In memoriam Erik Doxtader.
The illustration gracing the incipit of this essay comes from the Plantin print cabinet in Antwerp, once the famous Renaissance and Humanist printing house of Plantin-Moretus. I found it on a rack, at the museum shop. An Owl, staring at me, sat upon the earthly globe. I turned over the postcard and read, “Hermathena, painted by Joris Hoefnagel” (1593). I bought the last remaining copy and left. In the evening I was sitting at Brasserie Gustav and made somewhat meditative by the melancholy glow of dimmed brass chandeliers reflecting in hazy mirrors the blurred images of fellow diners, and by a bottle of “pinot noir du Cap.” I looked at the postcard again and thought of the verses quoted in the first history of my venerable ci-devant men only club in Cape Town, the Owl Club, devoted to promote the arts and sciences:
“Bird of Athens, ere we part;
Give, oh, give me back my heart.”
(W.E. Ranby, The Owl Club 1894-1950, Cape Town, Rustica Press & The Owl Club, 1952, p. 60.)
It seemed that the Owl was signalling to me from behind the mirror of Time, in the mute eloquence of her portrait, and was saying: “Would you like to know more about me? Can you decipher this painting? Do you know why butterflies flutter around me, Athena’s pet? Do you actually know who I am and what this picture is all about? ”
I. The Owl is an Enigma Machine
(I am aware I am coasting along a continent of erudite sources. The first impetus for this essay was a celebratory volume of the Owl Club in Cape Town (founded 1894), which was not to see the light, and was light on references).
What is this painting? It looks like an allegory. In fact it is an expanded emblem. In the Renaissance an impresa, a “device,” an emblem was comprised of two main elements: the picture itself (often an engraving) or “body” of the emblem, and its motto (a sentence often extended, even paraphrased by a poem or a text) or the “soul.” Our picture contains both elements: what we would call the “painting” with the motto set in a cartouche which reads: “Ars neminem habet osorem nisi ignorantem” (“Only the ignorant resent what is artful,” my version). Emblem books usually added a third element, a title or a label for easy indexation: it named the “conceit” set up by the combination of “body” and “soul.” Here, the name given to the portrait of the Owl is “Hermathena.”
The reason for this blue print was that emblem books existed first for the purpose of Humanist education, and then became widely popular due to mechanical reproduction—ranging from aristocratic in-folios to pocket-size duodecimos. A good few years ago you could pick up an Otto Van Veen Amorum Emblemata (1608) for a song, in one of the green boxes of Parisian booksellers along the river Seine. With the advent of the printing press and its corollary, the retrieval of Greek and Roman culture, Renaissance emblem books, printed in various languages, helped disseminate knowledge, mythological, political or historical. Images such as this portrait of our Owl summarized, in a striking, visual manner, teachings in philosophy, morals, science, politics, infused with newly rediscovered Classical knowledge—the Ancient Tradition, on a collision course with the other Tradition—Christianity.
Emblem books brought into public awareness an entire new range of intriguing and potent images concerning foreign mores and mythology, history and geography, zoology and botany, landscapes and cities, “pagan” philosophies alive and cosmic events, anatomy and natural nudity, and even Aztec blood sacrifices—far bloodier than animal sacrifices that prompted Justinian to shut down philosophy schools and eradicate ancient worship in the sixth century.
The eloquent alliance of images and texts provided a rich stock of inspiration for painters, sculptors, architects, poets who drew inspiration from their imagery. They were moral devices. Indeed imprese or emblems, such as our Owl as Hermathena, carried special meanings often so obscured by artistic virtuosity as to be hermetic. For instance, it took no less than three hundred years to prise open the emblematic meaning of Nicolas Poussin’s bewildering Landscape with Orion. Why would artists or printers elated by the Renaissance and eager to clear away medieval obscurantism, and to affirm “Man, measure of all things,” fabricate enigmatic imprese, if their aim was to disseminate and explain and popularize Humanistic culture? To protect their lives.
