From Ovid's Cecrops to Rubens's City of God in "The Finding of Erichthonius" Author(s): Aneta Georgievska-Shine Source: The Art

Bulletin, Vol. 86, No. 1 (Mar., 2004), pp. 58-74 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3177400 Accessed: 06/01/2010 22:00
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From

to Rubens's Cecrops The Finding of Erichthonius

Ovid's

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Aneta Georgievska-Shine
... The poet says, Dear City of Cecrops; and wilt not thou say, Dear City of Zeus?-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 4.231 The transitory character of all things as an aspect of a preordained natural course is a common theme in Peter Paul Rubens's written and painted musings on the world. In a 1629 letter toJan Caspar Gevaerts, the Antwerp humanist and his close friend, Rubens expresses condolences at the death of his wife, recalling his own bereavement for his beloved wife, Isabella Brandt, who had died in 1626. As if to underscore the necessity of accepting one's fate, the artist invokes Marcus Aurelius, an author intensely studied by Gevaerts at this very time: If any consolation is to be hoped for from philosophy, then you will find an abundant source within yourself. I commend you to your Antoninus, whose divine nourishment you will distribute liberally to your friends. I shall add only this, as a poor kind of comfort: that we are living in a time when life itself is possible only if one frees himself of every burden, like a swimmer in a stormy sea.2 Rubens is not citing a specific passage, yet this shared familiarity with Aurelius allows him to convey by means of allusions the leitmotiv of this seminal Stoic thinker-the futility of remorse over the unstoppable passage of time: One who has seen the present world has seen all that ever has been from time everlasting and all that ever will be For all things, in a sense, are mutually into eternity.... intertwined, and by virtue of that all are dear to one another; for one thing follows duly upon another because of the tonic movement and the common breath that pervades throughout and the unity of all substance.3 Whereas similar ideas can be followed in many other letters by the artist, this engagement with the Stoic notion of the cycle of life guided by Providence is even more apparent in his paintings. From such early works as TheFall of Phaeton (ca. 1606, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) to those he created at the close of his career, such as TheRape of Proserpina (ca. 1636-38, the Prado, Madrid), the "rushing torrent" of the "world-cause" that Aurelius wrote about remained a constant within his pictorial inventions.4 And no other source provided him with richer material for an investigation of this all-pervasive principle than Ovid's book of metamorphoses. Whether Rubens revisited a well-known story and rendered it novel by highlighting an unexpected facet of its surface or chose a seldom recounted tale, his pictorial representations of myths invariably possess an opulence of meanings that could rival Ovid's intertwining of narratives in service to the larger theme of his poem: the mutability of forms. One such example of Rubens's affinity for this way of thinking is The Finding of Erichthonius, a painting from the decade following his return from Italy to Antwerp (Fig. 1) .5 Created about 1616 for an unknown patron, and possibly without a specific commission, The Finding of Erichthonius is arguably among the most ambitious and mysterious of Rubens's treatments of ancient fables. It is based on a Greek creation myth, rarely commented on in writing and even more seldom represented in painting, whose meaning centers on the procreative power of nature. At its narrative core is a monstrous infant, Erichthonius, a half-human, half-serpentine creature engendered when the seed of Hephaestus spills on the earth (Gaea) after a failed advance to Athena, his great competitor for primacy among the Athenians.6 In Ovid's account of this story, the disreputable act leading to the birth of Erichthonius is completely omitted. Rather, the poet begins with the moment shown in Rubens's painting: the daughters of the Athenian King Cecrops (Herse, Aglauros, and Pandrosos), whom Athena had charged with the safekeeping of the basket holding Erichthonius, break their oath to the virgin goddess by uncovering the offspring of this divine indiscretion (Metamorphoses2.552ff.). No sooner has the reader been introduced to Erichthonius than Ovid decides to interrupt this story with an unusually long digression into a few seemingly unrelated transformations, so as to pick up the narrative at a much later moment, when one of these three royal daughters (Herse) catches the eye of Hermes. The poet continues with an elliptical conclusion to the first part: Hermes punishes Aglauros, who had attempted to thwart his desire for Herse and who had originally persuaded her sisters to open the basket with Erichthonius (Metamorphoses, 2.711ff.). This narrative lacuna is far from capricious, for it allows Ovid to avoid the problem of the different textual versions of the discovery of Erichthonius and the destiny of the princesses who had breached Athena's order. In another variant of this myth, for instance, going back to Euripides and Pausanias and popular among such Renaissance commentators of this myth as Natale Conti, all three daughters of Cecrops commit suicide as a result of a madness visited upon them by Athena.7 Classicists have frequentlyjudged the curious organization as being excessively self-reflexof book 2 of the Metamorphoses ive and indulgent of the poet's wit. As has been pointed out in a recent study, this reaction is largely due to the tendency to view Ovid's storytelling method as a rhetorical scheme of "good" and "bad" episodes of changes, a tendency that often leads to interpretations lacking in an understanding of the subtle interplay of narrators and addressees within the larger metanarratives of this poem.8 The Finding of Erichthonius presents comparable interpretative difficulties for art historians. While the ostensible subject of this painting is the disclosure of an infant whose hybrid form should elicit fear and abhorrence, the palpable sense of

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1 Peter Paul Rubens, TheFinding of Erichthonius,ca. 1616. Vaduz, Sammlungen des Fuirstenvon und zu Liechtenstein

bemusement among its protagonists imbues the scene with the atmosphere of a pastoral poem. Moreover, beyond presenting the characters relevant to the story, Rubens embellishes his composition with several figures of rather oblique import, including a cupidlike putto next to one of the princesses, an old nursemaid, a hermlike figure at the distant left, and a richly flowing fountain resembling Artemis of Ephesus on the right. Most scholars have seen these additions as mere allegorical enhancements of the artist's invention. The one reader to speculate on their deeper meanings was Julius Held, who proposed that the cupid and the nursemaid may allude to the second episode of Ovid's story, where Hermes' choice of Herse as his mate ultimately leads to the punishment of her sister Aglauros, the true agent of this forbidden discovery.9 The interpretation offered here builds on a significant implication of Held's suggestion concerning these narrative allusions-that the visual intricacies of The Finding ofErichthonius exemplify a mode of pictorial commentary on myth comparable to Ovid's manner of storytelling. The clearest indexes of this approach on the part of the artist are the figural prompts noted by Held, whereby the two parts of the Erichthonius narrative are brought together, as if in response to the poet who had decided to set them asunder in the At the same time, by means of this sophistiMetamorphoses. cated invention, Rubens leads the beholder toward a visual

exegesis whose elaborate texture can be seen as an equivalent to the discourse on ancient myths cultivated by the antiquarians of his generation. Rubens's sophistication as an interpreter of the past needs no lengthy introduction. The letter to Gevaerts cited above exemplifies the tenor of his voluminous correspondence, which is filled with references to an encyclopedic body of ancient texts. The same intellectual scope shaped his personal museum, which included both commonly collected artifacts, such as paintings and sculptures, and objects reflecting a rather more rarefied sensibility, such as ancient gems, burial urns, and even an Egyptian mummy.10 Likewise, though the contents of his remarkable library have only recently been fully published, studies of his work have consistently shown his firsthand knowledge of Greek and Roman literature, as well as its afterlife in the works of later writers." This fluency with the cultural legacy of antiquity proved especially pertinent in Rubens's representations of ancient fables, where questions such as the source of a story and its different variants could present both challenges and intellectual rewards. As this discussion of The Finding of Erichthonius hopes to demonstrate, Rubens was an artist who, in acknowledgment of the "marvelous character" of ancient fables (orazione favolosa), distanced himself from the tradition of the Ovide moralise prevalent among northern painters of his time.12 In pursuing the meanings of an Ovidian favola, he

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could appreciate the rich allegorical, as well as poetic, potential of the separation between the "surface" of the story and the moral gloss hidden within.13 Hence, in the richly layered composition of The Finding of Erichthonius, one can see a testimony to his antiquarian acuity as an interpreter of myths. At the same time, the opulence of this painting is a kind of homage to Ovid, a poet whom his more sophisticated Renaissance readers praised for a comparable copiousness of language: ... of all Latin poetry, there is none so ample, so rich, so diverse, and so universal as the Metamorphosesof Ovid, which contain in fifteen books composed in elegant heroic meter all (or nearly all) the stories of the ancient poets and writers, bound to one another, and so well linked by sustained narrative and by skilful transition, that each seems to arise from and to depend on the other in succession.... By means of all these myths Ovid's sole intention is to teach us that, in the nature of things, forms are 14 continually changing, while matter never dies.... Changing Forms and the Basket of Mysteries The manifold meanings of The Finding of Erichthonius begin with the characters that frame the narrative moment that shapes its composition. These are the Pan terminus on the left and a fountain statue at the right modeled on the Ephesian Artemis, generally interpreted as visual reminders of Hephaestus's desire for Athena and Gaea's motherly acceptance of its progeny, respectively. In the center, the putto and the maid seem to encourage the most restrained among the sisters (usually identified as Herse) to take in the forbidden sight. Right above this royal daughter, barely discernible in the crown of the large tree that shades the pastoral scene, Rubens introduces a black bird-the first, clearly identifiable signal of the various voices in Ovid's story. This is the crow, the internal narrator who details the finding of Erichthonius to a fellow bird, the raven, as a warning against disclosure of another secret, the betrayal of Apollo by his lover Coronis (Metamorphoses2.535ff.). As the reader learns from the admonishment, the crow's report to Athena of the disobedience of the Cecropides had resulted in her banishment from the entourage of the goddess, thus concluding a series of changes of this bird from her original state as a human princess (Metamorphoses 2.569-77). Another inconspicuous but potentially important narrative prompt is the peacock half obscured by the statue of Pan. Though associated in the literature with imperfection in nature and, by extension, with the aberrant birth of Erichthonius, in the context of the generative theme of Rubens's painting, the peacock can also signify the abundance of nature, as well as artistic creations. The latter meaning is invoked by a number of contemporary writers, including Piero Valeriano, who compares the colors of the peacock to the wealth of ornaments in Homer's poetry in his Hieroglyphica, a book purchased by Rubens in 1615, that is, not long before the creation of The Finding of Erichthonius.15 The level of signification becomes all the more intriguing as we consider how the peacock helps us locate the place of the represented story within the sequence of changes in Ovid's poem. The finding of Erichthonius is told after the

story of Callisto (a mortal who shares Herse's distinction of being desired by a god), which concludes with a note on the embellishment of the peacocks' tails with the "immortal colors" of the eyes of Argus. Characteristically, Ovid uses this marvelous instance of the change of the peacocks' tails as a segue to the transmutation of the showy white plumage of the raven to black (Metamorphoses2.531ff.). Thus, through a skillful parallel between the transformations of these birds, Ovid creates a narrative transition to the dialogue between the raven and the crow that introduces both the finding of Erichthonius and its embedded stories, all of which resound with the dangers of garrulity. Predictably, the crow's appeal to the raven not to disclose the infidelity of Coronis fails. The raven hastens to Apollo and causes the death of the nymph. Like the botched union of Hephaestus and Athena, the climactic resolution of this parallel story involves an infant, Asclepius, whom Apollo pulls out of the womb of Coronis as she is consumed by fire. In the postscript of the story, Ovid reminds us that the raven replays the crow's destiny for speaking of things beyond his authority.16

This thematic cadence introduces the following intermezzo, involving the metamorphosis of Ocyrrhoe, the daughter of the wise centaur Chiron charged with the education of Asclepius. She, too, is privy to secrets and, like the raven and the crow, undergoes a change for their disclosure. Her specific crime is to foretell the dual power of the snake's venom to kill and bring the dead back to life (the future deeds of Asclepius). As if to add to the complexity of these narrative links, Ovid brings in still another episode of change, in which the shepherd Battus (Chatterbox in Greek) is turned into stone as a punishment for betraying Hermes' theft of the cattle of Apollo (Metamorphoses2.685-708).17 Only at this junction does the poet return his attention to the daughters of Cecrops, as they walk toward Athena's temple on one of her festivals: It chanced that day was Pallas' festival and virgins carried, in the accustomed way, In baskets, flower-crowned, upon their heads The secret vessels to her hilltop shrine. (Metamorphoses 2.711ff.) The ironic echo between these secret offerings for Athena's temple ("in Palladis arces ... sacra canistris") and the earlier failure of the Cecropides to honor the virgin goddess by keeping the infant hidden in the box ("cista") leads the reader back to the central narrative of book 2. Simultaneously, this evocative image provides the poet with an occasion to introduce Hermes captivated by the sight of Herse's beauty (Metamorphoses 2.715ff.).18 From this moment on, events move swiftly toward the fulfillment of his desire and the jealousy it provokes in Aglauros, who, as a result, follows the destiny of Battus by being transformed into "a lifeless statue" of stone (Metamorphoses 2.824-30). In Ovid's narrative, we discern a thematic resonance between the forbidden discovery on the part of the Cecropides and a series of intermezzi through which Ovid develops the theme of changingforms, from white to black (the crow and the raven), from human and semihuman to animal (the crow

