Simone Martini’s Frontispiece to Petrarch’s Copy of Virgil, Georgics and Eclogues, 1338-44
Robert Baldwin
Associate Professor of Art History
Connecticut College
(This essay was written in the late 1990s as part of a book project on the rise of Renaissance landscape.Prior to posting this on my web site in February 2012, I revised this essay slightly for grammar and gave it a new opening paragraph on secular imagery in medieval art.)
Secular Imagery in Late Medieval Art
Martini’s frontispiece for Petrarch’s copy of Virgil’s rustic poems offers a relatively rare example of pagan subject matter in late medieval art. To be sure, such subjects were not unknown. The pagan zodiac and planetary themes were commonly included as a subordinate element in the sculptured facades and stained glass windows of Gothic cathedrals and in other official buildings such as town halls (Siena). Zodiacal images of the body also appeared frequently in illuminated books on cosmology, astrology, and medicine. Mythological themes also appeared, occasionally, in manuscripts of chivalric romances and allegories. With the exception of astrology which was welcome as a motif in large, public works of art, most pagan imagery in the later Middle Ages was confined to the more discrete, educated, and private world of the manuscript. Here, both patrons and artists were freer to indulge a growing taste for secular subjects. And here most pagan imagery remained until the later fifteenth century when freed by Italian Renaissance humanism to emerge into the full light of day and with strikingly pagan nudes.
Virgil as Roman Court Writer
Along with Boccaccio, Petrarch was one of the two most important early humanists in Italy. Both were Florentine. Martini’s illuminationdecorated a prized manuscript owned by Petrarch which contained Virgil’s Aeneid, Georgics and Eclogues, the most famous epic and agricultural and pastoral poems from Roman antiquity (written around 15 BC.) The manuscript also contains influential commentaries on Virgil written in the fourth century by Servius as well as other Roman poems by Horace and Statius. Working for the first Roman emperor, Augustus, Virgil was known primarily for the Aeneid, his great epic tracing the history of the Trojan hero, Aeneas, the son of Venus, who fled burning Troy (located in modern Turkey) and established the beginnings of a new settlement on the Italian coast which later became Rome. For the next two thousand years, Virgil’s Aeneid would become the most influential narrative of imperial conquest as civilization. [i] His poems on farming and pastoral nature – the Georgics and Eclogues, respectively - were also tied to Roman imperial court culture in their ideas of cosmic order and government, pastoral harmony and peace, and a Golden Age recovered under the wise rule of a divinely-ordained ruler (Augustus).
Virgil’s poems were much more serious and sober than the sensual writings of his colleague, Ovid. As such, they held a special appeal in the Middle Ages when Christian either lambasted Ovid for his lecherous verse or allegorized it heavily in Christian terms. For the same reasons, the moral and politically-oriented poetry of Virgil appealed greatly to the Florentine republican humanist, Petrarch, who espoused a more sober, burgher humanism tied to Stoic morality. In contrast to his fellow humanist, Boccaccio, whose romantic stories looked back to the spirit of Ovid and who delighted in amorous gardens, pastoral settings, and tales of seduction, Vergil and Petrarch focused on a nature tied less to courtly pleasure and leisure than sober work, moderation, spiritual retreat, self-contentment, and communal obligations. These were largely the same burgher, republican values celebrated in Lorenzetti’s agricultural landscape in the town hall of Siena painted around the same time as Martini’s frontispiece.
Petrarch as Burgher Humanist and Sober Republican
Despite sharing Virgil’s sober moral tone, Petrarch’s civic humanism diverged in some important ways from Virgil’s Roman imperial outlook with its grand notions of conquest, rule, divine ancestry and providence, and universal harmony. Petrarch’s nature was geared more toward moral virtues and the inner world of burgher virtue prized in the smaller, more modest world of republican city-states such as Florence, Siena, and Pisa. If Virgil’s court poetry glorified the politics of heroic warrior-conquerors, empire and universal dominion. Petrarch’s writings extolled a humbler, more mundane sphere of self-government, civic virtue, and “inner nobility” tied to mind and character. Empire was of interest to Petrarch more as proud Italian history. Or it was translated into burgher humanist notions of intellectual empire, cultural revival and a new golden age of Italian culture. Although Petrarch’s ideas of cultural golden age drew heavily on an earlier Roman rhetoric of Augustan cultural revival elaborated in Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, he redefined it in fourteenth-century burgher humanist terms. For all his admiration of Virgil, Petrarch subordinated conquering princes such as Aeneas to the new Renaissance burgher humanist ideal of the sober, virtuous, hard-working, divinely-inspired poet. In the end, he admired Virgil the world famous author more than his divinely born protagonist, Aeneas, or his all-powerful patron, Augustus. By placing the spotlight on Virgil’s accomplishments, Petrarch also claimed new importance for his own labors and status in a brave new world marked by urban economic, social, and intellectual advancement.
