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Unearthing the Past Archaeology and Aesthetics in the
Making of Renaissance Culture Second Printing Edition
Leonard Barkan Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Leonard Barkan
ISBN(s): 9780300076776, 0300076770
Edition: Second Printing
File Details: PDF, 35.46 MB
Year: 2001
Language: english
 aa
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ARCHAEQLOGY
AND

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OF
MAKING

RENAISSANCE
GU LEURE

ONARD BA.
UNEARTHING THE PAST
 Pa

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UNEARTHING THE PAST:

ARCHAEOLOGY AND AESTHETICS

IN THE MAKING OF
RENAISSANCE CULTURE
Published with assistance from the Elizabethan
Club, Yale University, and from the Kingsley
Trust Association Publication Fund established
by the Scroll and Key Society of Yale College.

Copyright © 1999 by Yale University.

All rights reserved.

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in

part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond
that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108
of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers
for the public press), without written permission
from the publishers.

Sections ofthis book, in earlier form, appeared in

Raritan 11 (1991) and Representations 44 (1993).
Permission to reprint these materials is gratefully
acknowledged.

Title page: Michelangelo, Separation of Light from Darkness

(detail), fresco, 1511-12, Sistine Chapel, Rome

Designed by Gregg Chase. Set in Quadraat type.

Printed in the United States of America
by Vail-Ballou Press, Binghamton, New York.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barkan, Leonard
Unearthing the past : archaeology and
aesthetics in the making of Renaissance
culture / Leonard Barkan
p.cm.
Includes bibliographic references
and index.
ISBN 0-300—07677-0 (alk. paper)
1. Sculpture, Classical.
2. Sculpture, Classical— Reproduction.
3. Art, Renaissance —Classical influences.
4. Classical antiquities in art.
I. Title.
NB85.B37 1999
709'.02'4—dc21 99—24893
CIP

A catalogue record for this book is available from

the British Library.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for

permanence and durability of the Committee
on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of
the Council on Library Resources.

OOS
7 OG AAD
Agli amici di Roma
Dal 1987 al 1992
E per sempre
 CONTENTS

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION Xxl

Note on Texts and Translations XXXI111

1 DISCOVERIES
Greeks Bearing Gifts
Vertical History
Findings and Losses
Rome’s Other Population

2 SORES
The Natural History of Art
Mimetic Narratives
Art in the Key of Myth
“Certain Antiquities Cited by Pliny”

3 FRAGMENTS
Nota History but an Autopsy
Marginal Bodies
Impersonations
Statues Fixed and Unfixed

4 RECONSTRUCTIONS
Pasquino Disfigured and Redressed
Narrative and the Eye of the Beholder
In Bed with Polyclitus

5 ARTISTS
Original Imitation
The Archaeology ofthe Artist
Disegno and Paragone
The Rhetoric of Draughtsmanship
Good Marble, Bad Marble

Notes
Photo Credits
Index
 ILLUSTRATIONS

1S Laocoon, marble, Roman copy, first century A.D.,

after Hellenistic original, Vatican Museums, Rome XXXIV

TZ. Laocoon, after Bartolommeo Marliani, Topographiae

urbis Romae, Rome, 1544

Teo Laocoon, with unfinished arm attached, as put in

place by Filippo Magi, Vatican Museums, Rome
1.4. Titian, Crowning with Thorns, oil on wood, 1540s, Louvre, Paris sd

15) Titian, Crowning with Thorns, oil on canvas, 1560s,

Alte Pinakothek, Munich I2

1.6. Titian, Sacrifice of Isaac, oil on canvas, 1542-44, Sacristy,

Church of Santa Maria della Salute, Venice 13
Tes Titian, The Glory of the Holy Trinity (detail), oil on canvas,
1551-54, Prado, Madrid 13
1.8. Titian, Bacchus and Ariadne, oil on canvas, 1520-22,
National Gallery, London 14
1.9. Niccolo Boldrini, after Titian, Ape Laocoén, woodcut, ca. 1566,
Art Institute of Chicago 14
1.10. Michelangelo, Ignudi surrounding the Separation of Light
from Darkness, fresco, 1511-12, Sistine Chapel, Rome USS
. Michelangelo, Crucified Christ, black chalk, ca. 1540,
British Museum, London 16

T.12. Antonio Lombardo, Vulcan’s Forge, marble relief, ca. 1508,

Hermitage, St. Petersburg 16

. Galeazzo Mondella, called Moderno, Flagellation of Christ, silver

and gold relief, ca. 1530, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna of
Titian, Averoldi Altarpiece, oil on wood, 1520-22, Church ofSanti
Nazzaro e Celso, Brescia 18

. Michelangelo, Rebellious Slave, marble, ca. 1514, Louvre, Paris 1g

. Equestrian Portrait ofMarcus Aurelius, bronze, second century A.D.,
Museo Capitolino, Rome 43
River Gods, Tigris/Tiber and Nile, colossal Roman statues,
second century A.D., Capitol, Rome 44-45
. Lion Attacking a Horse, third-century B.C. group, as restored in
sixteenth century, Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome 49
. View of the Lateran from Codex made for Giovanni Marcanova
(“Quaedam Antiquitatum Fragmenta”), ca. 1465, fol. 29v,
Biblioteca Estense, Modena 50

. Capitoline Wolf, mid-Italic bronze, fifth century B.c., Palazzo

dei Conservatori, Rome 52

1.21. Bartolommeo Fonzio, body of aRoman girl, ca. 1490, MS Lat.

Misc. d.85, fol. 161v, Bodleian Library, Oxford 59
. After Myron, Discobolus, marble, Roman copy offifth-century B.c.
original, Vatican Museums, Rome

Iphigenia Prepared
for Sacrifice, Agamemnon with Covered Head, from the
Ara of Cleomenes, Roman marble, first century B.c., after Greek original
attributed to Cleomenes, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence 68-69

ix
 Doo} Giorgio Vasari, Protogenes Throwing the Sponge, monochrome tempera,
1548, Casa del Vasari, Arezzo 104

2.4. Giorgio Vasari, Timanthes Painting Iphigenia, monochrome tempera,

1548, Casa del Vasari, Arezzo 105

Des Farnese Bull, Roman marble, second century A.D.,

Museo Nazionale, Naples 106

Delo): Pan and Apollo, marble, Roman copy of

Hellenistic original,
Museo delle Terme, Rome 107

ATR Hercules Standing, colossal gilt bronze, Roman copy of Lysippean

original, second century B.C., Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome 108

2.8. River God Nile, colossal Roman marble, second century A.D.,
Vatican Museums, Rome III

220; Nicolas Beatrizet, engraving of Dioscuri from Antoine Lafréry,

Speculum Romanae magnificentiae, Rome, 1546 114

Qe Henry Fuseli, The Artist Overwhelmed by the Grandeur of Antique Ruins,

chalk and sepia wash, 1778-79, Kunsthaus, Zurich 118

RM Marten van Heemskerck, courtyard of Palazzo Medici-Madama,

ca. 1532-36, sketchbook, II.48, Staatliche Museen, Berlin I20

3-3: Colossal bronze head and hand, fourth century A.D., Palazzo
dei Conservatori, Rome 123
3.4. Dioscuri, colossal marble pair, second century A.D., Piazza
. . . \ .

del Quirinale, Rome 125

3°5° River God Marforio, colossal marble statue, second century A.D.,
Museo Capitolino, Rome 126

Marsyas, Apollo, and Olympus, gem attributed to Dioscourides,

first century B.c., Museo Nazionale, Naples 127)
. Booty relief from Arch ofTitus, first century A.D., Forum, Rome 130
. Sacrificial instruments from frieze of Roman temple, Republican
period, Museo Capitolino, Rome 131
. Trophy pillars, marble, first or second century A.D., Galleria degli
Uffizi, Florence 132
3.10. Trophies of Marius, freestanding marble trophies, first century A.D.,
Capitol, Rome 134
. Alessandro Strozzi, map of Rome, 1474, Biblioteca Laurenziana,
Florence 135
Qo, Francisco de Hollanda, drawing after Trophies of Marius, 1538-40,
sketchbook, fol. 15, Escorial, Madrid 136
2.13), Drawings after Trophies of Marius, from sketchbook attributed
to Jacopo Ripanda, fols. 37, 62, early sixteenth century,
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford 137,
3.14. Amoretti with attributes of Neptune, marble frieze from
first-century B.c. altar, San Vitale, Ravenna; amoretti with attributes
of Saturn, Museo Archeologico, Venice 138-39
BuIS. Nymph “alla Spina,” marble, Roman copy of second-century B.C.
original, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence 140
3.16. Venus Binding Her Sandal, Hellenistic bronze statuette,
British Museum, London 140
Bulge Venus Crouching, Roman copy ofthird-century B.c. Hellenistic statue,
British Museum, London 140

X ILLUSTRATIONS
 3.18. Drawing after Nymph “alla Spina,” ca. 1490s, Holkham Album,
fol. 34 (detail), Holkham Hall, Norfolk, England I4I
3.19. “Invitation to the Dance,” marble, Roman copies of second-century B.C.
originals, as reconstructed by Wilhelm Klein 141
3.20. Venus Crouching at Her Bath (detail), marble, Roman funerary relief,
British Museum, London 143
22 Perino del Vaga (attributed), David and Bathsheba, fresco (detail),
ca. 1520, Vatican Logge, Rome 144
3.22. Marten van Heemskerck, drawing after Venus Binding Her Sandal,
Ca. 1532-36, sketchbook, I.25v, Staatliche Museen, Berlin 145
35235 Circle of Fra Bartolommeo, drawing after Crouching Venus,
black chalk and black crayon, ca. 1525-35, Fogg Art Museum,
Cambridge, Massachusetts 145
3.24. Arrotino, Roman copy ofthird-century B.c. Pergamene marble,
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Base Domenico Ghirlandaio, Baptism of Christ (detail), fresco, 1490,

Santa Maria Novella, Florence

3.26. Spinario, bronze, first-century B.c., Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome

Bein Thornpuller, terra cotta from Priene, second century B.C.,

Staatliche Museen, Berlin 150
3.28. Drawing after Spinario, ca. 1490s, Holkham Album, fol. 34v (detail),
Holkham Hall, Norfolk, England 152
3.29. Jan Gossaert, called Mabuse, drawing after Spinario, ca. 1508-9,
Welcker Collection, Bibliotheck van de Rijksuniversiteit, Leiden 153
BeBgO: Marten van Heemskerck, drawing after Spinario, ca. 1530s,
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford 153
Beals Filippo Brunelleschi, Sacrifice ofIsaac (competition panel),
bronze relief, 1402, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence 154
Breas Lorenzo Ghiberti, Sacrifice of Isaac (competition panel),
bronze relief, 1402, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence

3-33- Pinturicchio-Perugino, Baptism of Christ, fresco, 1480s,

Sistine Chapel, Rome

3.34. Luca Signorelli, Last Days of Moses, fresco, 1483, Sistine Chapel, Rome

3.35- Luca Signorelli, Madonna with Child in Landscape, oil on panel, 1490s,
Alte Pinakothek, Munich

3.36. Luca Signorelli, Madonna with Child (detail), oil on panel, 1490s,
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

3-37: Michelangelo, Doni Tondo, oil on panel, 1503-4, Galleria degli Uffizi,
Florence 159
3.38. Venus Felix and Amor, marble, Roman portrait, second century A.D.,
Vatican Museums, Rome 160

3-39- Hercules and Telephus (“Hercules-Commodus”), marble, Roman copy

of fourth-century B.c. Greek statue, Vatican Museums, Rome 161

3.40. Achilles on Scyros, Roman sarcophagus relief, ca. third century A.D.,
Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire, England 162

3.41. Hermaphrodite Discovered by Eros in the Presence of Venus, cameo,

first century A.D., Museo Nazionale, Naples

3-42. Reclining Hermaphrodite with Three Putti, cameo, probably fifteenth-century

copy offirst-century A.D. original, Museo Nazionale, Naples

xi ILLUSTRATIONS
 3.43. Standing Hermaphrodite, marble, Roman copy ofHellenistic statue,
Villa Doria Pamphili, Rome

3.44. Sleeping Hermaphrodite, marble, Roman copy oflate Hellenistic statue,

Villa Borghese, Rome

3.45. Drawing after Standing Hermaphrodite, northern Italian, ca. 1503,

British Museum, London 166

3.46. Camillus-Zingara, bronze, first century A.D., Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome 166

3-47. Icarius Relief, marble, Roman copy after Greek original, first century B.C.,
British Museum, London 168

3.48. Mithras Slaying a Bull, marble, Roman relief, third century A.D., Louvre, Paris 169

3-49. Amico Aspertini, drawing after Icarius Relief, ca. 1500-03, Codex Wolfegg,
fols. 46v—47 (detail), Schloss Wolfegg 171

3.50. Giovanni Maria Falconetto, drawing after Icarius Relief, ca. 1500, Graphische
Sammlung Albertina, Vienna 172

3.51. Standing Juno, marble, Greek statue mounted in first-century B.c. relief,
Villa Medici, Rome 174
Ba52e Amico Aspertini, drawing after Standing Juno, 1530s, London sketchbook, I,
fol. 7, British Museum, London 174
3°53: Tyrannicides (“Aristogeiton” and “Harmodius”), marble, Roman copies
of Greek bronze statues from fifth century B.c., Museo Nazionale, Naples LYS)
\

3.54. Marten van Heemskerck, drawing after Gladiators and Marcus Aurelius,
ca. 1532-36, Berlin sketchbook, I.44v, Staatliche Museen, Berlin

3-55: Marten van Heemskerck, drawing after Gladiators and other ‘

fragments, Berlin sketchbook, I.57v, Staatliche Museen, Berlin

3.56. Amico Aspertini, drawing after “Aristogeiton,” from Tyrannicides,

1530s, London sketchbook, II, fol. 3, British Museum, London

3:57- Muse Melpomene, marble, colossal Roman copy after Greek statue,
Paris, Louvre

3.58. Satyr Holding Up Grapes with Panther, Roman copy after Greek statue,
ca. A.D. 300, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

3-59- Female in Pose of Venus of Capua, marble, Roman copy ofHellenistic

statue, Vatican Museums, Rome

3.60. Marten van Heemskerck, antiquities from Galli Garden,

including Mars in Cuirass, ca. 1532-36, Berlin sketchbook, I.27,
Staatliche Museen, Berlin

3.61. Mars in Cuirass, marble, first century A.D., Museo Capitolino, Rome

3.62. Frans Floris workshop, drawing after Dead Amazon, 1540s,

Basel sketchbook, fol. 19, Kunstmuseum, Basel

ADB. Dead Amazon, marble, Roman copy of second-century B.c. Pergamene

original, Museo Nazionale, Naples

3.64. River God Tiber, marble, colossal Roman statue, Louvre, Paris

3.65. Apollo Draped and Seated, porphyry and marble, colossal Roman statue,
second century A.D., Museo Nazionale, Naples 182
3.66. Venus Seated, marble, Roman copy after Hellenistic type,
Vatican Museums, Rome 182
3.67. Marcantonio Raimondi (attributed), drawing after Venus Seated,
ca. 1516, Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

pa ILLUSTRATIONS
 3.68. Jupiter Enthroned, marble, fragment from colossal Roman statue
of Hellenistic type, Museo Nazionale, Naples

3.69. Raphael, detail of Christ from Disputa, fresco, 1508-9,

Vatican Museums, Rome

3.70. Giulio Romano, Jupiter Enthroned, fresco, ca. 1545, Casa di

Giulio Romano, Mantua

3.71. Amico Aspertini, drawing after Jupiter Enthroned, ca. 1500-03,

Codex Wolfegg, fol. 46 (detail), Schloss Wolfegg

3.72. Giulio Romano, drawing after Venus Seated, ca. 1515, Windsor Castle,
The Royal Collection

3-73. Restored version of Venus Seated, from Giovanni Battista Cavalieri,

Antiquarum statuarum urbis Romae, ca. 1574

3.74. Apollo Citharoedos, marble, Roman copy after Hellenistic type, from
Sassi Collection, Museo Nazionale, Naples

3.75. School of Raphael, drawing after Apollo Citharoedos, early sixteenth

century, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

3.76. Jacopo Sansovino, Madonna and Child (“Madonna del Parto”),

marble, 1518-21, San Agostino, Rome

3.77. Amico Aspertini, drawing after Apollo Draped and Seated, 1530s,
London sketchbook, I, fol. 41, British Museum, London

3.78. Marten van Heemskerck, Saint Luke Painting the Virgin, oil on panel,
ca. 1560, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes 188

3.79. Torso Belvedere, first-century B.c. marble signed by Apollonios,

son of Nestor, Vatican Museums, Rome 190
3.80. Amico Aspertini, drawing after Torso Belvedere, ca. 1500-03,
from Codex Wolfegg, fol. 42, Schloss Wolfegg IgI
3.81. Marten van Heemskerck, two views ofTorso Belvedere, ca. 1532-36,
Berlin sketchbook, 1.63, I.73, Staatliche Museen, Berlin 192
3.82. Hendrik Goltzius, drawing after Torso Belvedere, ca. 1590,
Teylers Museum, Haarlem 193
3.83. Bernardo Licinio, family portrait with Torso Belvedere, oil on wood,
1524, Galleria Borghese, Rome 194
3.84. Giovanni Antonio da Brescia, engraving after Torso Belvedere,
ca. 1515, British Museum, London
3.85. Drawing after Torso Belvedere, red chalk, mid-sixteenth century,
Cambridge sketchbook, fol. 22, Trinity College, Cambridge
3.86. Michelangelo, Ignudo over Jeremiah, fresco, 1511-12, Sistine Chapel, Rome

