Seminars

Drawing upon Athanasius Kircher’s reflections on the “Tea Herb,” my presentation will look at how the tea plant emerged as a locus of botany, horticulture, and medicinal knowledge in early modern Europe. In sharp contrast to representations of solitary plants in Renaissance herbals, Kircher’s image presents the tea plant as an ornamental shrub arranged in neat rows and tended to by Chinese workers. Here, in a rare glimpse of tea cultivation in the seventeenth century, the plant is offered as a living form whose regulation and calibration affirmed its productive potential and ornamental properties against the backdrop of medical botany. What work, then, does the tea plant do in the picture? How is it positioned as an artisanal product? What makes it a Chinese “herb”? These questions direct our attention to the travelers, merchants, artists, physicians, collectors, gardeners, and naturalists who participated in and shaped the networks of knowledge from which tea emerged as a curative plant, botanical specimen, and sensory beverage. Above all, Kircher’s image discloses an interest in haptic engagements that, in turn, relied on what Pamela Smith describes as “embodied skill and knowledge” applied to the care and sustenance of plants. Taking my cue from Smith, I situate Kircher’s image within the broader framework of gardening techniques, and horticultural and botanical practices that were deployed to cultivate and preserve vegetal matter. In doing so, I look at how these engagements laid the foundation for a plantation industry that would be developed a few centuries later in South Asia.

More’s Utopia had a significant impact on the Italian Renaissance, but the history of its reception has largely been overlooked. In an influential article, Eric Nelson argues that Utopia was ignored by Italian humanists and was taken up by the poligrafi, who interpreted it as a rejection of Roman ideals. However, Nelson’s choice to concentrate on only a few texts and failure to consider several relevant ones undermines his conclusion. A more comprehensive examination of the works Utopia directly influenced shows that the distinctiveness of its Italian Renaissance reception lies in its multifaceted nature. During the Italian Renaissance, Utopia was not only edited twice and translated into the vernacular but also “used” creatively. It was imitated, included in a literary game, evaluated, and inserted into longer works. The intellectuals who engaged with Utopia were a heterogeneous group: humanists, philosophers, and poligrafi. Because of their different intellectual inclinations, they focused on various aspects of More’s many-sided text. Some favored its ironic dimension, others concentrated on its social-political critique, and a few privileged its exploration of the best commonwealth. These ways of understanding Utopia led its Italian imitators to experiment with a variety of literary genres, from travel narratives to Ciceronian dialogues, “eccentric” centones, and literary extravaganzas. Examining the Italian Renaissance reception of Utopia sheds light on a neglected topic and reveals the vast literary and conceptual potential of More’s text.

Unlike his successors to the Spanish Crown, the emperor Charles V personally participated in several of the battles fought by his armies. His presence was emphasized in the rhetoric of the Tunis military campaign of 1535, as the embodiment of the new Scipio Africanus. Yet, his figure is barely visible in the series of tapestries designed by Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen and woven by Willem de Pannemaker in 1550-53 to celebrate his imperial deeds in North Africa, while Christian knights and Ottoman warriors occupy the foreground of the compositions. The lecture will explore the paradox of the emperor's concealed presence in the woven landscape of his Tunisian victory, by examining the modes of display of this magnificent and monumental tenture – one of the most ambitious and expensive artistic commissions of his reign.

This talk is a retrospective look at the process of writing a thousand-year history of technology— a project that I have just completed. I discuss why such a thing might be attempted in the first place. I describe the aims of the work, including that of giving as much emphasis to the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa as to Europe, and the issue of writing a regional history within a global context. I discuss problems and interesting discoveries in each of the subject chapters— food production, hydraulic technologies; building construction; urbanism and urban water supply; transportation and communication; crafts and industries; and instruments and machines including weapons. I then discuss some of the major themes of the work, including the historiographies that I try to elucidate. I suggest my own (and others’) revision of those historiographies—including the idea of technological revolution, of technological “progress,” the traditional focus on origins and invention, and the (very common) assumption of the superiority of European technologies.

