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ABSTRACT
This article investigates the essay the Descriptio Silentii (Description of Silence) by Celio Calcagnini, a humanist scholar from Ferrara, an essay written in the early sixteenth century and published in 1544. The article provides the first English translation of the essay, describes its inspiration and sources and reviews the content of the essay in order to assess Calcagnini’s contribution to the philosophy of silence from the Renaissance and before. Calcagnini’s essay is an ekphrasis of a picture supposedly located in the ruins of the Roman temple of Fortuna Primigenia in Praeneste, the inspiration for its format is the late Hellenistic text the Tabula Cebetis, and the principal content is an appeal for the virtues of silence in human affairs and the castigation of the garrulous following the example of Plutarch’s essay De Garrulitate from the Moralia. However, this appeal to the virtues of silence is a prelude to the deeper theme and purpose of the essay: the theme of mystical silence, a silence by which it is possible to approach and understand the god-head and the divine, and which can only be expressed in non-verbal language, riddles or poetic imagery.
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Notes
1 Calcagnini, Opera Aliquot, 491–4. It was reprinted in Hippolytus a Collibus, Harpocrates sive de recta silendi ratione. An Italian translation with notes is given in Nigro, Elogio della menzogna. Short excerpts from the Descriptio can also be found in Laurens, La Raison des Figures, 101–3, and another in Chevrolet, L'idée de fable, 131–2. The Descriptio in the Opera Aliquot is not dated, but the chapter titles of the latter work give a dedication for the piece to Thomas Furcus (Tommaso Foschi), Bishop of Comacchio. Furcus was Bishop from 1506 to 1514, which must therefore bracket the date of the composition of the Descriptio.
2 See Calcagnini, Opera Aliquot, 190, for the letter from Calcagnini to King Henry VIII reporting on his discussions with Richard Kroke (Crocus!).
3 Calcagnini, Opera Omnia, 395 and see Franco Bacchelli “Il quod Caelum state, Terra Moveatur vel de perenni motu Terrae commentatio di Celio Calcagnini.” Schifanoia, 2017 21–33.
4 Calcagnini in a letter to his nephew Thomas (see “Epistolicarum quaestionum, libri XVI,” Opera Aliquot) refers to this translation which was never published.
5 Further information on the life of Celio Calcagnini can be found in the article by Mutini, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, 492–8, and in English by Breen, Church History, 225–38.
6 Giovio, Elogia virorum literis illustrium, 135.
7 Gardini, “Memory and Self-Improvement”, ch. 3.
8 Calcagnini, Opera Aliquot, 324. It appears that he had no great ambition for his essays, which had to be recovered in scraps from “behind tables and benches” and were bequeathed after his death to the Estes, who arranged to have them published.
9 The book was finished after the death of Leonello under the patronage of Nicholas V in Rome.
10 Palermino, “The Roman Academy”, 117–55.
11 It is estimated that as many as twenty million books were printed in Europe during the final years of the Quattrocento (Encylopaedia Brittanica: Incunabula), including more than 30,000 titles and editions.
12 Of the many, many texts commenting on the causes of the Reformation, and the contribution to it of the rise of printing, see, for instance, Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, ch. 6.
13 See Raybould, The Siybl Series of the Fifteenth Century, passim.
14 Jons, cited and translated inDaly Emblem Theory, 77.
15 Henri Estienne, in his L’Art de faire les Devises of 1645, differentiated between devices, hieroglyphs, enigmas, symbols, fables, parables, emblems, sentences, reverses of medals, arms, blazons, cimiers, cyphres and rebuses. Claude-François Menestrier, Balthazar Gracian, Giordano Bruno, William Camden and Emanuel Tesauro added further categories. See Raybould, The Symbolic Literature of the Renaissance, passim, for a full description of the phenomenon.
16 De Certeau, La Fable Mystique, I. 138–155 gives an exposition of some of the many, many treatises from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which examined the challenge of mystical thought and the approach to God.
17 De Certeau, La Fable Mystique, I. 131.
18 Struck, The Birth of the Symbol, 220.
19 Plotinus, Enneads, VI. ix. 11.
20 St Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, I. 6, translated and cited in Banner, Philosophic Silence and the ‘One’ in Plotinus, 32).
