Love, Truth, Orthodoxy, Reticence; Or, What Edgar Wind Didn’t See in Botticelli’s...

8/9/2019 Love, Truth, Orthodoxy, Reticence; Or, What Edgar Wind Didn’t See in Botticelli’s Primavera-REBECCA ZORACH

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Love, Truth, Orthodoxy, Reticence; or, What Edgar Wind Didn’t See in Botticelli’s Primavera Author(s): Rebecca ZorachSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Autumn 2007), pp. 190-224Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/526092 .

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Critical Inquiry 34 (Autumn 2007)

2007 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/07/3401-0008$10.00.All rights reserved.

190

For kind help in gaining access to the EdgarWind Archivein Oxford, I am most grateful to the

assistanceand advice of Jon Whiteley, Jas’ Elsner,ElizabethSears, and Consolato Latella. Nanci

Young provided archival materials from Smith College. Thanks are due to the numerous readers

and interlocutors who have refined my thinking on this essay, in particular, audiencesat the

College Art Association, DukeUniversity,and the KunsthistorischesInstitut in Florence.Advice

from LaurenBerlant andthe board of Critical Inquiry has been especially thoughtful and

pertinent. I was privilegedto benefit from the commentsand suggestionsof—among others—

DaisyDelogu, Nicole Lassahn, Lucy Pick, Lisa Voigt,Peter Parshall,Ethan Matt Kavaler, Randi

Klebanoff, Bob Williams, PatriciaSimons, Michael Cole, JamesG. Turner, Hans van Miegroet,

PatriciaLeighten,Mark Antliff, Annabel Wharton, Kristine Stiles, Hannah Baader,Gerhard Wolf,

Darrel Rutkin, Lia Markey,KatherinePoole, Rainbow Porthé, and the students in my neo-

Platonism seminar.This essayis dedicated to the memory of Margaret Wind, whose careful

archivingenabled this project to come to fruition.

Unless otherwise noted,translations from German are my own.

1. Erwin Panofsky, “Introductory,” Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the

Renaissance (Oxford, 1939), p. 8. “Introductory”was revised as Panofsky,“IconographyandIconology:An Introductionto the Study of Renaissance Art,”Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (Garden City, N.Y., 1955), pp. 26–54.

Love, Truth, Orthodoxy, Reticence; or, WhatEdgar Wind Didn’t See in Botticelli’s Primavera

Rebecca Zorach

In the middle decades of thetwentieth century, somethingknownas neo-Platonism became a privileged interpretive toolfor thestudyof Renaissance

art. Associated witha contemplative method of hierarchicalascentto higher

meaning, it resonated with the iconographic method propounded byErwin

Panofsky, in which the scholar was to work toward increasing abstraction

through three layers of interpretation: the pre-iconographic, the icono-

graphic, and the iconological (or “iconography in a deeper sense” ).1 Neo-

Platonism offered historical justification for scholars seeking meaning

beyond the surface of images; it came to be an emblem of the iconographic

methodology of the Warburg Institute and its affiliates (including Panof-

sky), but it stretched much further than that. Art historytextbooksstillbear

the imprint of what Horst Bredekamp has called a “fashionable trend” of

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Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2007 191

2. Horst Bredekamp, “Götterdämmerung des Neuplatonismus,”Kritische Berichte 14, no. 4(1986): 42; hereafterabbreviated“G.” The termin German is Modewelle. Thanks to Ethan Matt

Kavaler for pointing this article out to me.3. See, for example, David R. Coffin, “Tintoretto and the MediciTombs,” Art Bulletin 33 (June

1951): 119–25, and uses of the term in Phyllis Pray Bober and Ruth Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources (London, 1986).

4. As he puts it, Botticelli’s Primavera is one of only three “witnessesfor the prosecution”(Kronzeugen), along with Dürer’s MelencoliaI and Titian’s so-calledSacred and Profane Love (“G,”p. 40).

mid-century scholarship; they invariably make reference to neo-Platonism

in discussions of Florentine humanism, Botticelli, and Michelangelo.2 In

that context the phenomenon is synonymous with what medieval and Re-

naissance commentators might have called allegory:Christianizedreadingsof classical themes in art. The mid-century’s “neo-Platonism” also dema-

terialized images and, frequently, desexualized them, both indicating and

masking homoeroticism, especially in the case of Michelangelo. Neo-Pla-

tonism became a catchall term to characterize the standardintellectual bag-

gage of medieval and Renaissance Europe to the extent that concepts like

harmony or the system of the four elements or any Renaissance instanceof

the revival of antiquity could be characterized, in a very general way, as

“neo-Platonic.”3 Because of what we might call its abuse, by the 1970s the

term had fallen out of fashion. In his 1986 article Bredekamp noted that it

had lost its signal role in our understanding of the meaning of Renaissance

art (see “G,” p. 39).

Bredekamp argues that Panofsky, Edgar Wind, Ernst Gombrich, andothers originally saw iconology and its preoccupation with the classical tra-

dition as a bulwark against Nazism, but that neo-Platonism was “the wrong

fortress [die falsche Burg],” an esoteric dead end (“G,” pp. 39, 40).4 But to

say this is perhaps to blame these authors unfairly for the assumptionsthat

grew up in the wake of their work—assumptions that softened and sim-

plified neo-Platonism, producing a domesticated version of what was ac-

tually a complicated and often internally conflicting set of esoteric

philosophical ideas. Neo-Platonism is not a word used in the Renaissance

or before; what it refers to is, as the founders of the approach knew, a mul-

tilayeredobject, beginning with late antique Alexandriancommentatorson

Plato (Plotinus and his following) and extending to a revival of interest in

their work and in that of Plato in the Italian Renaissance and beyond. In

R ebecca Zorach is an associate professor of art history and the college at the

University of Chicago. She is the author of Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and

Excess in the French Renaissance (2005). She is currently working on an exhibitionon early modern prints of Rome and an essay on relations between France and

Thailand in the late seventeenth century.




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192 Rebecca Zorach / Botticelli’s Primavera

5. Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (1958;New York, 1968),pp. 8, 238; hereafterabbreviated PM. Recent work on Wind includesthe projectof editing his unpublished (oruntranslated) papers (The Eloquence of Symbols and The Religious Symbolism of Michelangelo) aswell as an excellent German collection of essays on him,Edgar Wind: Kunsthistoriker und

Philosoph, ed. Bredekamp(Berlin, 1998).6. E. H. Gombrich, “Botticelli’s Mythologies: A Study in the Neo-Platonic Symbolism of His

Circle,” Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London, 1972), p. 37; hereafterabbreviated “BM.”

7. See Raimond van Marle, The Developmentof the Italian Schools of Painting, 19 vols. (TheHague, 1923–38),12:76.

8. The painting is painted in tempera overa gessoground on a support made of sevenpoplarpanels, approximatelysix by ten feet (the scaleof a tapestry!). Twenty-oneplant species are

identifiable on the ground; the trees include orange, laurel and myrtle; see Mirella Levi d’Ancona,Botticelli’s Primavera: A BotanicalInterpretation Including Astrology, Alchemy, and the Medici (Florence, 1983).

fifteenth-century Florence a group of scholars, principally Marsilio Ficino

and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and their circle, devoted substantialat-

tention to these lateantiquecommentators. TheAlexandrianGreekauthors

and the Italians (who wrote mainly in Latin) are now referred to as neo-Platonists. We tend to assume that part of their intention was to reconcile

classical philosophy with Christian belief. But with this commentary tra-

dition also came a heady mix of mysticism and esoteric knowledge that are

distinctly un-Christian. Ficino’s writings—the main body of Florentine

Platonism—are rich and complex; they are full of references to Plato and

Aristotle and their commentators, but also to medicinal formulae based on

herbs, minerals, and the stars. Wind, in his 1958 book Pagan Mysteries in

the Renaissance, cites Pico’s description of ancient writings possessing “co-

piousness of matter and . . . multiformity of religion . . . occult philosophy

and strange foreign mysteries.” Wind concludes by characterizing Renais-

sance neo-Platonism as a “manifest eccentricity” thatnonethelessproduced

great art.5

There may be a no more extensively examined case of neo-Platonism

than Sandro Botticelli’s tapestry-like Primavera (fig. 1). Its sculpted forms

and hauntingly impassive faces, set within a forest glade, have likelyinspired

moreinterpretive labor thananyother quattrocentopainting. AsGombrich

put it in 1945, “Anyone interested in problems of method can do no better

than to study the conflicting interpretations of the ‘Primavera’ and the dis-

cussions which centredround them.”6 Already in 1931, a scholar hadreacted

with irritation to the quantity of ink spilled about the painting.7 It depicts

Venus at the center of a dance of figures: from left to right, Mercury, the

three Graces, Venus (with Cupid floating above her), and Flora, Chloris,

and the wind-god Zephyr. Interpreters have connected the painting to nu-

merous classical literary texts, to contemporary love poetry, and,especially,

to festivals—as well as to neo-Platonic ideas.8 It is now assumed that it was




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1 .

S a n

d r o

B o t t i c e

l l i ( 1 4 4 4 – 1 5 1 0

) . P r i m a v e r a ( p o s t r e s t o r a t i o n

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P h o t o :

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, N Y

.




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9. See Aby Warburg, “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring: An Examination of Concepts of Antiquity in the Italian EarlyRenaissance,”The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity:Contributions to the Cultural History of the EuropeanRenaissance, trans.DavidBritt(1893; Los

Angeles, 1999), pp. 88–156.See alsoMatthew Rampley, “From Symbol to Allegory: Aby Warburg’sTheory of Art,”Art Bulletin 79 (Mar. 1997): 41–55, and Georges Didi-Huberman,Devant le temps:Histoire de l’art et anachronismedes images (Paris, 2000) and L’Image survivante: Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Paris, 2002).

10. See Creighton Gilbert, “On Subject and Not-Subject in Italian Renaissance Pictures,”Art Bulletin 34 (Sept.1952): 202–16.

11. Charles Dempsey,The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli’s “Primavera”and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent (Princeton, N.J., 1992), p. 7. Dempseyargues that Botticelli’s

painting constitutes a pictorial analogue to a new form of humanist literaturein which vernacularforms(for example, praise of the beloved as in medieval love poetry)are broughtto the level of universality (here, a generalized principleof love, Venus Physica ) through classicalreferences.Ivan

painted in the late 1470s or early 1480s and that it was commissioned either

by or for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, the older of the two younger

second cousins of Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici, called the Magnificent, who

served as theguardianof hiscousinsandadministratorof their considerablefortune. The Primavera (along with the Birth of Venus ) was the subject of

Aby Warburg’s doctoral dissertation, in which he argued for strong con-

nections between the painting and Agnolo Poliziano’s Stanze. More than

this, though, he suggested that artists and writers of the fifteenth century

looked to antiquity for thedepictionof movement—arguing thisin contrast

to the prevailing Winckelmannian notion that associated Renaissance clas-

sicism with static harmony.9 Warburg’s interpretation was literary and, in

a sense, formal, with form understood not in a surface or stylistic sense but

as a deeply rooted cultural resource. Those who followed in his footsteps—

Wind, Panofsky, Gombrich—added neo-Platonism, specifically Ficino’s

writings, to help understand the painting’s iconography.

Gombrich, for his part, collected fifteen different readings of the paint-ing’s affective portrayal of Venus as part of his argument that there was

something inexhaustibly haunting about the painting: “These puzzlingand

wistful faces give us no rest until we have built around them a story which

seems to account for their enigmatic expression” (“BM,” p. 38). But, as

Creighton Gilbert argued, Gombrich never actually explained thisaspect of

the work.10 I will argue in what follows that the painting’s haunting quality

may instead be the result of a formal asymmetry that bears an equivocal

meaning—if not of the accumulated ghosts of so many pastinterpretations.

Among these, Wind’s, in Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, has been one

of the most tenacious of the neo-Platonic camp. I am not alone in consid-

ering his treatment of the painting compelling (if not entirely complete);

Charles Dempsey, author of the most prominent recent scholarly treatment

of the painting, The Portrayal of Love, acknowledges thatamong thevarious

neo-Platonic readings Wind’s “certainly deserves primacy.”11 As Dempsey




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Tognarini focuses on the “muse” to whom Warburg drew attention, SimonettaVespucci, and on

the bride of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco,Semiramide Appiani. See Ivan Tognarini,L’identità e l ’oblio:Simonetta, Semiramide, e Sandro Botticelli (Milan, 2002). Giovanni Reale, Botticelli: La “Primavera”o le “Nozze di Filologia e Mercurio”? (Rimini, 2001), proposesa philosophicalallegory.An argument that the painting represents politicalharmonyamong different Italian cities has

been proposed by Enrico Guidoni, La “Primavera” di Botticelli: L’armonia tra le città nell’Italia di Lorenzo il Magnifico (Rome, 2005). Lilian Zirpolo sees the painting as addressedto Semiramideherself as does Michael Rollmann,who does not cite Zirpolo.See Lilian Zirpolo,“Botticelli’sPrimavera : A Lessonfor the Bride,”in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, ed.

Norma Broude and Mary Garrard (New York, 1992), pp. 101–9, and Michael Rohlman, “Botticellis‘Primavera’:Zu Anlaß, Adressat und Funktion von mythologischenGemälden im FlorentinerQuattrocento,”Artibus et Historiae, no. 33 (1996): 97–132.

notes, it is to Wind that we owe the essential insight that identifies the triad

of figures to the right of the panel. Zephyr, by raping the virginal nymph

Chloris, transforms her into the fecund Flora, nymph of flowers and fields.

In this paper I propose what I believe is a compelling new interpretationof Botticelli’s famous painting. Suspicious of the impulse to find answers

to a picture’s mysteries in a single detail, however, I use my interpretation

as a point of departure to aska new setof questions—aboutthe relationship

of art to philosophy, of eros to power, and about the gaps that remain when

we reduce art-historical methods to a conflict between formalism and his-

toricism or between iconology and social history. The seeds of my inter-

pretation appear in the works of thosemid-twentieth-century scholars who

made the painting into an object lesson in iconological interpretation. Be-

fore addressing the painting directly, however, I begin with a case study of

a different sort, drawn from the context in which these same interpretive

methods developed. In contrast to the apparent beauty and harmonyof the

Primavera, this will be a case study in conflict: specifically, that of Wind’sdebates with “Chicagoschool” critics and Great Booksadvocates in hisbrief

stay at the University of Chicago in the 1940s. Wind will also be my chief

interlocutor in considering Botticelli’s painting. The lectures that were to

form his Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance were given across the U.S., and

at Chicago they became part of a controversy whose details highlight

broader issues at stake in midcentury debates inAmericaneducation.I hope

to show here how these pedagogical issues can illuminate the “mysteries”

Wind studied in his 1958 book. The painting, in turn, prompts a reconsid-

eration of the status of the early modern image and the quandary of art

history’s own complicity with the power and violence that produces, some-

times, things of beauty.

Pagan Mysteries in Chicago

Wind is most often associated with Warburg’s intellectual legacy and

with his years as the first professor of art history at Oxford in the 1950s and




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12. LikePanofsky, Winddrew his conceptionof the symbol largely fromErnst Cassirer’s theory of “symbolic forms,” produced in dialoguewith Warburg. See Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans.Ralph Manheim and John Michael Krois, 4 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1953–

96).13. Wind and Gombrichwere to differ on the statusof the irrational in Warburg’s work. See

Wind, “On a Recent Biography of Warburg,” in The Eloquence of Symbols: Studies in Humanist Art, ed. Jaynie Anderson (Oxford, 1993), pp. 106–13.

