(You will notice that the quotations now are no longer in boxes. That is bebecause I am now working from posts on a different forum, Tarot History Forum (THF) as opposed to Aeclectic Tarot Forum (ATF). These posts) continue the argument from ATF.).
Hieroglyphs, for the 15th century humanists of the 1420s and 30s, were images of animals and other natural objects first used by the Egyptian priests for their sacred, along with common phonetic letters for other things; later, they thought, the Romans used hieroglyphs on temples and coins. Since coins combined images with short sayings written in the phonetic alphabet, there is the suggestion that short, cryptic sayings even without explicit images could count as hieroglyphs, or at least in the same genre. This is particularly evident in Alberti’s essays “Veiled Sayings” and “Rings,” from the early 1430s. Moreover, the same humanists, using the same sources, who promoted the concept of hieroglyphs also promoted knowledge of Pythagorean maxims, called “symbola.” But as far as I have been able to determine, the idea that hieroglyphs include even, for example, the parables of Jesus, is not explicitly formulated until Valeriano 1556. That is an area for discussion.
The general understanding of hieroglyphs that I have found is quite consistent throughout the period up to 1500, mostly based on writings known before 1400 but also texts made available in the first half of the 15th century. I have posted many of the most relevant passages in my previous section. Many of them come from the Appendix to Boas’ translation of Horapollo. To see them in their original context, go on-line for Diodorus Siculus (Bibl. I.81, at http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer...iculus/1D*.html; and III.4, at http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer...iculus/3A*.html), Plutarch (Isis and Osiris X, at http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer..._Osiris*/A.html, and LVI, at (http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer..._Osiris*/D.html), Ammianus Marcellinus (XVII iv 8-11, at (http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer...Ammian/17*.html), Herodotus (II.36, at http://classics.mit.edu/Herodotus/history.2.ii.html), Apuleius (11.22, in The Isis Book p. 97, at Google Books), Tacitus (Annals XI, at (http://classics.mit.edu/Tacitus/annals.7.xi.html), etc.
In this understanding, hieroglyphs are images, sometimes accompanied by a short saying or abbreviation, usually combined with one another; most importantly, the meaning is sacred and hidden from the ignorant but knowable by the learned.
Why the meaning is hidden, and how the learned are to determine it, is also said by these humanists, extrapolating from the ancient sources. Meanings are hidden so as to keep the most sacred truths from the ignorant and uninitiated, who will misunderstand. As far as interpreting them, there were two methods. In Diodorus, interpreting them was a matter of knowing the essential properties of the objects represented and then understanding them as metaphors to be combined with the metaphors of other objects to produce noble ideas. That Alberti thought in such terms is evident in his c. 1432 essay "Rings," in which he uses that method on twelve examples of of his own invention--hieroglyphs are not just Egyptian, but can be created by the learned in any age. Alberti cast a self-portrait medal of himself with one of these images, a winged eye, along with a Latin motto; he would certainly have talked about his medal and its hieroglyphic aspect at the great conclave in 1438 Ferrara, which he attended as a member of the Roman curia. That the high and mighty were listening is shown by his influence in Ferrara after that. Alberti's short public exposition of this point is in his De Re Aedificatoria, first version available in manuscript after 1452 and printed 1485.
Another part of understanding hieroglyphs was knowing how they were conventionally understood in ancient times and bringing this analysis to bear in the present. The ancient texts gave examples, which the humanists were happy to share with their (paying) patrons and pupils. When scholars who acquired these texts in various places, especially Florence, migrated to the great courts of Italy, often to tutor its children, then the ancient meanings of hieroglyphs (as they thought) became known to those who aspired to being called wise. So in Milan we have Filelfo ,1440, followed by Filarete, c. 1452, both of whom wrote about the meanings of hieroglyphs in Horapollo's terms, and Giorgio Valla, c. 1465, a 15th century translator of Horapollo, as tutor to the Sforza in Pavia. In 1429 Ferrara we have Guarino of Verona, translator of Plutarch and Strabo, tutoring Leonello d'Este and staying on as Professor of Rhetoric 1436 and interpreter between Latins and Greeks 1438.
These two approaches to hieroglyphs--as conventional and as natural signs--in fact represented two approaches to language, the Aristotelian view of language as conventional and spoken discursively, vs. the Platonic (in the Cratylus), as mirror of the eternal archetypes, best expressed in pictures, but also found in parables, fables, puns, and, I think could be added, the language of dreams and madmen. (I owe this point to D.L. Drysdall, "Filippo Fasanini and his 'Explanation of Sacred Writing,' Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 13 (1983):1, p. 128f.) The humanists of the "early Renaissance" (Drysdall's words) honored both approaches.
