas are often not too far from his writings about art and craft.

Actually, the same goes for books he's written subsequently, like Craft and American History, which manages to retell the entire story of the United States with handmade objects as the central theme, and even more so a book he'll be publishing soon on conceptions of the future throughout the 20th century. We'll do another bonus episode about that when it comes out.

all of which has led me to ponder whether I might try my hand at writing a bit about art history, just as he occasionally makes forays into philosophical territory. I must be able to do it, at least genetically speaking, right? And now I've got the perfect chance, because I wanted to do something special anyway, to mark the milestone of having reached 450 episodes. So I thought, why not do an episode on two of the greatest artists of the period we've been covering, and on two of the most iconic artworks of the time?

I have chosen representatives of the Northern and the Italian Renaissance, Albrecht Dürer and Michelangelo Buonarroti.

As a bonus, both of them lived through the Reformation. Jura lived from 1471 to 1528, and Michelangelo from 1475 to 1564. Jura was persuaded by Luther's cause, indeed so emotionally committed to it that when Luther was arrested he wrote, "'Oh, all you pious Christians, help me to lament this divinely inspired man, and pray that another enlightened one be sent us.'"

Down in Italy, meanwhile, Michelangelo was carried along on the current of the Counter-Reformation, taking an interest in the so-called "spirituale," the Italian equivalent of the "alumbrados" we've had occasion to mention when discussing Spanish mysticism. One of Michelangelo's masterpieces may also react to the ideas unleashed by Luther. I have in mind the enormous painting called "The Last Judgment," found on a wall of the Sistine Chapel, where it complements the frescoes he painted some years earlier on the ceiling.

We're going to look at the Sistine Chapel in this episode, alongside one of Jota's most famous images, a self-portrait he painted in the year 1500, in which he seems to have represented himself looking like Jesus Christ. When I first had the idea to devote an episode to these two artworks, I was concerned that it might seem a bit forced to connect them to the ideas we've been covering in the podcast, but I needn't have worried.

Taking Dürer first, it could hardly be more obvious that his artistic production responded to the ideas swirling around Germany at the turn of the 16th century. For starters, he was above all known for images that were reproduced many times by that new technology, the printing press. Dürer's godfather established the first press in his hometown of Nuremberg. Dürer was also the son of a goldsmith, so he learned the art of engraving young, and ultimately became an unchallenged master at this technique and the making of woodcuts.

Like Erasmus, the wide dissemination of his works gave him a fame that would have been impossible without printing. How appropriate, then, that he made an engraved image of Erasmus himself, of which Erasmus diplomatically remarked, "...it is not surprising that this picture does not correspond exactly to my appearance. I am no longer the person I was five years ago." With his typical blunt humor, Luther agreed that the likeness was a poor one, and added, "...but then no one is really pleased with his own likeness."

In general though, Erasmus was very taken with Dürer. He compared him to the ancient painter Apelles, whose creations were so convincing that they were taken for the real thing, according to the classical author Pliny. In fact, Erasmus said that Dürer outdid Apelles because he needed only the black lines of a printed image to convey what painters showed with the full range of colors.

Warming to his theme, Erasmus enthused, he even depicts what cannot be depicted: fire, rays of light, thunderstorms, sheet lightning, or even as the saying is, the clouds upon a wall. All the characters and emotions, in short, the whole mind of man as it shines forth from the appearance of the body. Nor was this the only connection between Dödo and humanism, even if he disarmingly claimed to be an untaught man of little learning.

He was a close confidant of the scholar Willibald Pirkeimer, writing to him at one point, "I have no other friend on earth like you." Like many humanists, Dürer visited Italy, and while he was there, Pirkeimer asked him to find interesting Greek books to bring home. Pirkeimer was also the subject of a portrait by Dürer which bears the unbeatably humanist motto, "One lives through the mind, all else is subject to death."

