Pavane for a Dead Princess: Part Six

At the forty-day μνημόσυνον after Cleofe's death on 18 April 1433, the intellectuals of Mistra came together to give their monodies. The four monodies that we have (there is a fifth, one page and negligible) are long, often moving, and indirectly full of information. I have been interested lately in their view of Cleofe as a political figure.

She was obviously a great help to Theodoros, and apparently participated in discussions with his advisors. Her doctor, Pepagomenos, spoke as if she were still present among them:

For there was nothing that was not communicated to your judgment and thus some difficult problems were solved, while matters of greater moment, of holy governance and of the (soul’s) ascent were determined by the superiority of your virtue.

Nikeforas Cheilas, about whom we know nothing, provides a little more information, though not enough:

She was not, in her mind, in competition with women, even as she worked to surpass the best of them, both ancient and modern, but although she was counted among women, she possessed a truly masculine intelligence, adorning her spirit with gentleness, adorning the constitution of her character with the guidance of philosophy and the practice of all the virtues and graces, and presenting herself as one belonging to a royal race . . . In the midst of turmoil, when present among the imperial councilors she gave virtuous advice of every sort and made herself available to help everyone . . .

This was not in itself exceptional: political participation was a normal activity of Palaiologan and Malatesta women. Much more striking is the fact that -- allowing for exaggerations implicit in imperial eulogy -- she was regarded as so valuable that George Gemistos used the word "salvation" (τήν τῆς ἀρετῆς ἄχρι τελευτῆς σωτηρίαν) in speaking of what her virtue had done for them. 

The men don't tell us much. Apart from that brief mention of her political skills, Cheilas spoke of her great generosity, Bessarion referred to her philanthropy and patronage -- but of what he fails to tell us. Pepagomenos was a little more specific, speaking of her great concern for the poor, visiting them in their hovels, bringing them firewood and cooking for the sick. (One wonders how a Malatesta-Palaiologina learned anything about cooking.) He also suggests that her arrival -- after twenty-five years of no imperial woman in the palace -- much improved the lives of women there and made it possible for a number to be married.

This, though is the kind of behavior to be expected of the women of her family, all of them tremendously educated and given extensive political authority -- her sister Paola Gonzaga of Mantua, her sister-in-law Battista Montefeltro Malatesta of Pesaro, their cousin Elizabeth Malatesta of Rimini. In the well-ordered court of the early Renaissance, the ruler's wife was the social security and public assistance administrations.

This, though, is not what Pepagomenos was talking about when he said:

The queen of the Romans is dead, the very eye of the people, the shared ornament of the inhabited world, the steadfast pillar, while all our present fortune totters. How the death of our queen has turned the expectations of the Romans upside down and has left none of the hopes of our race intact. The bond of union of the monarchy is gone, all is dead and nothing remains, not just of the present for the Romans but of what is to come as well, and it persuades us to prophesy the worst and to expect no end of distress. This horror has run through us like a thunderbolt, burning everything out and turning it to ash, threatening never to give up possession until it consumes all of what is left of the Romans. All the best for us came with your settling among us, and our congenital misfortune has taken away all this, and more besides, in your being gone from us in such an unnatural way.

This conveys -- again allowing for rhetoric -- an extraordinary sense of the doom that must have saturated the educated of that culture, if not the general population. Theodoros had, ten years earlier, unsuccessfully tried to give away to Venice the Morea that he could not defend, and his brother had given the Venetians Thessalonike which they could not defend either. A generation earlier, Adam of Usk reported that Greeks whom he had met in Rome told him that "their empire is almost worn out by the attacks of Turks and Tartars," and Kydones had written Manuel Kantakuzenos as early as 1353 that the Byzantines could not ultimately withstand the Turks.

Pepagomenos kept returning to the idea of doom:

What greater disaster might come than what has destroyed the whole world of the Romans . . . leaving behind sorrow not only to us, her subjects, but to all who are accounted as Roman.

How was it that Cleofe was seen, even rhetorically, as the Byzantine’s sole bulwark against the Turks? The sources give us no way to answer this question. How was it that Pepagomenos could conclude his monody with this statement?

It would be in your power, either with your prayers to the divine, as you stand immediately beside God, to alleviate the distress of our ruler, and through this the misfortune of the entire Roman people---you can do this, I know, with a mere nod of assent---or to leave us to mourn and lament throughout life, as long as the sun sends its rays over the earth.

Cleofe in the position of both Zeus and the Virgin is a stunning image!