SOME ADDITIONS ON THIS SAME TOPIC
In discussion on THF, "Huck" raised the issue of whether coming to understand a hieroglyph is like cracking a code, a work of cryptography. Here is my response.
Diodorus's explanation of hieroglyphics is indeed like a cryptographer's explanation of deciphering. You make conjectures and try to piece them together. Alberti follows Diodorus up to a point but goes further. Cryptographic painting, which fascinates as long as we don't understand it, is boring as soon as we do. Wind cites E. M. Forster, who said that if a work of art parades a mystifying element, it is to that extent not a work of art, "not an immortal Muse but a Sphinx who dies as soon as her riddles are answered." Wind gives the example of Filarete's winged eyes and ears fluttering around an Allegory of Fame (Wind's reference is M. Lazzaroni and A. Munoz, Filarete pl. xiii, 5) ; Filarete associated them to the "winged words of Homer." Once we know what it is, it's a boring image. But Alberti's "winged eye" is not like that. "It shows that a great symbol is the reverse of a sphinx; it is more alive when its riddle is answered" (Wind, Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance, p. 235).
But besides Diodorus, there was Apuleius, who talked about two kinds of hieroglyphics, in the quote I gave. One kind translated into ordinary speech and was just a code, a way by which the priests protected traditional sayings so that they would be the priests' property, to be delivered to the masses in what the priests considered a proper context. The other kind had as its content things that were themselves enigmatic, so that translating the code only enhanced the wonder of its content. This was even more secret than the first kind. The priest read from it to to prepare Lucius for the initiation to follow.
I have up to now called the two senses of hieroglyph the Aristotelian and the Platonic. Denis Drysdall, in an essay I did not get until this addition ("The Hieroglyphs at Bologna," Emblematica 2:2 (1987), pp. 225-248), distinguishes the two senses of "hieroglyph" in somewhat different terms.. One, emphasized by Pio (1490s), Boroaldo (1490s), Erasmus (1508), and Alciato (1531), is that taken from Diodorus and certain remarks early in Alpeius's Metamorphoses. In that view hieroglyphs are "metaphorical figures, universally recognizable to the learned through the properties of the objects portrayed, unlike letters whose phonetic significance is arbitrary and may easily be lost or forogotten." Alberti's wording in The Art of Building also is close to this definition.
In this characterization, the distinction between Plato in the Cratylus and Aristotle is quite blurred. Plato's natural signs become Aristotle's conventional signifiers; and conventional signifiers can be traced back to natural signs.
The other sense Drysdale calls "the Florentine view," that of "the esoteric concept of the hieroglyphs." He says
The first conception of hieroglyph depends on the ability of "natural signs" to function as words, which then acquire a conventional meaning, which the priest remembers and the "learned" can discover. Drysdall labels this as the "Aristotelian" conception. The other might be termed the "Neoplatonic."In Florence Ficino reads Herapollo in the light of Plotinus and Iambichus. He finds that the Egyptian priests imitated divine thought by means of signs which do not represent, like verbal langauge, a discursive linear account of the meaning, but provide a total, unmediated access to its reality, which i s the platonic idea itself and is beyond words. To this sort of sign, Ficino and Pico also relate magical hermetic and mystical cabalistic signs. (p. 226).
There, that's simple so far: just two senses, or kinds, of "hieroglyph." Clement of Alexandria has at least five kinds. Fortunately, the 15th century didn't read what he said.
Hieroglyphs in both senses (or kinds) are amenable to access, in Alberti's phrase in On the art of building, only "by expert men" (Curran's translation), "by experienced men" (Wind's translation), "per peritis viris" (original). But to the extent that, in the first sense of "hieroglyph," images are cyphers for ordinary words; so the "expert men" could write code books. That is essentially what the emblem writers provided, for the hieroglyphs (now = emblems) that they fashioned, out of the raw material of ancient texts and images.
Alberti, however, is hard to put in either camp. For the Neoplatonists, the meaning was only approximated in language, in an open-ended series of analogies. It is the same with Alberti in "Rings": however it is not clear that his series is intrinsically open-ended or just so long that one person can't think of them all. His explanations are like a series of two-dimensional architectural drawings that show what a three-dimensional edifice would look like. However if the word signifies a divine archetype, the edifice can never be described adequately in discursive (two-dimensional) language; it is a kind of super-edifice. I think that the early Renaissance emanating from Florence, from the 1440s, was fascinated by this second sense. The first sense existed earlier, from at ;east the 1410s.
