“Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye”
Friendship, survival, and the pathos of portraiture
Maria H. LoH
In the dusty pages of Giovan Battista Della Porta’s
enigmatic Criptologia we find an incredible recipe with
detailed instructions for a “sympathetic friend ointment”
(unguentum sympaticum) that would enable friends to
communicate to each other while apart. The ingredients
for this early modern potion were numerous and the
procedure was not for the faint of heart:
In order for two friends separated by a great distance
to speak to each other at an appointed hour, one must
prepare a certain sympathetic ointment that would appear
to operate solely through sympathy. Take two ounces of
each of these ingredients: pork lard, bear fat, human blood
purged of phlegm and bile; also one and a half ounce
from the skull of a man who died a violent death, as well
as earthworms, two drachms of hematite and a pound and
a half of acidic red wine. Prepare the ointment with all
these ingredients. Make sure the bear fat is excellent and
genuine in the following manner: Grease the threshold of
a door with it and dogs will not enter. The blood is purified
in this way: Burn then boil it in water so that the salt comes
out. Drink the water, but recuperate the salt, which will
then be mixed in again with the blood. Make sure that
the worms are carefully sprinkled with salt, and then burn
them immediately in a tightly covered pot. This will make
the ointment. Taking two new knives, anoint them with this
ointment in a warm place, that is not too hot and not too
cold. The friends should wound the same part on the body,
for example, on the arm; while the wound is fresh and
bloody, making sure that it does not close up, put ivy leaves
on top, as we do with fractures. Above the wounds make
two large or small circles, depending on the extent of the
wound. Write the alphabet around them, in the same place
and in the same way, size, and width. When the moment
that you have chosen to speak with your friend arrives,
place the knife above the circle and prick the requested
letter with the tip of the knife, and then the friend will feel
the same sting on his wound. For example, if I want him to
know: me valere [I am well], I prick the v and he will feel
the pain over the letter v, if I prick the a, his attention will
I would like to thank Yve-Alain Bois, Michael Cole, David Kim,
Timothy Hampton, Chris Laoutaris, Carol Mavor, John Mitchell, Todd
Olson, Alina Payne, Tristan Weddigen, and Bronwen Wilson for inviting
me to present versions of this material; and the Leverhulme Trust for
funding this research. Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.
be drawn to the letter a and so on from letter to letter. The
knife of the one friend should be dipped in the blood of the
other, mine in his, and his in mine.1
The ritual appeared “to operate solely through sympathy”
and promised to bind the two friends like early modern
“blood brothers” in a magical way that transcended time
and space. The Criptologia failed to receive ecclesiastical
approval when it was written in the tenebrous years
between the closing of the sixteenth and the dawning
of the seventeenth centuries, and without the necessary
papal privilegio, it never saw the light of day. The failure
of Della Porta’s lesser writings on arcane and esoteric
topics would be overshadowed eventually by his more
successful writings on physiognomy, and the friendship
potion would be forgotten for some centuries.
1. Giovan Battista Della Porta, Criptologia: Edizione, nota
biografica, traduzione, con lo studio Conoscenza magica e ricerca
scientifica in G. B. Della Porta, trans. G. Belloni (Rome, 1982), pp.
201–202: “Si prepara un certo unguento detto simpatico, che sembra
non possa operare altrimenti che per simpatia, sicché due amici
separati da grandissima distanza, abbiano la possibilità di parlare
insieme ad ore stabilite. Di ciascuno di questi ingredienti, sugna di
maiale, sugna di orso, sangue umano purgato del flemma e della
bile, prendi due once; inoltre pendi un’oncia e mezzo di cranio
uomo morto di morte violenta, altrettanto di lombrichi, due dramme
di pietra ematite ed una libbra e mezzo di vino rosso astringente. Si
prepari l’unguento con tutti questi ingredienti. Ci si renda conto che
il grasso dell’orso sia eccellente e genuino nel modo seguente. Con
esso si ungano le soglie della porta e i cani non le attraverseranno.
Il sangue si purifichi in questo modo: lo si bruci, quindi lo si cuocia
in acqua, in modo che ne venga fuori il sale, si faccia consumare
‘acqua, e si recuperi il sale, che poi sarà nuovamente mescolato col
sangue. Bisogna che i lombrichi siano accuratamente spruzzati di sale,
e che subito vengano bruciati in una pentola accuratamente coperta.
Questo sarà l’unguento. Si prendano due coltelli nuovi, si ungano
con questo unguento in un luogo tiepido, cioè non troppo caldo e
troppo freddo. Abbiano gli amici delle ferite nella medesima parte del
corpo, come ad esempio nella braccia, le mantengano sempre fresche
e insanguinate e, per fare in modo che non guariscano, vi pongano
sopra fronde di edera, come usiamo per le fratture. Sopra le ferite si
facciano due cerchi grandi o piccoli, a seconda dell’estensione della
piaga, ed intorno ad esse si scriva l’alfabeto, nel medesimo luogo e nel
medesimo modo, della medesima misura e della medesima ampiezza.
Pertanto nel momento che tu abbia deciso di parlare con l’amico, si
indirizzi il coltello sopra il cerchio e si punga la lettera dell’alfabeto
richiesta con la punta del coltello, ed allora l’amico sentirà la stessa
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This passage presents, however, a profound
connection worth exploring—one that links friendship
and magic to portraiture. The transitive quality of Della
Porta’s unguentum sympaticum—the preservation of
the self in the other and vice versa—calls to mind the
way portraiture was described by premodern authors.