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and Ocyrrhoe), and from animate to inanimate (Battus and Aglauros). This thematic resonance in effect establishes a metanarrative bond between Erichthonius and Asclepius, the god of healing who is likewise magically related to snakes. Seventeenth-century viewers with a taste for poetic correspondences would not have found it difficult to connect Athena's crow (cornix) in Rubens's painting to her absent addressee, the raven (corvus), whose garrulity would accelerate the birth of Asclepius. Ovid had done much the same in his play on the common etymological root of the names of these feathered messengers in the Metamorphoses.19 Pausanias, whose famous DescriptionofGreecewas also in Rubens's library around this time, related them in his discussion of the town called Corone, which, as he observes, received its name from "a bronze crow" discovered in its foundations. In the very next section, he added that "Artemis, called the 'Nurse of Children,' Dionysus, and Asclepius" have temples at that site.20 The implication of this comment is quite clear: Ovid's interpolation of the stories of Erichthonius and Asclepius drew on an existing connection between Coronis and her offspring and the cults of Athena and her crow. Though the circumstances surrounding the infancy of Asclepius are pieced together from conflicting accounts, for most authors, his miraculous birth from the corpse of Coronis anticipates his future powers of healing and prophecy. Like Erichthonius, he was a divinity honored in a number of Attic cults.21 According to some sources, when Minerva slew the snake-haired Medusa, she gave the blood spilled from her severed head to either Asclepius or Erichthonius. Blood from the left vein took life away, while blood from the right one restored it.22 Furthermore, in one version of his birth, Coronis left Asclepius exposed on Mt. Myrtium, subsequently called Nipple, which brings to mind the multibreasted Gaea/ Artemis in Rubens's painting. Abandoned at that site, the infant was suckled by a goat and guarded by the dog protecting a flock.23 The little dog at center barking at the discovery of Erichthonius can easily be accommodated to this segment of the narrative, being an animal whose traditional association with Asclepius extends to fanciful etymological equations between their names.24 Rubens alluded to this attribute of the god of healing in one of the paintings from the Medicis cycle, The Birth of theDauphin at Fontainebleau,where the Genius holding the young prince has a snake entwined around his arm and a little dog at his feet.25 In The Finding of Erichthonius, this connection to Asclepius draws further support from the dog as a signifier of arcane truths (philosophia communicata) and creates an ironic reminder of the betrayal of secrets that drives this story forward.26 None of these connections, however, is as pertinent to Rubens's invention as Asclepius's identification with the snake. His most famous portrayal in that form is found in the final pages of the Metamorphoses,where Ovid presents Pythagoras's teaching on the transmigration of souls as the theoretical key to his poem.27 The climactic moment of this final change is Asclepius's entry into Rome at the appeal of a Delphic oracle, who summons him to help this city against a devastating pestilence. Entering a ship as a huge golden snake, Asclepius reaches his new home at an island in the middle of the Tiber, thus concluding the translation of Greek

divinities to the new center of the world.28 This transfer, of course, is related to the famous topos of the Sibylline Books containing instructions for gaining the favor of foreign gods, which despite the initial objections of Tarquinius Priscus, the fifth king of Rome (trad. 616-579 B.C.E.), were finally enshrined in Rome in a chest of stone.29 Where this story folds into Rubens's painting is through the opening of Athena's basket that had concealed the snakeinfant Erichthonius from the eyes of the world. The disclosure of similarly prodigious infants is a common trope, which found its way into poems that the artist's brother Philip dedicated to his teacher and spiritual father, Justus Lipsius. In one of them, he extols the birth of this neo-Stoic thinker by invoking the virgin goddess and the dwellers of Helicon, who would have "wanted to put [Lipsius] in the cradle and drink deeply [of his wisdom] with their eyes...."30 In another poem, occasioned by Lipsius's death in 1606, the teacher's mind is deemed superior to the wisdom of the ancient shrines of Athena ("Cecropiae ... praestantius arces").31 In a similar vein, the Leiden professor of Greek Daniel Heinsius compared a 1609 treatise on ancient gems by the Antwerp antiquarian Abraham Gorlaeus to the Cecropian shrine ("Cecropis arces") whose contents have been granted for safekeeping to its author.32 Offerings concealed in baskets, as we have seen, play an important role in the second segment of the story of the Cecropides.33 Ovid's orchestration of the first meeting between Hermes and Herse during her pilgrimage to the shrine of Athena is a telling detail of his interpretation of this myth. Indeed, it recalls a mystery cult discussed by Pausanias, which involves maidens "called by the Athenians Bearers of the Sacred Offerings" who take down from the temple of the virgin goddess covered things that they could not look at, carry them through the city, "leave down below what they carry, and receive something else which they bring back covered up." The term Pausanias uses for these maidens is kistaphoroi, derived from the root kista (in Latin, cista) and commonly employed for baskets containing secret offerings, including the one with the infant Erichthonius.34 Marjon van der Meulen, the author of the most comprehensive study of Rubens's relation to antiquity, has identified a specific classical source for the snake-child that may help us understand further the nature of this mystery. This is the motif of a child opening a basket with a snake frequently found on Roman sarcophagi in representations of the "Indian Triumph of Bacchus," reproduced in several drawings from the circle of Rubens as well as in an engraving for a treatise written by his son Albert, De Re VestiariaVeterum(Figs. 2, 3). In one of the essays in this treatise, dedicated to an antique coin of Emperor Augustus ("De nvmmo Avgusti, cvivs epigraphe, Asia Recepta"), Albert specifically identifies this motif as a cista mystica.35 In typical antiquarian fashion, the author begins with a careful description of the coin, with its obverse portrait of Augustus and the personification of Victory elevated on a cista and flanked by intertwined serpents on the reverse. These figures, together with the accompanying inscription "Asia Recepta," provide him with a starting point for a long and learned commentary on the meaning of this antique object. In Albert's opinion, the cista itself relates to the notion

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3 R. Colin, engraving after Rubens, ThreeMotifs of a Cista Mystica,in Rubens, 270

Philip Rubens. More than anything else, however, what situates these ideas within TheFinding of Eriochthoniusis Rubens's visual arrangement of figures in his composition. Ordering as an Index of Time One of the most memorable contemporary passages on the importance of composition in poetic or pictorial inventions comes from the influential treatise on the painting of the ancients by Franciscus Junius, another of Rubens's learned correspondents. Published in Latin in 1637, Depictura veterum is, in many ways, a synthesis of ideas that had shaped the work of earlier Renaissance theorists of painting and poetry, ranging from Josephus Justus Scaliger and Baldassare Castiglione to Paolo Lomazzo and Giovanni Battista Armenini. His most important sources, however, are the standard works of ancients such as Pliny the Elder, Quintilian, Cicero, and the two Philostrati.40 Hence, it is not surprising thatJunius speaks of the "arrangement of matter" by paraphrasing the definition of "disposition [dispositio]"in book 10 of Quintilian's Institutio oratoria (10.7.16): We must fix our minde, not upon one thing onely, sayth Quintilian, but upon many continued things at once: even as when we cast our eyes through a straight way, we see all at once what is in it and about it: we doe not onely see the end, but to the end. There is most commonly in every historicall argument a first, second, and third sense: neither is it enough that we labour to settle them in order, but we must moreover endeavour to joyne and to connect them so cunningly, that it might not be perceived where and how they are joyned, as being now no more parts and members, but an entire bodie.41 Clearly predicated on the venerable debate between the relative values of painting and poetry with respect to the representation of time, this recommendation makes an unambig-

2 Copy after a lost drawing, possibly by Rubens, Motif of a Cista London, Courtauld Institute Mysticafroma BacchicSarcophagus. Galleries, Princes Gate Collection, MsJohnson, fol. lllr

of the dog (canis), while the intertwined snakes designate fertility symbols, for which he cites various ancient rituals.36 Concerning the child opening a basket on Bacchic sarcophagi, he calls on a number of authorities, including Clement of Alexandria, who had interpreted the motif of the "cista mystica" as a revelation of mysteries pertaining to generation, leading Albert to conclude that the snake appearing from the basket symbolizes the conjunction of Jove with the great mother (Rhea).37 These themes all bring him to his central thesis, that the inscription "Asia Recepta" on the coin signifies the victory of Caesar Augustus over Anthony and Cleopatra and, by implication, Europe's supremacy over Asia.38 Notwithstanding the fact that Albert's essay postdates The Finding of Erichthonius by several decades, his analysis follows very closely a discussion of the same type of antique coin in Valeriano's Hieroglyphica,a book that, as mentioned earlier, was owned by his father since 1615.39 Reading the fascinating exposition by Rubens's son on the "cista mystica" allows us to grasp some of the symbolic weight of this motif in seventeenth-century antiquarian discourse with respect to the transfer of cults, mysteries, and, ultimately, cultural systems. It also helps us gain a better sense of the metaphorical relation between the secret contents of Athena's basket and the praise for Justus Lipsius in the poems by

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uous claim about the power of painting to encompass a range of events (and meanings) in a potent narrative moment.42 As Junius explains further by recourse to the Philostrati, the artificer who strives for such arrangement assigns "the principall place unto the principall figures which have the chiefest hand in the represented action," allowing others to recede into the background: "The Painter hath shed a mist about the other things... that they might rather resemble things already done, than things that are a doing."43 Analogous precepts on disposition guide the composition of The Finding of Erichthonius, where several related mythological stories are combined into a Chinese box-like structure as yet another vivid example of a painting that can rival the temporal compass of a poetic oration.44 The innermost layer of this arrangement is the infant, a mythical figure inseparable from the idea of the generative powers of nature. It is worth mentioning that Erichthonius shares his half-serpentine form with the father of the three princesses, King Cecrops, who also was an important figure for a number of snake cults at the Acropolis.45 Athena's connection with snakes was obvious to Renaissance commentators, who spoke of the snakes decorating her shield as symbols of her unparalleled sight and insight.46 Desiderius Erasmus's adage "Serpentis oculis," dedicated to those who look at things "with keen and piercing eyes," reverberates in Rubens's painting both in the "finding" of the infant and in the eyes of the maid, who seems to look into the future of this disclosed mystery.47 Most importantly, through the related story of Asclepius, The Finding of Erichthonius evokes the commonplace about snakes and rejuvenation.48 Like Erichthonius, the snake-tailed father of the three princesses is of mysterious parentage and distinguished for his piety toward a number of divinities, including Saturn (Heaven) and Ops (Earth), as well as Athena.49 The dynastic significance of Cecrops was recognized already by Homer, who called the citizens of Athens "people of the great-hearted Erechtheus, whom once Athena daughter of Zeus raised, but the life-giving earth bore him."50 In view of these associations between Cecrops and the establishment of Athens, this king would continue to denote the highest nobility of birth ("nobilissimus a principe civitatis originem ducens") and the longest pedigree ("Athenienses nobiles a Cecrope antiquissimo, & primo suo rege") well into the seventeenth century.51 The daughters of Cecrops enrich the procreative theme of this myth through the etymological relations of their names with "dew" (Herse), "bedewed" (Pandrosos), and "brightness" (Aglauros), a theme underscored by the ornate vase beside them, their traditional attribute and long-established symbol of "nourishing moisture."52 While most scholars agree that the bashful virgin shaded by the tree is Herse, the identities of the two other maidens are less certain. Both textual and visual traditions suggest that Aglauros is the dark-haired princess in the center holding the basket lid.53 Nonetheless, she recalls Pandrosos through the obvious pun between her gesture and the prototypical woman associated with boxes, which finds reflection in some accounts of this myth, where she is called Pandora. In a teasing hint of this possibility, Rubens adorns her with a pearl diadem that evokes the epithet "pan" and "drosos" (all-bedewed).54 In turn, he accords the sister commonly identified as Pandrosos

several attributes that bring to mind Aglauros, most notably, brilliant tresses and a shimmering garment, both of which recall the adjective aglauos (shiny, bright).55 Even her gaze, fixed on the infant, may be seen as a pictorial reflection of Ovid's description of Aglauros's amazement at that forbidden sight, while her soft flesh against the stony fountain may intimate her subsequent transformation into stone.56 The ambivalence of identities is amplified by the figure of Herse, whose body, reminiscent of the Venus Pudica, echoes the Renaissance praise of this daughter of Cecrops ("Cecropis filia") and future bride of Hermes for her exquisite beauty ("formae praestantissimae").57 As Held insightfully observed, Rubens may have invoked this famous antique ideal of beauty and restraint in Herse's form in order to interpolate the moment of the sisters' betrayal of Athena's secret with the later episode of the story.58 The proleptic quotation brings into play a favorite Renaissance trope on beautiful maidens and ancient statues of Venus, exemplified by Lomazzo's words on a Venus Pudica from the Belvedere garden as an archetype for any beautiful woman.59 Rubens seems to concur with his opinion in several annotated drawings of the female form preserved in studio copies, where he upholds the canonical value of this statue as a model of beauty and identifies the subject as "Greek Venus."60 In view of the dynastic significance of the house of Cecrops for the history of Athens, the allusion to Venus Pudica in Herse's body can also be seen as a signifier of the specifically Greek origin of this myth. Beyond all of these metaphoric possibilities, the reference to the Venus Pudica helps us return to the internal voice in Ovid's account of the myth of the Cecropides: the faintly visible crow above Herse. As noted earlier, this bird sacred to Athena tells the raven that she was once the royal daughter ("regia virgo") of King Coroneus. Explaining how the virginal goddess turned her into a bird in order to save her from the advances of the sea god, she poignantly adds that "my beauty was my undoing [forma mihi nocuit]."61Rubens has placed her above another princess divinely chosen for her beauty, whereby she becomes not only a messenger of the infant's discovery but also an omen of the changes that will shape the narrative all the way to its conclusion with Aglauros's mutation into stone. At the same time, the statue of Venus Pudica enlivened in Herse's body performs an antithetical motion within the ordained chain of events, asserting the power of the artist to transform lifeless marble into an illusion of living flesh.62 The interplay between art and nature leads us to the fountain figure, whose resemblance to Artemis of Ephesus evokes a favorite Renaissance figure for the great mother goddess.63 A writer like Natale Conti emphasized the help of the Ephesian virgin to mothers during childbirth, conveyed by her eponyms Eileithyia and Lucina, while Guillaume du Choul related her to the Egyptian Isis.64 The indispensable textual source for these syncretistic proclivities of the late Renaissance antiquarians, Macrobius's Saturnalia, also conflates Artemis and Isis, thus bringing us full circle to another aspect of Gaea/Artemis in Rubens's painting: her Delphic cult as a prophetess.65 Furthermore, one can follow this interest in religious polymorphism directly to Rubens's circle and, in the case of Artemis, to a copy of an antiquarian treatise by

