Thinkers In A Landscape

Pino Blasone

Thinkers in a Landscape A Philosophical Anecdotage

1 – Filippo Lippi, Vision of St. Augustine; The Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg Augustine on the Shore In the history of Western art, the theme of the thinker in a landscape is nearly an iconographic sub-genre. What a philosophy, it may be suggested by a landscape or an interior, or even by which landscape. For example, let us think of the paintings The Three Philosophers by Giorgione (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; ca. 1508), or Democritus in Meditation by Salvator Rosa (Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen; 1650), or else A Philosopher by Lamplight by Joseph Wright (Derby Art Gallery; 1769). Here we like better to focus on those pictures or tales, peculiarly dealing with philosophical anecdotes. Let us begin in medias res. George Dennis was a British traveller, archaeologist and diplomat. Together with his friend Samuel James Ainsley, a draftsman and landscapist, he explored the

coast of Tuscany, the ancient Etruria. First issued at London in 1848, the account of this journey is titled The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria. There, we may read this annotation: “The lonely Tower of Bertaldo, at the mouth of the Mignone, probably marks the site of Rapinium, another station on this coast, half-way between Centum Cellae (Civita Vecchia) and Graviscae. It is more commonly called Sant Agostino, from a legend of that saint. The holy man, as he once strayed along this shore, was pondering on the mysteries of the Trinity, and doubts, suggested by the evil powers whose attacks he deplores in his Confessions, were arising in his mind, when, on reaching this spot, he beheld a child busied in filling with water a small hole in the sand. Augustine asked what he was about. ‘Trying to put the sea into this hole,’ replied the criatura. ‘Impossible,’ cried the saint, laughing at the boy’s simplicity. ‘Most easy this,’ said the other, who now stood confessed an angel, ‘than for thee to comprehend those sublime mysteries thou art vainly seeking to penetrate’”. Unfortunately, today of the medieval Tower of Bertaldo, else called of St. Augustine, there are only ruins. But the site described by Dennis is still recognizable. Its natural solitude remains almost intact. On a marble plaque in the near church of Sant’Agostino alla Fontanella, the anecdote reported by the British traveller is resumed in Latin. Yet the small building dates to the 17th century. The plaque might date back to the 15th century, at most. Which is the origin of that apologue, so many painters were pleased to illustrate all over Europe? Who is, or what does he represent, the criatura nicely evoked by Dennis? In some versions of the legend, he is an angel. Other times, he is understood as Child Jesus himself. Indeed, an indecision or indeterminacy like that may easily occur, while dealing with an unconscious archetype. Undoubtedly, in this case the most suitable one is that of the eternal-miraculous child (puer aeternus), such as in the depth psychology of Carl G. Jung and James Hillman. Nay, the vision reflected in the tale looks typical of a relation between contrasting but complementary archetypes, as the puer and the senex: that is an old wise man, though all his knowledge cannot equal the innate wisdom of the puer. By the way, Jung told to have inherited the term “archetype” from Augustine as a philosopher. And a well known study by Hillman is titled Senex and Puer. No wonder, most artists represented Augustine as an aged bearded man, clad with the robes of a monk or else of an archbishop.

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2 – The Pinturicchio, Mystery of the Trinity; Galleria Nazionale Umbra, Perugia This is a formal anachronism, even if the symbolism of legends does not require a strict concordance with different life times. In fact, the historical Augustine became bishop when back to native North-Africa, after a long stay in Italy. We know, he started his treatise On the Trinity in Italy, but completed it far later. Thus, we can also suppose the shore, on which the episode is set, was a North-African one instead of the seaside of the Tuscia, which is the current name of the zone between Tuscany and Latium. Yet the sense and the moral of the story do not change a lot. Nor did change the kind of landscape, where painters used to set it, mostly an imaginary albeit Mediterranean one. As to the origin of the narrative, an early version can be found in an annotation by William Caxton, to his English paraphrase of The Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine. In 1483, Caxton had written: “I will set herein one miracle, which I have seen painted on an altar of St. Austin at the black friars at Antwerp, howbeit I find it not in the legend. […] On a time as he went by the sea-side in Africa, studying on the Trinity, he found by the sea-side a little child which had made a little pit in the sand, and in his hand a little spoon. And with the spoon he took out water of the large sea and poured it into the pit. And when St. Augustin beheld him he marvelled, and demanded him what he did. And he answered and said: ‘I will lade out and bring all this water of the sea into this pit.’ ‘What?’ said he, ‘it is impossible, how may it be 3

done, sith the sea is so great and large, and thy pit and spoon so little?’ ‘Yes, forsooth,’ said he, ‘I shall lightlier and sooner draw all the water of the sea and bring it into this pit than thou shalt bring the mystery of the Trinity and His Divinity into thy little understanding as to the regard thereof […].’ And therewith the child vanished away”. The detail, that the writer saw the scene “painted on an altar of St. Austin at Antwerp”, tells us not only that the parable preceded Caxton’s translation, but also that then artists had already begun to be inspired by it for their works. Likely the story was one of the oral exempla, adopted by preachers in the late Middle Ages. But it might have well been the invention of a pious artist, almost an angelic trickster. The inspiring source could be a spurious letter in Latin, from Augustine to Cyril of Jerusalem. Exactly, there it is the spirit of St. Jerome to address the dreaming bishop of Hippo, in a way akin to that of the angel or Child Jesus in our apologue: Putasne brevi immittere vasculo mare totum? (“Do you think it possible to pour off the whole sea into a small vessel?”). Anyhow, the first documented representation of the scene ought to be a miniature of a codex in the British Library (London, ms. 29704; ca. 1400). We can admire one of the earliest paintings on the subject, by the Florentine Filippo Lippi, in the Hermitage Museum at St. Petersburg (circa 1450).