3.87. Michelangelo, model for River God, wax, ca. 1524-26, Accademia, Florence

3.88. Michelangelo, Victory, marble, ca. 1527-30, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence

3.89. Michelangelo, drawing for Victory, black chalk, ca. 1527, British Museum,
London 199
3.90. Michelangelo, Christ from the Last Judgment, fresco, 1534-41,
Sistine Chapel, Rome 200

3.91. Michelangelo, Saint Bartholomew from the Last Judgment, fresco,

1534-41, Sistine Chapel, Rome 201

3.92. Michelangelo, Bacchus, marble, 1496-97, Bargello, Florence 202

3.93. Marten van Heemskerck, Galli Garden, ca. 1532-36, sketchbook,

. 1.72, Staatliche Museen, Berlin 203

xiil ILLUSTRATIONS
 3-94. Drawing after Michelangelo Bacchus, red chalk, mid-sixteenth century,
Cambridge sketchbook, fol. 14, Trinity College, Cambridge 205

ASG Pasquino, Hellenistic marble, second century B.C., Piazza del

Pasquino, Rome 208

AiDe Pasquino, restored in the seventeenth century by Lodovico Salvetti

as Menelaus with the Body of Patroclus, Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence 212

Ane Pasquino, from engraving for Antoine Lafréry’s Speculum Romanae

magnificentiae, Rome, 1546 214

4.4. Title page, Carmina ad Pasquillum posita, 1511: Lutto (Mourning) 218

Anse Title Page, Carmina apposita Pasquillo, 1515: Orpheus 219

4.6. Marforio, from engraving for Antoine Lafréry’s Speculum Romanae

magnificentiae, Rome, 1546 223

47% Cleopatra-Ariadne, marble, second-century A.D. copy after

Hellenistic original, Vatican Museums, Rome
\
234
4.8. Fountain nymph from Colocci Garden, Rome, engraving from
Jean-Jacques Boissard, Romanae urbis topographiae, Frankfurt, 1600 235
4.9. Mars and Rhea Silvia (detail), marble sarcophagus, second century A.D.,
Vatican Museums, Rome 236

4.10. Diana and Endymion (detail), marble sarcophagus, third century A.D.,
Galleria Doria Pamphili, Rome 2377),
\

. Francisco de Hollanda, Belvedere installation ofCleopatra, ca. 1539,

Escorial sketchbook, fol. 8v, Escorial, Madrid 239
. Michelangelo, Night, marble, 1520s, Medici Tombs, Florence * 243
. Bed of Polyclitus, marble, Roman relief after Hellenistic figure types,
Palazzo Maffei, Rome 248

. Bed of Polyclitus, Renaissance copy of Roman relief, location unknown 249

. After Polyclitus, Doryphoros, marble, Roman copy after fifth-century B.c.
original, Minneapolis Institute of Arts 252
. Lorenzo Ghiberti, detail from Resurrection panel on North Baptistry doors,
bronze relief, ca. 1405-15, Florence 258
. Michelangelo, drawing including male figure on Bed ofPolyclitus,
pen and red chalk, 1517—18(?), Windsor Castle, The Royal Collection 259
. Baccio Bandinelli, drawing after male figure on Bed of
Polyclitus,
Département des arts graphiques, Louvre, Paris 259
4.19. Circle of Gentile da Fabriano or Pisanello, drawing after Rhea Silvia
and Orestes sarcophagi, pen and silverpoint, mid-fifteenth century,
Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan 260
4.20. Orestes, marble sarcophagus, second century a.D., Palazzo
Giustiniani, Rome 263
APM, Dancing Maidens, marble, Roman relief, first century B.c.—
first century A.D., Louvre, Paris 263
4.22. Maidens Decorating a Candelabrum, marble, Roman relief,
first century B.C.—first century A.D., Louvre, Paris 264
4.23. Giovanni da Udine and assistants, Lady and Satyr, plaster relief,
ca. 1520, Vatican Logge, Rome 265
4.24. Giulio Romano, Hercules and Deianira, fresco, from Sala dei Cavalli,
1525-26, Museo Civico di Palazzo Te, Mantua 266

XIV ILLUSTRATIONS
 4.25. Titian, Venus and Adonis, oil on canvas, 1553-54, Prado, Madrid 267
. Titian(?), drawing including male figure from Bed of Polyclitus,
later sixteenth century, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence 268

. Woodcut after Marcantonio Raimondi, after Giulio Romano, position

eleven from I modi, Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna 269
. Baccio Bandinelli, Orpheus, marble, ca. 1519, Palazzo Medici Ricciardi,
Florence 270
. Apollo Belvedere, marble, Roman copy, second century A.D.,
after Hellenistic original, Vatican Museums, Rome 274
. Donatello, David, bronze, ca. 1440, Bargello, Florence 276

Laocoon, in former state ofrestoration, marble, Roman copy,

first century A.D., after Hellenistic original, Vatican Museums, Rome 277
. Bandinelli, Laocoon, marble, 1525, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence 278
. Benvenuto Cellini, Ganymede, marble, 1545-46, Bargello, Florence 280

. Bandinelli, Hercules and Cacus, marble, 1527-34, Piazza della Signoria,

Florence 280

. Michelangelo, David, and Bandinelli, Hercules and Cacus, Palazzo

Vecchio, Florence 281

. Bandinelli, Adam and Eve, marble, 1548-50, Bargello, Florence 282

5-10. Bandinelli, Dead Christ Held by an Angel, marble, 1552, Santa Croce, Florence 283
5.11. Bandinelli, God the Father, marble, 1550s, Santa Croce, Florence 284

Elen Agostino Veneziano, after Bandinelli, Academia di Baccio Brandin.

in Roma in Luogo detto Belvedere, engraving, 1531, Davison Arts Center,
Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut 290
5.13. Enea Vico, after Bandinelli, Bandinelli’s Academy, engraving, ca. 1550,
Museum ofFine Arts, Boston 291
5-14. Antonio Susini after Bandinelli, Descent from the Cross, bronze relief
after 1529 original, Louvre, Paris 298

5.15. Bandinelli, Self-Portrait, oil on panel, ca. 1545, Isabella Stuart Gardner
Museum, Boston 3395)
. Niccolo della Casa, after Bandinelli, Self-Portrait, engraving, 1540s,
Museum ofFine Arts, Boston 395
aor: Bandinelli, Nude Man Seated on a Grassy Bank, red chalk, ca. 1525,
Courtauld Gallery, London 308

. Bandinelli, Standing Female Nude (after the Antique), red chalk, ca. 1515,
Private Collection 308

5.19. Venus of Cnidian type, Roman copy after Praxitelean original from
fourth century B.c., Glyptothek, Munich 308

5-20. Bandinelli, Birth of the Virgin, marble relief, 1518-19, Basilica della
Santa Casa, Loreto 310

Spat Bandinelli, Standing Female Nude, red chalk, ca. 1518, Biblioteca Reale,
Turin 311

5.22) Bandinelli, Two Female Figures (verso offig. 5.21), pen and ink,
ca. 1518, Biblioteca Reale, Turin 311

Spoey Bandinelli, Two Nude Men Fighting, Watched by Three Others,

black chalk, ca. 1517, British Museum, London 312

XV ILLUSTRATIONS
 5.24. Bandinelli, Seated Male Nude Breaking a Rod with His Knee,
red chalk, ca. 1512, British Museum, London 312

. Bandinelli, A Nude Man, Reclining on His Right Arm, red chalk,

ca. 1514, British Museum, London 313
: Bandinelli, Nude Boy, black chalk, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence 314
. Bandinelli, Seated Woman Sewing with Two Children, red chalk,
ca. 1515, Département des arts graphiques, Louvre, Paris 314
. Bandinelli, Man in Gontemporary Dress, Kneeling in Profile to the Left,
black chalk, 1530s, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford 315

5-29. Bandinelli, Standing Male Model, black chalk, ca. 1515,

Windsor Castle, The Royal Collection 315
5.30. Bandinelli, Study for the Figure ofMoses, 1550s, black chalk,
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence 317
Bol Bandinelli, Seated Young Man Pointing toa Tablet, red chalk,
ca. 1520, Kunsthalle, Hamburg

5-32. Bandinelli, Seated Old Man in Pseudo-Antique Costume, Pointing to

a Tablet, pen and brown ink, 1520s, British Museum, London

5-33: Bastiano da Sangallo (attributed), copy after Michelangelo, cartoon

for Battle ofCascina, ca. 1542, Holkham Hall, Norfolk, England 319

5-34. Bandinelli, Nude Kneeling in Profile to the Left, pen and ink, 1530s,
Département des arts graphiques, Louvre, Paris 320

5-35: Bandinelli, Baptism of the Neophytes, from tomb ofLeo X, marble relief,
1539-40, Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome a \ 321

5-36. Marco Dente, engraving after Bandinelli, Slaughter of the Innocents,

ca. 1520, British Museum, London 323
5:37: Bandinelli, Group of Standing Male Nudes, pen and brown ink, 1520s,
Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford 324
5.38. Bandinelli, Sacrifice ofNoah, pen and brown ink, 1546-48,
Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth 324
5-39: Bandinelli, Drunkenness ofNoah, pen and brown ink, 1547-48,
British Museum, London 325
5-40. Bandinelli, Nude Soldiers in Combat, pen and brown ink, 1540s,
Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford 326
5-41. Bandinelli, drawing after the Laoco6n, 1520s, black chalk, Galleria
degli Uffizi, Florence 327
5-42. Bandinelli, drawing after the Laoco6n, 1520s, pen and ink,
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence 327
5-43. Bandinelli, drawing for a bronze Hercules, pen and ink, ca. 1530,
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna 328
5-44. Bandinelli, Standing Male Nude Turned in Profile to the Right, red chalk,
1540S, British Museum, London 329
5-45: Bandinelli, Two Nude Men Facing Each Other, pen and ink, Museo Horne ’
Florence
329
5.46. Benvenuto Cellini, Crucifix, marble, 1562, Escorial, Madrid
332
5-47- Bandinelli, Pieta or Nicodemus with Dead Christ, marble, 1558-59,
SS. Annunziata, Florence
335
5.48. Michelangelo, Pieta, marble, 1547-55, Museo dell’Opera del
Duomo, Florence
336

xv ILLUSTRATIONS
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I.scary to do the math, but numbers don’t lie: I have spent about
a quarter of my life researching and writing this book. Or let’s say a quarter of the years
of my life, since, however satisfying the accomplishment may be, I hope the book does
not represent the whole of my existence during that time. Yet that statement, too,
should perhaps be qualified. A long and absorbing labor like the present one can never
be separated from the whole of one’s existence. As I try to remember the persons,
places, and institutions whose influence brought this work into being, I discover that I
am recalling thirteen years of friendship, support, and love, all of which are as insepa-
rable from each other as they are from the book. So, in spite of the usual neatly orga-
nized rubrics of gratitude that Ihave composed below, I really wish to thank everyone
for all their generosities. But perhaps that is best done in life rather than on an
acknowledgments page.
This book would not be possible without the Census of Antique Works Known to
Renaissance Artists, courtesy of Phyllis Bober and the Warburg Institute (of which I have
more to say in the Introduction); nor could I have written it without a fellowship from
the Howard Foundation, which first cast me loose upon Rome. Generous leave times
from my various academic homes—Northwestern University, the University of
Michigan, and New York University—have also been indispensable, though no more
so than the years spent on the job in all these places (as well as at Washington
University in St. Louis, where I was a Fannie Hurst Visiting Professor), since I
benefited at least as much from great conversations with students and colleagues as
from the chance to escape them. While on the subject of students, I am delighted to
celebrate a sequence of brilliant individuals who have served as my research assis-
tants: William West, Ann Flower, and Philip Lorenz. I cannot list all the libraries with-
out which there would have been no research, but I want to single out that of N.Y.U.’s
Institute of Fine Arts and especially its reference librarian, Clare Hills-Nova. I wish as
well to recognize the long-term support and encouragement ofYale University Press,
notably from two editors, as different as they are great: Ellen Graham and Jonathan
Brent. In the more recent term, the production of this book owes a great debt to the
care and enthusiasm of Karen Gangel. And, in a category both material and spiritual,
it is a special pleasure to acknowledge the grant from the Yale Elizabethan Club, place
of happiest New Haven memories and now ofinestimable assistance.
 Perhaps the definitive case of my personal and professional gratitude, however,
is bound up with the multidisciplinary nature of the book. Whether owing to the
breadth of my curiosity or to the brevity of my attention span, I have never been able to
stay inside my training as a scholar of English Literature. What is remarkable in this
story, though, is not my determination to delve in other fields but the extraordinary
generosity—that is, both the sharing of expertise and the invitations to colleague-
ship—that I have received from those who are the great recognized experts in those
disciplines upon which I have poached.
I have, first of all, been blessed with collaborative support from a worldwide
network of art historians: Northwestern colleagues Larry Silver and Whitney Davis;
Michigan colleagues Celeste Brusati and Pat Simons; N.Y.U. colleagues Marvin
Trachtenberg, Linda Nochlin, Colin Eisler, and A. Richard Turner. In wider geogra-
phies I have picked up such companions as James Ackerman, Nicole Dacos, Rona
Goffen, Michael Koortbojian, Marilyn Lavin, Irving Lavin, Joseph Rykwert, and Philip
Sohm. Classicists, perhaps even more than art historians, might have reason to run
when they see me coming; miraculously, they have been full of welcome and wisdom.
Again I have been favored with colleagues: at Michigan, John D’Arms and H.D.
Cameron; at N.Y.U., Michele Lowrie, Matthew Santirocco, and Seth Benardete. Farther
afield, a stint as Walker-Ames Professor at the University of Washington gave me a
chance to play classicist for real and to see some very fine ones in action, especially
Stephen Hinds. Elsewhere in my travels, I have had the great pleasure of support from
Alessandro Barchiesi, Alessandro Schiesaro, and Froma Zeitlin.
Nor, even though English Literature may have been left behind, have my col-
leagues in that field ever abandoned me. To cite a very small portion of those who have
managed to bear with me: Marjorie Levinson, Joseph Loewenstein, David Lee Miller,
Martin Mueller, Peter Platt, Michael Schoenfeldt, Tobin Siebers, Richard Strier, and
Michael Warner, who, as I recall, gave me the book’s title before a word of it had been
written. What life or liveliness has emerged in these writings about old stones I owe in
part to the challenging interventions of Chris King, writer, editor, friend.
Then there are those persons who defy all categories. They are my friends, my
mentors (or mentees, but what’s the difference?), examples of what a scholar can be,
readers and encouragers of my work, makers of my life, all of the above. May they for-
give the indignity of group listing: Albert Ascoli, Harry Berger, Philip Blumberg,
Jonathan Freedman, Anthony Grafton, John Hollander, Richard Howard, Jon Koslow,
Thomas Laqueur, Dan Lewis, Alexander Nagel, Stephen Orgel, Michael Putnam, Mary
Beth Rose, Richard Sennett, David Silverman, Benjamin Taylor, William Wallace,
Robert Weisbuch.
Finally, I elaborate on the book’s dedication as I record the greatest, if most
diffuse, debt ofall. When I arrived in Rome in 1987, I knew not a single person, nor
did I have any institutional affiliation. In the subsequent years I came to feel, like cer-
tain very fortunate ancients, that I could declare myself a Roman citizen. Such miracu-

XVlll ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
lous naturalization was owing to an extraordinary group of newly made friends, most
of them not academics (their professions range from housekeeper to historian, from
pediatrician to barkeep) but, rather, lovers of their city, of good wine, good food, good
talk, and, by felicitous extension, ofthis foreigner who would be Roman. I name some
of these glorious people and offer this book as a small return for their kindnesses
of mind and soul: Vincenzo Anelli, Michele Bernardini, Sergio Bonetti, Stefano
Bonilli, Andrea Carlino, Sergio Ceccarelli, Daniele Cernilli, lan d’Agata, Massimo
d’Alessandro, Giovanni Gregoletto, Silvia Imparato, Giovanni Levi, Paola di Mauro,
Mara Memo, Giovanna Pantellini, Sandro Sangiorgi, Rosalba Spagnoletti, Edward
Steinberg, Clara Viscogliosi, Paolo Zaccaria.

xix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Vi
 INTRODUCTION

The conditions under which an object of discourse may appear, the historical conditions which make it possible
to “say something about it” and for many people to say different things about it, the conditions under which
such a thing inscribes itself into a network of relations with other objects, so that it can establish with them
relations of resemblance, nearness, distance, difference, transformation—these conditions, as is clear, are
numerous and imposing. All of which means that one cannot simply talk about any old thing in any old time
period; it is not easy to say something new; it is not enough just to open one’s eyes, to pay attention, or to
become aware so that new objects light up and emerge from the surface of the ground in their first clarity.
—MICHEL FOUCAULT

\ Vincther there are new things to be said and thought at any

given moment, and what the conditions might be for saying them: these are among
Foucault’s fundamental questions about history and knowledge. No novelty is so
radical, he tells us, that it can be perceived independently of the time-bound conditions
of discourse. That would be like something that emerged from the ground into the
light of day with no more cause or context than its own self-generated will; such things
never happen.
This is a book about a group of objects that actually did emerge from the
ground into the light of day. The objects, as it happens, are not new, but they are
radical, which is to say that they appear literally and figuratively at the root level of the
civilization that unearths them and provide a fundamental alternative that must be
encountered. But if this book tortures Foucault’s metaphor by translating it into a
material reality, it nonetheless shares his project of narrating history by chronicling
the possibilities of discourse as they define the old and the new. The finding ofancient
sculpture in the ground during early modern times, followed by the decoding, the
restoring, the imitating, the reimagining, the weaving together of a grand narrative of
history from these material remains and their textual traces—what happens if
we entertain the possibility that this was precisely the impossibly new thing that
produces, or at the very least signals, historical change?

