5. Pictures of Poetry in Marot's Épigrammes
Stephen G. Nichols
Murray Krieger influenced many things that have come to play a significant role in my life. Not the least of these contributions was the vision that led to his founding of the School of Criticism and Theory at the University of California, Irvine, in 1976, one of those peripatetic institutions that distinguishes U. S. academia from its counterparts in other countries by embodying the American entrepreneurial spirit in the best sense of the term. Third in succession to Murray Krieger as Director of the SCT, I can appreciate the astute blend of pragmatics and theory that led Krieger to his vision of a place where theory and criticism could address issues of teaching and scholarship faced by its participants.
Equally important for me has been Murray Krieger's passionate involvement with the problem of ekphrasis, described by Krieger as "the poet's marriage of the visual and the verbal within the verbal art."[1] Like many others, I first got interested in the problem of ekphrasis after reading Krieger's essay, "Ekphrasis and the Still Movement of Poetry; or Laokoön Revisited."[2] Krieger subsequently described that essay as "the most easily written—and I think the most lyrical—critical essay I remember having written." The spell of the subject, "both maddeningly elusive and endlessly tempting," gripped me as few essays have ever done.[3] What was ekphrasis anyway? And why did it seem to arrogate to itself the effort of poetry to be picture?
Murray Krieger pursued his own obsession with ekphrasis to one kind of conclusion in his 1992 book, the culmination of over twenty years of meditation and a work that repays careful reading. I was led to contemplate the problem of the visual text in medieval manuscripts where paintings of ekphrastic passages raised the stakes of the game as real pictures strove to represent—ironically? parodically? mimetically?—their verbal homologues.[4] This research, in turn, led me further into the role of words as pictures in
By way of acknowledging my gratitude to Murray Krieger for his many acts of kindness, and for his vigorous intellectual leadership, I conceived this study as a continental counterpart to the poetic tradition in which Krieger has worked. It is, in any case, meant as testimony to his oeuvre rather than an extension of my own.
MARTIAL, MAROT, AND THE EPIGRAM AS EKPHRASIS
When, in 1537–1538, Clément Marot began to cultivate the genre of the epigram, he made no secret of his fascination with the example that the Latin poet, Martial, had set in his extensive cultivation of the genre—fourteen books varying in length from eighty-odd to over two hundred epigrams. Martial's epigrams typically contain between two and twelve lines, in keeping with the association of the genre's supposed origin as poetic rubrics incised on the stone bases of sculptures. Nothing constrained the epigrammarian to limit his work, however, and Martial sometimes wrote epigrams of over fifty lines. Even such deviations from conciseness, however, share with their briefer counterparts a vividly imaged subject matter, depicting, for example, virtuoso scenes of an extensive country estate. Such extensive poetic landscapes may serve as xenia or gifts to a host, or, as in the following case, an ideal description of one estate serving to complement its owner, Faustinus, while castigating Bassus, the stingy proprietor of another villa, in the mordant epigrammatic mode.
| Baiana nostri villa, Basse, Faustini | |
| non otiosis ordinata myrtetis | |
| viduaque platano tonsilique buxeto | |
| ingrata lati spatia detinet campi, | |
| sed rure vero barbaroque laetatur. | |
| Hic farta premitur angulo Ceres omni | |
| et multa fragrat testa senibus autumnis; … |
[Our friend Faustinus' Baian villa, Bassus, does not hold down unprofitable expanses of broad acreage laid out in idle myrtle plantations, unwed planes, and clipped boxwood, but rejoices in the true, rough countryside. Corn is tightly crammed in every corner and many a wine jar is fragrant with ancient vintages?….][6]
The association of epigram with picture, or highly imaged verbal representation, links the genre with ekphrasis, as suggested by the term "iconic epigram," referring to more highly imaged examples of the genre. This accords with the etymology of "epigram," a compound formed of the Greek "gramma" ("letter, writing," in the sense of "graphics"), and the Greek prefix
Martial makes the relationship between the epigram and the picture explicit in a number of poems. These may take the form of an oblique description, where poetry evokes by language's powers of indirection—a subtle critique of what painting cannot do—as in the following, lapidary couplet in which we divine the subject to be the description of a painting not by seeing the portrait before our eyes, but by allusion:
| Clarus fronde Iovis, Romani fama cothurni, | |
| spirat Apellea redditus arte Memor. |
[Memor, illustrious in Jupiter's leaves, fame of the Roman buskin, breathes, recalled by Apelles' art.][7]
This couplet also recalls the close association between epigram and spectacle or theater in Martial, who called his first efforts in this mode De Spectaculis Liber (now given as Book One of the Epigrams). The "fronde Iovis" above evoke the golden oak leaves worn by the emperor Domitian, Martial's patron, at the spectacles he founded in honor of Jupiter; "cothurni" evokes the high boots worn by the tragedian, Memor, on stage while acting; and Apelles was the mythical inventor of painting. This art of allusion, of metaphor connects the visual with the intelligible, the eye or mind's eye with memory, the material with the intellectual, the present with the past. It is fundamentally an art of transformation, linking disparate domains of inner life and perception with external or material stimuli in the space of writing which is simultaneously a space for the eye and the voice.