There was a method in their apparent emblematic craze: Humanistic knowledge was considered dangerous if not outright anti-Christian, “pagan, libertine,” both by Rome where cosmologist Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake and by Calvinist Geneva where physician Michael Servetus met the same fate. Nevertheless, whereas the printing press meant that subversive books could be used easily as material evidence—“printa” manent more than scripta—paintings and engravings were comparatively less hazardous. One can read a text. Not any one can read an image as carefully constructed as an emblem. Images left room for interpretation, and artists made the most of this uncertainty. They used “copious” abundance of visual details and often seemingly incoherent juxtaposition of vignettes so as to derail and fatigue censors who would rather focus on printed books where subversive ideas were plainly expressed, black on white.
Artists, engravers, painters in particular, became so expert at visual sophistry that time and time again they explained how their art followed the principles of rhetoric itself: invention (finding the main idea and its component images), disposition (arranging them in logical order on the canvas), elocution (the choice of lines and colours) and delivery (fitting the commission within the paying patron’s gallery). They knew emblems were persuasive tools. Pictorial composition followed the Ciceronian principles of a rhetorical education at the service of public affairs—here, spreading the message of Humanism. Painting tried to outdo eloquence and there was indeed a debate or “quarrel of the paragone,” as to whether the “mute eloquence” of painting outdid eloquence itself, since a painting could incorporate the visuals of speeches and set them explicatively without words being uttered, while the greatest speech could not claim colour and line and the glorious evidence of the gaze or energeia: think of Raphael’s frescoes in the Segnatura (illus.) or simply Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. Painting as a visual rhetoric, ut retorica pictura, played a crucial role in this stunning claim of supremacy that lent intellectual validation to the visual arts, and depicted even Christ as an orator (illus).
Yet new wisdom, and the retrieval of the Ancient Tradition, could not stop at cladding Christian symbols in Roman garb. It had to conceal itself. In this respect the Owl is a perfect example of how to devise a “device,” to fabricate an emblem, and to make an enigmatic painting talk in eloquent yet coded words—the Owl is a traditional symbol for eloquence and wisdom, for one reason (explain emblematists): she sees what is hidden in the dark, and flies to it. She sees behind the veil of appearances. She sees the true light within the dark matter.
Renaissance philosophy and incipient modern science, having rediscovered Plato and the division between opinion, reason and Ideas which upset faith-based, or revealed, truths, elaborated theories concerning “enigmatic” images. Neo-Platonists held that enigmatic images, if well conceived and purposely created, had the potential to shake and shock the mind and open it to ideas higher than personal opinion or inherited belief. This is why the Renaissance witnessed a tremendous gnostic revival of interest in Egyptian symbols. Hieroglyphics were considered both as a strategy similar to that of emblems, used by the first enlightened civilisation to protect true knowledge, and as a method to awaken the mind to Ideas—until they became incomprehensible.
Renaissance philosophers, before the advent of rationalism and experimental science, perceived the social value of harnessing visual and verbal codes of avoidance, of “dissembling”—to wit, Castiglione’s Courtier (1528)—and they rallied emblems to their cause, while projecting often their own story onto an imagined Egypt of obelisks and hieroglyphics—think now of Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499). They drew an analogy between hieroglyphics protecting knowledge from the populace and the powerful in Ancient times and the modern, emblematic effort to use images to conceal messages from censors and to reveal meaning only to those who had the deciphering keys. “Egyptian” and “Hermetic” were used indiscriminately and many emblem books bore the title Hieroglyphica or Hermetica.
This is why the motto or “soul” of our Owl picture, has two meanings: an exoteric, banal one, whereby ignorant one will be that “art” means painting, and the like, and an esoteric meaning that could be paraphrased as “The dislike some have for new knowledge comes from the fact they do not have the method, the technique, to get to it.” Ars translates tekhne in Greek, and it means a method for creation of ideas in this case. Long-winded? Of course, since a motto is supposed to be a conceit shaped into a witty epigram that would not irk censorship, or cause persecution by, for instance, the Inquisition—brevity conceals the critical enterprise of recovering the Ancient Tradition. The Bolognese aristocrat, imperial orator, and scholar Achille Bocchi gave his academy of heterodox friends the name of Hermathena, the dual divinity pictured arm in arm in his Symbolicarum Quaestionum (1555; illus.).