Most famously, we find Leon Battista Alberti’s beautiful
comparison of painting with friendship in its ability
to bring back the dead through its visual vigilance:
“Painting possesses a truly divine power in that not
only does it make the absent present (as they say of
friendship), but it also represents the dead to the living
many centuries later.”2
For the most part, this is how scholars quote
the passage taken generally from Cecil Grayson’s
authoritative translation. However, the final clause of
Alberti’s original sentence, which reads “so that they
[i.e., the absent] are recognized by spectators with
pleasure and deep admiration for the artist,” is often
clipped.3 The momentum of this fragment shifts the
semantic emphasis from the image and the spectator
back to the image-maker.4 The syntax in Grayson’s
translation allows us to look more closely at the
poignancy of portraiture and at the role of the artist
in the instance of making—a making that is at once
mechanical and detached, yet overflowing with pathos.
The bittersweet twinge that underlies portraiture emerges
out of the double acknowledgment of the pleasure of
presence in the now lapsed moment of image-making,
and the pain of loss that comes with the inescapable
deaths of the sitter and the portraitist. And if, as I will
argue, portraits can be said to operate metaphorically
puntura sopra la propria ferita. Per esempio, io voglio che egli sappia:
me valere. Pungo la v, egli percepirà la puntura sopra la lettera v,
quindi pungo la a ed egli stesso rivolgerà la sua attenzione alla a e cosí
di lettera in lettera. Ma che il coltello dell’uno sia intinto nel sangue
dell’altro, cioè il mio del suo, e il suo del mio.”
2. L. B. Alberti, on Painting, trans. C. Grayson (London, 1991),
p. 60.
3. Ibid.
4. For the Italian and Latin texts in context: L. B. Alberti, La pittura
di Leonbattista alberti (Venice, 1547), p. 17: “Percioche ella ha
veramente in se una certa forza molto divina; non solo, perche come
dicono de l’amicitia, la pittura ci faccia esser presenti quei, che sono
absenti, ma perche anchora rappresenta a i vivi quei, che son morti
dopo lunghi secoli; accioche siano conosciuti con gran maraviglia de
l’artefice, & piacere di quei, che veggono”; L. B. Alberti, De la Peinture
= De Pictura (1435), trans. J. L. Schefer (Paris, 1993), p. 130: “Nam
habet ea quidem in se vim admodum divinam non modo ut quod de
amicitia dicunt, absentes pictura praesentes esse faciat, verum etiam
defunctos longa post saecula viventibus exhibeat, ut summa cum
artificis admiratione ac visentium voluptate cognoscantur.”
like an unguentum sympaticum, bringing separated
friends together, then pictures of artists pose a special
case in point, since an image of an artist when it is not
a self-portrait is inevitably a representation made by
another artist. This may be to state the obvious, but what
does it mean for one image-maker to call forth another’s
image—to be the one to prick the letters that form the
utterance me valere (“I am well”)? Portraitists are, to be
sure, necromancers of a special order—white magicians
whose instruments are paint and brush, chalk, ink, pins
and paper, plaster, terracotta, and stone (rather than
bear fat, bones, earthworms, and old wine). As such,
what is at stake in the intensely intimate exchange that
takes place in artist portraiture? It is one thing for you or
me to allow a great artist to portray us, but what does it
mean for a great artist to give himself or herself over to
another for representation? In short, how do friendship
and portraiture come together to sustain each other in a
mutual embrace?
To respond to these questions, let us begin with an
image. Sometime around 1550, Daniele da Volterra
made a beautiful, intimate record of his friend and
mentor Michelangelo (fig. 1). Michelangelo’s gaze
is at once intense and distracted. The draftsman’s
concentration on the facial features of the aging artist
contrasts with his abstract rendering of hair at either
end, as ringlets seem to accumulate into clouds and
the sitter’s beard dissolves into steam. The sheet itself,
now preserved in the Teylers Museum in Haarlem,
feels like a relic beneath one’s eyes and between one’s
hands. The two corners at the top have been replaced,
and a new strip has been added to the lower right hand
corner, attesting to the deterioration of the support
from repeated viewing and handling. Two drops of ink
seem to have embedded themselves at the bottom of
the drawing, which brings to mind Charles de Tolnay’s
description of similar droplets on the surface of one
of Michelangelo’s many drawings of Christ on the
Cross, which he described as being “like the tears of
someone who is meditating [on the image].”5 It does not
matter that Tolnay had no means of proving his wistful
interpretation, for he draws a moving image of the
pathos that the artwork can elicit from its viewer.
The poignancy of this gesture is doubled here as we
behold an image borne from the bond between two
artists, one who survived the other and both of whom
were survived by the drawing. Like the playground
5. Quoted in J. Elkins, “What Do We Want Pictures to Be? Reply to
Mieke Bal,” Critical inquiry 22, no. 3 (1996): 600.
Loh: “Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye”
Figure 1. Daniele da Volterra, Portrait of Michelangelo, 1550–
1552. Leadpoint and black chalk with traces of lead white,
29.5 x 21.8 cm. Haarlem, Teylers Museum (inv. A21). Photo:
Foto Marburg/Art Resource, NY.
chant, “cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my
eye,” this drawing is a vow made between friends, and
the artwork remains a sworn statement attesting to their
friendship long after they themselves could no longer
speak that promise. At the time of making, Volterra was
about forty, Michelangelo seventy-five. Just over fifteen
years later, both artists would be dead. Volterra may
have been aware of the urgency of recording his aging
predecessor’s image for posterity, but, in the moment
of making, he could not possibly have known that he
would survive Michelangelo by less than three years. It is
our retrospective knowledge of this chronology of deaths
that leads us, like Tolnay, to imagine tears miraculously
emerging from the body of the work.
