Also a book on Satyrs in Renaissance art

Also a book on Satyrs which I found today by chance, and which is clearly very relevant:
The Noble Savage: Satyrs and Satyr Families in Renaissance Art, by Lynn Frier Kaufmann.

Shakespeare and the Cannibals

Interesting essay by Stephen Orgel, in Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce - Estranging the Renaissance. M. Garber (ed.), The Johns Hopkins University Press 1987.

Maybe I'll read it, in a future life.

an essay by Eugenio Garin, titled "Alla scoperta del 'diverso': i selvaggi americani e i saggi cinesi", in: Rinascite e Rivoluzioni - Movimenti culturali dal XIV al XVIII secolo. Laterza, Bari (1975).

Ishmael's paradox

A fundamental question I am avoiding at the moment is the role that Christian thought has played in shaping a modern relativist attitude (and I would like to read something on this subject).

In a nice passage of Moby Dick, Ishmael ponders if joining Queequeg in his prayers, at risk of committing idolatry. According to him, sometimes a good Christian must turn idolator.
Ishmael's relativist argument is evidently paradoxical, but it seems to me that the Christian principle on which it is based ("to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me") invites paradox.

...I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church. How then could I unite with this wild idolator in worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship? Thought I. Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth--pagans and all included--can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! But what is worship?--to do the will of God--THAT is worship. And what is the will of God?--to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man to do to me--THAT is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn idolator...
[Moby Dick, chapter 10]

My problems with the Golden Age - part 2

I guess that, generally speaking, the Renaissance stereotype of the Golden Age was built around Hesiod's and Ovid's narratives. Still, these accounts are remarkably short and vague, and it is clear that they can be adapted or integrated at will.

For instance, Cranach's Golden Age is certainly more the reign of Aphrodite than that of Chronos (to the extent that I wonder if he read Tibullus' elegies). Cranach's primitives are the "natural" interpretation of the refined courtly characters appearing in another of his paintings, the fountain of youth (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin). And in these two pieces I see a family resemblance with the sort of themes (free relationships between sexes, Epicurean ideal, primitivist attitudes, etc.) described by Poggio Bracciolini to Niccolo' Niccoli in his famous letter from Baden (in: Two Renaissance Book Hunters: The Letters of Poggius Bracciolini to Nicolaus de Nicolis, New York, 1974; p. 24ff.).

My problems with the Golden Age

this post is mainly to state that I have many problems with the Golden Age.

Not to talk of its Renaissance Christian version.

This painting is by Lucas Cranach the elder (Alte Pinakothek, Munich - a larger version here).





I find it rather puzzling, actually.

The more I find about Piero...

the more I am surprised.
I read Panofsky's study on Piero di Cosimo, and I guess I have more questions now than I had before.

It seems that Piero was obsessed by primitivism. He devoted various cycles of his works to the primitive state of mankind and the beginnings of civilization (apart from the series on hunting and animals, he painted a cycle on Vulcanus and Prometheus, plus another one on Bacchus - in their quality of innovators and mythological fathers of civilization).

However, Vasari's description of Piero is in this respect even more striking (and worth reading directly).
According to Vasari, Piero was a sort of wild and misanthropic figure, in love with the "subtleties of nature" (sottigliezze della natura), and recoiling urban and Florentine life. Vasari says that Piero lived alone and secluded, mostly enjoying long solitary walks. He hated noises and sounds, particularly bells and il cantar dei frati (friars' singing). He preferred raw food (apart from hard-boiled eggs). He never cleaned is shop, nor he cared to prune the trees of his garden, allegando che le cose d'essa natura bisogna lasciarle custodire a lei, senza farvi altro ("claiming that nature itself should preserve her own things, without any other intervention").
Vasari resumes Piero's wildness in a sentence: una vita da uomo piuttosto bestiale che umano ("a life more adequate to a bestial than to a human man"). Panofsky underlines another of Vasari's sharp annotations: Piero si contentava di veder salvatico ogni cosa, come la sua natura ("vedere salvatico ogni cosa" is a rather nice and concise Italian expression not so easy to render, but probably the sense of this passage is: Piero "enjoyed looking at the savage qualities of things, as his own nature [was savage]").

When Piero died, Vasari was nine years old, and it is clear that his portrait of the artist comes from the strong impression that Piero's eccentric life-style had produced among the Florentines.
However, how does Vasari's colorful depiction of Piero's wildness fit with the very refined literary and mythological allusions of his art? It is clear that something is missing here.

A related question I have is that of the social environment that was receptive to this sort of themes. According to Panofsky, it is probable that the cycle on hunting and on Vulcanus was commissioned to Piero by a certain Francesco di Filippo Pugliese, who probably was, as we know from the Istorie of Giovanni Cambi, a rich merchant of popular origins (uomo popolano e merchatante e richo).
In the case of the series on Vulcanus, Panofsky convincingly argues that the commission from this rich merchant of low birth makes perfect sense: Vulcanus is, after all, the most plebeian god - the only real worker in the Greek pantheon.
However, Piero's other series is centered on the issues of primitivism, and is an elaborate reflection on this theme: what kind of reception did primitivism have in Florence between the 15th and 16th centuries? Should we say with Panofsky that the surprising relevance of this theme in Piero is most of all due to Piero's own idiosyncratic interests? (this is of course at least partially true, but it also seems that Piero found a rather favorable environment in Renaissance Florence for his primitivistic views, notwithstanding his savage temper...)

Again on Piero di Cosimo

I think that the link I was making in a previous post:

Piero seems to link hunting and violence against animals with the origin of violence among human beings (see for instance the killing of the man on the right side of the painting)

is far from evident. It is much more natural to imagine that that scene represents a man killed by an animal during the hunt. Still, Piero's view of hunting seems negative: the various hunters look ferocious and savage, while the animals are showed as defenseless.
More on Piero di Cosimo as soon as I will read Panofsky.