3 – Jan van Scorel, St. Augustine and the Child (The Parable of Trinity); St. Stephen’s Church, Jerusalem

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Lippi’s Vision of St. Augustine, probably the extant panel of an altarpiece, shows the bishop and the holy child both haloed, on the bank of a stream: the Mignone? The background is a landscape with trees and hills. It could well be a Tuscany country view. Yet we do not see the sea, which is a so important element in the fable. We can only imagine it, behind us, as spectators in the midst of an extensible scenery. As for a real marine landscape, we had better turn to the contemporary Pinturicchio, with his Mystery of the Trinity. Here in the background we have a harbour too, with a sailing ship entering it. Augustine as a bishop and his young interlocutor are facing one another in the foreground, very expressive with their language of gestures. Currently in the National Gallery of Umbria at Perugia, also this picture was part of a polyptych, so as customary at those times. Several seascapes with Augustine and Child will follow, by other artists. And the presence of a ship, as well as of a tower or lighthouse in the rear, will be even susceptible to acquire a vague symbolic value. Marine or rather rural it be, it is the landscape itself to grow almost a third character integrated in the picture. The representation of the anonymous apologue will be a way, by which the landscape painting became a fundamental component in the Renaissance art. We dare say, it will become the image of a wider self, where the main characters may better interact and get reconciled or even reabsorbed. The natural landscape works as a transition from the golden background of the sacred, in the Byzantine icons, and the dark one of the depths of our psyche, in the Baroque painting. The Eternal Child as Aion Sometimes the child of Augustine’s vision is portrayed while pouring water into his pit with a spoon, just as narrated by William Caxton. Other times, the instrument of such a game is a more natural and poetical seashell. He is playing, anyway. Is he an allegory of Augustine’s inner child? In case we wish to meet with the figure of another playful one, we have to go back to the beginnings of Greek philosophy. Let us read Heraclitus’ poem On the Nature, its enigmatic fragment 52: “Aion is a child, moving draughts on a board; his is the kingdom”. In Greek aiōn means a natural, cyclic and everlasting time, often opposed to chronos, which designates the dimension of a linear one, limited to human life or history.

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4 – Jesus among the Doctors: Museo delle Terme, Rome (ca. 360); Augustine and Child on the Shore: Sizun, Bretagne (17th century) As a divine allegory, Aion was identified with the god Dionysus particularly by NeoPlatonists. According to the Platonic Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, the draughts of Heraclitus’ player are our lives themselves. It is also true, early Christian art not seldom represented Jesus as a Dionysian Orpheus, or else as a wise child. Nevertheless, he changed rules and goals of the game. Whereas the Dionysian strategy was mixed of casualness and causality, above all the Christian one should be a strategy of redemption and love. That was implicit in the words of the angel to Augustine: even or especially when founded on a religious dogma, a reasonable faith might as far as an integral reason cannot. What is close to Blaise Pascal’s principle: there are arguments, about which the reasons of heart work better than those of reason itself. In this sense, our apologue sounds an early modern one. Not by chance, most artworks on the subject are datable between the 15th and the 18th century, with an acme in the 17th, which is the same century of Pascal, the French scientist and theologian who can be considered – in part, at least – a modern heir to Augustine himself. During the 17th century, the relevant paintings are going to lose their prevalent idyllic atmosphere. Not few of them express a trouble, which is typical of the gestation of modernity. For instance, the sea in the background may become stormy. Then the ship,

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metaphor of the existence, is tossed about by huge waves. Even the scene in the foreground may show some an agitation or anxiety, reflecting the circumstances of the changed times. In an oil by the Spanish painter Esteban Murillo, titled Augustine and the Child on the Shore (Rugby Longton Douglas Collection, London; 1678), the child has just stopped playing and is still holding a shell in a hand. Fully dark clad, a spectral figure of the bishop is standing beside him. As in an analogous precedent by the Guercino in the Museo Nacional del Prado at Madrid, none of them is depicted with the nimbed head, usual badge of holiness. The sea in the rear looks calm, but the overcast sky is leaden and threatening. Respectively in the Church of St. Augustine at Antwerp (author unknown, ca. 1650) and in the old Hermitage of Augustinians at Bruges (ascribed to Erasmus Quellin, 1666-8), two other works are quite similar. They show a younger Augustine as a monk, and a ship at the mercy of a storm. Perhaps, the dangerous billows symbolize the temptations of this world.

5 – The Guercino, Augustine and the Mystery of the Trinity; Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid Inner or outer he be, whether playful or thoughtful, in all these pictures the child does not mind about the weather. Ships can be wreck in the sea. Even towers can ruin on the coast (ships and towers or castles are quite frequent in the seascapes, as contrasting details). 7

Over any change or accident, at last “his is the kingdom”. Actually, this puer aeternus resembles Heraclitus’ Aion more than a Child Jesus, concerned about general redemption and salvation. And this Augustine resembles the thinker perplexed about human free will or predestination, even more than a theologian absorbed in the problems of explanation of the Holy Trinity. What did the angel really mean, to the saint? Likely, “Know thyself”, after the ancient sages, or else In te ipsum redi, “Return into yourself”, according to Augustine himself. There it might be found the key, for a correct or reliable interpretation. In 1951, Carl G. Jung will issue his Aion: Researches Into the Phenomenology of the Self. In a chapter, he examines the possible connections between the archetypal allegory of Aion and the figure of the Christ. The contextual guess is that of a historical development in the psychological symbolism of the Self. A third century papyrus fragment had been already discovered in 1903 at Oxyrhynchus, in Egypt. Such an alleged saying of Jesus recites: “If those who lead you say ‘Look, the kingdom is in the sky’, the birds of the sky will go before you. If they say that it is beneath the ground, the fish of the sea will precede you. Indeed, the kingdom of God is within you, as well as outside you. Whoever knows himself will find this and, when you know yourselves, you will realize that you are children of the living father. But, if you will not know yourselves, you are in poverty; nay, you are the poverty”. Although this will be recognized as a passage of the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, not necessarily its words make us think of a Gnostic theory, within the early Christian reflection. Rather, they betray traces of the philosophical tradition. The sense of the speech also recalls later Augustine’s ideas, in particular that well condensed in the maxim In interiore homine habitat veritas, “Truth dwells in the inner man”. Of course, that does not exclude the religious revelation at all. Instead, it is a conciliation with the genuine human nature, and an eventual guide to a better exegesis and application. A memento of being all “children of the living father” may have inspired Augustine’s thought: all the more reason, those who invented or painted his visionary meeting with the puer aeternus on the seashore.