The picture must now reveal what the motto conceals.
II. The Three Cyphers
So, what does this picture of an Owl, Hermathena by name, say? How can we decipher it?
The first cypher, about Ortelius and imagining the globe
First, the dedication (bottom, left) offers a way to unlock the first cypher. The painting is dedicated to Abraham Ortelius (d. 1598) to whom Humanism owes the first world atlas, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570). Joris Hoefnagel (d. 1601) illustrated it. Modern cartography and geography were born out of Ortelius’ calculations, and made visible thanks to Hoefnagel’s drawings. With an Owl, symbol of knowledge, perched onto the Orbis, the illustrator pays homage here to the conceptor. In fact the illustrator is analogous to the “body” of that which the conceptor is the “soul.” Their work relationship duplicates the device of the emblem itself, “body” and “soul,” or rather the emblematic structure gives them the opportunity to formalize visually their teamwork in the painting itself.
Their relationship is the first deciphering protocol. It is named actually in the label of the picture (bottom, centre): “Hermathena.” The first modern cartographer, when the world opened up, Ortelius is like Athena, in the realm of conception or Idea, while Hoefnagel is like Hermes, in the field of communication. In Renaissance art theory, disegno, “design,” denotes the conceptual design, not the material one. Thus, Ortelius is the “designer” but Hoefnagel is the draughtsman. Ortelius’ atlas offers a new vision of the earth but his intellectual design remains mute and contained in his mind until the artist gives it a pictorial and material reality: beautifully drawn maps through which, as it were, our earth, old and new world together assembled, now speaks for herself. This is close to the Neo-Platonic philosophy that spoke justly of “introjected eloquence” to qualify invention in the mind, disegno, and of “projected eloquence” when ideas are formulated in words, or for that matter in images (that are “mute eloquence”). The one needs the other, and vice versa. The picture is therefore strewn with reminders of this reciprocal relationship: stylus, square, compass are traditional symbols of the geographer and of the draughtsman as well. They share the same tools, not the same art, yet work together: Hermes+Athena.
However the Owl holds a brush fashioned into the Hermetic caduceus, while she sits upon an orb itself resting on a book. This montage—square book, spheric orb, owl with the straight line of a pencil—is a visual syllogism. It is the second cypher.
The second cypher, about a visual syllogism
The second deciphering protocol rests on the idea that an emblem operates like a rhetorical syllogism. This was affirmed by a Savoy grandee of the Seventeenth-Century, Emmanuele Tesauro (d. 1675) who published a most delirious treatise on emblems, a best-seller of sorts at a time when in more advanced parts of Europe imprese had been relegated already to curiosa (or used by missionaries in Latin America for the purpose of catechism). They fell from grace in cultured circles, now enamored with Descartes, Newton and the vogue of “experiments”—that provided a new stock of images, and words.
So, what is the fantastic syllogism illustrated by the montage?
I. Joris Hoefnagel, am the pencil of Ortelius.
ii. Ortelius holds firmly the concept of the earth, still opaque (the white orb).
iii. Hence, thanks to my pencil and stylus the circular purity of the concept becomes an illustrated, square book, while the earthly orb from round and opaque becomes a lively atlas of colourful maps, a sphere spliced open, that is: as legible as a book.
The square of the book, a stack of illustrations, contains the circle of the abstract circle of the mental disegno. The logical scale of elements (owl, orb, book) delivers a visual syllogism, from premises to conclusion. Ortelius’ invention is therefore an example of what any “art” can achieve in the spirit of the Renaissance integration of the arts.
Let us sum up. So far, the central section of the painting where the Owl is represented: in the cartouche at the top there is an indictment of ignorance, in the middle there is an exemplary argument about how to produce knowledge, and at the bottom there is the label given to this particular syllogism, “Hermathena,” a label which is a cypher for the relationship between Ortelius and Hoefnagel and encapsulates a further “Egyptian” or Hermetic meaning we must now proceed to unlock.
