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Love, Truth, Orthodoxy, Reticence; or, What Edgar Wind Didn’t See in Botticelli’s Primavera Author(s): Rebecca ZorachSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Autumn 2007), pp. 190-224Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/526092 .
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Critical Inquiry 34 (Autumn 2007)
2007 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/07/3401-0008$10.00.All rights reserved.
190
For kind help in gaining access to the EdgarWind Archivein Oxford, I am most grateful to the
assistanceand advice of Jon Whiteley, Jas’ Elsner,ElizabethSears, and Consolato Latella. Nanci
Young provided archival materials from Smith College. Thanks are due to the numerous readers
and interlocutors who have refined my thinking on this essay, in particular, audiencesat the
College Art Association, DukeUniversity,and the KunsthistorischesInstitut in Florence.Advice
from LaurenBerlant andthe board of Critical Inquiry has been especially thoughtful and
pertinent. I was privilegedto benefit from the commentsand suggestionsof—among others—
DaisyDelogu, Nicole Lassahn, Lucy Pick, Lisa Voigt,Peter Parshall,Ethan Matt Kavaler, Randi
Klebanoff, Bob Williams, PatriciaSimons, Michael Cole, JamesG. Turner, Hans van Miegroet,
PatriciaLeighten,Mark Antliff, Annabel Wharton, Kristine Stiles, Hannah Baader,Gerhard Wolf,
Darrel Rutkin, Lia Markey,KatherinePoole, Rainbow Porthé, and the students in my neo-
Platonism seminar.This essayis dedicated to the memory of Margaret Wind, whose careful
archivingenabled this project to come to fruition.
Unless otherwise noted,translations from German are my own.
1. Erwin Panofsky, “Introductory,” Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the
Renaissance (Oxford, 1939), p. 8. “Introductory”was revised as Panofsky,“IconographyandIconology:An Introductionto the Study of Renaissance Art,”Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (Garden City, N.Y., 1955), pp. 26–54.
Love, Truth, Orthodoxy, Reticence; or, WhatEdgar Wind Didn’t See in Botticelli’s Primavera
Rebecca Zorach
In the middle decades of thetwentieth century, somethingknownas neo-Platonism became a privileged interpretive toolfor thestudyof Renaissance
art. Associated witha contemplative method of hierarchicalascentto higher
meaning, it resonated with the iconographic method propounded byErwin
Panofsky, in which the scholar was to work toward increasing abstraction
through three layers of interpretation: the pre-iconographic, the icono-
graphic, and the iconological (or “iconography in a deeper sense” ).1 Neo-
Platonism offered historical justification for scholars seeking meaning
beyond the surface of images; it came to be an emblem of the iconographic
methodology of the Warburg Institute and its affiliates (including Panof-
sky), but it stretched much further than that. Art historytextbooksstillbear
the imprint of what Horst Bredekamp has called a “fashionable trend” of
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Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2007 191
2. Horst Bredekamp, “Götterdämmerung des Neuplatonismus,”Kritische Berichte 14, no. 4(1986): 42; hereafterabbreviated“G.” The termin German is Modewelle. Thanks to Ethan Matt
Kavaler for pointing this article out to me.3. See, for example, David R. Coffin, “Tintoretto and the MediciTombs,” Art Bulletin 33 (June
1951): 119–25, and uses of the term in Phyllis Pray Bober and Ruth Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources (London, 1986).
4. As he puts it, Botticelli’s Primavera is one of only three “witnessesfor the prosecution”(Kronzeugen), along with Dürer’s MelencoliaI and Titian’s so-calledSacred and Profane Love (“G,”p. 40).
mid-century scholarship; they invariably make reference to neo-Platonism
in discussions of Florentine humanism, Botticelli, and Michelangelo.2 In
that context the phenomenon is synonymous with what medieval and Re-
naissance commentators might have called allegory:Christianizedreadingsof classical themes in art. The mid-century’s “neo-Platonism” also dema-
terialized images and, frequently, desexualized them, both indicating and
masking homoeroticism, especially in the case of Michelangelo. Neo-Pla-
tonism became a catchall term to characterize the standardintellectual bag-
gage of medieval and Renaissance Europe to the extent that concepts like
harmony or the system of the four elements or any Renaissance instanceof
the revival of antiquity could be characterized, in a very general way, as
“neo-Platonic.”3 Because of what we might call its abuse, by the 1970s the
term had fallen out of fashion. In his 1986 article Bredekamp noted that it
had lost its signal role in our understanding of the meaning of Renaissance
art (see “G,” p. 39).
Bredekamp argues that Panofsky, Edgar Wind, Ernst Gombrich, andothers originally saw iconology and its preoccupation with the classical tra-
dition as a bulwark against Nazism, but that neo-Platonism was “the wrong
fortress [die falsche Burg],” an esoteric dead end (“G,” pp. 39, 40).4 But to
say this is perhaps to blame these authors unfairly for the assumptionsthat
grew up in the wake of their work—assumptions that softened and sim-
plified neo-Platonism, producing a domesticated version of what was ac-
tually a complicated and often internally conflicting set of esoteric
philosophical ideas. Neo-Platonism is not a word used in the Renaissance
or before; what it refers to is, as the founders of the approach knew, a mul-
tilayeredobject, beginning with late antique Alexandriancommentatorson
Plato (Plotinus and his following) and extending to a revival of interest in
their work and in that of Plato in the Italian Renaissance and beyond. In
R ebecca Zorach is an associate professor of art history and the college at the
University of Chicago. She is the author of Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and
Excess in the French Renaissance (2005). She is currently working on an exhibitionon early modern prints of Rome and an essay on relations between France and
Thailand in the late seventeenth century.
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192 Rebecca Zorach / Botticelli’s Primavera
5. Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (1958;New York, 1968),pp. 8, 238; hereafterabbreviated PM. Recent work on Wind includesthe projectof editing his unpublished (oruntranslated) papers (The Eloquence of Symbols and The Religious Symbolism of Michelangelo) aswell as an excellent German collection of essays on him,Edgar Wind: Kunsthistoriker und
Philosoph, ed. Bredekamp(Berlin, 1998).6. E. H. Gombrich, “Botticelli’s Mythologies: A Study in the Neo-Platonic Symbolism of His
Circle,” Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London, 1972), p. 37; hereafterabbreviated “BM.”
7. See Raimond van Marle, The Developmentof the Italian Schools of Painting, 19 vols. (TheHague, 1923–38),12:76.
8. The painting is painted in tempera overa gessoground on a support made of sevenpoplarpanels, approximatelysix by ten feet (the scaleof a tapestry!). Twenty-oneplant species are
identifiable on the ground; the trees include orange, laurel and myrtle; see Mirella Levi d’Ancona,Botticelli’s Primavera: A BotanicalInterpretation Including Astrology, Alchemy, and the Medici (Florence, 1983).
fifteenth-century Florence a group of scholars, principally Marsilio Ficino
and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and their circle, devoted substantialat-
tention to these lateantiquecommentators. TheAlexandrianGreekauthors
and the Italians (who wrote mainly in Latin) are now referred to as neo-Platonists. We tend to assume that part of their intention was to reconcile
classical philosophy with Christian belief. But with this commentary tra-
dition also came a heady mix of mysticism and esoteric knowledge that are
distinctly un-Christian. Ficino’s writings—the main body of Florentine
Platonism—are rich and complex; they are full of references to Plato and
Aristotle and their commentators, but also to medicinal formulae based on
herbs, minerals, and the stars. Wind, in his 1958 book Pagan Mysteries in
the Renaissance, cites Pico’s description of ancient writings possessing “co-
piousness of matter and . . . multiformity of religion . . . occult philosophy
and strange foreign mysteries.” Wind concludes by characterizing Renais-
sance neo-Platonism as a “manifest eccentricity” thatnonethelessproduced
great art.5
There may be a no more extensively examined case of neo-Platonism
than Sandro Botticelli’s tapestry-like Primavera (fig. 1). Its sculpted forms
and hauntingly impassive faces, set within a forest glade, have likelyinspired
moreinterpretive labor thananyother quattrocentopainting. AsGombrich
put it in 1945, “Anyone interested in problems of method can do no better
than to study the conflicting interpretations of the ‘Primavera’ and the dis-
cussions which centredround them.”6 Already in 1931, a scholar hadreacted
with irritation to the quantity of ink spilled about the painting.7 It depicts
Venus at the center of a dance of figures: from left to right, Mercury, the
three Graces, Venus (with Cupid floating above her), and Flora, Chloris,
and the wind-god Zephyr. Interpreters have connected the painting to nu-
merous classical literary texts, to contemporary love poetry, and,especially,
to festivals—as well as to neo-Platonic ideas.8 It is now assumed that it was
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f i g u
r e
1 .
