LEONARDO, GIORGIONE, MANTEGNA, AND THE MAGI

LEONARDO, GIORGIONE, MANTEGNA, AND THE MAGIAuthor(s): Anne B. BarriaultSource: Source: Notes in the History of Art, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Fall 2010), pp. 16-23Published by: Ars Brevis Foundation, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23208526 .

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LEONARDO, GIORGIONE, MANTEGNA, AND THE MAGI

Anne B. Barriault

In his Adoration of the Magi (Fig. 1), Leo nardo imagines the moment when emissaries from the East are united by a messenger of

peace, as Paul Barolsky has beautifully and

succinctly observed in a recent issue of SOURCE.' The artist's genius of being able to convey meaning through composition pro vides other epiphanies as well. Leonardo's holistic rendering of the Madonna, Christ

Child, and Magi emerges out of darkness into light to convey universal truth, currents of time and tradition, East and West. Three

religious traditions—Judaic, Christian, and

perhaps Zoroastrian—embodied by Mary, the Child, and the Magi, may converge in Leonardo's image to quell contention and

express the promise of hope. It is said that the Magi were Zoroastrian

priests, practitioners of the ancient Persian

religion that influenced Judeo-Christian texts. Traveling from eastern Iran, the priests, we are told, followed a star in search of a world savior born of a virgin, as predicted in their teachings. Their gifts—gold, frankin

cense, and myrrh—may have been elements of their religious rites.2 The early Christian mosaic in Sant'Apollonare Nuovo, Ravenna,

depicts the "wise men" from Matthew 2 as

Persians, dressed in Phrygian caps and trousers. They are similarly depicted in the medieval alabaster reliefs of San Marco's ci borium in Venice. The name of their

prophet, Zoroaster, from the ancient Persian

Zarathustra, comes to us through Greek transliterations that suggest both the mun

dane ("old, yellow camel") and the stellar

("bringer of golden dawn," "star worship per"). Herodotus tells us about the Magi, a

bewildering Persian caste of priests; Plutarch refers to "Zoroaster the Magus"; Pliny the Elder calls Zoroaster the "inventor of magic"; and the Persian prophet himself is one of several identifications given to the turbaned philosopher standing next to

Ptolomy in Raphael's School of Athens. From the Greek word magos and the ancient Persian magush, magus is the root of magi cian. Medieval tales of Magian magic, as

trology, and sorcery appear throughout the The Golden Legend, and Altichiero, An

gelico, Gozzoli, Filippino Lippi, and Andrea

Mantegna share sources in that text for their various visions of the apostles Peter and James in triumph over Simon and Hermo

genes, each called Magus.3 Following the splendid artistic traditions

of early Italian Renaissance Adorations, Leonardo's approach creates order out of

chaos, peace out of battle, light out of dark

ness, and concord out of discord, as Barol

sky has elucidated. Such are the tenets of

Zoroaster, which in retrospect shed light on Leonardo's magisterial image. Leonardo's

image, in turn, helps to illuminate a later

painting—Giorgione's Three Philosophers (Fig. 2).

Giorgio Vasari, our modern mythologizer, names Giorgione as the first Venetian painter of the Grand Manner, the manner of Leo nardo, an artist linked to magicians because



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Fig. 1 Leonardo da Vinci, Adoration of the Magi (unfinished). 1482. Tempera mixed with oil on wood, 243 x 246 cm. Uffizi, Florence. (Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY)



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Giorgio da Castelfranco (Giorgione), Three Philosophers, c. 1506. Kunshistorisches Museum,

of his inventions and observations of nature.4

Giorgione's painting of the three figures— variously identified as philosophers, priests, astronomers, mathematicians, and Magi—is born of a Venetian cultural confluence of East and West, where ancient Persian, Ju

daic, Christian, and Islamic traditions form

social, economic, and artistic undercurrents.5

The identity of Giorgione's figures has confounded many an art historian. Are they stargazing Persian priests? Do they witness a sunrise or sunset in conjunction with a

morning or an evening star? Do they person ify three lands, embodied in Caspar of India, Melchior of Persia, and Balthasar of Arabia or Africa, united in their search for the Chris



19

tian Son of God? Is a Moor among them? Are they incarnations of ancient Greek, Arabic, and Judaic, or pagan. Christian, and Muslim thought?6 Arguments have been made in favor of allegory—the three ages of

man, portrayed from youthful on the left to

aged on the right—and of imaginary por traits. The figures have been identified as the ancient philosophers Pythagoras, Pherecy des, and Thales as well as, in a Dantesque vi

sion, a Renaissance youth in the company of Averroes and Aristotle, the young man's me dieval Islamic and ancient Greek precursors.7

