Section Two
9 HOMER
Homer (fl. 9th or 8th century B.C.E.)
Opera (Greek)
Edited by Demetrius Chalcondylas
Florence: [Bartolommeo di Libri
and] Demetrius Damilas for the brothers Bernardus and Nerius
Nerlius, 9 December 1488
and 13 January 1488/9
Rare Books Division
The editio princeps, or first printed edition in the
original language, of the Homeric canon – the Iliad and
the Odyssey, together with the minor works – is the
first major component of ancient Greek literature to appear
in print and, some say, the most important incunabular edition
of a classical text from Greek antiquity. It would not be surpassed
for sheer physical size until the appearance of the Aldine
Aristotle a decade later.
Chalcondylas (1423–1511) was brought to Italy by Cardinal
Bessarion in 1447 and taught Greek in Perugia and Padua, gained
Lorenzo de’ Medici’s patronage, and served as tutor to Lorenzo’s
sons. He assisted Marsilio Ficino with his Latin translation
of Plato. His edition of Homer, dedicated to Lorenzo, is his
major accomplishment. He chose Damilas to create the typefont,
which was based upon the hand of Damilas’s fellow scribe Michael
Apostolis.
It is fitting that this great epic of Greek classical antiquity
was printed in Florence, home to so many Hellenistic refugees
following the fall of Constantinople. However, the world of
Greek editing and publishing migrated soon thereafter to Venice.
Political realities in the city of the Medici made it an uncongenial
environment in which to work, but the commercial mastery of
Venice drew the world of scholarship and publishing to it in
droves.
10 HOMER
Head of Homer, etching from:
Jim Dine
(American, born 1935) and Neil Curry (British, born 1937)
The Bending of the Bow: A Version of the Closing Books
of Homer's Odyssey … with images by Jim Dine
London: Enitharmon Press, 1993
Artist’s book with one lithograph,
four photogravures, and one separate intaglio print by Jim
Dine
Spencer Collection
The Bending of the Bow, poet and playwright Neil Curry’s
retelling of the final episodes of Homer’s Odyssey,
served as a new setting for Jim Dine to present images from
a series of richly worked drawings of classical and Hellenistic
sculpture, primarily in the collection of the Munich Glyptothek,
which he created during the years 1987–92. Portrayed in the
prints among the dramatis personae of the poem are a
Trojan warrior’s arm with shield, a goddess, the twisted torso
of a youth, a portrait head of a woman, and a Trojan archer
(“Paris”).
Dine’s Head of Homer (etching, drypoint, and power-tool
abrasion) is after a Roman copy in marble of a Greek original
(ca. 450 B.C.E.) in the collection of the Munich Glyptothek.
11 ALEXANDER THE GREAT and HOMER
Marcantonio Raimondi (Italian, ca. 1470–82—1527–34)
Alexander
the Great Placing Homer’s Books in Achilles’ Tomb
Engraving,
after Raphael (1483–1520)
Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division
of Art, Prints and Photographs, Print Collection, Isaac John
Greenwood Collection
In 343 or 342 B.C.E., Aristotle was summoned by Phillip II
of Macedon to tutor his thirteen-year-old son, Alexander, in
all subjects within the philosopher’s enormous intellectual
grasp and to prepare him for his predestined role as military
leader. Aristotle used Homer's Iliad as his model for
teaching the values of heroism embodied in the epic poem; and
Alexander supposedly would have grown up hearing assertions
that his family tree included Achilles, the most valiant Greek
warrior of the Trojan War, and his mother Olympias’s ancestor,
as well as Heracles, his father’s legendary forebear. Later
in life, Alexander utilized these illustrious forefathers to
his advantage to construct his own mythic image, sometimes
even referring to Zeus as his real father.
Raimondi (basing his engraving on a fresco attributed to Raphael
in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican) shows a helmeted
Alexander, to the right, during his legendary visit to Troy,
as he deposits a copy of the Iliad in Achilles’ tomb.
Alexander here bears little resemblance to Lysippos’s famous
Hellenistic-period portrait sculptures of the ancient world’s
most charismatic conqueror, characterized by the ruggedly handsome
face and distinctive shock of hair.