S a n
d r o
B o t t i c e
l l i ( 1 4 4 4 – 1 5 1 0
) . P r i m a v e r a ( p o s t r e s t o r a t i o n
) . U ffi z i .
P h o t o :
S c a
l a / A r t
R e s o u r c e
, N Y
.
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194 Rebecca Zorach / Botticelli’s Primavera
9. See Aby Warburg, “Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring: An Examination of Concepts of Antiquity in the Italian EarlyRenaissance,”The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity:Contributions to the Cultural History of the EuropeanRenaissance, trans.DavidBritt(1893; Los
Angeles, 1999), pp. 88–156.See alsoMatthew Rampley, “From Symbol to Allegory: Aby Warburg’sTheory of Art,”Art Bulletin 79 (Mar. 1997): 41–55, and Georges Didi-Huberman,Devant le temps:Histoire de l’art et anachronismedes images (Paris, 2000) and L’Image survivante: Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Paris, 2002).
10. See Creighton Gilbert, “On Subject and Not-Subject in Italian Renaissance Pictures,”Art Bulletin 34 (Sept.1952): 202–16.
11. Charles Dempsey,The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli’s “Primavera”and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent (Princeton, N.J., 1992), p. 7. Dempseyargues that Botticelli’s
painting constitutes a pictorial analogue to a new form of humanist literaturein which vernacularforms(for example, praise of the beloved as in medieval love poetry)are broughtto the level of universality (here, a generalized principleof love, Venus Physica ) through classicalreferences.Ivan
painted in the late 1470s or early 1480s and that it was commissioned either
by or for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, the older of the two younger
second cousins of Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici, called the Magnificent, who
served as theguardianof hiscousinsandadministratorof their considerablefortune. The Primavera (along with the Birth of Venus ) was the subject of
Aby Warburg’s doctoral dissertation, in which he argued for strong con-
nections between the painting and Agnolo Poliziano’s Stanze. More than
this, though, he suggested that artists and writers of the fifteenth century
looked to antiquity for thedepictionof movement—arguing thisin contrast
to the prevailing Winckelmannian notion that associated Renaissance clas-
sicism with static harmony.9 Warburg’s interpretation was literary and, in
a sense, formal, with form understood not in a surface or stylistic sense but
as a deeply rooted cultural resource. Those who followed in his footsteps—
Wind, Panofsky, Gombrich—added neo-Platonism, specifically Ficino’s
writings, to help understand the painting’s iconography.
Gombrich, for his part, collected fifteen different readings of the paint-ing’s affective portrayal of Venus as part of his argument that there was
something inexhaustibly haunting about the painting: “These puzzlingand
wistful faces give us no rest until we have built around them a story which
seems to account for their enigmatic expression” (“BM,” p. 38). But, as
Creighton Gilbert argued, Gombrich never actually explained thisaspect of
the work.10 I will argue in what follows that the painting’s haunting quality
may instead be the result of a formal asymmetry that bears an equivocal
meaning—if not of the accumulated ghosts of so many pastinterpretations.
Among these, Wind’s, in Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, has been one
of the most tenacious of the neo-Platonic camp. I am not alone in consid-
ering his treatment of the painting compelling (if not entirely complete);
Charles Dempsey, author of the most prominent recent scholarly treatment
of the painting, The Portrayal of Love, acknowledges thatamong thevarious
neo-Platonic readings Wind’s “certainly deserves primacy.”11 As Dempsey
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Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2007 195
Tognarini focuses on the “muse” to whom Warburg drew attention, SimonettaVespucci, and on
the bride of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco,Semiramide Appiani. See Ivan Tognarini,L’identità e l ’oblio:Simonetta, Semiramide, e Sandro Botticelli (Milan, 2002). Giovanni Reale, Botticelli: La “Primavera”o le “Nozze di Filologia e Mercurio”? (Rimini, 2001), proposesa philosophicalallegory.An argument that the painting represents politicalharmonyamong different Italian cities has
been proposed by Enrico Guidoni, La “Primavera” di Botticelli: L’armonia tra le città nell’Italia di Lorenzo il Magnifico (Rome, 2005). Lilian Zirpolo sees the painting as addressedto Semiramideherself as does Michael Rollmann,who does not cite Zirpolo.See Lilian Zirpolo,“Botticelli’sPrimavera : A Lessonfor the Bride,”in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, ed.
Norma Broude and Mary Garrard (New York, 1992), pp. 101–9, and Michael Rohlman, “Botticellis‘Primavera’:Zu Anlaß, Adressat und Funktion von mythologischenGemälden im FlorentinerQuattrocento,”Artibus et Historiae, no. 33 (1996): 97–132.
notes, it is to Wind that we owe the essential insight that identifies the triad
of figures to the right of the panel. Zephyr, by raping the virginal nymph
Chloris, transforms her into the fecund Flora, nymph of flowers and fields.
In this paper I propose what I believe is a compelling new interpretationof Botticelli’s famous painting. Suspicious of the impulse to find answers
to a picture’s mysteries in a single detail, however, I use my interpretation
as a point of departure to aska new setof questions—aboutthe relationship
of art to philosophy, of eros to power, and about the gaps that remain when
we reduce art-historical methods to a conflict between formalism and his-
toricism or between iconology and social history. The seeds of my inter-
pretation appear in the works of thosemid-twentieth-century scholars who
made the painting into an object lesson in iconological interpretation. Be-
fore addressing the painting directly, however, I begin with a case study of
a different sort, drawn from the context in which these same interpretive
methods developed. In contrast to the apparent beauty and harmonyof the
Primavera, this will be a case study in conflict: specifically, that of Wind’sdebates with “Chicagoschool” critics and Great Booksadvocates in hisbrief
stay at the University of Chicago in the 1940s. Wind will also be my chief
interlocutor in considering Botticelli’s painting. The lectures that were to
form his Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance were given across the U.S., and
at Chicago they became part of a controversy whose details highlight
broader issues at stake in midcentury debates inAmericaneducation.I hope
to show here how these pedagogical issues can illuminate the “mysteries”
Wind studied in his 1958 book. The painting, in turn, prompts a reconsid-
eration of the status of the early modern image and the quandary of art
history’s own complicity with the power and violence that produces, some-
times, things of beauty.
Pagan Mysteries in Chicago
Wind is most often associated with Warburg’s intellectual legacy and
with his years as the first professor of art history at Oxford in the 1950s and
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196 Rebecca Zorach / Botticelli’s Primavera
12. LikePanofsky, Winddrew his conceptionof the symbol largely fromErnst Cassirer’s theory of “symbolic forms,” produced in dialoguewith Warburg. See Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans.Ralph Manheim and John Michael Krois, 4 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1953–
96).13. Wind and Gombrichwere to differ on the statusof the irrational in Warburg’s work. See
Wind, “On a Recent Biography of Warburg,” in The Eloquence of Symbols: Studies in Humanist Art, ed. Jaynie Anderson (Oxford, 1993), pp. 106–13.