And there are other clear examples of Gioro's involvement with humanism. One would be a frontispiece he made for an edition of St. Jerome's letters, which shows Jerome as translator of the Bible with the first line of Genesis in three languages. Another would be Gioro's own works on measurement and human proportion. Here we might be reminded of the output of an Italian humanist like Leon Battista Alberti, who composed a work on painting that we've had occasion to discuss in the past.

Erasmus identified Döder's understanding of proportion as the key to his genius and capacity for verisimilitude, and Döder would have agreed. He sounds rather like a Platonist when he observes in his book on the subject, there lives on earth not one beautiful person who could not be more beautiful. Because physical individuals fall short in this way, the best way to make a truly beautiful human image is to take the best parts from different people and combine them. As for what beauty itself might be, he admitted that he did not know.

Which might be a good way into another famous image created by Gioro entitled Melancholia. It's a kind of visual riddle showing a discontented winged figure who is holding a compass and has a large number of mysterious items scattered around her. A dog, a cherub, a sphere, a big knife, an hourglass, a set of scales, and strangest of all, what looks like an asymmetric block of stone.

An interesting study of this picture suggests that it may be inspired by one of Plato's lesser-known dialogues, in which Socrates talks to a sophist named Hippias, who boasted competence in all the arts. The various implements in the scene represent arts mentioned in the dialogue, and the melancholic central figure is disgruntled because true beauty lies beyond her grasp.

That would be represented by the weird shape, which could be a botched attempt to make a dodecahedron, that is, a 12-sided platonic solid, named as the shape corresponding to the heavens in Plato's Timaeus. I could definitely have chosen Melancholia as my representative work by Durer, but I've instead gone with that self-portrait from 1500, the one where he looks like Jesus.

It's not an engraving or woodcut, but a painting, something Dürer emphasizes in a text included in the image. I, Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg, painted myself in special colors at the age of 28 years. In this period, there was a kind of competition between drawing and painting, or as the Italians put it, disegno and colore.

If I may paint with a somewhat broad brush, the partisans of drawing, with its exactness and attention to proportion, can be associated with the Platonist leanings of Italian humanists like Ficino. Indeed, Florence was a center for expertise in disegno. Given what I've said so far, Jutter would seem to be an obvious candidate for a northern artist who followed this line of thought, but he was clearly anxious not to be thought of as just a great draftsman.

He wrote to Pirkeima that, thanks to a painted image of the Virgin Mary, he had silenced those painters who said that I was skilled in printmaking, but that in painting I didn't know how to handle colors. Now everyone says that they have never seen more beautiful colors. This painting from 1500 is not his only self-portrait. He made quite a number of them, and appears in such varied guises in them that he almost seems to be playing different characters, like an actor in a play.

Appropriate, then, that the art historian Joseph Leocana has mentioned Steven Griedblatt's work on individualism in Shakespeare to illuminate these artworks. Of course, Jodder was generations earlier than Shakespeare, but he was a contemporary of Erasmus. So it's plausible to say that he expressed in visual media the fascination with individuality that we have many times associated with Renaissance culture.

It's also plausible to say that this is typical of Northern Renaissance art in particular. Another commentator says, "Unlike Italian artists who generally focused on the elaboration of an idealized canon of beauty, German draftsmen strove to capture in their drawings what they perceived as individual, specific, and characteristic in the world around them." If you look through Dürer's output, you'll see plenty of evidence for this claim, as in an astounding drawing he made of his own mother.

Even without having met her, you can tell that this could not be a picture of anyone else. But it's one thing to paint recognizable individuals, even oneself, and to show them in different guises. It's another thing entirely to depict oneself as Christ the Savior. In the self-portrait of 1500, Dürer shows himself with a beard and flowing hair, dressed in a robe with a fur collar, and facing the viewer directly with a penetrating stare. The frontal presentation is one associated with pictures of Christ and other religious figures.

Art historians, including the great scholar of Renaissance art Erwin Panofsky, have long wondered how Dürer could have been so daring, arguably even blasphemous, as to cast himself in this particular role. One way to avoid the problem would be to deny that Dürer really meant to make himself look like Christ.