Xxi
Habent libelli sua fata. If the Latin grammarian was right to assert that even a little thing
like a book has a destiny, it is bound to be even more certain that a book has a history.
When the book is about history and about the ways a set of cultural objects can be
made into a history, then the book’s own past may offer the surest key to what it is.
Further, when the book uses metaphors of forward and backward time travel almost
compulsively, then a retrospective glimpse into its own origins would seem only
appropriate. After the author has spent a dozen years on finding art in the ground,
perhaps it is normal that the subject seems to him inevitable and universal, that it
appears to provide a kind of key to all knowledge concerning history, art, and culture.
The ensuing pages are unlikely to persuade even the most enthusiastic reader of any-
thing quite so absolute. Still, it is precisely this conviction of the author—itself a kind
of miniature mentalitt—which demands to be historically unpacked, so that its own
strands can be disentangled, its layers unsedimented, and its internal relations
mapped. With this in mind, I present, by way ofthis Introduction, a series oforigins.
As I write these words, it is precisely fifty years since Phyllis Bober, working
under Fritz Saxl and in the worldwide orbit of the Warburg Institute, began collecting
the materials for what soon came to be known as the Census of Antique Works Known to
Renaissance Artists.! (It is extraordinary, a case perhaps unequalled in the annals of
scholarship, that the same remarkable individual remains today the erudite, imagina-
tive, and indefatigable spirit behind this enterprise.) The plan was to make as com-
plete a record as possible, principally photographic and to a lesser extent textual, of
the pieces of ancient sculpture known in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and
equally to document the drawings and imitations of these works which proved their
familiarity in this period. What is perhaps most notable is that Professor Bober was by
training a classical archaeologist and not (to begin with, at least) a Renaissance schol-
ar at all. Thus the twentieth-century act of recuperation was a kind of archaeology—a
careful mapping of material artifacts on a grid of time and space—which was itself
being applied to a rather different sort of Renaissance archaeology, a recovery of the
past that was as unsystematic as it was passionate.
In my own experience of the Warburg enterprise, which included not only the
Census but also analogous projects of documentation on subjects like astrology,
Platonism, and classical iconography, the catalyst for these mutually reflective record-
ings ofthe past was, as my opening quotation suggests, a third archaeology. At some
point in the late 1970s I was by day a researcher in the collections of the Warburg
Library and by night a reader of The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge.
Which is to say that I was encountering in my research a nested history of
attempts to
archive the past, from Phyllis Bober and her colleagues back to the sixteenth-century
antiquarians and the collections of Renaissance sketchbooks after antiquity, back to
the discoverers of everything from mass-produced sarcophagi to the Laocoén, back to
the humanists from Petrarch to Alberti, who constructed an ideology ofthe past, back
to the Romans themselves, who had in the first place created or plundered or collected

XXll INTRODUCTION
the art objects as an act of retrieving a more glorious Greek past. Meanwhile I was
learning a different set of meanings for archive, seeing it not as the sum total of events
and things that had been recorded but as the system that governed what could be
recorded. The real archive, in other words, might not be the Census or the sketchbooks
or the antiquarian records or even the recovered works of art but rather the sequence
of mentalities that had made this list possible, both then and now. And archaeology
might not be the science of collecting and preserving these material things but “the
never completed, never wholly achieved uncovering of the archive.” I found myself, in
short, stranded between an archive being assiduously completed and an archive that
was by definition uncompletable but constantly acting as a commentary on itself. Yet I
felt far less conflicted when I realized that archaeology, which was in a sense my topic,
could now be understood as the very principle or method with which I approached my
topic and which I hoped it would in turn illuminate.
The result is a documentary history that aspires to rigor but that is properly
skeptical about the discursive practices that are called history; it also seeks to tell one
story among many—that is, of one moment that might be called “archaeology”—while
investigating what the larger archaeological paradigms of story and history might be.
Foucault, of course, repeatedly discounts the conventional meaning of the term he uses
in his title—just as I will say pointedly in the first chapter that the Renaissance redis-
covery of art in the ground is not archaeology in the normal modern sense—but that
does not prevent his work from being steeped in the metaphorics of depth, of layers,
and of excavation. What he cannot have anticipated is the uncanny appropriateness of
his metaphors to the particular case recounted in this book, that is, of the unearthing of
the past via a set of artistic representations that were once lost, dormant, and unread-
able but were now being awakened, interpreted, and transformed into culture.

These four terms: reading—trace—decipherment—memory . . . define the sys-

tem that usually makes it possible to snatch past discourse from its inertia and,
for a moment, to rediscover something ofits lost vitality.

Now, the function of enunciative analysis is not to awaken texts from their pre-
sent sleep, and, by reciting the marks still legible on their surface, to rediscover
the flash of their birth; on the contrary, its function is to follow them through
their sleep, or rather to take up the related themes of sleep, oblivion, and lost
origin, and to discover what mode of existence may characterize statements,
independently oftheir enunciation, in the density oftime in which they are pre-
served, in which they are reactivated, and used, in which they are also—but this
was not their original destiny—forgotten, and possibly even destroyed.3

I would only add—as with many Foucauldian formulations—that in practice it is not

so easy to separate those procedures that he disparages from those that he champions.
Whether ancient sculpture is being awakened from its sleep or followed through its

Xxiii INTRODUCTION
sleep, whether one is rediscovering the flash ofits birth or rediscovering something of
its lost vitality: these are not either/or possibilities but instead the continuing set of
methodological questions we must ask, questions concerning both what the
Renaissance did to its past and what we are doing to the Renaissance.
Another origin for this work emerges from a quite different world of theory
and method. Those poststructuralist theories of reading which see texts not as collo-
cations of themes but as sequences of tropes proved unexpectedly illuminating as I
began to consider matters less global than the entire conceptual or historical field of
archaeology. This book is even less deconstructionist than it is Foucauldian, but my
sense of how to decipher the reception ofindividual works of art has been much
influenced by a movement in literary criticism that has sought to denaturalize imagi-
native language. When Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller read text, they do not assume
that voice is an attribute that merely belongs in some automatic or uncomplicated way
to any fictive or real person; rather, they follow the process by which the text has creat-
ed personhood out of voice. While this work seems very remote from rediscovered
ancient sculpture, it is noteworthy that deconstructive reading reveals a kind of obses-
sion with the boundary lines between animate and inanimate objects, specifically with
the ways in which something like a block of marble—say, Pygmalion’s statue or a
gravestone—might be figured as speaking.
In fact, the very basis of recuperating ancient sculpture that represented the
human form was to endow the object with a voice. In an effort both to make these enig-
matic works live and to fix a particular identity upon them, Renaissance viewers
responded not only by describing the works in their own voices but also by giving the
objects voices of their own. For students of rhetoric, this is the trope of prosopopoeia,
which has been defined as “the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased, or voice-
less entity, which posits the possibility of the latter’s reply and confers upon it the power
of speech. Voice assumes mouth, eye, and finally face, a chain that is manifest in the ety-
mology of the trope’s name, prosopon poien, to confer a mask or a face (prosopon).”5
De Man traces this definition back from Wordsworth’s Essays upon Epitaphs,
which he sees as problematizing the questions of how the poet lives from beyond the
grave or how a poet’s name “is made as intelligible and memorable as a face.” The
material of the trope, in Wordsworth and in the important precursor of Milton’s early
poem “On Shakespeare,” is the stone of the tomb upon which an epitaph is written.
Milton, composing his sonnet for the Second Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, had dis-
counted the value of the marble monument (“weak witness of thy name”), whereas
Wordsworth—to follow de Man’s argument—rhetorically reanimates the stone even
while he argues against the efficacy of such tropes. De Man focuses Wordsworth’s real
anxiety upon an issue addressed in lines that the poet leaves out of his Milton quota-
tion: “Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving, |Dost make us marble with too much
conceiving.”® If the inanimate are permitted to speak, then, symmetrically, the living
must be turned to stone. Milton’s source for that image, which de Man leaves out,

XXlV INTRODUCTION
is Shakespeare’s own fiction in The Winter’s Tale, the reanimation of the statue |
Hermione, of which her formerly hard-hearted husband says, “Does not the stone
rebuke me / For being more stone than it?”7 Of course, the onlookers at those final
moments ofthe romance are astonished—astonied, as Shakespeare would say—just as
observers of newly discovered ancient marble often were.® At the same time, by this
process of deconstructive declension, the act of writing, which is in effect making a
self out of a voice, has been defined through a movement back to personification,
apostrophe, and prosopopoeia, at the end ofwhich is the poetic fiction of a statue that
comes to life. Italian Renaissance culture at the beginning ofthe sixteenth century was
just discovering a world of stony figures not invented by poets and not even by sculp-
tors within their own Christian tradition. These figures already had mouth, eye, and
face (or some remnants thereof), while the voices that emanated from them, even if
fictional and created by writers rather than by stonemasons, may well have seemed not
merely responses made possible by a living person’s apostrophe but initiations of a
historical—and transhistorical—dialogue.
Archaeology and prosopopoeia are to be found throughout this book; a quite
different set of informing origins is to be sought in what is not found here. At a very
early stage, the working title of this project was “Gilded Monuments, Powerful
Rhymes.” The allusion is to the opening of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55: “Not marble,
nor the gilded monuments / Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme.” It was a
neat conceit on the visual arts in the Renaissance as viewed through the eyes of a poet,
that is, inscribed in competition and defined by decay. The book that might have
resulted was designed on a kind of Solomonic balance between the verbal—consisting
of Dantean and Petrarchan archaeology, ekphrasis from late antiquity to the
Renaissance, and the poetically imagined monumentalism of such works as the
Hypnerotomachia or The Faerie Queene—and the visual, consisting of the rediscovery of
actual ancient art objects. It is not so much the case that half of this chapter outline
simply dropped out, though that should be in itself comforting to a reader who faces
the sheer bulk of the present volume. Rather it became clear that these were subjects
that could not be coordinated; in other words, they needed to be presented in the full
dynamic of their cultural interactions. The baby could not be split in two: I had to
write a book about one of these systems, in which I would record the informing and
competitive presence of the other.
Why it became a book about monuments and not a book about rhymes is per-
haps more interesting to the author than to the reader. Certainly it has something to
do with archaeology itself, as I have discussed it above, and the sense that I wished to
move from a textual to a material revival of antiquity. But the deeper answer to the
question is, once again, not in coordination but in subordination. Leonardo pointed
out (quite resentfully) that poets always had the chance to speak for themselves but
that painters were forced to be the objects of other people’s speech. Although that is
too simple—Leonardo is himself speaking, and so do many other visual artists, from

XxXvV INTRODUCTION
Ghiberti to Michelangelo to Vasari and onward—I suppose I was redressing a kind of
disequilibrium. On the other hand, it was the poets themselves who gave me the clues
to understand how the system of subordination might work.
Ariosto, for instance:

Timagora, Parrasio, Polignoto,

Protogene, Timante, Apollodoro,
Apelle, pit di tutti questi noto,
e Zeusi, e gli altri ch’a quei tempi foro;
di quaila fama...
sempre stara, fin che si legge e scriva
mercé degli scrittori, al mondo viva."®

Timagoras, Parrhasius, Polygnotus, Protogenes, Timanthes, Apollodorus,

Apelles, more famous than all the rest, and Zeuxis, along with the others of
that age, whose reputation, . . . thanks to authors, shall remain always alive in
the world, so long as man reads and writes.

In faithfully reproducing the topos, indeed the cliché, of the poet’s eternizing power,
Ariosto makes one of his characteristically ironic jokes. When Ovid inaugurates the
topos by concluding the Metamorphoses with the boast of his own immortality, he
engages in a kind of sublime tautology (or sublime self-referentiality): my writing will
immortalize my writing. By shifting the object to a canonical list of great visual artists
of Hellenic antiquity whose actual works are unrecoverable, Ariosto turns tautology
into incongruity and bathos. How can visual masterpieces be immortal thanks to
authors—that is, in words rather than in pictures? Does not this process of immortaliza-
tion ridicule both artist and writer and thus render the immortality of both a bit sus-
pect? These states of doubt are intensified in the immediately following stanzas when
the greatness of living artists (Leonardo, Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, Michelangelo,
etc.: “questi che noi veggian [as opposed to leggem] pittori”) is made contingent upon
the fugitive achievements of the ancient masters whose work “si legge e crede”—that
is, we can only read about and take on faith. Further doubt is raised when the poet gets
to his real point, the failure of the visual arts to depict the future. In the case of Apelles
et al., the future is their own nonexistence, a fate that presumably also awaits Leonardo
et al., except once again for the quixotic job of recovery mercé degli scrittori.
But Ariosto’s list of artists is very selective indeed: they are all painters.
Meanwhile the poet himself flourishes in a patronage world of Gonzaga and Este that
is pursuing with every resource the work of ancient sculptors, attempting to buy them,
to make casts of them, to copy them in miniature. All the ironic relations that Ariosto
establishes here, between words and images, between genius and oblivion, between
time and immortality, depend upon the exclusion of a vast middle term ofobjects that
by their very nature question the categories. When he homologizes two cross-cultural

XXvVi INTRODUCTION
encounters—one between ancients and moderns, the other between the art of the
image and the art of the word—and when he undertakes to stage a drama of attempted
communication that struggles in the face of the untranslatability of signs and the
irrecoverability of past masterpieces, he does so by suppressing a set of artworks that
are recoverable and may speak for themselves.
If Ariosto writes from the midpoint of the rediscovery of ancient sculpture,
then a somewhat later poet yet more removed from the scene looks back on the phe-
nomenon as though it were a closed book:

Ne vous pouvant donner ces ouvrages antiques

Pour vostre Sainct-Germain ou pour Fontainebleau,
Je les vous donne (Sire) en ce petit tableau
Peint, le mieux que j’ay peu, de couleurs poétiques,
Qui, mis sous vostre nom devant les yeux publiques,
Sivous le daignez voir en son jour le plus beau,
Se pourra bien vanter d’avoir hors du tombeau
Tiré des vieux Romains les poudreuses reliques.”

Not being able to give you those antique works for your palace of Saint
Germain or for Fontainebleau, I give you them, Sire, in this little tablet, paint-
ed, as best I can, in poetical colors. The which, if you deign to see it in its
sharpest light, may well boast of having extracted from the tomb the crumbling
relics of the ancient Romans.

Ariosto pretends that there is no surviving ancient sculpture. Du Bellay, here beginning
his sonnet sequence on the antiquities of Rome, can make no such simple gesture of
exclusion, since the failed attempt to import works like those in the Vatican Belvedere
was a determining cultural circumstance during the reign of Francis I, and, by the
time of Henry II when these poems are written, their unattainability must be viewed as
definitive. Excluded they nevertheless are, and if any poet could have a complex atti-
tude toward this heritage, it would be du Bellay, theorist of influence and of transla-
tion—indeed, of the impossibility of translation and the worthiness of the vernacu-
lar—in his Deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse.’* These lines open the Antiquitez
with an admission of failure and an act of substitution. The “tableau peint” and the
“couleurs poétiques” ostensibly signal the limits ofliterary language, but they also
define a task of compensation. As the poem engages in a vast cultural act ofenargeia, it
will make absent things present and will overcome its own belatedness in relation to
the unobtainable material remains of antiquity; it will present these things both as
ruined and as (to use the Renaissance term) repristinated—that is, like new.
For du Bellay, it is not only that antique works are unprocurable and that
translation is itself akind of plundering or profanation ofclassical relics. Rome is the
very name of what cannot be enunciated.

XXVli INTRODUCTION
 Nouveau venu, qui cherches Rome en Rome
Et rien de Rome en Rome n’appercois:
Ces vieux palais, ces vieux arcz que tu vois,
Et ces vieux murs, c’est ce que Rome on nomme.

Rome de Rome est le seul monument,

Et Rome Rome a vaincu seulement. [3]

Thou stranger, which for Rome in Rome thou seekest,

And nought of Rome in Rome perceiv’st at all,
These same olde walls, olde arches, which thou seest
Olde Palaces, is that which Rome men call.

Rome now of Rome is th’onely funerall,

And onely Rome of Rome hath victorie.

Rome seule pouvoit a Rome ressembler,

Rome seule pouvoit Rome faire trembler. [6]

Rome onely might to Rome compared bee,

And onely Rome could make great Rome to tremble.

Rome fut tout le monde, et tout le monde est Rome.

Et si par mesmes noms mesmes choses on nomme,
Comme du nom de Rome on se pourroit passer
La nommant par le nom de la terre et de l’onde,
Ainsi le monde on peult sur Rome compasser,
Puisque le plan de Rome est la carte du monde. [26]

Rome was th’ whole world, and al the world was Rome,
And if things nam’d their names doo equalize,
When land and sea ye name, then name ye Rome,
And naming Rome ye land and sea comprize:
For th’auncient Plot of Rome displayed plaine,
The map ofall the wide world doth containe.

Rome is unfindable, the nonpareil. It is the map ofthe world, but it cannot be mapped
and therefore renders the world unmappable. It is the only possible vanquisher of
itself, but it is also the tomb ofitself: the living Rome was entombed in or under the
seven hills; what survives of Rome is literally tombs, while to render Rome in poetry
may be to extract it from the tomb or simply to provide another kind of tomb. Rome is
the very definition of name—that is, of language—a claim that is abetted by all the
rhymes available among Rome, nomme, and nom; but if it is the quintessential name, it
can only be the name ofitself, and therefore it defines but also defies signification.

XXVlil INTRODUCTION
 Easy for him to say. Du Bellay writes these lines during a stay of several years
in Rome, when he goes native to the extent of producing considerable quantities of
Latin verse that even his contemporaries recognized as a contradiction to the mani-
festo in favor ofthe native muse in the Deffence. In response, he wrote an introductory
verse, Ad lectorem, in which he compares the writing of verse in French to legitimate
marriage and the writing of verse in Latin to a delicious episode of adultery; the
metaphorics are doubtless connected with the poet’s decision to write nostalgic elegy
in sonnet form, historically associated with eros. In fact writing in itself, writing about
Rome, and writing about a supposedly nonexistent Rome is eros in a tradition that
goes back to a letter of Petrarch that verbally reconstructs a tabula rasa version of the
city.'3 The less there is of material Rome, whether historical, urbanological, or aes-
thetic, the greater the space for the poet. The mantra of Rome, Rome, as well as the
scorched-earth policy that the poet exercises on the physical remains of the city, clears
the space for literary inspiration.
All this poetic compensation—and to Shakespeare, Ariosto, and du Bellay
one might add, among others, Dante, Petrarch, Spenser (whose very first work was a
set of translations from du Bellay’s Antiquitez)—cleared some space for me, I felt.
Rome is not impossible, even if it is ineffable: whatever du Bellay might say, it was
being very effectively mapped from the fourteenth century onward. Many monuments
of its architecture and its urban topography were in fine condition and formed the
basis of whole libraries of humanistic study. And, most relevantly, its artistic monu-
ments in marble and bronze existed in magnificent profusion and attracted massive
attention. Still, if for these writers they were the very central trope of the unattainable,
the invisible, and that which language must complete or supplement, then what relat-
ed senses of loss might inhabit those places where the objects were, in whatever con-
dition, actually present? This particular origin of the present volume, then, is as a kind
of response to the poets: by calling their bluff, I hoped to say something about the cul-
ture in which both writers and artists were constructing their past and about the ways
language and visuality are interdependent.
The remaining tales oforigin for this book have less to do with theory or his-
tory and more to do with personal experience and taste. It is difficult to find nice hous-
ing in the centro storico of Rome that an academic can afford. By some sort of uncanny
predestination, in the first years when I was plotting and researching this book, I
secured a little attic apartment near the Campo de’ Fiori in the Piazza dei Satiri,
named, it is said (probably erroneously), for two statues of satyrs that had been
discovered in its environs. Small wonder that it should be an archaeological site, since
this corner of the city, bounded by the Via dei Chiavari, the Via dei Giubbonari, the
Piazza del Biscione, and the Piazza Paradiso, is entirely constructed on the foundations
of Pompey’s Theater, one of ancient Rome’s most glorious and most enduring monu-
ments. Textual records from Pliny, Suetonius, and Tertullian, among others, reveal
many details of its magnificence; from Pompey’s own time down to the sixth-century

XXIX INTRODUCTION
pope Symmachus, it was one of the city’s great showpieces. And it was loaded with stat-
ues: fourteen subdued nations sculpted by Coponius, a bronze representation of
Sejanus, icons in four or five shrines to the gods, and, of course, the statue of Pompey
himself, under which on the fateful Ides of March Julius Caesar was murdered.'4 Many
stories beneath me, in other words, reposed the ancient world sub specie statuarum.
And not only beneath me. The facade of the Palazzo Pio-Righetti, which I
could glimpse through a front window, and the whole sequence of buildings that fol-
lowed into the Via di Grotta Pinta, all basically seventeenth-century constructions,
maintained the perfect semicircle that had characterized Pompey’s Theater in 55 B.C.
My own rather undistinguished building, probably of medieval origins, was in part
supported by the top ofa classical column whose capital was about waist high on me
but whose base doubtless extended deep into the ground where ancient Rome lay
buried. Noisy ditchdigging work in the Via dei Chiavari that frequently disrupted tele-
phone service churned up a steady stream of marble fragments—or so it was rumored
in the shops—too small and ordinary to merit the attention of the archaeologists. I
was, in short, living among the strata ofhistory, and I could be expected to be in awe
of the very spot on which I paid rent.
The truth is, I wasn’t entirely in awe. Certainly the sense that the very ground
of Rome was layered with multiple real and symbolic significances, which I will ele-
vate to a historical principle in the first chapter of this book, came to me as a lived
experience (and not a particularly original one). Yet what struck me more, at least after
a few weeks, was the delicious banality of conducting daily life at such an active and
monumental nexus point of history. That I was hanging out my wash or grilling
sausages or rushing to a dental appointment on a spot successively adorned by the
complete personnel of I, Claudius put me in touch with a Rome that lived its sediment-
ed past as the most mundane condition of existence. I don’t think I could have written
this book, at least in the way I did, without the sense that the adventures I would
chronicle here—of discovery, history writing, mythmaking, artistic inspiration—
reposed on a foundation of the ordinary. And I have tried to maintain a sense of the
distance between the story I am telling and the ground out of which it springs.
But there is a more radical set of implicit claims for the ordinary in this book.
I recall a pair of scholarly and convivial conversations—they took place on the same
day, as it happens—early in the life of the project. I explained that I was writing about
ancient sculpture and Renaissance response. Nicole Dacos, herself the author of mag-
isterial work on the Domus Aurea and the classical sources of Raphael’s work in the
Vatican Logge, urged me to move quickly through the antique part of the subject since
its artistic value was so patently inferior to what would follow. Robert Durling, who
has masterfully woven Dante and Petrarch into the fabric of earlier culture, pulled even
fewer punches about the rediscovered sculpture: “Why do you want to write a whole
book about third-rate stuff?” Now, personally I would not want to argue for or against
this proposition (though I have been known to refer to some of these materials as Late

XXX INTRODUCTION
Imperial Schlock). But it raised questions that proved to be a central part of the book’s
dynamic. If the Apollo Belvedere, so universal an icon in Renaissance art and so celebrat-
ed in the encomia of Winckelmann and his contemporaries, strikes me as just a little
bit stagy and vapid, if I allow myself to notice that the larger-than-life central figure of
the Laoco6n is a man about five feet high and that the whole group is slightly histrionic,
if the Bacchic sarcophagus so extolled by Donatello that the awe-struck Brunelleschi
trudged fifty miles from Florence to Cortona in his clogs just to see it 5 turns out to
have been (like most of them) a factory-made knockoff produced for the rising lower
middle class of Imperial Rome, what does it all mean?
What it meant to me was that I was writing a book about a gap. Not just the
space between ancient and modern or between objects and the discourse about them
but what we might call the energy gap—the sparking distance—that exists between an
artistic source and its destination. It is in the nature ofimitation, influence, and inspi-
ration that they may seek to efface their origins, or even that they may unconsciously
seek readily effaceable origins. That is certainly what Petrarch, Ariosto, and du Bellay
were doing when.they constructed their poetics on an emptied out field of classical art
and architecture. Renaissance artists certainly did not make the antiques go away. And
even if that were possible, this book does nothing to cooperate in the project, since it
defies all my friends’ good advice and approaches the subject more from the point of
view of the ancient sources than from that of the modern works they inspired. Yet I
remain with a certain consciousness that the modern culture which appropriates the
classical past in part seeks to make something out of nothing. That “nothing” may in
the end be less about artistic quality than about historic distance and all the inevitable
erasures that come with fragmentation, loss of context, and illegibility.
Each of the chapters that follow attempts to map the gap. First, discovery itself:
the opening chapter pursues the narratives of finding antique valuables in the ground,
attempts to historicize and theorize this fundamental cultural activity of the early mod-
erns, places the discovery of art objects in the context of other finds, and asks what
makes representational art a special category. Chapter 2 steps back from the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries to follow the written traces of ancient art as they themselves
resurfaced, particularly in the Natural History of Pliny and the traditions in which it was
read. Then in the third chapter the book goes on to ask what may be the most funda-
mental set of questions about the rediscovered objects: what constitutes a fragment,
what kinds of things are known and not known about these imperfect objects, and what
are the systems for decoding and assimilating them? Chapter 4, by way of complement,
concentrates on the reintegrating of fragments; it focuses on three significant discover-
ies that illustrate a range of discursive systems for weaving the past into the present. The
final chapter takes the example of one Renaissance artist, who is in some ways typical
and some ways unique; by telling the story of his career it attempts to present the situa-
tion of art in culture at the middle of the sixteenth century when those figures exist upon
a ground that is defined by the ancient objects that have been found within it.

XxXxi INTRODUCTION
 Finally, in case it hasn’t emerged from that summary, in my focus on these
spaces ofinspiration, there is a darker purpose that, sooner or later, must be confessed.
The archaeological recovery of ancient art, enabling it to arrive out of the earth with
almost autochthonic-independence—just what Foucault said couldn’t happen—offers
us a glimpse at a set of creative acts with quite particular valences. When Renaissance
artists look at works in the tradition of their own Christian civilization, whether reli-
gious or secular, they see a complex picture of the origins of their own society. Such art
radiates meaning by reflecting the society’s past. Excavated works seem by comparison
almost nonrepresentational. Their alienness and the fragmentary nature of their
exhumation create a new arena for art as independent from clear denotation, artistic
conventions, conceptual significance, and sociological function. What does that leave?
We may quote from an eyewitness to the discovery of the Laocodn: “The moment we
saw it we started to draw, all the time talking about antique works, discussing the
ones in Florence as well.”!® The discovery of the great fragments of ancient art puts
Renaissance artists in mind of—art. The cultural production that results becomes a
sign that art can be made not only out of dogma, out of natural observation, or out of
historical events but also out of what we might in the fullest sense call aestheticc—which
is to say a philosophy, a history, and a phenomenology proper to art itself.
To focus on a set of events like these, and to view them in this way, is to make
some quite conscious intellectual choices. It is a feature of our fin-de-siecle moment
in the history of scholarship that a project many years in the making should traverse a
wide arc of method. The citation of diverse names like Warburg, Foucault, and de
Man, along with the worrying of the term history, stands as a sign that this book
embraces not only the archaeology of monuments but also the archaeology of critical
approaches. Looking back on it myself, I see a palimpsest of theories and practices
that have formed, fragmented, crumbled to dust in some cases, and left their recom-
binable traces throughout the field of scholarship in these years. One of these
approaches—not really in ruins at all—deserves special mention. Critics of recent
decades, particularly in regard to the Renaissance, have brought about a revolution in
method, proposing new ways of reading the presence of history inside aesthetic
objects. Many of these scholars have worked under the assumption—explicit, implicit,
fully thematized, or taken for granted—that history is essentially the workings of
power in society. I want to separate what seems to me a brilliant methodology from
what can be an underinvestigated set of assumptions. It is not only politics, society,
and economics that generate the impulses ofart; it is also art itself. I hesitate to speak
up for a New Aestheticism—slogans, after all, are better born than made—but per-
haps the history that follows in these many pages can speak in that language for itself.

XXXll INTRODUCTION
 NOTE ON TEXTS AND TRANSLATIONS

In the pages that follow, the citation of texts in foreign languages follows a case-by-
case determination by the author rather than a simple uniformity. Poetry and other
forms of imaginative literature are cited in both original and translation within the
text, and the same practice is followed for any significant writings in which artists
themselves discuss their lives and practices. Pliny, whose prose is itself the subject of
Chapter 2, is cited in both languages in the body of the text. Vasari’s Italian is included
either alongside the English in the text or else in notes, depending on the importance
of the vocabulary in making the argument. Other classical and Renaissance writings
are sometimes cited in both languages in the text, but more often only in English,
with the originals given in the notes when the wording is of direct scholarly relevance.
Brief passages in foreign languages whose meaning is evident from the context are
occasionally left without translation, as are some quotations from modern scholarship
that appear only in the notes.

XXXI11
 \
7

Z Yj Ue ‘
Soi. NY. YY. SY EWN.
Ye I HONS CE OI7.-RRD

7 7 7 7 7 ~~ Yjje Gy HONE OW TN Ge < Gj, Z NG : ZZ

1.1. Laocoon, marble, Roman copy, first century A.D., after Hellenistic original, Vatican Museums, Rome
 CHAPTER 1

DISCOVERIES

Love . . . needs no incentives, being self-sufficient, its own stimulus and reward; ifit enjoys added benefits, it is
due not to friendship but to fortune. Thus, the man who finds a gem inside a fish is not a better, but a more
fortunate, fisherman. . . . The farmer who while tilling the soil happened to discover under the Janiculum sev-
en Greek and seven Latin books and the tomb of King Numa Pompilius was really doing something else; often
there came to me in Rome a vinedigger, holding in his hands an ancient jewel or a golden Latin coin, some-
times scratched by the hard edge of a hoe, urging me either to buy it or to identify the heroic faces inscribed on
them; and often while putting in supports
for a more sound foundation a builder has discovered a golden urn
or a treasure hidden in the ground. Which of these with their unusual treasure became famous for his artistry
or talent? For these are the gifts offortune, not the laudable merits of men. Much more worthy of the name of
artist is the man who ts stopped short, while performing his rightful labor, by a serpent sliding from a cave
than the man working blindly who is happily bedazzled by the unexpected brilliance of hidden gold.
—PETRARCH, Familiar Letters

alk Apollo Belvedere reentered the world around 1490 unan-

nounced—at least in any document that comes down to us. A trove of statues in the
Pergamene style, depicting various wounded and dead warriors, was unearthed in
September 1514: this we know from a Filippo Strozzi letter, though we have little other
evidence that the event excited much attention. The Tiber may have been discovered
twice, first in the 1440s, when Poggio Bracciolini reported such huge crowds that the
owner of the property reinterred the statue, and again in 1512, when according to a
detailed account by Grossino the piece was identified and brought triumphantly to
Pope Julius; in other words, both times documented, and both times the subject of
much popular notice.‘ A few bronzes and scores of friezes, sarcophagi, and sculpted
triumphal arches were never discovered at all because they were never under ground.
For many centuries they had decorated—or, depending on one’s point of view, lit-
tered—the Roman cityscape, but throughout these earlier times, interest in them
seems to have been sporadic. The Torso Belvedere, for us one ofthe definitive examples
of the inspired and inspiring ancient masterpiece, was probably above ground for
nearly a century before it received much attention.

GREEKS BEARING GIFTS

The discovery on 14 January 1506 of the Laocoén (fig. 1.1), another of these definitive
works, is the most famous case ofall, the very model of a high-publicity artistic event
such as we are familiar with in our own time.3 Almost instantly the news traveled to
Pope Julius II, who dispatched experts to make the identification. In March the pope
bought the statue; by the first of July it was installed in a specially built niche in the
Cortile Belvedere at the Vatican Palace near where it is exhibited today. It appears, in
fact, that this installation for antiquities was already under construction even as the
Laocoén was being found—which would clearly define the Laocoén as an idea whose
time had come. Indeed, the opportune moment may have arrived quite precisely. Only
eighteen years earlier, we hear in a letter to Lorenzo de’ Medici of the nocturnal dis-
covery of a small statue “with three beautiful little fauns on a marble base, all three
belted around by a huge serpent”; but the author hazards no guess as to the subject of
the work.5 As for the Esquiline find of 1506, there are many other indicators of fame: a
flood of correspondence within the first month and a series of poetic responses
throughout the sixteenth century; scores of drawings, copies, and re-creations in the
work of virtually every Renaissance artist; instant political valorization as far in the
future as the time of Napoleon, who procured the Laocoén for the Louvre, where it
flourished for about as long as the emperor who brought it there.®
The Laocoon is not unique. Doubtless it has been used too often as a para-
digm, and in the service of too many divergent aesthetics. Indeed, the artistic and his-
torical life of ancient sculpture in modern times has probably depended overmuch on
elevating individual works to paradigmatic status, and not only the Laocoén. The Apollo
Belvedere, adored by Winckelmann and associated with the famous “stille Einfalt und
edle Grosse,” has been the very emblem of Neoclassicism.7 The Torso Belvedere, sublime
in its fragmentariness, has stood as the (literal) embodiment of an art based on
inward struggle. For Hawthorne, it is the Marble Faun that symbolizes all the wayward
eros of ancient and modern Rome.® George Eliot has the Vatican Sleeping Ariadne define
the heroine of Middlemarch as she is first perceived by her future husband.9 Rilke—
slightly more generic in his tastes—hears the voice of an archaic torso of Apollo
declaring “Du muft dein Leben andern.”?°
Not that the present volume promises universality or even novel examples. It
is nevertheless worth establishing from the outset that hundreds, perhaps thousands
of ancient sculptural objects were found, placed in commerce, gazed at, written about,
and copied in the course ofthe Renaissance. To emphasize those ofspecial and endur-
ing fame offers the same promises and pitfalls as does any other focus on a traditional
canon: it records the cases that are most fully documented and that have touched the

2 DISCOVERIES
greatest number of individuals most deeply, but it tends to take their status for granted
and fails to give a full picture of the culture where the canon itself is in the process of
formation.
Now the rediscovery of ancient sculpture is not only the place where a canon
is being formed; it is also a place where canonicity itselfisreceiving some ofits crucial
modern definitions. For that reason it seems appropriate, at least briefly, to allow the
Laocoon exemplary status, since it is not only the most famous ofall antiquities in the
sixteenth century but also comes, through Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and others, to
be the very symbol of art as a subject. Before Lessing, indeed before January of 1506,
Laoco6n was a pivotal but not very fully delineated character in the Aeneid, the Trojan
priest who vehemently advises against accepting the wooden horse into the city and
who is punished by the visitation ofserpents that convinces the onlookers to disregard
his advice." He does get to say the poem’s most famous line—“timeo Danaos et dona
ferentis”—which, along with the statue itself, earns him a potentially high recognition
factor on two counts. But the Virgilian character can hardly be said to haunt the
Renaissance imagination. When Filippino Lippi, who died in 1504, depicts Laocoén in
a fresco at the Medici Villa Poggio a Caiano—an almost unique instance of this subject
prior to 1506—it is more as a classicizing reference to sacred customs than to the sub-
ject of the Trojan War.’* Laoco6n’s life really does change on that winter day on the
Esquiline Hill, for which we have an eyewitness account, a letter written sixty years lat-
er by Francesco da Sangallo, son of the famous architect Giuliano. Both father and son
were present at the scene ofdiscovery:

The first time I was in Rome when I was very young, the pope was told about
the discovery of some very beautiful statues in a vineyard near S. Maria
Maggiore. The pope ordered one of his officers to run and tell Giuliano da
Sangallo to go and see them. He set off immediately. Since Michelangelo
Buonarroti was always to be found at our house, my father having summoned
him and having assigned him the commission of the pope’s tomb, my father
wanted him to come along, too. I joined up with my father and off we went. I
climbed down to where the statues were when immediately my father said,
“That is the Laoco6n, which Pliny mentions.” Then they dug the hole wider so
that they could pull the statue out. As soon as it was visible everyone started to
draw, all the while discoursing on ancient things, chatting as well about the
ones in Florence.”

