It is well known that the Comte de Mellet in 1781 declared tarot cards to be “hieroglyphes” (http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/Recherch ... les_Tarots). That this terminology did not start with him was exhibited in a threat on the Aeclectic Tarot Forum (ATF) in 2008. Ross G.R. Caldwell and "Kwaw" posted some pre-deMellet references, either quotes or summaries by others, about tarot or other cards being called hieroglyphs, from 1570 (tarot, in the Anonymous Discourse), 1603 (probably other cards, a quote from a modern book in French describing a Spanish book of 1603), 1676 (minchiate), and 1748 (other cards). In addition, there were the emblem-book writers, who saw their work as in the same genre as hieroglyphs: Kwaw cited Alciato (1531), and Cesare Ripa (1597). To the extent that cards are like emblems, the inference is that these writers would have classified tarot and other cards the same way, as hieroglyphs.The most relevant 2008 ATF posts related to what I have just summarized are the first and third at: http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=94755&page=1.
On this ATF thread, Ross then raised the question of how this notion of cards as hieroglyphs might have affected how the tarot was viewed even earlier than 1570, and especially in the 1400s. His tentative conclusion (stated in the 4th post on the above thread) was that in the 1400s the concept of hieroglyphs was confined to a small group of Florentine scholars and therefore could have had little effect on the developing tarot until after 1499.
This conclusion was challenged in a way by "Kwaw," who cited a review of Curran's recent book The Egyptian Renaissance. But nothing in the way of concrete documentation was offered.
Here I will attempt to provide documentation that the concept, although starting in Florence, by the 1440s had spread at least to Milan and Ferrara, the two other centers where there is evidence of tarot production by that date, and probably also to Bologna, another center for tarot production. We are fortunate in having the book by Curran, although a lot of his information was already available in Wind, Wittkower, etc. Their main source, in turn, was Karl Giehlow, “Die Hieroglyphenkunde des Humanismus in der Allegorie der Renaisance,” in Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorisches Sammlungen des Allerhochsten Kaiserhauses 32 (1915), 1-229, a work not only in German but also hard to find. In 2004 it was translated into Italian as Hieroglyphica: La conoscenza umanista dei geroglifici nell’ allegoria del Rinascimento, Una ipotesi. I will stick with Curran, Wind, and other English-language sources.
THE RENAISSANCE CONCEPT OF "HEIROGLYPH": THE SOURCES
I will start with Charles Dempsey’s admirable 1988 summary of the Greek sources available to scholars in the first half of the 15th century.
Quote:
| One might be pedantic and arue that Poggio’s discovery of Ammianus Marcellinus at Saint Gall in January at Saint Gall in January 1417 (more than two years before the finding of Horapollo) marks the true beginnings of hieroglyphic studies, but this, too, would be misleading. Rather, when Poggio returned to Florence with the manuscript of Ammianus (where it was transcribed by Niccolo), and when Buondelmonti sent Horapollo’s Hieroglyphica to Niccolo (where it was read by Poggio and Ambrogio), both were adding new texts to the store of what was already known. Pliny, Lucan, Apuleius, and Macrobius were among these (leaving aside the reports of Isidore of Seville), and the emergence of hieroglyphic studies was then spurred by the convergence in Florence from the 1420s on of many manuscripts—Ammianus and Horapollo among them—containing a great deal of information and lore about hieroglyphs. Niccolo’s famous manuscripts of the Histories and Annals of Tacitus must be mentioned, but especially important are the Greek manuscripts sent by Aurispa, Filelfo, and others—Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Plutarch’s Moralia, Plato, Plotinus, Proclus, and Iamblichus—all combine with other sources to give the true stimulus to hieroglyphic research. Especially important, too, is the part played by the Church fathers and early Church historians, in particular Eusebius of Caesarea and Clement of Alexandria, the unique surviving manuscript of whose Stromata was read by Politian and Ficino, and remains to this day in the Biblioteca Laurenziana. (“Renaissance Hieroglyphic studies and Bellini’s Saint Mark,” p. 343.) |
Here is Herodotus (several centuries before Clement):
Quote:
| When they write or calculate, instead of going, like the Greeks, from left to right, they move their hand from right to left; and they insist, notwithstanding, that it is they who go to the right, and the Greeks who go to the left.They have two quite different kinds of writing, one of which is called sacred, the other common. (http://classics.mit.edu/Herodotus/history.2.ii.html) |
And Ammianus (XVII.4.6-12), in a manuscript brought to Florence in 1417:
Quote:
| In this city, amidst mighty shrines and colossal works of various kinds, which depict the likeness of the Egyptian deities, we have seen many obelisks, and others prostrate and broken, which kings of long ago, when they had subdued foreign nations in war or were proud of the prosperous condition of their realms, hewed out of the veins of the mountains which they sought for even among the remotest dwellers on the globe, set up, and in their religious devotion dedicated to the gods of heaven. Now an obelisk is a very hard stone, rising gradually somewhat in the form of a turning-post9 to a lofty height; little by little it grows slenderer, to imitate a sunbeam;a it is four-sided, tapers to a narrow point, and is polished by the workman's hand. Now the infinite carvings of characters called hieroglyphics, which we see cut into it on every side, have been made known by an ancient authority of primeval wisdom. For by engraving many kinds of birds and beasts, even of another world, in order that the memory of their achievements might the more widely reach generations of a subsequent age, they registered the vows of kings, either promised or performed. For not as nowadays, when a fixed and easy series of letters expresses whatever the mind of man may conceive, did the ancient Egyptian also write; but individual characters stood for individual nouns and verbs; and sometimes they meant whole phrases. The principle of this thing for the time it will suffice to illustrate with these two examples: by a vulture they represented the word "nature", because, as natural history records, no males can be found among these birds; and under the figure of the bee making honey they designate "a king", showing by this imagery that in a ruler sweetness should be combined with a sting as well; and there are many similar instances. (http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/...mmian/17*.html) |
Quote:
| In the education of their sons the priests teach them two kinds of
writing, that which is called "sacred" and that which is used in the
more general instruction...(http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/...culus/1D*.html We must now speak about the Ethiopian writing which is called hieroglyphic among the Egyptians, in order that we may omit nothing in our discussion of their antiquities. Now it is found that the forms of their letters take the shape of animals of every kind, and of the members of the human body, and of implements and especially carpenters' tools; for their writing does not express the intended concept by means of syllables joined one to another, but by means of the significance of the objects which have been copied and by its figurative meaning which has been impressed upon the memory by practice. For instance, they draw the picture of a hawk, a crocodile, a snake, and of the members of the human body — an eye, a hand, a face, and the like. Now the hawk signifies to them everything which happens swiftly, since this animal is practically the swiftest of winged creatures. And the concept portrayed is then transferred, by the appropriate metaphorical transfer, to all swift things and to everything to which swiftness is appropriate, very much as if they had been named. 3 And the crocodile is a symbol of all that is evil, and the eye is the warder of justice and the guardian of the entire body. And as for the members of the body, the right hand with fingers extended signifies a procuring of livelihood, and the left with the fingers closed, a keeping and guarding of property. The same way of reasoning applies also to the remaining characters, which represent parts of the body and implements and all other things; for by paying close attention to the significance was is inherent in each object and by training their minds through drill and exercise of the memory over a long period, they read from habit everything which has been written. (http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/...culus/3A*.html) |
Quote:
| ....so great, then, was the circumspection of the Egyptians in their
wisdom touching all that had to do with the gods. Witness to this also
are the wisest of the Greeks: eSolon, Thales, Plato, Eudoxus,
Pythagoras, who came to Egypt and consorted with the priests; and in
this number some would include Lycurgus also. Eudoxus, they say,
received instruction from Chonuphis of Memphis, Solon from Sonchis of
Saïs, and Pythagoras from Oenuphis of Heliopolis. Pythagoras, it seems,
fwas greatly admired, and he also greatly admired the Egyptian priests,
and, copying their symbolism and occult teachings, incorporated his
doctrines in enigmas. As a matter of fact most of the Pythagorean
precepts do not at all fall short of the writings that are called
hieroglyphs; such, for example, as these: "Do not eat upon a stool";
"Do not sit upon a peck measure"; "Do not lop off the shoots of a