As our eyes retrace the drawing, some part of us also
experiences the temporal kernel in which Volterra’s
labor took place. This portrait carries within it a certain
377
poignant claim—that it was, like most of Volterra’s
portraits of his mentor, drawn from the living subject, in
Michelangelo’s presence. On the back of the drawing, a
subsequent hand has written “pare il ritratto di Michel
Angelo,” where the verb parere could be translated as
either “it seems to be the portrait of Michelangelo” (a
statement about the subject’s identity) or “the portrait
of Michelangelo appears” (a comment about artistic
process). In historical terms, the former is undoubtedly
the correct reading of the inscription, but let us at
least entertain the poetic possibilities of the latter
interpretation of pare. The drawing is notable for its
incompletion; perhaps pare might be better translated
in the present continuous: “The portrait of Michelangelo
is appearing.” There is an earlier, painted portrait of
Michelangelo in the Metropolitan Museum in New York,
previously attributed to Jacopino del Conte but recently
given back to Volterra, which reiterates the ambiguous
state of flux seen in the drawing (fig. 2).6 Painted in oil
upon a recycled wooden panel when Michelangelo
was about seventy, the artist’s face appears almost like
a vision in the upper part of the field while his left hand
floats like a ghostly fragment in the lower right-hand
corner. Both partial objects—head and hand, theory
and practice—push through the undefined surface of
the panel to reach the beholder in the present tense of a
future-to-come.
The reattribution of the panel is based on an image
of the Holy Family, visible in X-rays, that sits under the
murky, monochromatic backdrop and corresponds to
one of Volterra’s known paintings in Siena. But perhaps,
like the drawing in Haarlem, the painting can also be
linked to Volterra on account of the irruption at the heart
of the work, where figure and ground compete for space.
A shadowy contour line sliding down from the sitter’s ear
on the left suggests the limits of a body that is there but
not there. Was the element of non finito, the unfinished,
an artistic formula or perhaps an “involuntary intention”?
Might this visual lapsus have suggested an anxiety to
complete, as if the actualization of the total image would
somehow inflict a form of death upon the flesh-andblood body of the sitter? One might think here of the
Romantic literary cliché in which the completion of the
portrait causes the death of the sitter, as in Edgar Allan
6. A. Donati, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Jacopino del Conte, Daniele
ricciarelli: ritratto e figura nel manierismo a roma (San Marino, 2010),
pp. 163, 264–274, 300, 305, 331. Two variations of this composition,
in the Uffizi and in the Casa Buonarroti in Florence, retain the
attribution to Jacopino del Conte.
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Figure 2. Daniele da Volterra, Portrait of Michelangelo, ca.
1540. Oil on wood, 88.3 x 64.1 cm. New York, Metropolitan
Museum of Art (1977.384.1). Photo: Metropolitan Museum of
Art/Art Resource, NY.
Poe’s short story “The Oval Portrait” (1842).7 Perhaps the
non finito, at least as it is deployed in the two portraits
assigned to Volterra, is an attempt on the part of the
living artist (Volterra) to deny—or at least to postpone—
the inevitable survival of the image as it tears itself away
from the body of his friend (Michelangelo).
At the same time, perhaps the inability to complete
also reveals itself as a desire to defer jouissance, to keep
the portal open, to make sure that the fresh and bloody
7. On the leitmotif of being “killed by a picture,” see S. Perosa, “Il
ritratto che uccide (da Poe a Wilde),” in Le metamorfosi del ritratto,
ed. R. Zorzi (Florence, 2002), pp. 271–299; and J. Hillis Miller, “What
Do Stories about Pictures Want?” Critical inquiry 34, no. S2 (2008):
S59–S97.
wound “does not close up” before the circles of the
unguentum sympaticum can be drawn. As the partial
image slides in and out of visibility, we are sent back to a
suspended moment of friendship—the intimate moment
of making rather than the subsequent moment of letting
go. This erotics of deferral is reenacted through different,
medium-specific means in the drawing. The evocative
quality of Volterra’s visual ellipsis calls attention to both
the myopic and exhaustive experience, but also the
desire and gratification, of artistic facture.
To face Volterra’s drawing of Michelangelo is to reinstantiate the pain and pleasure of making: to follow
the movement of pencil and chalk as it skips and drags
across the blank field; to witness the traces of lead as
they deposit themselves into the grooves left behind by
the pressure of Volterra’s hand; to feel the resistance of
the paper as the aghuciella (pin) pushes through to the
other side; to run one’s fingers across the landscape of
tiny depressions that puncture the sheet, connecting
figure and ground, binding recto and verso, and blurring
inside from outside. In a moment, the weight of the
spolverezzo (pouncing bag) will press up against the
surface of the drawing and deposit its dusty contents
through the perforations, enabling Volterra to replicate
the precious image formed.8
This particular drawing probably served as the
prototype for an intermediate cartoon that was then used
to project Michelangelo’s visage onto one of the heads
of the apostles in Volterra’s fresco of the Assumption
of the Virgin in the Della Rovere chapel at Santissima
Trinità dei Monti in Rome. The dimensions are an exact
match, but the Teylers sheet shows no sign of intonaco
and, therefore, could not have been the one used for
the actual fresco transfer in the chapel.9 It is perhaps
the original or at least one of the multiple originals in
Volterra’s possession from which subsequent copies
were pulled.
The persistence of the pinholes that pierce the skin
of the drawing keep coming back into the picture,
distracting our view of the total image. Sixteenth-century
terms for the process of pricking drawings include
puntare and punteggiare, which derive from the Latin
punctum.10 Volterra’s drawing gives new meaning to
8. See C. C. Bambach, Drawing and Painting in the italian
renaissance Workshop: Theory and Practice, 1300–1600 (Cambridge,
1999), pp. 56–62 and 76–77, regarding the delicate process of
pouncing.
9. For details on this technical note, see Daniele da Volterra: amico
di Michelangelo, ed. V. Romani (Florence, 2003), pp. 110–112.