It is a great narrative of discovery. The Florentine Sangallo family is appropriating

Roman antiquities, while the presence of Michelangelo has all the makings of a great
artist-myth, a Cinquecento visual-arts equivalent to the moment in the Commedia when
Dante first sees Virgil, whose voice “seems faint from long silence.” The young
Michelangelo, fresh from the Florentine triumph ofthe David, arrives for his first adult
stay in Rome only to be present at the discovery and identification of the greatest

3 DISCOVERIES
sculptural masterpiece of antiquity and to establish thereby a personal link with his
ancient colleagues.
So far as the Laocoén itselfisconcerned, what should strike us at once is the
means ofidentification. Pliny the Elder wrote a Natural History in thirty-seven volumes,
toward the end of which he included a history and description of the visual arts from
early Greece to his own time, with particular attention to the objects visible in then-
contemporary Rome." Pliny’s volume was fairly widely read, especially by painters
and sculptors, though it was hardly as well known as Virgil’s Aeneid. Yet what these
Renaissance Romans see first in that hole on the Esquiline is not Virgil’s Trojan mar-
tyr who said “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts” but a famous work of art as canonized
by Pliny. Renaissance viewers ofthe Laocoén will not forget the Aeneid, of course. On the
contrary, they will place Virgil’s text in a highly charged comparative relation to the
statue. Lodovico Dolce, for instance, attempts to destabilize the chronological priori-
ties between Raphael and his literary sources by declaring that Virgil based his
Laocoon on the statue; “it is a matter of mutual exchange,” he declares, “that painters
often seize their inventions from poets, and poets from painters.”'5 Actually, he uses
the word cavare—to dig.
But the key term is exchange: the material object that emerges from the ground
becomes the nexus point for the discourse ofancient narrative or history, as contained
in the Aeneid, and the discourse of art as contained in the Natural\History. As a conse-
quence the visible work of art develops its own privilege and priority, not merely as the
contingent material representation of a remoter but truer historical reality but rather
as a reality ofits own. In the face of these new interrelations, Sangallo and the other
onlookers respond in two ways: they draw and they talk. They create more works of
art, and they conduct an impromptu seminar on the history of art. The words are a
sign that art has a history that deserves to stand alongside the history of power or of
nature, while the establishment of a past history ofart directs the course ofart’s future
history. The images are a sign that art can be made not only out of dogma, out of natural
observation, or out ofhistorical events, but also out ofart itself. The words and images
together produce aesthetics—which is to say a philosophy and a phenomenology proper
to art itself. The unearthed object becomes the place of exchange not only between
words and pictures but also between antiquity and modern times and between one
artist and another.
A piece of marble is being rediscovered, but at the same time a fabric oftexts
about art is being restitched. Writings from later antiquity—Ovidian poetry, Roman
novels, Greek romances, lyrics, and rhetorical exercises—turn out to be filled with
passages, typically what are called ekphrases, in which narrative is framed not as reality
but as the contents of an artist’s picture. These passages stand in ambiguous relation
to the actual objects emerging from the ground. Ekphrases are categorically different
from the works of art they supposedly describe; indeed, the poetic description of an
imaginary sculpted Laocoén would doubtless not resemble the statue in Rome any
more than Virgil’s narrative does. Yet this fabric of texts tantalizes readers with the

4 DISCOVERIES
possibility that, together with the rediscovered works themselves, it will reconstruct a
complete visual antiquity. In addition, the ekphrastic literature brings with it a set of
ways to look at the visual arts and a set of relations between aesthetic representation
and language.
As it happens, the Pliny text that springs to Sangallo’s mind and enables him
to identify the statue is notably un-ekphrastic:

Nec deinde multo plurium fama est, quorundam claritati in operibus eximiis
obstante numero artificum, quoniam nec unus occupat gloriam nec plures
pariter nuncupari possunt, sicut in Laocoonte, qui est in Titi imperatoris domo,
Opus omnibus et picturae et statuariae artis praeferendum. Ex uno lapide eum
ac liberos draconumque mirabiles nexus de consilii sententia fecere summi
artifices Hagesander et Polydorus et Athenodorus Rhodii.’ [36.37]

The reputation of some works ofart has been obscured by the number ofartists
engaged with them on a single task, because no individual monopolizes the
credit nor again can several of them be named on equal terms. This is the case
with the Laocoon in the palace ofTitus, a work superior to any painting and any
bronze. Laocoon, his children, and the wonderful clasping coils of the snakes
were carved from a single block in accordance with an agreed plan by those
eminent craftsmen Hagesander, Polydorus, and Athenodorus, all of Rhodes.

There is a kind of entropy in the conjunction ofthese words with the found object. The
Natural History becomes a treasure map when the object is discovered just where Pliny
says it will be, and this piece of fortune (which does not frequently repeat itself) con-
fers special authority on the text’s account of aesthetic history. Pliny presents the
Laocoén as a unity in multiplicity, an object made from a single piece of marble but by
three different sculptors who somehow managed to work together, to the glory of
their creation but the detriment of their personal fame. Both of these claims reverber-
ate loudly. The object itselfisthe most complexly articulated of ancient statues; hence
the notion that it is constructed out of a single piece of stone amounts to an assertion
of almost magical status. Further, the idea of collaboration on a work so stylistically
unified reflects powerfully on the individualist and fame-obsessed world in which the
object was rediscovered.
Still more important is Pliny’s statement that the Laocoén is the greatest ofall
works ofart; it is a marble statue that is “superior to any painting and any bronze.” He
puts it in those terms because he has divided art objects rigorously into these generic
categories that correspond to the materials out of which they are made." For a
Renaissance reader this way ofassigning the first prize cannot help but summon up a
consciousness of medium or genre and especially of the rivalry among the media,
often referred to as the paragone, which means both “comparison” and “competition.”
It is just in these years that Leonardo is filling notebook pages with discussions ofthe
superiority of painting over sculpture or ofthe visual arts over music, while in the near

5 DISCOVERIES
future the whole career of Michelangelo will be read (perhaps even by the artist
himself) as an agon among artistic media.!9 The paragone, in other words, is a hot
topic, and the Laocoén emerges from the ground as the embodiment of triumph in the
comparison of the arts.
But it is the making of new words—the talking that Sangallo reports at the
discovery site—that really testifies to the unearthing of aesthetic consciousness. The
Laocoén statue figures in countless verbal artifacts of the early sixteenth century, letters
describing the discovery, poems extolling the work itself, representations of the statue
in Renaissance histories of art.2° The question of Pliny’s single piece of marble, for
instance, turns out to have been the center of considerable discussion, as is evident
from a letter by Cesare Trivulzio written about six months after the discovery, in which
he asserts that Giancristoforo Romano and Michelangelo, “the leading sculptors of
Rome,” have denied absolutely that the work could be a single stone. “They say that
Pliny was deceived, or wished to deceive others, in order to render the work more
impressive. . . . The authority of Pliny is great, but our artists can also be right; nor
should one undervalue that ancient saying: how fortunate the arts would be if they
were judged solely by artists.”2? Once again Michelangelo is invoked, here as part of a
complicated construction of authority. The text of Pliny can be disproved by the ocular
experience of unearthing the objects themselves, though only when evaluated, as
Trivulzio says, “da persone peritissime”—by supreme experts. The conjunction of text
and object (curiously, on the very subject of conjunction) raises questions about textu-
al authority itself by exposing the rhetoricity of the text. The solution to these uncer-
tainties is to find truth in the object rather than in the text and to place the discourse of
art in the hands ofartists themselves.
Poetic responses to the newly unearthed statue often betray a desire to place
art in the hands of artists. Like those present at the discovery, these writers say less
about the Trojan War than about the history and emotional power of art. On a number
ofoccasions, the form, medium, and condition ofthe material object come to be part
of the narrative rather than merely its external representation. The humanist and papal
courtier Jacopo Sadoleto, after celebrating the artwork itself and the miracle of its
rediscovery in a newly reborn Rome, begins his account of the narrative with a rhetori-
cized list of emotional topics; the climactic phrase, after father, children, snakes, and
wounds, is “veros, saxo moriente, dolores.” “Dying in stone” is syntactically
ambiguous: as it is enveloped by the “true sufferings,” it suggests at once that marble
is in opposition to the reality of the anguish and also that stone is the fitting medium
for the individual’s death. Evangelista Maddaleni Capodiferro (another figure of the
papal court, of whom we shall hear more) makes the point more directly by suggest-
ing that it is part of Laocoén’s punishment at the hands of Athena that he continue to
live his life in Parian marble—in effect, a further metaphorical turn on the much
praised longevity of the art object, thus rendered as a pleasure to the modern viewer
but as a pain to the (fictive) person under view.?3 An anonymous contemporary epi-
gram goes furthest to make the art object into the story:

6 DISCOVERIES
 Laocoon natique cadunt Trionidis ira:
Ile qui ad Troiam vulnere laesit equum.
Nec satis hoc: Rhodi artifices mirabile visu
marmore restituunt. Hos dea condit humo.
Ecce iterum redeunt. Quanta est iam numinis ira,
dextera, qua laesa est machina, trunca perit.”4

Laoco6n and his sons fall owing to the wrath of the goddess: he who brought
Troy down with the harm done by the horse. Nor is that all. The Rhodian
artists, amazing to see, have brought them back in marble. The goddess laid
them in the earth, and here they are again returned to us. How great is even
now the wrath ofthe divinity: the mangled right hand, in which the statue was
harmed, has been destroyed.

The making of the original statue, its loss in the ground, and the lack of Laocoén’s
right arm when it is unearthed all become continuing episodes in the original tale of
the goddess’s wrath. Even the thousand years of neglect that have mutilated the statue
become part of its narrative.
Implicit in all these responses—perhaps in all ekphrasis—is a sort of
paragone a tre. Poet-observers are in competition both with the narrative material (itself
generally deriving from other poets) and with the mediating art object. But they may
also make alliances with either of their competitors against the other—that is, they
may declare words to be the superior and necessary medium, or they may identify their
task as the verbal celebration of the visual artist’s triumph over the original material.
In the same letter quoted above, Cesare Trivulzio finishes his attempt at capturing the
statue for his son who has not seen it by relying on Sadoleto, “who has described
Laoco6n and his sons no less elegantly with his pen than the very makers of the work
realized him with their chisel. In the end, those who read Sadoleto’s verses won’t have
all that much need to see the statue itself, so well does he place every detail before your
eyes.”25 Curiously similar is Lessing’s statement in the appendix to Laocoon that he is
publishing the Sadoleto poem in its entirety because “it can well serve in place of an
engraving.”?° Such a casual reference to the exchangeability of apoem and a picture
sorts ill with all Lessing’s intricate differentiations between visual and poetic art. Or is
an engraving itselfa kind ofinferior ekphrasis? Lessing, it should be remembered,
had never seen the thing itself.
What places the unearthed object at the center ofthese aesthetic debates is its
specially elliptical quality. That the statue emerges from the ground, that it is to some
extent deprived of physical and historical context, that it is imperfect—all these cir-
cumstances contribute to a sense that the image is in itself incomplete. The experience
must be finished; and words play their role not only by describing or praising the
object as work of art but also by assigning emotions and words to the characters as
people. In fact, there isa two-thousand-year-long debate as to what sounds Laocoén
ought to be emitting.?7 Virgil has him making horrible cries to heaven like the bel-

7 DISCOVERIES
1.2. Laocoon, after Bartolommeo Marliani, 1.3. Laoco6n, with unfinished arm attached, as put
Topographiae urbis Romae, Rome, 1544 in place by Filippo Magi, Vatican Museums, Rome

lowing of a sacrificial animal, whereas Sadoleto hears him faintly moaning.?®

Winckelmann marveled at the stoicism of a figure who could suffer so greatly yet
(apparently) not bellow, as Virgil’s Laocoén does.?9 Lessing, on the other hand, took
the Laocoén to be the very keystone of the difference between art and poetry because the
figure in his control and silence epitomizes an ideal visual beauty that is not involved
with the realistic particulars of verbal description or the realistic outpourings of verbal
agony.3° The Laocoon’s medium, once again, determines the message.
The visual and material aspect of the statue demands completion as much as
the verbal. The power of the work in three dimensions exercised a kind of imperative
on painters and draughtsmen that they re-create it in two dimensions; while its frag-
mentary condition exercised a similar imperative on sculptors that they complete it—
either in replicas or upon the thing itself. Its power and its history as a great Roman
icon further inspired architects and designers to “stage” it—that is, to give it an
appropriate setting, whether it be the eventual canonical location in the Belvedere
courtyard of Pope Julius or placement in a mythic version of the rediscovery site.3!
These responses initiate what we might call a participatory art. Such an encounter
erases the distinction between connoisseurship and creativity and creates an indepen-
dent history of art by which a Renaissance painter is related to the sculptors of the
Laoco6n not only because of a school, a style, or a common patronage network but also
because the artists exist in a collective realm ofinspiration.
Artists could participate in the Laocoén much more directly, however, than by

8 DISCOVERIES
simply sketching it. We know both from early documents and from observation of the
statue in its present state that the only significant pieces missing in 1506 were the
right arms of Laoco6n and the younger son; as ancient sculpture goes, in other words,
the Laocoén was almost pristine.3? Still, it was a fragment, in a state somewhere
between that ofits two perennial companions, the Apollo and the Torso. And fragmen-
tariness is perhaps the most crucial fact of all about rediscovered sculpture. If
Laoco6n’s emotional expression seems to require a completion, his body requires it
even more. It is the physical incompleteness ofso much ancient sculpture that enables
both artists and viewers to enter into the works, to decide what the works depict, to
define or alter the narrative, to view the works as beautiful shapes rather than only as
narratives, and, finally, to take part literally in the creation by restoring the objects in a
particular way.
These processes of reimagining and restoring demonstrate just how difficult
it was for the Renaissance—and is for us—to arrive at the concept of an authentic
original, let alone at its embodiment in stone. Most of the statues the Renaissance
could unearth, and certainly the Laocodn, were themselves Roman copies after Greek
originals.33 This is a fact that Renaissance viewers did, and did not, confront. The par-
ticular gap, say, between the objects in the Belvedere collection and the legendary oeu-
vres of Phidias or Praxiteles, will carry a powerful charge for a culture just beginning
to make painful distinctions between anachronism and historicism.3* (All the more
potent in the case of the Laocoén, which, almost uniquely, comes with a correct attribu-
tion—though to artists oflittle fame.) Meanwhile, the Renaissance busies itself by
altering the form in which posterity will define the “true” Laocoén. Different projects
for restoring Laoco6n’s right arm succeed one another thick and fast in the middle of
the sixteenth century; these range from the diagonal, which dramatically replicates the
left leg, to the nearly vertical, which seems especially heroic, to the slightly flexed,
which is perhaps the most tortured. The Laocodn of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and
nineteenth centuries—in effect, the canonical Laocoén for the modern imagination—is
of the diagonal type (fig. 1.2; see also fig. 5.4). And as though to usher in our own revi-
sionist century, in 1905 a German archaeologist discovered in a Roman stonemason’s
shop what is almost certainly an authentic piece from the real Laocoon’s elbow, which
turns out to be more flexed than any of the reconstructions; curiously, it resembles
most closely some ofthe earliest ideas of reconstruction.35
What is of particular interest here is not so much the choice of a certain arm
position as the way the Renaissance understands the project of completing or solving
the riddle of the statue. Around 1510, the great architect and keeper ofthe Vatican trea-
sures Donato Bramante seems to have conducted a contest among a group offledgling
artists hanging around Rome, asking each to make a wax version ofthe Laocoon suit-
able for casting. Raphael, acting as judge, awarded first prize to Jacopo Sansovino,
who ultimately became one ofthe leading architects of Venice. This episode, as report-
ed by Vasari, demonstrates that within four years ofits discovery the Laocoén has

9g DISCOVERIES
already become the basis for an academy of design—just as these famous ancient stat-
ues and their copies will continue to be for another four hundred years. The winning
entry is cast in bronze and becomes a valuable work ofart with its own history; but for
the moment, at least, the pope’s Laocoén remains as it is, and the replica is understood
to be a work by Sansovino.3°
Ten years on, things have changed. It is Vasari, once again, who will eventually
tell the story:

There had recently returned from France Cardinal Bernardo Divizio of

Bibbiena, who, perceiving that King Francis possessed not a single work in
marble, whether ancient or modern, although he much delighted in such
things, had promised his Majesty that he would prevail on the Pope to send him
some beautiful work. After this Cardinal there came tosthe Pope two
Ambassadors from King Francis, and they, having seen the statues of the
Belvedere, lavished all the praise at their command on the Laocoon. Cardinals
de’ Medici and Bibbiena, who were with them, asked them whether the King
would be glad to have a work of that kind; and they answered that it would be
too great a gift. Then the Cardinal said to them: “There shall be sent to his
Majesty either this one or one so like it that there shall be no difference.” And,
having resolved to have another made in imitation of it,he remembered Baccio
[Bandinelli], whom he sent for and asked whether he had the courage to make
a Laocoon equal to the original. Baccio answered that he was confident that he
could make one not merely equal to it, but even surpassing it in perfection.37

The Laocoon (among other art objects) has become an important pawn in international
politics. The elaborate verbal negotiations hide—and reveal—just how much the
French want the statue and how little the pope is willing to give it up. At this moment
is born the idea of a replica that is worth just as much as the original. Bandinelli, of
whom we shall hear much in the present volume, is the ferocious competitor who
thinks he can outdo everybody, notably his contemporary Michelangelo; at the same
time, he derives his only great successes from copying ancient works. True to his repu-
tation, he boasts that he will produce a Laocoén that is better than the Laocoén. The
political valorizing of the Laocoén quite naturally adds to its aesthetic value the status of
currency (in every sense of the word). The Laocoén becomes exchangeable for diplo-
matic goods and services and also interchangeable with other Laocoéns. Fittingly,
Bandinelli not only creates this improved Laocoon but also constructs a new right arm
for the actual Belvedere statue—presumably, to bring it in line with his own complete
version ofthe work. (In the end Francis I gets neither of these Laocoéns. The pope likes
Bandinelli’s Laocoon and ships it back to his native Florence; the French king has to
make do with a bunch of plaster casts provided by Primaticcio and Cellini—which may
tell us a good deal about the future history of French art.)
38
Ten years later the right arm of the Laocoén needs to be invented once again—

IO0 DISCOVERIES
Other documents randomly have
different content
 – Nem, apám uram, ez a föld nem nekünk való. Sem nem elég
nagy, sem nem elég szép, sem nem elég gazdag. Vissza kell
szereznünk Attila földjét…
 A FARKAS KHÁN LEÁNYA.