Breathing, spirare, is exactly what the painted portrait cannot do, however, and it is the iconic epigram that restores this essential element of the tragedian's art to Memor. While this and the next epigram may postulate a paragone, or contest between poetry and painting, there is at least the possibility that Martial proposes not agon, but partnership in the interest of improved communication. He coins an apposite metaphor for this fertile connection between epigram and painting: "non tacita imagine," "a speaking likeness," rendered even more explicit in the Latin context by his insertion of the verb "respondet" between "non tacita" and "imagine," giving us the lines:
| candida non tacita respondet imagine lygdos | |
| et placido fulget vivus in ore decor. |
[The white lygdus [marble] matches [answers] with a speaking likeness, and living beauty shines in your face.][8]
Poetry could also complement painting through the resemblance of portrait image and real person—the magic of pictorial representation that led Pietro Bembo to say of Raphael's painting of Castiglione that "it was so naturale that ‘Tebaldeo does not resemble himself as closely as this resembles him.'"[9] The close link between painted likeness and human subject infused both with temporal vulnerability. This time, the example comes from Martial's own experience of portraiture:
| Dum mea Caecilio formatur imago Secundo | |
| spirat et arguta picta tabella manu, | |
| i, liber, ad Geticam Peucen Histrumque iacentum: | |
| haec loca perdomitis gentibus ille tenet. | |
| parva dabis caro sed dulcia dona sodali: | |
| certior in nostro carmine vultus erit; casibus hic nullis, nullis delebilis annis | |
| vivet, Apelleum cum morietur opus. |
[While my likeness is taking shape for Caecilius Secundus and the canvas, painted by a skilful hand, breathes, go, book, to Getic Peuce and prostrate Hister: these regions with their subjugated nations he rules. You will give my dear friend a small gift but a sweet one; my face will be seen more clearly in my poems. No accidents, no passage of years will efface it; it shall live when Apelles' work shall die.][10]
Poetry, unlike painting, stands outside time. While this has been parsed as paradigmatic of the rivalry between painting and poetry, it may just as logically be construed as postulating a partnership between the verbal and the visual, where poetry mediates the temporal vulnerability of the body and its likeness. For Martial does not repudiate the painting, nor disdain its resemblance to himself, as Plotinus does, for instance, in Porphyry's famous anecdote of the philosopher's unwillingness to have his portrait sculpted.
Plotinus objected so strongly to sitting for a painter or sculptor that he said to Amelius, who was urging him to allow a portrait of himself to be made, "Why really, is it not enough to have to carry the image in which nature has encased us, without your requesting me to agree to leave behind me a longer-lasting image of the image, as if it was something genuinely worth looking at?"[11]
Far from evincing such repugnance, Martial sends forth his book as a messenger across time and space proudly announcing the birth of the portrait: "mea…formatur imago."