Pio is also not easily placed, given a discussion of him by Nicholas Webb (in "Momus with little flatteries," pp. 56-71 of Mantegna and Fifteenth Century Court Culture). Webb writes about Pio, whom in a footnote he identifies as a "humanist friend" of the Mantuan humanist Equicola in the 1490s (p. 67):
The laconic commmunication of mottoes and verbal symbols operates like the ideographic langauge of hieroglyphics A humanist friend of Equicola at Mantua pointed out that hieroglyphs could be read on several levels. He drew attention specificlly to the moral messages to be found in theri occult meanings. Their bizarre visual appearance helped the message to be retained int he memory. Relatively straightforward impresa messages or personal symbolism could be reinfoced by elaborate visual allegory in the same way.As Webb describes this distinction, the "straightforward impresa messages" fall into Drysdale's second category.
The Pythagorean symbols and hieroglyphics belong in the second category in so far as their actual meaning is distinct from their apparent naturalistic meaning. (p. 67 footnote)Pio's discussion of hieroglyphis is in his Annotationes of 1496, fols. 108r_v, Webb says.
Then there is Mantegna. I am not sure where Mantegna was in the essay "the arrow in the eye," \ in relation to the two senses of "heiroglyph." In his St. Cristopher, Mantenga was doing as much homage to Alberti as he could in a two-dimensional field. "On Painting" seems to be Aristotelian, in Drysdall's sense (it is based on his studies of geometry, optics, and Aristotelian rhetoric in Bologna). "Rings" is more Platonic, as I have said. But the quote from Welliver on page 7 of the link (http://www.webexhibits.org/arrowintheeye/arrow7.html, which I owe to "Huck") hits the nail on the head, so to speak, about the "Florentine" sense, which I think applies to some tarot decks as well.
This is an overstatement, to be sure. But I love how he goes all the way back to Dante. Hieroglyphs are just a subset of this tendency. And as Kubovy says immediately after, the Florentines took this perspective wherever they went. Then there is Kubovy's final commentOne very strong manifestation of the tendency of Florentine art to be intellectual was the Florentine penchant for the subtle and the esoteric. The Florentine artist or poet frequently spoke a much different message to the initiate from that received by the profane; indeed it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the most typical kind of Florentine work was a riddle concealed from the profane by the trappings of innocence. This was a tradition sanctified by the example of Dante and increasingly reinforced, throughout the fifteenth century, by the rediscovery of Plato. It was the consistent element in Florentine nature which impelled the observant Jew from abroad, Joachim Alemanni, to write in 1490 that no people had ever been so given to communication by parable and riddle as the Florentines. (Welliver, 1973, p. 20)
This suggests also what I think the tarot designers were after, to the extent that they made the cards as or like hieroglyphs: the effect of transcendence, brought about by the simultaneous juxtaposition of mutually exclusive perspectives (in both the signified and the signifier: witness the bateleur's later table, the tendency toward cubism; and the distinction, introduced at some point, between upright and reversed meanings). That is what Bessarion preached, perhaps what Plethon preached, and so understood by Ficino and Pico, probably less so by Alberti.We will show in the following chapters that Renaissance painters deliberately induced a discrepancy between the spectator's actual point of view and the point of view from which the scene is felt to be viewed. The result is a transcendent experience that cannot be obtained by any other means.
This transcendence-effect also, for those who were interested in such things, would have made the cards suitable for seeing into the future, by allowing their reader one foot in the divine. In 1517, there is Fasanini, in the explanation of hieroglyphs he attached to his translation of Horapollo. (Fasanini, while a product of Bologna, quotes from all the sources, including those on the "Florentine" side, as Drysdall admits.) He says of Chaeremon, as cited by Suida
Earlier he had explained the term "Hierogrammates":There were among the Egyptians also men called Hierogrammates, who indeed made prophecies about the future, and he recalls that one of them foretold marvelously to the king many great things about Moses who was yet to be born. (Drysdall p. 137.)
The hierogrammates, then, are the readers of the sacred words (grammata), hieroglyphs. Their use in prophecy would have fit in with Ficino's doctrines about the melancholic humor, as in some cases a prophetic state )my reference is in the footnotes to the modern edition of Agrippa, but I cannot find my copy at the moment). So even then, orally c. 1460s Florence, in print 1490s, and clearly in 1517 Bologna, there would have been scholarly authority for the use of hieroglyphs, and hence tarot if so considered, in cartomancy.Hieroglyphic characters, called “hieroglypha grammata” by the Greeks, were the sacred writing of the Egyptians, so called because they expressed the mysteries in religion.
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