Leonardo da Vinci’s illustrations of complex shapes for De divina proportione of Luca Pacioli, a grand theory of how the world fit together.
An alphabetical index was all very well for creating an ordered list of a book’s contents, but how was Hernando to go about arranging his swiftly growing collection of printed images? As the number of prints he owned rose beyond the capacity of any individual, even one of prodigious memory, to remember them all, a system was needed, at the very least to ensure he wasn’t simply buying the same images over and over. But whereas the words in a book can be placed in an alphabetical order agreed upon and familiar to all users of the Roman alphabet, no such shared language exists for images. A small minority of prints were signed by those who made them, and as often as not they were signed with pictograms such as Palumba’s dove rather than with the full name of the artist, engraver, or printer. In response to this wordless world, Hernando devised an eccentric but ingenious method for putting his prints in order, first dividing them by the subject matter they portrayed, split into six groups:
humans
animals
inanimate objects
“knots” (abstract designs)
landscapes (including maps)
foliage
Within these categories, the images were then subdivided according to the size of the paper on which they were printed; the group containing images of humans, which was by far the largest, was further broken down by the number of people, sex, saints and secular, and clothed or nude. The catalogue would allow Hernando, when browsing among prints at the booksellers, to check whether he already owned an image or not. With Giovanni Battista Palumba’s Mars, Venus, and Vulcan in hand, then, he need simply turn to
humans > folio-size prints > prints with four men > secular > naked
But because there might easily be more than one image of four naked people on a folio-size sheet, Hernando also noted some detail of the picture that was likely to be unique. For this print, then, he noted the following:
Vulcan who is working in a helmet with a forge, behind is an armed cupid with a bow, an armed man touches the left of a naked woman, there is a huge tree in the middle from which hangs a cuirass, a guard, a knife, author IB , Vulcan has the right foot higher than the left upon a round stone, the hammer is in his right.
Bizarre though the catalogue is, it provides an almost foolproof technique for ensuring he never purchased the same print twice.5
That there was no accepted way of ordering these images would have confronted Hernando with the essence of list making in its purest form: namely, that all ordered lists must have both sameness and difference. The recognition that things are in some sense the same allows them to be put in a list together, a list that contains these items and not others—so, here, Hernando gathered in his list all of the printed images he purchased and did not include any paintings or books or leftover meals. While sameness allows things to be gathered together, then, difference allows them to be sorted internally, just as the different spelling of words allows them to be alphabetized. Hernando chose subject and size as the two central kinds of difference on which to structure his catalogue. It was fairly easy when looking at an image to know if it was a postcard-size octavo or a poster-size marca real (royal folio). Subject proved a little more difficult. What if the image contained both men and women, or men and animals, or naked people and clothed people? Hernando solved this problem by introducing a hierarchy of subjects: if the image contains even one human, it goes in the human category, even if the human is surrounded by animals; if it contains one man, it goes in the male category, even if surrounded by women, and so forth.
The indexes that Hernando created in his copies of Suetonius and Lucretius and the catalogue he produced for his prints are astonishing witnesses both to the experience of being overwhelmed by sheer numbers of things—ideas, facts, images—and to Hernando’s first experiments in how to respond to this tidal surge. How does one act when confronted by a plenitude beyond one’s own ability to grasp? How else but by creating tools to extend the natural abilities of the mind: if you can remember the word Corinth, the index can lead you to all the places it occurs in a book, and if you can count the number of men in a picture, the catalogue can remind you of all pictures with that number of men. Yet, amazing though they are, as the products of a young mind often acting without any models to copy, these early tools of Hernando’s had serious and significant weaknesses. While the print catalogue allowed him to check whether a particular print already existed in the collection, it was more or less useless if one wanted to find all the pictures of (say) Venus among the 3,204 prints: while you might find some of them by looking up women who were solitary and naked, many others might be (like Palumba’s Mars, Venus, and Vulcan) in the male section. Similarly, Hernando’s book indexes make no attempt to group similar words together, so you could use the index to find instances of pride in Suetonius, but entirely miss when the author was using another word—vanity, perhaps—instead. As he mounted his assault on the burgeoning world of printed information, Hernando would learn these lessons and improve on the results.
The example of Hernando’s print catalogue also gives some indication of the dangers involved in this kind of categorization. To begin with, any system you choose immediately makes other possible ways of organizing the world invisible. Even the very fact that Hernando chose to catalogue his printed images as a group, separate from, say, his books or his plants, meant a barrier had been erected between pictures and books that treated the same subjects. Someone who found a book on the city of Nuremberg on the bookshelves would have no idea a map of the city was in the print collection, and vice versa. More troubling than this, however, was the erection of hierarchies. All systems of order involve hierarchy: one could not alphabetize without an accepted order to the alphabet, A first and Z last. But even if the hierarchy is arbitrarily selected—there is no reason why the letters shouldn’t be in a different order in the alphabet—after a time it comes to seem natural, inevitable. Hernando’s hierarchy of subjects, in which humans take precedence over animals and men over women, reinforces the sense that these hierarchies are also natural and inevitable. It should be said they wouldn’t have seemed remotely controversial to Hernando and his contemporaries. But soon he would confront other fields in which there was not an accepted hierarchy. And once these hierarchies are written into the tools we use to navigate the world, this step becomes ever harder to undo. Eventually, in fact, we often forget the hierarchy was imposed in the first place and no longer see anything other than a natural, inevitable, timeless order, from Alpha to Omega. If God was revealed, according to medieval theologians, in the order of the world, orders imposed upon it could come to seem godlike. God is the name we give to the possibility of order.
