In the Shadow of Vesuvius

by Daisy Dunn

  The printing of the first edition of the Natural History in 1469 had roused considerable interest in Pliny the Elder as both a naturalist and art historian. Fourteen further editions were produced before the end of the century as his reputation spread through Italy.22 Leonardo da Vinci acquired a copy. Christopher Columbus owned an Italian translation from 1489.23 Vasari seems to have consulted the earliest Italian translation of the text when writing his Lives.24 Each man found his own area of interest in the work, from the engineering of ancient buildings to the geography of the Roman empire and creative possibilities for combining artifice with Nature. The text inspired artistic studies of the natural world, some of which were incorporated into the work itself. A page of an exquisitely illuminated fifteenth-century manuscript of the encyclopaedia, now in the British Library in London, is adorned with a scene of Pliny the Elder hard at work in his study. His desk overlooks a beautiful landscape with sun and moon, sea and mountains, rivers and woods, and fields full of animals and birds.25 When Francesco de’Medici and his designers set about creating his Studiolo the following century, they divided Nature similarly into groups according to the elements, after the manner of Aristotle.

  Paintings for the walls of Francesco’s grand study include the fall of Icarus to denote air, the primordial flood from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to evoke water, and scenes of gold miners, jewellery makers and glass blowers for earth and fire. In one panel, pearl fishers pour into boats and tumble out of them in their eagerness to scoop oysters from a bay. The nymphs and tritons in the scene are all but naked, their sashes drenched from their underwater forays. Pearls pile up in foreign shells – conches, roomier than the oyster’s own. Another of the paintings is inspired by the story in the Natural History of Cleopatra’s pearls. According to Pliny the Elder, a sculpture of Venus in the Pantheon at Rome wore enormous earrings formed of two halves of a single pearl formerly owned by Cleopatra. The ‘courtesan queen’ had originally had a pair of pearls, but having wagered with Mark Antony that she could consume 10 million sesterces at a single banquet, she dissolved one in a cup of vinegar and drank it.26 In Francesco’s painting she is shown removing the enormous pearl from her ear and resting it in a cup. Her fellow banqueters lean in to witness her consume its wealth in a single sitting.

  Francesco de’Medici had a keen interest in pearls and gems. He established with his brother a pietra dura industry, where pieces of mother-of-pearl, coloured marble, and other precious stones were cut and smoothed and slotted together to create seamless decorative panels. The central ceiling painting commissioned for his private study encapsulated the process. An artist named Francesco Morandini was instructed to paint within its frame the titan Prometheus as ‘first inventor of precious stones and rings, as testified by Pliny [the Elder]’.27 In the Greek myth, Zeus punishes Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to men by chaining him to a rock in the Caucasus for 30,000 years. While so enchained, Prometheus is said to have enclosed a fragment of rock in his shackles and worn it on his finger. Although Pliny the Elder called this story ‘wholly fiction’ in his encyclopaedia, the mere fact that he mentioned it, if only to reject it, persuaded Francesco de’Medici and his designers of its worthiness as inspiration for the centrepiece of the Studiolo. In the finished painting, Prometheus is depicted alongside Nature, who nurtures a baby, rabbit, snake, and unicorn. While still enchained he receives from Nature a rough stone to transform into something more beautiful. Nature’s rock will yield a glittering gem for the ring Prometheus has formed from his chains.

  The Renaissance portrait of Prometheus in the guise of an artist was a development of the ancient poets’ depiction of him as a creator of men from clay. In the late fourteenth century, a Florentine chronicler likened the work of the painter and poet to that of Prometheus in fashioning life.28 Among the artists he considered most divine in their talents were Praxiteles and Apelles. Both had flourished in classical Greece and were well known to Renaissance humanists from the elder Pliny’s Natural History. Praxiteles was the Athenian sculptor of the celebrated Aphrodite of Knidos, a work so beautiful and lifelike that one man was said to have made love to it then killed himself out of shame. Apelles was a painter from Kos who, according to Pliny the Elder, surpassed ‘all [the artists] born before him and yet to be born’.29 Pliny the Elder had admired both men for their ability to capture their subjects with such accuracy – despite, in Apelles’ case, using a palette of only white, yellow ochre, red, and black – as to give the illusion of having created something entirely tangible. Pliny the Elder’s passages on the close imitation of life in ancient art were so esteemed in the Renaissance that they helped to inspire a new appetite for naturalism in art.