Reading Martini’s Frontispiece
In Petrarch’s manuscript, Martini’s frontispiece faces the opening page of Servius’ commentaries on Virgil’s rustic poems. Martini imagines a laurel-crowned Virgil writing under a tree in a pastoral setting, looking up in divine inspiration. At left, Servius pulls back the curtain to reveal Virgil in a gesture which visually mimics the intellectual efforts of Renaissance humanists like Petrarch to unveil and restore the great texts of classical antiquity. Servius directs the attention of a nearby soldier – perhaps Aeneas - while below two shepherds look up. In this way, the lowly figures extolled by Virgil and raised to a higher dignity through his poetry pay visual homage to the poet’s lofty mind. Menial rustics acknowledge the rule of a celestial reason which descends to Virgil, and to Petrarch as well, who authored three Latin couplets inscribed in the painting. The first two read as follows.
“Oh bountiful Italian soil, thou hast nourished great poets, but this man [Virgil] has enabled you to obtain the aims of the Greeks”. [i.e. Virgil is connected to an earlier tradition of Greek poetry going back to Homer]
“Servius [is] uncovering the secrets of Maro [Virgil] the high-sounding, that they may be revealed to leaders, shepherds, and farmers”.
Although the second inscription speaks of revealing the secrets of Virgil’s poetry to the shepherds and farmers who look up, the educated viewer would have seen a clear social and intellectual hierarchy discriminating between the world of writers, intellectuals, and leaders, on the one hand, and uneducated rustics incapable of reading the very poems in which they were represented. It also goes without saying that they could not have read Martini’s allegorical images inscribed with Latin text. Martini underscored this hierarchy by placing Virgil and one of the shepherds in a similar position. In this way, he invited the reader-viewer to recognize both the commonalities and the world of difference between the anonymous shepherd sitting on the ground milking his goats and the celebrated Virgil, known through all time and space, composing some of the world’s greatest poetry. Though seated on the ground, Virgil’s inspiration clearly flows from the heavens. In contrast, the peasant can only looks up admiringly at his social superior as he exists in a lower, natural realm beyond divine inspiration.
Through these subtle visual choices translating classical and late medieval literary and social values into hierarchical visual structures, Martini included himself in the world of high culture as a different kind of author. Indeed, this was explicitly spelled out in the third couplet comparing Virgil’s writing to Martini’s painting. Here readers could admire Martini’s visual invention as a form of “authorship” and lofty intellect worthy of the great Virgil. Like Lorenzetti who proudly signed his complex allegories in Latin, Martini’s literary frontispiece suggested the desire of some late medieval painters to be recognized as thinkers, not just menial craftsmen all too easily grouped with lowly rustics.
Late Medieval Naturalism as High Mind and “Allegory”
Martini’s frontispiece and Lorenzetti’s Good Government in City and Country remind us that naturalism arose in the later Middle Ages not in opposition to allegory or as the liberation of seeing from intellect. In part, naturalism needed explicit mind and allegory to justify itself before it could emerge in late medieval and early renaissance art. Except for the court life, everyday life was too ordinary, too common, too base to enter significantly into art unless it could be “allegorized” and raised to some nobler significance. Thus the rise of naturalism in the late Middle Ages, especially in secular subjects, was inseparable from “allegory”. Here I use that term loosely to refer to the explicit structuring of reality to endow it with some higher significance.
Martini was able to paint rustics with a new observation and “truth” because those coarse bodily presences appeared in a larger, hierarchical universe, a coherent world ruled by intellect and geared toward higher purposes. With this in mind, it is much too simplistic to see earlier medieval art as more conceptual and late medieval naturalism as grounded in empirical seeing. It is more fruitful to see naturalism itself as a new form of visual thinking which was more subtly and cleverly intellectual than the flat, diagrammatic, abstract compositions of earlier medieval art. That is, naturalism arose as a kind of “visual allegory,” a visual language grounded in plausible images of the world reconfigured aesthetically to create a higher reality of artistic seeing tied to the mind’s eye. If the natural world became the vocabulary of a new aesthetic language, the stylistic choices available to the artist such as composition, lighting, color, space, and description became its grammar and syntax.
[i] See Richard Waswo, The Founding Legend of Western Civilization: From Virgil to Vietnam, Wesleyan University Press, 1997