Jacob Rhenferd (1654–1712), professor of Hebrew and Oriental languages at the University of Franeker in the United Provinces, is a mostly forgotten figure. This article analyses his theological and historical scholarship, with special attention to his use of Jewish mystical texts. It argues that Rhenferd’s conception of philologia sacra was profoundly shaped by kabbalistic insights and that a recourse to Kabbalah provided him with an idiom to articulate anew some foundational Reformed doctrines. Conversely, a comparison with the kabbalistic studies of (...) some of his contemporaries highlights the incipient difficulties faced by a kabbalistic approach to Christian doctrine and its history. The article uses the case of Rhenferd to propose some historiographical revisions about the role of Kabbalah in Christian scriptural philology around the turn of the eighteenth century, about its institutional currency in prominent Reformed academies and, more broadly, about the validity of ‘Christian Kabbalah’ as a category in modern scholarship. (shrink)

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola had his 900 Conclusions printed late in 1486, just a few weeks before Pope Innocent VIII attacked thirteen of them. Did Pico intend to provoke the Vatican? If not, what was his aim, what were his means and what was the product? The Conclusions looks like a miscellany, just as Pico described it. But disorder was only on the surface, in line with a purpose explicitly stated: keeping the holiest truths hidden. Pico’s informants about esoteric wisdom (...) included more than two dozen authorities—some named as individuals, others unnamed, some ancient, others medieval—listed in the first of two parts of the Conclusions. Not named at all were contemporaries and near contemporaries who introduced the prince to these sages from the past. (shrink)

Due to the elusive nature of the surviving documentation, it is often difficult to assess in what areas and to what extent the Tridentine prescriptions on sacred images led to acts of censorship directed at works of art. The Milanese diocese at the time of Archbishop Carlo Borromeo (1564–84) stands out as a rare case for which policies concerning the control of sacred art and their practical implementation are relatively well documented. This article examines Borromeo’s legislation on religious artworks and (...) how it was translated into practice, highlighting the role played by the administrative system of his diocese in the effort to identify and censor inappropriate works of art. I bring to light these dynamics through an in-depth analysis of the so-called Index of Profane Paintings, a document recording the results of a systematic enquiry into artworks that did not comply with Tridentine standards, carried out in the Milanese diocese under Borromeo. Despite being the only known evidence of an investigation of this kind made in the sixteenth century, this document has been largely ignored by art historians. I discuss the date and circumstances in which the Index was compiled, as well as the methods and targets of the enquiry it records. I then examine the problems raised by the artworks denounced and the solutions envisaged for them, exploring their relationship with contemporary religious and visual culture. A revised transcription and an English translation of the document are given in the Appendices. (shrink)

This article investigates a little-known computational and mnemonic device invented in c. 1348 by the English Carmelite friar John of Northampton, the details of which are known from a treatise written in or before 1394 by Richard Maidstone, a theologian and fellow member of the Carmelite Order. John’s anulus took the form of a metal finger ring whose wearer could use the complex arrangement of its alphanumeric inscriptions to make a range of calendrical calculations as well as predict the times (...) of the mean conjunctions of the sun and moon. In addition to reconstructing the principles by which this unusual instrument functioned, the article concludes by placing the anulus in the wider context of the computistical and astronomical sciences practised in fourteenth-century Europe. (shrink)

The present article explores the productive afterlife of the Vitruvian anecdote concerning Aristippus’s shipwreck on the shore of Rhodes. Known to several medieval scholars, the anecdote came into vogue during the Renaissance, when it was transformed into a potent metaphor mobilised by moralists, educators and religious authors. Not until the sixteenth century, however, did mathematicians come to recognise the value in appropriating the metaphor as a means to elevate the dignity of their discipline. Two centuries later, having accomplished their mission, (...) mathematicians elided much of the anecdote, preserving only the geometrical part. (shrink)

The reason for the lexical transformation of classical Latin auctor and auctoritas into Neo-Latin author and authoritas has remained obscure outside of specialist literature. This note offers a consolidated account of the matter in English. Based on a minor misreading of Priscian’s Institutiones grammaticae by glossators active at the turn of the thirteenth century, a back-formation of Latin author by analogy with Greek αὐθέντης and αὐθεντία was proposed by humanist scholars in the sixteenth century. Once introduced, the Neo-Latin fricative th (...) dropped out or was never fully adopted into any of the European vernaculars except English, where it nonetheless survives in ‘author’ and its derivatives today. (shrink)