12 HOMER
Jannis Kounellis (Greek, born 1936)
Untitled
1973. Offset photolithograph with collaged photograph
Printed
by Studio Bulla, Rome; published by Giorgio de Dominicis, Rome.
No. 14 from an edition of 90
Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division
of Art, Prints and Photographs, Print Collection, Kennedy Fund
Greek sculptor, painter, poet, and performance artist Jannis
Kounellis, a resident of Rome since 1956, is most often associated
with Arte povera, a movement of politically motivated
artists (with whom he fervently sympathized as an exile from
his native country) that emerged in Italy in the late 1960s.
In his art he has often made reference to the mythologies of
the ancient Mediterranean world, and his use of fragmentary
plaster casts of classical sculpture in installations has been
interpreted as a visual expression of the disintegration of
culture.
Kounellis’s untitled print, an image of a hand holding an
antique oil lamp surrounded by a frame composed of close-up
photographs of the left ears of eighteen men, bears the artist’s
handwritten inscription: “Ettore, tu sei riflessivo e prudente
al pari di Zeus. Ascolta.” (“Hector, you are as thoughtful
and prudent as Zeus. Listen.”). In Homer’s Iliad, Apollo,
god of light and the sun, clearly sided with the Trojans and
entered the battle several times to protect and glorify Hector,
the eldest son of King Priam, brother of Paris, and unquestioned
hero of Troy. In this print, Apollo speaks words of encouragement
to the wounded Hector, who in the end was no match for the
Greek warrior Achilles, the bravest and mightiest in Agamemnon’s
army.
13 DIOSCORIDES
Pedanios Dioscorides (40–ca. 90)
Fi Hayula al-tibb (De materia medica)
Manuscript in
Arabic; ink, tempera, and gold on paper
Copied and illustrated
1889–90, probably in Teheran or Mashhad,
by Mirza Baqir for the Persian monarch Nasir al-Din Shah; translated
from the Syriac translation of Hunayn ibn Ishaq al-Tbadi (ca.
809–73) by Mihran ibn Mansur ibn Mihran (fl. 12th century)
Spencer
Collection, Persian Ms. 39
De materia medica was the earliest authoritative work
on remedial substances and the most important source for botanical
illustrations and pharmacological terminology from the ancient
world. It was compiled and written during and following the
reign of Nero by Pedanios Dioscorides, a Greek-speaking pharmacologist
who was born in Cilicia, a Roman province in southern Anatolia,
and who is known to have traveled extensively in the Middle
East, probably as a surgeon in the Roman army. Copies of De
materia medica in Greek were in circulation by the end
of the first century.
The original Greek manuscript of De materia medica was
translated into at least seven other languages; the first printed
version in Latin appeared in 1478 and the first printed edition
in Greek in 1499. The present, monumental manuscript of De
materia medica is a late copy in Arabic, containing 677
illustrations and descriptions of plants and their medicinal
properties and of 284 animals. The manuscript is open to the
section on garden herbs. Folio 100v (the right-hand page) features
depictions (top to bottom) of blite (Amaranthus blitum),
high mallow (Malva sylvestris; Greek, moloche),
and hollyhock (Alcea rosea), and folio 101r (the left-hand
page) shows orache, frosted orache (Atriplex rosea),
and garden cabbage (Brassica oleracea).
14 PTOLEMY
Claudius Ptolemaeus (ca. 100–ca. 170)
Geographia (Geography)
Translated by Jacopo di Angelo
da Scarperia
Manuscript in Latin; ink, tempera, and gold on
vellum
Written in or near Florence, ca. 1460–70
Manuscripts and Archives
Division, Ms. 97
Although little else is known about his life, Claudius Ptolemaeus
(known in English as Ptolemy) was probably a Greek who lived
in Alexandria, Egypt, the location of the greatest library
in the ancient world. His writings on astronomy, mathematics,
and geography represented the highest level of scientific thought
and investigation from the Greco-Roman world. His first major
work, the Almagest (ca. 150), contained reports of astronomical
observations, elucidated in mathematical terms, that he had
made over the preceding quarter-century.
Ptolemy’s fame as a geographer was as great as his reputation
as an astronomer and mathematician. Written in Greek, the text
of his second treatise, Geography (its full title has
been translated as “A Guide to Drawing a Map of the World”),
began with a definition of the author’s field of endeavor: “Geography
is a representation in pictures of the whole known world together
with the phenomena which are contained therein.” The earliest
surviving maps included in manuscripts of Geography date
only from about 1300.