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6 – Author Unknown, Augustine and the Child on the Seashore; Church of St. Augustine, Antwerp The Horizon of Time Perhaps we do remember Plato’s maxim, according to which time is like a mobile image of eternity. With Greek terms and out of metaphor, that is an interpretation of the relation between chronos and aiōn. On the same line, a less famous but not less impressive metaphor is by the second century Christian apologist Tatian the Assyrian, in his Address to the Greeks: “While inquiring what God is, you are ignorant of what is in yourselves; and, while staring all agape at the sky, you stumble into pitfalls. […] Why do you divide time, saying that one part is past, another present and another future? For how can the future be passing when the present exists? As those who are sailing imagine in their ignorance, as the ship is borne along, that the hills are in motion, so you do not know that it is you who are passing along, but that time [aiōn] remains present as long as the Creator wills it to exist”. In this passage, more than archetypal images it stands out the evocation of an archetypal world. And there are anticipated two ideas, which Augustine’s philosophy will develop: the invitation to probe into one’s interiority, for a better intuition of the relation between mankind and divinity; the conception of a relative, if not even subjective, perception of time, exposed particularly in his famed Confessions. Yet here it is interesting the imaginary landscape evoked by Tatian. Evidently antithetical with Heraclitus’ image of the bather in the stream of time, it is so similar to the prevalent background of the anecdote of Augustine with Child on the shore, that this may not seem a simple coincidence. Actually, 9

they have to gaze with different eyes at the landscape. And this is not only a spatial, but a temporal one too. Whereas the puer aeternus looks at it as an eternally defined and imperturbable scenery, Augustine perceives all its “chronic”, dramatic precariousness. Between the 17th and the 18th century, landscapists as the French François de Nomé, better known as Monsù Desiderio, and the Italian Alessandro Magnasco, respectively dedicated more than one works to our topic. In these, the difference between foreground and background lessens or is totally wanting. The figures of the characters get so tiny, as to nearly disappear into a disquieting or turbulent landscape. No doubt, a peculiar iconographic masterpiece is Fantastic Ruins with St. Augustine and the Child, executed by De Nomé at Naples about in 1623, today in the National Gallery at London. Even more than a landscape picture, it is a capriccio, a bizarre painting genre where artist’s imagination can freely range.

7 – Erasmus Quellin (ascribed to), Augustine and the Child on the Seashore; Hermitage of the Augustinians, Bruges Like in other works by the Mannerist author, the pictorial technique is compendious and the atmosphere is so oneiric, that it will be highly appreciated by Surrealist painters in the 20th century. The sky is so dark, as to give the impression to be a nocturne one. Watching the scene, from left to right we have the sea, the shore and a front of ruined buildings. That is a classic, almost Baroque architecture, with tottering columns and marble statues. Our feeling is of a decaying civilization, such as it could be the late Roman empire,

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at the epoch of Augustine, or it might be the critical age of any epochal transition. On the beach, Augustine as a monk and the playing child look like lost in so much wilderness. Especially a detail drives our minds back to the above passage by Tatian: a damaged ship, stranded on the shore. Inside it, two anonymous and mysterious figures – a man with a woman? – can be hardly discerned. Seated side by side, they gaze at the insidious waves they presumably escaped from, maybe meditating about the vanity of this world. With paintings like that, Monsù Desiderio was a forerunner of so many melancholic landscapes with ruins in the Baroque and Romantic art. Yet, it is also true, in our case the aiōnios and ever young interlocutor of the saint represents the hope that life will start again, overcoming any kind of possible catastrophe, despite the Manichaeism of the young Augustine himself or the harsh pessimism of Tatian, who will end his thinking career as a Gnostic sectarian. Quite obviously, more luminous and less disquieting representations of a similar genre are not lacking on the same subject, as Landscape with St. Augustine and the Mystery of the Trinity, depicted in 1651-53 by the French Gaspard Dughet and housed in the DoriaPamphili Gallery at Rome. In most of these paintings, the figure of Augustine as a monk prevails over that of him as a bishop, since the former results more compatible with a natural setting or because often such artworks were ordered by friars. But here we like to complete the “dark” series, by mentioning the oil St. Augustine by Wladyslaw Wankie (Mazovian Museum, Plock; before 1907). The pictured scene is just a bit disconcerting.

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8 – François de Nomé, Fantastic Ruins with St. Augustine and the Child; National Gallery, London The Polish Symbolist represents Augustine as a still young hermit and the child as a naked winged angel, with a stormy sea and a cloudy sky in the background. A central detail is the perplexed expression of the man, while observing the game of the fruit of his visionary imagination. Just as George Dennis intuited in The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria quoted above, this appears the problematic philosopher of the Confessions more than the somewhat dogmatic theologian of the treatise On the Trinity. Thus, we may wonder about the actual moral of the story. Did the angel blame the thinker for his rash curiosity, in investigating divine matters? Or, rather, did he warn him against the dangers of a religious dogmatism? Whoever devised our anecdote, what we can guess is that he deemed Augustine meditating on human nature even greater than when detecting transcendent realities. Thales and the Thracian Maid Apparently at least, the Address to the Greeks by the Syrian Tatian is a stern – even rough and superficial – criticism against the pagan religiosity and Greek culture, while defending the Christian faith in name of an alleged “barbaric philosophy”. Paradoxically, few Christian apologists were as imbued with Hellenistic thought as Tatian himself. This is one of the contradictions, which make dialectic the history of European and Western civilization. Tatian was a follower of St. Justin, who conjugated Platonism and Stoicism with Christian doctrine. Reliably, he felt the effects of Justin’s martyrdom at Rome, like Plato had done when Socrates was put to death in Athens. In part, let us reread the passage here considered in the latest chapter: “While inquiring what God is, you are ignorant of what is in yourselves; and, while staring all agape at the sky, you stumble into pitfalls”. What did the author allude to, when talking about staring at the sky and stumbling into pitfalls? At first it was a simple Aesopian fable, with two anonymous characters: an astronomer and an occasional interlocutor, both of them set in a generic, presumably nocturne landscape. Later, in the dialogue Theaetetus by Plato, it grew a philosophical anecdote. There, it is Socrates master of Plato himself, who speaks and narrates, referring to the earliest Milesian scientist and philosopher: “A witty and attractive Thracian servant-girl 12

is said to have mocked Thales for falling down into a well while he was observing the stars and gazing upwards. She boasted that he was eager to know the things in the sky, but that the things just in front of him and just by his feet escaped his notice”.