palm-tree";"Do not poke a fire with a sword within the house." For my part, I think also that their naming unity Apollo, duality Artemis, the hebdomad Athena, and the first cube Poseidon, bears a resemblance to the statues and even to the sculptures and paintings with which their shrines are embellished. For their King and Lord Osiris they portray by means of an eye and a sceptre; there are even some who explain the meaning of the name as "many-eyed" on the theory that os in the Egyptian language means "many" and iri "eye"; and the heavens, since they are ageless because of their eternity, they portray by a heart with a censer beneath. In Thebes there were set up statues of judges without hands, and the statue of the chief justice had its eyes closed, to indicate that justice is not influenced by gifts or by intercession. The military class had their seals engraved with the form of a beetle; for there is no such thing as a female beetle, but all beetles are male. They eject their sperm into a round mass which they construct, since they are no less occupied in arranging for a supply of food53 than in preparing a place to rear their young.(http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/...Osiris*/A.html) Five makes a square of itself, as many as the letters of the Egyptian alphabet, and as many as the years of the life of the Apis. (http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/...Osiris*/D.html) |
Among the Latins, here is Tacitus, in his Annals, book 14:
Quote:
| It was the Egyptians who first symbolized ideas, and that by the figures of animals. These records, the most ancient of all human history, are still seen engraved on stone. The Egyptians also claim to have invented the alphabet, which the Phoenicians, they say, by means of their superior seamanship, introduced into Greece...(http://classics.mit.edu/Tacitus/annals.7.xi.html). |
Apuleius says (Metamorphoses 11:22)
Quote:
| Then the very kindly old man, putting his right hand in mine, took me straight to the very doors of the spacious shrine. There, after the service of the opening of the temple had been celebrated with exalted ceremony and the morning sacrifice performed, he brought out from the hidden quarters of the shrine certain books in which the writing was in indecipherable letters. Some of them conveyed, through forms of all kinds of animals, abridged expressions of traditional sayings; others barred the possibility of being read from the curiosity of the profane, in that their expression was knotted and curved like wheels or closely intertwined like vine-tendrills. From these writings he indicated to me the preparations necessary for the rite of initiation. (The Isis Book, p. 97, in Google Books.) |
Quote:
| Queen Isis devised the Egyptian letters when she came over from Greece. The priests used some letters and the common people used others. The priestly letters are known as eiros (sacred) and the common letters, pandemos (common) (trans. Barney, p. 39, in Google books). |
Clement of Alexandria is often cited as an important early source about hieroglyphics. The 1526 inventory of the Visconti Library, indeed, lists his Stromata\eis, where the account of hieroglyphics is to be found. That copy is now lost; but Curran reports that Ficino and Politiano were reading him in the 1460s. Perhaps it was a copy of the one in Pavia, copied and sent by Filelfo after he moved there in 1440. The curious thing about Clement is that there is no direct evidence of his section on hieroglyphics being used in the 15th century. Curran says that even in 1520 his writings on hieroglyphics were “obscure.” And Valeriano, Hieroglyphica, 1556, attempts to translate an inscription described by Plutarch Isis and Osiris 63 (376e-f), unaware of Clement of Alexandria’s translation in his Stromateis 5.7. (Curran p. 368).
Eusebius, too, is not quoted until at least mid-15th century.He speaks (Preparatorioix, 17) of the Egyptian god Temu whose symbol was the sacred hill or island that rises above the waters, (according to http://www.fbrt.org.uk/pages/essays/essay-enoch.html, ignoring its interpretation of the island). The inference would be that the some of the hieroglyphs were symbols of the gods. I don’t know what else he said.
Then there is the question of translations available then, from Greek into Latin. I could find little information, except about translations to Latin of Plutarch. Curran (p. 89) says that recent studies have shown that translations of the Moralia, of which Of Isis and Osiris is a part, circulated in manuscript from the beginning of the 15th century, citing two studies in Italian, 1987 and 1988:
Quote:
| ..Mario Manfredini, “Sulla tradizione manoscitta del ‘Moralia’ di Plutarcho,” in Sulla tradizione manoscitta dei “Moralia” di Plutarcho, Atti del convegno Salernitano del 4-5 dicembre, 1986, ed. Italo Gallo, 124ff, Quaderni del Dipartimento di scienze dell’antichita/Universita degli studi di Salerno 2 (Salerno: P. Laveglia, 1988); and M. Manfredini, “Codici plutarchei di umanisti italani,” Annali della Scuaolo Normale Superiore di Pisa, 3rd ser., 17 (1987): 1001-43 (Curran p. 321.) |
In relation to part of the Moralia the translator’s footnotes to Alberti’s essay “Veiled Sayings” are relevant.
Quote:
| The next nine sayings derive from Plutarch, “On the Education of Children,” Moralia 17 E-F, translated by Guarino of Verona about 1411. (Marsh's translation of Dinner Pieces p. 253). |
On later Latin translation of Greek works, here again Dempsey gives an admirable summary:
Quote:
| The next important event in the transmission and development of hieroglhphic information and theory is the humanist translation of those texts. The relevant streams here descend from various sources, but mention should be made of Traversari’s translations of the Greek fathers, especially Dionysius the Areopagite, whose mystical symbolism is fundamental to Renaissance concepts of hieroglyphic symbolism; the very important translations commissioned by Nicholas V in Rome, notably of Diodorus by Poggio, Herodotus by Valla, and Eusebius by George of Trebizond; and the translations commissioned by Cosimo de’ Medici from Ficino of various Platonic, Neoplatonic, and Hermetic texts. When Cyriacus went to Egypt in 1435 he took with him an abridged translation of Horapollo to aid him in his epigraphic researches, and this was disseminated in manuscript copies made by Michele Ferrarini. Giorgio Valla also made translations from Horapollo, as did Fillippo Beroaldo the Elder of Bologna, who even compiled a short list of hieroglyphic signs taken from various authors that was printed in a vocabularium for use of grammar school students. Early in the sixteenth century Celio Calcagini translated the whole of the Hieroglyphica for his nephew, to which he added more hieroglyphs taken from other sources; in Germany Joannes Stobaeus made use of a translation sent to konrad Peutinger by Trebatius for the composition of the famous hieroglyphic inscription on Durer’s Arch of Maximilian. Pirkheimer also made a translation of Horapollo, which was illustrated by Durer and presented to the emperor in 1515. (Dempsey p. 344) |
Also relevant to "hieroglyphs" (in the Renaissance conception) are the parabola, i.e.parables, or "veiled sayings" of Pythagoras. These were as much hieroglyphs as pictures, in as much as they were writings that hid their meaning from the vulgar. Pythagoras is said to have gotten the idea of them from his visit to Egypt. One source was the acount of Pythagoras in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the philosophers 8.17-18.. It is the source for eleven sayings cited by Alberti in his "Veiled Sayings" published 1543 but written in the1440s or earlier. Marsh (p. 253) says that Alberti’s text borrows from the translation by Ambrogio Traversari completed in 1433 .
I want to emphasize again that none of these translations were available until the 1430s at the earliest. Of the Greeks, I find only Plutarch translated into Latin before then.
1420-1450: FROM FLORENCE TO THE NORTHERN ITALIAN COURTS
Now let me give a summary of Curran’s exposition of how the Italian humanists, first in Florence and then elsewhere, investigated hieroglyphs in roughly the first half of the 1400s.
We first need to understand who this small band of “Florentines” was that first read the Horapollo manuscript. Speaking of the new generation of humanists who tackled the mystery of the obelisks in Rome, Curran says:
Quote:
| These included the Florentines Niccolo Niccoli (1364-1437) and Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459); the traveling merchant, antiquarian, and epigrapher Cyriacus (Ciriaco) of Ancona (circa 1390-1455); the historian Flavio Biondo of Forli (1392-1463); and the author and architect Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72). All of these men were dedicated students of antiquity and tireless proponents of its renovatio...One by-product of this moment was the emergence of a kind of Egyptology, which was directed in its initial phases to the problem of the hieroglyphs.(p. 35) |
Quote:
| Niccoli was a collector of manuscripts. He had Tacitus’s Histories and the second half of his Annals, bound together with Apuleius’s Metamorphoses. Niccoli also owned incomplete manuscirpts of Pliny’s Natural History.. His friend Pogio, visiting the monastery of Fulda in 1417, discovered the manuscript of Ammianus Marcellinus’s Rerum Gestarum Libri... (p. 36) |
Just as Niccoli was finishing his study of Ammianus, Pogio handed him the Horapollo. So when Pogio and he were in Rome, 1422-24, they recognized the strange inscriptions on the obelisks as Egyptian hieroglyphs. Poggio talks in a letter of the inscriptions “with various figures of animals and birds that the ancient Egyptians used in the place of letters” (p. 58).