14. See EdgarWind, “Heı̂oyUóby (Laws, II, 671D): On Plato’sPhilosophy of Art,” The Eloquence of Symbols, pp. 1–20.

15. Ibid., p. 9.16. NicholasXenos has recently argued that Leo Strauss’s sympathywith fascism (apart fromits

anti-Semitism)alreadyappears in writings frombefore he left Germany. See NicholasXenos, “LeoStrauss and the Rhetoricof the War on Terror,” Logos 3 (Spring 2004), www.logosjournal.com/issue_3.2/xenos.pdf

1960s, where his lectures created a sensation and packed theaters. Trained

as a philosopher before becoming an art historian, he waged a long battle

in his work in aesthetics and intellectual historyand in hishistoricalstudies

of Renaissance art on behalf of the symbol and against formalism in boththeoretical and pragmatic terms.12 Following Warburg and mindful of

Plato’s “divine fear” of the power of art, he insisted on the complexity of

symbols and a constant, vital, and sometimes risky tension between reason

and ritual (with Warburg, he believed ritual and magic tapped into pow-

erful, irrational forces within the human psyche).13 In his inaugural lecture

as a Privatdozent at the University of Hamburg in 1932, he explainedPlato’s

rejection of the plastic arts not as a rejection of a degraded copy of a copy

(as it appears in the Republic ) but as a recognition of the dangers posed to

theutopian republicby thepower of artto move humanhearts and minds.14

Running throughout Wind’s work is an insistence that some conflicts of

values are nontrivial, that legitimate values may come into conflict in ways

that cannot be resolved by a simpleevaluation of priorities. Inthe Hamburglecture, he raised the question of “whether everyone who is confronted by

conflicting values must not decide to make a sacrifice in one direction or

another—a sacrifice through which he defines the form of humanity in

which he believes and to which he commits himself.”15 That is, one legiti-

mate value may need to be sacrificed to another. This position reflects the

increasingly dire political situation, the rise of Nazism, met with compla-

cency or support by some of Wind’s intellectual contemporaries.16

Wind had been Panofsky’s first dissertation student in Germany. After

finishing his dissertation, he took the unusual step of spending three years

in the United States, first in New York and then at the University of North

Carolina. He returned to Germany in 1927 to complete his Habilitation and

soon met Warburg. His time in the U.S. accounts for the fact that he con-

sidered C. S. Peirce along with Warburg as his two great intellectual influ-




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17. Hutchins intervened withthe draft board to preventWind from being drafted. See Wind,letterto Robert Maynard Hutchins,5 Dec. 1942,and Hutchins, letterto Wind, 7 Dec. 1942, folder2, box 2, Presidents’ Papers, 1940–46,University of Chicago Archive,University of Chicago,

Chicago (UCA).18. Anne Stevens alludes to this problem in her“The Philosophy of GeneralEducation and Its

Contradictions: The Influence of Hutchins,” Journal of General Education 50, no. 3 (2001): 182.

ences. In 1933 Hitler’s racial laws cost him his university appointment, and

he moved with the Warburg Institute to London, becoming its deputy di-

rector under Fritz Saxl. In 1939, he undertook what was intended as a short

trip to the United States; with war intervening and then a falling-out withhisWarburg colleagues, he wasto live there more or less full-timeuntil 1955,

spending the last ten years as a research professor at Smith College before

moving on to Oxford.

In the U.S. in 1939 Wind quickly fell into an alliance with men involved

in a revolution in American higher education—among them Robert May-

nard Hutchins, the young president of the University of Chicago. War was

on everyone’s minds—especially as professors as well as students began to

be drafted—and therefore the issue of defining “the form of humanity in

which [they] believe[d]” was particularly charged.17 The often-heated de-

bates over educational philosophy were concerned with nothing less than

the fate of modern civilization. Hutchins and his allies were in the process

of establishing undergraduate curricula in Great Books, which were in-tended to counteract disciplinary overspecialization and lack of attention

to philosophical issues that, theybelieved, should equip young mento shape

society. They took aim in particular at the empirical social sciences and in

general at pragmatism and professionalization. Despite initial friendly re-

lations, it may have been inevitable that with Wind’s interest in American

pragmatism he would come into conflict with the architects of the reaction

against it in American universities. There is, as many have observed, a ten-

sion at theheart of theGreat Books philosophy: to itsproponents, theGreat

Books represented ideas, not history. And yet these books are treated as a

set of sacred texts authorized by tradition.18 For Wind, as a Jewish intellec-

tual exiled from Nazi Germany, the new curriculum’s rejection of articu-

lated historical understanding coupledwitha covert appeal to traditionmay

not have seemed such a promising way of addressing the state of Western

civilization.

To the Great Bookspartisans, I think, Wind simply represented a classical

European education. In 1939, at the instigation of Stringfellow Barr and

Scott Buchanan, who were then in theprocessof revamping thecurriculum

of St. John’s College in Annapolis, Wind lectured there for a semester on

Renaissance art. Early warning signs of incompatibility with the exponents




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19. Margaret Wind, note,folders i–iii, boxI, 7, EdgarWind Archive,BodleianLibrary,

Universityof Oxford, Oxford (EWA).20. Wind developed a group of American friends of the Warburg Institute, eventually securing

various offers of a temporary home, which forced the hand of the University of London and

enabled the institute to find a permanent homethere. From 1939 to 1945, he reported to theWarburg Institute;in addition to giving numerouslectureseries, he gave seventy-threeindividuallectures at a wide variety of locations.

21. Wind had met McKeon at Columbia in his first American visitin the 1920s andrecommended McKeon to Panofsky when he moved to the U.S. Buchanan and Barrwarned that

he wouldnot get alongwith McKeon at Chicago.See Wind, letter to Saxl,10 Apr. 1943, folder ii,box I, 5, EWA.

22. See Richard McKeon, letters to Wind, 3 Dec. 1941and 10 Dec. 1941,and letter to Hutchins,10 Dec.1941, folder 11 “[Correspondence regarding] Wind, Edgar1937–1944,”box 68, Richard

McKeon Papers, UCA.23. See Secretary of the Board of Trustees, letter to Wind, 24 Feb. 1942, folder i, box I, 8, EWA.24. Hutchins’s proposalhad been accepted, but a motion to rescindit failed narrowly, 58–58,

with Hutchinscasting the 58th vote. See Milton Mayer, Robert Maynard Hutchins: A Memoir

(Berkeley, 1993), p. 241. See also James SloanAllen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture:Capitalism, Modernism, and the Chicago-Aspen Crusade for Cultural Reform (1983; Boulder, 2002),p. 105.

of Great Books came when he found that, as Margaret Wind later put it,

“Buchanan, enamoured of the Platonic Idea, wished him to talk about art

without contaminating thought by showing pictures on a screen.”Presum-

ably while waiting for St. John’s to acquire a lantern slide projector, he“spent some peaceful afternoons eating oysters on Chesapeake Bay.”19

Wind’s initial plan had been, as he put it, “spreading the gospel” of the

Warburg Institute, its scholarly projects, its dire financial circumstances,

and its need for a permanent home. After the stint at St. John’s he lectured

incessantly for three years, all over the U.S., as the institute’s ambassador.20

Constant travel took a toll, and he wrote in the fall of 1941 to Richard

McKeon, dean of Chicago’s humanities division, to take him up on an offer

to teach there.21 McKeon’s initial response was equivocal (he cited a budget

crisis), but it was quickly followed by another, more favorable, letter.22 By

February 1942, Hutchins had formally invited Wind to take up a position

at Chicago.23

Wind arrived at a contentious time. Hutchinsbelieved thatby reformingundergraduate education at Chicago he could help guide American edu-

cation toward the pursuit of values rather than the accumulation of facts.

In April 1942, Hutchins cast a tiebreaking vote in the university senate to

pursue changes in the college, giving it greater autonomy and allowing it to

award a four-year BA based on “general education,” in other words, the

Great Books.24 Basic humanities courses were promptly revamped. While

a 1940 humanities textbook provided historical context organized chron-

ologically and included such chapter titles as “TheMacedonianEmpire and

the Hellenistic Age” and “The Spread of the Protestant Reformation,” the




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25. See University of Chicago, Introductory General Course in the Humanities, Syllabus, ed.Hayward Keniston, FerdinandSchevill, and Arthur P. Scott (Chicago,1940); Universityof

Chicago, the College, Humanities 2: Suggestions for the Analysis of Drama and Fiction (Chicago,1944); and University of Chicago, the College, Humanities 2: Syllabus and Selected Readings (Chicago,1945). Humanities1, 2, and 3 replaced the general introductory course; of the three,Hum 2 is the closest analogue to it.

