Du texte a l'image: La Calomnie d'Apelle et son iconographie.

This is a lavishly produced volume and for its help the Getty Grant Program is to be commended. The Calumny of Apelles, to adapt the phrase of Peter Schjeldahl, is a subject at once pedantic and passionate, based in Lucian on a properly classical writer and having as its theme an evident humanist vice, the disruption of discourse, Calumny, or as Massing often renders it here to emphasize its juridical aspects, Delation. But there is more, for this description or ekphrasis of Calumny was set upon a representation of the subject by Apelles, the perfect painter of antiquity, purportedly the target of this abuse from a rival artist, envious of the favors Apelles had received at court. To Lucian this detail had not mattered; but amidst the often bitter confusions of the Renaissance, several artists, knowing and emboldened enough to think grandly of their situation, used this allegory as a justification and consolation, picking its parts for their own use, the Judge with his Midas-like ears and his companions, Ignorance and Suspicion, Calumny and Envy, Artifice and Deceit, shamed only in their wickedness by Repentance who turned her eyes away before the solitary, yet approaching figure of Truth.

This story has been well known to modern scholars since 1886 when the philologist Richard Forster laid out the later story of Lucian and the first representations of Calumny in the visual arts. To that extent Massing's text, which was essentially completed in 1985, is the culmination of an already complex tradition of detailed scholarship. And all the expected names and texts are all here, Botticelli, Raphael, Mantegna, Signorelli and so forth; plus the story of the emblems books, still a part of iconographical detections, and at the end some interesting but, for Massing deficient, examples of Calumny and Apelles in the nineteenth century from artists like Edward Burne-Jones, Charles Meynier and Jean Louis Bezard. To fill out this narrative, Massing brings in some particular terms; the idea of schemata used so well by Ernst Gombrich in his history of representation; or what, in a potentially resonant phrase, he refers to as the semantic impermanence of all the various translations and transformations of Lucian, from Greek to Latin or whatever other more modern languages, and then from texts to images; and at the end, past the annotations and associations and confusions and errors of the record, what he calls the dispersal of this subject--I take it this is how his term eclatement is to be understood--in the iconographical dictionaries of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.

In all this, Massing is sure of the details of his scholarship. And the entries in the catalogue of examples, some 55 in all of representations known and lost of the theme or of subjects related to it, will surely now be the place to go for a first account of these materials. But for the most part it is not these examples in themselves that retain our attentions, the one or two emblems, the one sword handle and so forth, but the account that can be made of them as symptoms or instances in what we call the revival of the classical tradition and its dispersal and its constant resubstantiations after that from moment to moment and country after country. In stating at the outset how he will attend to this part of his task, Massing is ambitious, invoking phrases of great pith and moment, the semantics of translations, or the dichotomy of what he calls the signified and the signifiers in the relationship between the Greek text of Lucian and the different translations, or the surprises of the genesis of the genre of the emblems, and then at the end, using the same unguarded metaphor, the surprising results of his study. Yet how well he lives up to his announcement is not clear. He says that he was concerned to avoid the kind of eclectic or superficial analysis that leads to what he calls a synthetic account of the Renaissance; but it must be said that it is not clear that what he lays out is, for all his claims to the contrary, any different. Massing talks of letting himself be guided by the original texts, studied as systematically as possible, and of ridding himself of the idea of the masterpiece; and the reader might be willing to go along with such a statement of method. But little follows; and certainly when it comes to the method itself that he uses, it seems that everything is rather standard and conventional. It is surely not enough, in this day and age, to speak of being guided by an image or text, or to say that something is being studied systematically without saying what that guidance or that system is. A minute later, confounding things further, Massing says that his aim here was not only to arrive at a better comprehension of the works he talks about but also to present a glimpse, an apercu, of the values of which they were "at once the emanation and the expression." At which point, for all the apparently rigorous talk at the beginning of semiotics and schemata, the reader after encountering words like comprehensions and glimpses and emanations and expressions, may wonder what the method is that Massing is laying claim to or what indeed any of the words he uses are meant to mean, since they seem to come from such very different ranges of language.

This is disappointing. The historical and literary evidence Massing has assembled here is clear but the text around this catalogue is at once curiously old-fashioned and unwelcoming. Perhaps here in calling it unwelcoming I am voicing too personal a response. But to me it seems that Massing, so sure apparently of the authority of the way he deals with this material, not only passes over the many assumptions he makes in dealing with the material as he does but also, compounding the air of arrogance that lies over this, criticizes quite ungraciously some of those--the present reviewer included--who have attempted to plough these same cultural fields before. The Calumny is an image of conversation broken; it seems sad that this study appears in its intellectual temper to block the idea of courteous discourse that the humanists so feelingly and so carefully laid out in this allegory.

BRYN MAWR COLLEGE