Next, Cyriacus. He actually went to Giza and copied down the hieroglyphs he saw there, in 1435, no doubt inspired by their explanation in Herodotus, who said they pertained to the amount spent on “radishes, onions, and garlic for the workmen,” among other things (Curran p. 61). He or a contemporary may have made in the 1430s the “Latin abridgement of 36 signs from Horapollo’s book I that was copied years later in a sylloge now preserved in Naples.” This hypothesis was first advanced by Giovanni Batttista Rossi and still “has considerable merit,” Curran says (p. 104). Upon his return Cyriacus probably made the rounds of the various cities and courts; there was also his travel journal, with the copies of hieroglyphs. We know he went to Belfiore to talk with Leonello in 1449, because of his famous description of the Belfiore Muses there. I would not be surprised if he had an earlier visit closer in time to his return from Egypt.
Then there is Francesco Filelfo, who was in Florence 1427-1433. What is most interesting about him is that he joined the Milanese court in 1440 and stayed until around 1474 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesco_Filelfo).His friend and fellow Florentine Filarete came to Milan as well, sent by Cosimo to Francesco, where he wrote his treatise on architecture, only the second since Vitruvius, mentioning the decipherment of one hieroglyph unique to Horapollo, the depiction of an eel. Here is the essential quote:
Quote:
| They are all picture letters; some have one animal, some another, some have a bird, some a snake, some an owl, some are like a saw and some like an eye, and some with some kinds of figures, some with one thing and then another, so that there are few that can translate them. It is true that the poet Francisco Filelfo told me that some of these animals meant one thing and some another. Each one had its own meaning. The eel means envy. Thus each one has its own meaning...(Curran p. 85) |
Spencer, in his 1965 translation of Filarete (from Italian, i.e. Tuscan), mistranslated the word for “eel” as “obelisk,” and decided that Filarete’s source might have been Diodorus, read in Pogio’s Latin translation (Spencer p. 152). But Filarete’s word for “obelisk” was “guglia,” Curran points out (p. 85). The word “anguilla” means “eel,” he says (p. 320), citing Dempsey, “Renaissance Hieroglyphic Studies,” in Hermeticism and the Renaissance: Intellectual History and the Occult in Early Modern Europe p. 354. Here is the relevant sentence in Filarete’s Italian, minus accent marks:
Quote:
| Vero e che ‘l poeta Francesco Filelfo mi diesse che quegli animali significavano chi una cosa e chi un’altra, ciascheduno ognuno per se, l’anguilla significa la ‘nvidia, e cosi ognuna ha sua significazione, se gia loro ancora on avessino fatto ch’elle fussino pure come sono l’altre e potessinsi compitare. (p. 320). |
Quote:
| When they wish to indicate a man hostile to everyone and living in isolation, they draw an eel. For the eel is never found in the company of other fishes. (Boas translation, p. 94, in Google Books.) |
I checked Dempsey on whether Filelfo had a copy of Horapollo. Dempsey says:
Quote:
| Filarete’s memory, at least on this one point, did not fail him, for a letter written by Filelfo in 1444 to Scalamonti, the biographer of Syciacus of Ancona, refers to Horapollo and specifically cites the eel as meaning envy (Dempsey p. 354). |
I find this explanation somewhat weak as it stands. It might have been that Filfelfo had read the book in Florence and was citing it from memory in Milan, making small mistakes in Latin as he did so, confusing unfriendliness with hatred and hatred with envy. He might also have confused eels with snakes: for Horapollo, snakes are symbols of hatred for the mother.
But for our purposes, the point remains that Filelfo had read Horapollo and quoted him in Milan, to Filarete at least. Nor would the information have stopped with Filarete. When Filarete makes this remark, it is in the context of a dialogue between him and the prince, a thinly disguised Francesco Sforza. So the remark is either one already made to Francesco, or one he could be expected to read in Filarete’s manuscript.