9 – François de Nomé (Monsù Desiderio), Ruins with the Legend of St. Augustine; Private Collection In 1987 the book The Laughter of the Thracian Woman: a Prehistory of Theory, by Hans Blumenberg, sharply analyzed not few varying narrations. In reality, ancient astronomers used to let themselves down intentionally into dry wells, in order to better delimit their vision of sky. Maybe someone of them was unable to climb up, out of his ditch. The accident might have given rise to the tale. Its moral is transparent anyhow. On one hand, it reflects a popular incomprehension and even derision or hostility against the rising theory (later, this will be Socrates’ lethal drama itself). On the other hand, actually early philosophers or scientists could appear absent minded from people’s practical concerns and necessities. Nonetheless Aristotle, Plato’s pupil, in his Politics tells a contrasting story, already counterbalancing the former. Evidently, soon and well Thales learnt the lesson: “When they reproached him because of his poverty, as though philosophy were no use, it is said that, having observed through his study of the heavenly bodies that there would be a large olive crop, he raised a little capital while it was still winter, and paid 13

deposits on all the olive presses in Miletus and Chios, hiring them cheaply because no one bid against him. When the appropriate time came there was a sudden rush of requests for the presses; he then hired the olive presses out on his own terms and so made a large profit, thus demonstrating that it is easy for philosophers to be rich, if they wish, but that it is not in this that they are interested”. In particular Aristotle’s anecdote will grow better meaningful in the Modern Age, when natural philosophy will become experimental science and fully wedded to technics or technology, with all benefits but also perils of such a marriage. In both apologues we have a delightful landscape made of firmament, country, olive-groves. We can easily presume the Mediterranean sea in the background too. That is a scenery, where heaven and heart look still specular to each other. It is like if they required the gaze of thinkers to fully contemplate their mutual essences and discover the secret of their cosmic unity. There, in an almost magic short circuit with neighbouring and preceding civilizations, Western philosophy and world view were born. The attainment of modernity will make it an unique.

10 – Alessandro Magnasco (and A. F. Peruzzini?), 14

St. Augustine and the Child on the Shore; Galleria di Palazzo Bianco, Genoa In this case, that landscape is rendered by words alone. There are no relevant artworks to mention or to show. Yet our imagination itself can substitute for painters. Our spirit of observation may suggest that not only the scenery is similar to that illustrated in the episode of St. Augustine and the child on the shore, of which here above. Limitedly to the fable of Thales in the well at least, but with some important differences, also the described situation sounds alike. A diversity is that the former is projected at the twilight, whereas the latter at dawn of the history of ancient philosophy. Although the advice “Know yourself” is attributed to him first, mainly Thales still gazes out of himself. Instead Augustine’s research – after Socrates, Justin and Tatian – is introspective and metaphysical. Whereas Augustine’s interlocutor is a holy child, Thales’ one is “a witty and attractive Thracian servant-girl”. An analogy is that the divine or angelic child may well stand for the archetype of the puer aeternus, while the Thracian girl, for its correspondent one of a puella aeterna. Nor is the detail, that she is imagined as a Thracian, utterly fortuitous. In the Greek mythology, Thrace was the motherland of a Dionysian and Orphic tradition. When Tatian provokingly praises a “barbaric philosophy”, he includes the Thrace among the original countries of such an alleged irrational trend, opposed to the presumed rational one prevalent in Greece. He foreruns Friedrich Nietzsche’s distinction between Dionysian and Apollonian components, inside the Greek culture itself. Even more than a puella aeterna, “eternal girl”, the Thracian servant looks a variation on the cliché of the eternal feminine. Less nicely a variant of the same anecdote by Diogenes Laertius, in his Life of Thales, depicts her as “an old woman”. However, she was one of the earliest female characters in the history of philosophy, along with the Goddess of Parmenides and the priestess Diotima of Plato, in his Symposium. In one version more, by the Christian apologist Tertullian, the interlocutor returns to be male, but with a nuance of exotic and ancestral wisdom at once. There, we find a motive which Augustine will resume and develop as well. In his Apologetic, the North-African Tertullian ironizes about “the useless affectation of a scrupulous curiosity, which is tricked out with an artful show of language. It therefore served Thales of Miletus quite right, when, star-gazing as he walked with all the eyes he had, he had the mortification of falling into a well, and was unmercifully twitted by an Egyptian, who said to him, ‘Is it because you 15

found nothing on earth to look at, that you think you ought to confine your gaze to the sky?’ His fall, therefore, is a figurative picture of the philosophers; of those, I mean, who persist in applying their studies to a vain purpose, since they indulge a stupid curiosity on natural objects, when they ought rather to turn their own minds to their Creator and Governor”.

11 – Alessandro Magnasco, The Vision of St. Augustine; Private Collection: sold on 17 December 1999 in London, Christie’s Fine Art Auction House Generally in this apologue we may notice that the interlocutor, Thracian or Egyptian, she or he might be, criticizes not so much his thinking attitude, as rather the object to which the thinker directs his interest. The Thracian girl of Socrates/Plato makes fun of Thales since he minds so much the stars, as to not realize what by his feet or whom alive at hand. We may insinuate, she herself, now leaning there up at the entrance of the well to eclipse the moon, was an object of such a scarce attention. Later, when got old as in the version by Diogenes Laertius, her complaint grows wiser but somewhat bitterer: “Do you, O Thales, who cannot see what is under your feet, think that you shall understand what is in heaven?” 16

It might be expected, in the Christian thought all that could have been an occasion to recommend a better knowledge of our neighbour, what could work as a step toward any higher or deeper understanding. Instead, according to Tatian the contrast seems to be between an improbable comprehension of God and a plausible recognition of each one’s self. According to Tertullian, the alternative is between an useless investigation of the nature and a gratifying contemplation of the divinity. At the end of antiquity, Augustine inherited such and related problems. Their full solution had to be a too hard task even for him. In one sense, in the late Middle Ages the parable of his meeting with the angel forecasts the Protestant crisis, so deeply rooted in a divergent reading of his theology itself. The Well and the Pit If we well consider, neither the apologue of Thales in the well nor that of Augustine on the shore counter respectively the philosophy of nature or the theology in themselves. More simply, both of them seem to claim a centrality of humanity, between nature and divinity. Neither of these two dimensions can be correctly perceived, if we lose sight of humaneness. In the 20th century a German Jewish thinker and Augustinian scholar, Hannah Arendt, will extend such a point of view to the relationship between philosophy and politics. In The Life of the Mind, second chapter, once more she updates the Platonic tale concerning Thales. This time, the historical landscape is dramatically changed again. Now, the common sense of the Thracian girl sounds a beneficial irony: nay, a Socratic self-irony, so that we can identify Socrates himself with her even better than with the sunk proto-philosopher.

