Myths in Art, XV–XVII Centuries

Dear Colleagues,

The pagan gods are a robust stock. Made capricious in Homer, atomized by Lucretius, constrained to the law of their own natures by Cicero, only to be seemingly subverted and overthrown by the Christians so that one would have thought they were finished. Yet by late antiquity the erudite mythographers Martianus Cappella and Fulgentius Planciades gave mythology a didactic worth, as allegorizing moral truths and philosophical precepts. These learned intermediaries’ encyclopedic synthesis of the vast mythological-religious patrimony of ancient Greece and Rome had permitted the formation of medieval allegorical readings of that patrimony in Boccaccio’s scholarly compendium Genealogia deorum gentilium (“Genealogy of the Pagan Gods”) and Petrus Berchorius’ Ovidius Moralizatus, an intellectual approach that prevailed among humanists into the seventeenth-century. This special edition will explore how the reception of myths in Early Modern Europe impacted upon artistic representation of mythological subjects and what this may reveal to us culturally about the history of ideas at the time.

Important matters such as the liberal arts, medicine, mineralogy, philosophy, alchemy, astrology and theology were thought pertinent to what ancient myths had to communicate allegorically to early modern humanists, literati, medics, scientists and their respective noble patrons at all the European courts that mattered – from Medicean Florence, to d’Este Ferrara; from Gonzaga Mantua, to Montefeltro Urbino and papal Rome; from Francis I’s Fontainebleau, to Prague under Rudolf II, Habsburg Spain, the Archduke of Austria, Albert VII’s Brussels and the palace and gardens of Louis XIV’s Versailles. Part of the miracle was due to the Florentine academy under Marsilio Ficino, whose Latin translations of Plato and the Hermetic corpus prompted further speculation about the significance of ancient mythology that likely inspired topics of learned discussion at the courts. Artists, too, though limited in their scholarly awareness, in receiving commissions for mythological narratives or fantasies derived from them, were challenged to illustrate their subjects in ways that conveyed the arcane mysteries thought concealed within the outward appearance of the fables: from Botticelli and Pinturicchio, to Dürer, Raphael and Titian, to Caravaggio, Rubens, Bernini, Velázquez and Rembrandt among others. The allegorizing zeal and a pervasive interest in the Wisdom of antiquity spawned the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, hot off the Aldine press of Venice in 1499 and dedicated to Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino. The extraordinary engravings accompanying the text illustrate mythological inspired, hallucinatory settings, populated by ancient ruins, nymphs, satyrs and Olympian gods.

To explain the complex iconography in Botticelli’s Primavera, Aby Warburg in his dissertation pioneered scholarly attention to the Immagini degli Dei de gl’ Antichi (“Images of the Gods of the Ancients”) by Vincenzo Cartari, initially published in 1556 at Venice, which was the first iconographic manual specifically directed to artists. Warburg thus inaugurated an approach to study mythological artworks that also attempted to concretely place them within the cultural milieu of the period. The new method was made clearer and codified by Erwin Panofsky, who schematized the various phases of the new historical-artistic research, affording the literary texts a fundamental role in the iconographical analysis of mythological representations in the Renaissance. In 1953 Jean Seznec published his wonderful study, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art, which discusses mythology in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, to then provide a multifaceted look at the far-reaching role played by mythology in Renaissance intellectual and emotional life. Warburg’s, Panofsky’s and Seznec’s theses are open to further study, for which this special edition aims to provide analyses of mythological imagery from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries that forges new ground in our understanding of its cultural significance and iconology.

Prof. Dr. Robert Huber
Guest Editor

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