After this digression on eels, let me return to introducing the Florentine humanists. The next one is Flavio Biondo. He wrote a complete archeological topography of Rome for Pope Eugenius IV. That is about when the popes became interested in incorporating obelisks into their renovation of Rome. He describes the obelisks in much more detail than Pogio, which, Curran says (p. 62),
Quote:
| can be explained by the fact that almost all of it is copied word for word from Ammianus, with a concluding paraphrase of Tacitus’s observation that “the Egyptians, in their animal-picture, were the first people to represent thought by symbols,’ and that “these, the earliest documents of human history, are visible today, impressed upon stone.” |
I have one more "Florentine humanist" to go, the youngest and most complex, Leon Battista Alberti.
His writing about hieroglyphs probably had the most impact in mid-century Italy. Here is what he says, in De re aedificatario (On the Art of Building), the first treatise on architecture since Vitruvius. He is discussing inscriptions, which “should either be written—these are called epigraphs—or composed of reliefs and images, imagines” (Curran p. 72). Here the Egyptians are his model.
Quote:
| The Egyptians employed the following sign language: a god was represented by an eye, nature by a vulture, a king by a bee, time by a circle, peace by an ox, and so on. They maintained that each nation knew only its own alphabet, and that eventually all knowledge of it would be lost—as has happened with our own Etruscan: we have sepulchers uncovered in city ruins and cemeteries throughout Etruria inscribed with an alphabet universally acknowledged to be Etruscan, their letters look not unlike Greek, or even Latin, yet no one understands what they mean. The same, the Egyptians claimed, should happen to all other alphabets, whereas the method of writing they used could be understood easily by expert men all over the world, to whom alone noble matters should be communicated... Our own Latin ancestors chose to express the deeds of their most famous men through sculpted histories. This gave rise to columns, triumphal arches, and porticoes, covered with histories in paiting, or sculpture.(Curran p. 72f; also On the art of building in ten books, trans. Rykwert, Leach, and Tavernor, p. 256.) |
Quote:
| In the Roman church called San Lorenzo in Campo Verano, or fuori le mura, the curious observer had from time immemorial been able to admire the remnants of an anceint temple-frieze representing a variety of cult-objects and ritual symbols. It was undoubtedly considered a valuable and important relic, because not only was it removed for greater safety from San Lorenzo to the Capitol sometime during the sixteenth century, but it is found copied and reproduced again and again in the various sketchbooks of almost all important artists of the period, and there can be no doubt that it was considered one of the important tourist attractions of the city. |
Iversen also observes that Mantegna in 1486 put the signs on the temple frieze in his famous picture of Caesar’s triumph, adorning the front of the arch itself. Moreover,
Quote:
| The whole picture abounds in hieroglyphical emblems taken from Horapollo and other hieroglyphical classics. The signs were also used as emblematic ornaments on the paintings in S. Augustino degli Eremitani in Padua from about 1459, but nothing demonstrates the tenacity of the tradition better than the fact that their hieroglyphic origin and nature were still uncontested and taken for absolutely granted as late as the end of the sixteenth century. (p. 68f). |
Now let me turn to what Alberti says about the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Curran says (p. 75),
Quote:
| Alberti argues that the hieroglyphs had the ability to veil or encode the most secret doctrines of the Egyptian elite, so that only the most enlightened and noble viewers could hope to understand their true significance. The paradoxical juxtaposition of universality and exclusivity had a rich appeal to the humanists of Alberti’s generation, who fancied themselves as just the sort of “Expert men” that the Egyptians had in mind when they devised this extraordinary code. |
We don’t know for sure that the passage just quoted was actually in the version that was circulating in 1452, when he presented it to Eugenius IV (at which point it would be deposited in the newly created Vatican Library for other scholars to peruse and even copy). Alberti’s biographer Grafton says
Quote:
| Alberti told his dedicatee, Meliaduse d’Este, that he had written on architecture “at the request of your illustrious brother, my lord messer Leonello.” Meliaduse died in 1452, Leonello in 1450; accordingly this passage seems to tie the book’s composition to the 1440s. |
It seems to me that what is decisive for the particular passage in question is Alberti’s own device, the “winged eye,” below which were the words “Quid tum?”, i.e. “What then?”. It appeared in two Albertian manuscripts of circa 1436-1438, as well as an oval Self-Portrait plaquette of 1435-38. Here is one of the 1438 manuscript images (from http://www.thewingedeye.eu/, documented as such in Tavernor, Alberti and the Art of Building, p. 33).
