696 THE SURVIVAL OF CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY
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First is Jupiter, sitting in state upon his throne, holding scepter and thunderbolt.
Before him his armor bearer [the eagle] lifts the Trojan boy [i.e., Ganymede]
above the stars. Next with more stately gait, weighed down with gloomy age,
is Saturn; with veiled head and a gray cloak, holding a rake and sickle, a farmer
in aspect, he devours his sons.
A third type of handbook is represented by the Emblemata of Andrea Alciati
(1531), in which woodcuts of gods, virtues and vices, proverbs and aphorisms,
and many other subjects were depicted, each with a few lines of Latin elegiac
couplets, usually containing a moral lesson. Friendship, for example, was rep-
resented by a vine with clusters of grapes entwined round the trunk of a leaf-
less elm. Alciati concluded: "[The vine] warns us by its example to choose friends
whom the final day with its laws may not part from us." In 1571 a Latin com-
mentary was added to the Emblemata by the French jurist Claude Mignault, which
was extensive and important in its own right. The expanded work was frequently
reprinted, including duodecimo editions small enough to be carried in the pocket
or saddlebag of an artist or sightseer. Alciati's Emblemata was one of the most
important sources for the "correct" use of mythological figures as symbols or al-
legories, and his emblems can often be found in paintings of the later Renais-
sance and Baroque periods.
Two other handbooks were equally important. The Iconologia of Cesare Ripa
was published in 1593 and reissued with woodcuts in 1603. Ripa's commentary,
which was in Italian, separated the mythological figures from their narrative
contexts, so that they often became abstractions with a moral meaning. This ap-
proach was valuable for artists who wished to employ allegory, and the book
was translated and reissued frequently until the end of the eighteenth century.
The other important iconography was the Imagines of Philostratus, a Greek
work of the third century A.D. describing an art collection in Naples. It was trans-
lated into French by Blaise de Vigenère in 1578 and reissued in a splendidly il-
lustrated version in 1614, with woodcuts, explanatory poems, and commentary
containing a very wide range of classical myths.CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY IN RENAISSANCE ART
The classical gods had survived in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, but in
many disguises. Renaissance artists gave them back their classical forms. In Flo-
rence, Botticelli (1444-1510) combined medieval allegory with classical mythol-
ogy in his allegorical masterpieces, The Birth of Venus, Primavera, Venus and Mars,
and Pallas and the Centaur. In Venice, Giovanni Bellini (1430-1516), Giorgione
(1478-1510), and his pupil Titian (1487-1576) also drew on a variety of traditions
while representing the myths more or less in agreement with the handbooks.
Great artists, of course, like the four named here were hardly limited by these
criteria, as can be seen in Bellini's Feast of the Gods (see Color Plate 6).