14. See EdgarWind, “Heı̂oyUóby (Laws, II, 671D): On Plato’sPhilosophy of Art,” The Eloquence of Symbols, pp. 1–20.
15. Ibid., p. 9.16. NicholasXenos has recently argued that Leo Strauss’s sympathywith fascism (apart fromits
anti-Semitism)alreadyappears in writings frombefore he left Germany. See NicholasXenos, “LeoStrauss and the Rhetoricof the War on Terror,” Logos 3 (Spring 2004), www.logosjournal.com/issue_3.2/xenos.pdf
1960s, where his lectures created a sensation and packed theaters. Trained
as a philosopher before becoming an art historian, he waged a long battle
in his work in aesthetics and intellectual historyand in hishistoricalstudies
of Renaissance art on behalf of the symbol and against formalism in boththeoretical and pragmatic terms.12 Following Warburg and mindful of
Plato’s “divine fear” of the power of art, he insisted on the complexity of
symbols and a constant, vital, and sometimes risky tension between reason
and ritual (with Warburg, he believed ritual and magic tapped into pow-
erful, irrational forces within the human psyche).13 In his inaugural lecture
as a Privatdozent at the University of Hamburg in 1932, he explainedPlato’s
rejection of the plastic arts not as a rejection of a degraded copy of a copy
(as it appears in the Republic ) but as a recognition of the dangers posed to
theutopian republicby thepower of artto move humanhearts and minds.14
Running throughout Wind’s work is an insistence that some conflicts of
values are nontrivial, that legitimate values may come into conflict in ways
that cannot be resolved by a simpleevaluation of priorities. Inthe Hamburglecture, he raised the question of “whether everyone who is confronted by
conflicting values must not decide to make a sacrifice in one direction or
another—a sacrifice through which he defines the form of humanity in
which he believes and to which he commits himself.”15 That is, one legiti-
mate value may need to be sacrificed to another. This position reflects the
increasingly dire political situation, the rise of Nazism, met with compla-
cency or support by some of Wind’s intellectual contemporaries.16
Wind had been Panofsky’s first dissertation student in Germany. After
finishing his dissertation, he took the unusual step of spending three years
in the United States, first in New York and then at the University of North
Carolina. He returned to Germany in 1927 to complete his Habilitation and
soon met Warburg. His time in the U.S. accounts for the fact that he con-
sidered C. S. Peirce along with Warburg as his two great intellectual influ-
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Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2007 197
17. Hutchins intervened withthe draft board to preventWind from being drafted. See Wind,letterto Robert Maynard Hutchins,5 Dec. 1942,and Hutchins, letterto Wind, 7 Dec. 1942, folder2, box 2, Presidents’ Papers, 1940–46,University of Chicago Archive,University of Chicago,
Chicago (UCA).18. Anne Stevens alludes to this problem in her“The Philosophy of GeneralEducation and Its
Contradictions: The Influence of Hutchins,” Journal of General Education 50, no. 3 (2001): 182.
ences. In 1933 Hitler’s racial laws cost him his university appointment, and
he moved with the Warburg Institute to London, becoming its deputy di-
rector under Fritz Saxl. In 1939, he undertook what was intended as a short
trip to the United States; with war intervening and then a falling-out withhisWarburg colleagues, he wasto live there more or less full-timeuntil 1955,
spending the last ten years as a research professor at Smith College before
moving on to Oxford.
In the U.S. in 1939 Wind quickly fell into an alliance with men involved
in a revolution in American higher education—among them Robert May-
nard Hutchins, the young president of the University of Chicago. War was
on everyone’s minds—especially as professors as well as students began to
be drafted—and therefore the issue of defining “the form of humanity in
which [they] believe[d]” was particularly charged.17 The often-heated de-
bates over educational philosophy were concerned with nothing less than
the fate of modern civilization. Hutchins and his allies were in the process
of establishing undergraduate curricula in Great Books, which were in-tended to counteract disciplinary overspecialization and lack of attention
to philosophical issues that, theybelieved, should equip young mento shape
society. They took aim in particular at the empirical social sciences and in
general at pragmatism and professionalization. Despite initial friendly re-
lations, it may have been inevitable that with Wind’s interest in American
pragmatism he would come into conflict with the architects of the reaction
against it in American universities. There is, as many have observed, a ten-
sion at theheart of theGreat Books philosophy: to itsproponents, theGreat
Books represented ideas, not history. And yet these books are treated as a
set of sacred texts authorized by tradition.18 For Wind, as a Jewish intellec-
tual exiled from Nazi Germany, the new curriculum’s rejection of articu-
lated historical understanding coupledwitha covert appeal to traditionmay
not have seemed such a promising way of addressing the state of Western
civilization.
To the Great Bookspartisans, I think, Wind simply represented a classical
European education. In 1939, at the instigation of Stringfellow Barr and
Scott Buchanan, who were then in theprocessof revamping thecurriculum
of St. John’s College in Annapolis, Wind lectured there for a semester on
Renaissance art. Early warning signs of incompatibility with the exponents
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198 Rebecca Zorach / Botticelli’s Primavera
19. Margaret Wind, note,folders i–iii, boxI, 7, EdgarWind Archive,BodleianLibrary,
Universityof Oxford, Oxford (EWA).20. Wind developed a group of American friends of the Warburg Institute, eventually securing
various offers of a temporary home, which forced the hand of the University of London and
enabled the institute to find a permanent homethere. From 1939 to 1945, he reported to theWarburg Institute;in addition to giving numerouslectureseries, he gave seventy-threeindividuallectures at a wide variety of locations.
21. Wind had met McKeon at Columbia in his first American visitin the 1920s andrecommended McKeon to Panofsky when he moved to the U.S. Buchanan and Barrwarned that
he wouldnot get alongwith McKeon at Chicago.See Wind, letter to Saxl,10 Apr. 1943, folder ii,box I, 5, EWA.
22. See Richard McKeon, letters to Wind, 3 Dec. 1941and 10 Dec. 1941,and letter to Hutchins,10 Dec.1941, folder 11 “[Correspondence regarding] Wind, Edgar1937–1944,”box 68, Richard
McKeon Papers, UCA.23. See Secretary of the Board of Trustees, letter to Wind, 24 Feb. 1942, folder i, box I, 8, EWA.24. Hutchins’s proposalhad been accepted, but a motion to rescindit failed narrowly, 58–58,
with Hutchinscasting the 58th vote. See Milton Mayer, Robert Maynard Hutchins: A Memoir
(Berkeley, 1993), p. 241. See also James SloanAllen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture:Capitalism, Modernism, and the Chicago-Aspen Crusade for Cultural Reform (1983; Boulder, 2002),p. 105.
of Great Books came when he found that, as Margaret Wind later put it,
“Buchanan, enamoured of the Platonic Idea, wished him to talk about art
without contaminating thought by showing pictures on a screen.”Presum-
ably while waiting for St. John’s to acquire a lantern slide projector, he“spent some peaceful afternoons eating oysters on Chesapeake Bay.”19
Wind’s initial plan had been, as he put it, “spreading the gospel” of the
Warburg Institute, its scholarly projects, its dire financial circumstances,
and its need for a permanent home. After the stint at St. John’s he lectured
incessantly for three years, all over the U.S., as the institute’s ambassador.20
Constant travel took a toll, and he wrote in the fall of 1941 to Richard
McKeon, dean of Chicago’s humanities division, to take him up on an offer
to teach there.21 McKeon’s initial response was equivocal (he cited a budget
crisis), but it was quickly followed by another, more favorable, letter.22 By
February 1942, Hutchins had formally invited Wind to take up a position
at Chicago.23
Wind arrived at a contentious time. Hutchinsbelieved thatby reformingundergraduate education at Chicago he could help guide American edu-
cation toward the pursuit of values rather than the accumulation of facts.
In April 1942, Hutchins cast a tiebreaking vote in the university senate to
pursue changes in the college, giving it greater autonomy and allowing it to
award a four-year BA based on “general education,” in other words, the
Great Books.24 Basic humanities courses were promptly revamped. While
a 1940 humanities textbook provided historical context organized chron-
ologically and included such chapter titles as “TheMacedonianEmpire and
the Hellenistic Age” and “The Spread of the Protestant Reformation,” the
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Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2007 199
25. See University of Chicago, Introductory General Course in the Humanities, Syllabus, ed.Hayward Keniston, FerdinandSchevill, and Arthur P. Scott (Chicago,1940); Universityof
Chicago, the College, Humanities 2: Suggestions for the Analysis of Drama and Fiction (Chicago,1944); and University of Chicago, the College, Humanities 2: Syllabus and Selected Readings (Chicago,1945). Humanities1, 2, and 3 replaced the general introductory course; of the three,Hum 2 is the closest analogue to it.
