1. Introduction

Early in the sixteenth century a genre of portraiture emerged in Northern Europe that combines bust portraits of humanistic intellectuals and patrons with elegant Latin and Greek epigraphs. Many of these works have long since become iconic: Metsys’s Erasmus medallion (1519); Cranach’s Luther engravings (1520–21); Dürer’s engravings of Pirckheimer, Melanchthon, and Erasmus (1524–26); and Holbein’s paintings of Amerbach (1519), Erasmus (1523), and Melanchthon (1535/36). Here the inscribed texts are often so eye-catching, so integral to the overall design, that they fairly demand equal time with the portraits themselves. In Dürer’s Pirckheimer and Melanchthon, for instance, the Latin epigrams appear as if insculpted on a slab of stone that occupies the bottom quarter of the image.

For all their evident importance, the humanistic portrait epigraphs have attracted little attention from textual scholars. Indeed, among Neo-Latin philologists only Walther Ludwig has ventured into this arena in a stimulating paper that broadly surveys the inscriptions in scholar-portraits from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.Footnote ¹ The upshot is that the epigraphical texts have not had the kind of sustained expert study that the likenesses themselves enjoy.Footnote ² By default, they have largely remained the province of art historians. In consequence, even basic questions still go begging. It remains unknown, for example, who wrote these anonymous texts; whether the artists composed any of them and (if not) whether they got the wording right; and what exactly the epigraphs intend to say, or what models and conventions they follow.

The present essay hopes to provide at least a few answers to these questions. Unlike Ludwig, I will limit my inquiry to the humanistic epigraphs in the age of Erasmus and Dürer. What I envision here is a philological-literary investigation. A more inclusive analysis, with interpretation of the works’ visual form and overall design, is a desideratum that, I fear, would burst the bounds of this article and — more importantly — of my expertise. But just as artist and writer worked closely together in Renaissance times to create a work that neither could have completed on his own, so too art historians and literary philologists must needs join forces now, each teaming up with the other to understand the collaborative portrait in all its dimensions. Let us start with the public media of prints and medallions and then turn to the more intimate sphere of paintings.

2. Konrad Celtis’s “Death Portrait” (1503/04)

The symbiosis of printed portrait and verse inscription had its origins in 1503/04, when the arch-humanist Konrad Celtis (1459–1508) commissioned the Augsburg artist Hans Burgkmair (1473–1531) to create a commemorative woodcut for himself.Footnote ³ A tomblike monument, half Roman, half Christian in design, the print seems originally to have been intended as an illustration for Celtis’s collected works. Much to the humanist’s chagrin, however, financing for that undertaking proved hard to secure. Besides, Celtis still had to finish some of the books he wanted to include. In the meantime, therefore, he made the best of it, and sent copies of the image all over the empire. The picture would advertise his achievements and keep his memory alive beyond death. An archetypal humanist, Celtis was keenly intent on fame. He was also a syphilitic who knew he did not have many years remaining.

Celtis’s “Death Portrait” (Sterbebild), as it has come to be known,Footnote ⁴ shows a bust-length likeness of the humanist, wearing the full regalia of a laurel-crowned poet. With eyes lowered in death, he looks down on his major books: Germany Illuminated, Amores, Epigrams, and Odes. His hands are folded on the volumes. An arch, banderoles, and garlands frame the moribund figure. Poetry and eloquence, personified as Apollo and Mercury, mourn at the top left and right, while Love, in the form of putti, grieves at the bottom corners. Below the portrait, a plaque contains an epitaph of two Latin distichs, along with the humanist’s name and title, “Konrad Celtis Protucius, Guardian and Bestower of the Laurel in Vienna.”Footnote ⁵ Then follows the traditional, “Here he rests in Christ,”Footnote ⁶ a statement specifying the length of his life (forty-nine years), and the fictional year of death (1507).

The woodcut was much admired and treasured. Many copies are still extant. They have survived in three states.Footnote ⁷ The first and second of these bear the date, “[In the year] of salvation 1507.”Footnote ⁸ Celtis seems to have picked 1507 because he would then be in his forty-ninth year, the “perfect age” (seven times seven), when the mind is at its prime. As one of the climacteric years, the forty-ninth was also believed to be an especially dangerous time of life.Footnote ⁹ For a syphilitic like Celtis, then, it seemed like a good year to shoot for. As it turned out, Celtis died shortly after the year he had projected, on 4 February 1508. In a third state, therefore, his friends changed the date to “1508” (fig. 1).