Not the easiest case to make, since any modern viewer will instantly adopt that interpretation. In fact, while I was writing these very words, my daughter came into the room, took one look at the picture, and said, is he supposed to look like Jesus or what? But maybe it struck people at the time differently.

One study I consulted takes exactly this line, solving the blasphemy problem by suggesting that we are misreading Dürer's intentions. It points out that there is hardly any historical evidence for people reading the painting as Christ-like across the following centuries. But I think that in this case we can trust our eyes, modern though they may be.

There's an evident similarity between Dörö's painting and a portrait of Christ by Jan van Eyck, painted back in 1440, or rather two copies of the van Eyck, since the original is lost. More convincing still, other portraits of Dörö seem to pull the same trick, especially one where he shows himself as a man of sorrows, pointing at a wound in his side, just like Christ's. Let's assume then that Dörö did intend to paint himself as Christ. The question is, why?

In his lengthy discussion of the painting, Koerner says that Dürer was motivated by the idea of individualism and also by the desire to exalt his own artistic practice. He writes, "...by transferring the attributes of imagistic authority and quasi-magical power once associated with the true and sacred image of God to the novel subject of self-portraiture, Dürer legitimates his radically new notion of art, one based on the irreducible relation between the self and the work of art."

He also draws a nice connection to another German figure of the time, Nicholas of Cusa. A work I did not mention in the episode on him is his 1453 treatise On the Face of God. There, Cusanus talks about the illusionistic trick whereby a painted portrait may seem to follow the viewer with its eyes as the viewer moves around the room. For Cusanus, this is comparable to the way divine vision is able to follow events in the created world without involving any change in God.

Cusanus also says that God the Creator is like a painter, indeed, one who paints himself. Perhaps Döder wanted to suggest the same thing. This reading of the painting would more or less match what I was thinking when I selected it as a focus for this episode. Of course, the year it was made, 1500, places it earlier than the outbreak of the Reformation. But as we've seen, other thinkers already anticipated themes found in Luther, hence that saying that Luther hatched an egg laid by Erasmus.

With his self-portrait, Jodah captures in a single picture what Erasmus used a lot more than a thousand words to say, that individuals may have an intimate relationship with God, even that there is a spark of divinity within each person. The task of Christians would be to find and nourish that spark, whether by identifying with Christ's sufferings, as Jodah does in the other self-portrait as a man of sorrows, or by triumphantly using special colors to create an astonishingly lifelike imitation of what God has created.

so lifelike that Dürer's own dog supposedly licked the self-portrait, having mistaken it for his master. Of course, there's no way this could have happened with Michelangelo's paintings on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Maybe if they'd instead been on the roof. The work was begun in 1508, about one dog's year after Dürer's self-portrait, and completed in 1512. The commission came directly from Pope Julius II, as the Sistine Chapel is where he, other high church officials, and members of the papal household worshipped.

The chapel is named for Pope Sixtus IV, who had it built to the same dimensions as Solomon's Temple as described in the Bible. It was consecrated in 1483. In the intervening years, the painting of starry heavens on the ceiling had been ruined by cracking, and new frescoes were needed.

Michelangelo was not necessarily the obvious choice. Much as Dürer was known mostly for woodcuts, so he was primarily a sculptor. He had already created, among other famous works, the Statue of David that became a symbol of the Republic of Florence when it was placed in front of the Palazzo della Signoria in 1504. Michelangelo was actually frustrated at being tapped to do the ceiling because he wanted to be working on the sculptures for a monumentally ambitious tomb, also commissioned by Julius.

In a collection of biographical sketches, that is, more or less a version of the ancient lives of the philosophers by Diogenes Laetius, but for Renaissance Italian artists, Giorgio Vasari claims that the reassignment was the result of conniving on the part of Michelangelo's rivals. They assumed he would embarrass himself, taking on this demanding task in a medium that was not his specialty. If so, the plot was a spectacular failure.

