This is not by Leonardo or VITRUVIAN MAN AND THE FEATHERLESS BIPED

I suspect that the Saint Anthony tapestry was mostly designed by the Pieter Coecke van Aelst workshop and not the Raphael workshop since the Roman ruin in the background is a terribly callous way to allude to the 1527 Sack of Rome which must have caused untold destruction among Raphael’s circle. But it seems likely they helped out with the man in a shell near the lower left corner.

The best explanation for an illustration in the tapestry of Leonardo da Vinci’s caption on the famous Vitruvian Man drawing seems to be Vasari’s claim that there were 50 people milling around the Stanza della Segnatura while Raphael and assistants worked on the famous fresco of the School of Athens. Leonardo’s caption was 1) on an unpublished drawing, 2) in Italian, and 3) backwards in “mirror writing,” and 4) it suggested a hilarious way to misread Vitruvius. The 50 (all or mostly) Italian persons could have included serious scholars, child apprentices, and persons preoccupied with rivaling Leonardo and Michelangelo.

A translation of the second paragraph of the caption on Leonardo’s famous drawing, just above the man’s head, reads

 “if you open your legs enough that your head is lowered by one-fourteenth of your height and raise your hands enough that your extended fingers touch the line of the top of your head, know that the centre of the extended limbs will be the navel, and the space between the legs will be an equilateral triangle”

and fits the person in a shell in the tapestry as well as it does the famous Vitruvian Man in the drawing. It is similar to innumerable sight gags mocking Leonardo in The Garden of Delights/El Jardín de las Delicias, for instance the suggestion that horses are interesting to paint if they are red, white, and blue. The political point was that François I, king of France, was proud of his Leonardo paintings.

The point of the imitation Vitruvian man might be that it is not at all easy to reconstruct Roman architecture based on the Ten Books of Architecture/De Architectura even with the wonderful new editions with woodcut illustrations. The Raphael workshop had faced a similar problem working on the School of Athens, an enormous group portrait, with only some books and old portraits for guidance, and 50 people in the room.

Next to the Vitruvian man in the tapestry and much less obscure is an illustration of another ancient oversimplified definition of a man, the famous “featherless biped” of Plato that Diogenes proposed could just as well be a plucked chicken. The story came from Diogenes Laertius:

“Plato had defined Man as an animal, biped and featherless, and was applauded. Diogenes plucked a fowl and brought it into the lecture-room with the words, ‘Here is Plato’s man.’ In consequence of which there was added to the definition, ‘having broad nails.’” (Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers in Ten Books, Book VI, 40, page 43 of the Loeb Classics edition, vol. II)

It might be that in the School of Athens, Raphael meant to represent the incident by showing Diogenes sprawled on the floor with bare feet, as though his toenails had caught Plato’s eye.

The tapestries were more or less Bosch imitations albeit with mostly new material, and there are innumerable featherless bipeds in Hieronymus Bosch-style paintings. One in the Lisbon Saint Anthony tryptich (likely actually by Bosch since there are so many copies) illustrated the “broad nails” with hooves on what is more or less a dog with two horse’s legs and wings big ears. (I have no explanation for the wings big ears etc.)

The featherless biped in a Prado Saint Anthony (Las tentaciones de San Antonio Abad, Num. de catálogo P02049) is vastly more attractive and is a little like the one in the tapestry but with human feet. Looking closely at this painting with the help of the museum’s Galería Online, I am starting to think it could really be the work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. He was said to have studied with Pieter Coecke van Aelst and the tapestries are filled with odds and ends that are almost like Bruegel but seldom as good as Bruegel (maybe with the exception of the featherless biped shown here), and he would have been a small child when they were made. The most extraordinary improvement on a theme from the tapestries is the newly restored El vino de la fiesta de San Martín. The small painting of Saint Anthony is vastly harder to recognize as a Bruegel but that may be what it is. I think it is my favorite picture.

Ernst Gombrich, “The Earliest Description of Bosch’s Garden of Delight,” JWCI 30 (1967), 403-6, or how the triptych looked a dozen years before it was painted

In honor of the upcoming Hieronymus Bosch conference, here’s what it’s all based on, or at least what the attribution of The Garden of Delights/El Jardín de las Delicias to Hieronymus Bosch is based on. Gombrich (whose dissertation was on a Raphael associate) and Steppe (a tapestry expert) both pointed attention away from the Raphael tapestries that were the biggest show in town.

How to Spot a Raphael

Here is a fun link from Bendor Grosvenor to a London National Gallery web page. I think that in their picture of Eve the Raphael workshop were trying to imitate the lost tapestry cartoon by Leonardo. But it looks as though it was Raphael who showed them how to paint pretty eyes.
    Note on method: Morellian details can sometimes point to student work.

Raphael workshop/taller de Rafael

The current hypothesis is that the triptych in the Museo del Prado is based on the design for one of the tapestries in the style of El Bosco, was probably painted in 1530 or shortly before, and is best attributed to the Raphael workshop/taller de Rafael. It appears as though asked to illustrate the possible confusion of stories about St. George and St. Ursula with an allegory involving the constellations Draco and Ursa Minor, they came up with an improved version of Raphael’s St. George, whose arms were missing in the original painting. They added arms and subtracted the armor.

