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Toward a hermeneutics of doodling in the era of Folly

2013; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 29; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/02666286.2013.786311

1943-2178

Jessica Stevenson Stewart,

Renaissance Literature and Culture

AbstractErasmus' doodles, and those of his circle of acquaintances, serve as evocative relics of their textual sociability, registering their peculiar habits of visualization. As remnants of active textual engagement, doodles bring into higher relief the reciprocity of linguistic production and visual conception, the correspondence of scribal techniques and graphic illustration, and the psychically charged vacillation between readership and authorship. The drawings, illustrations, and paintings considered in this essay lie at the intersection of humanist visual and literary culture in the years surrounding the publication of The Praise of Folly and suggest the powerful identification these erudite men felt toward the figure of Folly, as an exemplar of sorts. Read alongside formal portraits Erasmus commissioned to construct an extra-textual ‘public’ face, the scholar's travestied autographs shadowed and prefigured his self-promotional machinations. As a patron and promoter of portraiture, Erasmus valued art's ability to rewrite the autonomous body as a social intertext, a visual corollary of the emulative circuitry of humanist rhetorical practices. However, as the humorlessness of the Luther-bloc radicalized reformatory rhetoric, iconoclastic and censorial fury – the dark side of doodling – turned against the image of Erasmus in word and image, undercutting hopes for moderate church reform.Keywords: Erasmusfollymarginaliaportraiture Notes1. – Desiderius Erasmus, “Prefatory letter to Sir Thomas More,” trans. Clarence Miller, in The Praise of Folly (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 4. The origins of this article trace back to a graduate seminar taken in 2007 with Professor Todd Olson, whose intellectual creativity has inspired me throughout my graduate career. Professor Olson’s critical commentary profoundly shaped the final form of this paper. Important feedback on an earlier draft of the paper was also given by Professor Elizabeth Honig, my primary advisor. My debt to Professor Honig, her rigorous approach to interdisciplinary history and her supportiveness can scarcely be measured. I also want to acknowledge Professor Darcy Grigsby, whose seminar on portraiture shaped my thinking in important ways, and who has been nothing short of an exemplary mentor. Finally, I want to thank my prodigiously talented friend Caty Telfair for her thoughtful comments on one of the final drafts.2. – The doodle appears in Scholia Erasmi in D. Hieronymi epistolas, 1515–1516, folio 226r Universitätsbibliothek Basel, HS.A.IX.56 Other discussions of this doodle include: Oscar Bätschmann and Pascal Griener, Hans Holbein (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 155; Emil Major, Handzeichnungen des Erasmus von Rotterdam (Basel: Jahresbericht des historischen Museums Basel, 1932); Alexandre Vanautgaerden, Self Portraits of Erasmus (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010); Peter van der Coelen, Images of Erasmus (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2008), 57.3. – English translations of Neudörffer’s graphemes are provided in Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 148–49.4. – Examples include: studies of the harmonic geometry of Roman capitals by the Venetian polymath Luca Pacioli (De divina proportione, 1509), epigraphic research by the Augsburg antiquarian Conrad Peutinger (Romanae vetustatis fragmenta, 1505), promotions of cursive by the papal chancellor Ludovico degli Arrighi (La Operina, 1522) and of italics by the Antwerp cartographer Gerardus Mercator (Literarum Latinarum, 1540). See Johanna Drucker, The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995); Marc Drogin, Medieval Calligraphy: Its History and Technique (London: Prior, 1980). On Peutinger see Christopher Wood, “Early Archaeology and the Book Trade: The Case of Peutinger’s Romanae vetustatis fragmenta,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28, no. 1 (Winter, 1998): 83–118.5. – For a different approach on how literary, specifically rhetorical, forms informed artistic theory, see Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).6. – The bibliography on Erasmus, his life, and works is vast. Some classic sources that have informed my thinking include: James Tracy, Erasmus of the Low Countries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Lisa Jardine, Erasmus: Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Johan