26. EdgarWind, “Statementby Wind on the McKeon trouble, possibly to be submitted to theCommitteeon Policy,”p.3, cover sheet dated6 Sept. 1943, folder 17, box 46, John U. Nef, Jr. Papers,UCA. In the same folder, see alsoMcKeon, letterto John Nef, 31 July 1943.

27. Wind, “Statementby Wind on the McKeon trouble,possiblyto be submitted to the

Committee on Policy,” p. 4.28. Nef dealsdirectly with what he calls the “pagantradition” in Germany in his The United

States and Civilization (Chicago, 1942), pp. 102–3.

analogous book in 1944 consisted of literary texts organized by genre and

supplemented by brief methodological essays.25 The philosopher and clas-

sicist McKeon was the architect of the new course, Humanities 2 (Hum 2),

which contributed to Wind’s dissatisfaction at Chicago. McKeon was him-self a contentious figure. While intermittently a Hutchins ally, he also pub-

licly opposed some of Hutchins’s schemes for the university. McKeon

argued for a neo-Aristotelian rationalist approach based on a notion of the

universality of the rational soul, which in pedagogical terms might be char-

acterized with the single word method.

From the perspective of Renaissance art history, Wind clashedmostcon-

spicuously with McKeon over the title of a series of public lectures he was

to give. As dean of the humanities division, McKeon had invited Wind to

lecture on “something in Renaissance art and culture,” suggesting that

Wind supply the specific title. Wind agreed and gave his title: “Pagan and

Christian Mysticism in the Art of the Renaissance.” McKeon, ever the ra-

tionalist, replied that the word mysticism displeased him and that he wouldprefer elements or influences.26 When Wind would not budge, McKeon

claimed that Wind was trying to substitute other lectures entirely for the

ones he had asked for. Wind later wrote,

I did not think that I needed to explain to Mr McKeon what I intended

to explain to the audience, namely, that I was using the word ‘mysti-

cism’ in the strict technical sense employed by Renaissance authors and

artists when they contrast a ‘mystical image’ with a ‘literal statement’ . . .

Since this is, in my opinion, the common denominator between such

varied expressions of Renaissance art as are to be found in the works of

Botticelli, Mantegna, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, Tintoretto and

even El Greco, it seemed to me a suitable subject for a general course of public lectures.27

On a basic level any whiff of paganism or mysticism must have called up

fears of the nationalism of Hitler’s Germany.28 But McKeon and his allies,




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29. Fora Hegelian reading of abstractionin modernpainting,see Robert Pippin, “What WasAbstract Art? (From the Point of View of Hegel),” Critical Inquiry 29 (Autumn 2002): 1–24.

30. See Gilbert, “On Subject and Not-Subject in Italian Renaissance Pictures,”p. 211.

31. See “InstructionsConcerning Lectures,Readings,and Discussions for the General Coursein the Humanities(Humanities 2),” Sept. 1942, folder 17 “Humanities 2,” box 38, Richard McKeonPapers, UCA.

I think, liked the idea of the Renaissance better than they liked the Renais-

sance itself. What was it that mid-twentieth-century educators saw in the

Renaissance? It sometimes seems that the Renaissance carries no other cul-

tural content than an assertion that change happens; it is a paradigm forhistorical change that can be mobilized to support the values any particular

writer seeks to propound. In the mid-century U.S. it signified the much-

vaunted “rise of the individual.” Accompanied, in the world of contem-

porary (American) art, by the rise of “pure” painting, the Renaissance

prefigured the ascendancy of painting as medium.29 This is evident, for in-

stance, in Gilbert’s intelligent but flawed responseto iconography, “OnSub-

ject and Not-Subject in Italian Renaissance Pictures,” in which he argued

for the existence of a Renaissance notion of pure (subjectless) painting: Re-

naissance painting nicely suited to modernist tastes.30 Modern scholarssaw

the Renaissance as a period of secularization in which art andthoughtpried

themselves from the realm of religious ritual as individualspried themselves

from submersion in collectivity. One edition of the Humanities 2 courseinstructions declared, for instance, that “the humanists of the Renaissance

conceived themselves to be engaged in an attempt to liberate the study of

things human and natural from subjugation to theology and the study of

things divine.”31

From the view then generally held, it would be easy to understand the

Primavera and other paintings like it as exemplary of Renaissance sensibil-

ity. First given the name Primavera by Vasari and symbolically indicating

the springtime of Renaissance revival itself, Botticelli’s pagan dance looks

far removed from the concerns of Christian representation. For the first

time, painted images appeared to stand alone and to invite a kind of

contemplation not directly connected to religious worship. For twentieth-

century humanists, Renaissance Italy offered a moment of the reorgani-

zation of pedagogy much like what they themselves were seeing, and

sometimes pushing, in education. McKeon’s friend and ally Ronald Crane,

chair of the English department, had written in 1935 that

it would be necessary to have properly prepared students as well, and to

give us these there is required something like a renaissance in general

education at the level of the high school and junior college. Perhaps

such a renaissance is coming, bringing with it the revived study of the




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32. R. S. Crane,“History vs. Criticismin the Study of Literature,” English Journal 24 (Oct. 1935):666.

33. See McKeon, Culture, Education, and the Arts, vol. 2 of SelectedWritings of RichardMcKeon,

ed. Zahava K. McKeon and WilliamSwenson (Chicago, 1998), p. 117. A distinctmedievalismpermeatedthe university duringthe Hutchins revolution; Hutchins was a Thomist, and McKeonbelieved in a scholastic systemof educationwith a strongly Aristotelian character.

34. Once the committee became a degree-grantingunit, its brochure describedits mission as

follows: “Thesubject matter for considerationis the broad general conceptionswhich have beenoffered as to the nature of manin society, as to the course of historical change, as to the majorendsof living and the circumstancesunder which groups of men definesuch ends,and as to methods of social action chosen or advocatedfor realizing those ends.”The fields represented included

anthropology and sociology; politics, economics, jurisprudence, and ethics; and education,psychology, and human development (Wind, “Report 1939–1945”to the Warburg Institute, folderi, boxI, 5, EWA; see alsofolders i and vi, box I, 7).

classics in some form or other, bringing with it also the renewed cultiva-

tion of those ancient arts of reading and writing upon which any criti-

cism of literature worthy of the name must be firmly based.32

To many Great Books sympathizers, the Renaissance had stripped away

the outmoded baggage of scholasticism and established rhetoric and ver-

nacular literatures as suitable subjects of study. McKeon’s position, how-

ever, was more ambivalent. On the one hand, the revolution in education

at Chicago was largely a return to “classics.” Understood in this way, the

Renaissance might provide an analogy for the pedagogical project upon

which the university had embarked. On the other hand, McKeon saw in the

Renaissance the lossof something significant aboutmedieval educationand

specifically scholasticism: method. He believed that a primary weakness of

modern education stemmed directly from the Renaissance—the replace-

ment of knowledge as method (the medieval trivium andquadrivium) with

knowledge as content, in other words, subjects of specialized study (liter-ature, natural sciences, history).33 McKeon took an approach that, in a sub-

stantial way, reversed rather thanimitated “theRenaissance”:it reinstituted

method. For a series of public lectures, he might simply have wanted a cele-

bration of the rebirth of learning, illustrated with pictures.

