In my previous post I revealed the identity of Dante Alighieri in Giorgio Vasari’s fresco depicting the Battle of Marciano. His guide through the first two parts of the Divine Comedy, Inferno and Purgatario, was the Roman poet Virgil.
Vasari portrayed Virgil as the faceless head alongside the helmet representation of the exiled Dante, and partly overshadowed by the helmet of the rider at his left shoulder, emphasising his role as a ‘shade’ or spirit of both darkness and light.
Notice also the helmet’s egg-shape, a reference to the sea-front Castel dell’Ovo (Egg Castle) in Naples and its egg legend associated with Virgil.
Vasari also played on the word Virgil as meaning verge or fringe, hence why he placed Dante’s guide at the edge of the frame.
The helmet’s sickle-shape weld, or fringe, suggests a merger of two parts. Here Vasari connects Virgil and the Egg Castle’s location to the sickle-shape coast-line of the Gulf of Naples; and then plays on the word gulf with Guelphs, a name associated with the political faction that supported the Papacy, as opposed to the Ghibellines who favoured the Holy Roman Emperor. Dante Alighieri took the side of the Guelphs.
Castel dell’Ovo (Egg Castle), Naples, Italy
Within sight of Naples and a short distance of about 20 kilometres is the volcano Mt Vesuvius, which is another pointer to the ashen colour of Virgil’s helmet and armour. Dante’s red plume – suggesting the features of “a man of sorrow” can also be visualised as a fiery eruption and a pointer to the descent and journey of both poets into Hell, or Inferno, the first part of the Divine Comedy.
Naples, Italy, with Mount Vesuvius in the background.
As well as embedding references in the Marciano fresco to Dante’s journey through Hell and Purgatory to finally reach Paradise, Vasari also included pointers to Virgil’s famous poem, The Aeneid, the story of Aeneas who fled the fall of Troy and made his way to Italy where he became the ancestor of the Romans.
Vasari merged elements of these two narratives with content from other artistic works to form a framework of connections and links to produce a new creation. The work was commissioned by the Florentine duke Cosimo I, to cover over the fresco depicting the Battle of Anghiari that was started and abandoned by Leonardo da Vinci some 60 years earlier.
I shall explain in a future post how Vasari called upon and utilised a particular image from a very rare Late Antique illuminated manuscript, now referred to as Vergilius Vaticanus, as part of the process off merging narratives of myth and truth in his Battle of Marciano fresco.
In my previous post I identified the three figures shown here as Dante Alighieri, Virgil and the half-hidden head as Plutarch (doubling up as Pluto, king of the dead and the underworld). They are part of the section known as the Panel of the Prince in the St Vincent Panels.
Virgil accompanied Dante as a guide through the depths of Hell and Purgatory in Dante’s Divine Comedy poem, but was never able to enter Paradise because he wasn’t baptised. Although the stain of “original sin” remained with him, he was what was referred to as a “virtuous pagan”.
Notice the face shaped in the folds of his throat and looking down at the stain of original sin presented as a black spot on his white undergarment. Baptism is said to remove the mark of original sin humanity is born with.
The face in the folds of Virgil’s neck is a reminder of a gorget worn to cover and protect the throat (as seen in the figure of Philippa). Gorget lends itself to the word “gorge” meaning “chasm” and this refers to the gap or distance that Virgil was never able to cross to reach Paradise.
Hugo van der Goes borrowed this detail from a section of the Ghent Altarpiece that refers to the biblical parable of The Rich man and Lazarus and the words spoken by Abraham to the rich man, “Between us and you a great gulf has been fixed, to stop anyone, if he wanted to, crossing from our side to yours, and to stop any crossing from your side to ours” (Luke 16:26).
In the top image Virgil is placed in front of the twinned figure of Plutarch and Pluto (representing Hades), and on the verge or edge of the frame. His location is Limbo, meaning “edge” or “border”, and a special place the Church conceived for unbaptised “virtuous pagans” after death.
And if to suggest that Limbo is closer to Hell than Heaven, Hugo formed a second, more sinister face in Virgil’s neck. The darkened area below the cheekbone forms part of the creature’s forehead, while the rim of the rather long ear forms the shape of a horn.
The horn feature also serves as a reference to Plutarch’s book of biographies known as Parallel Lives and the chapter on the Life of Theseus. When Theseus arrived at Delos he joined a group of youths dancing around an altar called Keraton and made entirely of horns taken from the left side of animals. The dance was known as The Crane.
Was Van der Goes also suggesting with the altar reference that the Plutrach image had been altered in some to also represent Pluto, or his Roman equivalent Hades?