Huizinga, Erasmus and the Age of Reform, trans. F. Hopman (New York: Harper, 1957).7. – Desiderius Erasmus, Institutio Christiani Matrimonii (Collected Works of Erasmus, 69), 423.8. – In a letter of 1488 to his friend Sasboud, Erasmus mentions drawing flowers in a book, “Vt autem serio loquar, quos flosculos dixeris non video; nisi forte libellum illum, in quo quosdam tibi flores, cum vna essemus, depinxeram.” Cited in Erwin Panofsky, “Erasmus and the Visual Arts,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 32 (1969): 200–227, here 202, note 8. See also Major, Handzeichnungen.9. – Peter Parshall, “The Art of Memory and the Passion,” Art Bulletin 80, no. 3 (1999): 460–463.10. – For a discussion of Erasmus’s Hieronymian paratexts, see Hilmar Pabel, Herculean Labours: Erasmus and the Editing of Saint Jerome’s Letters in the Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2008).11. – Numerous reading pointers from the early sixteenth century survive in museum collections. For an example of the object known as a “yad,” a form of judaica, variously known in the Catholic tradition as a “digitus,” see Sanne Klaver and Casper Staal, Schitterend: De Schatkamer van Museum Catharijneconvent (Utrecht: Waanders Uitgever, 2009), 86–87.12. – In the Hebraic tradition, the yad manually mediates the manuscript, which was considered ritually impure, and thus the pointer actively substituted for the reader’s hand. For an alternative take on the significance of pointing as puncturing, see Jacques Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing [Pointure] (1978)” in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology. Donald Preziosi, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) 301–305. trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).13. – The doodle’s textual dissonance is suggestive of the artificial memory systems described in Ad Herennium III, xxii; cited in Francis Yates, Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966) 10.14. – Tom Conley, The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern French Writing (New York: Cambridge University Press), 5.15. – Laura Kendrick, Animating the Letter: The Figurative Embodiment of Writing from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1999).16. – Jeffrey Hamburger, “The Iconicity of Script,” Word & Image 27, no. 3 (2011): 249–261, here 251.17. – Ibid., 16.18. – As a doodler, Erasmus was hardly unique. Many early modern scribes, artists, and authors confounded the dichotomy of word and image in their marginalia. On scribal doodles, see Carolyn Dean, “Beyond Prescription: Notarial Doodles and Other Marks,” Word & Image 25, no. 3 (2009): 293–316; Ernst Gombrich, “Pleasures of Boredom: Four Centuries of Doodles,” in the Uses of Images: Studies in the Social Function of Art and Visual Communication (London: Phaidon, 1999).19. – On Erasmus’s self-fashioning, see Lisa Jardine, Erasmus: Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). My understanding of the complexity of Erasmus’s literary self-image is also indebted to Stephen Greenblatt’s classic study: Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).20. – Van der Coelen, Images of Erasmus, 60.21. – Ibid., 61. On occasionality, see Hans Georg Gadamer, “The Ontology of the Work of Art and Its Hermeneutic Significance,” in Truth and Method, trans. Michael J. Heath (New York: Crossroad, 1989): 106–69.22. – Larry Silver, “The Face is Familiar: German Renaissance Portrait Multiples in Prints and Medals,” Word & Image 19, nos 1–2 (2003): 6–21.23. – Panofsky, “Erasmus and The Visual Arts,” 207, emphasis added. For more on Erasmus’s scattered discourse on art, see Van der Coelen, Images of Erasmus, 37–56.24. – See also Andrée Hayum, “Dürer’s Portrait of Erasmus and the Ars Typographorum,” Renaissance Quarterly 38, no. 4 (Winter 1985): 650–87.25. – Erasmus, “Letter to Cornelis Gerards” (CWE: 1), 49–50.26. – Erasmus, Dialogus Ciceronianus (CWE: 28), 375.27. – Erasmus, Institutio Christiani Matrimonii (CWE: 69), 428.28. – Erasmus, Convivium Religiosum (CWE: 39).29. – Erasmus (CWE: 28), 375.30. – The following details were culled from the introduction to Patristic Scholarship: The Edition of Saint Jerome (CWE 61), xix–xxii.31. – Erika Rummel, The Humanist–Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). See also, Alejandro Coroleu, “Anti-Erasmianism in Spain,” and Marcel Gielis, “Leuven Theologians as Opponents of Erasmus and of Humanistic Theology,” in Biblical Humanism and Scholasticism in the Age of Erasmus, ed. Erika Rummel (Leiden: Brill, 2008).32. – For details about the publication of Erasmus’s Hieronymian works see: Eugene Rice, Saint Jerome in the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Jardine, Erasmus: Man of Letters; Introduction to (CWE 61); Pabel, Herculean Labours.33. – Emil Major, Handzeichnungen.34. – See “Letter to Thomas More,” Epi. 654 (CWE 5), 106. Other discussions of the “friendship diptych” include Jardine, Erasmus, Man of Letters; Larry Silver, The Paintings of Quinten Massys with complete catalogue raisonné (Montclair, NJ: Allanheld & Schram, 1984): 105–108. Panofsky, Erasmus and the Visual Arts; van der Coelen, Images of Erasmus; Marlier, erasme et la peinture flamande de son temps (Damme: Éditions du Musée van Maerlant, 1954) 71 cf.35. – Jacques-Alain Miller “Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier),” trans. Jacqueline Rose, Screen 18 (1977): 22–34.36. – Erasmus (CWE 61), 16–17.37. – Erasmus, Paraphrases on Romans and Galatians (CWE 42); “Letter to Pieter Gillis,” Epi. 684 (CWE 5), 149–51.38. – Silver, Quentin Massys (1984), 105–106.39. – Van der Coelen, Images of Erasmus, 59.40. – Quoted in Lorne Campbell, Margaret Mann Phillips, Hubertus Schulte Herbrüggen and J.B. Trapp, “Quentin Matsys, Desiderius Erasmus, Pieter Gillis and Thomas More,” The Burlington Magazine 120 (1978): 716–725, here 717.41. – David Smith, “Portrait and Counter–Portrait in Holbein’s The Family of Sir Thomas More,” Art Bulletin 87, no. 3 (2005), 497–98.42. – Cited in Jardine, Erasmus, 27; Marlier, 88, note 34.43. – Jardine, Erasmus, 60.44. – Erasmus (CWE, 61), xxi.45. – Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 9.46. – Ibid., 3.47. – Pabel, Herculean Labors, 180–81; Jardine, Erasmus, 73, note 58.48. – Erasmus (CWE 61), 24.49. – On intellectual property see: Kathy Eden, Friends Hold All Things in Common: Tradition, Intellectual Property, and the Adages of Erasmus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). On possessing Jerome, see Jardine, Erasmus, 68.50. – Van der Coelen, Images of Erasmus, 92–94.51. – Unfortunately, the owners of this portrait have not granted permission to reproduce a photograph of the painting. Interested readers may however find good quality color reproduction either online thru the Web Gallery of Art, http://www.wga.hu/index1.html, (accessed 24 April 2013), or in print. See Christian Müller, et al. Hans Holbein d. J. Die Jahre in Basel 1515–1532. (München: Prestel, 2006), 96.52. – The formal similarities of Holbein’s portraits of Warham and Erasmus have been previously observed. Oskar Bätschmann and Pascal Grier, Hans Holbein, 164; John Rowlands, The Paintings of Hans Holbein the Younger: The Complete Edition (Boston: Godine, 1985), 133–34.53. – Erasmus (CWE 61), 10–11.54. – Jardine, Erasmus, 41–48; Matthias Winner, “Holbein’s Portrait of Erasmus with a Renaissance Pilaster,” in J. O. Hand and M. Roskill, eds., Hans Holbein: Paintings, Prints, and Reception (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 159–60.55. – Van der Coelen, Images of Erasmus, 68.56. – See Lothar Schmitt, Der Siegelring des Erasmus von Rotterdam: Auf den Spuren eines Rätsels der Renaissancezeit (Basel: Baumann, 2009).57. – A substantial literature on Praise of Folly has informed my thinking, including Walter Gordon, Humanist Play and Belief: The Seriocomic Art of Desiderius Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990); Walter Kaiser, Praisers of Folly: Erasmus, Rabelais, Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963); Zoja Pavolovskis, The Praise of Folly: Structure and Irony (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1983).58. – Arthur Pease, “Things without Honor,” Classical Philology 21 (1926): 27–42, here 28.59. – On More and his Jester, see David Smith, “Portrait and Counter–Portait in Holbein’s ‘The Family of Sir Thomas More,’” Art Bulletin 7, no. 3 (2005), 497–98. On the significance of fools in Netherlandish literary culture, see Paul Vandenbroeck, Beeld van de Andere, Vertoog over het Zelf (Antwerp: Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, 1987); Herman Pleij, De eeuw van de zotheid: over de nar als maatschappelijk houvast in de vroegmoderne tijd (Bakker, 2007). On the significance of linked motifs in marginal illustrations, see Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London: Reaktion, 1992), 42.60. – Erasmus, Praise of Folly, 1–3.61. – Kaiser, Praisers of Folly, 35.62. – See Görel Cavalli-Björkman, “The Laughing Jester,” Nationalmuseum Bulletin Stockholm 9 (1985): 100–110.63. – This visual ambiguity complicates the Foucauldian interpretation of Erasmus’s Folly. See Paromita Chakravarti, “Natural Fools and the Historiography of Renaissance Folly,” Renaissance Studies 25, no. 2 (2011): 208–27. It is also important to note that in the early sixteenth century, distinctions were made between “natural fools” and “jesters.” Visual evidence for