10. Bambach (see note 8), p. 56.
Loh: “Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye”
Barthes’s differentiation between punctum and studium.
Studium is the coded body of knowledge that aims
to give an overall picture, while in the same gesture
seeks to control meaning. It says to us: This is a face,
this is the face of a man, this man is Michelangelo and
no other. Punctum, in contrast, is the unexpected cut
that wounds and moves without warning; it is a “sting,
speck, cut, little hole—and also a cast of the dice.”11 It
is an accidental detail, a partial object, that nevertheless
possesses the power of expansion and the power to
affect. Michelangelo himself described the intromissive
force of portraiture in terms not unlike Barthes’s
punctum. In the penultimate stanza of one of his poems,
he writes about the image of the beloved that he guards
in his heart:
You entered me through my eyes, which make me dissolve
in tears. Like a bunch of unripe grapes as it enters into a
bottle and spreads out below the neck where the phial is
wider, your image, which from outside makes me wet with
tears, does likewise: after passing through my eyes it spreads
out, so that I expand like skin that is swollen by fat; since
you entered me by such a narrow passage, I cannot dare to
believe that you will ever come out.12
The punctum of Volterra’s drawing lies, for me, both
literally and physically, in the slightly drifting pupil of
the left eye that dematerializes in a field of tiny holes.13
For another viewer, the punctum might materialize in
the sudden accumulation of pencil marks in the corner
of the mouth, or perhaps in the ambiguous strip that cuts
across the lower right-hand corner, bringing attention
back to the materiality of the support and reminding
us that this drawing before our eyes has had to survive
almost five hundred years in order for us to see it. This
sheet, for all practical purposes, should have disappeared
in the time and space of the workshop: Once a drawing
11. R. Barthes, Camera Lucida: reflections on Photography, trans.
R. Howard (New York, 1990), p. 27.
12. Michelangelo, The Poems, trans. C. Ryan (London, 1996),
p. 45 (poem 54). On this theme in Michelangelo’s poetry, see B.
Hub, “Material Gazes and Flying Images in Marsilio Ficino and
Michelangelo,” in Spirits Unseen: The representation of Subtle Bodies
in Early Modern European Culture, ed. C. Göttler and W. Neuber
(Leiden, 2008), pp. 93–120. Michelangelo’s composition was itself
modeled after a famous sonnet by the thirteenth-century Sicilian poet
Giacomo da Lentini, which also describes the piercing of the subject by
the image of the lover as it enters through his eye. Giacomo da Lentini,
ed. R. Antonelli (Milan, 2008): “Or come pote sì gran donna intrare /
per gli occhi miei che sì piccoli sone? / E nel mio core come pote stare,
/ che nentr’esso la porto là onque i’ vone?”
13. Bambach (see note 8), p. 56.
379
was transferred onto fresco, it was normally discarded.
But this one was saved, preserved through an attentive
process of replication. For whatever unknowable
reasons, Volterra felt the need to replicate this precious
touch relic, and in doing so transformed what was
destined for public viewing (Michelangelo’s portrait
inserted onto the walls of the Della Rovere Chapel) into
a private souvenir, like a snapshot to remind the author:
“I was there!” The spectator’s gaze penetrates through
the surface of the pricked sheet and steals a glimpse of
another moment always already lost in time.
Portraiture always betrays the artist as a necromancer.
Gazing upon Volterra’s portrait, I know that the artist and
his luminous friend are both dead. The affective force
of this portrait lies in the doubled acknowledgment of
its historicity (this drawing was made long before the
moment in which we now look at it) and its fraught
materiality (it is at once the tangible result of the work
of a physical body that is no more and an object that
we hold in our hands and before our eyes—hands and
eyes that will be outlived by the very object that we
hold and behold).
The sting of this realization in early modern
portraiture can be compared with the “that-has-been”
(ça a été), which Barthes identified as the essence of
photography. For Barthes punctum too was tied to the
very materiality of the photographic image on account of
its unique indexical relationship to the lived experience
of time and space. Both punctum and the “that-hasbeen” can be extended, however, to earlier technologies
of image production. We take for granted the persuasive
power of photography over earlier media, but in a
moment before photography—in a historical actuality
without knowledge of and incapable of even imagining
the image technologies to come—painting, as Alberti
so eloquently observed, possessed that same magical
force (forza divina). Before it is a visual testament of
a specific sitter, a portrait (like all works of art) is a
physical imprint, an affidavit, a touch relic left behind
by the sensate body of the producer who can no longer
appear to us, but whose exertions remain in the traces
of the object before us. It might even be suggested here
that the more exploratory medium of drawing, whether
preparatory sketches or doodles, lends itself better to
the analogy with Barthes’s photographic punctum; if we
think of the move from Volterra’s drawing to the final
fresco on the chapel wall, the painted portrait is moving
already closer to the fixed language of the studium,
which seeks to encode, repeat, and identify.
Something in the punctum wounds and disturbs
the spectator’s time-bound experience of the image,
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rendering the familiar unfamiliar, the inanimate animate.
In this regard, we can point out three different bodies
present in the intimacy of the portrait: first and second,
there is the artist (Volterra) whose corporeal activity
reproduces the body of another (Michelangelo). Third,
there is the spectator who functions in the here and now
as a proleptic witness, the one whose belated arrival
acknowledges the loss and in doing so instantiates the
moment of production once more, allowing for the
survival of both the artist’s body of work and the promise
of affection sealed in the portrait—cross my heart.