  Artists and art theorists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were particularly interested in an anecdote told in the thirty-fifth book of the Natural History. Here Pliny the Elder described how two artists of fourth-century BC Greece had once challenged each other to a contest.30 The first painter, Zeuxis of Heraclea, painted grapes so lifelike that the birds were tempted to eat them. Meanwhile his rival, Parrhasius of Ephesus, the artist credited with discovering the use of proportion, painted a curtain that looked so real that Zeuxis, ‘gasconading over the judgement of his birds, urged that the curtain be pulled back and the picture revealed’. As soon as Zeuxis realised his error he conceded the prize. He, after all, had deceived only birds, but Parrhasius had fooled him, an artist.

  These stories helped to awake in Renaissance artists an ambition to imitate Nature – or even to surpass it, forging life from their paints and marbles as Prometheus had from clay. Pliny the Elder’s Natural History taught them to aspire to the standards of naturalism achieved by the artists of antiquity. Painters now strove to be hailed ‘Apelles’ for their skills of representation. They had no way of knowing how real Apelles’ paintings looked, or of gauging how well they measured up to him, but they had it on Pliny the Elder’s authority that Apelles was the best, and it was as the best that they sought to be hailed in turn. Titian, Mantegna and Pisanello were among the artists who succeeded in earning the sobriquet ‘Apelles’ for their genius.31 All three studied Nature closely and excelled in recreating it in paint. The emphasis that Pliny the Elder had placed on art as the imitation of Nature was perpetuated further by the leading theorists of the day. Vasari, Leon Battista Alberti, Lodovico Dolce and, earlier, Lorenzo Ghiberti, stressed its importance in their works of criticism. In Dolce’s Aretino, an influential dialogue on art from 1557, the protagonist proclaims, in true Pliny the Elder fashion, ‘Painting … is nothing other than the imitation of Nature.’32 Pliny the Elder’s descriptions of the perfection achieved by Apelles, Parrhasius and Praxiteles shaped a new competition between the artists of modernity and the artists of antiquity, between object and paint. It was a competition that no one had the authority to judge but everyone the opportunity to form an opinion on. Artists and viewers would now scrutinise art and Nature side by side. The Natural History steadily inculcated their ways of seeing.

  It is tempting to see the influence of Pliny the Elder’s passages on art in the design of the Tuscan estate itself. Outside, in the hippodrome garden, Nature was shaped by artifice. Inside, in the rooms used for entertaining, artifice was shaped by Nature. Pliny described a bedroom painted with a fresco of birds sitting on branches.33 Fragments discovered at the site of his villa provide further clues to its decoration. Leaves and vines were painted in stylised columns and framed by theatrical trompe l’oeil panels on walls of red, white, azzurro and yellow.34 Carvings depicted scenes from theatre and myth as though they derived from Nature. A deceptively friendly-faced gorgon poked out from a frieze; a griffin – resembling a cat with wings – posed in profile; a theatre mask carved in deep relief had eyebrows raised so high that they consumed the actor’s entire forehead.35 Pliny the Elder wrote in his encyclopaedia of a species of people from Scythia (the Russian Steppe) with a single eye in the centre of their foreheads who warred against griffins for gol
d.36 It is uncertain whether he would have known the surviving designs from the villa or whether they were introduced later by his nephew, but they point to a man whose tastes were for the lively and cheering.