ZeusNational Museum, Athens

The Cretan icon is signed Κὺρ Πακσύου ΑΨΙ μαεον η ετελιοθη το παρον - This was completed 8 May 1710 by Kyr Paskuos.

My great appreciation to Pierre A. MacKay for the translations of the monodies. The monodies can be found here.

Others in this series are:
Pavane for a Dead Princess, I
Pavane for a Dead Princess, II
Pavane for a Dead Princess, III
Pavane for a Dead Princess, IV
Pavane for a Dead Princess, V
Glory Days
Theodoros' Poem to Cleofe
Theodoros II Palaiologos  
Malatesta "dei Sonetti" Malatesti

Houses

 

Detail from a view of the Acropolis, before 1680, from a drawing in Bonn.

 Pierre A. MacKay spoke at the Archaeological Institute of America on 7 January about Evliya's view of the Parthenon and the Acropolis.  He gives here one detail of that talk, his discovery of an extraordinary and previously unnoticed detail of early modern Athens written down by Evliya alone.  

 * * * * * *

An earlier blog, using a larger expanse of this image of the Acropolis, discussed Evliya Çelebi's description of the Parthenon from his visit to Athens in 1668. This is the best, and it may even be the only 17^th century drawing of the Acropolis to represent what the artist saw, rather than what he thought he ought to see. It is uniquely important for our understanding of the Parthenon's appearance before the disastrous explosion of 1687, but it shows us more than that. Between the Parthenon and the edge of the fortress is a cluster of smaller buildings, which correspond with the private residences Evliya Çelebi described:  

There are three hundred houses built like those of Sheddad, fine masonry palaces, roofed all over with tile, houses like castles in their own right.  They have no gardens, but from the arches over the seats in the windows and screened balconies of all the houses, the gardens and orchards of the plain, and all the cultivated fields and trellised melon patches can be seen.

At least two of the houses in that image have balconies, most have arched windows, and the artist has indicated the tiled roof on one. 

Evliya also notes that:

There are . . . hundreds of thousands of kinds of pictorial creation of marvels and wonders, images in the Frankish taste, which leave the viewer amazed and distraught, his brain in a boil, and his body without senses. The pupils of his dear eyes are dazzled and filled with tears, as if each of these representations were a living thing causing a dread confusion in a man’s mind. These images laugh and smile at the man who views them and some, which are depicted as being caught up in anger and rage, look off askance at a man. 

 This could be an advance summary of what he says a bit later about the Parthenon, but it is more likely to refer to paintings and frescos on the walls of some of the richer houses, painted at the latest 210 years earlier.  The grand rooms built into the Propylaea to serve as a palace for the original Frankish lords are supposed to have been frescoed, and the same sort of decoration could have been applied to private houses. 

 Model of Frankish-Florentine palace in the Propylaea.

Evliya writes about houses in the lower town:

There are 7,000 tile-roofed houses, of both Muslims and Christians. They are sturdy houses, like castles with battlements and loopholes, and built completely of stone---there are no wooden houses or houses with earthen roofs or mud-brick walls, but only splendid houses with stone walls set with mortar and lime.

Evliya is quite clear that these houses are distinct from others in Greece, and in comparison with his descriptions of neighboring cities in regions both north and south of Athens, the specific features such as cut stone construction and battlements stand out sharply.  Among the possible models for these Athenian houses, the closest similarities are with Florentine private residences of the 13^th and 14^th centuries. Cyriaco of Ancona would have stayed in these houses with Florentine friends on his visits to Athens.

The Duchy of Athens, officially established under Neapolitan sovereignty in 1395, remained in the hands of the Florentine Accaiuoli family until Mehmed II suppressed the duchy and removed the last duke, Francesco, in 1458. The duchy left a considerable cultural memory in western Europe ("A Midsummer Night's Dream," Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale" for two examples), perhaps more than it deserved, but we have had little evidence until now of the cultural influence of the Dukes on Athens.  The Accaiuoli are known to have fostered close commercial relations with Florence, even when they were subject to rival powers, such as Venice, but this evidence suggests that they reinforced these relations by recruiting Florentines into Athens, probably by offering them significant privileges in the administration of the city and its territory. 