Once you begin to look—and there is no doubt Hernando was looking—expressions of this urge to categorize and order can be seen everywhere in Rome. In a room close to the Palatine Library in the Vatican, Raphael had (in 1511) completed a series of frescoes in which all of human thought was represented in four immense scenes, one on each wall of the cubic chamber, each labeled in a painted medallion on the ceiling above.
The Disputation of the Sacrament
The School of Athens
Justice
Parnassus
On the western wall, the painting known as The Disputation of the Sacrament depicts the knowledge of divine things; facing it on the east is The School of Athens, in which the causes of earthly things are delved into; to the north is Justice, showing the sources of the law; and to the south, Mount Parnassus, showing “things proceeding from inspiration” (poetry, music, and so forth). The Disputation of the Sacrament shows an arrangement familiar enough from traditional paintings of the heavenly hierarchy, though focusing here on the great figures of theology: beneath the Trinity are the four evangelists and the authors of epistles in the New Testament, and below them the Church Fathers, flanked by important latter-day theologians s
uch as Thomas Aquinas and (peeking out from behind the crowd) Girolamo Savonarola. The other walls use this familiar structure to arrange the remaining branches of knowledge: in The School of Athens the key figures are Plato and Aristotle, with Plato pointing upward to suggest his dominance in metaphysics and Aristotle gesturing downward, showing his thought is grounded in observation of things of this world. On either side of this central pair are the philosophers who belong to each of their schools, with figures such as Epicurus and Heraclitus representing the metaphysicians on the left and Euclid and Ptolemy standing in for the empiricists on the right. This pattern, in which the structure of the painted composition is used to propose a structure for human knowledge, is continued in the other frescoes, with Justice showing law descending from the Four Cardinal Virtues before being divided into Church Law and Secular Law, while Parnassus depicts the arts descending from Apollo and the Muses before being split into two branches that descend on either side of the window that looks out onto the Cortile del Belvedere, with epic, historical, and comic poetry (Homer, Dante, Virgil) on one side and tragic, romantic, and sacred poetry (Horace, Ovid, Propertius) on the other.
Raphael’s paintings were more than merely decorative: this was art as a grand proposition about the structure of knowledge. And this was far from a haphazard choice of subject, given that the rooms’ original purpose was to house the pope’s personal library. The saintly Pope Calixtus III, who had lamented the wasting of church funds on pagan manuscripts for the Vatican Library, would have been astonished to see pagan thinkers such as Plato, Epicurus, and Homer portrayed as prominently on the walls of the pope’s library as the figures of the Church. But Raphael’s division of knowledge into these categories—theology, law, philosophy, poetry—allows each its dignity within its own domain, while neatly avoiding the fact that the thought of Epicurus is incompatible with the thought of Saint Paul. Indeed, it is this very division that allows these contradictions to subsist—if the two are dealing with different subjects, then they are not in contradiction. It also erects a natural structure for each field of knowledge, in which later thought descends from a few original authorities in the same way that Divine Truth emanates from God.
Representing the structure of knowledge in a painting was one thing, but dealing with it in the form of books was quite another, as they were finding down the corridor in the rapidly expanding Palatine Library. Though the original library of Nicholas V was based on the fairly manageable list (the Canone) he had drawn up for Cosimo de’ Medici, by 1475 the library had over three thousand volumes and was beginning to seem uncontrollable. One valiant author, who attempted to write a catalogue of the library in verse, an epic tour of it in imitation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, gave up halfway through, exclaiming
Seeing so many books, I was speechless,
then said to myself, “Oh, what an abyss is here—
this will be a hard meal to stomach!”
The only way to make the books manageable was to categorize, divide, and order them. The library had begun by dividing books into Greek and Latin, and Parentucelli’s list had provided further structure, following the practices of medieval monastic libraries in giving the Bible (and commentaries on it) pride of place at the top of the list, followed by works by the Church Fathers, and then works by later theologians, with everything else more or less lumped together. This may have been sufficient for the original nucleus of the library—Dante’s Divine Comedy was the only vernacular text, after all, in Parentucelli’s Canone—but as it expanded under the Renaissance popes, the undifferentiated category of “classical letters” became so large that it was necessary to borrow categories from university courses—law, philosophy, medicine, etc.—to further divide up the books.