The film Nosferatu (1922) has graffiti created by the character of the madman Knock on the walls of his cell. This motif, which I call the ‘madman’s wall’, has accompanied depictions of lunatics since the beginning of the eighteenth century. This article examines the origin, transformations and functions of this motif. The popularisation of the motif originates with the longitude diagram in the last plate of A Rake’s Progress (1735) by William Hogarth, which subsequently found its way into the works (...) of Hogarth’s plagiarists and influenced illustrations of asylum interiors in the first half of the nineteenth century. The madman’s wall also appears in literature, such as the popular novel The Father and Daughter (1801) by Amelia Opie, which was plagiarised and dramatised, and the legend of the poet Charles Smart, who allegedly wrote his poem on the walls of his cell. The main prerequisite for the madman’s wall is the dungeon-like image of the asylum—presenting it as a prison. It is usually the author of the graffiti who displays the signs of madness, not the wall itself. As society distanced itself from the image of the asylum as a dungeon, the madman’s wall disappeared after the 1850s. Paradoxically, many reports about the authentic wall art of asylum patients emerged in the press after the 1850s. The madman’s wall in Nosferatu is the first example after an approximately seventy-year absence and could be a product of the period interest of avant-garde artists in the art of the mentally ill. (shrink)

The Huguenot refugee artist Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues is traditionally known for his observations of North America and as the author of numerous albums of floral drawings. This article reassesses the attribution of several of these albums to Le Moyne based on documentary and stylistic evidence. It identifies the sixteenth-century Huguenot nobleman and diplomat Jacques de Morogues as the owner of one of the albums, and it discusses the production and early use of these albums as luxury gifts in (...) French diplomatic and courtly circles. We document connections between the albums associated with Le Moyne and other sixteenth-century and later works of floral imagery. We argue that the albums associated with Le Moyne show that developments in floral imagery in this period were driven by a distinct network of artists and collectors, and we offer a hypothesis of how members of this network may have interpreted them as an occasion to take pleasure in nature’s charming variety, to praise it as God’s work and to use flowers as symbols of feminine beauty and fertility. (shrink)

Bolognese painter and printmaker Giovanni Luigi Valesio’s varied output included engravings featuring heraldic imagery coupled with allegorical figures and, in some cases, perplexing narratives. Their erudite, panegyric character is typical of thesis prints, elaborate ephemera made for the festive academic defences that flourished in early modern colleges. This essay establishes the heretofore unknown subject of one thesis print and offers a note on the dedicatee and art historical significance of another likely ‘conclusione’. Both prints were dedicated to cardinal nephews, Scipione (...) Borghese and Pietro Aldobrandini respectively, and they situate the position of the cardinal nephew as a militant force against the Ottoman world through learned allusion and consciously affective depictions of captivity. Drawing on the monumental imagery of their respective papacies and offering innovative conflations of historical and allegorical representation, they testify to a visual apologetics of nepotism as good government that permeated art and life in the Papal States. (shrink)

This article discusses the foundation ceremony of the church of Sant’Ignazio di Loyola in Rome, the new chapel of the Collegio Romano. The ceremony was held in the Collegio’s existing smaller chapel, dedicated to the Annunziata, in 1626. The ceremony was led by the sponsor of the new church, Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi, the nephew of the late Pope Gregory XV and one of the greatest art collectors of his time. The extraordinary apparato of the foundation ceremony focussed on the personifications (...) of a wide range of artistic disciplines that exalted the patronage of Cardinal Ludovisi, as described in an anonymous contemporary pamphlet entitled Ragguaglio della solennita. It was an exercise in self-promotion and a failed attempt by Cardinal Ludovisi to regain some of the power he lost when Urban VIII succeeded his uncle as pope in 1623. The article will reconstruct the iconography of the apparato in relation to the texts on a set of commemorative medals, copies of which were deposited in the foundations and distributed among the attendees and reproductions of which were included in the apparato. (shrink)

The ‘musca depicta’ trope is well known to art historians, with a history going back to Pliny. It flourished in the Renaissance, but in eighteenth-century England the meaning of the trope was altered greatly when employed in popular culture, both in live theatrical presentations (by George Alexander Stevens) and in published poetry (by James Robertson, comedian of York). Originally, the trope signalled the virtuosity of the painter, who was able to fool the eye by depicting flies so real that the (...) viewer attempted to shoo them off the picture. However, in the hands of Stevens and Robertson, that bit of theatre was turned on its head, as the supposed connoisseur engaged in a harsh criticism of a painting is startled when a fly that he thinks poorly depicted suddenly flies off the canvas, thereby rendering the connoisseur a satiric target. (shrink)