Here is the context. The Spanish infanta Catalina, Katherine of Aragon, who was well educated in Latin and spoke no English, might have been perplexed by a performance put on as part of the celebrations for her wedding in 1501 to England’s Arthur, Prince of Wales. It had something to do with two patron saints of England, St. George who killed a dragon and St. Ursula whose name means little bear, but knowing Latin and not English the infanta might have thought they were talking about astronomy and the adjacent constellations Draco (Dragon) and Ursa Minor, although to be fair she probably knew perfectly well that Sts. George and Ursula were patron saints of England. By the time the tapestries were made she also knew English.

Medical advice for gout sufferers in The Garden of Delights/El Jardín de las Delicias

New outside evidence* that Charles V was suffering from gout raises the medical question of whether the health regimen illustrated in The Garden of Delights/El Jardín de las Delicias is medically advisable. Did Philip II (assuming he suffered from the same condition) live longer because he heeded advice to exercise outdoors and avoid eating fish? The diagnosis helps to explain some of the oddest things about the triptych including the thin people in the center panel, the oversize fish and fruit and even the thistle plant in the center; why Philip II kept it; why its meaning became obscure; and why some observers dislike it. The diagnosis of gout resolves all sorts of art historical questions but raises a medical question of whether the lifestyle shown in the painting is something to imitate or not.

Art historically, the diagnosis makes it easy to trace at least some of the triptych’s enigmatic images from their source in an older Hieronymus Bosch triptych to their disappearance in the written record:

1) Images of oversize strawberries and fish (foods for a gout sufferer to avoid), a thistle, and some skinny people clowning around under a table can be seen in Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych of the Temptations of Saint Anthony, which was apparently well known since it was widely copied (although often without the people under the table).

2) The Garden of Delights/El Jardín de las Delicias, painted for Charles V, includes the same images in a more logical setting, since the fish and strawberries in the triptych of the Temptations of Saint Anthony could not have existed in the desert. The oversize fish and fruits represent things not to eat, or not to eat much of. A sardine is to be regarded as a very large fish, and a person is shown becoming sick from eating a small amount of a very large strawberry. There is a thistle, sometimes cited as a remedy for gout, near the center of the center panel.

3) Charles V’s court was peripatetic, and carrying around a large illustration of things not to eat might not have endeared him to his hosts in one city after another. He appears to have left The Garden of Delights/El Jardín de las Delicias with a member of his entourage, Hendrick III of Nassau. It may have been a political liability, analogous to the written requests for a certain type of bottled water that sometimes surface to embarrass politicians and rock stars today.

4) Philip II, who stayed in one place, also suffered from gout, and his liking The Garden of Delights/El Jardín de las Delicias has puzzled art historians for a long time. But he is on record as saying he never ate fish, and at least in later years as actually not having fish on the menu, and for saying the best thing to do for gout was to exercise outdoors and avoid physicians. The record on fruit is ambiguous, and might have to do with avoiding some fruits but not others.**

5) José de Sigüenza’s comments on The Garden of Delights/El Jardín de las Delicias include Philip II’s saying it was not heretical and an explanation of its old title as having to do with the vanity and brief taste and aroma of strawberries or madroños (“la otra tabla, de la gloria vana y breve gusto de la fresa o madroño y su olorcillo que apenas se siente cuando ya es pasado”). A likely explanation is that Sigüenza had in mind a general audience for whom fruit was not something to try to avoid. Eating or not eating strawberries is not an important thing to most people and thus can stand as an example of vanitas. A longer explanation would have meant reiterating the history of the king’s illness which ended with severe infections.

6) A fairly large proportion of the commentary on The Garden of Delights/El Jardín de las Delicias has to do with what seems like the peculiar, unconventional, and to some observers perverse conduct of the people shown in the center panel. This can be at least partially explained by the strangeness of recommended regimens for gout sufferers, which involve not eating specific foods, and not eating much overall. Foods that are good for everyone else are off limits to the person trying to lessen the severity of gout attacks. In the weird and disagreeable predicament of a person diagnosed with gout, it is healthier to be like the people in old, medieval paintings with their exaggeratedly thin legs and feet, and less healthy to be like the sturdy figures who populate most 16^th century art. From the gout sufferer’s perspective, the pointed toes that look silly to art critics might look cheerful. The medieval look might represent a fantasy of bygone times when gout was not so widespread.

*A team of physicians have definitely established that their 16^th century predecessors were not mistaken and the illness that afflicted Charles V was definitely gout. A 2006 article in the New England Journal of Medicine by Jaume Ordi, MD et al. details their analysis of part of the emperor’s finger which had become mummified and was kept separately in the sacristy in the Escorial, where they found the characteristic lumps (“massive gouty tophi”) and urate crystals that go along with the disease.