Vasari echoed the familiar Renaissance rhetoric of a luminous new time following on the dark ages of the past when he said of the Sistine ceiling, "...this work has been and truly is the beacon of our art, and has brought such benefit and enlightenment to the art of painting that it was sufficient to illuminate a world which for so many hundreds of years had remained in the state of darkness."

Like the Italian humanists he would have known through his education and social circles in Florence, Michelangelo too saw himself as reviving moribund art forms. We can see this in his sculptures, which are powerfully influenced by antique scatuary. Michelangelo trained himself by making copies of them and had an early boost to his career when a cupid he had made was mistaken for a genuine antiquity. His interest in ancient culture is also literally visible on the Sistine ceiling.

The clearest instance is that Old Testament prophets are depicted alongside pagan sibyls, women seers whose prognostications were thought by Christians to foretell the coming of Christ. This notion itself goes back to antiquity. It can be found in Lactantius, an ancient Christian writer who was, along with Cicero, among the first classical authors to have his works printed in Italy. I should mention a caveat here, which is that Michelangelo may not have chosen the iconography for the ceiling.

He claims that the Pope gave him permission to do whatever he liked, but it's more likely that trained theologians would have been brought in to consult, especially given the importance of the setting. For this reason, we should also be hesitant to take them as an expression of Michelangelo's own preferences or even his philosophical leanings. Laid out along the main axis are three groups of three frescoes, showing God's creation of the universe, the creation and fall of Adam, and the story of Noah.

If we read the ceiling from Noah to Adam to God, then this could be taken to symbolize an ascent from the mundane to the spiritual, perhaps an echo of the Platonism Michelangelo would have brought from Florence along with his brushes. The aforementioned Erwin Panofsky was inclined to interpret Michelangelo as a Platonist, and to make the point, quoted the great artist as calling the body an earthly prison of the soul, a commonplace drawn ultimately from Plato.

But, it's been observed by the Michelangelo expert, Creighton Gilbert, who by the way was a professor at Yale when my brother was there getting his PhD, that the chapel wall already depicted the story of Moses before Michelangelo came along. This made the scenes on the ceiling almost an inevitable choice, since the natural narrative sequence is downwards. The imagery up top would have to be drawn from parts of the Old Testament that come even earlier in the chronology than Moses.

But even if we cannot infer too much about Michelangelo's theological or philosophical ideas from the selection of themes, the way he painted those themes tells us plenty.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the ceiling is its focus on the human form, with minimal depiction of objects or background. Or perhaps I shouldn't say human form, since the most prominent character is God himself, shown as a kind of superhero swathed in pink-purple robes hurtling through the void as he separates light from dark and summons into existence the sun and moon.

The new techniques of perspective we discussed back in episode 361 are put to good use, especially in one striking image of God flying up and away with his back turned to the viewer down on the floor of the chapel. And by the way, if you want to see a great image showing how artists achieved these perspectival effects, check out Dodo's print of a perspective machine from 1525.

Many of the other figures on the ceiling are nude, allowing Michelangelo to call on another recent advance that we discussed in the following episode, number 362, an improved understanding of human anatomy.

Admittedly, the greatest Renaissance anatomist, Vesalius, was born only in 1514, just after Michelangelo finished his labors painting the ceiling. But it would be entirely fair to connect Michelangelo's approach as an artist to Vesalius' later remark that ancient sculptures were in part so convincing because they accurately depict the muscles of the human body. Of course, the naked Adam appears in the iconic fresco of God creating him, the two figures shown with outstretched arms, fingers almost touching.

It's such a familiar image, found on t-shirts and fridge magnets around the world, that we may forget to ask ourselves what it means. Again, ancient sources may be relevant. Augustine and other authors speak of the finger of God as representing the divine power that creates and then sanctifies humankind. An alternative, or perhaps complementary, idea was suggested by another early biographer of Michelangelo, Ascanio Condivi.