A farkas khán, ki Baskiriából szakadt a magyarokhoz, kevés

számú népet hozott ugyan magával, de gazdagsága vetekedett a
fejedelemével. Tizenkét szekér hozta utána az aranyat, ezüstöt, a
számasincs drágaköveket, a mindenféle színek pompájában játszó
selymeket, tarka virágú szőnyegeket. A szekerek után három gulya
és három ménes kolompolt, minden gulya s ménes mellett kilencz-
kilencz gulyás és csikós. Egy-egy gulya s ménes akkora volt, hogy a
szem nem győzte belepni. Baskiriában fegyveres vitéze is volt annyi,
hogy a főkhán is irigyelte ezért, de a farkasképű és farkaslelkű khánt
gyűlölték a katonái, mert ha vissza-visszatértek egy-egy
rablóhadjáratról, az osztozkodásnál mindig megcsalta embereit.
Mikor aztán rengeteg kincset harácsolt össze, fejébe vette, hogy ura
lesz az összes khánoknak, de katonái cserben hagyták s csak egy
töredék-néppel hagyta el Baskiriát, hol egykor a magyarok is
szállásoltak.
Lebediában szegődött a magyarokhoz, de a törzsek vezérei, bár
valamennyinél gazdagabb volt, nem ismerték el magukkal
egyenlőnek. Nem bíztak a farkasfejű khán hűségében. Arca inkább
hasonlított a farkas fejéhez, mint a rendes emberi archoz, s a
magyarok, amint közéjük került, mindjárt elnevezték farkas khánnak.
Jedajk khán volt a becsületes neve. A pásztoremberek esküvel
erősítették, hogy a farkas khán éjjelenkint igazi farkas képében jár s
ólálkodik a magyar nemzetségek ménesei körül, s ahány csikó a
ménesből eltűnt, azzal mind a farkas khánt gyanusították.
– Nem csuda, ha akkora ménesei vannak mint a fejedelemnek, –
mondották a magyar urak csikósai.
– A farkas khánnak a csikósai sem igazi emberek, ördöggel
cimborálnak azok, – panaszkodtak gazdáiknak a magyar csikósok. –
Hiába megyünk az eltűnt csikók után, látjuk messziről, hogy ott
vannak a farkas khán ménesében, de ahogy közeledünk, szörnyű
forgószél kerekedik s a ménes úgy eltűnik, mintha föld nyelné el.
Egy öreg csikós meg azt beszélte, hogy ő már egyszer meg is
fogta a farkas khánt. Vermet ásott s a verem szélére kikötött egy
harmadfűre menő csikót éjszakára. Reggel megy oda, hát a csikónak
csak a csontja. Néz a verembe: ott vergelődött egy farkas. Ugrált,
vergelődött, ki akart mászni a veremből, de mély volt a verem,
valahányszor nekirugaszkodott, visszaesett. Ő aztán hurkot vetett a
nyakára, kihúzta s vágta, szabdalta az ostorával, hogy a bőr
leszakadt róla. Hát egyszerre csak mi történt! Emberalakra változott
az ebadta, de a képe farkas volt s összetett kézzel könyörgött neki,
hogy ne bántsa, hagyja meg az életét s neki adja fele kincsét, fele
ménesét s fele gulyáját. No, szabadon is eresztette, de mikor elment
a sátrába, hogy beváltassa az igéretét, szeme közé vigyorgott s azt
mondta – talán bizony álmot láttál, he?
 Ez az öreg csikós beszélte azt is, hogy a sátor szögletében egy
nagy fekete macska dorombolt, de olyan macskát ő még nem látott
világon való életében. Szikrát hányt a szeme. Aztán egyszerre csak
keresztülbucskázott a fején s hát az Isten Istene ne legyen, ha
leánnyá nem változott. De ő még olyan leányt nem látott! A haja a
bokáját verte s tizenkét ágban volt befonva. A tizenkettőből hat ág
lángveres, hat ág fekete mint a fekete szurok. Az egyik szeme zöld
volt, mint a fű olyan zöld, a másik kék, olyan kék, mint az acél s úgy
hányta a szikrát, hogy ő szinte megvakult. Hát ő bizony ki is szaladt
a sátorból s a ménesig meg sem állott!
Levente, ki esténkint szeretett leheveredni a pásztortüzek mellé s
reggelig is elhallgatta a csikósok mesemondását, mosolyogva
hallgatta a vén csikós meséjét a macska képében járó leányról. Jól
tudta, hogy mese ez, együgyű csacska mese. Gyermekkora óta
ismerte ő a farkas khán leányát. Tudta, mi a mese, mi a valóság
abban, mit Birtikről, a farkas khán leányáról beszéltek. Mese volt,
hogy Birtik hol macska, hol leány alakjában mutatja magát, de az
már nem volt mese, hogy Birtik haja bokáig ért le s hogy ez a csuda-
haj tizenkét ágba volt fonva. Az sem volt mese, hogy hat ág
lángveres volt, hat ág koromfekete. De még az sem, hogy zöld
színben játszott az egyik szeme, kék színben a másik s ha nem is
hányt szikrát, valóban úgy tetszett neki is néha, mintha
szikrádzanék, néha meg mintha lobogó lánggal égne. Szörnyű szép
volt Birtik, szörnyű szép, ki egyszerre ellenállhatlanul vonzotta
magához az ő szívét, ugyanakkor meg valami megnevezhetetlen
félelmet, borzongást érzett. Ha néha kezét kezébe fogta, egyszerre
perzselő meleget és dermesztő hideget érzett minden tagjában.
Félt a különös leánytól s mégis szerette volna látni mindig. Ha
közelében volt, sokszor irtózat fogta el s ha nem látta, sorvasztó
epekedés fogta el. Mosolygott, mikor a vén csikós arról mesélt, hogy
látta Birtiket macska képében, de hogy számon vette a leány
természetét: igazat adott neki. Mert macskatermészet volt Birtik.
Doromboló, hízelkedő, aki azonban mindig kész a karmolásra. Sok
álmatlan éjszakája volt Leventének a leány miatt. Anyja
aggodalommal látta, mint sorvadoz legnagyobb fia, mint húzódik
beljebb-beljebb nagy, okos, fekete szeme s az anyai szív ösztönével
megérezte, hogy Levente testet sorvasztó, lelket betegítő, tépelődő
szerelem betege. Kedvetlenül látta, hogy Levente mindennap
ellátogat a farkas khán sátrába; hogy együtt nyargalják be a
végtelen pusztaságot, néha reggeltől estig űzve a vadat. És
nyomukban mindenütt a farkas khán, kit ösztönszerűleg gyűlölt.
Anyai szíve nagy veszedelmek sötét képeit látta készülődni s gyakran
szelíd szemrehányással illette urát, hogy a farkas khánt népe közé
fogadta. Hogy örült a jó Özséb, mikor ura legjobb vitézeivel
felkerekedett, hogy bejárja Etelközt, s magával vitte Leventét is!
Legalább erre az időre kikerül annak a leánynak gonosz varázslata
alól. Mert csak gonosz varázslat lehet, ami az ő fiát fogva tartja,
szemmelláthatóan sorvasztja. Ime, de más volt Levente, mikor az
országjáró útról hazatért! Melle kiszélesedett, megdomborodott,
roppanásig megfeszült, napsütötte arcán rózsák virultak, szeme a
régi tiszta fényben égett – mintha újra született volna. Még csak
tizennyolc éves, de már oly magas mint az apja, szinte oly vállas,
erős. Ha egyszer az élére áll a magyar vitézeknek, bizony meghódítja
a világot, mint egykoron Attila!
Gyönyörködve legeltette tekintetét a legnagyobb fiún, amint a
sátor előtt felterített asztal körül ült a fejedelem egész háza-népe. A
színarany kerek asztal, melyet a görög császár küldött ajándékba
Árpádnak, a jó szomszédság okáért, arany és ezüst szálakkal átszőtt
abrosszal volt megterítve. Körülötte arany lócák, melyeknek nem volt
háta, hogy meg ne szokják a puha kényelmet. Özséb Álmos és Árpád
közt ült, szembe velük a három fiú. Mögöttük a dajka állott, ringatva,
csicsisgatva ölében a kis Jutócsot. A nőcselédek puha, fehér cipókat
raktak az asztalra, a kisebb fiúknak arany bokályokban frissen fejt
tejet, s pirosra sült őzpecsenyét, úgy amint megsült a nyárson,
tettek az asztal fejére.
Az agg Álmos vágta a pecsenyéből az első szeletet s Özséb szíves
készséggel segített a reszkető karú öregnek. Árpád megelégedetten,
mosolyogva nézte a kedves jelenetet.
 – Még egy combot, apám uram. Szeljek-e még?
– Elég, fiam, elég. Gondoskodjál az uradról. Messzi útról jött ő.
– Nem olyan messziről, mint apám uram, – jegyezte meg Özséb s
rejtelmesen mosolygott az urára, ki kérdően tekintett reá.
– Hol járt, nagyapám uram? – kérdezték egyszerre a fiúk.
– Messze, nagyon messze, – mondotta Álmos. – Ma éjjel
bejártam az őshazát. Aztán mit gondoltok, hol jártam még?
– Attila földjén, – előzte meg a feleletben Jelekh a többit. –
Nagyapám uram lelke mindig ott jár.
– Igazad van, fiam, igazad, – s szeretettel pihent meg szeme a
kis Jelekhen, akiben legtöbb atyafivonást látott az ő rég porladó édes
anyjának, Emesének vonásaiból, s kit ezért legjobban kedvelt az
unokák közül.
– Attila földje, – mondotta halkan Árpád, mintha magával
beszélne. Ott akarok meghalni én is…
– Hát te, Levente, mit szólsz? Hol jár a te lelked? – kérdezte
Özséb.
Levente felriadt a kérdésre.
– Az én lelkem még Attila földjén is messze túl jár. Nekem nem
lesz elég nagy Attila földje. Mind bírni akarom az országokat s
népeket, melyeket Attila leigázott… Megmutatom, hogy Attila vére
van az ereimben!
Árpád elkomorodva hallgatta a fenhéjázó beszédet.
– Hogy mit teszel az én halálom után, – mondotta Árpád – az a
te dolgod. Én hazát akarok az én népemnek, állandó hazát. Végit
vetem népem örökös vándorlásának s ha ezt elértem, örömmel
szállok az én koporsómba.
 – Isten beszél a te szavaidban, a magyarok istene, – szólalt meg
Álmos s reszkető karjával átölelte nagy, hatalmas fiát. – Te pedig, –
fordult Leventéhez, – látszik, hogy gyermek vagy. Szeretnéd, hogy
tied legyen az egész világ. De ne felejtsd, hogy Attilának is végül
csak egy darabocska föld maradott, akkora, a mekkorába
leeresztették a hármas koporsót s hármas koporsó mellé a
rabszolgákat… Mind ide jutunk, fiam. Azonban mely boldog az a
fejedelem, ki, ha behunyja szemét, kicsiny országot hagy bár a
népének, tudja, hogy ez a kicsiny ország az ő népének országa s az
is marad időtlen időkig.
– Nem mondok ellent nagyapám uramnak, mert az nem illendő, –
mondotta Levente, – de arca, szeme lángolása mutatta, hogy
szertelen hírvágy forrong a lelkében. Hogy az ő példaképe a
világverő Attila.
Hirtelen felállott a lócáról s intett egy lovásznak:
– Nyergeld meg a vasderest!
– Már elmégy? – kérdezte megütődve Özséb. – Hisz még nem is
pihentél.
– Pihenéssel nem lehet világot hódítani, édes anyám, – felelt
Levente.
– Arrafelé akarsz világot hódítani? – mutatott Özséb szomorúan a
farkas khán sátra felé.
– Nem, édes anyám, nem arrafelé. Érzem, hogy ma utoljára űzök
vadat Dnyeszter vize mentén. Itt én elsenyvedek, elsorvadok. Ma
mutatom meg, hogy férfisorba léptem.
A lovászlegény elévezette a vasderest. Levente íjjat vetett a
nyakába, dárdát a vállára s szélnél sebesebben elvágtatott a farkas
khán sátra felé…
Tarkacs és Jelekh kivételével mind szomorúan néztek utána.