21 Plotinus, Enneads, VI. ix. 3.
22 It may not be a coincidence that the goddess Fortuna plays such a prominent part in Calcagnini’s essay. She was the only Roman deity who survived during the Christian period and it is therefore understandable that he would wish to use her as the link between Classical and Renaissance times.
23 See Cicero, De Divinatione, II, 85 (41).
24 A detailed history of Praeneste, together with photographs of the Temple as it could be restored is given in Chalton-Bradshaw, Papers of the British School at Rome, 233–62. See .
25 See La Malfa, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 267–72.
26 An English verse translation of the Tabula with notes by Thomas Scott of 1754 is at https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Table_of_Cebes_Or_the_Picture_of_Hum/N_JbAAAAQAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1. The only picture which is contemporaneous with the Descriptio (1506–1514, see note 1) is that by Aesticampianus described in the text below.
27 Many, many pinakes have been unearthed from around Greek and Roman Temples, but the great majority are merely fragments. One of the sizes described in the Tabula is unrealistic. See Karoglou, Attic Pinakes, passim.
28 For the printing history of the Tabula together with the Pilgrim’s Progress and the Enchiridion, see Jerram, Kebētos Pinax. Cebetis Tabula. For a bibliography on the Tabula, see Benedetti, Itinerari di Cebeti, 9. For a commentary on recent interpretation of the Tabula see, Squire and Grethlein, “Counterfeit in Character but Persuasive in Appearance”.
29 Fors derives from the Latin ferro, meaning “I bring”. The two words together thus illustrate the two facets of the personification: Fortune, the bringer of good things, and Fortune, symbolized by her ever-revolving wheel.
30 The meaning of this inscription is disputed. In the Opera Aliquot of 1544, this inscription is printed as “Fide Sato” and it is so stated in the Ricciardi epitome of the Descriptio Silentii, in the Commentaria Symbolica II, 292v Col. A. Modern commentators, including Laurens and Nigro in their translations (see note 1) and Prandi, “Premesse umanistiche del ‘Furioso’”, 3–32, in his transcription of the passage, substitute the alternative phrase “Fide Fato”; that is “Trust in Fate”, also making sense in a passage focussing on the vagaries of Fortune.
31 The logic of the suggestion is provided as early as the Anon., Rhetorica ad Herennium, first century B.C.E., (4.28.39 trans. Lacius Curtius): “If you are an idiot, for that reason you should remain silent, should you remain quiet, you are not for that reason an idiot”.
32 Examples of the first are given by Waddington, “The Iconography of Silence”, 249 nt.s 2–5, who cites fifteen references to classical authorities, and, for the second, by Bisello, Sotto il ‘Manto’ del Silenzio, who quotes a dozen contemporary references.
33 From the 1584 Paris edition of the Emblemata. Pharian means “of Alexandria” and refers to the Pharos, the great lighthouse of Alexandria. Some of the great number of emblem writers who used silence or garrulity as a basis for their emblems are listed in Bowen, “Lingua quo tendis?”, 249–60 (252–3).
34 Calcagnini, Opera Aliquot, 598.
35 See Gardini, Memory and Self-Improvement, ch. 3.
36 It cannot be a coincidence that Lucian’s story is also told by an attendant as in the Descriptio. In his De mercede conductis Lucian gives his own brief parable, “in the manner of Cebes”, about the ascent of the figure of Dependence up a mountain to be greeted by Hope. See De Mercede Conductis The Works of Lucian of Samosata (Translated by Fowler, H. W. and F. G. Oxford), The Clarendon Press, 1905, Paragraph 42. Hercules Gallicus was a popular motif for Renaissance authors and is used by Alciato, Bocchi and Haechtanus in their emblems, as is discussed by Valeriano, Hieroglyphica, and Tory, Champfleury. See also Barbara C. Bowen, “Geoffrey Tory's Champfleury and Its Major Sources”. Studies in Philology, 76, 1 (1979):13–27.