** See Henry Kamen, Philip of Spain (1997).

note: The medical advice described here and the Nahuatl chronology described in earlier posts are both part of the overall commentary on Ecclesiastes that is the main subject of the triptych.

The Race is not to the Swift

The circle of riders in the center of the triptych represents just part of a verse from Ecclesiastes:

9:11 I turned myself toward another thing, and I saw that under the sun, the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor wealth to the learned, nor grace to the skilful: but there is a time and an end for all these things. (Verti me ad aliud, et vidi sub sole, nec velocium esse cursum, nec fortium bellum, nec sapientium panem, nec doctorum divitias, nec artificum gratiam: sed tempus, casumque in omnibus.)

How many ways are there for a swift animal and rider to lose a race? Starting at the lower left, an animal and rider could be looking up at something distracting, and the goat in front of them could be distracted by birds making noise. Every contestant in the whole circle seems to have a different problem.

The circle of riders appears to be the password for unlocking the rest of the triptych, even though I have found it fairly late in the game, after deciphering the inside and outside panels in some detail and identifying the overall subject as the book of Ecclesiastes. A more alert interpreter might have seen that all of the riders and animals were showing different ways to lose a race, remembered the part of a line from Ecclesiastes, and proceeded from there. Different interpreters might come up with different numbers if the question were about exactly how many ways to lose a race are shown in the picture, but there seem to be enough examples to make it clear that “the race is not to the swift” is the answer to a puzzle. This one extremely redundant example demonstrates how the rest of the puzzles are to be solved, by guessing the answer and then finding more detail or context based on the answer, or new questions. For José de Sigüenza the next step was to identify the vices symbolized by each animal, but for this interpretation it will be to continue with the project of establishing that the triptych dates from 1528 or later and show how it relates to more news-like events and issues, even though Sigüenza may have been right in suggesting that casting blame is a major theme in the triptych.

Henry VIII, main part of the triptych

Once the Nahuatl chronology is in place and the king and island on the outside are shown to relate to Henry VIII and his situation as of 1528, interpreting the central panels is amazingly easy. The three main topics in the triptych are the conquest of Mexico, shown year by year in annals style and in hieroglyphics, problems with Martin Luther, shown in an equally obscure fashion, and Henry VIII's pending divorce, which is shown as a matter of big, simple issues that do not go away.
To start with, the left panel shows Adam and Eve, with no replacement in case Adam wants to try again with another woman. On the other hand, the right panel shows the sack of Rome (labeled in the Nahuatl chronology as happening in 1527) which would continue to affect the divorce one way or the other.
The most obvious divorce-related image in the center panel is the scene showing a woman inside a sphere, where the man outside the sphere cannot see another man who is inside the sphere with her. Was Katherine of Aragon's marriage with the king's older brother consummated? Who knows.
Artistically, the late Hieronymus Bosch (who died in 1516) is less important than the Franciscan Thomas Murner, who had a system of teaching based on sets of pictures, sometimes playing cards. The idea was that pupils could connect words to pictures of things they liked (horses, spiders, scorpions) and also remember larger, complicated pictures. Like the "new math" of the 1960s, it made no sense to anyone but the pupils, which may have made it more effective. Murner was also the one to translate Henry VIII's book into German. The humorous side that José de Sigüenza called macaronic seems to derive more from the late Peter Martyr who was Katherine of Aragon's tutor, and the late Antonio de Nebrija.
The present interpretation has been going along CSI-style, starting with the iconographic equivalent of looking at footprints under a microscope, but like a CSI mystery, it is revolving into a situation where some of the most implausible or fragmentary early interpretations turn out to be correct. These include:

• Paul Vandenbroek's 1000-page explanation of how (paraphrasing very loosely) the center panel shows marriage as boring but necessary;
• Isabel Mateo Gomez's identification of the person at the lower right as John the Baptist (since he was beheaded for objecting to a case of bigamy);
• Derek Wilson's identification of the skull in Holbein's Ambassadors as a pun where memento mori stands for memento (Thomas More)i;
• the anonymous French inventory that described a tapestry version as follows: "…Une aultre pièce en laquelle est figuré le Monde, l'Enfer et le Paradis terrestre, enchassé en ung tableau contrefaict de menuyserie comme les précédans, sauf qu'il y a deux colonnes par voye…" The two columns made it absurdly obvious that it showed Charles V's view of the world. The associated motto "plus ultra" (farther out) applies fairly well to the process of interpreting the very complicated picture.

Also, to add something new, the fish in the center has to represent John Fisher. Saint Thomas More and Saint John Fisher, both shown as important here, were canonized later.
The artist is still unidentified but it is starting to look as though the triptych went to Breda with Hendrick III of Nassau (as various scholars claim) rather than his wife Mencía de Mendoza since Hendrick was a crony of Charles V and seems to have had more of a sense of humor than his more literate wife.
For those who long for CSI type evidence, the paw of the lizard that was discovered when the right panel was x-rayed has a remarkable resemblance to the hand of a small boy in a tapestry that was made for Hendrick III, based on a design by Raphael and Giovanni da Udine but more ridiculous than the average Raphael.