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.

Toufa, Toupha: Part Three

 Detail, second king, from Adoration of the Magi,
Gentile da Fabriano, 1422-23,  Florence

An earlier Western conception of the toupha has turned up, this time in the Adoration of the Magi by Gentile da Fabriano, a Florentine painter, thirty-five years before the Benozzo Gozzoli  Procession of the Magi, also in Florence.  I had blithely assumed that Gozzoli had created this toupha:

Gozzoli painted his Magi in 1459-60, and I had been pleased with the discovery that not only was his painting based on the visit of John VIII Palaiologos to Florence in 1438, but that this toupha uses the red, gold, green, and white colors of the Medici who commissioned it. (The Medici were sponsors of a religious organization that specifically honored the Magi.)

However, Gentile da Fabriano painted his Magi in 1422-23 and the toupha may have been his design.  Here the toupha has red and gilded feathers, the Strozzi colors of red and yellow, and this painting was commissioned by Palla Strozzi.

(click to enlarge)

Gentile paints the the Magi three times as they process into the realm of magic and off the edge of this world, and each time one of them is wearing the gold and red feather toupha:

(click to enlarge)

(click to enlarge)

There are other elements to notice.  The forked beard, for one, which is very common in Western portrayals of John.  The short-sleeved outer garment, typically Byzantine.  And that this toupha-wearing king is the second king in the line to adore the Infant.

Now back to the Gozzoli.  He, too, is a second king.  The beard hints at a fork, although not obviously.  And he is wearing that short-sleeved outer garment. (Do notice the luxurious fabrics and colors both are wearing.)

John was in Ferrara and Florence in 1438, trying desperately to get help for Constantinople.  John was in Venice and Milan in the winter of 1423 and spring of 1424 trying desperately to get help for Constantinople.

But: Gentile da Fabriano signed and dated his altarpiece in May 1423.

And the beard turns out not to be diagnostic.  Other painters of the period have a second king with a forked beard, or a king with the short outer sleeves, though I have not identified any more combinations of forked beards and short sleeves.  The forked beard seems to be an attribute of  "a king from somewhere exotic."  So do the sleeves.

Had Gentile seen pictures of the toufa, such as this from 1340?  Or pictures of John? Or pictures of Eastern emperors?

Moving on to the animals, Gozzoli gave his magi cheetahs and a lynx.  Gentile includes a cheetah and a leopard, on the rumps of their keepers' horses, and hunting.

Clearly, Gozzoli drew heavily from Gentile's work and these quotations must have given a great sense of security to his viewers who were looking at a very different style of painting. Surely some art historian has tidily explained this, and the business about the two Second Kings, and some reader can send me the relevant references -- which I have not found although I have looked for them.

This is the great pleasure of research: there is always something else out there you haven't seen yet.  It is not a matter of "Gotcha!"  It is the joy of the exploration that leads from Cyriaco's ridiculous sketch to Gentile's shimmering gold.  It is the  matter of the journey, riding with the Magi, following the shining track, discovering the unlimited abundance just over the next hill.




Toufa, Toupha: Part Two
Toufa, Toupha: Part One
The Leopard-Wranglers: Part Two
The Leopard-Wranglers

Pure Pleasure: Peacocks

Villa of Poppaea, 1st C.

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It is time for pleasure, and few things are more pleasurable than peacocks.

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S.ta Costanza, Rome, 4th C.

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Dioscorides manuscript of Anicia Juliana, 6th C.

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Rotunda, Thessalonike, 4th C.

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I saw a peacock with a fiery tail

I saw a blazing comet drop down hail

I saw a cloud with ivy cirlced round

I saw a sturdy oak creep on the ground

I saw a pismire swallow up a whale

I saw a raging sea brim full of ale

I saw a Venice glass sixteen foot deep

I saw a well full of men's tears that weep

I saw their eyes all in a flame of fire

I saw a house as big as the moon and higher

I saw the sun even in the midst of night

I saw the Man that saw this wondrous sight.

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Rotunda, Thessalonike, 4th C.

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Identification  misplaced.