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4 Michelangelo, The CumaeanSybil. Vatican State, Sistine Chapel, Vatican Palace (photo: Scala / Art Resource, NY)

Hubertus Goltzius believed to have originally belonged to Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc, the great connoisseur of antiquity and friend of the artist, where printed entries on the various figures from the Greek and Roman pantheon are frequently supplemented by handwritten names that elaborate on their relationships to divinities from other ancient religions.6 The putto extends this web of relations by his own formal debt to antiquity. If his placement next to the basket recalls the motif of the "cista mystica," his proximity to Herse may allude to the theme of the Judgment of Paris, whose representations on ancient sarcophagi often include similar cupid figures.'7 This suggestion is enriched by the resemblance between the sisters and the figures of nymphs also common within sarcophagi reliefs depicting that mythological scene.68 As creatures whose beauty could induce frenzy in the beholder, nymphs can serve as fitting epithets for the princesses, especially in view of Hermes' passion for Herse.9 Sustaining this simile is the association of the Cecropides with nourishment, as well as the grovelike setting in which they are depicted. The locus classicus of this caregiving attribute of the nymphs is Aphrodite's speech to Anchises about Aeneas, the child born of their union on Mt. Ida, who will be left there to be raised by ... deep-girdled mountain Nymphai ... who dwell on this great and holy mountain. They are numbered neither with mortals nor immortals.... But at their birth firs of loftycrowned oaks are also born, trees fair and flourishing in the high mountains, and they are called precincts of the
gods.70

parallel between Minerva's offspring and the great Trojan hero Aeneas, and thus between the progenitor of the Greeks and the ancestral hero of the Romans. The lushly green foliage behind Herse resembling a crown of an oak tree continues this comparison through the traditional association of the oak with Pan and the nymphs as his customary companions. Both Pan and the nymphs are commonly associated with prophetic powers, which extends the idea of prophecy beyond the figures of Gaea, the dog, the putto, and, most importantly, the old nursemaid.71 As for this last character,Julius Held compared her gaze at the beholder to a Sibylline look into the future events of the story.72 Against the Athenian backdrop of The Finding of Erichthonius, she brings to mind Herophile, the Sibyl whose tomb in Attica carried an inscription recorded by Pausanias: Here I am, the plain-speaking Sibyl of Phoebus, hidden beneath this stone tomb. A maiden once gifted with voice, I am buried near the but now forever voiceless.... this and Hermes, enjoying in the world below a nymphs of the part kingdom I had then. The Hermes stands by the side of the tomb, a square-shaped figure of stone. On the left is water running down into a well, and the images of the nymphs....73 While Rubens did not necessarily organize his composition to accord with this epitaph, the formal and literary confluences between Pausanias's passage and the painter's composition show the degree to which his approach to the Erichthonius myth is attuned to classical topoi on sacred spaces and the mysteries they contain.74 This becomes even clearer as we turn to the praise of Augustine for the Christian spirit of Herophile (the Erythraean Sibyl), whose prophecy "not only has nothing that can relate to the worship of the false or

Like the visual reference to Venus Pudica in the body of Herse, this passage offered to seventeenth-century beholders of The Finding of Erichthonius sensitive to poetic allusions a

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5 Michelangelo, lunette with Ezechias, Manasses, and Amon. Vatican State, Sistine Chapel, Vatican Palace (photo: Scala / Art Resource, NY)

feigned gods, but rather speaks against them and their worshipers in such a way that we might think she ought to be reckoned among those who belong to the city of God."75 One of the most famous visual tributes to Augustine's apologia for the pagan ancestry of Christianity was Michelangelo's work on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, whose Prophets and Sibyls were among Rubens's most important pictorial models during his Italian sojourn.76 Of these figures, the Sibyl that appears most appropriate to the sisters' maid in The Finding of Erichthonius is that of Cumaea, blessed with eternal life but doomed to perpetual old age (Fig. 4). Michelangelo had emphasized her nourishing role through her breasts, thus conveying the idea of the heavenly nourishment (lac de coelo)she gave to mankind as a food of salvation.77 He further stressed this concept through the contiguous images of nursing mothers in two lunettes beneath the Cumaean Sibyl (Fig. 5).78 Though Michelangelo's Sibyls constitute discrete images within a larger cycle, his path to visual meaning follows a logic of allusions similar to the one in The Finding of Erichthonius. Indeed, the placement of the Cumaean Sibyl next to the nursing mothers in the lunettes of the Sistine ceiling can be compared to the formal relationship between the nursemaid and the Gaea/Artemis fountain in Rubens's composition. Certainly, the metaphoric potential of these formal alignments depends on the larger theme of The Finding of Erichthonius-the "discovery" of a miraculously begotten infant who brings about both death and a new beginning-and thus recalls the famous ancient locus on cultural succession from Virgil's fourth Eclogue:

Now is come the last age of the song of Cumae; the great line of the centuries begins anew [nascitur ordo]. Now the Virgin returns, the reign of Saturn returns; now a new generation [nova progenisse] descends from heaven on high. Only do you pure Lucina, smile on the birth of the child, under whom the iron brood shall first cease, and a golden race spring up throughout the world! Thine own Apollo now is king!79 Terminus The one figure that remains to be reconsidered within this arrangement of matter in Rubens's painting is the Pan flanked by a pinelike tree and draped with a cloak resembling a Greek pallium.80As a herm, a favorite Renaissance symbol of fertility, he underscores the complex nature of all beings and the generative theme of this story.81 For the artist's contemporaries, Pan's alter ego, the goat, was "the machine of the universe" that marked the new solar cycle and, even more in line with this painting, the birth of a new ruler.82 Among the deeds that brought Pan honor in Attica was his assistance to the Greek gods after they fled the Giants in Egypt, where he taught them to disguise themselves as various animals.83 Moreover, as Pausanias observes, the Athenians were the first to "set up limbless Hermae."84 Pan's service to the citizens of Athens, especially during the Battle of Marathon, earned him a game of torches alongside the other divinities celebrated in such festivals, including the progenitor of Erichthonius, Hephaestus.85 Among the Pan topoi, the most important for the artist's purposes in The Finding of Erichthonius is one of the classic

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6 Paolo Veronese, MosesSavedfrom the Waters. Dijon, Musee des BeauxArts (photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY)

accounts of his death. According to Plutarch, it happened during the reign of Tiberius, when a sailor passing by the Echinades Islands heard a mysterious voice proclaiming that the great god Pan was dead. This event, as later writers would add, took place at exactly the time when Christianity was born in Judea.86 The theological significance of Pan's death is frequently noted by Renaissance mythographers, including the Antwerp antiquarian Johannes Goropius Becanus, who explicitly identifies him with Christ.87 Even his figuration in Rubens's painting as a herm can be seen as an aspect of this transition, for, as another influential northern humanist, HadrianusJunius, explained in his emblem "Terminus," the form symbolized both inevitable death and an understanding of what is present through that which is past ("ex praeteritatis praesentia aestimatur").88 As we move from Pan toward the figures in the foreground, the correlation between past and present becomes fully realized. Already Ludwig Burchard observed that the atmosphere of surprise in The Finding of Erichthonius is closer to scenes depicting the finding of Moses than to other representations of the Erichthonius myth. Concurring with Burchard, Svetlana Alpers noted that the central characters in Rubens's painting resemble an engraving of the Finding of Moses by Baptiste del Moro, possibly based on a work by Parmigianino.89 One could add a number of similarly configured images on the theme, such as the various versions of the discovery of Moses by Paolo Veronese, an artist who certainly influenced the young Rubens in Italy (Fig. 6). More important for our purposes is the interpretative value of such similarities, that is, the manner in which formal recollections point to a symbolic relationship between several related pagan stories and a famous instance of infant discovery from the Old Testament. The potential for parallels between Rubens's painting and the finding of Moses includes the commonly accepted ety-

mological wordplay between the name of the patriarch and the Egyptian root ms ("child" or "child of god"), which can be related to Erichthonius as a divinely begotten infant.90 Renaissance mythographers also compared Moses to the second infant within Ovid's narrative, Asclepius, specifically with regard to the raising of the brazen serpent.91 These analogies are, once again, supported by the visual structure of Rubens's invention. The nursemaid calls to mind the midwives of the Hebrew women, who "feared God" and disobeyed the king of Egypt, allowing the newborn male children to live (Exod. 1:17). The open basket can be compared to the arc of bulrushes into which Moses was cast by his Hebrew mother "when she could no longer hide him" (Exod. 2:3). Standing at a certain distance from the infant, Herse resembles Moses' sister, who "stood afar off, to wit what would be done to him" (Exod. 2:4). At the same time, her nudity reminds us that the Egyptian princess who discovered Moses by the banks of the Nile had come there to "wash herself' (Exod. 2:5). Finally, the stream of water from the Gaea fountain brings a fitting conclusion to this metaphor, echoing the explanation of the pharaoh's daughter for naming the foundling Moses: "Because I drew him out of the water" (Exod. 2:10). Needless to say, this mapping of tropes can function only within the system of correspondences between mundane and celestial history to which Rubens and his contemporaries were so accustomed. In Eusebius's Cronica, a prime example of this intellectual heritage of seventeenth-century antiquarians, the various events from the life of Moses were diligently matched to the house of Cecrops.92 Augustine did much the same in his extended parallel between the earthly and heavenly cities, stating that in the time of "Cecrops king of Athens, in whose reign that city received its name ... God brought His people out of Egypt by Moses."93 As if to underscore the Greek king's piety, he added that Athena was "already worshiped as a goddess when Cecrops reigned in Athens, in whose reign the city itself is reported to have been rebuilt or

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founded."94 The temporal coincidence between the establishment of Mosaic Law and the Athenian royal house is reiterated several paragraphs into the account: Moses led the people out of Egypt in the last time of Cecrops king of Athens ... and having led forth the people, he gave them at Mount Sinai the law he received from God, which is called the Old Testament, because it has earthly promises, and because, through Jesus Christ, there was to be a New Testament, in which the kingdom of Heaven should be promised. For the same order behooved to be observed in this as is observed in each man who prospers in God, according to the saying of the apostle, "That is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural," since, as he says, and that truly, "The first man of the earth, is earthly; the second man, from heaven, is heavenly."95 Rubens's viewers could easily recognize the dichotomy between the "earthly" and the "heavenly" state of being in the strife between Hephaestus's earthly energy and Athena's celestial intellect that led to the birth of the snake-infant Erichthonius. Some of them might remember an even more canonical text on this theme: Paul's discourse on the death of the flesh and the resurrection of the soul in chapter 15 of the First Epistle to the Corinthians.96 Though Augustine does not cite Paul's comment on the distinction between the first (mortal) and the last (spiritual) man, those very lines complete the discourse on the transformation of the terrestrial into a celestial existence: "And as we have borne the image of the earthly, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly."97 One could say that this message is also part of Rubens's address to the beholder, who, led by these allusions to the finding of Moses, is guided to uncover the sacred in the image of the profane. The Justification of the Fabulous As for this story and others like it told about the gods, although I do not personally accept what I write down, nevertheless I write 2.17.4 them down.-Pausanias, Description When the learned interpreters of the past in Rubens's immediate circle or from the generation of his son Albert spoke about the continual mixing of the divine and human nature in ancient fables, they invoked a topos going back to Plato's account of the origin of hero myths.98 Augustine's grouping of Cecrops and Moses belongs to the same interpretative legacy, even as it is governed by a strict doctrinal claim about the falsity of pagan beliefs and the truth of Christian teaching. When Augustine juxtaposes the pagan account of Vulcan and Minerva as parents of "Erichthonius king of Athens, in whose last yearsJoshua the son of Nun is found to have died," to the "more plausible" historic explanation of this mysterious infant as a child wrapped in snakeskin and left at the temple of Minerva and Vulcan in Athens, he adds the following note: 'Yet the fable accounts for the origin of his name [eris and hton] better than the history. But what does it matter to us? Let the one in books that speak the truth edify religious men, and the other in lying fables delight impure demons."99