Similar conflicts emerged in the design of Ph.D. fields in the Committee

on Social Thought. Social Thought was a new entity that corresponded,on

the divisional level, to the changes Hutchins was making in the College. It

had been established to enable cross-disciplinary work in social theory; its

driving force was John U. Nef, an economic historian who became Wind’s

closest friend at Chicago. Later, Social Thought would be associated with

Leo Strauss (who arrived in 1949) and would become the refuge for the

Great Books philosophy after the College curriculum shifted away from it.But in 1943 it was an elite group that embodied, in polite form, many of the

university’s debates.34




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35. It was approved by the committee in December1942. See Nef, letterto Wind, 29 Dec.1942,

folder17, box 46,JohnU. Nef, Jr. Papers, UCA.36. Wind, “Renaissance Studies,” folder ii, box I, 8, EWA.37. Concernedprimarily with the survival of antiquity in its very aliveness, movement,and

formal-empatheticeffects, Warburg did not focuson the issueof a purported but spurious

genuineness of that or any othertradition. The conflict most crucial for Warburg’s reading of Renaissance classicism is the internaltension that we can characterizein a shorthand way asDionysian-Apollonian.

Wind was asked to join the committee upon his arrival at Chicago and

produced a memorandum on how the study of art might be integrated into

the program of study in Social Thought. In it he discussed at length the

philosophicalquestion of the existence of aesthetic universals andproposeda range of topics that clearly derive from the preoccupations he shared with

Warburg: “the relation of the ‘fine arts’ to folklore and magic”; “the tradi-

tional veneration and fear of the artist”; “origins and history of the term

‘genius’ as applied to the artist”; “origins andhistory of theterm‘aesthetics’

as applied to art”; “the evolution of canons” for different styles and genres

of art—wherein he refers to a “growing distrust [one shared by him] in the

dismissal of whole periods of art as ‘decayed’ or ‘undeveloped’”—and sev-

eral others. While this discussion was not incorporated into Social

Thought’s published program—and it is not clear what reception it got—

Wind’s description of the field of Renaissance studies did become part of

the official program.35 It promptly provoked controversy. In it, he wrote,

The student will be expected to form an idea of the general problem of

cultural revivals, of which the historical period called the Renaissance is

only one among many examples. The common characteristic of these

revivals is that the revolt against a given tradition is coupled with the at-

tempt to re-instate an older, supposedly more “genuine” tradition, so

that revolutionand restitution go hand in hand. To trace the manner in

which the traditional and novel features interpenetrate and reinforce

each other, is the central problem of Renaissance studies.36

Wind’s description of the Renaissance thus takes it as an instance of a

more general problem of history and insists upon a dispassionate view of

what he calls the“supposedlymore‘genuine’ tradition.” This isnot a simple

transposition of Warburgian ideas; it is, I think, a more skeptical formu-

lation than Warburg would have used.37 It’s tempting, therefore, to read

Wind’s comment as a subtle digat the GreatBooksapproach, oneinformed

by his reactions to the rise of German nationalism and its uses of history to

construct a notion of authentic, “Aryan” Germanness. Of course, Wind

would not, in anyfacile way, have equatedtheAmericanpreoccupationwith

the Great Books with the Nazis. Yet he clearly shows an inclination to cast




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38. Crane, letterto Nef, 18 Feb. 1944, folder ii, box I, 8, EWA.39. In the case of the New Critics the generalization would be about the nature of poetry,for

example, irony as a master trope. Cranedivides criticisminto two modes, to the first of which“belong all the criticalsystems that find it necessary, in order to givean understandingof artisticworks or to account for the valuesthey contain, to place them in a context of some kind inclusiveof morethan the works themselves.” The second seeksthe poem’s individuality; its content arises

“from the embodiment in the medium of an individualform” (Crane, “TheTwo Modes of Criticism,” Dec. 1937, typescript,pp. 2, 12, folder6, box 1, R. S. Crane Papers, UCA).The sameargument with respect to the New Criticsappears,for instance, in his “Prefatory Note” to twoessays by Maclean and Charles Olsonin The University Review [University of KansasCity] (Spring

1942): 199–202 and in his “Cleanth Brooks; or, the Bankruptcy of Critical Monism,”Modern Philology 45 (May 1948): 226–45.

40. Crane, letterto Nef.

a critical and historically complex eye on the interpenetration of old and

new. Wind’s views appeared, to some of his colleagues, to overdetermine

questions of method. On seeing the program description Crane wrote to

Nef, labeling Wind’s approach “obscurantist”:

What you are really proposing, therefore, is a kind of a priori history in

which one and only one among many possible—and equally plausi-

ble—formulae for the Renaissance period is to be imposed on the inter-

pretationof the intellectual and artistic works the student considers. . . .

[In] the absence from your program of any of the basic arts of interpre-

tation and criticism, the students who are exposed to such a course of

historical study are likely to come out with a great many general conclu-

sions which they will be unable either to defend intelligently or to relate

to the conclusions of other scholars working with different principles of

explanation.38

“A priori” is an important term for Crane, who used it to characterizeevery critical method other than his own. Though the methods of Chicago

critics themselves bear some resemblance to New Criticism, Crane lumped

the latter together with historicism. He believed they both fell into the trap

of beginning with a generalization or a “monism” and from it moving to

the particular, rather thanbeginning withan individual caseand proceeding

inductively.39 Wind, he thought, was imposing content that would over-

determine the process of interpretation. Instead, method should follow the

“basic arts of interpretation and criticism” (then called, for literature as for

art, “formal analysis”). Crane goes on to say that the Renaissance “has suf-

fered peculiarly (witness the tradition of Burckhardt) from this mode of

‘Geistesgeschichte’ and I can therefore understand the difficulties your

Committee has faced in attempting to evolve a fresher and more genuinely critical approach; but I should hope that it is not part of your intention to

carry over the same or a similar method to the study of the other historical

fields.”40




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41. See Wind, introduction, trans. Richard Newald, KulturwissenschaftlicheBibliographie zumNachleben der Antike, in A Bibliography of the Survival of the Classics, ed. Hans Meier, Newald, andEdgarWind (London, 1934), pp. vii–viii. The second section of the introduction is entitled “Kritik

der Geistesgeschichte.”42. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960;

Princeton,N. J., 1972), p. 20. Jas’ Elsner points this out in his “From EmpiricalEvidenceto the BigPicture: SomeReflections on Riegl’s Concept of Kunstwollen,” Critical Inquiry 32 (Summer 2006):

741–66.43. “TheField of Renaissance Civilization,”folder ii, box I, 8, EWA. A later version of the same

prospectusincorporatedCrane’s points. See folder 1, box 61, John U. Nef, Jr. Papers, UCA.

In characterizing Wind’s approach as “Geistesgeschichte,” Crane was

unaware of the fact that Wind had spent several paragraphs of his intro-

duction to the Warburg Library’s Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliographie on a

“Kritik der Geistesgeschichte.”41

In the context, Crane’s use of the Germanterm suggests an allusion to Nazi Germany: Geistesgeschichte insisted on

cultural-historicalhomogeneity, a racialism presumedto be mirrored in the

political realm by Nazism (this despite the fact that Wind was himself a

refugee). In a similar vein, in Art and Illusion, first published in 1960, Gom-

brich would complain that art history, in “inculcating the habit of talking

in terms of collectives, of ‘mankind,’ ‘races,’ or ‘ages’. . . weakens resistance

to totalitarian habits of mind.”42 The relationship between the particular

and the general was subtly politicized, such that the imposition of general

upon particular was a mark of totalitarian thought.

Crane and McKeon were allied as members of SocialThought’s subcom-

mittee on “Eighteenth-Century European Civilization.” Within the same

brochure, the description of the study of the eighteenth century pointedly states that “emphasis will be placed on theinterpretation of importantwrit-

ingsin their ownterms, aidedby therelevanttechniquesof analysis,without

undue simplification of their arguments, and without any presupposition

as to the general character of the age in which they appeared, and without

commitment to any particular philosophical position.”43 Here, method

reigns supreme. Writings are to be interpreted in their own terms, without

regard to historical position. The description of eighteenth-centurystudies

has nothing to say about the eighteenth century; instead, it is a rebuke to

the description of Renaissance studies. If Wind takes the period as a whole

as his object, he does not, however, presuppose a prevailing “spirit of the

age” specific to the Renaissance but rather emphasizes internal conflicts.

Crane was not able to see this emphasis, ironically, because he applied a

generalization about the tenor of Germanic scholarship to the individual

case of Wind.