37 Certainly, Hercules was one of the sons of Zeus. Calcagnini may have remembered the words of the Sibyl from Aeneid 6.124, where she is telling of the difficulty of making a return from Hades. “Few, very few, whom righteous Jove did bless,/Or quenchless virtue carried to the stars,/Children of gods, have such a victory won.” (trans. T. C. Williams; Perseus Project, see http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a1999.02.0054).
38 Xenophon in the Cyropedia (8.2.10–12) also explains the origin of the belief that the King has many eyes and ears. See http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0204%3Abook%3D8%3Achapter%3D2%3Asection%3D10.
39 The wolf skin is also mentioned by Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, 1.18.1, and may be the origin of this reference. The wolf was of course very much part of Greek and Roman mythology. Apollo was wolf-born (Homer, Iliad, 4.102), Romulus and Remus were suckled by a wolf and the Lupercalia was one of Rome’s most famous festivals. For the Eclogues see http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Verg.+Ecl.+9&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0057. For the Natural History see http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D8%3Achapter%3D34.
40 Hermes was said to wear a pileus, as were Castor and Pollux.
41 See Cartari, Le Imagini con la sposizione dei dei de gli antichi, 374, and .
42 This latter is a misreading of Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride, 378D, where the Persica (actually Persea) with its heart-shaped leaves is said to be the attribute of Isis.
43 Dolce, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 24; Volpi, Le immagini degli dei, 422.
44 Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, ch. 68, reports the motif of Harpocrates with his finger to his lips as the symbol of silence but he also tells the story (ch. 16) of how Isis suckled the boy by putting her finger rather than to her breasts to his lips. The ubiquity of Harpocrates in Egyptian culture can be seen from the many images illustrated in Cuper, Harpocrates.
45 The Roman army marched and fought in silence so as to ensure that all orders could be heard. See De Gomberville, La Doctrine des Moeurs, Emblem 28 and Vaenius, Horatii Flacci Emblemata, Emblem 29.
46 This is reported by Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1010a 12–13. For more on Achille Bocchi and the image of Hermes/Harpocrates, see Watson, Achille Bocchi; Rolet, Les Questions symboliques d'Achille Bocchi.
47 For further discussion, see Wind, Pagan Mysteries, 123.
48 Wind, Pagan Mysteries, 44, describes it as “the prudence of speaking in riddles” and Nigro, Elogio della menzogna: “Calcagnini posits a model of language intertwined with silence which [he] proposes should be dictated by prudence”.
49 Calcagnini was aware of the ideas of Plotinus and Proclus on mystical silence since the works of both authors were in his library. See Ghignoli, L’inventario dei libri di Celio Calcagnini, 241, where inventory #1077 is given as “Plotinus” and Item #111 is given (p. 147) as “Proclus Diadochi” but with no further details. Further items applicable to Proclus are entries 176 and 1233. Manuscripts of Proclus were introduced to the West by Cardinal Bessarion and studied and published by Marsilio Ficino.
50 Augustine, Confessions, 9.10.23–24.
51 Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, 378C.
52 “This god” must refer to the “great god” in the previous sentence. He is, for Calcagnini, the principal god of silence; I comment on him and his attributes in detail in note 33.
53 Horace, Epistulae, I.xv.41, extols the tastiness of the sparrow or thrush: Nil Melius turdo, “Nothing better than a thrush”, he says.
54 See note 13.
55 The black volcanic glass, obsidian, is said to have been first brought to the West from Ethiopia by Opsidius and to be the symbol of Prudence.
56 Presumably this was Nepenthe, the drug of forgetfulness first described in Homer, Odyssey, 4.219.
57 Agatha tyche is now a common Greek phrase meaning “good luck” or “good fortune!”. Demosthenes supposedly had the phrase inscribed on his shield but this he threw away during the battle of Chaeronea (338 B.C.E.) and then ran for his life, naturally an action for which he was criticized. The cult of Agathe Tyche became popular in the fourth century B.C.E. and there was a sanctuary to her in Athens in which offerings were made at times of crisis for the city. Agatho daimon, the good spirit, was reputed to be the spouse of Agathe tyche and had a much more complex history in Greek, Roman and Egyptian mythology. See Tracy, Hesperia, 241–4; Felicano, https://www.academia.edu/27115429/The_Agathos_Daimon_in_Greco-Egyptian_religion. Pausanias 9.39.3 (13) describes a building at the Oracle of Trophonius at Lebadaia which was sacred to Agatho daimon. See https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0160%3Abook%3D9%3Achapter%3D39%3Asection%3D5
58 Bonum genium is also the name of the gate-keeper at the foot of the mountain in the Tabula Cebetis.
59 Dea Salutare was a name for Osiris used in Roman times. The god was said to come to the sick in their dreams and suggest the appropriate remedies.