Figure 1. Hans Burgkmair. “Death Portrait” of Konrad Celtis, 1503/04. Third state. The British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Over the portrait, an arch contains two mottos: “exitvs acta probat” (“The end justifies the labors”), followed after a little space by the words, “qvi bene fecit habet” (“Whoever has done good, has”). The first motto is a familiar one. Quoted from Ovid, Heroides 2.85, the text had been divorced from its original, quite skeptical context long before Celtis’s time, and turned into an independent proverb.Footnote ¹⁰ The second motto has the look and feel of a familiar quotation too, but no source has ever been found: its meaning is unclear. Banderoles to the right and left of the portrait complete the niche-like space. In the print’s first state, the left banderole declares, “The final urn calls all people.”Footnote ¹¹ In the second state the wording is revised to, “Why, Death, do you break up such sweet friendships?”Footnote ¹² The banderole on the right contains another question, “What do you, Libitina, not tear asunder?”Footnote ¹³ Directly beneath Celtis’s books one sees the inscription, “Their works follow them,”Footnote ¹⁴ as well as Celtis’s personal emblem, now cracked and broken.

Of these texts, only the enigmatic “qvi bene fecit habet ” has caused trouble: “Whoever has done good, has.” Here it is not at all apparent what the direct object of “has” might be. Some wring sense out of the motto by turning it into a relative clause attached to the preceding “acta.”Footnote ¹⁵ They forget that the neuter plural “acta” cannot possibly be connected to the masculine nominative singular “qui.” Equally impossible is Kurt Löcher’s idea of linking “Qui bene fecit habet” to the banderole on the right, “Quid non Libitina resolvis” — impossible, because “Quid” is an interrogative, not a pronoun.Footnote ¹⁶ Harry C. Schnur, Franz J. Worstbrock, and Peter Luh rightly understand the phrases as distinct mottos, but they too are at a loss to explain the missing object of “habet.”Footnote ¹⁷ To my knowledge, the first to move beyond the impasse is Berndt Hamm. In a recent essay, he argues that the words in the arch are separate mottos that make up a single pentameter. (Properly speaking, they are two hemistichs.) Hamm then explains the implicit object of “habet”: whoever has done good deeds, has eternal life in heaven, in the memory of God, and at the same time, enduring fame on earth in the memory of humankind.Footnote ¹⁸ But that still does not answer why Celtis leaves the object unstated. He could have done so only if he were quoting a familiar saying.

There is but one way to solve the riddle: by going back to Ovid — not the Ovid that modern philologists have painstakingly restored, but the warts-and-all Ovid that Celtis and his friends still knew, practically by heart. For at the root of Celtis’s phrase is a second Ovidian verse. At Fasti 2.379–80, the ancient poet explains why the Luperci run stripped at the festival of the Lupercalia: they do so in memory of one of Remus’s exploits. In the Teubner edition, the distich now reads as follows: “forma manet facti: posito velamine currunt, / et memorem famam quod bene cessit habet” (“The manner of the deed lives on. They run stripped; and what turned out well has memorial fame”).Footnote ¹⁹ Celtis, however, saw these lines in a contemporary printed edition (my emphasis): “Fama volat facti: posito velamine currunt, / Et memorem famam qui bene gessit habet” (“The fame of the deed flew. They run stripped; and whoever acted well has memorial fame”).Footnote ²⁰ Here, finally, is a solid line of attack. Celtis seems to be looking forward to posterity. Having acted well (bene fecit), he can depart life (exitus), in the conviction that future generations will supply the memorial fame that his works and deeds have earned for him.