For the Church Father, all of these instances of mastery among "theological poets" of antiquity, such as Orpheus and Musaeus, pale before the wisdom of Christian Prophets, specifically Moses, "whose writings are first in the authoritative canon; and therefore the Greeks, in whose tongue the literature of this age chiefly appears, have no grounds for boasting of their wisdom, in which our religion, wherein is the true wisdom, is most evidently more ancient at least, if not superior."100 The treatment of fables as vague intimations of Christian doctrine did not disappear even in the most sophisticated antiquarian studies of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Some thousand years after The City of God, Guillaume du Choul wrote that while Christianity appropriated numerous aspects of its religious practice from the pagan traditions, it brought to them an understanding previously unattainable by the "Gentiles."101 Becanus confirmed this point of view in his Hieroglyphica,adding that all of the pagan fictions carried within themselves symbols of the Christian 102 mysteries.2 Later generations, including that of Albert Rubens, built on these broad analogies between the theologia prisca of ancient poetry and the clarity of Christian teaching with ever more elaborate compilations of sources and authorities. One such example is the treatise DemonstratioEvangelica by Bishop Pierre Daniel Huet, whose exegesis about Cecrops, Asclepius, and Pan as pagan images of Moses (Mosis effigies)possesses all of the complexity of a latter-day Saturnalia.l03 The transformation of the foreshadowing of divinity in pagan myth to the light of the Catholic Church is the salient matrix of Rubens's appropriation of antiquity as well. An example of this approach can be found in his account of the history of the temple of the Ephesian Diana to Gian Francesco di Bagno, bishop of Patras and papal nuncio to Brussels, in two letters of 1626.104 The first letter begins with an urbane apology because the artist was unable to consult his books or notes. In an echo of his famous epistolary description of the Aldobrandini Wedding fresco to his fellow antiquarian Peiresc, Rubens appeals to his memory as his main instrument of interpretation.'05 Stating that the temple at Ephesus was built not by any king or ruler in particular, but by all the people of Asia ("ab universis Asiae populis"), Rubens details the stages of its construction, from a bronze edifice destroyed in an earthquake to a marble one that burned "on the night of the birth of Alexander the Great, for the poets say that Diana (alias Lucina) was unable to guard her temple from the fire because she had gone to assist the Olympias at the delivery of this great king."106 Restored during the reign of Philip, the father of Alexander, and subsequently burned again "by that wicked Herostratus," the temple, as the artist repeats, was always rebuilt by the hands of the people of Asia.107 The second letter, intended to correct the artist's earlier imprecisions, adds to this account that "all the Roman emperors consecutively took care that it [the temple] was kept up and restored more or less according to the need, until the time of Julian ... the last of the emperors who sought to At this point, perpetuate the ancient superstitions."108 Rubens introduces the cultural succession from paganism to Christianity as the ideological axis of his reading of this

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history of destructions and rebuilding, noting that after Julian, "as Christianity gained strength, these vanities little by little declined, and finally, as one reads in the ecclesiastical Annals, totally vanished."109 As he adds, though pagan antiquities were at first denied an entry into the canon of the Church, they were later wisely appropriated: "And by main force, through excessive zeal, those proud edifices were ruined which could have been preserved and applied to our religion. This was done later, when the first fervor of the fanatics had moderated a little."'l This colloquy on the temple of Diana of Ephesus owes as much to historical annals as it does to writers like du Choul and Natale Conti, the latter of whom provides a remarkably similar description of this edifice: Ephesus had the most famous, most August temple to Diana which all of Asia helped build. Two hundred and twenty years in the making, it was erected according to the There were also plan of the architect Chersiphone.... excellent paintings and statues according with the sublimity of the edifice. The whole temple was destroyed in a fire set by an Ephesian named Herostratus, whose only reason for doing so was that his life was undistinguished and he wanted his name eternally remembered.... Il We have already mentioned the crucial role of the Pan herm for the theme of cultural conversion in The Finding of Erichthonius. The Gaea fountain as his counterpart complements that discourse through her manifest kinship with the Ephesian Artemis, a conflation that can also trigger the memory of the series of incarnations of the famous temple of this goddess. The most notable of its destructions, as Rubens (and Conti) had noted, was the fire of Herostratus on the night when Diana (Lucina) helped with the birth of Alexander the Great, the emperor who was to bring Europe to Asia. That same name is already implicitly present in The Finding of Erichthonius through the reference to the theme of the "Indian Triumph of Bacchus."112 The cista mystica that delivers Erichthonius had cultural consequences comparable to the building of the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, since it led to the institution of the cult of Athena by Cecrops, in whose reign, as Augustine had noted, "God brought His people out of Egypt by Moses."'13 Rubens followed this analogical mode of parallels between the terrestrial and the divine realms to create an image embedded with a number of other images that slowly yield the full semantic content of his invention: the crow and the raven, Erichthonius and Asclepius, Pan and Moses, the providential finding of the snake-infant against the discovery of Moses, and Gaea/Artemis presiding over this birth versus the Ephesian goddess who facilitated the delivery of Alexander. The regret that Rubens expressed to Gian Francesco di Bagno concerning the destruction of antiquities finds tangible reflections in the putto figure borrowed from ancient sarcophagi, the quotation of Venus Pudica in the body of Herse, and the evocation of the Bacchic cista mystica.Yet The Finding of Erichthonius is not a lament for the past but a statement on the authority of painting to reactivate what has been lost, even if merely as a fiction that reestablishes another one, of an older provenance.

Throughout this discussion, I have argued that for Rubens and his contemporaries, including his brother Philip or his son Albert, the "monstrous" biformity of Erichthonius spoke of the mysteries in nature rather than its imperfection or randomness. The other, equally important theme of this myth of discovery is the virtue of silence regarding divine secrets. Circumscribed by the stories of the garrulity of Apollo's raven and Athena's crow, Rubens's painting enunciates arcane knowledge through its allegorical veils while admonishing us to keep it from less deserving minds, as it behooves fables that "pertain to the generation of elements, to the hidden things in nature ... nearly the only kind found in the delightful, magnificent, awe-inspiring poems of the ancients."114 Through the snake-infant as an embodiment of the procreative powers of nature, the artist proffers his allegorical reading of fables. At the same time, his resort to the inherently open-ended language of visual and literary allusions in order to advance his interpretation seems to accord with his fellow antiquarians' growing realization of the hermeneutic difficulties presented by the marvelouscharacter of classical myths: Nevertheless, one should follow the excellent advice given by Melanchthon in his notes on Hesiod: namely, that it is not always necessary to seek assiduously for a reason, a continuity, and an appropriate and consistent coherence in every detail of poetic fables; it is sufficient to have to some extent discovered and shown what the poets wanted in general to signify in the fable as a whole.ll5

Aneta Georgievska-Shineteaches at the University of Maryland, CollegePark. Recent publications include articles on paintings by Rubens in Artibus et Historiae (2002) and the MarburgerJahrbuch fur Kunstwissenschaft (2003). She is currentlypreparing a book-lengthmanuscript on Rubens's interpretationof ancient myths [Department of Art History and Archaeology, University of Maryland, CollegePark, Md. 20742].

Frequently Cited Sources

Apollodorus, The Library, trans. James George Frazer, 2 vols. (London: W. Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1939-46). Arents, Prosper, et al., De Bibliotheekvan Pieter Pauwel Rubens: Een reconstructie (Antwerp: Vereniging der Antwerpse Bibliofielen, 2001). Augustine of Hippo, Saint, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Random House, 1993). Conti, Natale, Natale Conti's Mythologies: A Select Translation, trans. Anthony DiMatteo (New York: Garland, 1994). Du Choul, Guillaume, Discours de la religion des anciens Romains illustre (Lyons, 1556; reprint, New York: Garland, 1976). Euripides, Euripides: Selections, ed. and trans. David Kovacs, 5 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994). Gantz, Timothy, Early GreekMyth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Held, Julius, "The Daughters of Cecrops" (1976), reprinted in Rubens Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 156-66. Hyginus, Fabularum Liber & Poeticon Astronomicon (Basel, 1535; reprint, New York: Garland, 1976). Keith, A. M., The Play of Fictions: Studies in Ovid's Metamorphoses Book 2, Michigan Monographs in Classical Antiquity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992). Macrobius, The Saturnalia, ed. and trans. Percival Vaughan Davies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969).

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of PeterPaul Rubens(Cambridge, Mass.: Magurn, Ruth Saunders, TheLetters HarvardUniversityPress, 1991). Meulen, Marjonvan der, Rubens, Copies aftertheAntique, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, pt. 23, 3 vols. (London: HarveyMiller, 1994). trans. A. D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1986). trans. W. H. S. Jones, 5 vols. (London: W. Pausanias, Description of Greece,
Heinemann; New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1926-35). Rubens, Albert, Alberti Rubeni Petri Pauli F. De Re Vestiaria Veterum.... (Antwerp: Plantin, 1665). Valeriano, Piero, Hieroglyphica,seu De Sacris Aegyptiorum.... (London: Thomas

Soubron, 1594).

Notes
This essay is dedicated to the memory of Julius Held (1905-2002), whose words "not to be afraid of the great ones" helped me staywith Rubens at the beginning of a research that resulted in my dissertation.As my ideas developed further, I was fortunate to discuss and defend them before an exceptional scholarly committee, including H. Perry Chapman, Anthony Colantuono, Robert Dorfman, Douglas Farquhar,and WalterS. Melion, chaired by ArthurK.Wheelock (Universityof Maryland,1999). The two readersfrom The Art Bulletinget my deepest admiration for their critical insights and their genuinely helpful suggestions. I only wish I could thank them in person for their anonymous guidance toward this version of my manuscript. Lory Frankel deserves thanks for her wonderful skills as a manuscripteditor, and Wayne Millan for his patient advice with respect to the often perplexing neo-Latin of some of my literarysources. trans. Robin Hard (Ware: Wordsworth, 1. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 1997), 4.23. 2. For this letter, see Magurn, 336-38, no. 204. 3. MarcusAurelius, 6.37-38 (as in n. 1), 52. 4. Ibid., 9.29, p. 87. 5. Ca. 1616, oil on canvas, 857/8by 125/4 in. (218 by 318 cm), Vaduz, Liechtenstein Collection, inv. no. 111. The literature on the Liechtenstein painting and its second version, preservedin a fragmentarystate and belonging to the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, Ohio, includes Ludwig Bulletin Art Museum AllenMemorial Burchard, "Rubens'sDaughters of Cecrops," An Ancient 11 (1953): 4-26; Wolfgang Stechow, "TheFindingof Erichtonius: InternaArt:Actsof the Twentieth Theme in Baroque Art,"in Studiesin Western tionalCongress ofArt,vol. 3 (Princeton:Princeton UniversityPress, of theHistory 1963); and Held. 6. The struggle between Athena and Hephaestus is embodied in the compound name of the infant, composed of the Greek roots eris (strife) and chthon(earth). For a summary of the classical meanings of this myth, see 28 (1943): 28ff. Philology MurrayFowler, "The Myth of Erichtonius,"Classical See also EvelynHarrison, "Alkamenes'Sculpturesfor the Hephaisteion: Part 81 (1977): 412. Isidore of 1, The Cult Statues,"American JournalofArchaeology Seville's derivation of Minerva from the first syllables of "munus artium variarum"(the gift of all arts, Origines 8.11.71) corresponds to the focus of Renaissance interpretations of this divinity. On Isidore's import for the Renaissance, see Katherine Nell Macfarlane,Isidoreof Sevilleon thePagan Gods VIII.11) (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1980), 27. (Origines Ovid's description of Erichthonius'shybrid body involves the somewhat enigmatic phrase "aporectumdracone" (Metamorphoses 2.561), which can be translated either as "next to him a snake"or, more freely, as "havinga snake's tail." See Euripides, Ion 20ff.; and Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 3.14.6, for the version according to which Erichthonius as a human baby was encircled by serpents. Hyginus (2.13) states that Erichthonius was born as a serpent, which, when beheld by the daughters of Cecrops, drove them to their suicide, while the serpent hid under Athena's shield and was raised by her. See Pausanias, 1.24.7, for the statue of the virgin Athena on the Acropolis with a Description serpent coiled at her feet, which the author believes to be Erichthonius. 7. See Euripides, Ion 9-26, 260-82, for Athena giving the child to the daughters of Cecrops, 273-74, 496, for the daughters jumping from the Acropolis, and 1163-64, for a statue of the snake-tailed Cecrops and his daughtersat the entrance of a temple. Pausaniasis another like source, giving this comment on an Attic site dedicated to Aglauros:"Abovethe sanctuaryof Dioscuri is a sacred enclosure of Aglauros. It was to Aglauros and her sisters, Herse and Pandrosus, that .. Athena gave Erichthonius, whom she had hidden in a chest [Greek:kista;Latin: cista],forbidding them to pry curiously into what was entrusted to their charge. Pandrosus,they say, obeyed, but the other two (for they opened the chest) went mad when they sawErichthonius, and threw themselves down the steepest part of the Acropolis." Pausanias,
Description 1.18.2; see also 1.2.6, 1.14.6. See also the entry on the annotated tragedies of Euripides, ibid., fol. 17, col. 2. See Apollodorus, Bibliotheca3.14.6; and Conti, 196. An edition of Conti's popular treatise is recorded in the posthumous catalogue of the library of the artist's son Albert, Catalogus librorum bibliothecae clarissimi viri D. Alberti Rubens.... (Brussels: Franciscus Vivien, 1658), fol. 14, col. 1. I shall be referring to the facsimile of this catalogue incorporated in Arents et al., 339-66. Many of the books in Albert's