this can be found in the woodcut version of the Triumphal Procession of Emperor Maximilian I of 1526, designed by Albrecht Dürer, Hans Burgkmair, and Albrecht Altdorfer.64. – Erasmus, Letter to Martin Dorp, reproduced in The Praise of Folly, trans. Clarence Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979): 146.65. – For more on posing in portraiture see Harry Berger, Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000)66. – Christian Müller, Hans Holbein: Die Jahre in Basel, 1515–1532 (Munich: Prestel, 2006), 288–89.67. – Joseph Koerner, Dürer’s Hands (New York: Frick Collection, 2006).68. – Philip Sohm, “Maniera and the Absent Hand: Avoiding the Etymology of Style,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 36 (1999): 100–124, here 101.69. – Erika Michael, The Drawings by Hans Holbein the Younger for Erasmus’s “Praise of Folly” (New York: Garland Publishing, 1986); J. Austen Gavin and Thomas M. Walsh, “The Praise of Folly in Context: The Commentary of Girardus Listrius,” Renaissance Quarterly 24, no. 2 (Summer, 1971): 195.70. – Myconius claims that the edition “was illustrated within ten days, so that Erasmus might be amused by it.” Cited in Michael, The Drawings of Hans Holbein, 13. The original Latin is: “Hanc Moiam pictam decem diebus, ut oblectaretur in ea Erasmus habuit.”71. – Michael has argued that Holbein produced the first three-quarters of the drawings while in Myconius’s company and the last quarter independently, perhaps in his own studio, (ibid., 39–46).72. – Anita Traninger, “Erasmus’s Rhetoric of Corporeal Punishment and its Discontents,” in Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen and Karl Enenkel, eds. The Sense of Suffering: Constructions of Physical Pain in Early Modern Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 39–58.73. – See catalogue entry no. 22 in Müller et al., Hans Holbein, 158–60.74. – Jardine posits that texts “encourage us to look through or past the type, to a meaning beyond it — to the mind ‘figured’” in the text. We do not look at the writing but through it,” Erasmus, 48.75. – Michael, The Drawings of Hans Holbein, 69.76. – See also Erasmus, Adagia, 122.77. – Eramus, Praise of Folly, 11.78. – Michael, 679.79. – Sebastian Brant, Ship of Fools, trans. Edwin Zeydal (New York: Dover Publishers, 1944); see also, Ulrich Gaier, “Sebastian Brant’s ‘Narrenschiff’ and the Humanists,” PMLA (Publications of the Modern Languages Association of America) 83, no. 2 (1968), 266–70.80. – Erasmus, Praise of Folly, 122, see also Clarence Millers’s introduction, xx–xxi.81. – Wayne Rebhorn, “The Metamorphosis of Moria: Structure and Meaning in the Praise of Folly,” PMLA (Publications of the Modern Languages Association of America) 89, no. 3 (1974): 466–67.82. – Michael Screech, Ecstasy and The Praise of Folly (London: Duckworth, 1980); Richard Sylvester, “The Problem of Unity in The Praise of Folly,” English Literary Renaissance 6 (1976): 125–39.83. – Whereas Bosque has identified the figure as a woman, Silver argues that it is a male. See Andre de Bosque, Quentin Massys (Brussels: Arcade, 1975), 209; Silver, Quentin Massys, 146–47.84. – Larry Silver, Hieronymus Bosch (New York: Abbeville Press, 2006), 159.85. – Erasmus, Praise of Folly, 56.86. – Ibid, 12–13.87. – Stephen H. Goddard, “Probationes Pennae: Some Sixteenth‐Century Doodles on the Theme of Folly Attributed to the Antwerp Humanist Pieter Gillis and His Colleagues,” Renaissance Quarterly 41, no. 2 (Summer, 1988): 242–67.88. – Ibid. 249.89. – Johan Verberckmoes, Laughter, Jestbooks, and Society in the Spanish Netherlands (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1999), 133–38.90. – Erasmus, “Letter to Nicolas Maillard,” (Correspondence 9, Ep. 2466).91. – See Carlos Eire, War against the idols: the reformation of worship from Erasmus to Calvin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 28–104; On print culture in Reformation polemics, see Robert Scribner, For the Sake of the Simple Folk (New York: Claredon Press, 1994).92. – Joseph Koerner, Reformation of the Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 115.93. – I want to thank Todd Olson for bringing this image to my attention and Dr Adrie van der Laan, the Special Collections Curator at the Erasmus Center for Early Modern Studies for helping me track down the repository holding the defaced woodcut. A similarly defaced image of Erasmus is reproduced in van der Coelen, Images of Erasmus, 86.94. – Cited in Daniel Preus, “Luther and Erasmus: Scholastic Humanism and the Reformation,.” Concordia Theological Quarterly 46, nos 2–3 (1982): 219–230, here 229.95. – Albert Hyma, Erasmus and the Humanists (New York: Crofts, 1930). 10.96. – Erasmus (CWE 61), p. xxviii, see note 68.