26. EdgarWind, “Statementby Wind on the McKeon trouble, possibly to be submitted to theCommitteeon Policy,”p.3, cover sheet dated6 Sept. 1943, folder 17, box 46, John U. Nef, Jr. Papers,UCA. In the same folder, see alsoMcKeon, letterto John Nef, 31 July 1943.
27. Wind, “Statementby Wind on the McKeon trouble,possiblyto be submitted to the
Committee on Policy,” p. 4.28. Nef dealsdirectly with what he calls the “pagantradition” in Germany in his The United
States and Civilization (Chicago, 1942), pp. 102–3.
analogous book in 1944 consisted of literary texts organized by genre and
supplemented by brief methodological essays.25 The philosopher and clas-
sicist McKeon was the architect of the new course, Humanities 2 (Hum 2),
which contributed to Wind’s dissatisfaction at Chicago. McKeon was him-self a contentious figure. While intermittently a Hutchins ally, he also pub-
licly opposed some of Hutchins’s schemes for the university. McKeon
argued for a neo-Aristotelian rationalist approach based on a notion of the
universality of the rational soul, which in pedagogical terms might be char-
acterized with the single word method.
From the perspective of Renaissance art history, Wind clashedmostcon-
spicuously with McKeon over the title of a series of public lectures he was
to give. As dean of the humanities division, McKeon had invited Wind to
lecture on “something in Renaissance art and culture,” suggesting that
Wind supply the specific title. Wind agreed and gave his title: “Pagan and
Christian Mysticism in the Art of the Renaissance.” McKeon, ever the ra-
tionalist, replied that the word mysticism displeased him and that he wouldprefer elements or influences.26 When Wind would not budge, McKeon
claimed that Wind was trying to substitute other lectures entirely for the
ones he had asked for. Wind later wrote,
I did not think that I needed to explain to Mr McKeon what I intended
to explain to the audience, namely, that I was using the word ‘mysti-
cism’ in the strict technical sense employed by Renaissance authors and
artists when they contrast a ‘mystical image’ with a ‘literal statement’ . . .
Since this is, in my opinion, the common denominator between such
varied expressions of Renaissance art as are to be found in the works of
Botticelli, Mantegna, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, Tintoretto and
even El Greco, it seemed to me a suitable subject for a general course of public lectures.27
On a basic level any whiff of paganism or mysticism must have called up
fears of the nationalism of Hitler’s Germany.28 But McKeon and his allies,
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29. Fora Hegelian reading of abstractionin modernpainting,see Robert Pippin, “What WasAbstract Art? (From the Point of View of Hegel),” Critical Inquiry 29 (Autumn 2002): 1–24.
30. See Gilbert, “On Subject and Not-Subject in Italian Renaissance Pictures,”p. 211.
31. See “InstructionsConcerning Lectures,Readings,and Discussions for the General Coursein the Humanities(Humanities 2),” Sept. 1942, folder 17 “Humanities 2,” box 38, Richard McKeonPapers, UCA.
I think, liked the idea of the Renaissance better than they liked the Renais-
sance itself. What was it that mid-twentieth-century educators saw in the
Renaissance? It sometimes seems that the Renaissance carries no other cul-
tural content than an assertion that change happens; it is a paradigm forhistorical change that can be mobilized to support the values any particular
writer seeks to propound. In the mid-century U.S. it signified the much-
vaunted “rise of the individual.” Accompanied, in the world of contem-
porary (American) art, by the rise of “pure” painting, the Renaissance
prefigured the ascendancy of painting as medium.29 This is evident, for in-
stance, in Gilbert’s intelligent but flawed responseto iconography, “OnSub-
ject and Not-Subject in Italian Renaissance Pictures,” in which he argued
for the existence of a Renaissance notion of pure (subjectless) painting: Re-
naissance painting nicely suited to modernist tastes.30 Modern scholarssaw
the Renaissance as a period of secularization in which art andthoughtpried
themselves from the realm of religious ritual as individualspried themselves
from submersion in collectivity. One edition of the Humanities 2 courseinstructions declared, for instance, that “the humanists of the Renaissance
conceived themselves to be engaged in an attempt to liberate the study of
things human and natural from subjugation to theology and the study of
things divine.”31
From the view then generally held, it would be easy to understand the
Primavera and other paintings like it as exemplary of Renaissance sensibil-
ity. First given the name Primavera by Vasari and symbolically indicating
the springtime of Renaissance revival itself, Botticelli’s pagan dance looks
far removed from the concerns of Christian representation. For the first
time, painted images appeared to stand alone and to invite a kind of
contemplation not directly connected to religious worship. For twentieth-
century humanists, Renaissance Italy offered a moment of the reorgani-
zation of pedagogy much like what they themselves were seeing, and
sometimes pushing, in education. McKeon’s friend and ally Ronald Crane,
chair of the English department, had written in 1935 that
it would be necessary to have properly prepared students as well, and to
give us these there is required something like a renaissance in general
education at the level of the high school and junior college. Perhaps
such a renaissance is coming, bringing with it the revived study of the
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Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2007 201
32. R. S. Crane,“History vs. Criticismin the Study of Literature,” English Journal 24 (Oct. 1935):666.
33. See McKeon, Culture, Education, and the Arts, vol. 2 of SelectedWritings of RichardMcKeon,
ed. Zahava K. McKeon and WilliamSwenson (Chicago, 1998), p. 117. A distinctmedievalismpermeatedthe university duringthe Hutchins revolution; Hutchins was a Thomist, and McKeonbelieved in a scholastic systemof educationwith a strongly Aristotelian character.
34. Once the committee became a degree-grantingunit, its brochure describedits mission as
follows: “Thesubject matter for considerationis the broad general conceptionswhich have beenoffered as to the nature of manin society, as to the course of historical change, as to the majorendsof living and the circumstancesunder which groups of men definesuch ends,and as to methods of social action chosen or advocatedfor realizing those ends.”The fields represented included
anthropology and sociology; politics, economics, jurisprudence, and ethics; and education,psychology, and human development (Wind, “Report 1939–1945”to the Warburg Institute, folderi, boxI, 5, EWA; see alsofolders i and vi, box I, 7).
classics in some form or other, bringing with it also the renewed cultiva-
tion of those ancient arts of reading and writing upon which any criti-
cism of literature worthy of the name must be firmly based.32
To many Great Books sympathizers, the Renaissance had stripped away
the outmoded baggage of scholasticism and established rhetoric and ver-
nacular literatures as suitable subjects of study. McKeon’s position, how-
ever, was more ambivalent. On the one hand, the revolution in education
at Chicago was largely a return to “classics.” Understood in this way, the
Renaissance might provide an analogy for the pedagogical project upon
which the university had embarked. On the other hand, McKeon saw in the
Renaissance the lossof something significant aboutmedieval educationand
specifically scholasticism: method. He believed that a primary weakness of
modern education stemmed directly from the Renaissance—the replace-
ment of knowledge as method (the medieval trivium andquadrivium) with
knowledge as content, in other words, subjects of specialized study (liter-ature, natural sciences, history).33 McKeon took an approach that, in a sub-
stantial way, reversed rather thanimitated “theRenaissance”:it reinstituted
method. For a series of public lectures, he might simply have wanted a cele-
bration of the rebirth of learning, illustrated with pictures.
Similar conflicts emerged in the design of Ph.D. fields in the Committee
on Social Thought. Social Thought was a new entity that corresponded,on
the divisional level, to the changes Hutchins was making in the College. It
had been established to enable cross-disciplinary work in social theory; its
driving force was John U. Nef, an economic historian who became Wind’s
closest friend at Chicago. Later, Social Thought would be associated with
Leo Strauss (who arrived in 1949) and would become the refuge for the
Great Books philosophy after the College curriculum shifted away from it.But in 1943 it was an elite group that embodied, in polite form, many of the
university’s debates.34
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202 Rebecca Zorach / Botticelli’s Primavera
35. It was approved by the committee in December1942. See Nef, letterto Wind, 29 Dec.1942,
folder17, box 46,JohnU. Nef, Jr. Papers, UCA.36. Wind, “Renaissance Studies,” folder ii, box I, 8, EWA.37. Concernedprimarily with the survival of antiquity in its very aliveness, movement,and
formal-empatheticeffects, Warburg did not focuson the issueof a purported but spurious
genuineness of that or any othertradition. The conflict most crucial for Warburg’s reading of Renaissance classicism is the internaltension that we can characterizein a shorthand way asDionysian-Apollonian.