McKeon’s and Crane’s concern with method, with “teaching how to

read,” could both coincide and conflict with Hutchins’s view of education




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44. See Mayer, Robert Maynard Hutchins, esp. chaps. 31–34.45. See McKeon, “InstructionsConcerning Lectures,Readings,and Discussions for the

General Course in the Humanities (Humanities 2),”Sept. 1942, folder17, box 38, Richard McKeon

Papers, UCA. The “Instructions,” Windwrote, were “wrought with strangefallaciesconcerningthe nature of the humanities,as some of us understand them. . . I think it astonishing that suchstatements should be handed out to the staff as Instructionsin mimeographed form less thantwenty-fourhours before the first classmeets and with the order that they be distributed to the

students” (Wind, letter to McKeon, 12 Oct. 1942, in “Bill of Particulars in Support of the StatementRegarding the Memorial to the Board of Trustees,” folder ii, box I, 8, EWA).

46. Wind, letter to McKeon.47. Wind stayed at Smith afterfalling out with his Warburg colleagues; he was irritatedat being

offered a position as Reader rather than Professorby the University of London (which housed theInstitute)and disagreedwith Saxl overthe intellectual and institutional directionof the institute.Wind wrote to Gertrud Bingat the time that despite “the discomfort of being an intellectual

as facilitating the development of values. McKeon and Crane sought to de-

velop judgment and critical sensibility and were resistant to crusades, even

those of Hutchins, that might seem to compromise theintellectualfreedom

of individuals. Hutchins was under attack in 1944 because of speeches inwhich he proposed a rededication of the university to a moral revolution

in American life and, along with it, a radical reorganization of the univer-

sity’s structure that would have abolished rank and made salary commen-

surate with need rather than (perceived) merit. Unsurprisingly, the latter

plan appeared “Bolshevist” to many of the faculty, but understanding that

they could make a case more strongly on the basis of the intellectualhealth

of the university than on that of personal financialinteresttheyemphasized

a threat to individual intellectual freedom.44

In this context, Wind’s counterattack was rather ill-judged; he defended

Hutchins by attacking McKeon. How could the faculty claim intellectual

freedom was threatened by Hutchins, he argued, when it was actually

McKeon who was exerting undue control over the departments and faculty of theDivision of theHumanities? Oneof thecornerstones of hisargument,

presented in a “Bill of Particulars,” was the teaching of Hum 2. In the bill,

Wind inveighed against what he saw as the doctrinaire methods promoted

by its instructional manual, written by McKeon.45 Wind objectedto thefact

that the instructions were “ambiguous on the subject of history” by which

he meant disingenuous (claiming history is unimportant to the interpre-

tation of texts but then requiring memorization of dates); that they sepa-

rated form and content and proposed an initial and primary approach of

dealing only with form; and that they suggested he should be able to “teach

[students] in three hours how to read Herodotus or Thucydides or Gibbon

when every word in these authors is full of connotations which they have

no equipment to understand.”46

Wind’s bill of particulars wasdismissed bythe faculty senate, and hesoon

moved on—expecting an imminentreturn to London—toSmith College.47




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outcast” it was “today the only honourableposition” (Wind, letter to Gertrud Bing,15 June 1945,folder ii, box I, 5, EWA).

48. David Grene, “Statement by Mr. David Grene,” in “Bill of Particularsin Support of the

Statement Regarding the Memorial to the Board of Trustees.”49. Leslie C. Warren, letter to Clarence H. Faust,10 July 1945,folder 14 “Humanities Divisionof,

1940–78,” box38, RichardMcKeon Papers, UCA.

Others remained who shared his view; a young faculty member in Classics,

David Grene, joined Wind’s dissent, protesting that expertise was routinely

ruled out of order in meetings of Humanities 2 teaching staff. As he tells it,

the course was “the place where the failure to understand that the assumedobjectivity of the ‘disciplines’ is no objectivity at all, has borne hardest on

the non-conformists and where the mental attitude of such non-conform-

ists has most consistently been treated with a sorrowful pity or disciplinary

measures or most often by an apparent unwillingness to admit that such a

disagreement is honestly possible by a fully conscious intellectual oppo-

nent.”48 Grene described the comical resultsof the dogmaticand indiscrim-

inate application of Aristotle’s four causes or the theory of tragedy in his

Poetics to Aeschylus and Gibbon—against the protestations of those who

had expertise in Greek. In the next year, Leslie Clare Warren, an instructor

in the course, expressed similar views. In the humanities course, Warren

suggested, Aristotelian theory was introduced covertly and repeatedly via a

series of textual illustrations so that by the time it was explicitly presented,it appeared universal and inevitable. Ironically or not, Warren used the lan-

guage of pagan mysteries: theHum 2 method is a “technique forintellectual

conditioning that more closely resembles a priestly rite than an educative

process” that makes of the humanities “a narrow and useless academic

cult.”49

The Concealed GodThe lectures Wind didn’t give at Chicago were published in 1958 as Pagan

Mysteries of the Renaissance, and it is in a central chapter of this book that

he proposes his interpretation of the Primavera. Wind,likeGombrich,drew

on Ficino’s neo-Platonic thinking in elucidating the painting, based on Fi-

cino’s close association with Botticelli and the painter’s patrons among the

Medici family. Ficino would, in this view, have provided the philosophical

underpinningsfor the painting (while classical literatureandcontemporary

lyric provided much of the overt subject matter). Wind’s approach makes

more systematic use of neo-Platonism than Gombrich’s does and opposes

Panofsky’s rationalist reading of neo-Platonic love. For Wind, the divine

love toward which the Florentine neo-Platonists strove encompassed fren-

zied ecstasy as well as calm devotion—inseparable, in his view.




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50. Gombrich, “Botticelli’s Mythologies: A Study in the Neo-Platonic Symbolismof HisCircle,” Journal of the Warburg and CourtauldInstitutes 8 (1945):24. Cupid is a child and alsofunctions as an identifying attributeof Venus.

51. With his Medici features,he is sometimes identified with Lorenzo the Magnificent; but theman in the pointed hat and white robes to his left (our right) makes a better match with portraitsof Lorenzo,especially if we consider a date in the later 1470s.

Following the neo-Platonic fascination with triads, Wind focuses on the

groups of three in the painting, in particular the three Graces, whichhe saw

as the representation of movement between the soul and the divine. The

divine emanates toward the soul, which receives the emanation and thenturns itself back to the divine; the triad is that of giving, receiving, and re-

turning. For Wind, the depicted Graces, from left to right, are Pleasure,

Chastity, and Beauty—not simply a trio of undifferentiated nymphs. With

her determined gaze, her unbound hair licking like flames, Pleasure’s in-

terest in the demure Chastity is more passionate than sisterly; Beauty joins

the two as a mean between extremes.

If we think about this painting in terms of threes, what happens to the

arrangement of its figures? On the left, the triad of Graces; on the right, a

triad of transformation in which Zephyr captures Chloris, making her into

Flora, who then returns his love. With six figures organized into two triads,

we are left with two major figures, Venus and Mercury, and one who is, as

Gombrich put it, “not much of a person.”50

Long before I knew anything of neo-Platonism or Warburg or Wind, I

was bothered by something about this painting. The composition looks as

if it is supposed to be symmetrical, but isn’t. A powerful formal logic—in

the compositionaltraditionin which Botticelli worked—wouldsuggestthat

Venus shouldbe at thecenter, butshe standsslightly to the rightof theactual

mathematical center of the panel. It is perhaps this very fact that caused

Vasari to give the title of Primavera to thepainting(assuming that thefigure

we now call “Flora” is the goddess of the springtime). Understood as the

title figure, “Primavera” seems to upstage Venus. To make Venus the center

of the panel would require adding slightly less than one figure’s width to

the right-hand side.