library were inherited from his father, including an edition of Pausanias, recorded among Peter Paul Rubens's purchases from the Plantin press in 1615 (ibid., E32). 8. See Keith, 1-7. 9. Held, 160-61. Burchard (as in n. 5), 5, saw the putto as an enticer whose role is comparable to the snake in the Garden of Eden. Wolfgang Stechow, in turn, compared the role of this characterto the putti that aid the narrativein and another earlymythologyby Rubens, TheRapeof theDaughters of Leucippus, saw it as an "enhancement of the action by allegorical allusions which add to and theClassical the liveliness of the scene." Stechow, Rubens Martin Tradition, ClassicalLectures, 22 (Cambridge,Mass.:HarvardUniversityPress, 1968), 66. 10. The most systematicstudy of Rubens's collection to date is Jeffrey M. Muller, Rubens:TheArtistas Collector (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1989). See also Meulen. 11. As an example of the scope of this library,the books that were directly purchased by Rubens from the Plantin press amount to 213 volumes, as noted by Arents et al., 132-206. 12. I am referring here to a term common in the debates among Italian literarytheorists of this period, specifically,to the words of Bardi di Vernio in his defense of the "marvelous" poetic language of Ariosto (In difesadell'Ariosto, 1583), discussed in the seminal work of Bernard Weinberg, A Historyof the in the Italian Renaissance LiteraryCriticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), vol. 2, 986. The poetic character of fables was a classical commonplace repeated by most Renaissanceinterpreters.As an example, see the discussion of the epistemological value of fables and their relation to poetic on theDreamof Scipio,ed. William Harris fictions in Macrobius, Commentary Stahl (NewYork:ColumbiaUniversityPress, 1990), 83-87. See also one of the most influential later readers, GiovanniBoccaccio, for a comparison between the "veiled surfaces"of fables and poetic speech: "This fervour of poetry is sublime in its effects: it impells the soul to a longing for utterance; it brings forth strange and unheard-of creations of the mind; it arranges these meditations in a fixed order, adorns the whole composition with unusual interweaving of words and thoughts; and thus it veils truth in a fair and fitting di gli Dei (Venice, 1582), 14.7, trans. garment of fiction."Boccaccio, Genealogia in the Problems Text: and discussed in Terence Cave, TheCornucopian of Writing French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 152. See also Conti, 4, 9. For the currencyof moralized readings of ancient fables among Netherlandish artistsand theoristsof the time, with focus on the Dutch Republic, see Eric van de GoudenEeuw: fabulen"in de schilderkunst Jan Sluijter, De "heydensche in de Noordelijke metverhalende uit de klassieke onderwerpen mythologie Schilderijen Nederlanden circa1590-1670 (Leiden: PrimaveraPress, 2000). and "meaning" 13. For a good discussionof the essential dualityof "surface" in ancient myths, see Conti, 70ff. Naturally, Conti's ideas are echoed by a number of other contemporarymythographers,both in Italyand elsewhere. The most popular English mythographerof the period, Abraham Fraunce, stressed the hierarchy of allegorical meanings generated by means of this distinction. In his opinion, the moral meaning of myth would be the first, most accessible layer:"They,whose capacities is such, as that they can reach somewhatfurther than the external discourseand history,shall finde a morall sence included therein, extolling virtue, condemning vice, euery way profitable for the institution of a practicalland common wealth man."Only readers of greater refinement could enjoy the deeper levels of signification:"Therest, that are better borne and of a more noble spirit, shall meete with hidden mysteriesof natural,astrological,or diuine and metaphysicallphilosophie, to entertaine their heavenly speculation."Fraunce, preface to The ThirdPart of the Countesse (London, 1592), B2. Yuychurch of Pembrokes ed. Aneau (Lyons, 14. BarthelemyAneau, preface to Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1556), fol. 5r-v, quoted in Cave (as in n. 12), 175, 345. 15. The use of the peacock as a metaphor for prodigious talent is an old topos, as evident from Piero Valeriano's comparison of the colors of the peacock to Homer's language rich with poetic colors ("varietatempoeticis coloribus").Valeriano, 220. For the purchase of Valeriano's treatise by Peter Paul Rubens in 1615, see Arents et al., E23. The earlier interpretation has been put forth by Svetlana Alpers, based on a passage in Conti on the peacock's color, "Neque tamen totum est corpus coloribus distinctum sed quaedam pars deformis cum nihil omnino felix possit contingere,"which she understood to mean that "nothing in nature is completely beautiful."Alpers, "Mannerand Meaning in Some Rubens Mythologies," Journalof the Warburg Institutes30 (1967): 284. Cf. Held, 161, for an alternative and Courtauld reading of Conti's passage, which he took to refer to happiness rather than beauty. See Conti, 80: "Noris the whole body of the bird markedwith colors, but a certain part is ugly since nothing that happens can be totally happy, alwayssome adversitypresent."For the peacock's connection with the notion of abundance, see also Valeriano, 221. See Francis Bacon on Pan's "spotted mantle": "Pan's cloake or mantle is ingeniously fained to be the skin of Leopard, because it is full of spottes:so the heauens are spotted with stars,the sea with rockes and Islands, the land with flowers, and euery particular
creature also is for the most part garnished with diuers colours about the superficies, which is as it were a mantle vnto it." Bacon, De sapientia veterum (London, 1609), trans. as The wisdome of the ancients (London, 1619; reprint, New York: Garland, 1976), 29. See FranciscusJunius, "De pictura veterum," in The Literature of Classical Art, ed. Keith Aldrich, Philipp Fehl, and Raina Fehl (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), vol. 1, 85: "Nature ... a most fertil Artificer of good and bad ... would have us know that it fitteth her best

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to delight her selfe somewhat in the varietie of things... as Pliniespeaketh, 'seeing no man is so well able to speake, but Nature is still a great deal better able to paint, especiallywhen she meaneth to make her selfesome sport in the midst of herjolly fertilitie ... the Peacockes, together with the spots of Tygers, Leopards, and so many more painted creatures,' as Plinie speaketh: for though such things doe sufficientlydelight the lookers on, yet doe they not in Blaise See the annotations to Philostratus,Imagines, instructthe Artificers.'" de Vigenere, ed., Images... des deuxPhilostrates grecset les statuesde Sophistes Callistrate (Paris, 1615), 373. 16. The dangerous garrulityof the crow is used as a negative example in an emblem of prudent silence by the 16th-century antiquarianHadrianusJunius. Illustratedby Minerva'sowl on a shield, the emblem, titled "PrudenceRather is inscribed: "NoctvaCecropiis Than Speaking [Prudensmais quamloquax]," insignia praestatAthenis, / inter aues sani noctua consilij. / Armiferamerito obsequiis sacrata Minerua, / Garrula quo cornix cesserat ante loco" (The Owl, noted among birds for its wise counsel, showed its noteworthyfeatures before Cecropian Athens-Arm-bearing Minerva, having received sacrifices deservedly-in the place where once the garrulous crow had been). The dwells on the supreme statusof Athens among ancient cities and the explicatio prudence of its constitution-"et itaque Athenis, id est, emporio disciplinaru toto orbe notissimo, & urbe optimis instituta legibus, symbolum fuit, vt significareturprudens matutumqueconsilium, & recta ciuitatisinstitutio...." (and so Athens, that is, the emporium most noteworthy with respect to teaching, and with the best laws in the world, was a symbol and represented prudent and quiet advice and the correct institution of the city-state ....)and relates it again to the house of Cecrops ("CecropidaeAthenienses"). Eiusdem libellvs Emblemata: Aenigmatvm (Antwerp: Junius, HadrianiIvnii medici Plantin, 1585), 19, 36, 633ff. 17. Keith, 95-115, observesthat Battusechoes the punishments of the other garrulouscharactersin this part of Ovid'spoem, notably, the raven, the crow, and Ocyrrhoe. 18. The enticingly displayedbodies of the Cecropides in Rubens's painting compel the beholder to think of this desire and relate it to Herse as the most perfect beauty chosen to become Hermes' consort ("tantovirginibus praestantior omnibus Herse"). Ovid, Metamorphoses 2.724. and 19. For Ovid's exploration of the etymological relation between cornix see Keith, 58-61. By its veryplacement in the dense foliage of the tree, corvus, the crow brings to mind ancient gems and rings that show Apollo's raven perched on a tree branch. See, for example, Abraham Gorlaeus, Abrahami Gorlaei Antverpiani Dactylotheca.... (Antwerp:Plantin, 1609), nos. 9, 10, 19. See Valeriano,24.218, who notes that the ravenwas a sacred symbolof Apollo ("Corvus hieroglyphicumApollinis haberetur"). 20. Pausanias,Description 4.34.4, 4.34.6, where he adds that "the statue of Athena ... on the Acropolis is of bronze, and stands in the open air, holding a crow in her hand." For Rubens's purchase of Pausanias from Plantin in 1615, see Arents et al., E32. Later mythographers exploit the resonance between these related terms. See, for example, the alliterativeplay on Coronis and corvusin this passage from Hyginus (202): "... Apollo cum Coronida Phlaegiae filiam grauidam fecisset, coruum custodem ei dedit, ne quis eam uiolaret.... Apollo Coronidem grauidam percussit & interfecit, cuius ex utero exectum Asclepium educauit, at coruum qui custodiam praebueratex albo in nigrum commutauit" (When Apollo made Coronis the daughter of Phlegia pregnant, he gave to her the ravenas a guardianso that she would not be violated ... [later] Apollo hit and killed the pregnant Coronis, from whose womb he extracted Asclepius to be educated, and the raven who had been her guardian, he turned from white to black). 21. On the cult of Asclepiusin Athens, see Gantz,355. For a summaryof the various accounts, see the notes of James Frazer to Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 3.10. Most authors accept the view that Coronis was his mother: Pausanias, 2.26.4, 2.26.6, 4.3.6, 4.31.12; Hyginus, 202; Apollonius Rhodius, Description, TheArgonautica 4.616ff., trans.R. C. Seaton (London: Heinemann; New York: was certainly and the Crow Putnam, 1930). The semiotic bond between Coronis instrumentalin another variant,according to which Asclepius was born "out of the egg of a crow under the figure of a serpent."See Ronald ForsythMillen Deeds and Mystic A NewReading and RobertErichWolf, Heroic Figures: ofRubens' (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1989), 157. "Life of Maria de'Medici" For the healing powers of Asclepius,see Macrobius,20.4. See H. Junius (as in n. 16), 25 (MediciIcon-Asclepius),with references to Pausanias and Macrobius. 22. On Athena's killing of Medusa and the gift of her blood to Erichthonius, see Euripides,Ion989-1018. On her giving that same blood to Asclepius, see Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 3.10.3. See Pausanias, Description 1.23.4, on "Health"as a shared surname of Athena and Asclepius. See Aratus,Solensis, et astronomiae in Hugoni GrotiiSyntagma Arateorum: Phaenomena, Opuspoeticae studiosis utilissimum.... (Antwerp:Plantin, 1600), 169. 23. See Pausanias,Description 2.26.4: "In the country of the Epidauriansshe [Coronis] bore a son, and exposed him on the mountain called Nipple at the present day, but then named Myrtium.... As the child lay exposed he was given milk by one of the goats that pastured about the mountain, and was guarded by the watch-dogof the herd."Pausaniasalso notes that the shepherd in charge of the infant was Aresthanas,which recalls the name Aristaeus(the Thessalian incarnation of Pan). See Valeriano, 5.46, who refers to Pausanias for the version of the story according to which Asclepiuswas left exposed on "Nipple Mountain" ("Aescvlapiusin solitudine Titthei montis expositus"),