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12 – Gaspard Dughet, Landscape with St. Augustine and the Mystery of the Trinity; Doria-Pamphili Gallery, Rome Both anecdotes show a well or a pit, at the centre of the scene and of the landscape. In both cases, it is a metaphor of the human mind. In spite of the witticism by the Thracian girl, we have to admit Thales’ well will succeed in reflecting a scientific knowledge of the sky of nature, at a certain extent at least and especially in the Modern Age. Just as the miraculous child warned on the shore, Augustine’s pit was not so capacious as to fully comprehend the sea of divinity. Yet the well or the pit is not an image of the human reason only. Like Justin, Tatian and Augustine intuited, even more it represents an unconscious self too. Dealing with any knowledge of nature and its possible use, as well as with any religious faith – the more advanced and noble it be –, we had better remember the “Know yourself”. Without such a control, what the angel did not openly say is that sometimes even that small innocent pit is susceptible to grow a black hole. The late Augustine himself could be exposed to some a risk to be swallowed up by it. His soul itself might have been clouded by his “shadow”, just to employ here Jungian psychological terms and concepts, even if his inner child had to perceive the danger. Some artists will intercept this conflict, when going to picture him against a stormy sea or a threatening sky, on a desolate shore. Then, the storm was not only out, but inside the young Church too. On one hand, that was the relation between spiritual and secular powers. Otherwise, an effort to define orthodoxy, by fighting

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off either last pagan culture and early heresy. While doing this, some began to drift into opposite or even stray excesses. The sad case of the Neo-Platonist Hypatia is well known. Like not few other liberal Christians at that epoch, Synesius of Cyrene, bishop of Ptolemais in Egypt, loved as a friend and respected as a teacher this female pagan philosopher and scientist of Alexandria. A lot of what little we know about her is owed to his admiring letters addressed to herself. He calls Hypatia simply “the Philosopher”, implicitly distinguishing her from questionable ones “who wear the white or dark mantle”, that is respectively Platonist and Christian thinkers of those times and places (cf. Synesius, Letter 154, A. D. 404). Unfortunately, not all Christians thought in the same way. Likely soon after Synesius’ death, in 415 Hypatia was slain inside a church of Alexandria by a mob of fanatic followers of Cyril, the new bishop of the town. At their respective times, the unlucky philosophers Socrates and Justin underwent a farce of trial; Hypatia, not even that.

13 – Ulisse Ciocchi, The Mystery of the Trinity; fresco in the Vestry of the Church of Santo Spirito, Florence (1609) Even worse than against philosophy, heathenism or heresy, that looks an indirect attack to a possible liberal Christianity. Dark times were at hand. Before long not only pagans and Jews, but actual or alleged heretics too, began to be persecuted. It does not result that either Cyril or Augustine himself publicly condemned such a crime. Nevertheless, our bishop of Hippo improbably could be unacquainted with the event. By him, we have a few 19

letters to Cyril of Alexandria. Evidently forgetful of the monition by the angel on the shore, in one of them the “shadow” of the elderly Augustine informs his colleague against some religious dissidents, inviting him to correct or – if they persist in their errors – to harshly repress them. This letter does not seem a fake, as that to Cyril of Jerusalem above quoted. About on the day of the death of Cyril of Alexandria, in a message presumably sent to another Syrian bishop, Theodoretus bishop of Cyrrus in Syria will write these astonishing words: “I really am sorry for the poor fellow. Truly the news of his death has not caused me unmixed delight, but it is tempered by sadness. On seeing the Church freed from a plague of this kind I am glad and rejoice; but I am sorry and do mourn when I think that the wretch knew no rest from his crimes, but went on attempting greater and more grievous ones till he died” (trans. Blomfield Jackson, from Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 3, edited by P. Schaff and H. Wace; Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1892). Thinkers in an Interior What did happen, to the faith of fraternal love? Did the persecuted turn into persecutors? Above all, with the bishops Ambrose of Milan earlier – Augustine’s master – and Cyril of Alexandria later, more and more the religion got involved in politics, while the final crisis of the Roman empire was going on. Probably, the heavy work of Cyril contributed to rescue the oriental wing of the state. The price was its transformation into the Byzantine theocracy, where it will be no longer place for philosophy, pagan culture or religious minorities. Christian ideas themselves will slow in developing, almost like icons.

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14 – Wladyslaw Wankie, St. Augustine; Mazovian Museum, Plock As to the long lived Augustine, he had time to think over the whole question. Fifteen years after Hypatia’s murder, he composed his third thought masterpiece, beyond the Confessions and On the Trinity. The City of God was the first real treatise on Christian politics. It will work as an ideal model in western Europe, during the Middle Ages at least. Just only with the Renaissance, in the 16th century and inside the Apostolic Palace at the Vatican, it will appear an imaginary likeness of Hypatia, painted by the genius of Raphael. The new “eternal child” had to play a trick, in order to insert her figure into his fresco of The School of Athens, thanks to the support of an enlightened Pope. He adopted Pope’s young nephew Francesco Maria della Rovere as a model for Hypathia. She is still there, gazing out of the picture white clad as a Platonist philosopher, or rather like a laic martyr. She might even remind us Plato’s Thracian maid. After all, if the first scientist of antiquity had been Thales, the last one was a woman. As if grown more mature and pensive, she smiles no longer. She seems to tell us: “So long and so much I spent to make me worthy, to gaze at stars without stumbling down. Meanwhile, the well grew ever larger and deeper. When I was in sight of the secrets of nature, I myself could not come out of it. I also called for help. Nobody answered me. They were all around, absorbed in the mysteries of divinity. Indeed, some rushed there up onto the edge. But they stoned me to death, like in a nightmare. What else are you searching for, now, my dears?” We have almost all Augustine’s and Cyril’s works too; none by Hypatia, for they were all burnt or destroyed. 21

No wonder, for a long time there will be no female philosophers. In the meantime, women could be condemned and burnt as witches. Rightly one might object, the persecutors wearing a religious vestment were only a scandalous minority. Actually, give it a pretext and human cruelty knows how to be impartial. In the 20 th century, women thinkers were not lacking again. The German Edith Stein had good chances for being a new victim. She was a woman philosopher, an original Jew, a Catholic convert at once. Incidentally, she was a nun too. Nazis could not lose an opportunity like that. In a letter to Pius XI, she had denounced the Nazi ideology, asking him to openly invite that regime “to put a stop to this abuse of Christ’s name”. Unfortunately, no immediate effect of Stein’s appeal is known. A later Pope will canonize her in 1998, after she perished in an extermination lager at Auschwitz in 1942.

