Editor’s Note: What We See Doth Lie

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Previous articleNext article FreeEditor’s Note: What We See Doth LieJohn CunnallyJohn Cunnally Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreSome years ago I taught History of Photography at Iowa State University (Dr. Emily Godbey now teaches that course), and sometimes citizens would visit my office asking me to comment on an antique photo they found in their attic or barn and to speculate about its market value. One woman brought in a nineteenth-century studio portrait of a family group. She believed it was an unknown and unpublished photograph of Abraham Lincoln, his wife, and children. If this assessment proved true, the image would certainly count as a valuable and historically significant discovery.I told her that the man in the picture did not look much like Lincoln to me but more important was the fact that the photo appeared to be a gelatin-paper cabinet card, a process not in use until at least ten years after the president’s death in 1865. Moreover, the people in the portrait were dressed in the fashions of the 1880s. She replied with some annoyance that I should know that Matthew Brady, Lincoln’s photographer, was a very inventive man and may have experimented with cabinet card technology long before it was widely available. And it is a fact that Lincoln and his family amused themselves by dressing up in outlandish costumes. Perhaps for this occasion they chose the theme of “Fashions of the Future.” She left my office still convinced that she had made her fortune with this find and even more convinced that I was as dumb as a stone.We should give this good citizen some credit for her readiness to distrust expert opinion, like Shakespeare who scolded Time for deceiving us with false evidence from the past:Thy registers and thee I both defy,For thy recórds and what we see doth lie.Many of the essays that appear in this journal are efforts to correct registers and records corrupted by our predecessors’ all-too-human wishful thinking—or rather wishful seeing. Case in point: an unpublished drawing of a female nude in the Uffizi by Cristofano Roncalli (ca. 1580), previously identified as a copy of the figure of Roxana from Sodoma’s Marriage of Alexander and Roxana fresco in the Villa Farnesina. In an article published in Source (Spring 2020), James Grantham Turner demonstrated that the bedroom where the fresco is located was not open to the public in the sixteenth century, and therefore it is doubtful that the drawing was based on Sodoma’s Roxana. In this issue Turner contributes an addendum to his earlier note, illustrating the drawing in question, an erotic life sketch of outstanding quality but with no apparent connection to the fresco.The Tickhill Psalter in the New York Public Library is an illustrated manuscript made in England in the early fourteenth century. Its original owner is believed to have been John Tickhill, abbot of the Augustinian monastery at Worksop, on the basis of an inscription bearing his name and a litany added to the psalter in praise of the saints associated with the Augustinian order. Anne Rudloff Stanton, however, notes that the inscription and litany were inserted later and urges us to “look beyond these textual factors” at the images in the book, which include heraldic shields and scenes of biblical women. On the basis of this evidence, she proposes that the psalter was owned by the noble lady Joan de Verdon (1303–34), before finding its way to Worksop Abbey.The sword held by St. Paul in Raphael’s St. Cecilia Altarpiece has attracted the attention and curiosity of Christian K. Kleinbub, who points out that this weapon is not the usual double-edged blade (suitable for decapitating saints) that is normally carried by Paul. Instead, its shaft is as thin as an icepick and ends in a cross-shaped section “like the tip of a Phillips screwdriver.” This lethal tool is an estoc, a recent invention designed to penetrate the plate armor of a Renaissance knight and a suitable attribute for Paul, who tells us in Hebrews 4:12 that the Word of God is “more piercing than a two-edged sword.”A letter by Michelangelo dated 1542 is often quoted as evidence of his malice toward Raphael. The younger artist, he writes, tried to ruin him and was envious because “whatever he had of art, he had from me.” Michelangelo’s autograph of this letter has not survived, only a copy transcribed (accurately, we assume) by his secretary, Luigi del Riccio. Sara Ellen Kay, analyzing the handwriting of the copy in the Casa Buonarroti, argues that the letter was not in fact transcribed by del Riccio but by some unknown person whose relationship with the artist cannot be determined. If so, we are permitted to suspect that the fabled enmity between Raphael and Michelangelo is indeed a fable, based on a document of shaky authenticity.All too topical is William E. Wallace’s account of how Michelangelo’s personal and professional life was shaped by periodic outbreaks of la peste, the plague. This silent, recurring killer robbed him of his favorite brother, Buonarroto, in 1528, and much of the artist’s anxiety about finances from that time onward can be attributed to his concern for the proper education of his orphaned niece and nephew. All too familiar is Michelangelo’s advice in a letter to a friend: the plague is raging, please stay home and stay safe.“A big book is a big evil,” said the Greek librarian Callimachus. My students would certainly agree and so would Tintoretto, whose painting Christ among the Doctors (1540–41) is investigated here by Paul Barolsky. The figure of Jesus is distant and small, hardly noticeable among the massive forms of the learned graybeards who dispute him. Barolsky directs our attention to the “preposterously enormous tomes” that they consult. In contrast to the pedants’ reliance on bookish authority, Jesus, the Living Word, needs no text to sustain his wisdom.Noting the contradictory accounts of how Caravaggio lit his subjects in order to achieve his celebrated tenebrism, Troy Thomas decided to conduct experiments by photographing a model under diverse modes of illumination. His conclusion: Caravaggio at various times made use of direct sunlight, diffuse daylight, and candlelight. No realist in the literal sense, the artist combined all three modes in the London Supper at Emmaus: the inanimate objects appear in direct sunlight, the face of Christ is lit by diffuse daylight, and the innkeeper is seen by candlelight; the total painting a luminescent patchwork. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Source Volume 40, Number 2Winter 2021 Sponsored by the Bard Graduate Center, New York Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/712858 © 2021 by Bard Graduate Center. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.