He said that the finger is one of command. God is shown here giving Adam precepts as to what he must and must not do. If this is right, then the most famous picture on the ceiling of the chapel resonates thematically with the gigantic painting Michelangelo later added to its wall, showing the last judgment. Here we see what happens to people who follow those divine precepts, and especially what happens to those who don't. It was commissioned only in 1534, again by a pope, in this case Clement VII.

An original plan to show the resurrection of Christ was changed with a new theme selected under yet another pope, Paul III. Given the dating, we might wonder whether the resulting masterpiece reflects themes of the Counter-Reformation, much as Joda's self-portrait seems to anticipate themes of the Protestant Reformation. As one critic has commented, the very choice of topic may already do so.

The selection of a last judgment, far more popular in the Middle Ages than in the worldly Renaissance, has been interpreted as a sign that the era of humanism was dead and the era of the Counter-Reformation had begun. This is, in the most literal sense, an apocalyptic image, a response to unsettled times and unsettling ideas. It insists on the resurrection, and when appropriate, the punishment of the body, which is fully in keeping with the Church's recent doctrinal statements on the afterlife.

What Michelangelo adds, as only he could, is an evocation of the contorted physical agony of the sinners who are being dispatched to their fate. It's a terrifying application of his later so-called mannerist style, which is already on show in some of the final images he had painted for the ceiling years earlier. On the other hand, if you had to name just one inspiration for Michelangelo's Last Judgment, it would probably be a fellow Florentine who played a major role in Renaissance Italian humanism, Dante.

Vasari already makes the connection, explaining that the painting's portrayal of Charon the boatman was done in imitation of the description given by Michelangelo's very favorite poet, Dante. As Panofsky points out, Michelangelo would likely have read his favorite poet along with Platonist commentaries, like the one by Cristoforo Landino. So it is apt when Vasari goes on to a rather Platonist interpretation of The Last Judgment as a whole,

This painting is that example and that great picture sent by God to men on earth so that they could see how fate operates when supreme intellects descend to earth and are infused with grace and the divinity of knowledge. A Platonist interpretation could also help to explain Michelangelo's choice to place Christ in the center of the image instead of at the top, which is highly unusual in the history of depictions of the Last Judgment.

Christ's role is to separate the wheat from the chaff, sending the good upwards and the sinners down to meet their fate, so a central placement does make logical and graphical sense. But there's also a message here about the radical dependence of all things on God. At the time, a correspondent who wrote to Michelangelo referred to the painting as depicting the universe and heaven and hell.

If so, then divinity is placed at the middle of everything, not as in Aristotelian philosophy, at the periphery, tasked with nothing more than steering the heavens. Let me conclude on a final point suggested to me by my brother. When I told him that I was working on an episode comparing and contrasting Duda and Michelangelo, he gave me an insight about the fact that on the Sistine ceiling, the outstretched fingers of Adam and God are not quite touching.

This could be taken to symbolize the ultimate transcendence of God. We humans can reach for him, but not reach him. By contrast, Jodo's self-portrait can be read as an image of human closeness to God. In fact, never mind mere closeness, here the artist has become identical with Christ.

We could take this even further by suggesting that the distance between God and humankind, suggested on the Sistine ceiling, is a good fit for Catholic culture. Priestly mediation, through the sacraments, is needed to carry us across that small space between the fingers. Whereas, as we've seen, Jodo's self-portrait could evoke the individualized and immediate spiritual encounter that was so important to Erasmus and the Protestant reformers.

Wooden shouldn't insist too emphatically on this. After all, the interplay of divine transcendence and imminence was already fundamental to medieval spirituality and philosophy. Still, it's one more reason to think that art history could be a natural pairing with the history of philosophy. Art and philosophy are, you might say, like twins, born in the same circumstances, mirroring each other as they respond to those circumstances. It's something to ponder over the next month, during which the podcast will be on its usual annual break.

When September comes, we'll dive back into the story of Iberian scholasticism. I can already tell you in advance the first topic we'll cover, namely the analysis of divine foreknowledge offered by Luis de Molina, involving his famous doctrine of middle knowledge. That's what you can look forward to next time here on the History of Philosophy, without any gaps.