15 – Rembrandt H. van Rijn, Philosopher in Meditation; Musée du Louvre, Paris Edith Stein and Hannah Arendt came from the same German phenomenology school. In this group, Martin Heidegger had been well disposed toward Nazism, whereas Arendt had been forced into exile. In part, they had been pupil and master, and lovers too. In one sense, they became respectively a survived persecuted and persecutor. The former in her The Life of the Mind (1978, posthumous) and the latter in his What is a Thing? (1962), both of them

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revisit the anecdote of Thales in the well so differently, that we can consider them the latest identification respectively with the Thracian girl and the fallen proto-philosopher. Heidegger writes, the ancient Platonic apologue should be recalled every time when philosophy begins. So often this recurrent beginning occurs in an uneasy condition, that it seems the condition itself for thinking in a philosophical way. That is to say, the bottom of the well is a metaphor of a new possible foundation. As an astronomer, Thales stumbled into the well was able to foresee the next eclipse. As a philosopher, Socrates got converted from natural philosophy to a human centred one. The hard ground after a crisis might be a basis, from which to rise to see any light of the Being. In this at least we could trust Heidegger, since he himself was responsible of his bad situation, if only he recognized and criticized his errors or faults involving others. What, in his case, results never happened. Difficulties can be also political. The so told original Phoenician Thales advised Ionic towns to form an alliance, against the Persian menace. The North-African Augustine lived the sunset of the Roman Empire and gave the medieval Europe an unifying theory, Christianizing and widening the pattern of the Platonic republic. On the contrary, Heidegger’s political choices before and during the Second World War indirectly somewhat contributed to the disaster and were even accomplices in a genocide. Past the war, he was unable to correct and surpass his position. What he learnt was merely the lesson of a historical pessimism. Doubtless, he was the fallen thinker in Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind, and his well was very deep. She herself anticipated this comparison in The New York Review of Books, in 1971, on the occasion of Heidegger’s 80th birthday. This time her sneer as the Thracian woman was a bitter one, even if Arendt distinguished the philosopher’s absent-mindedness from Nazis’ thoughtlessness.

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16 – Salomon Koninck, Philosopher with an Open Book; Musée du Louvre, Paris A Philosophy of Landscaping Mostly, we have seen how Thales’ character is literarily linked with a natural landscape, and that of Augustine with an open air pictorial setting, even though sometimes he is portrayed within his study. Rather, Heidegger’s figure makes us think of an interior. Particularly, the mental association is with two oils in the Louvre Museum at Paris: Philosopher in Meditation by Rembrandt van Rijn (1632) and Philosopher with an Open Book by Salomon Koninck (ca. 1640-50). In the former, the character of an old housemaid in the foreground suggests that this thinker might be an aged Thales, if we refer to the anecdote as reported by Diogenes Laertius at least. Even worse than of a quest for vain objects, in both pictures the detail of a spiral staircase ascending in the dark insinuates the impression of a twisted thought, prevented from attaining its aim by an inmost impediment. A large window lets sunlight penetrate the dusty room. Yet an old and tired scholar looks like riveted on the arm-chair of his own theory, no longer capable to turn his eyes outward. Nonetheless, Heidegger’s The Basic Metaphysical Question and Introduction to “What is Metaphysic?” (1935 and 1949) can help us to better comment a landscapist mentioned above. In the production of Alessandro Magnasco, the theme of St. Augustine 24

and Child on the shore recurs almost obsessive. Rather than a dark one, in all the variants the pervasive background is a cosmic storm. This circumstance drives us to wonder about the actual question this early modern Augustine and the ever young angel are dealing with. In his writings, Heidegger updates the so defined basic metaphysical question, such as formulated by Gottfried Leibniz in the 17th century: “Why is there anything instead of nothing? […] Granted that something must exist, why is it thus and not otherwise?” Our angel seems to say, what we can answer is the latter query, trying to correspond to it at the best. In fact, at last it is our free will to fully accomplish the second part of the sentence. By answering the latter question, maybe each one will find the answer to the former. In Heidegger’s works, such an ensuing or interdependent question is what the author of Augustine and the Neo-Platonism “forgets” to consider or expressly quote, of the original Leibniz’s formulation. We dare conclude, this is a clue to motives why, for all its good reasons, his criticism of modernity remains a reactionary theory. His ventilated power of decision itself is the repetitive affirmation of an old self. At the right moment, it does not grow a free choice to renew this self within an open, luminous albeit stormy horizon, like in disquieting Magnasco’s pictures. In Greek, not only the terms chronos or aiōn designate time. Even better than of the aiōn, perhaps Augustine’s child was an allegory of the kairós, an instant when eternity – or a profound unconscious – flashes stirring up the conscience. In Heidegger’s case, a so rare phenomenon appears to have got no appreciable effect like that.

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17 – An old Martin Heidegger and the head of an ancient bust of Thales, photomontage Just only a digression, about the emotional involvement of the landscape, in most artworks surveyed here above. For example, probably we do remember an impressive evocation of the paysage in Richard the Third, by William Shakespeare. That is a joyful exordium, consistent with alternate vicissitudes in the drama: “Now is the winter of our discontent/ Made glorious summer by this son of York;/ And all the clouds that low’r’d upon our house/ In the deep bosom of the ocean buried”. As to the legend of St. Augustine and Child on the shore, rarely a same event gave rise to so different ambient representations. Sometimes the landscape is serene, almost heavenly; other times, troubled or even anguished. We may infer, the chosen background depends on an interpretation of the event. Yet a pessimistic opinion regards the latter type of characterization. In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), the French writer Albert Camus, an Existentialist like the early Heidegger, argues: “Let us realize how much the world is refractory and a stone is a stone, irreducible to us. Let us discern with which intensity the nature, a landscape, might back out of us. Deep inside every beauty there is something, which is not human. All of sudden and at once the hills, the mild sky, the shapes of trees, may lose any illusory sense with which we had clothed them. Then, they fade away farther than a paradise lost. A primordial world’s estrangement re-emerges against us, through millennia. For an instant we can understand it 26

no longer, for during centuries we perceived only the figures and representations we had attributed to itself. Now, our forces for going on with profiting by such an artifice do fail. And this world seems to recede from us, just simply because it has returned to be itself”. This dismal perception lets us think of a painting by Edward Hopper, Excursion into Philosophy (private collection; 1959), although here most landscape has to be guessed out of an open window. At the same time, it is consonant with that described by Heidegger, in an initial passage of The Basic Metaphysical Question. Yet it is in the Lecture on Ethics by Ludwig Wittgenstein, issued posthumous in 1966, that a latent philosophy of the paysage is more closely reconnected with that question as put by Leibniz. In this case, a philosophical wonderment prevails over any dismayed feeling: “It is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing. I could of course wonder at the world round me being as it is. If for instance I had this experience while looking into the blue sky, I could wonder at the sky being blue as opposed to the case when it’s clouded. But that’s not what I mean. I am wondering at the sky being whatever it is”.