Á Á
 Álmos is, Árpád is egyszerre bús sejtelmet temettek el a
lelkükben e pillanatban, félve, hogy Özséb meg ne lássa: ez a fiú
nem látja meg Attila földjét. De hiába temették bús sejtelmüket oly
féltve, titkolva: Özséb látta jól. Mert az ő anyai szíve épen e bús
sejtelemtől vonaglott…
Arra felé, arra felé, látni még egyszer Birtiket! Meg akarja
mutatni, hogy van ereje megszabadulni a bűbájos leány gonosz
varázslata alól. Maga sem ismer magára, mióta apjával bejárta az új
hazát. Elemi erővel támadt fel lelkében a vágy, hogy az ő híre, neve
megreszkettesse a földet s annak minden népeit. Eddig egész valóját
nyügbe szorította a bűbájos Birtik, kiben embernek és ördögnek vére
egyesült: csuda szépsége egyik pillanatban delejes erővel vonzotta
őt a leányhoz, a másik pillanatban pedig szörnyű félelemmel töltötte
el szívét. Hiába mosolygott a csikósok csacska meséin, ifjú szíve
megérezte, hogy romlásba kergeti ez a leány. Elsorvad ifjan,
virágjában, elpusztul dicstelenül, mielőtt a halhatatlanság
márványkövére véste volna a Levente nevet.
Amint nyargalt gyorslábú lován, szinte felujjongott a diadalnak
érzetében, mit romlásba kergető szerelmén szerzett. Lelki szeme
előtt egy más leánynak alakja jelent meg. Egy leányé, kit még nem
látott soha, de akit fel fog találni, meg fog ismerni ezer közül is. Aki
méltó lesz hozzá, a világ leendő urához. Aki bíborban született, arany
bölcsőben rengetődött. A mesék világszép királykisasszonya ez,
kinek kezéért császárok és királyok versengenek, de ő szolgaságba
veri mind a császárokat, királyokat s arany trónra ülteti maga mellé a
világszép leányt…
Mikor a farkas khán sátra elé ért, ott már nyergelve állott két
szénfekete paripa. A vasderes összenyerített jó ismerőseivel, kikkel
oly sokszor futott versenyt a sivatagon, királyi szarvasok nyomán. A
következő pillanatban kilépett a sátorból Birtik. Arca, szeme diadal
tüzében égett. Maga sem hitte, hogy Levente, alig megérkezése
után, felkeresse őt. A perzselő nap fényében lánggal égni látszott
hajának az a hat ága, mely világ csudájára rézvörös volt, míg a
másik hat ága feketébb a sötét éjszakánál. Vége, vége a férfiúnak, ki
e hajszálakhoz köti szívét, életét. S azok a szemek! Az egyik angyali
szelidséggel hiteget, a másik nem tudja rejteni a bűbájosok
gonoszságát. S a hófehér arc s ennek az arcnak gyenge pirossága! A
kicsi száj s a vakító fehér macskafogak! S a hófehér nyakon
kilencsoros igaz gyöngy, minden szeme kincseket érő! Ruhája kék
selymébe görög takácsok művészi keze szőtte bele arany, ezüst
szálakkal a világ legszebb virágait.
Mintha érezte volna Birtik, hogy ma van a döntő ütközet napja:
ma varázsolja meg egy egész életre, vagy ma veszti el örökre a
nagy, a hatalmas fejedelem fiát, ki apjánál is nagyobb, hatalmasabb
lesz, világnak ura. S világ urának ő lesz az asszonya. Nem szolgálója,
mint a többi asszonyok, nem is felesége, aki egyenlő az urával, de
több ennél. Az ő kezében lesz a hatalom. Kő kövön nem marad
Baskiriában, honnét az ő apjának megalázva kellett elvándorolnia.
Aztán végigsöpör a hatalmába kerített népek áradatával az egész
világon.
– Éreztem, hogy eljösz, – mondotta halkan, szelíden Birtik az
ifjúnak.
Más volt ez a leány már, mint abban a pillanatban, mikor a
sátorból kilépett. Boldog szemérmetességgel sütötte le szemét,
gyengén elpirult, keze remegett Levente kezében.
– Látni akartalak, – mondotta Levente s érezte, hogy remeg az ő
keze is.
Soha sem látta ily szépnek e leányt. Szépségének harmóniáját e
pillanatban semmi sem zavarta. Mint a tiszta azurkék ég, oly tiszta
kék volt most mind a két szeme s haja, ez a csudahaj is mintha egy
színben ragyogott volna, enyhe, szelíd fényben. Ez nem az a
bűbájos, gonosz varázslattal ifjú szíveket megejtő leány, hanem
angyal, ki most szállott le az égből, hogy a tiszta, bűnös gondolattól
ment szerelem virágát ültesse a földi emberek szívébe.
Ha mindig ilyennek látta volna! Ha mindig ilyennek láthatná!
 – Apád is jön? – kérdezte Levente.
– Nem, ő kint van a méneseinél. Majd ott találkozunk vele.
– Hát ezen a lovon ki jön?
– Senki, ha te úgy akarod, – felelt a leány pirulva.
– Úgy akarom, – mondotta Levente, szinte parancsoló hangon s
azzal megfogta a leány kezét jó erősen s könnyű pehelyként emelte
fel a nyugtalanul prüszkölő fekete ménre.
Csendes ügetésben indították lovaikat. A leány tekintete
szerelmesen pihent Leventén s már jó messzire haladtak, mikor
megszólalt.
– Tudod-e, – mondotta, – hogy mióta elmentél, minden nap
magamban kóboroltam s egymagam kergettem egy csudaszép
szarvast – hiába. Mikor már-már nyomába értem, bevette magát
vagy a rengetegbe, vagy a nádas közé s eltűnt, mintha föld nyelte
volna el. Hiszed-e, hogy ennél a szarvasnál szebb nem lehetett a
Hunor és Magyar szarvasa sem? Egyszer beugrottam utána a
nádasba, de nyakig süppedt a lovam. Alig tudtunk kivergelődni. Azt
hittem, vége, itt pusztulok. Reád gondoltam, Levente, s úgy féltem a
haláltól! Megsirattál volna-e, ha meghalok?
– Meg.
– De röviden felelsz!
– Mondom, hogy meg.
– Mindég sirattál volna?
– A férfi nem sír, a férfi gyászol.
– Halálig gyászoltál volna?
– Halálig.
– De azért lett volna feleséged. Úgy-e?
Ú
 – Úgy.
– Hát te így szeretsz?
– Az én nemzetségemnek nem szabad kiveszni.
Büszkén, szinte gőgösen mondta ezt Levente.
– Igaz, igaz, – mondta a leány színlelt alázatossággal. – Hanem
azt a szarvast – tört ki hirtelen – megölöm! Meg én! Addig meg nem
nyugszom.
– Miért? – kérdezte Levente el nem rejthetett megdöbbenéssel.
– Mert háromszor huszonnégy napja, hogy folyton ingerkedik
velem. Velem senki se ingerkedjék! Meglásd, szemed láttára ölöm
meg. Miatta fenyegetett a cudar halál. Nézz reám, Levente! Arra
születtem-e én, hogy hideg ingoványnak fenekén kigyók marják
testemet? Nézz reám!
Levente rá nézett, de alig tudta elfojtani borzongását: oly
félelmes, oly ijesztő volt most újra e leány. Farkas khán leánya ő,
hiába!
– Látod? Látod? – ragadta meg hevesen Levente karját. –
Lobogó lángban égett mindkét szeme. Égett a haja is, a fekete haja
is. Nem nő volt ez többé, hanem szörnyeteg, ki dühtől lihegve veti rá
magát arra, kit áldozatul kiszemelt.
– Nem látod? Nem látod? Haj, utána, haj!
Igen, ott nyargalt előttük a csudaszép szarvas. Épp most ugrott
föl egy forrás mellől. Valóban, ilyen szép szarvast sohasem látott
Levente. A két ágas-bogas szarva koszorúba volt fonva, lebegett a
feje fölött. Ilyen lehetett az a csudaszarvas, csakugyan ilyen, melyet
Hunor és Magyar együtt üldözének, aztán eltűnt, örökre eltűnt az
ingoványban.
– Oh de szép! – kiáltott Levente. – Ne öld meg! Fogjuk meg
elevenen!
 De Birtik nem hallja Levente szavát. Nem akarja hallani. Esze
nélkül sarkantyúzza, ostorozza a tűzvérű mént: haj, utána, haj!
Nyomában mindenütt Levente: Ne öld meg, ne! Fogjuk meg
elevenen! Már elejbe is kerül a vasderesen, mely sohasem száguldott
így még: könnyű lába alig éri a földet. Rengeteg erdő szélén hirtelen
megfordul a szegény szarvas, s megfordulván, reszketve, hökkenve
áll meg: szemtől-szembe kerül az amazonnal, ki háromszor
huszonnégy napja üldözte hiába. Egy pillanat s Birtik nyilától szíven
találva roskad össze a csudaszép állat.
A diadaltól mámorosan ujjong a leány, aztán lekapja derekáról
hétágú ostorát s esze nélkül csap végig a nemes állat bőrén. S
mintha hét ágú kés hasított volna végig rajta, hét patakban omlik a
csudaszép szarvas vére s nézi a leány vad gyönyörűséggel. Egész
teste reszket belé.
– Úgy-e, megmondtam? – kiált Leventének. – Megöltem a kutyát!
– Meg, meg, – mondja Levente komoran.
– Hát te nem örülsz?
– Nem.
– Nem örülsz? Az én örömöm neked nem öröm?
– Ez nem.
– Világosabban beszélj, Levente!
– Isten súgja nekem, hogy ez a szarvas ivadéka volt ama
csudaszarvasnak, melyet Hunor és Magyar hiába üldözött. De még
sem hiába. Mert az a szarvas vezette őket ama szép szigetre, mely a
paradicsomhoz hasonlatos vala. Ez a szarvas is paradicsomba
vezetett volna minket. De te megölted. S még halálában sem esett
meg rajta a szíved. Van-e szíved, te leány?
– Van. De nem gyáva, mint a tied.
– Leány!
É
 – Meggyűlöltél, látom a szemeden, hallom a hangodon. Érzem,
hogy elvesztettelek. De jegyezd meg, Levente, hogy mint azt a
szarvast megöltem, úgy ölöm meg azt a leányt, kit sátradba hozol.
Értetted-e, Levente?!
Gyilkos szemmel mérte végig az ifjút s még egyszer rácsapva a
kihült testű szarvasra, torzra vált arccal vágtatott el, folyton ütve,
vágva habba keveredett lovát.
Néhány pillanat mulva elnyelte a szemhatár a leányt s Levente
nagyot sóhajtva indult tovább, más irányba, maga sem tudva, hová,
merre. Érezte, hogy könycsepp gördül le arcán.
Az utolsó könycsepp.
 A «KEMÉNY» NIKETÁSZ.

rekkenő hőségtől tikkadtan bolyongott Levente a síkságon, s

nem nézve se jobbra, se balra: egészen a lovára bízta
magát. Az okos állat vissza-vissza tekintett gazdájára, mintha
kérdezné: hová vigyelek, édes gazdám? De Levente nem vette észre
a ló nyugtalankodását. Lelke nem tudott megszabadulni attól a
visszataszító képtől, melynek az imént tanúja volt. Látta Birtiket,
amint vadul, magánkívül szabdalja hétágú ostorával a csudaszép
szarvast; hallja a gonoszlelkű leány ádáz fenyegetését. Fülébe
cseng: Értetted, Levente? Testét, lelkét égeti, perzseli a gyilkos
tekintet, mellyel a leány végig mérte. Balsejtelmek nehezedtek
szívére s szorongó érzéssel nézett a jövendőbe. Mindenképpen átka
lesz neki ez a leány. Átka lesz, ha feleségként sátorába vezeti; átka,
ha más leányt vezet sátrába. Ezer szeme legyen, úgy is kelepcébe
ejti…
 A lova hangosan elnyerítette magát. A messzeségből tompa
nyerítés válaszolt rá. Levente felrezzent gondolataiból. Körülnézett.
Egy élő lelket sem látott a végtelen pusztaságon. Messze keleti és
északi irányba látta a gulyák és ménesek halovány körvonalait, de a
nyerítés déli irányból jött.
Épp akkor ért egy óriás, terebélyes szádogfa mellé. Egyedül
uralkodott a régi magyarok kedves fája messze területen. Aljában
széles köpűbe fogott forrás vize csorgott durván faragott vállúba.
Köröskörül letaposva a fű jó messzire. Megismerte e helyet: egyik
delelő helye volt a farkas khán méneseinek.
Leszállott a lováról, a vállúhoz vezette, megitatta. Aztán kivette a
zabolát a szájából s szabadon eresztette, hogy legelésszen egy kicsit.
Magára nem gondolt. Leült a kút köpüjére s úgy nézett a
messzeségbe, déli irányba, honnét újra nyerítés hallszott. A vasderes
felemelte fejét, fülelt s hosszan nyerített. Újabb nyerítés válaszolt s
most megismerte Levente: a farkas khán arab kancájának a
nyerítése volt. Ennek a kancának nem volt párja az etelközi
tartományban. Hányszor alkudott rá Levente! De a farkas khán azt
mondta mindig: Annyi az aranyam, hogy a görög császárnak sincs
több. De ilyen kancám csak ez az egy van. Én nem adtam pénzt
érte, mert azért nem adta a gazdája, Miriam khán. Ha nem adta, hát
– elloptam. Levente büszkén, megvetően felelte: – Én nem lophatok,
mert fejedelem fia vagyok! – Jó, jó, hiszen én is lehetnék fejedelem,
– mondogatta a farkas khán – ha ebben is olyan szerencsés volnék,
mint egyébben. Hanem, hallgass ide, Levente. Van a kancának egy
csikaja. A hasában hozta magával. Ezt majd neked adom. – Mikor
lesz ez a majd? – faggatta Levente. – Azt neked kell kitalálnod! –
felelte rejtelmes vigyorgással a khán.
No, ahhoz nem kellett nagy kitaláló ész, hogy ezt Levente
kitalálja. – Hiszen csak más volna az a leány, – mormogta magában
Levente – már rég alattam nyargalna az a csikó – az anyjával együtt!
Haj, nézzetek oda! Már túl volt a tizen a farkas khán kancája, s
alig éri lába a földet. Száján túrja a habot, fel-feláll hátsó lábára,
mint a forgó szél úgy forog maga körül veszett haragjában, hogy
gazdája nem engedi repülni, versenyt repülni a széllel. Széles,
domború szügyén hogy kifeszültek vastag izmai! Isten csodája, hogy
szerte nem szakadnak! Micsoda állat! S hogy ez a farkas képű,
farkas lelkű kháné! Bizonyos, hogy megvarázsolta. Máskülönben nem
tűrné meg a hátán.
Két-három nyíllövésre lehetett a farkas khán a szádogfától, s
most már Levente éles szeme kivette, hogy nincs egyedül. A lemenő
nap sugarától megaranyozott vastag porfellegből egy kis csapat
idegen vitéz alakja bontakozott ki. Elől, a csapat élén a farkas khán,
balján magas termetű, széles vállú, hosszú szürke szakállas ember
lovagolt. Hosszú köpenyege egészen betakarni látszott a lovát s ló és
gazdája csillogott-villogott a nap fényében.
– A ruhája előkelő embert mutat, – mondotta magában Levente.
– Nagy csud’ám, ha nem görög. A Duna felől jő. Bizonyosan a görög
császár követje. Talán éppen a «kemény» Niketász, Bölcs Leó
császár fő embere. A hadban vitéz, tanácsban bölcs Niketász, ki ha
nincs, már rég kő kövön nem marad a görög császár birodalmában:
úgy végig seper rajta Simeon, a bolgárok hatalmas császára.
Már csak egy nyíllövésre volt a csapat: egyenkint látta Levente
őket. Mi tenger kincs Niketásznak a ruháján! Arany, rubint, smaragd,
gyémánt borítja aranyszálakkal átszőtt selyem kaftánját. Nyuszt
kalpagján öklömnyi gyémánt. Mekkora lehet a császárnak, ha ekkora
van a követjének. S im jött a nyomában tizenkét dalia. Mind magas
szál legények, csillogó, ragyogó köntösökben. S a tizenkét dalia
mögött huszonnégy szolga vezet huszonnégy lovat, a lovak hátán
nehéz zsákok átvetve, lelógva két oldalt. Ezek a zsákok bizonyosan
meg vannak gyúrva drágábbnál-drágább selymekkel, s mindenféle
drágaságokkal. És bezárja a menetet huszonnégy fegyveres vitéz.
– Attól a szádogfától háromszor egy óra a fejedelem sátra –
hallszott a farkas khán éles, rikácsoló hangja, s előre mutatott hét
ágú ostorával a sátor irányába.

É
 – És csakugyan hallgat reád a fejedelem? – kérdezte Niketász, –
mert ő volt – s gyanakodva nézett a khánra.
– A fejedelem is, a fia is. Mondom neked, hogy Levente s Birtik
annyi már, mintha egy sátorban élnének.
Levente önkéntelen felkelt a kút köpűjéről s a szádogfa mellé
húzódott, hogy ne lássák. Hadd beszélje ki magát kedve szerint a
khán. Elpirult a gondolatra, hogy ő most hallgatódzik, de
megnyugtatta magát: nem magáért hallgatódzik. Hátha valami
roszban sántikál gonosz lelkű khánja.
– Árpád akaratjával? – kérdezte Niketász.
– Árpád akaratja! – legyintett megvetően a farkas khán. – Neki
csak egy akaratja van, hogy a magyarokat elvezesse Attila földjére.
Hát nem jobb volna itt maradni az öt folyó között? Innét
beüthetnénk hol ebbe, hol abba a tartományba. Amikor nektek
szükségetek lenne ránk, segítenénk mindenféle ellenség ellen. Ti
fizetnétek, mert van miből. Tenger kincse lehet a ti császárotoknak.
– Összegyűlt egy kevés az idők során, – mondotta Niketász a
dúsgazdag ember dölyfével.
– No, nálam is összegyűlt egy kevés. Több kincsem van, mint
Árpádnak.
– De hát többhöz több kell, úgy-e? – jegyezte meg Niketász
gúnyosan.
– Régi igazság, – vetette vissza a khán. Abból a háromszor nyolc
zsákból legalább kettő az enyém lesz. Te is így számítottad?
– Az a fejedelem dolga, – mondotta Niketász határozottan.
– A fejedelem dolga? Az mind a vezérei közt osztja ki az ajándék
javát. Többet a vezéreknek, mint magának. S legkevesebbet nekem.
Mindig azzal fizet ki: neked úgy is több kincsed van, mint a
vezéreimnek.
 – A ti fejedelmetek igazságos ember lehet.
– Igazságos! Fél tőlem, a hatalmamtól. Hiszen csak Levente…
Nem fejezte be gondolatát, de a «kemény», a «bölcs» Niketász
így is eleget értett s folytatta a félbehagyott mondatot:
– elvegye a leányodat, te leszel a fő khán. Az igazi fejedelem.
Árpád és Levente csak amolyan árnyék fejedelmek. Értlek, Jedajk
khán. Nekem különben mindegy, mit csináltok, csak most kapjak bár
ötezer vitézt a cudar bolgárok ellen. Annyit csak kapok, úgy-e bár?