It is fitting that Volterra becomes a sort of allegory
in Vasari’s biographies for the equivalence between
portraiture and friendship. Vasari tells us how Volterra
interrupted his trip to Carrara, where he was sourcing
marble for a commission in Rome, in order to return to
Florence where his beloved assistant, Orazio Piatesi,
died suddenly. Volterra made a cast of his premature
corpse from which he produced a marble portrait
bust that he installed in the church of Santi Michele
e Gaetano in memory of his departed companion.14
The funerary inscription beneath the portrait (still in
situ today) is careful to record this doubled gesture
of remembrance for the young Piatesi as well as for
Volterra, the dedicated friend (DANIEL VOLATERRANVS
PICTOR AMICO OPTIMO CARISSIMOQUE P[OSUIT]).
Volterra’s profound sense of responsibility is also
demonstrated in the playful spelling of his own surname
as vola/terranus (“flying from the ground”), hinting at the
importance of his own role in Piatesi’s resurrection—as
if the monument served as a posthumous portal for the
friends or an unguentum sympaticum ut duo amici longe
mutuo loqui possint.
This demonstrative gesture of devotion led Vasari
to praise Volterra as “a different sort of friend to his
friends from the kind that is generally seen at the present
day, when there are very few to be found who value
anything in friendship beyond their own profit and
convenience.”15 Upon Volterra’s own death, Vasari, who
was also a close acquaintance, would name and shame
Volterra’s pupils for being precisely the kinds of fairweather friends that Vasari so despised:
14. Daniele da Volterra (see note 9), pp. 156–157.
15. G. Vasari, Vite de’ più eccellenti Pittori, Scultori e architettori,
ed. P. Barocchi and R. Bettarini (Florence, 1966–1987), vol. 5, p. 547:
“Nel che si mostrò Daniello, con questo veramente amorevole uffizio,
uomo di rara bontà et altrimenti amico agli’amici di quello che oggi
si costuma communemente, pochissimi ritrovandosi che nell’amicizia
altra cosa amino che l’utile e commodo proprio.”
I asked for his portrait from those students of his, who had
made a gesso cast, and they promised it to me when I was
in Rome last year; despite the messages and letters that I
have written to them, they refused to give it to me, showing
little love for their dead master. However, unwilling to be
deterred by their ingratitude, and since Daniele was my
friend, I have put a portrait here [fig. 3], which, even though
it doesn’t look much like him, is evidence of my diligence
and of Michele degli Alberti and Feliciano da San Vito’s lack
of affection.16
For Vasari and Volterra, portraiture was a demonstration
of true friendship, but the politics of friendship could
turn quite ugly as the survivors competed over the legacy
of the departed. From an artistic point of view, what is
especially pitiful in Vasari’s tale is how he admits that
Volterra’s portrait does not resemble the man, but that
this deliberate lapse should be read as a sign, a displaced
damnatio memoriae, of Michele and Feliciano’s infidelity
toward their mentor—stick a needle in my eye.
From bad friends to good friends, let me invoke
two insights here which comment on the link between
friendship and survival. The first quote, like an impatient
friend, has already started without us and we join it in
mid-sentence:
. . . philía begins with the possibility of survival. Surviving—
that is the other name of a mourning whose possibility
is never to be awaited. For one does not survive without
mourning.17
The second quote, like a patient friend, has waited for
us to begin. Shorter than the first in words, but not in
sentiment, it reads:
If ever comes a day when we can’t be together, keep me in
your heart, I’ll stay there forever.18
We find here two profound insights from Jacques
Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship (1994) and from
the tales of Winnie the Pooh. Both quotes instruct us
on the tenuous balance between the individual and
16. Ibid., p. 550: “Il suo ritratto s’è chiesto a quei suoi creati
che l’aveano fatto di gesso, e quando fui a Roma l’anno passato
me l’avevano promesso; né per imbasciate o lettere che io abbia
loro scritto, non l’han voluto dare, mostrando poca amorevolezza
al lor morto maestro; però non ho voluto guardare a questa loro
ingratitudine, essendo stato Daniello amico mio, che si è messo questo
che, ancora che li somigli poco, faccia la scusa della diligenza mia e
della poca cura et amorevolezza di Michele degli Alberti e di Feliciano
da San Vito.”
17. J. Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. G. Collins (London,
1997), p. 13.
18. Pooh’s Grand adventure: The Search for Christopher robin (dir.
Karl Geurs, 1997).
Loh: “Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye”
Figure 3. Giorgio Vasari, Portrait of Daniele da Volterra, in Le
vite de’ piv eccellenti pittori, scvltori, et architettori scritte, &
di nuouo ampliate da M. Giorgio Vasari, pit. et archit. aretino
(Florence, 1568). Photo: Author.
the collective, the singular and the universal; Derrida
underlines, however, the chance and the risk that
surrounds the friend who always has in him/her the
potential to become an enemy through neutrality and
apathy (think here of Volterra’s students). At the same
time, both the French philosopher, reflecting upon the
bonds that form political community, and the young
Christopher Robin, who gazed upon the passing of his
childhood with advanced nostalgia, teach us a similar
lesson: The politics of friendship are founded on the
promise to survive and the promise to mourn the one
who leaves first; it is the obligation of the friend to keep
the dearly departed alive and present through the gesture
of remembrance. The playground chant—cross my heart,
hope to die, stick a needle in my eye—then is a promise
not to betray the friend, precisely because we know how
easy it can be to do so whether intentionally or not. This
is also the promise and pathos of portraiture.
381
In Derrida’s moving obituary for Barthes following his
friend’s tragic death, he lamented that “Roland Barthes
is the name of someone who can no longer hear or bear
it.”19 A ghost, Derrida continued, was nothing less than
“the concept of the other in the same, the punctum in
the studium, the completely other, dead, living in me.”20
In the absence of the departed, who can no longer speak
nor receive for himself, Derrida asks if “the best sign of
fidelity” is to keep “Barthes” alive within oneself.21 Isn’t
this, we might ask, the sentiment conveyed in Della
Porta’s me valere—I am well—uttered from another time
and place?
