zaterdag 16 februari 2019

Spinozisme over leven, dood en zelfdoding bij #Spinoza [intermezzo]

 
Het zal de regelmatige bezoeker van dit Spinoza-blog niet zijn ontgaan dat de vijf blogs in de serie onder de titel “Spinozisme over leven, dood en zelfdoding bij Spinoza” geïllustreerd werden met - telkens een ander - schilderij van Luca Giordano (1634-1705): The Death of Seneca / La muerte de Séneca. Hij maakte er vele. Daarover gaat het in dit intermezzo-blog.

Luca Giordano (1634-1705), the Death of Seneca, ca. 1650–1675 - Bolton Museum and Art Gallery
 
Maar eerst breng ik een citaat uit Gregor Damschen & Andreas Heil (eds.), Brill's Companion to Seneca: Philosopher and Dramatist. BRILL, 2013 - 896 pagina's – books.google.

“The degree of influence ancient-stoic philosophemes had on Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) is currently a topic of controversy (Klessinger 2008). It is known, however, that Seneca's Epistulae formed a part of his private library (Klessinger 2008: 998f.). Furthermore, Seneca is quoted by name in an important passage of Spinoza's Ethica (5.42s). David Hume (1711-1776) presented Seneca in his Dialogues concerning natural religion—written in 1751, but published not before 1779—as an icon of rational religion, with Hume summing up his concept of a natural religion with a quotation from Seneca (epist. 95.47): deum colit, qui novit; everything else he considered 'absurd, superstitious, or even impious" (ed. Gaskin 1993: no. 140).”
Daar ik de afbeelding op de cover zo mooi vind, haal ik die hier nog eens apart naar binnen - een uitstapje binnen een intermezzo.


University of Glasgow, Special Collections, MS Hunter 231, page 276, between 1299 and 1399 [cf.]
 
Veel van wat er over Seneca te weten valt, komt in dit boek aan de orde, zo o.a. op p. 60 de transcriptie van de teksten in bovenstaande afbeelding [cf. books.google]. Maar Luca Giordano met zijn vele Seneca-schilderijen komt in dit boek niet voor. Wel vinden we over hem iets in een ander werk over Seneca, dat van James Ker, waarover verderop. En we vinden e.e.a. in het volgende boek, waaruit ik hier een passage uit het eerste hoofdstuk en onder een uit het 23e hoofdstuk citeer.

Susanna Braund, "Seneca Multiplex: The Phases (and Phrases) of Seneca's Life and Works," Chapter 1 in Shadi Bartsch & Alessandro Schiesaro (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Seneca. Cambridge University Press, 2015, schrijft: 
"Seneca wanted his legacy to be the imago vitae suae (Ann. 15.62). Ironically, perhaps, given the struggle it was for him to die, it was the imago mortis suae that resonated for later ages. The many representations of the death of Seneca are analyzed in an excellent study by James Ker. In a chapter devoted to the receptions of Seneca's death (chapter 7), Ker shows how Jerome, for example, aligns Seneca's Stoic death with Christian martyrdom (On Famous Men 12.3 ) while making no mention of the bath (Ker 2009a, 184-5). By contrast, the visual iconography of Seneca's death makes much of the bath: illuminated manuscripts from the thirteenth century onward show Seneca standing naked in a barrel bath with his arms stretched out while attendants cut the veins and Nero makes an imperious executionary gesture. A late fifteenth-century illumination for the Roman de la Rose has Nero peeking from behind a curtain at an effeminized and youthful Seneca standing in a bath while the attendant applies a scalpel in the form of a pen to his left arm. Another image from the same period, an illustration for the Speculum historiale by Vincent of Beauvais, juxtaposes Seneca in his bathtub with the gruesome physical examination of Agrippina's naked corpse. The first treatment of Seneca's death in drama is in the final act of Matthew Gwinne's extraordinarily long Latin play Nero (1603), in which Gwinne's character borrows from Seneca's tragic and philosophical discourse. There follow, among many items one could mention, paintings by Rubens (1614—I5), Luca Giordano (around 1650-3 and around 1684-5), Jacques-Louis David (1773), and Joseph Noel Sylvestre (1875), plays by Friedrich von Creutz (Der sterbende Seneca, 1754) and Ewald Christian von Kleist (Seneca, prose draft 1758, versified in 1767), and Heiner Müller's poem Senecas Tod (1992). Each of these treatments has its own agenda and appropriates particular aspects of Seneca to remake him as a Stoic sage or a proto-Christian martyr or a hypocritical courtier or a student of death.”[p. 17]
* * *
Luca Giordano had, zoals in deze blogs blijkt, wel méér schilderijen over de dood van Seneca dan de twee die Susanna Braund hiervoor noemt - ze noemde precies de twee waarover James Ker in zijn "excellent study" schreef in een passage die ik hierna zal citeren.
Giordano was een tijdgenoot van Spinoza die meerdere malen - hij schilderde in opdracht of op verzoek - een schilderij maakte over het thema van Seneca’s dood. Dat zegt iets over de belangstelling die er in de 17e eeuw was voor dat onderwerp. “De Napolitaanse kunstenaar Luca Giordano (1634-1705) stond bekend als Luca Fa-presto, Luca de snelle werker. Die bijnaam kreeg hij niet zomaar! Hij vervaardigde duizenden schilderijen en fresco’s. En, net zo belangrijk, hij groeide uit tot een van de meest invloedrijke schilders van de Napolitaanse School.” Aldus Aniek Rooderkerken in een interessante tekst over Giordano’s “massaproductie aan schilderijen”. Over die schilderijen van hem gewijd aan Seneca’s dood lezen we in