where he was protected by a dog ("a Cane custodius fuerit"). This tradition remained current long after Rubens, as exemplified by Abbe Banier, who refers to Pausaniasand other authors, such as Lactantius Placidus, for this and Fablesof theAncients version of the story. Banier, TheMythology Explain'd 4 vols. (London, 1739; reprint, New York:Garland,1976), vol. 3, fromHistory, 156. 24. Banier (as in n. 23), vol. 3, 159, also notes that the name Asclepiuswas derived from that of Kaleb, "whichthe Hebrews gave to a Dog... composed VirCanibus...." of these two words... Isch-Kalibi, 25. For a summaryiconography of this figure, see Millen and Wolf (as in n. 21), 88-89. These authors discount an earlier hypothesis that the Genius represents Eternity per se and support their argument about Asclepius by pointing to the similaritybetween his pose and attributesto those of Rubens's ca. 1615, Detroit Institute of Arts.For the dog as symbolicof princely Hygieia, rule, see Valeriano, 5.48. 26. Valeriano, who dwells on that meaning, notes that the dog can designate the prophet (oracle), and is thus frequently found as a guardian of images and temples of the gods. Among his sources are Pausanias and numerous biblical authorities such as Saint Gregory the Great, Isaiah, and Ezekiel, who had written about dogs and prophecy. Valeriano, 5.44-45, 47. 15. See Valeriano, 16.147. See also du Choul, 104, 27. Ovid, Metamorphoses on the serpent of Asclepius symbolizingrejuvenation. 15.739-42. The cult of Asclepius is also connected 28. Ovid, Metamorphoses to that of Cybele, or the great mother goddess, which is not irrelevantwith fountain in Rubens's painting. For this relationship,see regard to the "Gaea" The OxfordClassicalDictionary, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 29, 416ff. 29. Apollo was the firstGreek god tojoin the Roman pantheon following an epidemic in 431 B.C., while his son Asclepius was the last one, arrivingfrom Epidaurus in 293 B.C.It is noteworthy that among the books of unknown authorshiprecorded in the libraryof AlbertRubens is a volume on the subject of the Sybils,titled Sybillina Oracula. librorum ... Rubens (as in n. 6), Catalogus fol. 17, col. 2. Libri 30. Philip Rubens, "In eiusdem natalem,"in PhilipiRubeniElectorum ad IvstumLipDuo ... in quibusantiquiRitus, Emendationes, Censurae, EnVSDEM sium Poematia.... (Antwerp: Plantin, 1608), 22-26, 106. I am using the English translation of this poem by George Angell included in app. I of Frances Huemer, Rubensand theRomanCircle: Studiesof theFirstDecade(New York: Garland, 1996), 163: "Innuba quinetiam Pallas, doctique Heliconis/ Numina se pueri voluerunt sistere cunis, / Atque hauire oculis, qui mox suus esset alumnus, / Et fama reliquis sic antistaret alumnis, / Vt matutinus praestinquit Lucifer ignes" (Yes indeed, unmarried Pallas and the learned boys, the divinities of Helicon, wanted to put you in the cradle and drink deeply of you with their eyes, you who would soon be their pupil and would outshine in reputation the other pupils,just as the Morning Star makes dull the other early morning fires). in FunereJusti 31. P. Rubens (as in n. 30), Lacrymae Lipsi,20-24, 118. I am using again the translationof George Angell, in Huemer (as in n. 30), 175:"O Atlantiade, & cum virgine Phoebe patrima / Vos decuit, decuit vos intercedere iussis/ Fatorum& vestronoxam defendere alumno:/ Quo nil Cecropiae tuleruntpraestantius arces, / Nil Latiumvetus atque nouum, nil Galliatriplex" (O descendant of Atlas, and you, Phoebus, with the maiden whose father yet lives, it wasyour task,it fell to you to intercede in the orders of the Fates, and to defend your pupil from harm. The Cecropiancitadels never bore anything more outstandingthan this man, nor did old or new Latium,nor did tripartite Gaul). While Angell translates "arces"as citadels, from arca (arceo),in this the second possible meaning of this context, I am inclined to read in "arces" word as a chest or box. The epithets "Atlantiade"and "Phoebe patrima" establish the high ancestryof Lipsius,which is then extolled by the comparison to the mysteries (arcana)contained within the Cecropian citadel and/or chest (arces). 32. Gorlaeus (as in n. 19): "Uidimus AEGIDAE& Cecropis arces, / Quae uolucrem gestat diua Minerua tuam" (We see the shields and the arks of Cecrops, / which the Goddess Minervaswiftlycarries to you). 33. Keith, 119, points out that in both episodes, "... the goddess Pallas Athena ... is servedby virgins (Metamorphoses 2.555, 2.711, 2.724-25) carrying sacred baskets (Metamorphoses, 2.554, 2.560, 2.713)." 34. Pausanias, Description 1.27.3. On this term used for the basket with as the carryingof Erichthonius, see ibid., 1.18.2, 1.2.6, 1.14.6. On kistaphoreo a casket in mysticprocessions, see Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Lexicon(Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1968), 954. Greek-English 35. Albert Rubens. See Meulen, vol. 2, 151-54, cat. nos. 132-34. Of particular importance in this regardis the lid of a late Roman sarcophagusacquired by CardinalScipione Borghese in 1607 and seen during the same year by a group of antiquariansthat included the two Rubensbrothers (151-52, cat. no. 132). Another Roman sarcophagus (2nd century A.D., Museo Nazionale, Rome) showing the Indian Triumph of Bacchuswas described by both Ulisse Aldrovandiand Cassianodal Pozzo, though without a specific reference to the
motif (153, cat. no. 133). 36. Rubens, 265: "Cistam autem esse ostendunt illae striae, quae cannas significant, ex quibus conflabantur cistae. Canistrum fisis cannis contextum, unde nuncupatur: alij Graeciam afferunt. Cistella a costis ex canna uel ligno, quibus contexitur, nominata (Isidorus, Origines, 20.9)" (The basket is shown with three lines, which designate reeds, from which baskets are woven. The

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flower basket bound with reeds was thus named; others say it is a Greekword. The small box made of reed or wood was also called thus). Albert singles out the Cretans, who had frequentlyjuxtaposed the figure of the sacred basket and the intertwined snakes on their coins: "... Cretenses in nummis suis ab una parte duos angues, ab altera sacram cistam exprimebant; ita & in his Romanorum Impp. nummis in Creta signatis, cum Imperatoriscaput unam partem numismatisoccupet; a postica parte utraque simul Cretensium insignia, duos angues implexos & cistam mysticam,impressaesse" (... the Cretans impressed on one side of their coins two snakes, while on the other one, the basket;and the Roman coins that were minted in Crete showed the head of the Emperor on the obverse;while on the reversewere impressed the Cretan insignia, the two intertwined snakes with the basket of mysteries). He notes, 272: "Cretensescum alia omnia mysteria Cereris, Bacchi, & Magnae Matris cum alijs gentibus communnia celebrarent ...." (since the Cretans used to celebrate with all other people the mysteries of Ceres, Bacchus, and Magna Mater....). As for the other peoples who had appropriated this symbol, Rubens mentions the Phrygians,Thracians,Lydians,and Macedonians,citing in support authors such as Diodorus Siculus, Euripides, Demosthenes, and Erasmus,"nam his in mysteriisBacchanalibusutebantur, quod ea a vis sacra sit Baccho" (and they made use of these in Bacchic mysteries, because this power is sacred to Bacchus). Rubens, 267-68. 37. Rubens, 270-71, 273ff., mentions the engravingafter the drawingsfrom the circle of his father before citing Clement of Alexandria, who had suggested that the mysticalbasketswere used to reveal sacred things and enunciate secrets ("Oportetenim sancta eorum revelare,& arcanaenuntiare").He digressesfurther to include representationsofJove mating with Proserpinain the form of a snake and refers to authors including Clement of Alexandria, Arnobius, and Athenagoras, who had explained the procreativesignificance of the myth (274). In conclusion, he notes Cretancoins analyzedby Hubertus Goltziusthat show a mysticalbasketwith a serpent, encircled by an ivywreath, and symbolic of Bacchic mysteries ("cista mystica cum serpente in corona hederacea, ob Bacchica mysteria,"275). 38. The connection to Anthony and Cleopatra is established in coins that show their portraits on the obverse ("imagines Antonij & Cleopatrae"), matched by two intertwined snakes and a female figure reclining on a basket on the reverse ("duo serpentes impliciti, ac cista mystica& figura muliebris ei insistens"). Rubens further adds, 276, that this imagery represents the devotion of Anthony, who had wanted to be initiated in these mysteries ("Quam pietatem Antonij esse existimo, qui forte mysterijshis initiari voluit").Thereupon, Albert, 277, notes that through these Cretan coins impressed with the symbols of snakes and the basket, the victory at Actium, where Octavian received all of Asia, was shown ("in hoc nummulo in Creta percusso, praeter serpentes & cistam Cretae insignia, adiuncta est victoria Actiaca qua Caesar Asia recepit"). 39. Albert lists Valeriano as his main authority at the very opening of the essay.Valeriano's account of the snakes as symbolsof Asia and of the Roman victory over the world reads: ". . .Serpentes tres, Asiam prouinciam significari.... Imperium Romanum tres iam orbis partes occupasse: Europa enim diu possederant,Africampaulo ante subiugarant,nunc Asia recepta"(... the three serpents signify the Asian province.... The Roman Empire occupied three parts of the world: Europe which they had possessed for a long time, Africa,which had been subjugatedsomewhat earlier, and now Asia has been received). Valeriano, 15.142. 40. For the manner in which Junius's treatise conforms to existing art theory ideas, see the editors' introduction to F.Junius (as in n. 15), 26, 34-36. Rubens received a copy of the treatise immediately after its publication, as indicated by his response toJunius in a letter of August 1, 1637. See Magurn, 406-8, no. 241. 41. F.Junius (as in n. 15), 274. As the editors of the 1991 edition ofJunius's treatise note, this emphasis on proper placement is very close to Aristotle, Poetics17.1 (1455a), ed. and trans. Stephen Halliwell (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversityPress, 1995). 42.Jeffrey Muller has recently returned to Held's suggestion about the chronological aspects of the arrangement of figures in TheFindingof Erichin a study on the pictorial conception of time in paintings by Anthony thonius Van Dyck,such as Vertumnus andPomona and RinaldoandArmida. Muller,"The Dimensions of Time in Anthony van Dyck'sInventionsfor HistoryPaintings," 55 (1994): 127-38. He also relates Van Dyck's apWallraf-Richartz Jahrbuch proach to Junius's discussion of disposition. 43. F. Junius (as in n. 15), 275, with reference to Philostratus, Imagines 1.12.15 ("Bosphorus"). 44. I am borrowing the "Chinese box" metaphor from E. J. Kenney's introduction to Ovid's Metamorphoses, trans. A. D. Melville, 26. 45. See Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 3.14.1. Athenians decorated the necks or bodies of their infants with golden serpents to commemorate the snakes that guarded Erichthonius.Euripides,Ion 20-26, 1426-31. When Rubens painted the serpent coiled around the infant in The Birth of the Dauphinfrom the Medicis cycle, in addition to referring to the divinitySalus, he may also have had in mind this ancient custom and its specificallyAthenian provenance. See Millen and Wolf (as in n. 21), 88-89. 46. "But because in waging a war, wisdom is especially necessary, she [Minerva] is preeminent in battle and given a shiningly clear shield covered with many snakes. Indeed, what is the nature of a snake? It is to see most Conti, 199. Like many clearly,whence the Serpent's name in Greek [ophis]."

others, Conti derived his reading from Macrobius,who observed, 137, that the snake was called draco("to see" in Greek), "for with its keen and watchful eyesight the serpent is said to resemble the nature of the sun and for that reason to be entrustedwith the charge of protecting temples, shrines, oracles, and treasuries." Works 47. Desiderius Erasmus,Adagia1.9.96, in Collected Adages, ofErasmus: ed. and trans. R. A. B. Mynors,5 vols. (Toronto: Universityof Toronto Press, 1989-92), vol. 2, 231. 48. "Statuesof Asclepius and Salus, then, have figures of serpents in attendance because these two deities enable human bodies, as it were, to slough off the skin of weakness and to recover the bloom of their former strength,just as serpents each year shed the skin of old age and renew their youth ... it is for this reason that the sun itself is represented in the form of a serpent, because in its passage from the lowest point of its course to its height it always seems, as it were, to pass from the depth of old age and return to the vigor of youth." Macrobius,137. Within Rubens's milieu, this topos is most explicitly addressed in a treatise by a fellow Antwerpian,Johannes Goropius Becanus, who details the varied meanings of the snake with a specific emphasis on its life-renewingpower:"Scimusserpentes quotannis tempore verisvetus corium deponere.... De hac natura homines symbolum sibi fixerunt, quo per serpentem nouam vitam, abiectavetere senecta, denotabant"(We know that the serpents shed their old skin every year.... from this nature of the animal, people establisheda symbolwherebythey used to designate by the serpent the Joani discarding of old age and the creation of new life). Becanus, Opera Becani ... Hermathena, Vertumnus, Gallica,Francica,HisHieroglyphica, Goropii recorded as a 93. Becanus's treatise was panica (Antwerp:Plantin, 1580), purchase by the artist in 1613. See Arents et al., E10. See Josephus Justus Scaliger,who likewisenotes that the serpent may signify,among other things, the unbroken ring, the world, and the ruler ("Serpentem... quo anum, Ivli Caesarisf.Opusde mundum, Regem, & alia significabant"). Scaligeri Josephi emendatione temporuvm (Antwerp:Plantin, 1598), 194. 49. "Philochorussays that Cecrops was the first to build, in Attica, an altar to Saturn and Ops, worshiping these deities as Jupiter and Earth ...." Macrobius 1.10, pp. 72-73. Macrobius's etymological explanations of Saturn which is needed to bring forth the fruits bounty (ops)... or... the toil (opus) of trees and fields,"drawa clear analogy between their generative power and that figured by the "strife-earth" offspring of Hephaestus and Athena. See Pausanias, Description 8.2.3, for Cecrops as the first to establish Zeus as a supreme divinity. See Isidore of Seville on Cecrops instituting the cult of Athena in Athens, and in whose reign the city got its name: "ApudGraecos autem Cecrops, sub quo primum in arce oliva orta est, et Atheniensium urbs ex Minervae appelatione nomen sortita est" (Among the Greeks, it was Cecrops, in whose reign was the olive grown for the first time in the city, and when the cityof Athens got its name from the appelation of Minerva).Isidore, Origines 8.11.9, quoted in Macfarlane (as in n. 6), 13, who identifies the as the direct source of of Jerome's translationof Eusebius's Cronica praefatio this passage. Erichthonius instituted the comparable festival of Panathenea. For this, see Hyginus, 75; and Aratus (as in n. 22), 168 ("primuPanathenaea constituisse"). 50. Homer, Iliad 2.547-48, trans. A. T. Murray,ed. William F. Wyatt,2nd rev. ed., 2 vols. (Cambridge,Mass.:HarvardUniversityPress, 1999). For the conflation between Erechtheus and Erichthonius, see Gantz, 233. & Auli Persii cumveteris Scholiastae 51. Juvenal, D.JuniiJuvenalis FlacciSatyrae commentaries &'variorum Vetstenium, 1684), 289. For the impor(Amsterdam: Classical tance of self-generationin mythsof origin, see Oxford (as in Dictionary n. 24), 224, s.v. "Autochthons." For the royal lineage of the Athenians, see Virgil, Aeneid6.21, in Virgil,trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. G. P. Goold, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.:HarvardUniversityPress, 1999). See Hyginus, 48 ("Reges Atheniensium"), who identifies Cecrops as son of the Earth ("Cecropsterrae filius") and Erichthonius as son of Vulcan ("Erychthonius Vulcani filius"). The entry on Cecrops in the seminal dictionary by Charles Estienne (CarolusStephanus) refers to both Virgil and Hyginus, as well as to Herodotus, in identifying Cecrops as the first king of Athens ("primusAtheniensum rex") and the Athenians as "Cecropidae."Carolus Stephanus, Dictionarium Poeticum Authore Carolo new ed. Historicum, Stephano, Geographicum, (Oxford, 1671), 256. The survivalof this thinking in the later part of the 17th cited above, where centuryis illustratedby the 1684 edition ofJuvenal's Satyres the adjective Cecropides is explained as an attributeaccorded to persons of the most noble origin and descending from the greatest city on earth, like the Athenians who originated from their most ancient king, Cecrops ("nobilissimus a principe civitatisoriginem ducens, ut Athenienses nobiles a Cecrope antiquissimo, & primo suo rege"). The Scholiast commentary on the same line confirms this relationship between Cecropides and the idea of nobility related to King Cecropsof Athens ("Nobilis.Cecropsrex fuit Atheniensium"). 52. Calimachuscalls Erichthonius"the Dew of Hephaestus."Ovid, Metamor2.559-60, p. 388. Cf. Keith, 35, for the etymologicalexplanation of the phoses, names of the Cecropides. See Harrison (as in n. 6), 267, for the pitcher as a standard attribute of the Aglaurids (Cecropides) in Greek art. 53. For this opinion, see Stechow (as in n. 5), 32; Alpers (as in n. 15), 281; and Held, 159. 54. Fulgentius (Fabius Planciades), Mythologiae (Basel, 1535; reprint, New York:Garland, 1976), 75-76. On the meaning of her name, see Keith, 35.
"from the word for growth from seed (satus)" and Ops, who designates "her