Wind was asked to join the committee upon his arrival at Chicago and
produced a memorandum on how the study of art might be integrated into
the program of study in Social Thought. In it he discussed at length the
philosophicalquestion of the existence of aesthetic universals andproposeda range of topics that clearly derive from the preoccupations he shared with
Warburg: “the relation of the ‘fine arts’ to folklore and magic”; “the tradi-
tional veneration and fear of the artist”; “origins and history of the term
‘genius’ as applied to the artist”; “origins andhistory of theterm‘aesthetics’
as applied to art”; “the evolution of canons” for different styles and genres
of art—wherein he refers to a “growing distrust [one shared by him] in the
dismissal of whole periods of art as ‘decayed’ or ‘undeveloped’”—and sev-
eral others. While this discussion was not incorporated into Social
Thought’s published program—and it is not clear what reception it got—
Wind’s description of the field of Renaissance studies did become part of
the official program.35 It promptly provoked controversy. In it, he wrote,
The student will be expected to form an idea of the general problem of
cultural revivals, of which the historical period called the Renaissance is
only one among many examples. The common characteristic of these
revivals is that the revolt against a given tradition is coupled with the at-
tempt to re-instate an older, supposedly more “genuine” tradition, so
that revolutionand restitution go hand in hand. To trace the manner in
which the traditional and novel features interpenetrate and reinforce
each other, is the central problem of Renaissance studies.36
Wind’s description of the Renaissance thus takes it as an instance of a
more general problem of history and insists upon a dispassionate view of
what he calls the“supposedlymore‘genuine’ tradition.” This isnot a simple
transposition of Warburgian ideas; it is, I think, a more skeptical formu-
lation than Warburg would have used.37 It’s tempting, therefore, to read
Wind’s comment as a subtle digat the GreatBooksapproach, oneinformed
by his reactions to the rise of German nationalism and its uses of history to
construct a notion of authentic, “Aryan” Germanness. Of course, Wind
would not, in anyfacile way, have equatedtheAmericanpreoccupationwith
the Great Books with the Nazis. Yet he clearly shows an inclination to cast
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Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2007 203
38. Crane, letterto Nef, 18 Feb. 1944, folder ii, box I, 8, EWA.39. In the case of the New Critics the generalization would be about the nature of poetry,for
example, irony as a master trope. Cranedivides criticisminto two modes, to the first of which“belong all the criticalsystems that find it necessary, in order to givean understandingof artisticworks or to account for the valuesthey contain, to place them in a context of some kind inclusiveof morethan the works themselves.” The second seeksthe poem’s individuality; its content arises
“from the embodiment in the medium of an individualform” (Crane, “TheTwo Modes of Criticism,” Dec. 1937, typescript,pp. 2, 12, folder6, box 1, R. S. Crane Papers, UCA).The sameargument with respect to the New Criticsappears,for instance, in his “Prefatory Note” to twoessays by Maclean and Charles Olsonin The University Review [University of KansasCity] (Spring
1942): 199–202 and in his “Cleanth Brooks; or, the Bankruptcy of Critical Monism,”Modern Philology 45 (May 1948): 226–45.
40. Crane, letterto Nef.
a critical and historically complex eye on the interpenetration of old and
new. Wind’s views appeared, to some of his colleagues, to overdetermine
questions of method. On seeing the program description Crane wrote to
Nef, labeling Wind’s approach “obscurantist”:
What you are really proposing, therefore, is a kind of a priori history in
which one and only one among many possible—and equally plausi-
ble—formulae for the Renaissance period is to be imposed on the inter-
pretationof the intellectual and artistic works the student considers. . . .
[In] the absence from your program of any of the basic arts of interpre-
tation and criticism, the students who are exposed to such a course of
historical study are likely to come out with a great many general conclu-
sions which they will be unable either to defend intelligently or to relate
to the conclusions of other scholars working with different principles of
explanation.38
“A priori” is an important term for Crane, who used it to characterizeevery critical method other than his own. Though the methods of Chicago
critics themselves bear some resemblance to New Criticism, Crane lumped
the latter together with historicism. He believed they both fell into the trap
of beginning with a generalization or a “monism” and from it moving to
the particular, rather thanbeginning withan individual caseand proceeding
inductively.39 Wind, he thought, was imposing content that would over-
determine the process of interpretation. Instead, method should follow the
“basic arts of interpretation and criticism” (then called, for literature as for
art, “formal analysis”). Crane goes on to say that the Renaissance “has suf-
fered peculiarly (witness the tradition of Burckhardt) from this mode of
‘Geistesgeschichte’ and I can therefore understand the difficulties your
Committee has faced in attempting to evolve a fresher and more genuinely critical approach; but I should hope that it is not part of your intention to
carry over the same or a similar method to the study of the other historical
fields.”40
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41. See Wind, introduction, trans. Richard Newald, KulturwissenschaftlicheBibliographie zumNachleben der Antike, in A Bibliography of the Survival of the Classics, ed. Hans Meier, Newald, andEdgarWind (London, 1934), pp. vii–viii. The second section of the introduction is entitled “Kritik
der Geistesgeschichte.”42. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960;
Princeton,N. J., 1972), p. 20. Jas’ Elsner points this out in his “From EmpiricalEvidenceto the BigPicture: SomeReflections on Riegl’s Concept of Kunstwollen,” Critical Inquiry 32 (Summer 2006):
741–66.43. “TheField of Renaissance Civilization,”folder ii, box I, 8, EWA. A later version of the same
prospectusincorporatedCrane’s points. See folder 1, box 61, John U. Nef, Jr. Papers, UCA.
In characterizing Wind’s approach as “Geistesgeschichte,” Crane was
unaware of the fact that Wind had spent several paragraphs of his intro-
duction to the Warburg Library’s Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliographie on a
“Kritik der Geistesgeschichte.”41
In the context, Crane’s use of the Germanterm suggests an allusion to Nazi Germany: Geistesgeschichte insisted on
cultural-historicalhomogeneity, a racialism presumedto be mirrored in the
political realm by Nazism (this despite the fact that Wind was himself a
refugee). In a similar vein, in Art and Illusion, first published in 1960, Gom-
brich would complain that art history, in “inculcating the habit of talking
in terms of collectives, of ‘mankind,’ ‘races,’ or ‘ages’. . . weakens resistance
to totalitarian habits of mind.”42 The relationship between the particular
and the general was subtly politicized, such that the imposition of general
upon particular was a mark of totalitarian thought.
Crane and McKeon were allied as members of SocialThought’s subcom-
mittee on “Eighteenth-Century European Civilization.” Within the same
brochure, the description of the study of the eighteenth century pointedly states that “emphasis will be placed on theinterpretation of importantwrit-
ingsin their ownterms, aidedby therelevanttechniquesof analysis,without
undue simplification of their arguments, and without any presupposition
as to the general character of the age in which they appeared, and without
commitment to any particular philosophical position.”43 Here, method
reigns supreme. Writings are to be interpreted in their own terms, without
regard to historical position. The description of eighteenth-centurystudies
has nothing to say about the eighteenth century; instead, it is a rebuke to
the description of Renaissance studies. If Wind takes the period as a whole
as his object, he does not, however, presuppose a prevailing “spirit of the
age” specific to the Renaissance but rather emphasizes internal conflicts.
Crane was not able to see this emphasis, ironically, because he applied a
generalization about the tenor of Germanic scholarship to the individual
case of Wind.