"Certior in nostro carmine vultus erit" does not mean that the poet's likeness will be seen more clearly or more accurately in the poems than in the painting, but rather that it will be seen more surely, more definitely, more deeply. And this for three reasons: space, time, and interiority. The imperative "i, liber" ("go, book") evokes the song's mobility, its capacity to move rapidly
Interiority, the capacity to represent the inner person, frames the last of the claims Martial makes for the ability of poetry to complement painting. What he implies in the epigram on his own portrait becomes explicit in Book 10.32 where Martial comments on a portrait of Marcus Antonius Primus ("vultus" ["mien," "visage"] links the two poems around the theme of outer appearance/inner qualities). Here the text stresses dissimilitude between portrait and subject, for the latter has grown old, so that the portrait no longer resembles—it is only a memory. The picture fails to catch the continuity between the younger subject and his present self, for the connection between them, the signature of personality, lies in the inner being. The poem, then, must portray the deeps, the psyche, in order to match the beauty of the physical being:
| Haec mihi quae colitur violis pictura rosisque, | |
| quos referat vultus, Caediciane, rogas? | |
| talis erat Marcus mediis Antonius annis | |
| Primus: in hoc iuvenem se videt ore senex. | |
| ars utinam mores animumque effingere posset! | |
| pulchrior in terris nulla tabella foret. |
[This picture which I decorate with violets and roses, do you ask whose face it recalls, Caedicianus? Such was Marcus Antonius Primus in middle life; in this countenance the old man sees his younger self. Would that art could represent his character and soul! No painting in the world would be more beautiful.]
What I am here calling the complementarity between the iconic epigram and painting, a link underlying Martial's development of the genre, has recently been adduced as a major factor in the development of portraiture in the Renaissance. In his Mellon Lectures for 1988 at the National Gallery in Washington, John Shearman argued that the greatest progress in Renaissance portraiture occurred between 1490 and 1530, precisely the period of Marot's birth and poetic formation.[12] What fueled this progress, Shearman argues, was first of all a greater role accorded to the spectator—the assumed presence of a viewer not as accident, but as a thematic of the painting itself. The second decisive change concerns the presence of poetry in the painting: not just any poetry, but most particularly epigram. Shearman even ascribes what he calls "the communicative idea" to this link between epigram
This is not the place to engage a dialogue with Shearman's fascinating theses. I cite them by way of entry into our main concern, the role of pictures and poetry in Marot's epigrams, and to remind ourselves of the cultural horizon, particularly as concerns the visual arts, surrounding Marot during his formative years, and immediately preceding his adoption of this genre in 1537. Whereas Shearman insists on the link between art and epigram as one of paragone or agon—and that may well be the case for Renaissance pictures—I want to suggest that it is the partnership or complementarity that Marot, like Martial, perceived as the essence of interartistic wisdom. He pursued this goal from his very first epigram, a subtle allusion to Martial's epigram 7.84. But, as we shall see, Marot eschewed the more direct and simple comparison of painting and poem. Most frequently, in a virtuoso ekphrastic reversal, Marot's pictures are of poems, but poems transformed into graphic images, word paintings. Let us see how this works.
Marot opens his Épigrammes with a clear transformation of Martial's epigram 7.84, the comparison between his portrait and his "carmina" which I discussed above. Martial, we saw, sent his book off to bear a likeness more certain than that in the portrait taking shape under the hand of the painter. With his own "i, liber," Marot dedicates the first epigram to the governor of Bretagne, Jehan de Laval, Seigneur de Chasteaubriant, whom he designates as "Prince Breton." Like Martial, Marot sends his book some distance to the ruler of subjugated lands:
| Ce Livre mien d'Épigrammes te donne, | |
| Prince Breton, & le te presentant | |
| Present te fays meilleur, que la personne | |
| De l'Ouvrier mesme, & fut il mieulx chantant: | |
| Car mort ne va les oeuvres abbatant: | |
| Et mortel est cestuy là, qui les dicte. | |
| Puis tien je suis des jours a tant, & tant: | |
| De m'y donner, ne seroit que redicte.[14] |
Whereas Martial juxtaposes his portrait and his book by evoking the portrait process in the first line ("Dum mea…formatur imago"), Marot excises any reference to a painting from his poem. Marot juxtaposes book and person—the book presents the person better than the person himself, and the book is even a better musician. He thus plays upon the Renaissance topos, already quoted, of the picture which is a better likeness than the model himself. In
The elision of painting is the more strongly marked by a systematic reference to and reworking of the other elements of Martial's poem, such as temporality, the image of the artist, and song. Martial figures the temporality of the artistic process by the first word, "Dum," and last two, "morietur opus"; Marot refigures these by playing on "donne"/"presentant"/"present" so that the purely temporal Latin "Dum" becomes the equivocal French "don": a present present, the gift of writing, and a better song than that sung by the Ouvrier in person. Marot uses the generic term, ouvrier, for the transforming artist, rather than a modeor genre-specific term like "poet" or "painter"; he does so, I think, to signal the conflation of painting and poetry in his poem. That same conflation makes the poet both the subject of the poetic picture and its maker; in short, it makes the poem a self-portrait. Marot refers to himself in this dual role more than once in his Épigrammes, as for example in the second book, epigram 5, "Á FranÇoys Daulphin de France": "C'est ung Clement, ung Marot, ung qui rithme:/Voicy l'ouvrier, l'art, la forge, & la lime" (ll. 4–5).