In 1938, in his 7-volume Early Italian Engraving, Arthur Hind wrote: “With a few exceptions, of which Antonio Pollaiuolo and Andrea Mantegna are the most notable, the early Italian engravers are artists of secondary importance, craftsmen who never had the same status ... [as] the painters, sculptors and architects, in the society of the time.” The singling out of Pollaiuolo and Mantegna seemed perhaps to imply a doubt on Hind’s part about their exceptional status, but his text betrays no hint of doubt. As early as 1943, however, Erica Tietze-Conrat published an article entitled “Was Mantegna an Engraver?” She contested the received wisdom, stating her belief that the answer to her question was “no.” A half century later, working on the Mantegna exhibition of 1992, I came to the same conclusion as Tietze-Conrat. In 2000, an important corroborative document was discovered, a contract of 1475 in which Mantegna hired the goldsmith Gian Marco Cavalli to make engravings. And by 2013, Sharon Gregory could write: “the general consensus now seems to be that Mantegna never actually engraved his own prints.” Recently I have been thinking about this same question regarding the other artist in Hind’s statement, i.e.: Was Pollaiuolo an engraver? My belief is that the answer is also “no”. Pollaiuolo is generally believed to have made just one engraving, the well-known large Battle of Nude Men, inscribed OPUS ANTONII POLLAIOLI FLORENTTINI. I will show why I believe this inscription identifies the designer, but not the engraver.

Prosopopoeia (rhetorical impersonation) was part of the nuts and bolts of literacy in early modern Europe. One of the pedagogical exercises used in schools from Antiquity through the early seventeenth century termed progymnasmata, prosopopoeia taught children to assume a point of view far from their own subjective reality and to write directly from this point of view, to “speak as this person.” It was also a basic device in the early novel, one that brought into being peculiar entities: person-fictions, hybrid creatures blurring the lines between fictional characters made of paper and ink and real persons in flesh and blood—part and parcel of this period’s expanding book trade which trafficked in such fictional personae: Amadis, Fiammetta, Panurge ... In studying a quintessentially rhetorical device, this seminar will venture onto anthropological terrain, taking from Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency the fundamental premise that art objects are by their very nature social agents and therefore animistic. Early novels’ readers were not only partaking of literature as an esthetic pursuit; they were also engaging in a social relationship that did not happen to involve another human being. (Perhaps all readers are animists.) The focus for this seminar will be the mechanisms that brought these person-fictions to life: rhetorical practice; printing combined with the expanding book trade; and, finally, the profoundly human drive to attribute personhood to non-human things (animism)—all forces at work in the early novel.

The Renaissance period in Dubrovnik is notable for the relatively large number of women intellectuals who emerged within a small geographic area over a brief span of time in the 16th century. Among these women, five stand out for their close friendships and involvement in the same intellectual circle centered around N. Gozze (Gučetić) and M. Monaldi: Maria Gondola (Maruša Gundulić), Fiore Zuzori (Cvijeta Zuzorić), Nika Zuzori, Esperanza Bona (Nada Bunić), and Giulia Bona (Julija Bunić). Various forms of direct and indirect evidence document the intellectual contributions of these women. It is evident that all five were highly educated, with a particularly strong foundation in philosophy, especially Platonism. This talk will focus on these five women, with a special emphasis on Maria Gondola, who stands out as an accomplished woman philosopher.

In 1551, excavators in the outskirts of Rome found an ancient throne inscribed in Greek. The inscription included calendars calculating the dates of Easter and the titles of some works ascribed to Saint Hippolytus, a theologian prominent in the early Roman church. Very quickly scholars identified the throne as the base of a seated statue of the saint: it was brought to the Vatican, restored, and displayed, first in the Belvedere, and then in the library, where it still greets readers today. Ostensibly, the monument provides an example of early Christian iconography, an illustration of chronological scholarship, and a source for Hippolytus’ life and subsequent veneration. In practice, though, it has raised more questions than answers. In this paper, I will examine the discovery and early reception of the monument to see what that tells us about late Renaissance learning and about the statue itself.