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55. On Aglauros and water, see PaulysReal-Encyclopadie derclassischen Altered. G. Wissowaet al. (Stuttgart:A. Druckenmuller, 1893tumswissenschaft, 1983), vol. 1, 826. 56. Ovid, Metamorphoses 2.747-50. 57. Stephanus (as in n. 51), 428, with references to Ovid and Apollodorus. 58. Held, 160. According to him, the putto borrowedfrom ancient sarcophagi reinforces the poetic simile between Herse and the goddess of love and further helps in connecting the two episodes of Ovid's account. 59. Held, 160; and Meulen, vol. 2, 73. See Paolo Lomazzo,"Ideadel tempio della pittura,"in Scritti sulle arti,ed. Roberto Paolo Ciardi, 2 vols. (Florence: Marchie Bertolli, 1973-74), 1.12, pp. 56-57, 6.3, pp. 251-52, cited in Meulen. For the fame and the artisticlegacy of the MediceanVenus Pudica, see Francis TheLureof Classical Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Tasteand theAntique: Sculpture, 1500-1900 (New Haven:Yale UniversityPress, 1981), no. 88. 60. In MS Johnson, London, Courtauld Institute Galleries, Princes Gate Collection, fol. 97r, the drawingafter this statue is inscribed "venerisgrec [a]e da monte cavalli,"while in MSde Ganay, whereabouts unknown (formerly Paris, collection of the MarquisJ. L. de Ganay), fol. 63r, we find a similar Venus ... op Monte Cauallo."See Meulen, inscription in Dutch, "Griecksche vol. 2, 72-73, no. 58. Cf. the drawing after Rubens, Torsoof a VenusPudica (Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen), based on the Medici statue, and the related study (side view), in ibid., vol. 2, 71-74. A passage from the lost theoretical notebook of the artistis equally significantin this respect: "Etpro foemineae formae exemplari, unica sufficiat, Veneris Aphroditis, quae in mediceo est" (And for the female form it is sufficient to mention a unique example, the Aphrodite Venus who is in the Medici collection). "De figurae de Ganay,fols. 22r-23r, in Meulen, humanae statibus sive modis standi,"MS vol. 1, 255, 262. In later drawings,Venus Pudica continues to be referred to as "Greek."Meulen, vol. 2, 73, reproduces one such example by Jan de Bisschop, accompanied by an inscription that identifies this particularVenus as a "Greek"one ("Venus Aphroditis gemeenlijck ghenaemt de Grieckse Venus"). 61. Ovid, Metamorphoses 2.572. See Keith, 23ff., for the self-characterization of the crow and the analogy between her as a daughter of Coroneus and the Cecropian princesses. 62. Pan and Gaea, symbolic of Erichthonius'sparentage, complement the dialogue on art and nature initiated through the reminiscence of Venus Pudica in the body of Herse. Alpers (as in n. 15), 283, notes the contrast between the statuesand the bodies of the Cecropides,though not in the sense of the dialectic between art and nature: "itis clear from the position of these statues . . and from the fact that their gray-whitestone is clearly differentiated from the rosy bodies and colorful robes in the center, that they are related to each other ... Gaia and Pan represent different aspects of nature... ." 63. Stechow (as in n. 9), 67, correctly points to Rubens's reuse of Artemis Ephesia throughout his oeuvre. For Renaissance beholders of this painting, the most important attribute would have been her numerous breasts, symbolic of nurturing power: "Ausimulacrede la mere des Dieux donnerent les Anciens plusieurs mamelles come celle qui nourissoit tout le monde ...." Du Choul, 93, and 78, for a coin showing Artemisof Ephesus flanked by Minerva and Mercury.Cf. the relief of MaterDeumreproduced by Jean Jacques Boissard, with the headdress of Cybele, cornucopia in hand, a Mithraic figure behind her, and a sphinx by her feet. Next to her is a tree trunk encircled by urbis Romae, a snake. Johannes Jacobus Boissardus, Topographia Johannem Boissardum (Frankfurt,1681), 20, pl. 133. Jacobum A manuscript of 64. Conti, 166, 169-70, with reference to Horace's Odes. Pirro Ligorio also illustrates this interest in the use of multiple names for Diana, such as Luna Lucifera, Diana Lucifera,Juno Lucina, Diana Victrix, Roman Latona Puerpera, Luna Diana, and Juno-Dolichena. See PirroLigorio's in Paris,ed. Erna in MSXIII.B. 7 in theNational Library TheDrawings Antiquities: and CharlesMitchell (London: WarburgInstitute, 1963), nos. 15, Mandovsky 16, 40, 41, 47, 48, 69, esp. 47, pl. 28c: ". . .Diana Lucifera, che vuol dire portafacella, et che luce, o vero la crescente Luna, per che il suo lume representa la facella che tiena, et e come dicemmo disopra dea delle partorenti."See du Choul, 93: "Lune au Ciel, Diane sus terre & Proserpine aux Hecatentria virginisoraDianae.'. . ." and enfers, quand il a dit, 'Tergeminaque 307, for her connection to Isis, symbolic of "la fertilit6 du pais de l'Egypte." 65. Macrobius, 20, 13, 140, specifically relates Gaea to Isis, whose many that exists drawsits sustenance and nourishment breastsshow that "everything from the earth or world of nature."A copy of his work is also recorded in the ... Rubens librorum (as in n. 6), fol. 14, col. libraryof Albert Rubens, Catalogus 1. The oracular shrine at Delphi had originally belonged to Gaea, before passing to her daughter Themis, followed by Phoebe, and finallyApollo. See trans. Herbert Weir Smyth, vol. 2 Iff., in Aeschylus, Aeschylus, Eumenides (London: W. Heinemann; Cambridge,Mass.:HarvardUniversityPress, 1938). 10.5.5. The choice and disposition of elements See also Pausanias,Description around this "Mother"figure in Rubens's painting bring to mind two more
descriptions in Pausanias: an effigy of the Mistress (Great Mother) accompanied by images of nymphs and Pans, and her representation with Demeter and Artemis, the latter goddess with serpents and a hunting dog at her side. Pausanias, Description 8.3.2-4. 66. Hubertus Goltzius, Thesaurus Rei Antiqvariae.... (Antwerp: Gerard Nolfschat, 1618). The copy I have examined in the rare book collection of the Library of Congress bears Peiresc's device on its cover and the bookplates of

two subsequent owners. The printed pages are interleaved with numerous handwrittenadditions. Artemis (Diana) appears as Lucifera,Lucina, Triplex, and so on, whereas the entry on Isis, for instance, is complemented by handwritten names: Isis Paria (Faria), Fructiferae,or Isidi Myrionymae(511). Cf. Ligorio's description of an altar dedicated to MagnaMaterand Attis, in the Cesi collection until the end of the 17th century and presently in the VillaAlbani, Sala dei Bigliardi,Rome. Ligorio (as in n. 64), 57, 67-68, no. 27, pl. 17a. 67. This connection to ancient sarcophagi was first suggested by Stechow (as in n. 5), 32. 68. One such example is the sarcophagus with the Judgment of Paris presently in the collection of the Villa Doria Pamphiljin Rome, discussed in A P. P. Bober and R. Rubinstein, Renaissance Artistsand AntiqueSculpture: Handbook of Sources(London: H. Miller; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 150, no. 120. The three nymphs of Spring on this sarcophagus echo the figures of the sisters;the personificationof Nature at the right end of this sarcophagusfinds its equivalent in the figure of Gaea/Artemis;while the dog seated beside Pariscompares to the pet of the Cecropian princesses. For this ed. John Classicae, Mythologiae sarcophagus, see also LexiconIconographicum Boardman et al. (Zurich:Artemis, 1981-), vol. 7, pt. 1, 183, no. 81. 69. On nymphs as goddesses of lower rank, see Homer, Iliad24.616; idem, 6.105; and Euripides, Helen805. In the corpus of Greek literature,the Odyssey term nymph is often applied to any marriageablemaiden or a bride. Homer, Iliad 3.130, 9.560, 18.492; Herodotus, Histories 4.172, trans. A. D. Godley, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.:HarvardUniversityPress; London: William HeineOde7.14; and Euripides, Medea150. The mann, 1938-46); Pindar, Olympian became fundamental text on the frenzy induced by nymphs, Plato's Phaedrus, the basis for Marsilio Ficino's discourse on poetic inspiration. See Michael Ficino: A Studyof His Phaedrus Commentary, J. B. Allen, ThePlatonism of Marsilio Its Sources and Genesis (Berkeley:Universityof CaliforniaPress, 1984), 3, 31ff. 70. "HomericHymn to Aphrodite,"256-70, quoted in Gantz, 140-41. 7.21.2. Cf. Virgil, 71. On oracles and the oak tree, see Pausanias,Description 2.16 in Virgil (as in n. 51): "the oaks, deemed by the Greeksoracular." Georgics 8.54.4. See Virgil, Georgics On Pan and the oak, see Pausanias, Description 2.493-94: "Happy, too, is he who knows the woodland gods, Pan and old Silvanusand the sister Nymphs!"On nymphs and prophecy, See Pausanias, 9.3.9: "Aboutfifteen stades below the peak on which they make the Description altaris a cave of the Cithaeroniannymphs. It is named Sphragidium,and the story is that of old the nymphs gave oracles in this place." di Poppea 72. Held, 161. In Claudio Monteverdi's opera L'incoronazione (Venice, 1643) the old nurse of Nero's bride, Poppaea, comparesherself to an ancient Sibyl:"thosewho meet me in the street / now say:'How youthful, still a beauty'-and I, although I know I look / like one of the ancient, legendary sibyls,everyone will flatter me like this / because they think by wooing me / to curryfavourwith Poppaea."Gian FrancescoBusenello, libretto to II Nerone di Poppea, overo l'incoronatione by Claudio Monteverdi (Naples: Roberto Mollo, 1651; reprint, London: Archiv Production, 1996), 3, 6. 73. Pausanias,Description 10.12.6, 10.12.2-3: "The Delians remember also a hymn this woman composed to Apollo. In her poem she calls herself not only Herophile but also Artemis, and the wedded wife of Apollo, saying too sometimes that she is his sister,and sometimes that she is his daughter. These statementsshe made in her poetrywhen in a frenzyand possessed by the god. Elsewhere in her oracles she states that her mother was an immortal, one of the nymphs of Ida."See Stephanus (as in n. 51), 733, for a reference to this passage. Pausanias also notes that the Erythraeans,"more eager than any other Greeks to lay claim to Herophile," believed she was a nymph and surnamed her Idaean, because "men of those dayscalled idaiplaces that were thicklywooded." 74. This commonplace is present in Rubens'sletter to Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc of March 16, 1636 (Magurn,403, no. 238), in which he describes a famous ancient landscape in the possession of CardinalBarberini,concluding that the depicted site may be "a nymphaeum, being like a confluence multorum [of many fountains flowing from all fontium undiquescaturientium sides]. That little temple with three female statues could be dedicated to the nymphs of the place, and those on the summit of the hill to certain deities of the fields or mountains." 18.23 (I will be referrringto the translationby 75. Augustine, De CivitateDei MarcusDods). For the Sibyllinelore in the Renaissanceand its relation to the exegetical approaches of early Church Fathers, see Anthony Grafton,Joseph 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford A Studyin theHistory Scholarship, of Classical Scaliger: UniversityPress, 1983-93), vol. 2, 703-5. Renaissance commentators recognized that the Sybilsoften bore several names. Thus, Stephanus (as in n. 51), 734, noted that the Cumaean Sybil was also known as Erophyle, Amalthea, and Demophile ("Cumana,proprio nomine Amalthea, Erophyle & Demophile"), and, more importantly, that in her prophecy, she spoke in secret codes about the name of Jesus ("eius versus ... per numeros exprimitur nomen Jesu"). 76. For Rubens's drawings after Michelangelo, see Frits Lugt, Musee du Flamande du nord... Ecole desdessinsdesEcoles Inventaire (Paris: Louvre: general Musees Nationaux, Palais du Louvre, 1949), 20-23. 77. See Edgar Wind, Michelangelo's Prophetsand Sibyls,British Academy, Annual Lecture on Aspects of Art, 1960 (London: Oxford UniversityPress, [1977]), 68. 78. Ibid.