There is much literature on this “eye.” According to Grafton (Leon Battista Alberti p. 104, in Google Books), Alberti's idea behind such devices is first found in an early dinner-piece entitled “Veiled Sayings”; the picture just adds to the mystery. For both Curran and Wind, a work of the 1430s, the Anuli, ”Rings,” is instructive. Wind notices that although he says more about the winged eye here than anywhere else, he doesn’t say much, especially about the wings:
Quote:
| I prefer to be very short (brevissimus): for to give an exhaustive account of such a compact matter would be prolix; particularly as you yourself, in the measure of your wisdom, will be able, if you apply your mind to it, to perceive the meaning plane et aparte. (Wind, Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance p. 234). |
Another point that suggests that already before 1452 Alberti was thinking what he expressed in his book published in 1486, is that the explanations, truncated though they may be, are examples of exactly why they are not secret to the expert or wise. He describes in detail the particular qualities or essence of each object in the image, makes conjectures as to their meaning, and put them together in a way that forms a noble thought. Here is Diodorus again (Bibl. III.4, using Boas's translation, in the Appendix to his translation of Horapollo, p. 101f)
Quote:
| ...For their writing is not built up from syllables to express the underlying meaning, but from the appearance of the thing drawn and by their metaphorical meaning, learned by heart...The hawk means to them all things that occur swiftly, because this bird is by far the swiftest of all winged things. And the meaning is carried over by metaphor to all swift things and to things associated with swiftness, as if they had been spoken of...For by concentrating on the inner meaning of each, exercising their souls with great care, and memorizing them, they recognize by habit each of the letters. |
Quote:
| On the first ring is engraved a crown, the center of which is occupied
by an eye adorned with an eagle's wing. Do you undersand?... The crown is an emblem of gladness and glory. There is nothing more powerful, swift, or worthy than the eye. In short, it is the foremost of the body's members, a sort of king or god. Didn't the ancients regard God as similar to the eye, since he surveys all things an dreckons them singly? On the one hand, we are enjoined to give glory for all things to God, to rejoice in him, to embrace him with all our mind and vigorous virtue, and to consider him as an ever-present witness to all our thoughts and deeds. On the other hand, we are enjoined to be as vigilant and circumspect as we can, seeking everything which leads to the glory of virtue, and rejoicing whenever by our labor and industry we achieve something noble or divine. Have you understood this? In dscribing this first ring, I have chosen to be brief, for it would take too long to discuss all the aspecs of a matter so rich in lessons. Besides, since you are wise, you will be able to appreciate their value clearly and plainly if you reflect on them. (Dinner PiecesMarsh translation, p. 213f). |
Curran notices that
Quote:
| ...in the same text, Alberti describes a host of these allegorical devices, which he calls “mysteries” (mysteria, that had a special appeal to the imaginations of learned men. These include an elephant’s ear covered by a net, an open forecourt with a burning lamp and candelabrum, an unbroken circle flanked by a hook and a flame, a helmet an mask surrounded by a swarm of flies, and so on, suggesting an effort on the author’s part to compose his own image-symbols in imitation of the hieroglyphs. (p. 75) |
In the remark in De Re, as well as those in “Veiled Sayings” and “Rings,” Alberti is also expressing the idea that the most sacred thoughts have to be kept hidden, and the Egyptian way was by means of enigmatic images. Again this comes from his reading from his reading before 1430. It is as in Apuleius. Lucius is
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| initiated into the Isiac mysteries by Egyptian priests who conduct their rites with the aid of books inscribed with “unknown characters,” some of which “used the shapes of all sorts of animals to represent abridged expressions of liturgical language,” while others are "knotted and curve like wheels or interwoven like vine-tendrils to protect their meaning from the curiosity of the uninitiated.” (Curran p. 22). |
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| In contrast with the euhemeristic historicism of Diodorus, Plutarch explains the religion of the Egyptians as a “hieroglyphic” system whose strange gods and enigmatic symbols encoded their most secret doctrines in veils of enigma. He claims that this method of poetic concealment was subsequently adopted by Greek philosophers like Plato and Pythagoras, who “copied [the Egyptians] symbolism and occult teachings” and passed them on to the Greeks." |
Then there is the image of the sphinx, about which Plutarch writes (Isis and Osiris IX):
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| For the kings used to be elected out of either the sacerdotal or the military class, the latter enjoying dignity and honor on account of valor, the former on account of wisdom; but he that was elected out of the military class immediately became one of the priests, and was initiated into their wisdom, which was for the most part shrouded in fables and stories giving obscure indications and glimpses of the truth, as indeed they themselves half acknowledge by kindly setting up the Sphinxes in front of their temples, as though their religious teaching contained wisdom hidden in enigmas. |
Such a purpose of hieroglyphs, to express sacred enigmas, is not inconsistent with Christianity. There is the Biblical injunction not to throw pearls before swine, which Clement endorsed in language similar to that in which he characterized the Egyptians’ sacred letters. Pseudo-Dionysus, whom Alberti read in a Latin translation by his Florentine colleague Ambrogio Traversari, had likewise emphasized that “it is most agreeable ...to keep the holy and secret truth respecting the celestial minds inaccessible to the multitude.” (p. 76).