The third cypher, about Cicero
It opens up, as it were, onto a much larger chamber of meaning. Hermathena is a fascinating key to Humanistic culture. It may sound fanciful today but if one sees the use of emblems and conflated words (Hermes+Athena) as a way for Humanism’s intellectuals to circumvent censorship, speak in code and develop ideas which, plainly stated, would cost them their lives, we may appreciate a social strategy of communication that is, after all, far worthier yet no more outlandish than X, Facebook and the like, made for idiots, by idiots, and for the benefit of non-idiot merchants. Coded communication helped construct the international, intellectual networks then called “la République des Savants” or a “Republic of Letters” which brought about the Enlightenment and ultimately created modern culture for more than two centuries.
In fact, Hermathena had currency in the most advanced Humanistic circles to name their attempt at shedding off medieval ideas. These circles or private “academies,” clubs as the Victorians would say, had in addition to their Platonist elevation, a particular devotion for Cicero, orator and statesman. In Plato, academies found inspiration for intellectual life—the Symposium was a favourite read. In Cicero they sought solutions in active life.
Indeed, the Renaissance underwent a “Ciceronian revolution”: Humanists rediscovered the oratorical works of the great Roman consul and they found Hermathena in Cicero’s letters to his friend Atticus, a correspondence Petrarch has recently unearthed, causing a literary sensation as it exposed, for the first time since the Fall of Rome, the rich complexity of life and culture in a pagan civilization, and its moral elevation. To adorn his library at Tusculum Cicero had made a “Hermathena” by placing a bust of the goddess atop a square signpost, a conventional image for Hermes who was the tutelary god of crossroads, places for barter and banter. Hermathena was adopted by Humanists because this dual-bodied statue emblematized their own dual striving at leading an intellectual as well as an active life: the intellectual formulations of new arguments about Nature, Man, the World, coupled with the necessity to know how to debate them in public and for the public good.
When a learned painter like Rubens designed his Italianate palace in Antwerp, not far from the house where French exile Christophe Plantin (d. 1589) established his printing press, he placed on the garden portico two statues, one of Hermes, the other of Athena, positioning the god of practical eloquence on the side of his living quarters and, fittingly, business, while the goddess, emblem of intellectual eloquence, facing his studio, as if commending artistic invention.
Numerous Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century artists used Hermathena, to the point that it was considered also as a symbol for—art collectors (who master indeed commerce and knowledge, Hermes and Athena). Sometimes the Hermathena imagery of two bodies, symbolizing intellectual and practical wisdoms interlocked, was related to the Greek myth of dual-bodied, primeval humans (as told in Plato’s Symposium) represented frontally coupled and forming a gyrating monster with four arms and four legs. The “hieroglyphic” relationship between Hermathena and the primeval creature was clearly expressed by Paduan doctor Marcantonio Passeri (d. 1563) when he had a medal struck, showing the enigmatic figure with the motto “Philosophia Duce Regredimur”—paraphrased as “Greek and Roman philosophy showing the way we are returning to the Golden Age.”
Our Owl has escaped an eight-limbed, copular treatment, to signify her eloquent powers as Hermathena, but the deciphered message is clear: Hermathena was Cicero’s visualisation of the core tenet of his philosophy as a Republican statesman. Knowledge (Athena) that is not concerned with practical reason (Hermes), or science that does not know how to explain itself and show what it does for the betterment of mankind and especially the polity, are without reason. This is the political lesson in Cicero’s image of Hermathena, and it is that portentous lesson Humanists took to heart by making that odd emblem one of their signatures. So, our Owl presides not merely over Ortelius’ work, but on works produced by Humanism’s striving to know and to act.
What I have described so far is how the portrait of our Owl must be read as a depiction of enlightened knowledge and critical enquiry, which grapples with the physical and political world, yet couched in enigmatic, visual codes and guided by logical protocols of decipherment.