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Mark you how the peacock's eye
Winks away its ring of green,
Barter'd for an azure dye.
And the piece that's like a bean,
The pupil, plays its liquid jet
To win a look of violet.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

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Al Jazari's model for a drinking fountain, Topkapi Museum, ca. 1000?

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Benozzo Gozzolo, Medici Chapel, Florence, 1460

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Domination of Black

At night, by the fire,

The colors of the bushes

And of the fallen leaves,

Repeating themselves,

Turned in the room,

Like the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind.

Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks

Came striding.

And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails

Were like the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind,

In the twilight wind.

They swept over the room,

Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks

Down to the ground.

I heard them cry -- the peacocks.

Was it a cry against the twilight

Or against the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind,

Turning as the flames

Turned in the fire

Turning as the tails of the peacocks

Turned in the loud fire

Loud as the hemlocks

Full of the cry of the peacocks?

Or was is a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window,

I saw how the planets gathered

Like the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind.

I saw how the night came,

Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks

I felt afraid.

And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

Wallace Stevens

Toupha, Toufa

When Cyriaco of Ancona was in Constantinople, he sketched as best he could the great bronze statue of Justinian (527-565). The statue was made of gilded bronze, and stood on a column 50m. high. The most remarkable thing about the statue itself -- otherwise your basic equestrian statue -- was the headdress, called a toupha, which an earlier traveller drew in great detail in 1340 (right) and you can see that this drawing and Cyriaco's are pretty much in agreement.
[Late correction: I now believe this drawing has been erroneously attributed to Cyriaco.]

.A number of different headdresses have been called the toupha, or toufa as you prefer, but we are currently concerned with the one on the statue, and will describe it a diadem with a lot of peacock feathers. It probably came from the East, perhaps Persia, which is an all-purpose explanation for various Byzantine appurtenances not otherwise explicable.

The toupha had been in use for quite a while before Justinian -- coins of Constantius II (337-361) like the gold here show him wearing one -- and notice the little thing in front that looks like the tuft on a hawk's hood.

When Justinian came along, 200 years later, it was apparently well- established as part of the emperor outfit, regardless of how silly it must have looked, and was worn when an emperor rode in procession to celebrate a triumph.

A hundred and seventy years ago, an extraordinary piece of fabric was discovered in Bamburg, Germany, in the tomb of Gunther, Bishop from 1057 to 1065, a fabric he had obtained in Constantinople. Splendidly colored, it showed a tyche -- a representation of a city, here Constantinople -- presenting presenting a toupha to the emperor John I Tzmiskes (971-976), unless it was to Basil II (976-1025) for defeating the Bulgarians, but either way it was already an antique when Gunther acquired it on pilgrimage. Gunther died on that pilgrimage, and his cloth was buried with him. The tyche seems to be dressed as a bride so this fabric is emphasizing that the Emperor is married to the City, much as Elizabeth II was given a ring as part of her coronation ceremony

John VIII Palaiologos who gave so much pleasure to artists with his dramatic hats went to the Council of Ferrara-Florence in late 1437. Now, Cyriaco who drew the first toupha pictured above, and who was a friend of John, was at the Council when it moved to Florence in early 1439. And the young painter Benozzo Gozzoli (1421-1497), being a Florentine, was there, too.

John didn't wear a toupha in Florence. Florence was a humiliation, not a triumph, and if he had worn a toupha, there would be twice as many pictures of him wearing it as there are of him wearing the melon hat. But one can imagine a variety of ways in which a young painter might have met up with Cyriaco who had recently been in Constantinople, and might have looked at his travel notes and diaries. And might have seen that image of a mounted emperor wearing a toupha.

Or young Benozzo talked to other people who had been in Constantinople and or saw other drawing. He may have made his own copies of them. He may have thought that it was a silly headdress, too, and that he could improve on it. Or he may have only understood that it was a crown with feathers. So that when he came to paint his amazing frescos for the Capello dei Magi in the Palazzo Medici twenty years later, he included the emperor John, wearing carefully curled hair, exotic Eastern robes, imperial red buskins, and a toupha -- a crown bejewelled with the rubies and pearls which John is known to have worn in Florence, and with red, white, and green feathers. 

[An explanation for Benozzo Gozzoli's particular feathers is here.]