Like the Just Judges panel where the identity of each rider has a connection to one next to it, as if they were jigsaw pieces fitted together, so too the figures featured in the Witnesses of the Old Testament.
For instance, the three central figures in the detail below, the prophet Isaiah wearing the red chaperon, and two men behind him, John the Baptist and the poet Virgil, all connect a way to relate to prophecies made by Isaiah – “The wolf will live with the lamb…”(11:6); “A voice cries in the wilderness, prepare a straight way for the Lord…”(40:3); and the Saviour as a sheep “burdened with the sins of all of us…”(53:6).
Detail from the Adoration of the Lamb, Ghent Altarpiece. Image source: Closer to Van Eyck
Virgil, as a Roman represents the Capitoline Wolf, the symbol of Rome since ancient times. John the Baptist replied to the question put to him by the men sent by the Pharisees to ask who he was, by saying: “I am, as Isaiah prophesied, a voice that cries in the wilderness, make a straight way for the Lord.” The next day, seeing Jesus coming towards him, John said to his disciples, “Look, there is the lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world”(John 1:29).
The muzzle and shape of an ear depicting the sacrificial lamb of God is shaped into Isaiah’s red chaperon, not an unfamiliar feature in the work of Jan van Eyck. Virgil also makes reference in his First Eclogue to a tender lamb often staining the altar, and offered to a god who gives peace.
The second line of Isaiah’s prophecy of the coming of the virtuous king is also referred to: “The leopard lies down with the kid (goat)…(11:6)” This is illustrated in the two figures above Virgil, the apostles Philip and Peter. The fur rim of Peter’s hat represents the spotted leopard lying down while Philip’s unusual-shaped profile with its narrow eyes, and the two black horns shaped into his hat represent the goat.
I mentioned in my previous post that some of the figures in the group have been given double identities (even more in some instances). Virgil is also cast in more than one role, not just as a poet in his own right but as a companion who acted as one of three guides to the soul of poet and philospher Dante Alighieri during the writer’s journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven in Dante’s Divine Comedy, “an allegory of human life”.
As Dante starts his journey he is confronted by three beasts, a lion, a leopard and a she wolf. He is rescued by Virgil and the pair continued their travels together. Two of the beasts, the lion and the she-wolf, are depicted in the beards of Virgil and St Peter, but the figures need to be turned upside down to recognise the feature. St Peter’s beard represents the she-wolf, while the beard belonging to Virgil portrays the lion.
Upside down… left: the merged representation of a she-wolf and a she-bear and, right, the lion.
The upside down feature also points to a second identity the Van Eycks applied to Virgil, that of Simon Magus, the ‘magician’ described in the Acts of the Apostles who offered money to be able to receive the power to call down the Holy Spirit on people. His name has since extended to the word “simony”, understood and considered sinful as “selling church offices and sacred things”. Virgil and Dante met with Simonists in the Inferno level of the Divine Comedy. The Simonists were “upside down in round holes the size of baptismal fonts”.
The figure of St Peter is also portrayed in the guise of another Pope, Nicholas III, who Dante placed in hell among the Simonists. Nicholas reveals himself in the poem as the son of a she-bear. The family name was Orsini, meaning “bearlike”. In the papal representation of Nicholas the bear reference is indicated by the shape and visible fingers of the two hands. They represent the stars and formation that combine to form the Great Bear constellation. The pronounced vein seen on the right hand represents an adjacent constellation to the Great Bear known as Draco, that forms the shape of a serpent dragon.
The leopard attribute is the one revealed earlier on the rim of St Peter’s hat. This may be a subtle reference by the Van Eyck’s to Dante’s run-in with Church authorities and his belief that the authority of kings and emperors was not dependent on the authority of the Pope but descended from the “fountain of universal authority” which is God. This creed could also explain one of the reasons why Jan van Eyck included a fountain feature below the altar in the Adoration of the Lamb panel.
The St Peter figure as head of the Church points to another connection concerning the travels of Virgil and Dante. Because Virgil was unbaptised (depicted with his back to John the Baptist), he was prevented from entering Paradise as Dante did in the Divine Comedy. Virgil remained in Limbo, along with oher souls considered by the Church as “virtuous pagans”. The Van Eycks have illustrated this by separating the figure of Virgil and that of Dante (a second identity given to the Judas figure) with the portrayal of St Peter as first pope and representing the Church. St Peter’s raised hand can also be interpreted as indicating no entry into the green pastures of Paradise for the unbaptised Virgil.
Left: Dante Alighieri by Sandro Botticelli. Right: The dual image of Dante and Judas.
The composition is carefully crafted and constructed because now the dual identity of the the figure in red as both Judas and Dante introduces another narrative – that of wasted talents – which I will detail in a future post.
C A T C H L I G H T 
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