But enough talk about men and their privileged
friendships. What is one to do if one’s circle of friends is
limited by social protocol? Moreover, what if you are a
superior female artist among your male friends? Can one
remember oneself through one’s friends? I would like
to ruminate about and respond to these questions with
Sofonisba Anguissola’s devastating self-portrait from the
late 1550s in which she represents herself as a painting
on an easel (always already an image) in the process
of being created by her master, the Cremonese artist
Bernardino Campi (fig. 4).
Feminist art historians have suggested that the painting
stages an obvious imbalance between the sexes and
in doing so, it exposes and critiques the patriarchal
structure that bound the woman artist.22 Social historians
of art, however, are less convinced about the historical
possibility of such an ideologically determined reading,
concluding that while the gender relations may be
evident to modern viewers, “it would surely not have
been seen in these terms by an individual living at that
time.”23 Perhaps a middle ground can be reached, for
surely the psychodynamics being played out here would
have been clear to at least one historical viewer: the
female artist herself. However, Anguissola doesn’t just
deconstruct facile male/female gender roles; instead,
she reconstructs them in a more critical manner that
speaks of the potentialities of artistic production and
reproduction (both hers and Campi’s) rather than the
19. J. Derrida, The Work of Mourning, trans. P.-A. Brault (Chicago,
2003), p. 45.
20. Ibid., pp. 41–42.
21. Ibid., p. 36.
22. M. D. Garrard, “Here’s Looking at Me: Sofonisba Anguissola
and the Problem of the Woman Artist,” renaissance Quarterly 47, no.
3 (1994): 560.
23. J. Woods-Marsden, renaissance Self-Portraiture: The Visual
Construction of identity and the Social Status of the artist (New Haven,
1998), p. 209.
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Figure 4. Sofonisba Anguissola, Self-Portrait as Painting on an Easel Painted
by Bernardino Campi, late 1550s. Oil on canvas, 111 x 110 cm. Siena,
Pinacoteca Nazionale. Photo: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/
Art Resource, NY.
reductive simplicities of biological essentialisms (hers
alone). Anguissola, resplendent in her deep red dress,
towers above Campi, who emerges from the darkness
of the background. Up close before the canvas, one
can make out a set of pentimenti, suggesting that her
hand was originally just underneath the very spot where
Campi rests his hand.
Anthony Bond questioned whether the proximity of
Campi’s hand to Anguissola’s breast might be identified
as a breach of decorum.24 But again, it would seem that
Anguissola inverts any easy correlation as to whose
hands are “active” and whose are “passive.” She shows
Campi using an appoggiamano (mahlstick) to steady his
hand, and Mary Garrard, citing Paolo Pino’s sixteenthcentury treatise on painting, has argued that utilizing this
24. A. Bond, “Performing the Self?” in Self Portrait: renaissance to
Contemporary, ed. J. Woodall and A. Bond (London, 2005), p. 36.
object was considered “a shameful thing, not followed
by the ancients.”25 This sounds logical enough, but then
Anguissola sometimes depicts herself using one in other
self-portraits, so it must not have been all that shameful.26
Must a tool always be a phallic prosthesis? Could
it not be instead a prophylactic? The Italian term
appoggiamano literally means “hand support.” If we
think of it in these terms, rather than allowing Campi
to immodestly touch Anguissola, it actually bars the
possibility of inappropriate contact between the two
painted bodies. It is almost as if the pentimenti of
Anguissola’s missing hand (beneath Campi’s) is doubling
as the mahlstick—as if it is her hidden hand that now
steadies and controls her master’s. This effect is flattened
25. Garrard (see note 22), p. 564.
26. The self-portrait from 1556 in the Muzeum Zamek in Lancut,
Poland, is one example.
Loh: “Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye”
383
Against such cultural ideals, Anguissola brilliantly
manipulates the power relations that dictated the
conventions of early modern female portraiture by
rendering the author as a silent object and the sitter
as an active agent. In that ironic gesture, however, she
also succeeds in complicating the expectations that
predicated male portraiture. Social ideals for men and for
women are presented in accordance with convention,
only to be subverted “with circumspection and with that
gentle delicateness” (con riguardo, e con quella molle
delicatura) in that same instance.
Ilya Sandra Perlingieri made the wonderful
observation that the portrait of Campi “is far more
sensitively done—in her own style—than Anguissola’s
portrayal of herself, which appears much flatter, as if
she were painting herself as Campi would have—trying
to imitate his style.”29 Anguissola was praised in a
letter from the painter Francesco Salviati to Campi for
being his best work (vostra fattura), but here she is not
made in the image of her maker—rather it is the maker
who is remade in her image.30 Poor Campi must have
understood this in Salviati’s backhanded compliment;
Anguissola, however, is not insulting her master—instead
she acknowledges, honors, and remembers him. She
survives him by painting him both in and through the act
of painting her. It is her art that gives them both visibility
once more; after all, without her, the all-but-forgotten
Campi would be little more than a shadow in nobody’s
eye. The double portrait therefore becomes a brilliant
comment about who and what is being made and by
whom as traditional hierarchies between protector
and protégé are collapsed. At once tender and cruel,
revealing an incurable codependency, the beauty of this
gesture ultimately lies in the furtive coupling of the hand
of the master with that of his pupil, there at the locus of
her creativity—cross my heart.
Beyond the historical and modern concerns about
gender, this double portrait remains a document of the
professional friendship and bond between the two artists
at a crucial turning point, as Anguissola’s star was about
to outshine her master’s (the self-portrait was made either
before or shortly after her departure for the Spanish court
and many years after she had left Campi’s studio).31
And Anguissola would remain defiant until the end.