For comparison, we can look to Botticelli’s Adoration of the Magi from

around 1475 (fig. 2). Now in the Uffizi, it was commissioned by Guaspare

di Zanobi del Lama for his funerary chapel in Santa Maria Novella. Thetwo

works share a surprising number of features. First, thematic: the three

Graces have to do with gift-giving, as do the three Magi. Each of the two

groups of three attends a central figure, Venus and the Virgin respectively,

who appear in similar positions and resemble each other closely. The pose,

position, and face of the young man in the lower leftcorner of the Adoration

recall the Primavera’ s Mercury.51 The figures leaning forward in the right




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f igure 2. Sandro Botticelli(1440–1510).Adoration of the Magi. Uffizi.Photo: Scala/ArtResource, NY.

foreground mimic the movement of Chloris. Reducing the comparison to

a series of formal parallels, we might see the Adoration as a triangle and the

Primavera as a flattened version of the same triangle—except for the fact

that theyellow-robed figure at thelower right of the Adoration, a significant

figure (often thought of as a self-portrait of the painter) corresponds to noformal feature of the Primavera.

Wind claimed that “the crux of any interpretation of the Primavera isto

explain thepart played by Mercury” andthat “the composition ofthe paint-

ing is therefore not fully understood, nor the role of Mercury quite com-

prehended, until he and Zephyr are seen as symmetrical figures” (PM, pp.

121, 124–25). Yet Zephyr is a kind of demigod, more like the nymphs or

Graces thanlike the stately Olympians Venusand Mercury. Venusis flanked

by a triad on either side, but only one side has a “major” god to frame the

scene. Mercury’s and Zephyr’s relations to the female figures are quite dif-

ferent: Mercury rules over the three Graces; Zephyr, a lesser figure in Greek

myth, is the agent of Chloris’s transformation into Flora. He also partici-

pates fully in the triadic group that corresponds to the Graces on the otherside, part of a triad rather than ruler over it. The painting is a musical phrase

missing its final note.




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52. See MarsilioFicino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, 2 vols. in 4 (1572; Turin,1959–62),2:2:1559.

53. Quoted in Gombrich, “Botticelli’s Mythologies,”p. 57. See Ficino, letter to AlbertoVeronensi, 20 Oct. 1481, Opera omnia, 1:2:845. Another lettermentionsthe same three; see Ficino,

letterto Matthaeo Forliensi, [n.d.], Opera omnia, 1:2:862.54. See Ficino, The Book of Life, trans.Charles Boer(Dallas, 1980), p. 3. “There are three planets,

which we have mentioned before, that are extremely favorable to contemplationand eloquence:the Sun, Venus,and Mercury”(p. 13).

55. See Ficino, In Plotinum, 2:2:1561, 1560.56. Ficino, speech 1, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, trans. Sears Jayne (Dallas,

1985),chap. 4.57. This fact was noticed by Eugenio Marino, who mentions the sun as invisible figurefor the

Christiangod in his theologicalreadingof the painting. See Eugenio Marino, Estetica, fede, e critica d’arte: “L’arte poetica” di Savonarola,” “L’estetica” di Ficino e “La primavera” di Botticelli (Rome,1997), pp. 193–96, pl. 31.As Marino puts it, Wind’s triadic interpretationrequires him to “double”the figureof Zephyr (p. 162).

If a figure were missing from thescene, whowould it be?Whatgod might

flank the scene on the right? An answer is found in the very same writings

of Ficino cited by both Gombrich and Wind; it is, I think, Apollo. In fact,

Wind hints at this when he cites a text by Ficino that begins with the triadMercury, Venus, and Apollo and suggests a musical transformation in “the

key of Apollo” (PM, p. 130).52 Given his interest in triads, it is surprising

that Wind did not follow through with the idea of Apollo’s relation to the

twoothergods.In fact, thetriadof Mercury, Venus, and Apollo (orthesun),

interpreted in many different ways, reappears insistentlyin theFicinian cor-

pus. Ficino writesof them, “thesestars are, among thecelestial bodies, those

which most affect by their favor the human genius.”53 In The Book of Life,

he declares that the three heavenly guides of scholars are Mercury, Apollo,

and Venus. A scholar should rise early in the morning when these three

planets (including the sun) are in force.54 In his commentary on Plotinus’s

Ennead I.3, which deals with the means for the soul to ascend to the heavens

through contemplation, Ficino takes the three gods as figures of the threetypesof humans who canfollow paths of ascent:the philosopher(Mercury),

the lover (Venus), and the musician (Apollo). From that starting point, Fi-

cino works analogically and piles interpretation on interpretation. He

equates the gods with the senses: Venus with sight,Apollo with hearing,and

Mercury with the imagination. These are the three highest of the six senses

of humans, which included the imagination; they contrast with smell,taste,

and touch, the lower and more bodily senses.55 In his commentary on the

Symposium Ficino states thatthese higher sensesarethe onlysensesrequired

for love.56 Further, Mercury is the good, Venus theintellect,Apollo thesoul.

Mercury is truth, Venus beauty, Apollo concord. Whatever variety there

may be in these interpretations, it is clear that the three gods persistently

form a triad.57




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58. Ficino, “In Praise of Matrimony,”The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, trans.membersof theLanguage Departmentof the School of EconomicScience, London, 7 vols. (London, 1981), 3:70.

59. See Ficino,“Apologus: In traductionem libride amore missam ab Alamanno Donato ad

LaurentiumMedicem” and “Apologus: Quod malese habet Lucilia, id est, anima, quandoàPhoebo, id est, à Deo, discedit,” Opera omnia, 1:2:848–49.

60. Gombrich alsopoints out that Alberti recommended nine or ten figures as the maximumfor a painting;here we have eight or nine, depending on whether Cupidis counted,and Apollowouldgive us nine or ten. Archival documents equivocate about the number of figures. John

Shearman has published archivaldocuments relating to the Medicicollections in whichadiscrepancy appears between two copies (from1499 and 1503) of a 1498 document:in the first,there are nine figures, in the second, eight. See John Shearman,“The Collections of the YoungerBranch of the Medici,” Burlington Magazine 117(Jan.1975): 17.

61. See Stephen Campbell, The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Paintingand the “Studiolo” of Isabello d’Este (New Haven, Conn., 2006), chap. 4, and also Wind, Bellini’s Feast of the Gods: A Study in Venetian Humanism (Cambridge, Mass., 1948).

62. The surface has been stripped down to the barepanel (it appears) in two narrow areas on

the lower half of the far right-hand side.Umberto Baldini, “La Primavera” del Botticelli: Storia di un quadro e di un restauro (Milan, 1984)does not address this issue, instead showing a preferencein illustrations for cropping the painting severely on the right.

Were Apollo positioned to the right of Zephyr, he would produce a more

satisfying formal symmetry, according to typical Renaissance conventions.

Such positioning is suggested in a letter by Ficino to Antonio Pelotti, in

which the philosopher praises marriage by saying that “there Phoebus, lordof the Muses, and their companion Mercury, move as escorts on either side

of Venus, mother of love and of music, and walk with her almost step for

step, soto speak, and never gofar from her.”58 To Wind, the figure of Zephyr

appeared sufficient to provide completion to the group on the right. But

Apollo might also play a role here. In another letter by Ficino, he makes an

appearance as the father of Flora. In the springtime she wanders into the

realm of Venus where she discovers bodily pleasures but also pains—from

which she returns to her father, “author of life-giving medicine,” to seek

healing (quoted in “BM,” p. 61).59 As father of Flora, herself the namesake

of the city of Florence, Apollo would appropriately govern thegroupon the

right. With Apollo and Mercury flanking the scene, we would have two tri-

ads ruled over by Olympians, a total of nine figures in three groups of three.60 Were Apolloto appearin thepicture itwouldalsomakethis painting

a precursor, in reverse, of Mantegna’s morecomplicatedlycomposed paint-

ing usually known as the Parnassus (fig. 3). Here the triad appears very ex-

plicitly: Apollo to the left, Venus in the top center (with Mars as her

accessory), and Mercury at the right.61

I am not claiming that the painting has been cut down—though there

are some peculiarities at its rightmost extremity, and Chloris and Zephyr

aretheonlytwofigureswhosebodiesarecutoffbytheedgeofthepainting.62

I suggest, however, that the painting would have raised the question of




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f igure 3. Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506). Venusand Marswith Vulcan, Apollo, and Mercury (“Parnassus”). Louvre. Photo: Erich Lessing/ArtResource, NY.