How did complex, illustrated books about plants make their way into print in the early seventeenth century? For this talk, we will discuss three interconnections between Basel’s prominent botanist-anatomist, Caspar Bauhin, and the de Bry publishing house that reveal rarely- seen stages in early modern publication. Two virtually unstudied sets of material relating to Bauhin in the Universitätsbibliothek Basel (UBB) archives prompted our research: a folder of botanical drawings, watercolors, and copperplate proofs (“Plant Images Related to Caspar Bauhin and his Herbarium,” UBB, K IV 3, A-D); and Bauhin’s unique cut-and-paste draft of his uncompleted Theatrum Botanicum -- a volume that interleaves a copy of Bauhin’s 1623 Pinax Theatri Botanici with pages of clipped woodcuts of plants and manuscript notes ([Caspar Bauhin and Johann Caspar Bauhin], “De Graminibus,” UBB K I 6 a&b). First, the folder’s watercolors and engraved proofs show that Johann Theodor de Bry, capitalizing on the success of the publication of Bauhin’s illustrated Theatrum Anatomicum (Frankfurt, 1605), persuaded Bauhin to help with Florilegium novum (Oppenheim, 1612, 1614, 1618), a deluxe, oversized album of elegant engravings of flowers. Second, we conjecture that Bauhin’s dissatisfaction with the Florilegium’s lack of real botanical content and order convinced him to return to the Renaissance herbal format of side-by-side text and woodcuts -- and to leave de Bry out of the Pinax’s acknowledgments. Finally, the folder’s watercolor of the American milkweed plant raises a tantalizing question: in the course of publishing Thomas Harriot’s A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (Frankfurt, 1590), had the de Bry family made this close copy of a milkweed originally painted by John White, Harriot’s companion, in “Virginia” circa 1585, and transmitted it to Bauhin?

The history of human depictions of animals is as revealing about humans as it is about animals. In this talk I will examine a specific type of depictions of animals, namely those on maps made from the thirteenth to the middle of the eighteenth century, with a focus on animals of the Renaissance. The talk will begin with an introduction to the history of the illustration of animals in general, particularly the effects of the European discovery of New World animals, and the decline of emblematic interpretations of animals in favor of more observational representations. I will then examine several striking images of animals on maps, together with associated texts. Animals on maps can reveal the cartographer’s interest in geographic exotica, from supposedly kneeless elephants to squirrels that sail on pieces of bark. They can reflect the cartographer’s philosophy about the proper relationship between animals and humans. They can symbolize a region or indicate some of its most important resources, and indeed whole regions can be ascribed the shapes of animals, which demonstrates just how deeply involved animals are in our views and perceptions of the world. Moreover, the choices of animals that appear can reveal much about the mapmakers’ sources and processes—about their methods for constructing an image of the world.

Despite declared philological scruples, the Canzoniere (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta [Rvf]) by Petrarch that we read today in most modern editions is at best a hybrid: Petrarch’s text from his partial holograph in Vatican Latino 3195 (rediscovered in 1886), often with silent editorial emendations, in the form of Renaissance canons of genre and book production. With the definitive demonstrations in the 1980s by Brugnolo and Storey of the intricate visual poetics instilled in Petrarch’s carefully crafted manuscript the question of a new edition became critical to the presentation of a more accurate text. By the mid-1990s Storey had begun work on a new diplomatic edition that would form the basis of a new edition that continues to be published in the Petrarchive.org Project. After examining the complex layers of editorial and textual conditions inherent in Petrarch’s Fragmenta, including how Petrarch worked with his copyists, I will demonstrate the contrasts and interpretative implications of ‘Renaissance Petrarch’ and the reconstructed texts of the Petrarchive’s new edition.

In his attacks on Platonism, the Byzantine neopagan philosopher George Gemistos (Plethon), and Plethon’s student the cardinal Bessarion in the later 1450s, George of Trebizond repeatedly mentions that he had seen hymns to the sun god written by Plethon, in which Plethon celebrated the sun as the soul of the universe and the creator of all. Modern scholars have long noted that George’s report conflicts with Plethon’s surviving Platonic hymns that assign the sun a less important role as the boundary between the material and ideal worlds. In this paper, I will suggest that the cardinal Bessarion, not Plethon, wrote Trebizond’s hymns. Fascinated by the sun in Platonic theology, Bessarion had read and annotated Julian the Apostate’s hymn to the sun god. In his In calumniatorem Platonis (Against the Slanderer of Plato), Bessarion would suggest that Plato had some knowledge of the trinity via the sun. Just as Plato treated the sun as the offspring of the good, a real-world manifestation of the Good in the Republic (508b-c), so Christ, the son of God, bridged ideal and material. As Bessarion wrote Platonizing Christian hymns such as a hymn to the archangel Michael, “a most pure form,” this suggests that he may have composed hymns syncretizing the Son with the sun as he does in the defense. As such, this paper speculates how Bessarion and his followers may have syncretized their Christianity with Platonism. More concretely, it will show that Bessarion’s syncretism is a missing link, connecting the Platonic theology of Plethon with the later sun worship of Demetrios Rhaoul Kabakes as well as more importantly Marsilio Ficino’s syncretizing project in his Liber de Sole et Luna (Book on the Sun and Moon).