It will not have escaped the reader that the Renaissance edition of Ovid’s text prints “gessit,” not “fecit,” as Celtis has it. The humanist, it appears, must be drawing on a secondary tradition. And indeed, though Ovidian in origin, Celtis’s second motto is no more a direct quotation than the first one in the arch. It derives from an epitaph tradition that emerged from Ovid’s verse but then carved an independent path. Already the sixth-century poet Venantius Fortunatus concludes an epitaph with the words: “Omnia restituit mundo quae sumpsit ab ipso, / sola tamen pro se quae bene gessit habet” (“He gave back to the world all the things he borrowed from it; but for himself he has only whatever good he did”).Footnote ²¹ A fifteenth-century epitaph collection records this leonine pentameter, inscribed on the grave of a “woman of easy virtue”: “Hic iacet Elizabeth. Si bene fecit, habet” (“Here lies Elizabeth. If she did good, she has”).Footnote ²² As in Celtis’s motto, the object of “has” is left unstated. Elizabeth’s epitaph was widely quoted, in jest and in earnest. It serves as the title of a popular song that was appended to Jakob Hartlieb’s mock-quodlibetal speech, On the Fidelity of Prostitutes to their Lovers, in 1505 and often thereafter.Footnote ²³ During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the phrase was even rumored to have been inscribed on the tomb of Saint Elizabeth in Marburg.Footnote ²⁴ A Catechismus Christiano-Catholicus of 1723 cites this epitaph: “Hic iacet Augustus. Si bene fecit, habet” (“Here lies August. If he did good, he has”). The author helpfully explains: “If he served God well, he has his reward, honor, beatitude. If he did not, he does not, but is damned eternally.”Footnote ²⁵ Celtis, therefore, took the motto from the epitaph tradition. In the “Death Portrait,” as Hamm suggested, it points not only to eternal life in heaven, but also to immortal fame on earth.

The remaining mottos are unproblematic. “The final urn calls all people,” used only in the print’s first state, is taken from the concluding verse of Celtis’s Amores, book 4. There it serves as the poet’s valediction to the young people of Germany.Footnote ²⁶ In the second state, the motto is replaced with the pentameter, “Why, Death, do you break up such sweet friendships?” — a far better match for the partial hexameter, “What do you, Libitina, not tear asunder?” Both questions are of Celtis’s own composition. They lament the loss of dear friendships, the rending of human bonds. The inscription, “Their works follow them,” comes from Revelations 14.13. As Franz J. Worstbrock has shown, the phrase is used in the Office for the Dead and thus has a commemorative function.Footnote ²⁷

All the inscriptions are arranged with exquisite care, especially in the second version. The two overarching mottos and the quotation below the books direct attention to the humanist’s works and deeds, which are rightfully his until the end of time. The texts to the left and right of the sitter are addressed to Death, but celebrate the undying power of the heart and mind. Death may be able to break up friendships, but cannot destroy their memory. Libitina, goddess of funerals, can tear earthly bonds asunder, but has no power over works of genius.Footnote ²⁸ Here Celtis’s phrasing, as often noted, evokes the triumphant words of Horace in Odes 3.30.6–7: “I shall not all die, but a large part of me will dodge Libitina.”

The twin themes of loss and memory, of death and enduring fame, are echoed in the elegiacs inscribed on the monument’s base beneath the initials “D M S” (“Sacred to the Divine Shades”).Footnote ²⁹ The first distich recalls the laments of the banderoles; the second repeats Celtis’s humanistic conviction that his writings will evade death: “Weep, faithful bards, and beat your breast with your palms, for this Celtis of yours has suffered the supreme fate. Dead he may be; but alive to future ages forever, he speaks through his writings to scholarly men.”Footnote ³⁰ Celtis will live on in his books.Footnote ³¹ There his voice will speak until the end of time.

3. Celtis’s Woodcut Medallion (1507)

Around the same time as they were creating the “Death Portrait,” Celtis and Burgkmair also collaborated on an allegorical woodcut that, in text and image, depicts the imperial eagle as bestower of the laurel wreath and fountainhead of the arts. The broadside was evidently intended as an advertisement for the College of Poets and Mathematicians in Vienna, created in 1501 by Maximilian I (1459–1519) and headed by Celtis himself.Footnote ³² Beneath the eagle, an elegiac distich compliments the woodcut’s cocreators: “Johann Burgkmair depicted this eagle with his art, and Celtis wove the lovely story.”Footnote ³³

In early 1507, the same block, now somewhat worn down, was used to make a new set of prints.Footnote ³⁴ In these copies, a woodcut medallion is inserted at the foot of the sheet, under the title, “Bronze coin with the symmetry of Celtis.”Footnote ³⁵ The obverse has a bust portrait of the laurel-crowned poet and the legend, “At age forty-eight.”Footnote ³⁶ The portrait image is identical to the one in the “Death Portrait,” except that Celtis, still very much alive, now has his eyes keenly fixed on the viewer. The reverse bears the pentameter, “Lend the sound of his voice, this will be a second Celtis,” and the date “1507.”Footnote ³⁷ It is the highest compliment a humanist can pay the artist: the image is so true to life, it all but speaks.