The square and compass, later adopted by Masonic lore (together with Hermetic-Egyptian rhetoric), stylus or dry point tool are reminders of such protocols; they surround the closed book (a symbol of knowledge, of course) and order us to decipher with method (in order to open the book).
But what are oysters doing here?
III. Oysters, Pearls, Crabs, Caterpillar—and Butterflies
Let us take a fresh look at the painting. Granted, the Dutch are masters of “nature morte.” They excel at still-life. At a glance the painting can pass for a still-life, and that is what an ignorant public may think. But we remember the opening warning: “Ars neminem habet osorem nisi ignorantem.” The Owl painting is packed with shells and corals, caterpillar and butterflies and dragonfly and fireflies, not to mention flora. What does it all mean? Should the Owl care about reigning over this menagerie that cannot keep still?
Anyone for oysters?
Let us begin with marine elements. Emblem books are unanimously negative about the Big Blue and present sea images as occasions for lessons on crime, rapine and pillage. Except perhaps for Venus rising from the foam, Spanish emblematists equated the salty nature of the sea with the salaciousness of it all. However three marine elements escaped condemnation: of course the dolphin, “philanthropos” (kind to humans); the oyster and the coral.
Oysters are a hard shell to crack, if you do not have a copy of Alciato’s Emblemata (1534, illustration above) that launched the popular fashion of emblem books. Alciato was a grave jurisconsult who pioneered the comparative history of law. According to him the oyster is a vicious creature who traps its enemies lured by its pearly bait. The crab is its usual victim driven by “gula,” gulosity, and caught by the “gula” of the oyster’s clamping valves. A case of the biter bitten—an emblem is at its best when its conceit is tight. However, the pearl itself was endowed traditionally with a transcendental meaning: born from dew when the oyster surfaces at dawn, warmed up by the rising sun, its embryo thus conceived is taken away by the conch, immersed deep into the ocean, and returns as a glorious wonder of Nature, a pearl. Why this? For the pearl is a hallowed symbol of Mary whose epithet “stella Maris” is a corruption of “stilla Maris,” a drop in the sea, a pearl—Mary was often referred to as “the priceless pearl” (from Matthew 13: 46). The transcendental birth of the pearl, born from dew and sun, illustrated the virgin conception. Aggressive, but not vicious, is therefore the oyster who shelters its precious charge from the crab whose mundane rapaciousness finds its own demise where it thought it would find its fulfillment, like his master and prototype Satan tempting Christ in vain.
What about corals, shown here as herbaceous twigs sprouting from the orb? Mariners back from far away seas reported how pallid and flaccid and sundry were corals in the depth, but how red and hard and rare they became once exposed to air. Again, by contact with air, sun and light something precious was born, out of a radical transformation.
Oyster and coral carry the same enigmatic lesson: things are not what they seem in their natural element and until the right “light” is applied to them they will remain unborn. The oyster told Humanists the following: because your discoveries are new (virginal) and brought about by the combination of intelligence (the rays of the sun) and eloquence (the dew), they tempt our enemies (the crab). The lesson applies specifically, here, to cartography and geography: until the light of Ortelius’ project had been cast onto the opaque orb a proper description of the earth could not be born. Look at the painting carefully and you will see how the Owl sums up the oyster-and-coral syllogistic protocol: the orb on which she stands rests on the book like a pearl on a shell, and from the orb sprout unwieldy coral branches which, in the Owl’s claw and under her stern gaze, become precious tools of measure and reason. Once the orb is sheltered by the book, the earth described by the atlas, a radical transformation of knowledge has taken place. The Owl is truly Humanism’s emblem.
Add to this hieroglyphic story that Humanism was the age of great sea voyages that literally “invented” the world (five years before Hoefnagel painted his allegory, Dias had rounded the Cape and a year earlier Colón had set foot in Indian America), and you will appreciate how clever is the cypher—especially the conceit of the pearl that resonated amiably with Christian, Marial devotions, while the idea behind dealt a blow to medieval knowledge. No more than a pearl or a coral is what they seem to be is any longer the world as it seemed before. The horizon itself kept moving. A radical transformation has taken place under the light of Humanism.