18 – Walter Benjamin and the Angelus Novus, watercolour by Paul Klee (photomontage) Among such so varying and literary interpretations, it is difficult to tell affective moods from philosophical reasoning. Alluding to Heidegger, in an article of 1932 Rudolf Carnap ironized, metaphysicians resemble musicians with no talent for music. We might 27

also suspect that they are like artists without a bent for art, and that paintings by real landscapists are far more expressive. But, behind all those arguments, a tacit question is whether philosophy was born from wonder in front of the universe, so as Aristotle wanted and the apologue of Thales confirmed, or rather it has become a daughter of anguish, according to Heidegger. A further problem is that, for philosophers as well as for artists, landscapes often assume a broad metaphorical value and wide work as mirrors of the times. In one sense the nature for Thales, the divinity for Augustine, or history for modern thinkers, are all human landscapes. Antiquity, Middle Ages and modernity are human declinations of time as well. Among those world views, each age privileged its own. Really are they projections of a same old absurdity? Did Socrates, Justin, Hypatia or Edith Stein – and we could add several others – die for any background detail? More credibly, for them like for not few landscapists the background mattered not less than the figures in the foreground. Nay, some details grew more important than the landscape itself. That is what art historians define “inverted perspective”, which can well be a perspective for the future. For instance in both our anecdotes, regarding Thales and Augustine, an uncanny landscape fades into a more familiar portrait, by assuming personal features. Always these are of a stranger: Thracian, Egyptian or even angel he be. It is like to say, only otherness may work as a mediation, and an antidote, between our selves and a possible alienation of this world. Then, the basic question would rather paraphrase that already modified by Max Scheler, in his The Position of Man in the Cosmos (1927): “Why is there anyone, instead of none? And, since someone exists, why am I myself and not another?” With the advent of Christianity, actually the thinking attention had turned from the self onto the other, understood as an interface between humanity and divinity within a less selfish horizon. Yet so slowly that, notoriously, still at present such a research has not attained its goals at all…

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19 – Peter P. Rubens, The Four Philosophers; Palatine Gallery, Palazzo Pitti, Florence In the meantime, human-like allegories did not stop visiting philosophers, from time to time. At the dawning Middle Ages, it is the case of the Philosophy herself, in The Consolation of Philosophy by Severinus Boethius. More than of the Thracian girl by Plato, this fair lady shows the appearance of an Hypatia, striving to comfort the jailed and death sentenced thinker. As to Augustine’s angel, his latest colleague is the Angelus Novus, by the painter Paul Klee and the philosopher Walter Benjamin, in his Theses on the Concept of History (1940). During the Second World War, this child-like “angel of history” stares back at such a spectacle of slaughter and rubble, as to feel impotent to lend any aid or comfort. No longer he plays or speaks. In his gaze, something apocalyptic can be perceived. Now, even the laughs of the Thracian maid or of Augustine on the shore resound as a grim echo. In his essay Paris, the Capital of the 19th Century, Benjamin had observed: “Landscapes announce a change in the relation of art with the technics. They express a new feeling of life. Repeatedly made manifest along the century, a political superiority of the citizens to the country leads to the attempt of importing landscaping into the city. In the panoramas, the town itself widens as the landscape”. This regarded the development of 29

photography, as well as the painting en plein air. Yet, already at Benjamin’s times, the power of destruction over nature, and of self-destruction achieved by mankind, was going to upset the whole background again. No longer it was a matter of countryside or of urbanism. With the advance of a technocratic barbarism especially in the war period, the scenery ran a risk to turn into a general desolation, just like in the old landscapes by François de Nomé. A dissident from Heidegger’s ideas, Benjamin died – or committed suicide – while flying from Nazi-Fascism. For a bitter irony of the philosophical anecdotage, one of the last landscapes with thinker is terribly true. The interior setting is a holiday inn in the Spanish village of Port Bou, in the night between the 25 and 26 September 1940. The outside view is a Mediterranean seascape, such as in the apologue of St. Augustine and Child on the shore. Local policemen had just menaced to send Benjamin back to France, occupied by German Nazis. Within his chamber, we cannot know if the Angelus Novus finally spoke and what possibly told him. Long after his death, it has been known that he held a briefcase by himself, with his last manuscript inside. Scholars have put forward various hypotheses about. In a cabalistic way, we like to imagine that the lost manuscript contained a reportage of the words of angel, and that it will reappear only when men will get worthy of reading it.

20 – Daniel Huntington, Philosophy and Christian Art; County Museum of Art, Los Angeles

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The Landscape beyond a Window Hereinbefore we have dealt with the figure of the thinker, as represented in a landscape or on a different background, which can be either real or metaphorical, or else both of them at once. In this latter case, the most famous example is the above mentioned painting The Three Philosophers by Giorgione, otherwise titled Three Philosophers in a Landscape in an early annotation we have of it in the history of art. It looks so deeply enigmatic, that even too many interpretations have been already discussed by art historians. There are also cases, as the six portraits of philosophers commissioned to the Spanish Jusepe de Ribera by the Prince of Liechtenstein in 1636, where the background is fully dark, in Caravaggio’s manner. Yet in The Four Philosophers by Peter Paul Rubens (Palazzo Pitti, Florence; 1611-12), there is a remarkable peculiarity. Just as in The School of Athens by Raphael, the painter himself is included among the portrayed thinkers. He is standing beside them, who are sitting around a table covered with books. In the rear, an open window shows a singular landscape: an archaeological sight on the Palatine Hill at Rome. Inside a niche in a wall of the room, we can even discern a marble half bust of the Latin philosopher Seneca. This time the message, nay the claim, of the Italian Raphael as well as of the Flemish Rubens is clear enough. Artists themselves are thinkers, though their main means of expression are meaningful images instead of written words. In a classicistic way, their shared and ideal motherlands are now Athens and Rome, even more than a heavenly Jerusalem like in Augustine’s view. And the idea of a “republic of philosophers” prevails over that of a theocratic kingdom again. Anyway, not only the history of art but of philosophy too, if beheld within a history of Western culture, can leave out of consideration artists’ contributions. A concept of them as philosophers grows more explicit in some works of the Neapolitan Salvator Rosa, particularly in his Self Portrait now in the National Gallery at London (about 1645). In Latin, there we can read: “Be quiet, if you have nothing better than silence to say”. What, by far, anticipates Wittgenstein’s anti-metaphysical polemics.