The pentameter has attracted little notice. To my knowledge, only Walther Ludwig has inquired into its credentials as a humanistic text.Footnote ³⁸ In Ludwig’s view, the emphasis on the missing voice proves that Celtis imitates a Greek distich preserved in the Planudean Anthology of Greek epigrams. First published by Janus Lascaris at Florence in 1494, this version of the Greek Anthology was reprinted in an augmented collection at Venice by Aldo Manuzio in 1503. There would be many reeditions, beginning in 1519.Footnote ³⁹ As time went on, selected epigrams started appearing in Latin translation, often in bilingual florilegia.Footnote ⁴⁰ For many decades, therefore, the book’s influence was by and large limited to those with Greek. Now the epigram to which Ludwig calls attention runs as follows: “Life painter, you steal only the external form, but you cannot capture the voice, for that will not obey your colors.”Footnote ⁴¹ The epigram is not among the ones that the early translators and anthologizers took note of.

Ludwig’s suggestion has the merit of locating Celtis’s epigraph within the ancient tradition that portraitists can capture only the bodily features, not the sitter’s mind or voice.Footnote ⁴² But the mere fact that the Greek epigram stands in that tradition is, of course, no guarantee that it served as Celtis’s source. Skepticism is all the more warranted, as the commonplace can be found in earlier humanistic writers too, none of whom was ever acquainted with the Greek Anthology. Those authors, moreover, use it to compliment the artist, just as Celtis does, not to mock him, as in the Greek epigram. Thus Francesco Petrarch (1304–74) praises a polychrome stucco relief of Saint Ambrose in Milan by saying that “only a voice was lacking to make you see Ambrose alive.”Footnote ⁴³ Pope Pius II (r. 1458–64) mentions marble statues that lack only a voice to turn them into living beings.Footnote ⁴⁴ In 1458, Janus Pannonius (1434–72) lauds Andrea Mantegna’s double portrait of himself and a friend by declaring: “How little do these faces differ from the way they look in reality? How, except that those portraits lack a voice?”Footnote ⁴⁵ A few years later, Giannantonio Campano (1429–77) salutes Andrea Guazzalotti of Prato for sculpting a portrait medallion of Pius II that appears so alive that one involuntarily believes it speaks with a living voice. If only this were not an illusion! For alas, Campano sighs, even supreme artistry cannot sculpt genius and eloquence.Footnote ⁴⁶ And in 1483, Rudolf Agricola (1443/44–85) has this to say about a portrait of two lovers: “Look, art depicts eyes and mouths that are utterly true to life. How hard would it be for the gracious gods to give them a voice too?”Footnote ⁴⁷

No, it was not from the Greek Anthology that these humanists took the idea that, but for a voice, the portraits are alive. The model they had in mind was one they had all grown up with: Ovid’s famed Letters of Heroines. Toward the end of Heroides 13, Ovid has the mythical heroine Laodamia write a verse letter to her beloved husband Protesilaus. She does not yet know that he is the first Greek to fall at Troy, but already she is full of forebodings. Unable to bear his absence, she has had a wax effigy made of him. It is no ordinary image, she assures her husband. Indeed, it is so wonderfully lifelike that she embraces it and kisses it and even speaks to it. If you lent it a voice, it would be Protesilaus himself. “But while you bear arms in a foreign war,” she writes, “I keep a wax that recalls your features to my sight. To it I speak a lover’s whispers, to it the words you rightfully deserve; it receives my embraces. Believe me, the figure is more than it appears. Lend a voice to the wax, it will be Protesilaus” — “adde sonum cerae, Protesilaus erit.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Here is the true model for the medallion inscription, “Adde sonum vocis, Celtis is alter erit.” In quintessentially humanist fashion, Celtis plays on a well-known text, but refashions it in his own image. Like Protesilaus, he will soon die. Of their mortal features, only a mute effigy will remain. But just as Protesilaus lives on in Laodamia’s two memorial portraits, the wax she embraces and the letter she writes, so Celtis lives on in the all-but-speaking portraits and in his writings that will forever lend them voice.

4. Two Types of Portrait

Celtis’s “Death Portrait” and woodcut medallion are, each in its own way, programmatic statements on humanist portraiture. It is as if Celtis is telling the viewer: Look! Before you are two representations of a scholar-poet. On the medallion is the man as he looked in life. But however true to life it may be, the image you are gazing at is not the part of me that matters. It portrays my mortal features only; it lacks soul and voice. Now look at the memorial image! I am dying before your eyes. Soon the body’s voice will be stilled. But in the four books on which I rest my fame I shall go on speaking to you for all time to come. There you will find a more enduring likeness: the portrait of my mind.