The number of houses, whether on the acropolis or in the lower town is a typical Evliya exaggeration. Except in rare instances, numbers have a flavor, rather than a factual content in his style. The Accaiuoli seem to have got along rather well with Greeks, at least with better-off Greeks, so there is no reason to think that Greeks were disposessed to make room for Florentines. On the other hand, there is little reason for Greeks to have abandoned their own styles of housing to adopt a foreign style. Evliya remarked on the houses he found most interesting, and simply passed over the remainder which were probably in the majority.

Our one slight hope of finding proof of this is in the lower city, where there might still be a fragment of Florentine wall built into a surviving structure. It will be an interesting challenge for the next generation of archaeologists to see whether anything remains.

House with double-fold windows
surviving in 1765-66, which can be compared with a typical Turkish house, below.

W. Pars, Museum Worsleyanum, 1794.

Look for An Ottoman Traveller: Selections from the Book of Travels of Evliya Celebi,

translated by Robert Dankoff.

Here, more than anywhere else, patience

 

The view from Bettina's front windows.

Ag. Giorgios, Nauplion, drawn by Leo von Klenze, 1834

This continues Brigitte Eckert contribution of excerpts from her translation of Bettina Schinas' letters from Greece in 1834-1835. Here Bettina writes with keen and gentle observation of her first weeks in Nauplion.  Bettina was the daughter of Friedrich Carl von Savigny (1779-1861), prof. of Roman Law at the Berlin University and one of the developers of the new (Humboldt) university, and Gunda Brentano, from the Brentano family. She married one of her father's students, Konstantinos Schinas. Bettina went with her husband to Nauplion in 1834, where they lived in a house at Ag. Giorgios (above), and then moved with the government to Athens in 1835. An letter from Bettina about Athens is here.

* * * * * *

To her parents, 2 November 1834:

First visit to Countess Armansperg who was very polite and kind, coming back home I found an invitation for the same evening. . .

The Armansperg house, 2010,
the first house in Nauplion to have a piano.

I must report about the evening at the Armanspergs. Beautiful rooms nicely decorated, filled with all kinds of people, diplomats, officers, dressed in Bavarian uniforms, as palikaria or French; also the ladies dressed French or Greek. The countess in mourning because of the Duke von Altenburg’s* death. She received me very kindly, complaining there would be no dancing because of the death. The daughters very pretty, very modest and polite, offered me conversation as they noticed I didn’t know anybody. The older played the piano later very skillful. The many rooms were crowded -- tea, ice cream, lemonades were offered. When the Countess saw me speaking with Kolettis, (I was standing up because he is so tall) she came and offered us 2 chairs next to each other so we could speak seated; the daughter played the piano, so we stopped our conversation. 

 Ioannis Kolettis

Prime Minister, June 1834 - June 1835

To her parents, 5 November 1834:

Some hundred steps before our road met the big road to Argos we saw the king, 3 officers and 2 followers on horseback, and more 8 or 10 soldiers following. 

Otto of Bavaria,
King of Greece 1832-1867
 

In Pronia (Nauplion suburb) we got off the horses and let the luggage be taken to town. At 4 ½ we reached our house facing Ag. Giorgos cathedral. Mr. Praidis (provisional Minister of Justice) who was still living in the rooms which the workers had finished did not expect us yet but moved out immediately. While he packed I waited in the room of the landlord, the archbishop who had watched us arriving came in, a colossal venerable man, indescribably warm towards S. [Bettina's husband] , and stayed with me though we couldn’t speak to each other. 
 

Facing Ag. Giorgios, the front door of Bettina's house.

. . . Our lodging exceeds my expectations by far. At the front side facing the square a big room and a little boxroom, from there a big hall with a kitchen and larder at one side, at the end it meets in right angle a wide corridor with 3 spacious rooms; a 4th one longer than the corridor’s width, as big as our blue room at home, has 3 windows. 
 

Ag. Giorgios and the L-shaped footprint of Bettina's house across the street.

To her parents, 31 December 1834

In front of the cathedral facing our house is, as I told you before, kind of a loggia, 3 doors open into the church, at one side is the bell tower, surely unique, like a top decoration of a cake, 2 bells hanging toneless between the little columns, a piece of string attached to them is just hanging down and tied to a nail, even small street urchins can reach it (to my despair). Behind the campanile rises a Turkish minaret of the same height, broken down to half size so as not to darken the campanile completely. A staircase which led to the minaret leans to one side of the campanile, and maybe for the sake of symmetry a second one has been added at the tower under the loggia of Orcagna,** which joins the first one behind the tower, and these attract the boys to run up and down. Next to this stair, in front of the side door, under the loggia lies the noble Ipsilanti whose memory is generally kept sacred. No stone, no sign of any kind indicates his tomb -- children play all kinds of games on it. Yesterday a priest emptied a big bucket of dirty water (from the construction works on the inside which are not yet finished) onto the tomb. Though there is so much more to do for the living it hurts that this tomb does not receive more respect. A splendid memorial would be unsuitable to the wishes of the dead, but some kind of sign is just missing. I did not know the man personally but I miss it when I look there or pass by.