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21 – Mattia Preti, Boethius and Philosophy: Private Collection; 17th century Not necessarily, this implies a divorce between art and religion. In an artwork by the New Yorker Daniel Huntington, Philosophy and Christian Art (Los Angeles County Museum of Art; 1868), philosophy and painting are represented as autonomous but reconciled allegories. Respectively, they are an elderly philosopher and a young lady. She is standing for a religious art, presumably fried from a dogmatic theology. The open book of him and a holy icon, held by her, are shown as complementary attributes. The light of human reason is symbolized by a lamp on the left, while daylight enters the room from an open window on the right of the picture. Reliably influenced by the pantheistic worldview of Ralph Waldo Emerson, an impressive North-American thinker at that epoch, the natural landscape beyond the window stands out as the dominant element within the whole scene. Especially if compared with the contemporary French Impressionism, Huntington’s revisiting of Renaissance painting – after the lesson of the German Nazarene movement – may appear old fashioned. Yet art critics should be indulgent about, at least for his closeness to a late Romantic thought results quite Post-modern today. Moreover, his conceptualism is supported by a refined pictorial technique and artistic learning. Not less than philosophy, fine arts seem to be a dialectic phenomenon. Nor are their connections with other forms of

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cultural expression limited to iconography. Nevertheless iconology, understood as a hermeneutics of the image, may work as a good approach to such an iconic phenomenology. Exceptionally, philosophy itself occurred to be figured as an erotic allegory; nay, to be exact, as a metaphor of a sensation of loss in our feeling of Eros. No longer it is the “witty and attractive” Thracian maid by Plato, who was an anti-philosophical character indeed, but rather the Philosophy as a consoling lady, in Boethius and Philosophy by the Italian painter Mattia Preti (private collection; 17th century). All the more reason, that is a half naked woman in Excursion into Philosophy, by the American artist Edward Hopper. She is sleeping behind an occasional thinker, seated on the edge of a bed, who stopped reading a book left open beside him and now stares into the void. Only the tip of one foot of him is put forward, into a square of light cast by a window on the floor of the room. Likely no scene, pictured in a still topical past, was better suited to our so called “age of anxiety”.

22 – Edward Hopper, Excursion into Philosophy: Private Collection; 1959 In the here mentioned artworks by Rubens, by Huntington and by Hopper (as well as in a “metaphysical” one by Giorgio De Chirico titled The Philospher, in a private collection; 1924), easily we can notice a shared device, which is a legacy of the Renaissance painting. The paysage is not an immersive landscape, such as frequent in the pictures concerning 33

Augustine and Child on the seashore. Instead it is visible through a window, represented within the scene set in an interior, almost a picture inside the picture itself. By replacing a vertical perspective with a horizontal one, we will realize how this situation is analogous to that of the proto-philosopher Thales within his well, as narrated in the well known anecdote. From a psychological or philosophical point of view, again a metaphorical value may be that of a relation between inside and outside, with reference to human being and condition. To use Renaissance philosophy terms, that is a microcosm, striving to reflect a macrocosm. Unfortunately this mirror is too narrow and dimmed, for being able to reflect nature, divinity, culture, all dimensions we were long used to attribute to the absolute. We might feel inadequate to see what really is beyond that window, or to judge whether what we believe to discern is reality or illusion. An open window is better than an occluded sight, anyhow. At least, we can perceive what is there beyond as the complexity of life, and that world life exceeds not only any contingent individuation but any instrumental definition too. Whatever scene or characters are represented in the foreground, and whichever it be, the persistent vision of a landscape appears a sort of assurance in itself. After privileging the golden background of the sacred and before adopting the dark one of the psyche, respectively due to a Byzantine and to a Caravaggist convention, Renaissance artists were well aware of that. Let us consider the most ever celebrated portrayal, Mona Lisa by Leonardo. Part of her charm, and of the enigma of her smile, is for her figure looks so integrated with the natural panorama behind, as to nearly result an expression of it. In the original composition, this was framed with a loggia, the equivalent of an open window.

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23 – Raphael Sanzio, presumed Hypatia’s imaginary portrait, The School of Athens detail; Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa: Louvre Museum, Paris (photomontage) Even better than Hypatia by Raphael, she seems a grown up incarnation of Plato’s Thracian girl. Although she is not a thinker, so musing she smiles out and down at us, as to make us feel on the bottom of the well of our existences and history. Yet like conscience and unconscious, it is also true, the two specular portraits may be simply watching one another. A lot has been written about Mona Lisa’s smile; a bit less, on her thoughtful gaze, directed to the viewer of the picture. Which precedents may be found, in the history of art? The School of Athens by Raphael is coeval with the masterpiece by Leonardo. Its subject is secular as well. Our search had better turn back to religious painting. There, we meet with the pensive eyes of the Virgin Annunciate by Antonello da Messina at Palermo, or of the Madonna and Child by Giovanni Bellini, in the National Gallery of Art at Washington. Behind them, no landscape is visible. Long before the Caravaggio, their painters converted the golden “Greek” background into a dark one. The prototype and archetype remains the Byzantine Hodegetria, “She who shows the way”, while stares at us so that we cannot escape her gaze wherever facing the icon nor within our consciences. No longer the new Hodegetria indicates the right way. Mona Lisa emerges from a vast, misty panorama, where a meandering road and a bridge to overcome can be hardly discerned.

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Last but not least, our favourite philosophical painting has not so much a landscape as a remote background. Rather, it is a full immersive one. Pictured by the French artist Nicolas Poussin in about 1647, and titled Landscape with Diogenes, the work is housed in the Louvre at Paris. It represents one anecdote more, this time concerning the ancient Greek Cynic thinker. After having rejected most of his possessions, he threw away even a drinking cup, once he saw a peasant drawing water from a stream by the hollow of his hands. In a varying tradition, this simple drinker is a child like in St. Augustine’s parable. Diogenes’ return to nature is well rendered in the quite wild country setting, reflecting his ideal of nature itself as ultimate source of everything essential to a free mankind. Just then the proud season of Athenian democracy was at an end. Likely that is why the painter does not forget to show, in the distance, the palace of an authoritarian power impending over the city.

24 – William Mortensen, Death of Hypatia, artistic photograph: in The Model, p. 185; 1937 Copyright [email protected] 2009

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25 – Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with Diogenes; Musée du Louvre, Paris 37

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