The two kinds of image — the lifelike, but mute, portrait of the mortal features and the literary, speaking portrait of the soul — are, of course, not something that Celtis came up with on his own. They are staples of ancient Greek and Roman literature.Footnote ⁴⁹ At the close of a biography of his father-in-law Cn. Julius Agricola, Tacitus remarks: “Like people’s features, so too likenesses of those features are fragile and short-lived. The portrait of the mind is everlasting.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Earlier, Horace had made a similar comment: “the features of famous people come across no more clearly when sculpted in bronze statues than do their character and mind when portrayed in a poet’s work.”Footnote ⁵¹ In exile in Tomis on the Black Sea, Ovid has much the same thought. While duly grateful that his friends and admirers look longingly at portraits of him, he would rather have them read his writings, because “my poems show a grander portrait.”Footnote ⁵² Martial tells a faraway friend that a painting now being made of him will be a splendid likeness indeed. But artistic depictions are subject to destruction, just like the sitter himself. The portrait revealed in the poet’s writings will live forevermore: “My face will come through more surely in my poems. It cannot be obliterated by any hazards, by any length of years. It will go on living when the Apellean work has died.”Footnote ⁵³ Wistfully looking at the portrait of a beloved and admired man, the same poet exclaims: “How I wish that art could portray his character and mind! There would not be a lovelier painting on earth.”Footnote ⁵⁴

Until Celtis’s time, the artistic and literary portraits had pretty much led separate existences, each in its own sphere. It was a stroke of genius, therefore, when Celtis and Burgkmair combined the two in a single representation. Their example was to prove enormously influential. Well into the eighteenth century, artists and poets would join forces to portray intellectuals and patrons in combined image and text.

Almost from the start, the portrait epigraphs split into the two tracks that Celtis had laid out. Texts in paintings mostly follow the pattern exemplified by the woodcut medallion. They foreground the illusion of reality and praise the all-but-speaking likeness. Mortality and commemoration are kept to the background. This pattern is inverted in the mass-disseminated portraits. Like the “Death Portrait,” the representations in prints and medals are self-consciously memorial. Their texts, accordingly, praise the mortal likeness, but point beyond it to the immortal image of the sitter’s mind and soul.

5. Metsys’s Erasmus Medallion (1519)

In 1519 Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536) and Quinten Metsys (1465/66–1530) produced a medallion that on the obverse shows a profile of the Dutch humanist, along with the abbreviated name, “er. rot.” (fig. 2). The rim bears the date “1519” and two mottos in Latin and Greek, the Latin one to the right, the Greek one to the left. It has gone unnoticed that they are arranged according to the sitter’s line of sight. The Latin motto, which focuses on the mortal image, the one soon to be left behind, is fittingly placed behind the sitter: “imago ad viva[m] effigie[m] expressa” (“Portrait stamped to create a living likeness”). The Greek motto, by contrast, looks to the future and hence is placed before the sitter’s eyes: “την κρειττω τα συγγραμματα δειξει” (“The writings will show the better one”).Footnote ⁵⁵ The reverse (fig. 3) shows the Roman god of limits (and hence of life’s end), inscribed with the name “terminvs ” and surrounded by the words, “concedo nvlli ” (“I yield to none”).Footnote ⁵⁶ Around the rim are two further reminders of mortality: to the right, “mors vltima linea rerv[m]” (“Death [is] the finish line of things”), and to the left, “ορα τελοσ μακρου βιου” (“Look to the end of a long life”). Both mottos are quotations from ancient poetry. The Latin one is from Horace, the Greek from Ausonius.Footnote ⁵⁷ As on the obverse, the mottos are arranged in accordance with the figure’s line of sight: the Latin one behind, the Greek in front.

Figure 2. Quinten Metsys. Bronze medallion of Erasmus, obverse, 1519. Münzkabinett der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin — Preußischer Kulturbesitz. Photo via Europeana.

Figure 3. Quinten Metsys. Bronze medallion of Erasmus, reverse, 1519. Münzkabinett der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin — Preußischer Kulturbesitz. Photo via Europeana.

Like Celtis’s “Death Portrait,” Erasmus’s medallion is a commemoration of the humanist’s life and works. The artistic image, so the Latin inscription on the obverse assures us, shows the sitter “to the life.” For a “better one,” the Greek text points to the humanist’s writings. There Erasmus will lend the mute portrait a voice.