Let us look now at aerial creatures. Two massive butterflies, larger than our Owl, hover on either side of the painting. There are buzzing fireflies, a dragonfly below the cartouche on the left and an upside down smaller butterfly on its right and also next to what resembles a centipede but surely is a caterpillar (here we must make allowance for pre-Buffonian puzzles).
In emblematic thought, the caterpillar had a bad reputation. Huguenot poet Du Bartas in his famous Divine Weeks of the World’s Birth (1578) uses it as an image of Satan’s deceptions: the caterpillar is of a lovely green, but this comes from pillaging our well-tended, Edenic gardens. It is an oblique reference to the Psalms when the Lord admonishes those who pray just to show off, that is who prey on him for social convenience’s sake (Psalms 50: 16-17), like caterpillars devour plants. Of course, larvae become butterflies, and this is the other reason for the cultural Christian imagination of the time, to condemn them: changing of shape was disreputable, witches and cats were burnt for changing shapes. Satan is burlesque: just look at Hollywood today. Changing one’s shape in this world was thought demonic. The only change acceptable was at Resurrection. The caterpillar image was applied naturally to lying orators and lying preachers who prey on their audience by assuming deceitful shapes of discourse, “rhetoric.” Humanist onlookers were probably amused by these coded vignettes, which of course eludes us, modern readers.
However, if you were a Humanist you would pursue the logical protocol noted earlier, compounding the images of transformation illustrated by coral and pearl with that of the rampant chrysalis becoming a flying insect. And being versed in Ancient Greek you would know that the Greek word for a larva has to do with death since Ancient zoology ascribed to chrysalis, larva, cocoon to be “like dead,” in a state that is neither life (the butterfly, the moth) nor cadaver (nekros). Which is another way to signify that until Ortelius and Hoefnagel set about to become an Owl, a Hermathena conjoining Athena and Hermes’ forces to produce the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, our physical world was neither alive nor dead; it was dead insofar as Christian Scholasticism prevented us to truly “discover” its reality; it was alive insofar as it was pregnant with Humanistic transformation.
Which brings us naturally to the butterflies (I leave other flies to their own devices). They are as large as the Owl, and they are a pair while our tutelary bird is single. Their XXL size is a warning: butterflies matter! Not because of the larva-to-flying insect narrative, a tad obvious. Because of the relationship between them and Hermes and Athena, which brings us back to our dear vigilant Owl, emblem of our Club.
There is a covert connection between oyster, crab and butterfly—and the Owl, of course.
Humanists often used the image of the crab holding a butterfly, together with the motto “Festina semper lente” (“Always hurry slowly”), to indicate that surefooted knowledge and good politics proceed always with careful consideration of the next step.
In emblem books, the butterfly had the unfortunate tendency to rush to fires and be destroyed. So the crab held it back. It is the one occasion where the crab plays a good part. Printers in Lyons, an important Renaissance centre, used the crab and the butterfly with the motto “Matura” to denote a commonplace of the new culture: that Europe was at last coming of age, maturing at last, after the long infancy of Gothic idiocy, as they saw it, owing to the prudent “way-forward” of Humanists. Europe, “humanitas” in fact, was like a chrysalis, not alive and not dead—just awaiting its own true birth. Yet its midwives, the Humanists, had to proceed carefully not to abort its transformation (parts of the Western world failed indeed at it).
The early Sixteenth-Century Aldine press in Venice, yet another Humanistic capital, added a variation to the representation of Festina semper lente, destined to greater fame than the butterfly-crab puzzle: its printer’s mark showed a dolphin (“kind to humans”) spiraling around an anchor (the illustration above is from Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia, and refers to Patience). Aldus Manutius thus paid homage to Venice’s sea-borne empire, yet he sounded a warning to his fellow Humanists: as you are sailing on unchartered or troubled waters it is more prudent to heed the lesson of navigators and patiently wait for favourable winds, or currents—a political lesson of survival.