This talk focuses on the extraordinary life-story of the eminent Venetian humanist, Ermolao Barbaro (1454-93). In his youthful On Celibacy (De coelibatu, 1472-3) Barbaro seeks to justify a contemplative existence that rejects the career-path expected of the Venetian patrician. The second work belongs to a much later phase in his short life: based on Barbaro’s own experience as a Venetian envoy abroad, his brief treatise On the Duty of the Ambassador (De officio legati, 1488) outlines the conduct expected of the career diplomat. But then an extraordinary turn of events: in March 1491 Barbaro was appointed Patriarch of Aquileia by Pope Innocent VIII; Barbaro was at that time the Venetian ambassador to the Papal State. Barbaro accepted the appointment to Aquileia in obedience to the Pope but without Venetian permission. He was dismissed from his Venetian ambassadorship and remained in Rome, a figure of disgrace in Venice. But how to reconcile his actions with the fact that, only two or so years before, his On the Duty of the Ambassador had preached a sermon of loyalty to the state above all else? Viewed against each other, Barbaro’s On Celibacy and On the Duty of the Ambassador offer contrasting perspectives on the wider fifteenth-century debate about the claims of the reflective as opposed to the active life. The paper explores the life-long drama of Barbaro’s divided loyalties to the self and to the state, with stress on his recourse to many features of the ancient tension between the vita contemplativa and the vita activa.

I examine a short work by Leon Battista Alberti, his De commodis litterarum atque incommodis, which considers both the disadvantages and the benefits of a life devoted to scholarship. Alberti mocks the scholar whose life is marked by extreme hardship and poverty with little chance of attaining the rewards of fame and wealth. Yet there are also more serious benefits that come from the study of ancient literature, leading Alberti to re-assess his own motivations for wanting to embrace the life of a scholar. It is only through a philosophical clarification of values that the true worth of a scholarly life can be grasped. Along the way Alberti makes plain that the ultimate goal is the cultivation of a virtuous character. This is what makes a life devoted to scholarship a philosophical way of life.

The Florentine Pier Vettori (1499-1585) produced editions of Aeschylus, Euripides, Plato, Varro and others. He also published editions of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Poetics, and Nicomachean Ethics – no one, a contemporary said, left Aristotle’s text in better state (“more cleaned up”). My own concern is with his work on Aristotle’s other Ethics, the Eudemian. He did not publish an edition of the work, but we have his copies of the Aldine, one of them with copious marginal annotations. These record readings he found in “ancient books,” which I identify with the three Aristotelian codices containing the Eudemian Ethics that are in the Laurentian library (whose contents an eighteenth century writer claims that Vettori catalogued); they also include a significant number of emendations of his own, a majority of which are both correct and original to him. My own new critical edition of the Eudemian Ethics (OUP, September 2023) refers to him more often than to anyone else before the early modern period. In other cases (e.g. with Aeschylus, or with Plato’s Lysis), he evidently printed few of his own emendations. But the text of the Eudemian Ethics is in poor condition (as Vettori himself noted) and called for greater intervention. In this case he outplays his immediate predecessors, who include K. Laskaris, Chalkondyles, and Bessarion (although the last, in particular, in his copious excerpta from Aristotle, himself makes a number of important restorations), showing himself a true forerunner of his nineteenth-century German and British successors.

My friendship with Leo Steinberg (1920-2011) lasted 49 years. This paper discusses several of the more controversial ideas put forth in his career as an art historian, including ideas on the Renaissance/Baroque architect Borromini, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” and the significance of the sexuality of Christ. Steinberg was accused of being a Freudian theorist; I dispute this. Rather, Renaissance and Baroque artists broke with the non-sex-indicating tradition of Byzantine icons, to emphasize Christ’s and the Virgin Mary’s humanity.