Such, in fact, is the interpretation that Erasmus’s amanuensis, Gilbert Cousin (1506–72), gave for a very similar portrait, a woodcut medallion by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/98–1543).Footnote ⁵⁸ That image shows an older Erasmus, to be sure, but one still in profile. First published in the Adagiorum opus (Basel, 1533), the likeness was republished at the head of Erasmus’s Ecclesiastes (1535), along with an epigram by Gilbert Cousin.Footnote ⁵⁹ The poem starts off by lauding the depiction’s lifelike quality: “If one has not seen the bodily form of Erasmus, the woodcut portrait will show it skillfully depicted to the life.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Alas, Cousin continues, the artist was not able to paint the voice: “If the artist’s hand had rendered the voice in the same manner, you would simultaneously have also seen the portrait of his mind. But what the masterly hand was unable to accomplish, Erasmus himself has done more fully and accurately on his own.” For in his many books, Cousin concludes, you will see his mind depicted as clear as in a mirror, a portrait worthier of contemplation than any artist’s image.Footnote ⁶¹ A similar train of thought appears in Alaard of Amsterdam’s epigram on a copy of the same woodcut (1538): “So vividly has the Leiden hand depicted Erasmus that, but for the voice, the likeness is alive.” Alaard goes on to declare that the voice, missing in the portrait, can still be heard, sweet as a swan’s song, in Erasmus’s books. In them, he says, his mind yet speaks to us.Footnote ⁶²

The phrase “Imago ad vivam effigiem expressa” on Metsys’s medallion is no longer as transparent to us moderns as it was to Erasmus’s contemporaries.Footnote ⁶³ In the context of portraiture, imago and effigies have much the same meaning. It seems strange, then, that Erasmus would use the two terms side by side in the same phrase.Footnote ⁶⁴

In his seminal article, Walther Ludwig rejects the now usual translation of “ad vivam effigiem” as “from the life, from nature,” and persuasively explains the phrase as meaning “to the life, true to life.” As such, it is the precise equivalent of ad vivum.Footnote ⁶⁵ The expression, Ludwig emphasizes, focuses on the outcome of the artistic effort, not on the artist’s procedure. In other words, far from being a dry statement that Erasmus sat for his portrait, it compliments the portraitist for creating an image that is all but alive. Recently, Jörg Robert has disputed this conclusion, on the grounds that ad effigiem in the sense of “to the life” goes counter to Latin usage.Footnote ⁶⁶ In support of his argument, he cites Ludwig’s observation that there are no parallels in ancient Latin with respect to artistic representations. But Robert misquotes. Ludwig was referring to ad vivum, a standard Middle and Neo-Latin phrase that corresponds exactly to the vernacular phrases al vif, au vif, and to the life. The idiom ad effigiem, by contrast, does have good precedents in ancient and Renaissance Latin. These will help us rediscover Erasmus’s intent.

The early Christian apologist Lactantius writes that God first shaped a man into his own image (“ad similitudinem suam”) and then molded a woman into the likeness of the man himself (“ad ipsius hominis effigiem”).Footnote ⁶⁷ Paraphrasing Virgil, Aeneid 4.654, that Dido’s “imago” will go down to the underworld in all its greatness, the ancient grammarian Servius explains: “quoddam simulacrum … ad nostri corporis effigiem fictum inferas petit” (“a kind of ghostly image … fashioned into a likeness of our body goes to the underworld”).Footnote ⁶⁸ Here, as in the 1519 medallion, an “image” is said to be “fashioned into a bodily likeness.” Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.7.31, uses a quite similar expression, but now with the epithet “human”: “oscilla ad humanam effigiem arte simulata” (“masks artfully made into a human likeness”).Footnote ⁶⁹ Lorenzo Valla’s Elegantiae linguae Latinae, a first version of which was completed around 1440, adds the epithet viva (living). An “effigies,” Valla writes, is “figura ad vivam alterius similitudinem, vel ad veritatis imaginem facta” (“a figure made into the living likeness of someone, or into the image of reality”).Footnote ⁷⁰ The definition reappears in Niccolò Perotti’s best-selling Cornucopiae (1489) and thence in Ambrogio Calepino’s even more popular Dictionarium (1502).Footnote ⁷¹ Erasmus himself uses the idiom in a translation of Lucian’s dialogue, “Diogenes and Mausolus” (1506). When Mausolus boasts that his magnificent tomb possesses representations of horses and men carved to perfection (“ἵππων καὶ ἀνδρῶν ἐς τὸ ἀκριβέστατον εἰκασμένων”), Erasmus translates: “viris scilicet atque equis … ad vivam formam absolutissimo artificio expressis.” Here Lucian’s “to perfection” is quite adequately rendered as “absolutissimo artificio.” But just to make sure the phrase has the force of “carved to the life,” Erasmus idiomatically adds “ad vivam formam expressis.”Footnote ⁷²

Erasmus’s intent in the medallion should now be clear. He wants to compliment Metsys for the “portrait stamped to create a living likeness.” But because even an all-but-living likeness can depict nothing more than the mortal body at a fleeting moment in life, he goes on to urge viewers to read his books. There they will see a better portrait: the image of his mind that will go on speaking eternally.