It was this religious tradition, Curran thinks, Alberti had in mind with his “winged eye” and later the celebrated passage in De Re. So what was Alberti’s influence? Curran says,
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| The impact of Alberti’s explication of the hieroglyphs has been acknowledged by generations of scholars, from Giehlow and Wittkower to the present. (Footnote: Giehlow, pp. 29-37, Wittkower, “Hieroglyphics in the Early Renaissance,” reprinted in Allegory and the Migration of Symbols. pp. 117f, 120.) Most important, perhaps, is the insight the passage provides for the circumstances surrounding the emergence, at this same period, of a taste for the invention of “modern hieroglyphs”—a form whose precise character is difficult to fix, but is intimately related to the host of other forms that proliferated during this period: imprese, emblems, epigrams, heraldry, and so on. The taste for symbols had deep roots in the chivalric traditions of the northern Italian courts at Ferrara, Mantua, and elsewhere, a milieu that Alberti knew well. Indeed, Alberti’s personal contribution to this taste would appear to be a significant one. (p. 75). |
Curran adds later:
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| Indeed, Alberti’s “hieroglyph” would seem to be most directly related to the allegories and devices—inspired by the imagery of ancient coin reverses—that began to appear on the reverses of commemorative medals designed by Pisanello and Matteo de’ Pasti for their noble patrons in the northern Italian courts and elsewhere at midcentury.(p. 76.) |
I will conclude by tying this Renaissance conception of hieroglyphs more fully to the 15th century tarot. This conception—hieroglyphs, by whatever name (e.g. “mysteries”) as pictures hard for the masses to interpret properly, but easy for the wise, or initiated--was taken to all the courts and signori associated with the tarot: Florence, Milan, Ferrara, even Bologna (where Alberti briefly was in the late 1430s). These patrons would have liked to think of their playing cards, as well as their medallions, as modern hieroglyphs. All they had to do was ask the humanists, who already were demonstrating their skill in single-item images such as the medallion. In return for patronage, these new humanists were happy to oblige.
I especially see the shift to “hieroglyphs” in this sense in Milan. In the Cary-Yale, it is mostly clear what the cards are about, except maybe the kings at the bottom of the theological virtues and the strange scene on the World/Fama; on the whole, the symbolism is that which the masses also know, from pictures in churches, triumph parades, etc. The main hidden aspect of most cards pertains to the heraldic devices, and perhaps in whom historically the people on the cards are. But in the PMB, usually dated to the 1450s, look at the Chariot: straightforward in the CY, it now has the winged horses of the Phaedrus, known only to the wise. And what about that sad, middle-aged man at the table, and the Popess, and the Hanged Man? And later the Moon, the Sun, and the World? We still discuss what those PMB cards might mean.
Then in the Cary Sheet, we see a conscious effort to suggest Egypt as well as hieroglyphs, as I have suggested on the “Cary Sheet” thread on THF. We have there also the “Arrow” card, as the Steele Sermon had it, further mystified later by the French as “Maison-Dieu.” This intentional obscurity, by late century prized in high art as well (e.g. Leonardo), migrates to France (along with the Mona Lisa), where the card-makers, meeting demand, continue the tradition. And the interpreters of the tarot, as Ross’s quotations at the beginning of this thread show (as well as the writer whom Kwaw quotes, for other games), continue applying this word “hieroglyph,” even perhaps not fully understanding what the word meant to the humanists and courtiers of 15th century Italy.
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