"Ce Livre mien d'Épigrammes," the "presenting present," a gift in the present but also immediately present to the eyes, figures both painting and poetry, it is poetry as picture, doing in song—"& fut il mieulx chantant"—what required picture and song in Martial. Whereas Martial sends his book away to represent him in the subjugated provinces while his portrait remains in Rome with his person of whom it is the momentary likeness, Marot can both give his book to Jehan de Laval in Brittany, and also, thanks to printing, keep a copy present with him in Lyon.
NOTES
1. Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 22.
2. Originally published in The Poet as Critic, ed. Frederick P. W. McDowell (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 3–26.
3. Krieger, Ekphrasis, 1.
4. See, for example, my "Ekphrasis, Iconoclasm, and Desire," in Rethinking the Romance of the Rose: Text, Image, Reception, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 133–66.
5. See my "On the Sociology of Medieval Manuscript Annotation," in Annotation and its Texts, ed. Stephen A. Barney (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 43–73.
6. Martial, Epigrams, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 1:240 ff.
7. Martial, Epigrams, 1:119.
8. The epigram addresses Julia, daughter of Domitian, comparing her to a portrait sculpture, and reads in full:
| Quis te Phidiaco formatum, Iulia, caelo, | |
| vel quis Palladiae non putet artis opus? | |
| candida non tacita respondet imagine lygdos | |
| et placido fulget vivus in ore decor. | |
| ludit Acidalio, sed non manus aspera, nodo, | |
| quem rapuit collo, parve Cupido, tuo. | |
| ut Martis revocetur amor summique Tonantis, | |
| a te Iuon petat ceston et ipsa Venus. |
[Julia, who would not think you molded by Phidias' chisel or the work of Pallas' artistry? The white lygdus matches with a speaking likeness, and living beauty shines in your face. Your hand plays, but not roughly, with the Acidalian knot that it snatched from little Cupid's neck. To win back Mars' love and the supreme Thunderer's, let Juno and Venus herself ask you for the girdle.] (1:613)
9. V. Golzio, Raffaello nei documenti nelle testimonianze dei contemporanei e nella letteratura del suo secolo (Vatican City: Spoleto, 1936), 43, quoted by John Shearman, Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 116.
10. Martial, Epigrams, 7:84.
11. Porphyry on the Life of Plotinus and the Order of his Books, in Plotinus, Enneads I, trans. A. H. Armstrong (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 3.
12. "The transformation of [visual art]…in the direction of increasing awareness of and response to the spectator's presence, is more pervasively repeated in the portrait, and more obviously: it strikes you at once when you walk into a gallery of Renaissance portraits.…The pace and scope of the change in this genre [of portraiture] are greatest in the period 1490–1530" (Shearman, Only Connect, 108, italics added).
13. Ibid.
14. Clément Marot, Oeuvres Poétiques, ed. Gérard Defaux (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 1993), 2:203. All further citations from Marot are taken from volume 2, and will be made parenthetically in the text.