If, as Marcantonio Michiel tells us, Tad

deo Contarini owned Giorgione's painting together with the Finding of Paris and Ae neas with Anchises, could the subjects indi

cate family namesakes, or could the themes

express epic beginnings and endings (the fall of Troy, the birth of Rome, a historical Ve

netian-Trojan identification, the eclipse of

classical Greek and Judaic traditions by the

Christian-Muslim era)?8 In his painting, Giorgione brings his Three

Philosophers to a source of light, just to the

right beyond the mouth of a mysterious cave. From the horizon, the sun—a tri

umphal morning star—reveals a rocky grotto, saturated in the beautiful shapes and colors that nature and the painter provide. The seekers quietly contemplate their sur

roundings: one with compass and charts of the heavens in hand, the second enveloped in thought and wearing a cross-wrapped Per

sian turban, and the third mesmerized by what he sees.

While we behold the enigmatic cavern, much as the youngest man in the painting does, we may think of other grottoes: the

caves of Zoroastrian and Mithraic religious rituals, Plato's cave, the cave of the Chris

tian Nativity and Entombment. Leonardo

again comes to mind. As light penetrates the

darkness in Leonardo's Madonna of the

Rocks, we see that he has placed the Madon

na, Child, and Saint John the Baptist in the center of a grotto. He has embellished the

Byzantine artistic tradition that sets the

Nativity in a cave—from the apocryphal Gospel of James—which survives in four

teenth-century Venetian painting. "James" writes that Mary and Joseph sought refuge in a cave, from which later emanated a great source of light to reveal the Christ Child.1'

While cavernous settings loom behind the

mangers of Duccio, Giotto, Lippi, Botticelli, Piero di Cosimo, and Gentile Bellini, the

singular, unadorned rock lives in Leonardo's Madonna of the Rocks as well as Gior

gione's Allendale Nativity and Three

Philosophers. Andrea Mantegna's work

may be the artistic bridge that connects these

images. Vasari centers Mantegna within Ve netian and Florentine traditions. He not only calls Giorgione the Leonardo of Venice, but,

writing of Mantegna, he quotes Ariosto, who lists "Leonardo, Andrea Mantegna, and Gian Bellino" as the "greatest painters of their time." Vasari's life of Mantegna follows the lives of the Bellini and that of Verrocchio and precedes Leonardo's, and his quotation from Ariosto suggests that Mantegna's work is grounded along the art-historical path leading from the Bellini to Leonardo and, of

course, to Giorgione.10 Mantegna's imagery provides a historical

precedent for Giorgione's Three Philoso

phers, just as the medieval relief carvings of

the Magi in San Marco are their Venetian an

cestors. In his Uffizi Adoration (Fig. 3),

Mantegna's Magi trek across barren, rocky terrain along a stone pathway to the Holy

Family's bright, cherub-filled cave of the

Nativity. And in his Getty Adoration (Fig. 4), Mantegna isolates and magnifies the

Magi, who are softly illuminated, enfolded



20

Fig. 3 Andrea Mantegna, Adoration of the Magi, central panel of the triptych. 1464-1466. Tempera on wood. Uffizi, Florence. (Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY)



21

Fig. 4 Andrea Mantegna, Adoration of the Magi. 1495-1505. Tempera on linen, 48.6 x 65.6 cm un

framed. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles



22

in exotic eastern turbans, and revering Mary and the Christ Child in an intimate setting. Giorgione's painting descends from these

images as well as from Leonardo's, and his Three Philosophers invite the viewer to con

template the allusions, tempered by the artist's sensibility and touch.

Arter studying countless texts, we con

tinue to see, in essence, a vision of stillness: three men in a silent moment of spiritual awakening. Giorgione's Three Philosophers —priests, astronomers, mathematicians, phi

losophers ... the Magi—behold the shadows of the cave in the clarity of earthly and heav

enly light. Looking at Giorgione—and Leo nardo and Mantegna before him—we may apply to these three artists the ancient epi thets given by Pliny and Plutarch to the Zoroastrian Magi. Together, our three "in ventors of magic" are Magi themselves,

bearing mysterious gifts of painting—allu sive and elusive traces of ancient traditions from a vast sea of sources—into a confluence of Florentine and Venetian artistic currents.

NOTES

1. Paul Barolsky, "Concord and Discord in

Leonardo's Adoration of the Magi," SOURCE: Notes

in the History of Art 28, no. 1 (Fall 2008):20. 2. Matthew 2:1-2; Salley Vickers, Miss Garnet's

Angel (London: HarperCollins, 2000); "Zoroastrian

ism," in Thomas Kelly Cheyne and John Sutherland

Black, Encyclopaedia Biblica, 4 vols. (London: Black, 1899-1907), IV, 17.5436. The democratic entry for

"Biblical Magi" in Wikipedia cites one translation of

Matthew's star as "in the East," from the Greek ana

tole, "rising" or a "heliacal rising"; online (accessed 13 Jan. 2009).