To her parents, 7 December 1834:

. . . Using a large map you will see that the big half-moon shaped plain of Argos is bound at one end by Nauplia. The suburb of Pronia, very clean, pretty new houses, wide streets, lies at the foot of Palamides where the steep high bold rock slants towards the other mountains, it stretches to the mountains and the last houses are placed almost imperceptible higher. From Pronia to the by is the large drill-ground, up to a bridge which leads over a kind of moat to the gateway, the only one the town can have considering its location. The small door in the fortification which leads to a troublesome rocky footpath along the seashore can’t be considered a gateway.

On the water’s edge are many houses with kind of an embankment in front of them like a harbour, from which you can put to sea. The smell here is horrible because the water is low and the dirt of the town is brought here. Even now it smells marshy. S used to live here and each time I visit his sister and his former rooms I am glad that they are not mine. The drill-ground extends along the base of Palamidi, which has a front side aligned to town and sea. It is brusque, most picturesque, descending so steeply that an extremely arduous stair, supported fantastic by walls, leads upwards in a zigzag. A public garden about 80 steps wide lies between the drill-ground and Palamidi. From the steep rocky wall of Palamidi stretches like a spit of land, about half as high as Palamidi, the rock on which Itshkale (Acro-Nauplion) sits and the towns leans at and fills the space till the seashore.

Leaving the town by the bridge a wide footpath at the right side rises a bit between Palamidi and Itshkale, like a pass. This road leads up half the height of Palamidi for a rather long way where one can see on the right the clear sea, beyond the gulf the most beautifully shaped mountains one can think of, many layers of different forms, sizes, distances behind each other, each moment a new landscape by illumination. Many of these mountains are as high as being covered by snow two days after my arrival while the heat here was still going on, the snow staying for two days.

. . . The wealth of picturesque views existing here anyway is constantly increased by the changes of light and perspectives while moving along; this is the most significant when I walk through the hills at Pronia. Some rocky hills lie visible to their roots in the plain, like at Salzburg. The colour of hills and mountains (except of Palamidi, where the rock is brownish) gives at first sight the impression of unfertile and barren ground, a dead grey sometimes a bit yellowish. Several of these closer hills call the Lilienstein near Dresden to mind, rising gradually, then steep till the top where suddenly and wonderfully stratified completely naked grey rock appears and mostly ends flattened like the Lilienstein. Viewed from the plain the terrain seems to ascend regularly and it looks monotonous. But as soon as gaining a little height one finds unexpectedly deep and wild gorges torn by the waters in spring, now completely dried except some marshy spots where the young fish lie till they get washed down.

. . . One can see how all the mountains were cultivated, because the descending area is originally terraces built for fields or olive plantations, which only gradually flattened out. The ground is so fertile you need only a plough and seed without any further preparation to get an overflowing harvest. Heideck once picked an ear from a full field, it contained almost 100 grains, 3 ears growing from the same root, so 300-fold bears the corn without big effort and cost, fertilizer is hardly needed. With very thinly spread sheep’s dung the ground gets black and heavy like hotbed soil.

When H was Commander of Nauplia 1828 he found a significant part of the town in ruins - the buildings, not the streets, the sewerage marshy, weeds, thistles, thorny bushes lush at many places. The inhabitants, but only women and children as the men had been carried off by the war or were not back yet, lived in great numbers in straw huts like the plantation guards at home, all built close to each other, no pavement -- chicken, ducks, pigs and their dung next to the huts. When it rains here, the waters keep standing as there is no draining and it does not seep away; so the huts were surrounded by green mud ½ -1 foot high. H ordered the construction of the first houses of Pronia, just 4 walls, insisting the families move out of their huts, then tear them down and top the walls with a roof of these materials. In the beginning the women didn’t want to move of fear of the palikaria. But after they did the sewerage was opened, cleaned, the marshy placed were laid dry. In Pronia the people who moved in were mostly ill but they became well, as health generally improved gradually in Nauplia. 

