 |
| 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] |
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten