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“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 376 RES 65/66 2014/2015 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. 378 RES 65/66 2014/2015 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, 380 RES 65/66 2014/2015 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. 382 RES 65/66 2014/2015 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.28 384 RES 65/66 2014/2015 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 386 RES 65/66 2014/2015 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.