McKeon’s and Crane’s concern with method, with “teaching how to
read,” could both coincide and conflict with Hutchins’s view of education
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Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2007 205
44. See Mayer, Robert Maynard Hutchins, esp. chaps. 31–34.45. See McKeon, “InstructionsConcerning Lectures,Readings,and Discussions for the
General Course in the Humanities (Humanities 2),”Sept. 1942, folder17, box 38, Richard McKeon
Papers, UCA. The “Instructions,” Windwrote, were “wrought with strangefallaciesconcerningthe nature of the humanities,as some of us understand them. . . I think it astonishing that suchstatements should be handed out to the staff as Instructionsin mimeographed form less thantwenty-fourhours before the first classmeets and with the order that they be distributed to the
students” (Wind, letter to McKeon, 12 Oct. 1942, in “Bill of Particulars in Support of the StatementRegarding the Memorial to the Board of Trustees,” folder ii, box I, 8, EWA).
46. Wind, letter to McKeon.47. Wind stayed at Smith afterfalling out with his Warburg colleagues; he was irritatedat being
offered a position as Reader rather than Professorby the University of London (which housed theInstitute)and disagreedwith Saxl overthe intellectual and institutional directionof the institute.Wind wrote to Gertrud Bingat the time that despite “the discomfort of being an intellectual
as facilitating the development of values. McKeon and Crane sought to de-
velop judgment and critical sensibility and were resistant to crusades, even
those of Hutchins, that might seem to compromise theintellectualfreedom
of individuals. Hutchins was under attack in 1944 because of speeches inwhich he proposed a rededication of the university to a moral revolution
in American life and, along with it, a radical reorganization of the univer-
sity’s structure that would have abolished rank and made salary commen-
surate with need rather than (perceived) merit. Unsurprisingly, the latter
plan appeared “Bolshevist” to many of the faculty, but understanding that
they could make a case more strongly on the basis of the intellectualhealth
of the university than on that of personal financialinteresttheyemphasized
a threat to individual intellectual freedom.44
In this context, Wind’s counterattack was rather ill-judged; he defended
Hutchins by attacking McKeon. How could the faculty claim intellectual
freedom was threatened by Hutchins, he argued, when it was actually
McKeon who was exerting undue control over the departments and faculty of theDivision of theHumanities? Oneof thecornerstones of hisargument,
presented in a “Bill of Particulars,” was the teaching of Hum 2. In the bill,
Wind inveighed against what he saw as the doctrinaire methods promoted
by its instructional manual, written by McKeon.45 Wind objectedto thefact
that the instructions were “ambiguous on the subject of history” by which
he meant disingenuous (claiming history is unimportant to the interpre-
tation of texts but then requiring memorization of dates); that they sepa-
rated form and content and proposed an initial and primary approach of
dealing only with form; and that they suggested he should be able to “teach
[students] in three hours how to read Herodotus or Thucydides or Gibbon
when every word in these authors is full of connotations which they have
no equipment to understand.”46
Wind’s bill of particulars wasdismissed bythe faculty senate, and hesoon
moved on—expecting an imminentreturn to London—toSmith College.47
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outcast” it was “today the only honourableposition” (Wind, letter to Gertrud Bing,15 June 1945,folder ii, box I, 5, EWA).
48. David Grene, “Statement by Mr. David Grene,” in “Bill of Particularsin Support of the
Statement Regarding the Memorial to the Board of Trustees.”49. Leslie C. Warren, letter to Clarence H. Faust,10 July 1945,folder 14 “Humanities Divisionof,
1940–78,” box38, RichardMcKeon Papers, UCA.
Others remained who shared his view; a young faculty member in Classics,
David Grene, joined Wind’s dissent, protesting that expertise was routinely
ruled out of order in meetings of Humanities 2 teaching staff. As he tells it,
the course was “the place where the failure to understand that the assumedobjectivity of the ‘disciplines’ is no objectivity at all, has borne hardest on
the non-conformists and where the mental attitude of such non-conform-
ists has most consistently been treated with a sorrowful pity or disciplinary
measures or most often by an apparent unwillingness to admit that such a
disagreement is honestly possible by a fully conscious intellectual oppo-
nent.”48 Grene described the comical resultsof the dogmaticand indiscrim-
inate application of Aristotle’s four causes or the theory of tragedy in his
Poetics to Aeschylus and Gibbon—against the protestations of those who
had expertise in Greek. In the next year, Leslie Clare Warren, an instructor
in the course, expressed similar views. In the humanities course, Warren
suggested, Aristotelian theory was introduced covertly and repeatedly via a
series of textual illustrations so that by the time it was explicitly presented,it appeared universal and inevitable. Ironically or not, Warren used the lan-
guage of pagan mysteries: theHum 2 method is a “technique forintellectual
conditioning that more closely resembles a priestly rite than an educative
process” that makes of the humanities “a narrow and useless academic
cult.”49
The Concealed GodThe lectures Wind didn’t give at Chicago were published in 1958 as Pagan
Mysteries of the Renaissance, and it is in a central chapter of this book that
he proposes his interpretation of the Primavera. Wind,likeGombrich,drew
on Ficino’s neo-Platonic thinking in elucidating the painting, based on Fi-
cino’s close association with Botticelli and the painter’s patrons among the
Medici family. Ficino would, in this view, have provided the philosophical
underpinningsfor the painting (while classical literatureandcontemporary
lyric provided much of the overt subject matter). Wind’s approach makes
more systematic use of neo-Platonism than Gombrich’s does and opposes
Panofsky’s rationalist reading of neo-Platonic love. For Wind, the divine
love toward which the Florentine neo-Platonists strove encompassed fren-
zied ecstasy as well as calm devotion—inseparable, in his view.
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50. Gombrich, “Botticelli’s Mythologies: A Study in the Neo-Platonic Symbolismof HisCircle,” Journal of the Warburg and CourtauldInstitutes 8 (1945):24. Cupid is a child and alsofunctions as an identifying attributeof Venus.
51. With his Medici features,he is sometimes identified with Lorenzo the Magnificent; but theman in the pointed hat and white robes to his left (our right) makes a better match with portraitsof Lorenzo,especially if we consider a date in the later 1470s.
Following the neo-Platonic fascination with triads, Wind focuses on the
groups of three in the painting, in particular the three Graces, whichhe saw
as the representation of movement between the soul and the divine. The
divine emanates toward the soul, which receives the emanation and thenturns itself back to the divine; the triad is that of giving, receiving, and re-
turning. For Wind, the depicted Graces, from left to right, are Pleasure,
Chastity, and Beauty—not simply a trio of undifferentiated nymphs. With
her determined gaze, her unbound hair licking like flames, Pleasure’s in-
terest in the demure Chastity is more passionate than sisterly; Beauty joins
the two as a mean between extremes.
If we think about this painting in terms of threes, what happens to the
arrangement of its figures? On the left, the triad of Graces; on the right, a
triad of transformation in which Zephyr captures Chloris, making her into
Flora, who then returns his love. With six figures organized into two triads,
we are left with two major figures, Venus and Mercury, and one who is, as
Gombrich put it, “not much of a person.”50
Long before I knew anything of neo-Platonism or Warburg or Wind, I
was bothered by something about this painting. The composition looks as
if it is supposed to be symmetrical, but isn’t. A powerful formal logic—in
the compositionaltraditionin which Botticelli worked—wouldsuggestthat
Venus shouldbe at thecenter, butshe standsslightly to the rightof theactual
mathematical center of the panel. It is perhaps this very fact that caused
Vasari to give the title of Primavera to thepainting(assuming that thefigure
we now call “Flora” is the goddess of the springtime). Understood as the
title figure, “Primavera” seems to upstage Venus. To make Venus the center
of the panel would require adding slightly less than one figure’s width to
the right-hand side.