63. See Charles M. Rosenberg, The Este Monuments and Urban Development in Renaissance

Ferrara (Cambridge, 1997), p. 102. See alsoRosenberg, “The Iconographyof the Saladegli Stucchiin the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara,” Art Bulletin 61 (Sept. 1979): 377–84. Rosenberg’sargumentwas brought to my attentionby Iva Olah, “Tarocchiand the Depiction of ChristianPrincely Virtues in the Schifanoia Frescoes” (M.A.thesis, Carleton University, 2005).

64. See Angelo Poliziano, “Monodia In LaurentiumMedicem, intonato per ArrighumIsac,”Angeli Politiani Opera, quae quidem extitere . . . (Basel, 1553), pp. 621–22. The same workpp. 594–95, refers to Lorenzoas the “pure brillianceof an Apollinianstar [Purus Apollinei sideris . . . nitor].”

Apollo’s absence: why was he not in the picture? One might hypothesize

that the god was “absent” when a particular viewer was absent from the

room in which the painting hung and present when he was there—that is,

perhaps Apollo was intended to be embodied in a privileged viewer. A con-

temporary analogy might be found in the absence, among a series of theVirtues in theSala deiStucchi at thePalazzo Schifanoia inFerrara, ofJustice.

Charles Rosenberg has argued persuasively that this absence implied that

Justice was to be embodied by the duke, Borso d’Este.63 Perhaps the “miss-

ing” god was to be figured by the elder Lorenzo de’ Medici—Lorenzo the

Magnificent—himself. Angelo Poliziano associates Lorenzo with Phoebus

in his funeral ode and refers to him as Apollo’s poet in his Stanze; indeed

the grounds for such an identification are manifold.64 Like Apollo,Lorenzo




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65. On absence (mostly in modernart), see studies collected in Figurations de l’absence:Recherches esthe ´tiques, ed. Jean-PierreMourey (St.-Étienne, 1987).

66. This asymmetry is madevery apparentin an illustration in Umberto Baldini’s bookon therestoration of the Primavera that splits the painting into its figuralparts. See Baldini, “La

Primavera” del Botticelli, pp. 92–93.67. On this topic, see Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, “Semiotics and Art History,”Art Bulletin

73 (June 1991): 174–208.

was a musician and poet. Apollo is the inventor of the laurels of poets; a

common pun, used by Poliziano, connects the name Lorenzo with laurel

(Lauro). The absent Apollo suggests a kind of secret flattery—a secret un-

derstood by a larger circle of viewers, by which a distance was closed be-tween the human ruler and the gods of pictorial representation.

There is in art history a very strong presumption against arguing from

absence, and the prestige of the painting, the fact that so many eminent

viewers have seen it as complete, makes it hard to imagine that something

is “missing” from it.65 When, however, one combines the formal logic of

the painting with the pervasiveness of the Ficinian triad—and adds the evi-

dence of Mantegna’striadic Parnassus—thisabsencebecomespalpable. My

suggestion thus depends not only on content but also on form—the lack

of symmetry of the painting’s composition.66 And even if iconologists were

inclined to wring rich meaning from tiny details, they were less ready to

explain absences. Wind (and Gombrich) thus missed an opportunity to

combine a focus on form with a complementary focus on iconography. Per-haps this came from a sensitivity to the critique leveled at them by the likes

of McKeon: that they were already importing too much from outside the

work. But if iconographers frustrated formalists by assuming that everyde-

tail possessed extrapictorial meaning, formalists in the mid-century mold

would have been hard pressed to see the painting as unbalanced or incom-

plete; they generally viewed works as complete and bounded, possessing

tensions, to be sure, but tensions that could be resolved internally to the

object.

This notion of boundedness is perhaps a necessary prerequisite to the

idea of art as autonomous. This concept has a hoary pedigree in art history,

one that dates back to Kant and hassince been revived repeatedly. Thework

of art is thus isolated from social life, existing in its own aesthetic sphere.

Even those art historians who consider objects in historical context make

an assumption that the work of art (and the working of art) canbe detached

from something else called a context.67 This detachment presupposes a dis-

tinction like the one Crane made between the particular and the general.

The Chicago critics added a soupçon of antitotalitarian liberty to the au-

tonomy of the art object. But, here as elsewhere, the autonomousart object




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68. With the notion of “bewegtes Beiwerk.” See Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, andKurt Forster,introductionto ibid., pp. 13, 65 n. 54. See alsoPhilippe-AlainMichaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York, 2004).

69. See Artists at Court: Image-Making and Identity1300–1550, ed. Campbell (Boston, 2004),

esp. EvelynWelch, “Painting as Performancein the ItalianRenaissance Court,” pp. 19–32.70. See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. CatherinePorter (Cambridge, Mass.

1993).

comes around to serve something—in this case, a notion of human free-

dom. Within art history and criticism our view of paintings of the past is

still conditioned by modernist expectations of painting as nonnarrative,

subjectless (as in Gilbert’s wishful thinkingabout Renaissanceart).As I sug-gested earlier, Renaissance art has often been mobilized to establish a nar-

rative of progressive vanquishing of content that tends toward a notion of

perfect freedom for the human subject. We might, however, make more

headway with Renaissance art by considering objects and subjects as a web

of multiple dependencies. This does not, however, mean stasis. The forms

of objects were, in the Renaissance, regularly put intomotion—asWarburg,

notably, emphasized.68 Images and iconographies circulated from panel

painting to parade to manuscript, costume,and amulet.In theRenaissance,

the objects we consider art played a variety of social and politicalfunctions,

and those who might be designated professionally as painters or architects

also painted furniture and banners for festive occasions, designed luxury

objects and tapestries, and made political statements—as Botticelli didwhen he was commissioned to paint the defeated Pazzi conspirators,

hanged and humiliated, on the outer wall of the Palazzo Vecchio in 1478.

Objects attained shape and significance by their participation in complex

scenes of social and cultural performance.69

Much recent research in Renaissance art suggests we should think of ob-

jects as more ambiguously approaching the status of the human—part of

a continuum that includes stories of animated statues, portraits that seem

to lack nothing but breath, coins that serve as representatives of the sov-

ereign, performancesin which humans are costumed as images, andobjects

invested with subjective value through gifting, proximity,or memory. They

do not, in other words, fit a simple subject-object paradigm. Thus, if we see

meaning latent in the web of social, political, and psychological relationsin

which a work exists—as exchange or interchange, circulation, intersection,

ambivalence—we might pry it from the assumptions of modern subject-

object relations.70

I have dealt with these issues at some lengthin order to establisha frame-

work for understanding pictures. Beyond a simple oppositionbetween “ob-

ject of aesthetic contemplation” and “medium for conveying iconographic




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71. See forexample Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy (New York,1979), p. 158. Forinstance,in one sign of covert exercise of power, Lorenzo monitoredvoting in the governingcouncil,while not explicitly interveningin it.

72. Work by Webster Smithdrew attention to the presencein an inventory of the Medici housein the ViaLarga (owned by Lorenzo di Pierfrancescoand his brotherGiovanni) of a painting with“nine figures,men and women” (Webster Smith, “On the Original Location of the Primavera,” Art Bulletin 57 [Mar. 1975]: 37). See also Shearman, “TheCollections of the Younger Branch of theMedici.” The painting hung above a lettuccio (“daybed”)in a room next to Lorenzodi

Pierfrancesco’s bedroom.73. See Bredekamp, Botticelli “Primavera”:Florenz als Garten der Venus (Frankfurt, 1988), esp.

pp. 34–55. Dempsey reviews the competingproposals on the datingof the work in his “AHypothesisConcerning the Castello Nativity and a Scruple about the Date of Botticelli’s

Primavera,” in Opere e giorni: Studi su mille anni di arte europea, ed. Klaus Bergdolt and GiorgioBonsanti (Venice, 2001), pp. 349–54. Proposals include the idea th

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