3. Matthew 2:1-2; Herodotus, Histories 1.101 ff.; Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris 46.7; Pliny, Natural His

tory 30.2.3. See also Pietro Zampetti, The Complete Paintings of Giorgione (New York: Abrams, 1968). The Persian prophet Zoroaster preached one of the

earliest codes of ethics, although the ancient Greeks

saw him as the master of mysterious wisdom and

magic; and Herodotus weaves references to the ritual

istic Magi throughout his histories. See also Acts 8.9

24, and Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend:

Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 170,

99, for Saint Peter and Simon Magus and for Saint James and Hermogenes, respectively. The stories of

James and Hermogenes may be found in the frescoes

of Altichiero and associates in Padua as well as those

by Andrea Mantegna, and in Angelico's predella panel in the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth. The en

counter between Peter and Simon Magus appears in

two panels by Gozzoli, in the Metropolitan Museum

and at Hampton Court, and in Filippino's fresco in the

Brancacci Chapel. 4. Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de' piu eccellenti pittori,

scultori ed architettori, ed. Gaetano Milanesi, 9 vols.

(Florence: Sansoni. 1906), IV, pp. 17-52, 38. Leo

nardo's magic is observed in his automated lion, his studies of natural patterns, his genius.

5. As a medieval seafaring power, Venice looked

east, beyond Constantinople, more than it did west.

Eastern trade—glasswork, majolica, and especially textiles—is captured in late fifteenth- and early six

teenth-century Venetian and Florentine paintings (the Bellini, Lotto, Piero di Cosimo, Ghirlandaio). See Ste

fano Carboni, Venice and the Islamic World, exh. cat.

(New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale

University Press, 2007). 6. Among the seminal studies are Johannes Wilde,

"Rontgenaufnahmen der 'Drei Philosophen' Gior

giones und der Zigeunermadonna Tizians," Jarhbuch

der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien 6 (1932): 141-154; Friderike Klauner's argument for the

Epiphany in "Zur Symbolik von Giorgiones 'Drei

Philosophen,'" Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen

Sammlungen in Wien 51 (1955): 145-168: E. H. Gom

brich, "A Note on Giorgione's 'Three Philosophers,'"

Burlington Magazine 128 (July 1986):488. See also "The Three Philosophersin Salvatore Settis, Gior

gione's Tempest: Interpreting the Hidden Subject, trans. Ellen Bianchini (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 15-47 (my thanks to



23

Jeryldene Wood for this reference). Settis's argument that Giorgione's "Magi" witness the setting sun in an

ticipation of the first rising star is subsumed in his

larger efforts to see Giorgione's paintings within the

context of clear, logical histories of visual images—

e.g., as connotations of Adam and Eve with child in

form the Tempest, so the Magi resound in the Three

Philosophers. 7. Recent interpretations include Karin Zeleny on

Pythagoras, Pherecydes, and Thales in "

'The Gior

gione Code': Painting in Vienna Deciphered," Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, www.khm.at

/ausstellungen/Bellini/Giorgione (16 Oct. 2006; ac

cessed 19 Nov. 2008); and Stefano Carboni on Aver

roes and Aristotle, n. 5, above. Carboni quotes Jaynie Anderson on Giorgione's puzzling philosophers: "We

may never be able to identify who they are" (p. 167). See Jaynie Anderson, Giorgione, the Painter of Poetic

Brevity (New York: Flammarion, 1997). See also Elke

Oberthaler and Elizabeth Walmsley, "Technical Stud

ies of Painting Methods," in David Alan Brown and

Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, Bellini, Giorgione, Titian and

the Renaissance of Venetian Painting, exh. cat. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), cat. no. 30, p. 293. On Persian, Arabic, and Indian turbans, see Ann

Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance

Clothing and the Materials of Memory (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 53, 55-57.

8. For Marcantonio Michiel, see n. 6, above.

9. The cave of the Nativity became Bethlehem's

Church of the Nativity under Constantine, Helena, and

Justinian. On Leonardo's Madonna of the Rocks, see

Frederick Hartt, History of Italian Renaissance Art:

Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, 3rd ed. (New York:

Abrams, 1987), p. 450. See also James 19:2 in "The

Protoevangelism of James," in Early Christian Writ

ings, trans. M. R. James (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1924); www.earlvchristianwritings.com (©2001-2006 Peter Kirby, accessed 3 Feb. 2009).

10. See n. 4, above. Vasari, III, p. 409; and

Lodovico Ariosto, Proemio alia parte terza 10-11.



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LEONARDO, GIORGIONE, MANTEGNA, AND THE MAGI