Crab and butterfly, anchor and dolphin were in reality enigmatic elaborations on Hermes’ caduceus-like pencil held by the Owl: the serpent, denoting quick, striking ideas, wraps itself around a baton, meaning prudential direction. In sum, pearl, coral, crab and butterfly are set in a logical protocol of symbols aimed at reminding Humanists that for social, political, intellectual, scientific transformation to take place one had to proceed carefully. A renascence is not a revolution. Do not rush to talk too openly about Plato, Ovid, Copernicus and the rest, do not rush and burn your wings like the butterfly does: think first, think anchor, think crab, maneuver sideways if necessary, and then move fast like a dolphin or strike like a snake, always keeping your eyes, that can see through darkness, straight on target.
The painting is therefore about Prudence. The link between our Owl so far deciphered is made explicit in Alciato’s Emblemata where the virtue of Prudence is illustrated by a stern-looking owl with the motto “Prudens, magis quam loquax” (“She thinks before she talks”—my version) and she, like savants, sees in the dark.
In sum, the Owl, for all its self-awareness, can learn from the butterfly and since butterflies are not taken seriously Hoefnagel has made them larger than the wise Owl to whom, aflutter, they say: “Bird of Hermathena, be careful not to spend too much time mulling over ideas, like owls hovering into the night, or you may never experience the live tension that animates the dialectics of the crab and the butterfly.” Vita contemplativa is good indeed, but what of vita activa?
This stunning emblem was devised by a medical doctor, Hadrian Junius (Emblemata, 1565, Plantin). It encapsulates the question of the two vitae, and brings us back to the owl-orb-book montage: it shows a spade stuck in the orb of the earth, with a snake encircling it, meaning that the works of the mind must be followed by actions. Knowledge is a spade. The formal structure of this emblem (with its the descending sequence of elements: snake-spade-earth) is so close to the image of the Owl sitting on the orb and above Ortelius’ atlas that a parallel between them is incontrovertible. Emblem books’ writers enjoyed quoting each other and swapping and distorting images.
But there is more to it—there is always more to it, in hieroglyphic iconology.
V. The Owl and the Call for Stoicism in Troubled Times
In 1952 a mosaic was unearthed in Philippopolis, in Ancient Syria. Dating from the reign of Philip the Arab (born near Damascus, imperator in the mid-3rd century he celebrated the VRBS’s Millennium). Prometheus is represented modeling in clay the protoplastos, the first male human being, while both gods are watching him. Hermes, above Prometheus, holds a figure, Psyche. In Ancient Greek, a butterfly is a “psyche.” The soul, or the living principle, Psyche, is deemed to be a butterfly chrysalis Athena held above the homunculus fashioned by Prometheus. The visual story in the mosaic narrates how Hermes separates the soul from the body; death in other words, but death seen as an event in the cycle of life, which began with Athena creating or holding the butterfly-soul. For paganism, and many Humanists, life was a matter of renascence (which also explains their Egyptomania). In other words the butterflies surround the Owl to remind her, and us, that philosophy is the key factor in fostering a Renaissance, since “you Hermathena, you have presided over my body and soul when the Promethean gesture gave birth to the first mortal, and you, Hermathena, you also gave me, mortal being, the power to be renascent. So be it then! Be truthful to this lesson, and let a Renaissance happen.”
Lofty words, but let us not rush, let us “Festina semper lente.” As we approach the end of the hermetic enigma let us take a second look at the tools of the trade: you would have noticed the ubiquitous presence of the “ruler,” either as a baton, an engraver’s dry point, a stylus, a mason’s square or the arms of a compass. Geometry is everywhere, in the circle of the orb and the quadrilateral book; in the butterflies’ wings that are a quarter of a circle each; and so on. As it happens the printer’s mark chosen by Ortelius’ publisher Christophe Plantin is the compass, with the motto: Labor et Constantia. Labor, work, we have already seen what it implies. What about “constancy”? With this question we are about to reach finally the inner chamber of the Owl enigma machine and of our itinerary through symbolic images.