60 “Inviolate faith” was a short-hand phrase for belief in Christianity or Catholicism. It is used several times by Calcagnini in his essay but it is unclear whether by repeating the phrase he was intending to emphasize his orthodoxy in view of the fact that this was doubted in some circles. For the possible nicodemism of Calcagnini (and thus another reason for silence), see Bisello, Sotto il “Manto” del Silenzio, particularly chapter 1, p.56.
61 In the Tabula, the two accompanying women are named Temperance and Fortitude.
62 According to Pliny, The Natural History, 7.26, the Astomoi were a tribe who lived in India at the source of the Ganges. Since they did not have mouths, they ingested food by smelling it.
63 There is no Roman god called Silentius or Silentiosus: the Romans adopted Harpocrates or Angerona; presumably Calcagnini is providing a translation.
64 As stated by Nigro, Elogio della menzogna, 49 nt.1, Epaminondas does not appear in Pindar. According to Cicero, de Officiis, 44, he was a Pythagorean, but Plutarch says he was a Theban General.
65 Actually said by Zeno (334–264 B.C.E.), as quoted in Laërtius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, vii. 23.
66 See Nigro, Elogio della menzogna, 49 nt. 2, for a further explanation.
67 Pliny, De Auditu, 1.2, reports that athletes used ear protectors to protect their ears from the blows of boxing or wrestling.
68 This famous story and its antecedents are fully discussed in Konstantakos, Classica et Mediaevalia, 85–137.
69 Some depictions of Harpocrates show him with a black cloak since he was “a friend of the night”.
70 The battle of Gaugemela in 331 B.C.E.
71 Pausanias, King of the Spartans, won the battle of Plataea for the Greeks against the Persians in 479 B.C.E. but was subsequently accused of treachery for opening discussions with the enemy. He was betrayed by a messenger who revealed the contents of a letter he had sent to Xerxes with an offer to marry his daughter.
72 Leaena was ordered to be tortured to reveal the details of a conspiracy by her lover Harmodius against the Athenian State in the sixth century B.C.E. but she cut out her own tongue to save him. The Athenians later set up a statue of a lioness to commemorate her. The story is also commemorated in Alciato, Emblemata, XIII, and a similar story is told of Zeno (Plutarch, De Garrulitate, 505d) and of Timychka, the wife of the Pythagorean Myllias.
73 It is not clear what is meant here, although it seems likely that Calcagnini mistook Hercules for Achilles. Achilles, the hero of the Greeks at Troy, was buried at Sigeion and the etymology of the name is the Greek word sige, meaning silence. It could be said that Achilles, who was sulking in his tent most of the four days of the Iliad, was indeed silent. On the other hand, Hercules in an earlier episode had also sacked Troy, then under the leadership of Laomedon, but there is nothing in that story about silence.
74 It is well-known that Pythagorean novitiates had to remain silent for five years before they were fully initiated. “Do not allow swallows [or chatterers] to enter your house” is one of the Pythagorean symbola, the maxims supposedly coined by the master which were handed down for many generations and proved of great fascination to the Renaissance when commentators took delight in examining their origin, authenticity and meaning.
75 According to Reece, Classical Philology, 261–78, there are 104 instances of the phrase “winged words” in Homer. In Lucian’s account of the picture of Hercules Gallicus, the guardian also refers to the “winged words” “that you know”, confirming the wide knowledge of the trope even at that date. Some Renaissance illustrations of Harpocrates give him wings.
76 Homer, Iliad, 4.350. This reference is given also by Plutarch, De Garrulitate, 503C. Plutarch is describing the circulation of a secret; no one is capable of keeping silent when a secret is revealed to them. A classic description of this phenomenon is Manzoni, I Promessi Sposi, 190–1, who wittily describes how a secret circulates one person at a time until it returns to the original source.
