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.

Henry VIII

The picture on the outside panels is based on an illustration in the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493), with several changes.

Subtractions include:

1) the bambini at the top building a tabernacle from cut branches
2) the crystal orb representing the earth
3) the two columns at the sides, which since about 1516 had been a personal emblem of Charles V
4) the blank shields that could be filled in by the owner of a copy of the book.

Additions include:

1) a pope's crown
2) a book
3) a circular island, resembling the map in Thomas More's Utopia.

These are updates: around 1528, against the advice of Thomas More, the island king Henry VIII, who had written a book that was well received by the pope, was on the way to divorcing the queen and breaking with the Catholic Church.

The circa 1528 date comes from the allegorized Nahuatl picture writing on the inside panels, but perhaps the English connection is enough to suggest an approximate date on its own, at least to a time window when the king's decision was still up in the air.

added note: An object on the throne in the Nuremberg Chronicle illustration might be a book, but it is more prominent and recognizable on the triptych.

Vanitas (continued): lines from Ecclesiastes

This is a follow-up to an earlier post about how in a 2006 article, José Manuel Cruz Valdevinos noted that the original title of The Garden of Earthly Delights/El Jardín de las Delicias appears to have been "La Banidad del Mundo," The Vanity of the World.

More so than the better known “vanitas” still life paintings that often include skulls and/or flowers and expensive objects as a reminder of death, The Garden of Earthly Delights/El Jardín de las Delicias is about the whole book of Ecclesiastes. To start to show how the two outside panels and three inside panels relate to the book, I have picked out some verses that seem to match the different panels.

Whether its audience found them entertaining or annoying, the purpose of the innumerable seemingly nonsensical details in the painting was apparently to illustrate things that seem impossible to show in a picture, including Ecclesiastes 1:11, "There is no remembrance of the former things. Indeed, neither shall there be any record of past things in the future, for those who will exist at the very end." The exceptions include the Bible, illustrated by the picture with Adam and Eve, and the Latin Vulgate edition of the Bible, exemplified by the verse from Psalms on the outside panels. Almost everything else is obscure, leading to disagreements among art historians, but in many places things are not too obscure to decipher. Explanations tend to sound pedantic because "all is vanity" and because the artist chose some good examples of things that would be forgotten by many, including Nahuatl histories of Mexico.

I have included only the first few verses that seem relevant to the large center inside panel and the hell scene because it is easier to read the original Latin and English text separately than as a long picture caption running several pages. The text shown here is copied from an online Latin English Study Bible that shows the whole book of Ecclesiastes on one page in an easy to read format with only a little commentary. There are larger pictures of both the inside and outside panels on Wikipedia, and on newer computers the inside panels are shown in amazing detail in Google Earth (at the Museo del Prado, Madrid). The detail here, from Google Earth, shows how "the race is not to the swift" (Ecclesiastes 9:11) maybe because a swift horse is faster than a swift bear, or vice versa, or because winning has to do with motivation, or for whatever reason. If "La Banidad del Mundo" was the original title, it seems clear that the painting was not meant to be completely enigmatic.

I am working on an article that will look at one of the riddle-pictures in detail by way of texts familiar to art historians including Ovid's Metamorphoses. The picture represents Minerva turning Arachne into a spider.