On July 12, 1624, as plague broke out in Palermo,
she received a special visitor at her palazzo, a young
painter named Anthony van Dyck, who would produce
a moving portrait of her in his so-called Chatsworth
Sketchbook (now in the British Museum), depicting the
blind but spritely Anguissola at the age of ninety-six
27. For this literary tradition see: V. Finucci, The Lady Vanishes:
Subjectivity and representation in Castiglione and ariosto (Stanford,
1992); V. Cox, “Seen but Not Heard: The Role of Women Speakers
in Cinquecento Literary Dialogue,” in Women in italian renaissance
Culture and Society, ed. L. Panizza (Oxford, 2000), pp. 385–400.
28. Cited in the Italian original in S. Kolsky, “Women Through
Men’s Eyes: The Third Book of Il cortigiano,” in The Shared Horizon:
Melbourne Essays in italian Language and Literature in Memory of
Colin McCormick, ed. T. O’Neill (Dublin, 1990), p. 63: “Poich’io posso
formar questa donna a modo mio, non solamente non voglio ch’ella
usi questi esercizi virili cosí robusti ed asperi, ma voglio che quegli
ancora che son convenienti a donna faccia con riguardo, e con quella
molle delicatura che avemo detto convenirsele.”
29. I. S. Perlingieri, Sofonisba anguissola: The First Great Woman
artist of the renaissance (New York, 1992), p. 49.
30. Salviati quoted in Garrard (see note 22), pp. 560–561: “la bella
pittrice cremonese vostra fattura.” The original letter dates to April 28,
1554, and was published in Alessandro Lamo’s Discorso intorno alla
scoltura et pittura (1584); see R. Sacchi, “Fonti a stampa e letterarie
1550–1625,” in Sofonisba anguissola e le sue sorelle (Corsico, 1994),
p. 408.
31. As Garrard pointed out (see note 22, p. 617), while Campi
was “painting portraits for modestly eminent North Italian princesses,”
Anguissola was in the employ of “the most powerful monarch in
Europe” (King Philip II); see also Woods-Marsden (see note 23), pp.
209–210.
out in reproductions, but when one stands in front of the
painting it becomes evident that the surface is somewhat
abraded at her elbow, as if Anguissola’s hand is moving
up and down and in and out of the pictorial space—one
could say, as if she were in the process of painting by
remote control through Campi’s brush. In other words,
Anguissola is Campi’s “support.”
The crisscrossing of hands and of frames within frames
can also be read against a highly performative early
modern gestural rhetoric of courtly address, in which
the donna di palazzo is seen but not heard.27 Think, for
instance, of the controversial passage in the third book
of Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528)
where Giuliano de’ Medici is informed that in antiquity
men and women were known to wrestle together naked.
The duke responds to this outrageous suggestion by
defining the comportment of the ideal Renaissance
woman:
Since I can fashion this woman as I wish, not only do I not
want her to practice these masculine exercises that are so
rough and tough, but I want her to practice those arts that
are appropriate to women with circumspection and with
that gentle delicateness which we have said befits her.28
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Figure 5. Anthony van Dyck, Portrait of Sofonisba anguissola at
the age of 96, from Lionel Cust, a Description of the SketchBook by Sir anthony Van Dyck Used by Him in italy, 1621–
1627 (London, 1902), pl. 38. Photo: Author.
(fig. 5).32 There is something heartbreaking about the
resistant body as it struggles for air in the crowded field
of text that encroaches upon her from every side. In a
tender insight into the pitiless indifference of time that
depletes the body of the artist, van Dyck notes: “As I
was making her portrait, she gave me many hints, such
as not to take the light from too high, lest the shadows
in the wrinkles of old age should become too strong.”
It is now van Dyck who must survive in order to enable
Anguissola to live on through his portrait of her—and she
wanted to make sure (as we all would) that he caught
her good side. In this memento, the young van Dyck,
32. The drawing is thought to be the basis for van Dyck’s painted
portrait of Anguissola now at Knole House, England; see S. J. Barnes,
Van Dyck: a Complete Catalogue of the Paintings (New Haven, 2004),
p. 171.
still in his twenties, reminds himself of Anguissola’s
resilience in old age: Although blind, she still delighted
in having artworks brought to her so she could “steal
a little pleasure” by smelling them; her memory and
conversational skills were sharp as ever; and her
hands, although idle, remained “steadfast without any
trembling at all.”33 It is as if the sympathetic young artist
exaggerated the size of her hands in his drawing to
compensate for this sorry state of affairs.
This sentiment is also doubled by van Dyck’s insertion
in the text of the emphatic adverb ancora in between the
words era and ferma (“was still steadfast”), entered as
an afterthought to underline Anguissola’s indefatigable
vitality. However, even as the draftsman’s lines preserve
Anguissola’s portrait, and even as his memorandum
celebrates the concrete will of the old woman, a
certain world-weariness prevails as the body slowly
contracts upon the sheet: the measly squiggles of her
unseeing eyes; the drooping marks that make up her
face struggling to hold still; the slump of the body whose
arms are doubled and held up by the arms of the chair;
the discursive inferno that consumes the furniture that
supports her; the last gasp of the lived-in body as it gives
way to its representational avatar.