 

. . . The streets are paved, cobbled or macadamized except some spots filled with ruined remains of or left without buildings. Some newly built streets wide, straight, pretty friendly houses on both sides, more streets are older and therefore narrow, here stand new, renovated, old and partly collapsed buildings side by side. The new houses look like at home, not only roughcast but many painted like square stone blocks, decorations at the friezes etc.. In front of the windows, shutters or venetian blinds, painted green; windows with big panes, to open or to raise like we know them in Germany. Roofs not very high, with pediments and tiles, many houses roofed partly with a flat terrace where laundry can be dried. Balconies with beautiful wrought iron railings. The corridors and staircases are small in our terms. The staircases are made of stone or wood.

The doors don’t close, not even in new houses, probably because the wood is used too fresh or because the measurements of the doors coming ready-made from Trieste don’t fit exactly into the already built openings for the doors. At Armansperg’s house one can stick a hand through the doors. Thresholds don’t seem to be known to improve this trouble. I already decided my future doors will be closing one or another way. Stoves get set like in Italy -- at the beginning of winter next to a window, a pane is taken out and replaced by a piece of tin and the pipe stuck through it. Till today, Nov. 19th, I have no fire, not even with writing I don’t need to wear more than my brown merino woollen dress, no jacket, shawl, which are just bothersome. In traditional Greek pubs there is no stove, but a big copper coal machine in the middle of the room, like you know them from Italy. Floors are generally made of wood. The ceilings are also covered with wood (our ceilings are painted with oleo colour topped by a pattern of a different colour, though it is an old house, but belongs to Miaoulis, a Hydriot to whom cleanliness and neatness is essential.). With some Germans here you can find wallpapers, but generally walls are whitewashed or painted one colour. I gave you an idea of an old house and its furniture and fittings by the description of the Bey's house. Differences depending on poverty or wealth can be imagined.

. . . Some Greeks have an amazing mixture of poverty and splendour. The splendour is shown off with a silver salver for the preserved fruit sweets, a precious Turkish shawl, real pearls, diamonds etc. are remains of old wealth lost forever. A chest of drawers, solid mahogany, heavy bronze attached, marble cover, nothing else in an empty room or just surrounded by most simple thatched chairs; a precious modern table in front of a couch made of boards, covered by a mattress and cotton; or a big beautiful mirror in tasteful gold-painted frame at the same wall where single household appliances are hanging at nails because of the lack of drawers etc.; indicate the owner is not in poverty at all ( i. e. now or in the past has earned a pay which made the purchase possible, but which can end any day and put him vis à vis de rien). Otherwise he could not have bought the expensive things, but is as well evidence of the practical impossibility to buy here at the spot what is needed and reminds one in each moment that here more than anywhere else in the world patience is indispensable.

* Grandfather of King Otto of Greece.

** Bettina uses "Loggio of Orcagna" for the front of Ag. Giorgios, using a reference to the great loggia in Florence to give her family a sense of the architecture.

* * * * * *

Copyright © Brigitte Eckert 2010.
Photographs by Brigitte Eckert.

SEE Ruth Steffen: Leben in Griechenland 1834–1835. Bettina Schinas, geb. von Savigny. Briefe und Berichte an ihre Eltern in Berlin. Verlag Cay Lienau, Münster 2002.   ISBN 3-934017-00-2.

My Very Good Friends

Cyriaco wrote about seeing these dancers on Samothraki,
built into the new palace.

In working on my talk for the AIA last week, I became fascinated with the particular culture of the eastern Mediterranean in which Cyriaco moved.  He had the wealth and status -- and the personal appeal -- to be the guest of local rulers, so when he was in Mistra he stayed with Constantine Palaiologos; Manuel Asan, governor of Imbros, gave him a boat to go to Samothraki, he had Christmas with Francesco Gattilusi, prince of Thasos; he stayed with Francesco Nani, governor of Mykonos, who took him to see Delos; and he got rides on the galley of Giovanni Delfino, Captain General of the Venetian fleet.

What is more interesting, and more important, is that all of these men had some degree of interest in antiquities, showed him what they owned personally, and took him out to see interesting things in the area. Not just the rulers: farmers and fishermen took him to see carvings and sites and caves all over Mani; a Cretan fisherman, Phantasios, showed him the mole near Maroneia made of shattered sarcophagi. Monks in several monasteries on Athos brought out their oldest manuscripts for him.