This Latin manuscript of Geography, open to the map
of Greece, contains a world map and twenty-six regional maps
of parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia as far east as India.
The same versions of these maps were used in the first printed
editions of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries,
including the 1482 Ulm edition. It has been speculated that
the German cartographer Nicolaus Germanus of Reichenbach may
have used this very manuscript of Geography as the direct
model for that Ulm edition.
15 OLYMPIC GAMES
Les Jeux Olympiques, 776 av. J.-C. – 1896 … Deuxième
partie: Les Jeux Olympiques de 1896 par Le Baron de Coubertin
Athens: C. Beck; Paris: H. le Soudier, 1896
General Research
Division
The Olympic Games, whose legendary founding by Heracles was
recounted by Pindar, existed in some form at least 3,500 years
ago. The first games of historical times occurred in 776 B.C.E.,
which marked the beginning of the use of dates based on Olympiads,
the four-year periods between games. By the end of the sixth
century B.C.E., there were four major festivals featuring organized
athletic competitions – the Olympic Games at Olympia, honoring
Zeus, near the huge sanctuary dedicated to the chief deity
of the pantheon and the most celebrated of the pan-Hellenic
festivals; the Pythian Games, honoring Apollo, at Delphi; the
Nemean Games, honoring Zeus, at Nemea; and the Isthmian Games,
honoring Poseidon, at Corinth. In later periods, competitions
took place in many locations throughout the Greco-Roman world,
including Rome, Naples, Antioch, and Alexandria. The Games
were banned in 393 by decree of the Christian Roman Emperor,
Theodosius I, because of their ancient associations with what
were considered pagan gods.
The modern-era revival of the Olympics in 1896 in Athens has
been largely credited to the tireless efforts of the French
reformist educator Pierre Coubertin. A founding member and
president of the International Olympics Committee (IOC), Coubertin
was the principal author of the two-volume official publication
(shown here) commemorating the 1896 Olympics. The identical
front covers of both volumes picture a young Greek woman dressed
in contemporary native costume. The infant Heracles is depicted
strangling a serpent on a relief to the right; at the top right
on the entablature is a relief of infants engaged in the traditional
sporting events of the Olympics. Following his instructions,
Coubertin’s body was buried in Lausanne, headquarters of the
IOC, and his heart was interred near the ruins of ancient Olympia.
16 PINDAR
Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973)
Pindare. VIIIe Pythique
Alès: PAB [P. A. Benoit], 1960
Livre d’artiste, text
in Greek and in French translation based on Pindar’s Eighth
Pythian Ode and with four drypoints on celluloid, including
one on the front cover, by Picasso.
No. 20 from an edition of 56 copies
Spencer Collection
Picasso produced countless paintings, drawings, and prints,
as well as décor for the stage, inspired by themes and works
from antiquity. His depictions of the half-man, half-bull Minotaur
became an iconic surrealist image of the 1930s. His prints
for most of the 150 or so deluxe edition books on which he
collaborated, whether artistic dialogues with contemporary
poets or with writers of the past, seldom referred directly
to the texts they accompanied. Exceptions to this are found
in his three major livres d’artistes based on ancient
texts: Ovid’s Les métamorphoses (Paris, 1931),
in which the artist’s neoclassical-style etchings evoke the
imagery of the first-century Roman poet’s Greek mythologies;
Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (New York, 1934), with prints
clearly intended to illustrate specific scenes in the fifth-century
playwright’s antiwar comedy; and Pindare. VIIIe Pythique.
In 1960, after agreeing to create prints to accompany Pindar’s
Ode (composed and sung in 446 B.C.E. to honor a winning wrestler,
Aristomenes, at the Pythian Games at Delphi), Picasso furnished
his publisher with four large drypoints: the head of an elderly
bearded man (an imaginary portrait of Pindar?), a nude athlete,
a defeated contender, and, shown here, a youth marching to
his competition (or to battle). In depicting this heroic youth,
Picasso chose to suggest the archaic-period sculptural type
known as the kouros, traditionally viewed as the pan-Hellenic
ideal embodied by Apollo.
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