77 Plautus, Poenulus, 3.2: St! Tace, “Shush! Be quiet”.
78 The reality is slightly different from the story given by Calcagnini. Appius Claudius Caecus (fl. c. 300 B.C.E.), the distinguished consul, was so-called because he did indeed go blind towards the end of his life. According to Livy, his blindness was retribution from the gods for allowing officials to take over the administration of the Temple of Hercules from the traditional family.
79 Valerius Soranus was a grammarian and author who was executed in 82 B.C.E. supposedly for having published the secret name but it is more likely that the execution was for political reasons. Macrobius, Saturnalia, 3.9.5, says that the Romans called forth the tutelary gods of any city they were besieging since they held it to be against divine law to make prisoners of gods. In 3.9.7, Macrobius sets out the prayer for calling forth the gods.
80 See note 38 for the dictum of Augustine.
81 Angerona was apparently aware of the secret name of Rome, which, for the security of the city, should not be revealed. This name may have been Amor or Roma backwards. According to Macrobius, Saturnalia, 1.10. 7–9: “Angerona propitiated and banished anxiety and mental distress … An image of this goddess with the mouth bound up and sealed is placed on the altar of Voluptia, because all who conceal their pain can find care, thanks to their endurance, great joy at last … pursuant to a vow, [Angerona] delivered the Roman people from the disease known as quinsy (angina)”. And when discussing the tutelary god of Rome, Macrobius, Saturnalia, 3.9.4, says also that “Angerona is represented with a finger to her lips as though enjoining silence”. The fact that she shares a Temple with the goddess of pleasure (Voluptia) suggests that, as in the case of Harpocrates, the original reason for the finger on the lips of Angerona was not to signify silence but rather to signify the necessity for restraint in the face of suffering and a reminder that suffering was lack of pleasure. Nevertheless, in spite of these anomalies, Angerona is usually cited as the Roman goddess of silence.
82 There was an altar to an unknown god in the Areopagus in Athens but not specifically to Athena. It was in front of this altar that St Paul preached to the Athenians (Acts 17.22–18.17), thereby suggesting that the unknown god was the god of the Christians.
83 Thersites the ugly Greek speaks out in Book II of Homer, Iliad, against the whole purpose and result of the Greek expedition: was the carrying away of a man’s wife worth the death of all these heroes? Thersites then has to endure the rebuke of Ulysses.
84 Dodona in the Epirus is the site of the Oracle of Zeus, supposedly the oldest oracle in Greece, in use at least from the second millennium B.C.E. The bowls is a reference to an apparatus which was famous throughout Greece: a statue of a boy holding a chain was placed adjoining some bronze bowls and when the chain swung in the wind the bowls resounded with a noise which could then be interpreted as an oracle.
85 Melissus Maecenas was a freedman of Gaius Maecenas, the Roman patron of the Arts of the first century B.C.E.
86 This remark is said by Plutarch, De Garrulitate, 505C, to have been made not by Pythagoras but by “old Metellus”.
87 This story is also told by Plutarch, De Garrulitate, 506D, when King Antigonus was asked by his son when they were going to move camp. His reply was intended to teach his son to be guarded about such matters. See also Nigro, Elogio della menzogna, 49, nt. 3.
88 Xenocrates was a fourth-century philosopher and student of Plato. Very little of his work has survived. Plutarch says that this anecdote originated with Simonides; see Plutarch, De Garrulitate, 515.
89 Those young men who volunteered to be whipped at the Temple of Artemis so as to gain a reputation for strength and endurance. He who remained silent the longest received a prize.
90 Presumably this is the Fable of the Fox and the Crow. The fox, seeing the crow up a tree eating a piece of cheese, flatters the crow and asks her to sing for him. She opens her beak and the cheese falls into the fox’s mouth.
91 Talthybius and Eurybates were heralds in Homer, Iliad, for Agamemnon and Odysseus, respectively. In Book 1, they are sent together by Agamemnon to Achilles’s tent to recover Briseis. Achilles describes them (Book 1, line 334) as messengers of Zeus, thus acknowledging the earlier statement in Book 1, line 5, that the theme of the whole epic was to fulfill the will of Zeus.