6. Four Commemorative Portraits by Dürer (1519–24)

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) created two engravings of Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg (1490–1545). The smaller one, dated 1519, is known as “The Small Cardinal” (fig. 4); the second, “The Large Cardinal,” bears the date 1523.Footnote ⁷³ Both show a bust portrait, the one in half profile, the other in full profile. Both also display the sitter’s coat-of-arms and identify him by name, rank, offices, and titles. In the 1519 engraving, a plaque-like space at the foot of the picture contains a Latin hexameter, “This is what his eyes, his cheeks, his mouth looked like,”Footnote ⁷⁴ followed by the sitter’s age (twenty-nine) and the year ( “ m.d.x.i.x. ” ). The verse reappears in the 1523 version, but now above the portrait, along with updated year and age.

Figure 4. Albrecht Dürer. Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg (“The Small Cardinal”), 1519. The British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum.

It is well known that the hexameter is an adaptation of Virgil, Aeneid 3.490: “sic oculos, sic ille manus, sic ora ferebat.” Because the bust image does not show the cardinal’s hands, something had to be done with Virgil’s word manus (“hands”). It was replaced with the metrically equivalent genas (“cheeks”). The new triad of eyes, cheeks, and mouth has ancient and humanistic cachet. Aulus Gellius (second century ce) comments that the three features that people specifically associate with the human face are “mouth and eyes and cheeks.”Footnote ⁷⁵ And in the celebrated Tale of Two Lovers, Eurialus and Lucretia (1444), Enea Silvio Piccolomini (the later Pope Pius II) tells how Eurialus adored his mistress’s face: “now he praised her mouth, now her cheeks, now her eyes.”Footnote ⁷⁶ The adapted verse, then, has a distinctly humanistic ring to it, even as it directs attention to the sitter’s face.

As is so often the case, the humanist who adapted Virgil’s phrase is unknown. Dürer must have inserted the verse on the cardinal’s authority, however, for a prosaic version of the line appears already in the medallion that Hans Schwarz (ca. 1492–after 1532) made for Albrecht of Brandenburg in the latter part of 1518: “This is what his cheeks, his eyes, his mouth looked like at age twenty-eight.”Footnote ⁷⁷ The metrical version in Dürer’s engraving, however, restores Virgil’s word order and more clearly recalls the line’s origin in the Aeneid.

To modern-day readers, the Virgilian verse is a straightforward compliment to the artist: Dürer has depicted the cardinal just as he looked in life.Footnote ⁷⁸ Humanistic contemporaries would have had a more complex reaction. They would have noticed at once that the cardinal wishes to be remembered as a friend of humanism, indeed, as a connoisseur of literature.Footnote ⁷⁹ For the quotation is not a facile slogan, but anchored in the context of the Aeneid. During his wanderings over the Mediterranean after the fall of Troy, Aeneas and his people spend time in Epirus. Here Priam’s son Helenus is now king, and Hector’s widow Andromache his queen. When the time comes to say their farewells, Andromache looks at Aeneas’s son Ascanius and sees in him the image of her own dead son Astyanax. Turning to Ascanius, she sadly says: “Oh you, the only image of my Astyanax that is left to me! This is what his eyes, his hands, his features looked like.”Footnote ⁸⁰ So too the features depicted in Schwarz’s medallion and Dürer’s engravings will live long after the cardinal has passed away. Like Celtis’s “Death Portrait” and Erasmus’s medal, then, the portraits must be regarded not just as portraits of the moment, but as commemorative images.Footnote ⁸¹ That purpose comes out more vividly in Dürer’s “Small Cardinal,” where the combination of lifelike depiction and epitaph-like subscriptio conveys a sense of death within life, but also of life beyond death in memory.