Much like most collections, then and now, however, the great Italian libraries’ most effective tool in creating order was a rigorous policy of exclusion. By drawing up relatively narrow criteria for the books that were allowed in, they ensured the structures they had created for categorizing the world weren’t overwhelmed by a torrent of things that didn’t quite fit. This exclusivity even found amusing expression in the Stanza della Segnatura: on the outside of the door leading into the library is a portrayal of a much-despised and widely ridiculed poet of the day, seen riding the pope’s pet elephant, Hanno (Hannibal), in a mock-triumphal procession intended to deride his pretensions. Like this foolish poet, works considered lacking in dignity were to be shut out, the door slammed upon them in disdain. So while Hernando must have marveled at the magnificence of the Vatican libraries, he must also have recognized that they did not offer much help as models for his own collection, which was more radically open to everything that was on offer, to the torrents of matter from the printing presses of Europe.
A sketch (c.1516) by Raphael of the pope’s elephant, Hanno, a great celebrity during Hernando’s stay in Rome.
* * *
The arrival of the white elephant Hanno in Rome in March 1514, and his celebrated status in the public life of the city thereafter, must have served as a painful reminder to Hernando that his father’s legacy still hung in the balance. While Peter Martyr’s account of Columbus’s discoveries was making its presence felt in Rome, with Leo reading the first Decade aloud to an assembled body of cardinals and members of his family, and major Vatican figures such as Giles of Viterbo echoing the Columbus line that the New World discoveries were the catalyst for a new age, the Portuguese discoveries had been making more of a splash of late. Hanno the Elephant was a present to Leo from Manuel I of Portugal, delivered by the explorer Tristão da Cunha along with forty-two other animals as part of a conspicuously lavish embassy designed to display the immense riches offered by their ventures in the East, in Goa, and (more recently) as they made inroads into the centers of the Eastern spice trade at Malacca in the Malaysian archipelago. The Portuguese may also have been bearing gifts of sumptuous palm cloth from the newly converted king of Kongo. Much to the delight of the Roman crowds, Hanno arrived for his papal reception at the Castel Sant’Angelo carrying two mahouts (elephant keepers) and a leopard: he trumpeted three times to salute the pontiff and sprayed the gathered crowd with water from his trunk, not omitting to douse the cardinals. While the forest elephant from the steeply sided woodlands of the Western Ghats in India was doubtless unimpressed by Rome, the city was entirely enthralled by him, which perhaps contributed to the success of the Portuguese embassy. In April, da Cunha was awarded the papal bull Præclesæ Devotionis, which threatened to tilt the balance between Portuguese and Spanish imperial ambitions, established at Tordesillas twenty years earlier, disastrously away from Spain. The Portuguese, this bull declared, could lay claim to any heathen lands they found while sailing east. This appeared to be a decisive blow for the interpretation of the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas to which Columbus had clung so tenaciously—allowing the Portuguese to claim only the parts of west Africa they had discovered by 1494, and not the entire eastern hemisphere—and which Hernando himself had hoped to set in stone when he proposed his trip around the world three years before. To make matters worse, Spain’s influence was waning in Europe as well, in part due to the victory of French forces at the Battle of Marignano in September 1515, and Hernando accompanied Leo north to Florence as the pontiff went to seek terms with the victorious young King Francis I. Hernando may have filled in the background to these affairs by reading the first printed work of Niccolò Machiavelli, which he bought that year. In the room next door to the papal library Raphael began a new fresco in which Leo III was crowning Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor, though it was clear for all to see that these portraits were actually of Leo X and Francis I. Though the old Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I, was still very much alive, the wind of fortune was blowing toward France. Spain’s dream of a universal empire, set in motion by the Columbian discoveries, was beginning to slip beyond reach.6
European politics was not the only thing threatening the Columbus legacy. Though the second phase of the case over Columbus’
s rights in the New World was still grinding through the Castilian courts, with the family attempting to extend the limited rights secured in 1511 to regain the broader powers over the western Atlantic promised to the explorer in 1492, things were beginning to move on regardless. Ferdinand’s court was quivering with excitement over the newly founded region of Darién on the mainland south of Hispaniola, where it was believed the gold-rich regions for which they had all been searching had finally been found—just east of the area Hernando had explored with his father a decade before. The appointment of a governor for Darién in 1513 made no reference to Diego Columbus’s government in Hispaniola: it was beginning to look as if Columbus’s perennial adversary Fonseca was going to bleed Columbus’s legacy dry by simply ensuring the Columbus base at Santo Domingo was bypassed by all the real wealth flowing out of the New World. As if this weren’t bad enough, in 1514 Diego was recalled to Spain in ignominious circumstances, after his administration in Hispaniola had been brought to its knees by warring factions. Hernando returned to Spain periodically from Rome, during the vacations when neither court nor university were in session, but he could provide little comfort to Diego from Rome, where the case in the Sacra Rota, still far from resolution, was continuing to cast a pall over the family fortunes. During the return from one such trip, over Christmas 1514, Hernando made his first visit to his ancestral homeland of Genoa, and it may have been then that he had the strange encounter he would record in his biography of his father. Writing many years later, Hernando recalled how, in an attempt to verify his father’s assertion that their family had a long and distinguished maritime history, he stopped in the Genoese neighborhood of Cugureo and spoke to two brothers by the name of Columbus, who were the richest men in the region. But Hernando was unable to gather much information, given that the younger of the men was over a hundred years old. The achievements and even the memory of his father’s life must have seemed in these years to be sifting through Hernando’s fingers.7
The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books Page 17