I find it highly significant that Cyriaco was shown the antiquities on Imbros by Michael Kritoboulos, and in Sparta by Laonikos Chalcocondyles.  These are two of the three historians of the period.  And he would have known Doukas, too, who was secretary to several Genoese governors of Galata, including Cyriaco's friend Baldassare Maruffo. Maruffo rebuilt and extended the walls of Galata. Cyriaco wrote and had carved a Latin inscription commemorating this, and the inscription survives now in the Istanbul museum.

In Nauplion, Pietro Rangano and Joannes Bendramon, took him to see what they thought was Mycenae. (What did Italians think they knew about Mycenae in 1448?) They were off by 1000 years, but they were interested, and had made an effort to look.

Ag. Adrianos - Katsingri as drawn by Cyriaco

Ag. Adrianos - Katsingri

Ag. Adrianos - Katsingri
 Cyriaco drew the stones to the right of the doorway.

[For a context for Ag. Adrianos-Katsingri, look at this entry on 3rd-century watchposts.]

[NOTE: This seems to have posted itself before I finished.  I will just leave it as it is and save the rest for another Cyriaco post.]


Much of this talk is taken from Cyriaco of Ancona: Later Travels.  Edward W. Bodnar with Clive Foss. I Tatti Renaissance Library,  HUP, 2003.

To Tell You Something Special

Cyriaco of Ancona, 

Museo della Città di Ancona*

The title comes from a letter written by Cyriaco of Ancona.  I have been asked to speak on Cyriaco at the Archaeological Institute of America which is meeting this weekend in San Antonio, and it will also be the title of my talk.

One of the things I will do in the talk is present a portrait of Cyriaco that seems to have gone unnoticed in contemporary scholarship. While I have read of many identifications made of people in the Gozzoli frescos of the Procession of the Magi (Plethon, Theodore of Gaza, Sigismundo Malatesta, Patriarch Joseph, Cosimo de Medici, the young Lorenzo, Filarete, John VIII Palaiologos, and others), I have never seen anyone identified as Cyriaco.  He may have been identified somewhere, but I have been unable to find such a statement, either in Cyriaco material or in Gozzoli material.  

But Cyriaco has to be in the painting.  Given his familiarity with John VIII and Plethon, his acquaintance with nearly every humanist and merchant in Italy, and his known presence in Florence in 1439 during the council, he has to have been included.  He is.  You can find him in the panel of the Old King, to the far right of the golden-haired boy with the cheetah, and just to the right of Gozzoli himself.

Cyriaco of Ancona, Gozzoli
Medici Chapel, Florence

Gozzoli was, during the year of the conference, painting frescos with Fra Angelico at the Domenican convent of S. Marco, which was where many members of the Greek delegation were staying in Florence. Cyriaco had met quite a few of them at Mistra, and more in Constantinople.  It is not difficult to think of him coming around to talk about classical remains and mutual friends.  I am profoundly pleased with this identification -- this is the special thing I am telling you -- and it doubles the number of known portraits of Cyriaco.

I am also going to remind the archaologists of Cyriaco's jubilant praise of archaeology:

O magnam vim artis nostrae, ac penitus divinam! 
Siquidem dum vivimus quae diu vivis viva, & praeclara fuere,
& longi temporis labe, longaque semivivum injuria
obstrusa penitus, & defuncta jacebant, ex ea demum arte diva
iterum vivos inter homines in lucem ab orco revocata
vivent felicissima temporis reparatione.

O great and utterly divine power of our art!
 For indeed, during our lifetime, those things that had been alive
and brilliant among the living, were lying dead, buried
by the long ruin of time and the long injury of the half-living:
finally, from the dead,
called back from the underworld** into the light by divine art,
they live happily among living men by the restoration of time.

.

Continued in the next post:

More Cyriaco:
http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2008/07/on-galley-by-lamplight.html

http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2009/01/along-with-bishop-and-huntsmen.html

http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2009/09/genio-vrbis-johannes-darivs.html
http://surprisedbytime.blogspot.com/2010/02/roosters.html

* This relief carving was identified as a portrait of Cyriaco by Gablriele Baldelli in "Su due pretesi ritratti anconetani," Cyriaco d'Ancona e la cultura antiquaria dell'Umanesimo: Atti del convegno internazionale di studio, Ancona 6-9 febbraio 1992. Ed. Gianfranco Paci & Sergio Sconocchia.  1998.

** Cyriaco has "Orcus" as a personification of the underworld. I can't bear it. Thanks to Michael Pettinger for helping with the translation.

Larger images of the portraits here.