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79. Virgil, Eclogues 3.1-.10, in Virgil(as in n. 51). Having recognized the Sibylline character of the old serving maid, the viewers of Rubens's painting could trace several elements of this famous passage in the surrounding figures, notably Herse (the Virgin), the infant, and Gaea/Artemis (Lucina) protecting his birth. 80. See Gantz, 111, for the conflation between Pans and Silenoi / Satyroi. On Pan's charming of Diana (Artemis) with the gift of wool, see Virgil, 3.391-92. Cf. Elizabeth McGrath,"Pan and the Wool," RinglingMuGeorgics seumofArtJournal, 1983: 52-70. For Pan and the pine tree, see du Choul, 272. 81. A herm of Priapus flanked by two maidens reproduced in Boissard (as in n. 63), 15, pl. 73, exemplifies this function, as underscored by the accompanying inscription, in which the herm is identified as a guardian, custodian, keeper, and propagator of plants, vines, and gardens ("Hortorum Custodi See Goltzius (as in n. 66), 13 Vigili ConservatoriPropaginis VILLI CORVM"). ("PriapusHortorum Custos"). See Philostratus (as in n. 15), 369, for an illustrationof Pan and the nymphs, one of whom holds a scythe near his erect phallus. See Gantz, 110-11. On the Renaissanceview of Pan, see also Conti, 266-67; and Valeriano, 566. See also Alpers (as in n. 15), 283, for Pan's hybridityas a possible signifier of the half-human,half-divinenature of man; and Held, 161, for Pan's allusion to Hephaestus. 82. See Valeriano, 10.87-88 and ibid., 10.88 for Pan as a symbol for the birth of a prince. See also Philostratus (as in n. 15), 373. 83. For a summary, see Gantz, 110-11. For Pan's help to the gods, see Hyginus, fabula 196, p. 54: "Dii in Aegypto cum Typhoniis immauitatem meteuerunt, Pan iussit ut in feras bestias se conuerterunt quo facilis eum deciperent...." (When the Gods in Egypt feared the savageness of Typhoneus, Pan instructedthem to turn themselvesinto variousanimalsso that they could deceive him easily). See Gregorio Giraldi, De deis gentiumlibri siue deorum XVII,quibusvaria ac multiplex gentiumhistoria,imagines,a syntagmata cognomina.... (Leiden: HaeredesJacob, 1565), 384, on Pan as the Egyptian Mendes. See also Becanus (as in n. 48), 266, with reference to Herodotus, Histories 2.42, 2.46, 2.145, who underscores that Pan was held to be the most ancient among the gods in Egypt ("Panemvetustissimuminter primos Deos apud Aegyptios habitum fuisse"). For Pan as a companion to Dionysus (Bac2.38.3-6, chus) in his conquest of India, see Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca 3.65.7-8, in Diodorusof Sicily,trans. C. H. Oldfather, 12 vols. (London: W. Heinemann; Cambridge,Mass.:HarvardUniversityPress, 1933-67). 84. Pausanias,Description 1.24.3. See Giraldi (as in n. 83), 259, who invokes Pausaniasas a grammaticus (philologist) regarding the origin of herms among the Athenians as statues of Hermes without arms or legs ("StatuasMercurij ... sine pedibus & manibus, Hermae vocantur"). 85. Herodotus, Histories 1.28.4, 8.54.6. See 6.105; and Pausanias,Description Conti, 265: "The ancients recalled many heroic deeds of Pan. He is said to have sent fear one night into the hearts of the Gauls, enemies of the Greeks.... He also aided Athenians in a navalbattle ... as Simonides testifies in these lines: Arcadian Pan, goat-footed, upon the Medes, / I've been told, worked for Cecrops' sake / Militiades'victory."See also Giraldi (as in n. 83), 384. Hephaestus was among the father figures of the Athenians, which was reflected in the name of one of the four Attic tribes (Hefaistias) and in the 1.26.5. presence of his altar at the shrine of Erechtheus. Pausanias,Description 86. See Plutarch, Moralia419b-d, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt et al., 16 vols. (London: W. Heinemann; New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1927-69). See Philostratus (as in n. 15), 374: "Le Grand Pan est Mort...." (Great Pan is dead). 87. Becanus (as in n. 48), 266-67, discusses this connection in book 16, beginning with Plutarch'saccount of the voice that proclaimed the death of the "GreatGod Pan."His interpretation of the connection between Pan and Christ is as follows:"Videndumergo quis Pan Tiberio imperante mortuus fit, ad cuius nuncium diamones & admiratione fuerint perculsi. Expostulat diabolus cum Christo,quod ante tempus possessione sua vetustaexpelleritur:& cum iamse sibi laquem in morte Christi praeparandanexuise deprehendisset.... Cum igitur mortus esset Christus,cuius solius morte cacodaemonum imperium est euersum.... Christus igitur magnus Pan est" (It must be recognized that during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, Pan died, at precisely the time when demons were greatly overturned. The Devil demanded the surrender of Christ, for he had been banished by him earlier from his original domain: and since he had already detected the snare for himself in the death that was prepared for Christ,when Christwas dead, by his death the imperial throne was defiled and overturned by the Devil.... Therefore Christ is the Great Pan). A direct parallel between Pan and Christianity (through the horns shared by Bacchus, Pan, and Moses) is also drawn in the 1694 Vossius edition ofJunius's Depictura.For this, see F.Junius (as in n. 15), 339 n. 53. See also Bacon (as in n. 15), 24: "the Grecians (either by intercourse with the Egyptiansor one way or other) ... heard something of the Hebrew mysteries:for it [Pan's origin] points to the state of the world not considered in immediate creation, but after the fall of Adam,exposed and made subiect to death and corruption:for in that state it was (and remains to Pan this day) the offspring of God and Sinne .. ."and further (32): "Whereas the messenger of the Gods, there is in that is said to bee (next vnto Mercury) a diuine Mysteryconteined, for next to the word of God the image of the world proclaimes the power and wisdome diuine, as sings the sacred Poet. Psal. 19.1.... The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth the workes of his hands."

88. H.Junius (as in n. 16), 157, 189, s.v. "Terminus": "Terminusest, homines qui scopus unus agit. / Est immota dies, praefixaque tempora fatis, / Deque ferunt primis ultima iudicium" (Terminus is that one place that guides men. It is alwaysunmoved, and fixed by fate for eternity, and from the earliest (350), he notes that things, the final things carryjudgment). In the explicatio the Terminussignifies the inevitabilityof death in all created things ("mortem significat, quae ineuitablem habet in res omnes"), adding an explanation to the line "deque ferunt primis"as "an understanding of the present by means of the past [ex praeteritatis aestimatur]." praesentia 89. Alpers (as in n. 15), 185. 90. On the etymology of Moses, see the comment in TheNew Oxford AnnotatedBiblewiththeApocrypha, ed. Herbert G. Mayand Bruce M. Metzger (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 68; J. Gwyn Griffith, "The Egyptian Derivation of the Name Moses,"Journal of Near EasternStudies12 (1953): Studies 36 225-31; andJ. R. Towers, "The Name Moses," Journalof Theological (1935): 407-9. 91. See Valeriano, 16.147, on Asclepius and the serpent of Moses, and 14.138, for Moses' esteem of the snake as the most prudent of all animals ("Mosesprudentissimuminter bruta Serpentem dixit"). 92. Examples of Eusebius's comparisons in Eusebii Caesariensis Episcopi chronicon (Paris: Henricus Stephanus, 1512) include parallels between the travailsof Moses in Egypt and the reign of Cecrops in Athens (fol. 29, cols. 108-10) and a direct alignment between the time of Moses and that of Erichthonius as a son of Vulcan and Minerva (fol. 31). Rubens's reliance on Eusebiusas an EarlyChristianauthorityis underscored in his letter to Peiresc of August 1630, in which he comments on a bronze tripod owned by the French antiquarianas a type of object "so often mentioned in the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius ...." Magurn, 366, no. 216. 93. Augustine, De Civitate 18.8, p. 615. 94. Ibid., 615-16. See Valeriano, 384. 95. Augustine, De Civitate18.11, pp. 617-18, and 618, for Moses' lineage: 'Joshua, the son of Nun, succeeded Moses, and settled in the land of promise the people he had brought in.... He also died, after ruling the people twenty-seven years after the death of Moses, when Amyntasreigned in Assyria as the eighteenth king, Coracosas the sixteenth in Sicyon,Danaos as the tenth in Argos, Erichthonius as the fourth in Athens." 96. I Cor. 15.46-47, in the KingJames version. 97. Ibid., 15.49. 98. Plato, Cratylus 398c-d, in Plato,trans. H. N. Fowler,9 vols. (London: W. Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.:HarvardUniversityPress, 1937-42), vol. 6. 99. Augustine, De Civitate 18.12, pp. 619-20. 100. Ibid., 18.37, p. 646. 101. Du Choul, 312. 102. Becanus (as in n. 48), 61, where he observes that only the doctors of the Churchwere able to ascertainthe truthfulnessbeneath the veils of ancient myths ("quidem omnia, quae de Harpocrate & Horo & Apolline dicuntur, & symbolo denotatur,vt verasunt, dum ad quosum discipulos & quosuis veritatis doctores accommodantur"). 103. Pierre Daniel Huet, ... Demonstratio Evangelica.... (Lipsiaea: T. Fritsch, 1703). Naturally,when Huet compares Cecrops to Moses, he is citing Eusebius as his main authority (". . Cecrops, primus ille Atheniensium rex, Mosis effigies est. Aetas convenit in Eusebii Chronico...."). As a clarification of this point, he adds thatjust as Cecrops instituted certain rites and sacrifices in Athens, Moses performed the same function for the Israelites ("PrimusJovi bovem immolasse dictus est Cecrops, vel quod Vitulum aureum confregerit Moses, vel quod sacrificiorumritus Israelitasdocuerit," 193-94). Huet, 18789, produces persuasiveproofs of the parallelsbetween Moses and Asclepius as infants, the snake as their common attribute, through their "discoveries" their solar associations, and their shared restorative powers as healers. He further suggests that the doctrine of Moses is implied in the Greek accounts of Pan and Priapus, as well as Hermes and Apollo, albeit in the habitually obscure language of fables. He explains that in the fable of Asclepius we can discern Moses by means of their association with Egypt,since both Asclepius and Moses were termed "Egyptian."He proceeds to relate Moses and Asclepius by a number of shared attributes,including riversas sites of their discoveries, their radiant countenances, their healing and prophetic powers, and their shared association with the dog as a symbol. I am grateful to Anthony Colantuono for bringing Huet's work to my attention. 104. Magurn, 126-27, no. 75, 129-30, no. 78. Peiresc had praised Rubens's antiquariansophistication in a letter to di Bagno (Feb. 26, 1622): "Inmatters of antiquityespecially,he [Rubens] possesses the most universaland remarkable knowledge I have ever seen." Ibid., 462. 105. Magurn, 126: "since I find myself deprived of books and my notes, I cannot answeryou as preciselyas I should like. But I shall tell you what I think as far as my memoryservesme ..." Yet, as Magurnnotes, 462-63, for all these disclaimers, Rubens gives an impressivelydetailed account of the history of this temple. 106. Magurn, 126. See Cicero, De natura2.27.69: "Timaeusin his history with his usual aptness adds to his account of the burning of the temple of Diana of Ephesus on the night on which Alexander was born the remarkthat this need cause no surprise, since Diana was awayfrom home, wishing to be present when Olympiaswas brought to bed." 107. The importance of memory is highlighted throughout: "And if I remember rightly, it was ruined seven times, by fire, earthquake, and the

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incursions of the barbarians,and alwaysrestored by the same peoples up to the time of the Romans.And they, during the reign of Augustus or Tiberius, rebuilt it anew."Magurn, 126. 108. Magurn, 129. 109. Ibid. 110. Ibid., 129-30. 111. Conti, 173. On the rebuilding of the temple, Conti makes a specific reference to Strabo, Geography 14, trans. Horace LeonardJones, 8 vols. (London: W. Heinemann; New York:G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1917-50). For another similarlydetailed description of the temple, see du Choul, 78. 112. If we follow the allusion to the Judgment of Paris,we find an echo of Alexander in the story of Paris, who had been exposed on Mt. Ida in his infancy and later in life was accorded that very name. See Apollodorus,

Bibliotheca 2.47: "WhenPriamlearned of the dream from Hecuba, he sent for his son Aesacus,for he was an interpreterof dreams.... He declared that the child was begotten to be the ruin of his country and advised that the babe should be exposed. When the babe wasborn Priamgave it to a servantto take and expose on Ida; now the servantwas named Agelaus. Exposed by him, the infant was nursed for five days by a bear; and, when he found it safe, he took it up, carriedit away,brought it up as his own son on his farm, and named him Paris.When he grew to be a young man, Paris excelled many in beauty and strength, and was afterwardssurnamed Alexander, because he repelled robbers and defended the flocks." 113. Augustine, De Civitate 18.8, p. 615. 114. Conti, 12. 115. Aneau (as in n. 14), fols. c5v-c6r, quoted in Cave (as in n. 12), 176, 345.