In 1584 ex officina Christophori Plantini comes out a work that would revolutionise moral and political philosophy, Justus Lipsius’ De Constantia (d. 1606). Both Plantin and Joost Lips were Catholic, one suspected of “pagan” (atheistic) tendencies, the other of having abjured Protestantism to secure an imperial office. Both communed in Stoic philosophy. On Constancy extolled Stoicism. And this is the final cipher placed on the image of the Owl by Joris Hoefnagel. The Owl stands in defence and illustration of Stoic philosophy. I sat at the desk where Lipsius wrote his masterpiece.
Regarding the renascence of Stoicism, the Renaissance witnessed, much to Rome and Reformation’s annoyance, the rebirth of Ancient Greek and Roman schools of thought—beside the neo-platonic revival, the hermetic fantasies, the gnostic fervor, or the Chaldaic elucubrations, which were of deep concern to the Church as they all promised transcendence. By contrast, Epicureanism could be ridiculed. Skepticism could be cornered by contradictions (although its critical sapping would show its potency in the Age of Enlightenment). Stoicism was a problem. Stoics believed in responsible and respectful conduct in civil life (we owe them the concept of “humanity”). Stoics were weary of human passions which they thought should be organized, not merely repressed. Stoics had a concept of the soul as a “technical” agent of life. For sure, Ancient Stoics had an unfortunate tendency to commit suicide when they thought the world was truly, unbearably vulgar; but on the whole Christian theologians agreed that Stoics were good people, “ante-Christians”: they had somehow foreseen the message of the Incarnation. Among the Heathen they were one step ahead and in the right direction. An accepted label applied to them (and the Socratics) was “virtuous Pagans,” as in La Mothe Le Vayer’s De la Vertu des Payens (1642).
Stoics had always displayed a keen sense of, and for, politics (Seneca was both one of Rome’s greatest statesmen and a Stoic) because they cast a cold eye on human behaviour, human motives and human passions, while aiming at reconciliation (oikeiosis) whenever possible. Stoicism taught the possibility to live a moral life and a civil life without faith, out of pure free will. For the Stoics, Man is one’s own measure because Man makes free choices. So, as in the Plantinian printer’s mark, Man holds his own compass and measures his actions without bothering about sin or salvation yet with constancy, that is how one’s actions are freely ruled by choices congruent with one’s humanity.
Ortelius, Lipsius, Plantin, and others, formed in reality a philosophical circle, a club of Stoic obedience, housed and supported by the power of a prestigious press. Some thirty years later Rubens tried to recapture the ambiance of a time and of a circle he had known when he was a young artist, disciple of painter and emblematist Van Veen.
It is the subject matter of Rubens’s famous painting of the Four Philosophers (c. 1615): side by side, under a bust of Seneca and flowering tulips, and around Lipsius who points at a book, his De Constantia, are assembled three of his disciples, including the painter himself. This inclusion is an arresting statement about the power of images: it shows the high regard Rubens had for his art, equating it indeed with a branch of philosophy. Few painters at the time dared to claim such station, with the notable exception of Nicolas Poussin. Rubens’ sublime group portrait, extravagant inasmuch as it places together sitters dead and alive, yet faithful to Stoicism’s belief in reincarnation is, in truth, no different from the portrait of the Owl. The decorative painting by Hoefnagel, who was an illustrator of moderate geniality but a visual propagandist of great skill, and the genial portrait by Rubens elaborate with different means on the same enigmatic material concerning the true wisdom of the Owl.
This is the Stoic lesson contained in the painting of the Owl: to know is an art of rebirth, as taxing as deciphering Hoefnagel’s piece. To know demands measure, and without self-knowledge it is unknowingly that we measure blindly. If we heed the lesson of images, objects, devices and allusions contained in the painting of Hermathena the Owl, we may take also the full measure of the hallowed tradition from which stems our civilization as it enters its own version of Late Antiquity, and time is ripe for some of us to preserve what can still be salvaged.