For comparison, we can look to Botticelli’s Adoration of the Magi from
around 1475 (fig. 2). Now in the Uffizi, it was commissioned by Guaspare
di Zanobi del Lama for his funerary chapel in Santa Maria Novella. Thetwo
works share a surprising number of features. First, thematic: the three
Graces have to do with gift-giving, as do the three Magi. Each of the two
groups of three attends a central figure, Venus and the Virgin respectively,
who appear in similar positions and resemble each other closely. The pose,
position, and face of the young man in the lower leftcorner of the Adoration
recall the Primavera’ s Mercury.51 The figures leaning forward in the right
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208 Rebecca Zorach / Botticelli’s Primavera
f igure 2. Sandro Botticelli(1440–1510).Adoration of the Magi. Uffizi.Photo: Scala/ArtResource, NY.
foreground mimic the movement of Chloris. Reducing the comparison to
a series of formal parallels, we might see the Adoration as a triangle and the
Primavera as a flattened version of the same triangle—except for the fact
that theyellow-robed figure at thelower right of the Adoration, a significant
figure (often thought of as a self-portrait of the painter) corresponds to noformal feature of the Primavera.
Wind claimed that “the crux of any interpretation of the Primavera isto
explain thepart played by Mercury” andthat “the composition ofthe paint-
ing is therefore not fully understood, nor the role of Mercury quite com-
prehended, until he and Zephyr are seen as symmetrical figures” (PM, pp.
121, 124–25). Yet Zephyr is a kind of demigod, more like the nymphs or
Graces thanlike the stately Olympians Venusand Mercury. Venusis flanked
by a triad on either side, but only one side has a “major” god to frame the
scene. Mercury’s and Zephyr’s relations to the female figures are quite dif-
ferent: Mercury rules over the three Graces; Zephyr, a lesser figure in Greek
myth, is the agent of Chloris’s transformation into Flora. He also partici-
pates fully in the triadic group that corresponds to the Graces on the otherside, part of a triad rather than ruler over it. The painting is a musical phrase
missing its final note.
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Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2007 209
52. See MarsilioFicino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, 2 vols. in 4 (1572; Turin,1959–62),2:2:1559.
53. Quoted in Gombrich, “Botticelli’s Mythologies,”p. 57. See Ficino, letter to AlbertoVeronensi, 20 Oct. 1481, Opera omnia, 1:2:845. Another lettermentionsthe same three; see Ficino,
letterto Matthaeo Forliensi, [n.d.], Opera omnia, 1:2:862.54. See Ficino, The Book of Life, trans.Charles Boer(Dallas, 1980), p. 3. “There are three planets,
which we have mentioned before, that are extremely favorable to contemplationand eloquence:the Sun, Venus,and Mercury”(p. 13).
55. See Ficino, In Plotinum, 2:2:1561, 1560.56. Ficino, speech 1, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, trans. Sears Jayne (Dallas,
1985),chap. 4.57. This fact was noticed by Eugenio Marino, who mentions the sun as invisible figurefor the
Christiangod in his theologicalreadingof the painting. See Eugenio Marino, Estetica, fede, e critica d’arte: “L’arte poetica” di Savonarola,” “L’estetica” di Ficino e “La primavera” di Botticelli (Rome,1997), pp. 193–96, pl. 31.As Marino puts it, Wind’s triadic interpretationrequires him to “double”the figureof Zephyr (p. 162).
If a figure were missing from thescene, whowould it be?Whatgod might
flank the scene on the right? An answer is found in the very same writings
of Ficino cited by both Gombrich and Wind; it is, I think, Apollo. In fact,
Wind hints at this when he cites a text by Ficino that begins with the triadMercury, Venus, and Apollo and suggests a musical transformation in “the
key of Apollo” (PM, p. 130).52 Given his interest in triads, it is surprising
that Wind did not follow through with the idea of Apollo’s relation to the
twoothergods.In fact, thetriadof Mercury, Venus, and Apollo (orthesun),
interpreted in many different ways, reappears insistentlyin theFicinian cor-
pus. Ficino writesof them, “thesestars are, among thecelestial bodies, those
which most affect by their favor the human genius.”53 In The Book of Life,
he declares that the three heavenly guides of scholars are Mercury, Apollo,
and Venus. A scholar should rise early in the morning when these three
planets (including the sun) are in force.54 In his commentary on Plotinus’s
Ennead I.3, which deals with the means for the soul to ascend to the heavens
through contemplation, Ficino takes the three gods as figures of the threetypesof humans who canfollow paths of ascent:the philosopher(Mercury),
the lover (Venus), and the musician (Apollo). From that starting point, Fi-
cino works analogically and piles interpretation on interpretation. He
equates the gods with the senses: Venus with sight,Apollo with hearing,and
Mercury with the imagination. These are the three highest of the six senses
of humans, which included the imagination; they contrast with smell,taste,
and touch, the lower and more bodily senses.55 In his commentary on the
Symposium Ficino states thatthese higher sensesarethe onlysensesrequired
for love.56 Further, Mercury is the good, Venus theintellect,Apollo thesoul.
Mercury is truth, Venus beauty, Apollo concord. Whatever variety there
may be in these interpretations, it is clear that the three gods persistently
form a triad.57
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210 Rebecca Zorach / Botticelli’s Primavera
58. Ficino, “In Praise of Matrimony,”The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, trans.membersof theLanguage Departmentof the School of EconomicScience, London, 7 vols. (London, 1981), 3:70.
59. See Ficino,“Apologus: In traductionem libride amore missam ab Alamanno Donato ad
LaurentiumMedicem” and “Apologus: Quod malese habet Lucilia, id est, anima, quandoàPhoebo, id est, à Deo, discedit,” Opera omnia, 1:2:848–49.
60. Gombrich alsopoints out that Alberti recommended nine or ten figures as the maximumfor a painting;here we have eight or nine, depending on whether Cupidis counted,and Apollowouldgive us nine or ten. Archival documents equivocate about the number of figures. John
Shearman has published archivaldocuments relating to the Medicicollections in whichadiscrepancy appears between two copies (from1499 and 1503) of a 1498 document:in the first,there are nine figures, in the second, eight. See John Shearman,“The Collections of the YoungerBranch of the Medici,” Burlington Magazine 117(Jan.1975): 17.
61. See Stephen Campbell, The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Paintingand the “Studiolo” of Isabello d’Este (New Haven, Conn., 2006), chap. 4, and also Wind, Bellini’s Feast of the Gods: A Study in Venetian Humanism (Cambridge, Mass., 1948).
62. The surface has been stripped down to the barepanel (it appears) in two narrow areas on
the lower half of the far right-hand side.Umberto Baldini, “La Primavera” del Botticelli: Storia di un quadro e di un restauro (Milan, 1984)does not address this issue, instead showing a preferencein illustrations for cropping the painting severely on the right.
Were Apollo positioned to the right of Zephyr, he would produce a more
satisfying formal symmetry, according to typical Renaissance conventions.
Such positioning is suggested in a letter by Ficino to Antonio Pelotti, in
which the philosopher praises marriage by saying that “there Phoebus, lordof the Muses, and their companion Mercury, move as escorts on either side
of Venus, mother of love and of music, and walk with her almost step for
step, soto speak, and never gofar from her.”58 To Wind, the figure of Zephyr
appeared sufficient to provide completion to the group on the right. But
Apollo might also play a role here. In another letter by Ficino, he makes an
appearance as the father of Flora. In the springtime she wanders into the
realm of Venus where she discovers bodily pleasures but also pains—from
which she returns to her father, “author of life-giving medicine,” to seek
healing (quoted in “BM,” p. 61).59 As father of Flora, herself the namesake
of the city of Florence, Apollo would appropriately govern thegroupon the
right. With Apollo and Mercury flanking the scene, we would have two tri-
ads ruled over by Olympians, a total of nine figures in three groups of three.60 Were Apolloto appearin thepicture itwouldalsomakethis painting
a precursor, in reverse, of Mantegna’s morecomplicatedlycomposed paint-
ing usually known as the Parnassus (fig. 3). Here the triad appears very ex-
plicitly: Apollo to the left, Venus in the top center (with Mars as her
accessory), and Mercury at the right.61
I am not claiming that the painting has been cut down—though there
are some peculiarities at its rightmost extremity, and Chloris and Zephyr
aretheonlytwofigureswhosebodiesarecutoffbytheedgeofthepainting.62
I suggest, however, that the painting would have raised the question of
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Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2007 211
f igure 3. Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506). Venusand Marswith Vulcan, Apollo, and Mercury (“Parnassus”). Louvre. Photo: Erich Lessing/ArtResource, NY.