  The carvings and wall paintings, many of which are characteristic of the first century AD, provided a suitably dramatic backdrop for the entertainers who came to perform at the villa after Pliny inherited it. Forgoing his evening entertainments throughout the winter to retreat to his soundproof study, Pliny liked to invite lyre players and comedians to strum and jest away the long light nights of the summer. On some evenings at the Tuscan estate he was joined by his wife, Calpurnia, who had been known to adapt his poems to the cithara and sing to them. Whenever Pliny gave readings from his own work to groups of male guests, she would ‘sit behind a veil’ and wait eagerly for the applause. Her aunt, Pliny said, had ‘often predicted that I would seem to my wife to be such a man as I am now’.37 He prided himself on being as good a husband to her as she was a wife to him.

  ELEVEN

  A Difficult, Arduous, Fastidious Thing

  But when the blissful summer is summoned by the West Wind

  To send each flock out to pasture in the glades,

  Let us lose ourselves in the chill fields at first light

  While the morning is fresh, while the grass is white

  And the dew on the delicate blades most delicious to graze.

  Virgil, Georgics, 3.322–6

  Even in the relaxed setting of his Tuscan villa, Pliny endeavoured to keep a strict routine. He had set hours for seeing Calpurnia – in the middle of the day, over dinner and at recitals – and set hours for exercising, bathing, writing and dictating.1 Anyone who did not know him would have said he got off to a slow start in the summer months, waking around sunrise only to lie in bed like a laggard. But Pliny rested, his shutters closed, to make the most of the darkness. He liked the way his thoughts flowed unimpeded when there was nothing for his eyes to fix upon except the pictures in his head.

  My mind does not follow my eyes, but my eyes my mind. They see what my mind sees, since they cannot see anything else. If I have something current to work on, I’ll think it through in much the same way I would if I were writing and editing it. Sometimes I’ll do more, sometimes less, depending on how easily it can be composed or retained in my head.2

  This was Pliny lengthening the day from the moment he awoke. Ignoring any instinct to spring from his bed to his desk, he indulged in a protracted levee in order to settle his ideas. In these quiet moments, he might write an entire letter or edit a flight of speech before he had so much as picked up his stylus. It was only when he had something worth remembering that he would summon his secretary, throw open his windows, and dictate what he had formed in his head. The process must have taken time to perfect. Was it born in necessity, when his eyes became inflamed and red and sensitive to light? Did he learn to ‘see’ more clearly with his mind once his vision had begun to fail? Whatever the circumstances surrounding his routine, nothing seemed to diminish the pleasure Pliny took in thinking in the dark.

  Sometimes he was just relieved to be able to complete something. Writing did not always come as easily to him at his Tuscan villa as it did in Rome or at his ‘seat of the Muses’, Laurentum. ‘I have revised the odd little speech,’ he confessed to Tacitus one summer, ‘though it’s the kind of work that’s toilsome and devoid of pleasure, resembling more the burdens of the countryside than its pleasures.’3 He was always anxious to update Tacitus on his progress. He was overcome by excitement whenever Tacitus told him that their names were being uttered in the same conversations about literature. Pliny seldom believed common hearsay, but he gathered hard evidence that proved that he was really catching up with Tacitus – or even level-pegging him: ‘You ought to have noticed it even as far as wills are concerned: unless someone happens to be a very close friend of one of us, we receive the same legacies which are equal in worth.’4 Tacitus, who appears to have been more flattered than offended by Pliny’s tireless efforts to tie his own name up with his, advised him to take a break, and mix a little ‘Diana with his Minerva’ by picking up his hunting nets as well as his books. ‘I wish I could obey your orders,’ Pliny replied, ‘but there is such a shortage of boars that … I cannot. It simply isn’t possible.’5

  After a morning’s work Pliny usually went for a walk or ride across his grounds. Assuaging his guilt at being away from his desk by reminding himself ‘how the mind is roused by exercise and the movement of the body’, he would be outside again in the afternoon for further exertion before his bath and dinner.6 But if Tacitus wanted him to hunt, then he would go. With his hunting nets trailing behind him, he padded up and down his plains with all the enthusiasm of a field mouse on a hot day. It is estimated that his land extended to some 5,000 hectares (twenty square miles).7 It could be hours before he heard the rustling of a boar in the undergrowth. The landscapes surrounding his villa formed an amphitheatre, but it was an amphitheatre such as ‘only Nature can create’. The Colosseum at Rome was enviably enclosed and confined, its eighty entrances and vomitoria (passages designed to ‘spew forth’ spectators on their way in and out of the auditorium) servicing the humans, not the beasts, which had nowhere to hide during the emperor’s staged hunts.8 Pliny’s estate felt limitless by comparison. Hunting here was a real sport, where man stalked beast over grasslands which stretched on forever.