According to the artist’s notes, the portrait of
Anguissola in van Dyck’s sketchbook was made from
a living subject (fatto dal viva); most of the other
portraits that appear in those pages were copied from
paintings—representations of representations rather
than representations of flesh.34 Looking closely, one also
becomes aware of the disruptions that occurred in the
process of transcription: for instance, where van Dyck
has crossed out the first garbled spelling of “to steal”
(piglio) to the right of Anguissola’s head or the illegible
33. Translation in L. Cust, a Description of the Sketch-Book by Sir
anthony Van Dyck Used by Him in italy, 1621–1627 (London, 1902),
pp. 24–25. “Rittratto della Sigra. Sofonisma pittricia fatto dal vivo in
Palermo l’anno 1624 li 12 di Julio: l’età di essa 96 havendo ancora
la memoria et il serverllo prontissimo, cortesissima, et sebene per la
vecciaia la mancava la vista, hebbe con tutto cio gusto de mettere
gli quadri avanti ad essa et con gran stenta mettendo il naso sopra il
quadro, venne a discernere qualche poca et piglio gran piacere ancora
in quel modo, facende il ritratto de essa, mi diede diversi advertimenti
non devendo pigliar il lume troppo alto, accio che le ombre nelle ruge
della vecciaia non diventassero troppo grande, et molti altri buoni
discorsi come ancora conto parte della vita di essa per la quale se
conobbe che era pittora de natura et miraculosa et la pena magiore che
hebbe era per mancamento di vista non poter piu dipingere: la mano
era ancora ferma senza tremula nessuna.”
34. According to Perlingieri, the sketch would form the basis of van
Dyck’s (at least) two known paintings of Anguissola, in Turin and Kent
(see note 29, p. 205 and pls. 117–118).
Loh: “Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye”
385
Figure 6. Anthony van Dyck, Portrait of Sofonisba anguissola at the age of 96,
1624. Pen and brown ink on paper, 199 x 158 mm. London, British Museum
(1957,1214.207.110). Photo: © Trustees of the British Museum.
word scribbled out in the second-to-last line. In the
reproduction of this page published in Lionel Cust’s early
twentieth-century monograph on van Dyck’s sketchbook,
we can still see a trace of an old wound that has since
healed (fig. 6). Just beneath Anguissola’s right arm, three
small strips of paper, like stitches on a cut, hold back the
deterioration caused by an accidental bleeding of ink
that seeped through from the urgent shadows of a nude
figure on the verso, threatening to burst the page open.
It has since been restored, the stitches removed, and
the surface now reads a bit like a scar. A viewer today
might never know it bore that injury if it weren’t for the
reproduction in Cust’s catalogue. But it is there (like the
strips of paper in the top and bottom corners of Volterra’s
drawing in Haarlem), attesting to the material history of
this wondrous object as it continues to survive its author
and subject.
As the plague became worse over the course of that
summer of 1624, van Dyck left Palermo for Genoa
(armed undoubtedly with letters of introduction from
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Anguissola); for her part, Anguissola would survive just
over a year more. She was buried in San Giorgio dei
Genovesi and mourned by her devoted second husband,
Orazio Lomellino. If Anguissola’s first marriage was
arranged within the Spanish court to provide her with
social status and security, the second time around, she
would marry for love. Sofonisba met Orazio on her trip
back from Spain: He was the dashing young captain of
the ship that brought her home.35 The forty-seven-yearold Anguissola married her young lover, and they lived
happily ever after in his palaces (in Genoa and Palermo)
on her imperial pension—but even fairy tales must
come to an end. On November 16, 1625, well into her
nineties, Anguissola passed away and left her grieving
husband to continue alone. On the anniversary of her
hundredth birthday, Orazio would commemorate his
beloved, departed wife with a moving epitaph:
To Sofonisba, my wife, whose parents are the noble
Anguissola, who is recorded among the illustrious women
of the world, for her beauty and her extraordinary gifts. She
was outstanding in portraying images of men, so excellent
that there was no equal in her time. Orazio Lomellino, in
sorrow for the loss of his great love, in 1632, dedicated this
small tribute to such a great woman.36
ashes to ashes, dust to dust—the irreversible
disappearance of the mortal body could only be
countered by the mourning of the friend who survives.
Both van Dyck and Lomellino, however, would one day
have to go as well, and when this moment came, it was
the visual and textual portrait that remained to carry on
the work of mourning.
This brings us, in closing, back to the beginning, to
Della Porta’s sympathetic friend ointment. When the
Criptologia failed to secure ecclesiastical approval,
it entered a shadowy archive populated by other
unrealized early modern texts and slipped quietly into
obscurity for some three hundred years, lying dormant
in a Roman library until a vigilant historian brought it
back to life.37 The fate of Della Porta’s Criptologia serves
as a poignant reminder of how easily the past can
slip out of view if the sentinels of the present are not
35. On Orazio see S. Ferino-Pagden, La prima donna pittrice,
Sofonisba anguissola: Die Malerin der renaissance (um 1535–1625)
(Vienna, 1995), p. 53.
36. R. Sacchi, “Tra la Sicilia e Genova: Sofonisba Anguissola
Moncada e poi Lomellini” in Sofonisba anguissola e le sue sorelle (see
note 30), pp. 153–172.
37. I refer to Gabriella Belloni who transcribed Della Porta’s Latin
manuscript and translated the text into Italian (see note 1).
attentive. Survival requires mourners. When the friend
can no longer sustain the dirge, it is the portrait, the
document, and the historical object that must take on
that responsibility. And when these have lost their ability
to speak, it is the task of the historian to retrieve, to
remember, and to remind. Like the artist, the historian is
at once a friend and a conjuror who must gather together
the various ingredients of the unguentum sympaticum
that makes present that which is absent and sympathetic
that which has otherwise become estranged. In the final
analysis, the poignant lesson that Anguissola, Piatesti,
Barthes, Alberti, Della Porta, Derrida, Volterra, and
Michelangelo offer us is that the shared responsibility
and burden of friendship and portraiture are to survive,
to mourn, and to sing . . . cross my heart, hope to die,
stick a needle in my eye.