63. See Charles M. Rosenberg, The Este Monuments and Urban Development in Renaissance
Ferrara (Cambridge, 1997), p. 102. See alsoRosenberg, “The Iconographyof the Saladegli Stucchiin the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara,” Art Bulletin 61 (Sept. 1979): 377–84. Rosenberg’sargumentwas brought to my attentionby Iva Olah, “Tarocchiand the Depiction of ChristianPrincely Virtues in the Schifanoia Frescoes” (M.A.thesis, Carleton University, 2005).
64. See Angelo Poliziano, “Monodia In LaurentiumMedicem, intonato per ArrighumIsac,”Angeli Politiani Opera, quae quidem extitere . . . (Basel, 1553), pp. 621–22. The same workpp. 594–95, refers to Lorenzoas the “pure brillianceof an Apollinianstar [Purus Apollinei sideris . . . nitor].”
Apollo’s absence: why was he not in the picture? One might hypothesize
that the god was “absent” when a particular viewer was absent from the
room in which the painting hung and present when he was there—that is,
perhaps Apollo was intended to be embodied in a privileged viewer. A con-
temporary analogy might be found in the absence, among a series of theVirtues in theSala deiStucchi at thePalazzo Schifanoia inFerrara, ofJustice.
Charles Rosenberg has argued persuasively that this absence implied that
Justice was to be embodied by the duke, Borso d’Este.63 Perhaps the “miss-
ing” god was to be figured by the elder Lorenzo de’ Medici—Lorenzo the
Magnificent—himself. Angelo Poliziano associates Lorenzo with Phoebus
in his funeral ode and refers to him as Apollo’s poet in his Stanze; indeed
the grounds for such an identification are manifold.64 Like Apollo,Lorenzo
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212 Rebecca Zorach / Botticelli’s Primavera
65. On absence (mostly in modernart), see studies collected in Figurations de l’absence:Recherches esthe ´tiques, ed. Jean-PierreMourey (St.-Étienne, 1987).
66. This asymmetry is madevery apparentin an illustration in Umberto Baldini’s bookon therestoration of the Primavera that splits the painting into its figuralparts. See Baldini, “La
Primavera” del Botticelli, pp. 92–93.67. On this topic, see Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, “Semiotics and Art History,”Art Bulletin
73 (June 1991): 174–208.
was a musician and poet. Apollo is the inventor of the laurels of poets; a
common pun, used by Poliziano, connects the name Lorenzo with laurel
(Lauro). The absent Apollo suggests a kind of secret flattery—a secret un-
derstood by a larger circle of viewers, by which a distance was closed be-tween the human ruler and the gods of pictorial representation.
There is in art history a very strong presumption against arguing from
absence, and the prestige of the painting, the fact that so many eminent
viewers have seen it as complete, makes it hard to imagine that something
is “missing” from it.65 When, however, one combines the formal logic of
the painting with the pervasiveness of the Ficinian triad—and adds the evi-
dence of Mantegna’striadic Parnassus—thisabsencebecomespalpable. My
suggestion thus depends not only on content but also on form—the lack
of symmetry of the painting’s composition.66 And even if iconologists were
inclined to wring rich meaning from tiny details, they were less ready to
explain absences. Wind (and Gombrich) thus missed an opportunity to
combine a focus on form with a complementary focus on iconography. Per-haps this came from a sensitivity to the critique leveled at them by the likes
of McKeon: that they were already importing too much from outside the
work. But if iconographers frustrated formalists by assuming that everyde-
tail possessed extrapictorial meaning, formalists in the mid-century mold
would have been hard pressed to see the painting as unbalanced or incom-
plete; they generally viewed works as complete and bounded, possessing
tensions, to be sure, but tensions that could be resolved internally to the
object.
This notion of boundedness is perhaps a necessary prerequisite to the
idea of art as autonomous. This concept has a hoary pedigree in art history,
one that dates back to Kant and hassince been revived repeatedly. Thework
of art is thus isolated from social life, existing in its own aesthetic sphere.
Even those art historians who consider objects in historical context make
an assumption that the work of art (and the working of art) canbe detached
from something else called a context.67 This detachment presupposes a dis-
tinction like the one Crane made between the particular and the general.
The Chicago critics added a soupçon of antitotalitarian liberty to the au-
tonomy of the art object. But, here as elsewhere, the autonomousart object
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Critical Inquiry / Autumn 2007 213
68. With the notion of “bewegtes Beiwerk.” See Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, andKurt Forster,introductionto ibid., pp. 13, 65 n. 54. See alsoPhilippe-AlainMichaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York, 2004).
69. See Artists at Court: Image-Making and Identity1300–1550, ed. Campbell (Boston, 2004),
esp. EvelynWelch, “Painting as Performancein the ItalianRenaissance Court,” pp. 19–32.70. See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. CatherinePorter (Cambridge, Mass.
1993).
comes around to serve something—in this case, a notion of human free-
dom. Within art history and criticism our view of paintings of the past is
still conditioned by modernist expectations of painting as nonnarrative,
subjectless (as in Gilbert’s wishful thinkingabout Renaissanceart).As I sug-gested earlier, Renaissance art has often been mobilized to establish a nar-
rative of progressive vanquishing of content that tends toward a notion of
perfect freedom for the human subject. We might, however, make more
headway with Renaissance art by considering objects and subjects as a web
of multiple dependencies. This does not, however, mean stasis. The forms
of objects were, in the Renaissance, regularly put intomotion—asWarburg,
notably, emphasized.68 Images and iconographies circulated from panel
painting to parade to manuscript, costume,and amulet.In theRenaissance,
the objects we consider art played a variety of social and politicalfunctions,
and those who might be designated professionally as painters or architects
also painted furniture and banners for festive occasions, designed luxury
objects and tapestries, and made political statements—as Botticelli didwhen he was commissioned to paint the defeated Pazzi conspirators,
hanged and humiliated, on the outer wall of the Palazzo Vecchio in 1478.
Objects attained shape and significance by their participation in complex
scenes of social and cultural performance.69
Much recent research in Renaissance art suggests we should think of ob-
jects as more ambiguously approaching the status of the human—part of
a continuum that includes stories of animated statues, portraits that seem
to lack nothing but breath, coins that serve as representatives of the sov-
ereign, performancesin which humans are costumed as images, andobjects
invested with subjective value through gifting, proximity,or memory. They
do not, in other words, fit a simple subject-object paradigm. Thus, if we see
meaning latent in the web of social, political, and psychological relationsin
which a work exists—as exchange or interchange, circulation, intersection,
ambivalence—we might pry it from the assumptions of modern subject-
object relations.70
I have dealt with these issues at some lengthin order to establisha frame-
work for understanding pictures. Beyond a simple oppositionbetween “ob-
ject of aesthetic contemplation” and “medium for conveying iconographic
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214 Rebecca Zorach / Botticelli’s Primavera
71. See forexample Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy (New York,1979), p. 158. Forinstance,in one sign of covert exercise of power, Lorenzo monitoredvoting in the governingcouncil,while not explicitly interveningin it.
72. Work by Webster Smithdrew attention to the presencein an inventory of the Medici housein the ViaLarga (owned by Lorenzo di Pierfrancescoand his brotherGiovanni) of a painting with“nine figures,men and women” (Webster Smith, “On the Original Location of the Primavera,” Art Bulletin 57 [Mar. 1975]: 37). See also Shearman, “TheCollections of the Younger Branch of theMedici.” The painting hung above a lettuccio (“daybed”)in a room next to Lorenzodi
Pierfrancesco’s bedroom.73. See Bredekamp, Botticelli “Primavera”:Florenz als Garten der Venus (Frankfurt, 1988), esp.
pp. 34–55. Dempsey reviews the competingproposals on the datingof the work in his “AHypothesisConcerning the Castello Nativity and a Scruple about the Date of Botticelli’s
Primavera,” in Opere e giorni: Studi su mille anni di arte europea, ed. Klaus Bergdolt and GiorgioBonsanti (Venice, 2001), pp. 349–54. Proposals include the idea th