«Mintha földből pattant volna ki, úgy termett a

csapat elé.»
 – Többet is, ha velem jól beszélsz, – mondotta a khán s falánk
tekintete rátapadt a zsákokra. Vagy hármat már el is nyelt a
huszonnégyből.
– Jó, jó, nem leszek háládatlan, – nyugtatta meg Niketász – csak
ember légy a talpadon.
Éppen akkor haladott el a csapat a szádogfa mellett, de a farkas
khán nem is nézett a fa felé, az ő lelkét egészen elfoglalta a gazdag
ajándék s az ezt követő még gazdagabb zsákmány reménye. Hallotta
a lónyerítést, s ügyet sem vetett rá. Mikor aztán jó messzire
haladtak, Levente hirtelen felkapott a vasderesre s nagy kerülővel
elejbök vágott. Mintha földből pattant volna ki, úgy termett a csapat
elé.
– Levente! – kiáltott a farkas khán s meglepődve nézett körül.
Látszott rajta, hogy keres valakit a közelében. – Hol hagytad Birtiket?
– Ő hagyott el, – mondotta Levente, de oly egykedvűen
mondotta, hogy a farkas khánnak arca belésáppadott.
– Összevesztetek?
Levente vállat vont.
– Szerelmes szívek szokása, – szólt közbe Niketász, kinek éles
szeme észre vette, hogy a szerelmesek közönséges virrongásánál
nagyobb baj történt.
– Idegenek vagytok, amint látom – terelte el Levente a beszédet,
– s ha jól szemlélem, Görögországból jöttök. A fejedelemhez
igyekeztek?
– Árpádhoz, a magyarok nagy fejedelméhez, kinek vitézsége és
bölcsessége eljutott a hatalmas keleti császárnak udvarába.
– S a hatalmas keleti császárnak az a kérése, úgy-e bár, –
mondta Levente gúnyosan, – hogy Árpád, a magyarok nagy
fejedelme verje ki Görögországból a bolgárokat?
 – Büszke hangod, dali termeted azt sejteti, – mondá Niketász
hizelkedő hangon – hogy te a nagy, a hatalmas fejedelem fia vagy.
Eltaláltam-e?
– Eltalálhattad, mert hallottad nevemet, – felelt Levente, kit e
hizelkedő szavak nem ejtettek meg. Jól látta Niketász arcán, hogy
nehezen tudta elfojtani sértett büszkeségét s a segítségre szorult
gőgös ember kényszeredetten nyögte ki a hizelkedő szavakat.
– Hallottam nevedet, de vajjon nincs-e több Levente az öt folyó
között?
– Több Levente? Ki merné az én nevemet viselni abban az
országban, ahol az én apám a fejedelem?
– Igazad van, – hagyta helyben alázatosan Niketász, de
bensejében szánakozást érzett. Mi kár, gondolá magában, hogy
ennek a szép, dali ifjúnak szíve gőggel vagyon tele!
– Bizony igaza van! – rikácsolt a farkas khán, ki merthogy még
nem tudta e pillanatban, hogy hányadán van Leventével,
célirányosnak vélte a hizelkedést. – Levente! Haj, Levente! –
áradozott a farkas khán. – Az ő nevétől még reszketni fog a világ!
Meglássátok, úgy elsöpri a bolgárokat, hogy hírük-poruk sem marad.
Aztán neki vág nyugatnak, mint egykoron Attila. Hej, ha meg nem
hal Attila időnek előtte, bizony nem jöttök ti most segítségért,
görögök! Hol volnátok most?
– Jedajk khán! mordult rá Levente – ami szabad a fejedelem
fiának, nem szabad neked. Megesmerem, hogy Niketászt
megbánthatták szavaim. Ifjú hevem elragadott. Azt gondoltam,
mikor Niketász azt mondta, hogy a hatalmas görög császártól jő: ha
a görög császár hatalmas, miért van szüksége a maréknyi magyarra?
Visszavágtam egyszer s azzal vége. De te mi jogon sértegeted a
görögöket? Mit tudod, mi lesz vala, ha Attila nem hal meg hirtelen
halállal?
 – No, no, Levente, – hunyászkodott meg a farkas khán – látod,
látod, ifjú vagy te még. Én csak téged akartalak dicsérni, s tehetek-e
róla, ha szájam tovább szaladott? Mert, ami igaz, igaz, – fordult
Niketásznak – jaj lesz a népeknek, mikor Levente megmozdul…
Niketász a sokat látott, tapasztalt ember szemével nézett
Leventére. Világosan látta, hogy Levente lelke mélyéből megveti a
farkas khánt, s im mégis jól esik hallani, akárkitől ered, a csúnya
hizelkedő szavakat. Hogy ennek az ifjúnak lelke tele van messzelátó
tervekkel. Világverő Attila idejét akarja feltámasztani egy maréknyi
néppel. Ámde Attila népe szörnyű áradat volt, mely maga előtt
seperte vagy maga köré habarta az útjában talált népeket. Mit
kezdhet Levente azzal a néppel, mely az öt folyó közt kedve szerint
elterülhet? Ha legalább együtt volna mind, aki magyar. De a
bessenyők két felé szakasztották már Lebediában. Az egyik fele
elbódorgott a perzsák földjére, a másik felét ide vezette Árpád.
Vajjon találnak-e egymásra valaha az elszakadt testvérek? Niketász
éles szeme hamar megvette a mértéket Leventéről. Különösen
alkalmas arra, hogy diadalmas harcra vezessen nehány ezer embert
akár tízakkora sereg ellen, de nem kitartó, nem körültekintő. Egy-egy
diadalra nagyot alszik s mire újra fellángol benne a világverő harci
kedv – már késő: sziklafalként állják útját mind a népek, melyek
külön-külön tán meg sem állhatnának előtte.
– De belemerültél a gondolatidba! – szólalt meg Levente. –
Megmondanád-e, hogy mit forgatsz elmédben, kemény és bölcs
Niketász?
Niketász elmosolyodott. Hiszen csak az kéne, hogy megmondja a
valóságot.
– Azt forgattam az elmémben, dali Levente, hogy áldott az óra,
melyben elindultam Bizáncból, ha apád, a nagy fejedelem, megsegíti
az én császáromat nagy bajában s te vezeted apád seregét a
bolgárok ellen. De hidd el nékem, te is áldhatod az órát, ha átkélsz a
Dunán. Hallottad-e hírét…
 Itt megakadt Niketász szava.
– Mit akartál mondani? Mért nem mondod tovább?
Niketász lopva a farkas khánra tekintett.
– Hajolj közel hozzám.
Levente áthajolt egészen Niketászhoz, az meg belesúgta a
fülébe: Világszép Hajnának, Simeon bolgár császár leányának
hallottad-e hírét?
Ám a farkas khánnak farkas füle volt: úgy hallott minden szót,
mintha az ő fülébe súgták volna. Arca elszederjesedett, szeme
szikrát hányt, teste vonaglott a magába fojtott dühtől. Ellenben
Levente arca átszellemült, nem tudott uralkodni magán, hangosan
felkiáltott:
– Hírét is hallottam, láttam is. Láttam álmamban, nem egyszer!
– Cudar görög! – ordított a farkas khán, nem tudva tovább
magába fojtani indulatját. Aztán kétségbeesetten fordult
Leventének: – Ne hallgass rá! Megcsal. Mind csaló a görög. Megcsal,
megvarázsol. Csak egy világszép leány van. Az én leányom. Hallod,
Levente? Ne higyj a görögnek!
Levente szánakozva nézett a farkas khánra.
– Eredj a sátradba, Jedajk khán. Csendesüljön véred. Már közel a
fejedelem sátra. Nem állhatsz elé ilyen felindultan. Eredj haza,
Jedajk khán!
Ezt már parancsoló hangon mondta Levente.
– Megyek, megyek! – hörögte a farkas khán. – De ezt az órát el
ne felejtsétek. Hallod-e, Niketász? Hallod-e, Levente?
Abban a pillanatban fájdalmasan felhorkantott az arabs kanca,
rettentő ugrásokban vágtatott el a farkas khán sátra felé.
 Niketász aggodalmasan csóválta fejét.
– Ezzel még meggyűlhet a bajunk. Kár volt elárulnod magadat,
Levente.
– Mit rejtegessem, amit érzek!? Különben is ő hallotta minden
szavadat. Mértföldekről meghallja a hangot, kiveszi a szót. S mit
bánom én, hallotta, nem hallotta: ami a szívemen, a szájamon.
– Magyar vagy, – mondotta Niketász. – Hallottam a magyarnak
erről a természetéről. Sok kárt vallotok még emiatt.
– Az lehet, – mondotta büszkén Levente – de azért a
természetünkön nem változtatunk!
E pillanatban feltűnt Árpád sátra. Niketász önkéntelen végig
nézett magán, rendbe rángatta köpenyegét. Aztán szigorúan vissza
nézett a kiséretre. A hosszú úttól kissé meghajlott hátak
kiegyenesedtek, a daliák rendbeszedték magukat. Minden arcon
különös érzés tükröződött. Nemsokára színről-színre látják Álmos
fiát, a nagy, a hatalmas Árpádot. Akinek csak egy maréknyi népe van
s még sem hajtotta meg fejét Kelet leghatalmasabb királya, a kozár
király előtt. Ezek a vitézek, akik annyi császárt, királyt, fejedelmet
láttak, Árpád sátrához elfogódva közeledtek.
 APA ÉS FIA.

lkonyodott, mikor a görög császár követei Árpád sátra elé

értek. Az idegenek láttára nagy tömegekben verődtek össze
a magyarok, férfiak, nők, gyermekek. A férfiak, különösen az
öregebbrendűek, jól ismerték a «kemény» Niketászt, hisz gyakran
fordultak meg a görög császár városában, a fényes Bizánczban. Ide
vitték foglyaikat, ide a pusztákon és rengetegekben elejtett vadak
bőrét s hoztak cserébe selymet, bársonyt, drága ékszereket s csengő
aranyakat. Jó ismerősként fogták körül Niketászt és embereit s az
asszonyok vágyakodva szemlélték a zsákokat: mi drága selymek
lehetnek azokban! Vajjon jut-e nekik azokból? A cselédnép serényen
forgolódott a követek körül, leemelték, vitték a zsákokat a sátor elé,
egy halomba rakták. Egy része meg a lovakat vette gondjába,
vezették a szárnyékokba, megkötötték s illatos szénát vetettek
eléjük.
 – Juthatunk ma a fejedelem színe elé? – kérdezte Niketász
Leventét.
– Ma nem, – mondotta Levente. – A magyarok fejedelme csak a
törzsek vezéreinek jelenlétében fogadhatja más országok
követségeit. Nemcsak a fejedelemnek, de a vezéreknek is hallani
kell, hogy miben jártok. Akkor aztán egybehívják mind a
nemzetségek főbbjeit is s együtt határoznak: mit feleljenek a ti
kérésetekre. Ez a magyar törvény.
– Bölcs törvény, – jegyezte meg Niketász. – Tanulhatnánk tőletek.
– Most jertek a vendégsátorba. Pihenjétek ki magatokat.
Holnapra egybehivatjuk mind a vezéreket s a nemzetségek főbbjeit.
A fejedelmi sátor mögött díszes sátor állott: a vendégsátor. Itt
szállásolták el Niketászt s az előbbkelő görögöket.
– Mintha csak otthon volnék, – mondotta megelégedetten
Niketász, a nagy kényelem láttára.
Drága selymekkel bevont széles diványok, rajtok dagadó
vánkosok, aranyszövetű terítők: többnyire a görög iparművészet
remekei. Nehéz függönyök osztották szobákra a nagyterjedelmű
sátort s közepén óriási terem volt: ebédlő-terem. A hosszú, arany-,
ezüstdíszekkel ékített asztal patyolat fehér abrosszal volt megterítve,
rajta öblös arany tálak, tányérok, serlegek szépen elrendezve,
mintha előre várták volna a követeket.
– Mennyi kincs csak ezen az asztalon s ez mind a mienk volt, –
dörmögte magában Niketász. – Mennyi kincs! – ismételte fenhangon
Niketász. – Mi lehet akkor a fejedelem sátorában!
– Sokkal kevesebb, – mondotta Levente. – Apám az egyszerűség
embere. A pompának nem kedvelője. Meglátod holnap, milyen
egyszerű belől az ő sátra.
– Az a része, hol a követséget fogadja?
 – A követséget nem sátrában fogadja. Arra külön sátrat emelnek.
Magas rudakra hosszú, széles selyem ponyvát feszítnek ki.
– S alatta arany trón, magas aranypádimentumon, úgyebár?
– Nem – mosolygott Levente. – A fejedelem lóháton trónol,
nemkülönben körülötte a vezérek, s oldalt a nemzetségek főbbjei.
– És a követség?
Levente megütődve nézett Niketászra.
– A magyarok fejedelmével nem lehet lóhátról beszélni!
– Ugyanúgy, mint a görögök császárával! – vetette vissza
Niketász, – nem fojthatva el bosszúságát.
– Ugyanúgy, – hagyta helyben Levente, – jól megnyomva a szót.
Közben a cselédek egész raja lepte el az ebédlőtermet s hozták
ezüst- meg aranytálakon a ropogós, nyárson sült pecsenyéket,
hatalmas kannákban üdítő méhsert, tüzes borokat s Levente asztal
mellé tessékelte Niketászt és főbb embereit.
– Mintha otthon volnátok, – mondotta Levente. – Egyetek,
igyatok, senki meg nem háborít. Nyugodalmas jóccakát, Niketász!
Nektek is, vitézek!
Azzal magára hagyta a követséget s sietett a fejedelem sátrába.
Árpád akkor már a sátor előtt ült, a terített asztal mellett háza
népével. Ő nem szeretett behúzódni a sátor alá. Isten szabad ege
alatt érezte csak jól magát, étel, ital jobban esett itt, hol messze
elnézhetett népeinek sátra felett. Láthatta a sátrak előtt égő tüzeket,
hallhatta az ideverődő hangokat: az ő népének hangját. Méla
dallamú nóták szállottak föl a tüzek mellől s szálltak csendesen az
alkonyatban, hová, merre? Kelet felé? Nyugat felé? Egyik-másik sátor
előtt eleven vikotába vegyültek a férfiak. Összeverődtek a
nemzetségek egy-egy hatalmas tűz köré, s vitatták keményen: hogy
lesz jó, mint lesz jó. Bizonyos, hogy hadba hívják a görögök a
magyart. Kára lesz-e, haszna lesz-e, ha mennek?
– Itt van Levente! – kiáltotta egyszerre Tarkacs és Jelekh.
Szerettek volna felugrálni az asztal mellől, elébe szaladni,
tarsolyát kikutatni, nem hozott-e nekik valamit. De a fejedelem
komor tekintete helyükre szegezte a kandi fiukat. Levente különben
most ügyet sem vetett öccseire, arca, szeme lelkes tűzben égett s
boldogan borult anyja kebelére.
– Hadba megyek, édes anyám!
– Jó, jó, – hárította el magáról gyöngéden Leventét Özséb –
nincs itt senki rajtam kívül?
Levente kissé meghunyászkodva lépett apja elé, alázatosan
lehajlott kezére s zavartan hebegte:
– Engedjen meg, édes apám uram.
– Ülj a helyedre, – intett a fejedelem – s komolysága mintha
enyhült volna ennek a deli szép ifjúnak, az ő véréből való vérének
láttán. Szép deli ifjúságát látta megelevenedni Leventében. Ő is épen
ilyen volt: fellegekbe járó, nagyot, rendkívülit akaró, de a férfi korra
csendesebb lett a vére, nyűgbe verődtek szertelen indulatai, s más
szemmel látja a maga s népe jövendőjét, mint könnyen lobbanó ifjú
korában. Majd lecsendesül Levente is. A szilajságot magát mérséklő,
edzett erő, a szív féktelenkedését az elme bölcsessége, higgadtsága
váltja fel s uralkodása áldás lészen az ő népének.
Levente elfoglalta helyét, de bár egész nap étlen-szomjan
csatangolt, alig evett-ivott valamit. Az ő lelke már messze járt, túl a
Dunán, Fekete-tenger partján, onnét száguldott tovább, tovább,
beszáguldotta a bolgárok földjét, azon is messze túl – vajjon mi lehet
azon túl?
– Jelentették, – szólalt meg hosszú hallgatás után Árpád, hogy
követség jött a görögök császárától.
É
 – Én kalauzoltam a farkas khán kútjától idáig, – mondotta
Levente.
– A kemény Niketász vezette a követséget, úgy jelenték nekem.
Mit akarnak?
– Segedelmet a bolgárok ellen. Úgy-e, megyünk, édes apám
uram?
– Ha a törzsek s nemzetségek többsége e mellett szavaz, –
menni kell, – mondotta Árpád kedvetlenűl.
– Hát édes apám uramnak nem lesz kedve szerint?
– Nem. Elég vért vesztett már a magyar. Eleget volt bolondja más
népeknek. Ma ennek segítsünk, holnap annak s csak gyengül a nép,
ahelyett, hogy gyüjtené az erejét Attila földjére.
– Szabad-e elémondanom, édes apám uram, amit az én ifjú
elmém forgat?
– Hadd mondja elé, – nézett Özséb kérően a fejedelemre. –
Lássuk, hogy vált az esze.
– Lássuk, lássuk, – mondotta Árpád s szeretettel nézett Özsébre.
Arcának komorsága eltűnt, mint mindannyiszor, ha hallotta szavát
annak az asszonynak, ki érette elhagyta apja fényes udvarát, el a
hatalmas kozár birodalmat s lett a felesége, osztályosa egy vándor
nép fejedelmének.
– Az én ifjú elmém azt forgatja, hogy megrenyhül a magyar vér a
tunya pihenésben. Inkább kevés magyar, de annak a kevésnek
lobogjon a vére, mint a tűz, semhogy sok legyen s aludjék a vére,
mint a tej. Meg kell mutatni az erőnket. Hadd menjen világgá a
hírünk. Ha most hadba szállunk, s végig pusztítunk a bolgárok
földjén, bezzeg másként beszélnek a magyarokról! Egy kicsit arra
jártunkban benézünk Attila földjére is: hadd lám, csakugyan olyan
szép, olyan gazdag-e, mint a hogy eleinknek Csaba regélte?
 – Jól vált az esze? – suttogta Özséb.
Árpád nem felelt, de szemében ott volt a felelet. Látható
gyönyörűséggel hallgatta Levente okoskodását.
– Tűz a vére, de az esze is, – azt mondotta Árpád tekintete.
– Sok igaz van abban, amit elé mondtál, – szólalt meg végre
Árpád. – Csak egy a bökkenője. Hátha elpártol a szerencse a
magyarok fegyverétől?
– Bátraké a szerencse! – tüzeskedett Levente. – Érzem, édes
apám uram, hogy velünk lesz a magyarok Istene. Diadalmasan
hordozzuk meg a turulos zászlót. Én mindig elől járok, – elől, előre!
Előre! Utánam a magyar. Tűzön, vízen át! Úgy-e, én leszek a vezér,
édes apám uram?
– Várj, várj, – csitította Árpád, s csak alig tudta elrejteni
mosolygását. – Azt a nemzetgyűlés határozza meg. Hátha még
fiatalnak tartanak? Hátha a hadba szállás ellen szavaznak?
– Óh, ismerem én a magyart. Rég megunta ezt a tunya életet.
Csak vadászat, vadászat, hadijáték, de igazi csata soha! Csak ellene
ne szóljon, édes apám uram, tudom, hogy egyakarattal száll hadba
minden nemzetség.
– Lám, lám, te felkerekednél az egész néppel s védtelen hagynád
az öt folyó közét. Hány ezer vitézt kiván Niketász?
– Öt ezeret.
– Tudod-e, hány fegyverfogható marad itthon, ha ötezer hadba
száll?
– Hétszer ötezer.
– Lesz az nyolcszor ötezer is. De kell is, hogy ennyi itthon
maradjon. Minden órában rajtunk üthetnek a bessenyők.
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