  Nor was it merely animals Pliny was attempting to hunt. In Tacitus’ plea for him to worship Diana scholars have detected a hidden request for poetry.9 Aper, the Latin for ‘boar’, was the name of the protagonist of an imaginary debate Tacitus composed between a group of men on the status of modern oratory. Tacitus and Pliny were playing a literary game. Tacitus’ Aper argued that rhetoric was more important than poetry but praised the ‘woods and groves’ as a setting for writing verse.10 In his own woods and groves Pliny set his hunting nets and lance to one side, his books to the other, and did his very best to entwine the arts of Diana with the arts of Minerva. In the end, he found that the poems Tacitus assumed ‘could be finished off so easily among the woods and groves came to a standstill’.11 Aper the Boar’s swift dismissal of poetry as almost a folly one could roll out in the peace of the countryside, unencumbered by other concerns, could not have been more irritating. Literature, said Pliny, is ‘a difficult, arduous, fastidious thing’ that ‘has contempt for those who have contempt for it’.12

  Pliny was more eloquent in his letters from the countryside than he realised. While he struggled to complete a poem, his prose swam with observations which might readily have inspired a dozen lines of verse. He described the flowering of trefoil; the way bristly acanthus looks so peculiarly soft from a distance that ‘I would almost say it looked like water’; the blurring of time that the city-dweller does not notice. In the letters, City Pliny has no trouble in recollecting what he has done with his day. Country Pliny cannot account for how he has spent the last few weeks: all the weddings and engagement parties and errands which usually filled his time between work seeped away into nothing.13 Being away from Rome made Pliny alert to many of the things which ordinarily passed him by. Above all, it showed him how similar one day in the city was to another. Upon leaving Rome behind it became a joy rather than a frustration for him to exclaim, ‘How many days I have wasted on trivial things!’

  The difficulty came when mixing his two worlds. The Court of One Hundred was his arena, the Tuscan estate his amphitheatre. They were the same shape as one another – and also the same size. To have fitted them together would have required the genius of the engineers who designed Curio’s theatre in Rome – the famous double theatre constructed in the late Republic out of two half-circles which could be arranged back-to-back to provide two separate performances, then pushed together to create a single amphitheatre.14 The mechanics of the building eluded scholars and architects for centuries until finally Leonardo da Vinci discovered a solution. Using the description he found in Pliny the Elder’s Natu
ral History, he imagined the theatres propped up on wheels and connected via two chain-like devices which could be pulled to bring the two halves together almost seamlessly.15 It was not for want of trying that Pliny found himself unable to position his arena alongside his amphitheatre in quite the same way. He might scatter the seeds of his barley, beans and other legumes in the courtroom and reap whichever happened to take, but he seemed incapable of making his speeches take root in his fields.

  Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of Curio’s Revolving Double Theatre

  Attempts to bring the legal arena into the Tuscan amphitheatre only seemed to illuminate the shortcomings of both. The glories of the trefoil and acanthus would pale as Pliny’s labourers set about filling his ears with their worries. Querelae rusticorum mounted upon agrestes querelae – complaints of a kind only a peasant could contrive. Pliny’s farm manager and probably also some of his labourers lived in a villa in the agricultural quarters of his estate, some distance from the main house. Although Pliny gave them time to discuss their work with him before bed, it was never enough. He would dread coming back to Tifernum when they thought it was ‘their right to exhaust my ears after a lengthy absence’.16 And it was stressful when their grievances piled on top of his urgent legal work. The situation was even worse when ‘city business’ followed him to the countryside as well.