92 Cited in Prandi, “Premesse umanistiche del ‘Furioso’”, 24 nt. 65.
93 See Erasmus, Prolegomena (translated J. N. Grant), Collected Works of Erasmus 30. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017, which give the full origin of these three references. According to Stephanus of Byzantium, the cicadas of the city of Acanthos are silent. According to Erasmus, Adages, 1.5.31, the frogs of Seriphus are mute.
94 Perhaps this sentence is the heart of Calcagnini’s argument. The arcana or the ultimate mysteries are not revealed by rational argument (“the inspiration to philosophize”) but by faith by, which alone the divine can be attained and contemplated.
95 See Plato, Ion, 533d, in which Socrates compares Ion’s oratory to a divine power analogous to the power of a magnet.
96 That is training in the round or all-round knowledge.
97 Homer, Odyssey, 4.221: Telemachus visits Sparta early in the epic to seek news of his father. The nepenthe is administered by Helen, who had returned to Sparta and is apparently living happily with Menelaus.
98 At this point, the guardian of the Temple, who has been describing the picture, stops, and Calcagnini or his narrator continues to describe what he sees in the picture.
99 The canephores or caryatids and the baskets must indicate the Erechteum of the Acropolis, which commemorates the founding of Athens by Erechteus and Palladius or may refer to the Palladium, the antique wooden statue of Athena eventually taken to Rome. Or Calcagnini may have conflated Palladius with Palladas, the fourth-century C.E. Greek poet who wrote the following epigram: “Every uneducated man is wisest if he remains silent, hiding his speech like a disgraceful disease” (Greek Anthology 10.98, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=urn:cts:greekLit:tlg7000.tlg001.perseus-grc4:10.98).
100 The priests of Cybele.
101 An Egyptian musical instrument.
102 Presumably the fifth-century philosopher, who is said to have engaged Socrates in a number of logical arguments.
103 The Cabeiri were the ancient gods of Samothrace. A full description of the Cabeiri is given in Thwaites, “The Deities of the Sacred Axe”, 25–56.
104 Possibly Cerberus.
105 The Essenes were a strict Jewish sect flourishing in about the second century C.E. Their customs are related in Pliny, Natural History, 5.73, see https://www.gutenberg.org/files/57493/57493-h/57493-h.htm, Philo, Hypothetica, 11.1–18, and Every Good Man Is Free, 12.75–13.91, translated by F. H. Colson, Loeb Classical Library 363, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941, and included a three-year purification period, although silence does not seem to have been a part of this initiation.
106 See Macrobius, On the Dream of Scipio, quoted in Banner, Philosophic Silence and the ‘One’ in Plotinus, 112. Numenius saw in a dream that the priestesses of the Eleusinian mysteries had been put out on the street to prostitute themselves as a punishment for him, Numenius, having revealed the secrets of the Mysteries.
107 Homer, Odyssey, 19.42.
108 This story is from Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 12. 2.
109 Hesiod, Works and Days, v. 720.
110 According to the Protagoras, 343b, this was inscribed in the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. Plato Protagoras http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0178%3Atext%3DProt.%3Asection%3D343b
111 Ecclesiastes, 3.
112 Possession of this egg, which is reported in Pliny, Natural History, 29.12, supposedly assisted in pursuing lawsuits, approaching princes and generally achieving what you desire. See also Nigro, Elogio della menzogna, 50, nt. 5.
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Robin Raybould
Robin Raybould (M.A., L.L.M. Cantab) is an independent scholar who focusses on the symbolic literature of the Renaissance. His recent publications include The Sybil Series of the Fifteenth Century (Brill 2016) and translations and commentary on Karl Giehlow’s The Humanist Interpretation of Hieroglyphs in the Allegorical Studies of the Renaissance, and Ludwig Volkmann’s Hieroglyph, Emblem and Renaissance Pictography (Brill 2015 and 2018). His articles have appeared in Emblematica and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition. Raised in the U.K., he has lived and worked in New York for thirty years.