James Ker, The Deaths of Seneca. Oxford University Press, 2013 - 432 Pages | 39 illus. – books.google
In The Deaths of Seneca, James Ker offers the first comprehensive cultural history of Seneca's death scene, situating it in the Roman imagination and tracing its many subsequent interpretations. Ker shows first how the earliest accounts of the death scene by Tacitus and others were shaped by conventions of Greco-Roman exitus-description and Julio-Claudian dynastic history. At the book's center is an exploration of Seneca's own prolific writings about death—whether anticipating death in his letters, dramatizing it in the tragedies, or offering therapy for loss in the form of consolations—which offered the primary lens through which Seneca's contemporaries would view the author's death. These ancient approaches set the stage for prolific receptions, and Ker traces how the death scene was retold in both literary and visual versions, from St. Jerome to Heiner Müller and from medieval illuminations to Peter Paul Rubens and Jacques-Louis David. Dozens of interpreters, engaging with prior versions and with Seneca's writings, forged new and sometimes controversial views on Seneca's legacy and, more broadly, on mortality and suicide. The Deaths of Seneca presents a new, historically inclusive, approach to reading this major Roman author.
Luca Giordano (1634-1705), De dood van Seneca / Tod des Seneca, 1650-1653, - Munich, Alte Pinakothek.
Ker schrijft in de Introduction: “In two works by the late-baroque painter Luca Giordano, a figure is located at Seneca's feet. In the first painting, from c. 1650-53 [cf. hierboven], the figure is recognizable as a scribe, with pen poised to take dictation from the dying man. In the later version, from c. 1684-85 [cf. onder], the figure holds a scalpel and is clearly engaged in cutting the veins in Seneca's foot.' Giordano's alternation draws a visual analogy between the two figures and also between the two events they signify. Beyond simply registering the temporal coextension between bleeding and dictating, the analogy hints rather at a codependency and indeed a func-tional equivalence between them. Without the letting of blood, Seneca's words would be just like any other words; and without being recorded in ink, Seneca's bloody death would disappear from memory. To this extent, bloodletting is writing and writing is bloodletting. (Elsewhere in the visual tradition, too, the scalpel used for opening Seneca's veins is often wielded like a pen or brush.) Furthermore, if the figure of the scribe may be understood as a placeholder for all other documenters of the event—the series of authors and painters to which Giordano himself now belongs—then the painter himself is in some sense also complicit in the slow violence of Seneca's death.” [p. 6]
Luca Giordano (1634-1705), the Death of Seneca, ca. 1684-1685 - Musée du Louvre


In de vierde en vijfde blog kwamen nog de volgende schilderijen van Luca Giordano’s met Seneca’s dood. De volgorde is niet zeker: de datering is vaak niet precies gegeven of geheel afwezig.  In volgende blogs volgen nog enige gravures naar schilderijen van Giordano. Opvallend is hoe er op al die schilderingen geschreven wordt: men hangt aan de lippen van de wijsgeer om zijn laatste wijze woorden op te vangen.

Luca Giordano (1634-1705), The Death of Seneca, Burghley House



Luca Giordano (1634-1705), La muerte de Séneca ca. 1660 - Museo de Arte de Ponce

[Een mogelijke inspiratiebron van Giordano]
Peter Paul Rubens  (1577–1640), Der sterbende Seneca, 1612/1613 - Alte Pinakothek
Hierover en over Giordano schrijft
Francesco Citty, “Seneca and the Moderns”. Chapter 23 in: Shadi Bartsch & Alessandro Schiesaro (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Seneca. Cambridge University Press, 2015
“His [Seneca’s] death is widely immortalized by the figurative tradition, according to two iconographic schemes already codified by Rubens; the first is that of Seneca dying (1612-5: Figure 1 [boven]), where the suicide appears accompanied by the soldiers who had informed him of Nero's order to kill himself, the opener of his veins, and a scribe who takes note of his last words. Seneca's figure, standing in a small basin, with cruciform arms and eyes serenely facing the sky, seems to recall a type of Christus patiens and therefore suggests the idea of a Christian Seneca, as outlined not only by the patristic tradition but also by Lipsius, a close friend of Rubens. This scheme is adopted, among others, by Gerrit van Hothorst [sic, = Honthorst] (1622-7) and Luca Giordano (1699 ca.: Figure 2 [het 3e hier: dat van Musée du Louvre]), who depicts Seneca partly recumbent, in a pose reminiscent of Christ's washing of feet. An alternative iconographic scheme focuses on the isolated figure of Seneca: divulged by the engraving made by Cornelis Galle from a drawing by Rubens and reproduced in the 1615  Lipsius edition (Figure 3 [hier niet te zien]), this pattern is repeated several times by Luca Giordano, who depicts an emaciated and seated Seneca, with the same face as the engraving by Theodor Galle for the 1605 Lipius edition; the eighteenth-century Seneca by Francesco Pittoni (1714) is more muscular and meditative, like that of Guercino, submerged to mid-torso in the bath (1640)." [p. 311]

Voor zijn scenes heeft Giordano mogelijk/waarschijnlijk zelfs gebruik gemaakt van bovenstaand schilderij van Rubens, hoewel zijn 'Seneca's' uitgemergelder zijn en alle zitten. Maar volgens James Ker  [cf. The Deaths of Seneca p. 212] heeft Giordano voor het gezicht van zijn Seneca niet naar dat van Rubens [of een gravure van een Galle] gekeken, maar gebruik gemaakt van de buste van Seneca die Guido Reni (1575 – 1642) kort na 1601 gemaakt had. Daar zit m.i. wel iets in.

Guido Reni (1575 - 1642) Testa di 'Seneca' / Head of 'Seneca' Terracotta
[gebruik gemaakt van afbeldingen op Flickr en Pinterest]



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