The same is true of Dürer’s engravings of Duke Frederick the Wise of Saxony (1463–1525) and Willibald Pirckheimer (1470–1530), both dated 1524.Footnote ⁸² The engravings are pendants to each other. In the manner of a Roman tombstone, they show a bust portrait above a stone plaque containing a eulogizing inscription with names and dates. All these elements are intended to serve the sitter’s memoria.

The elegiac distich for Dürer’s Frederick opens with the dedicatory phrase, “christo. sacrvm.” (“Sacred to Christ”). The words are reminiscent of the ancient tombstone formula, “Dis Manibus Sacrum,” that Celtis had revived for his “Death Portrait.” The funerary association is strengthened by an acronym that appears immediately above the date: “b.m.f.v.v.” (“Bene Merenti Fecit Vivus Vivo,” or, “The living made this for the living, who well deserves it”). These initials go back to a formula often found on Roman tombs.Footnote ⁸³ The elegiac distich itself is in the style of an epitaph, a eulogy in brief: “He was deeply devoted to God’s word, a man worthy to be remembered by posterity forever.”Footnote ⁸⁴ The main verb, favebat, is in the past imperfect tense. As for the pentameter, it recalls the concluding verse of an epitaph by the Italian poet Gregorio Tifernate (1414–ca. 1463/64), first published at Venice in 1498 and reprinted at Strasbourg in 1509: “A man worthy … to be remembered by distant posterity.”Footnote ⁸⁵ The distich for Frederick may well have been supplied, via the duke’s secretary Georg Spalatin, by Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560).

Eulogy is the dominant note also in the epigraph for Dürer’s engraving of Willibald Pirckheimer. It consists of a single pentameter: “We live through the mind. The rest will belong to death.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Pirckheimer provided the motto himself. As Dieter Wuttke has shown, he took it from a funeral poem for the great Roman patron of the arts, C. Maecenas (ca. 70–8 bce).Footnote ⁸⁷ The epicedion was widely read, for it formed part of the Appendix Virgiliana, a set of poems traditionally attached to Virgil’s works. Here too, context is all. The ancient poet eulogizes Maecenas for a life devoted to the Muses and Apollo. That is the monument he will leave behind for the ages: “Homer’s books outlast marble monuments. We live through the mind. The rest will belong to death.”Footnote ⁸⁸ So Pirckheimer too will live on, his voice speaking forever in his books.

7. The Inscriptions for Cranach’s Engravings of Luther (1520–21): Literary Models

In the waning months of 1520, the Wittenberg court painter Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553) made two engravings of the hugely popular, but increasingly embattled, Reformer Martin Luther (1483–1546). Structurally, both are modeled on Dürer’s first engraving of Albrecht of Brandenburg.Footnote ⁸⁹

The first of the Cranach engravings shows Luther in half profile, his crown tonsured, his frame dressed in the Augustinian habit (fig. 5).Footnote ⁹⁰ An empty background focuses the eye on the sitter himself, a resolute man of faith. The portrait seems not to have been published during the Reformer’s lifetime. At a time of delicate negotiations with Church and empire, the Wittenberg court may not have wanted to release an image of rugged intransigence. The published version of the portrait shows Luther in a conciliatory pose (fig. 6).Footnote ⁹¹ Standing in front of a niche, he appears to be explicating a point of theology. His left hand is placed on his breast; his right hand holds an open book, presumably the Bible. Despite the different poses, both portraits have the same epigraph, an elegiac distich. As in Dürer’s “Small Cardinal,” the inscription is placed directly below the image, along with the date “m.d.x.x.” and Cranach’s signature, the winged dragon. The distich reads: “Luther himself expresses the everlasting image of his mind, but the wax of Lucas his ephemeral features.”Footnote ⁹²

Figure 5. Lucas Cranach. Martin Luther, 1520. First version, intermediate state between the second and third. British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Figure 6. Lucas Cranach. Martin Luther, 1520. Second version. British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Cranach’s third engraving of Luther is dated 1521 (fig. 7). The portrait has the same layout as the first two, but with Luther in profile, wearing the cap of doctor of theology. It is extant in two states.Footnote ⁹³ In the first state, the background is blank. In the second, the background is darkly shaded. In both versions, an elegiac distich beneath the portrait declares: “Lucas's work is this short-lived likeness of Luther. The everlasting one of his mind he expresses himself.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Then follows the date, “m.d.x.x.i. ” Virtually identical in wording and thought, the two epigraphs must have been composed as variations on a theme, by the same poet, at about the same time.Footnote ⁹⁵ But who that poet might have been, when precisely he wrote the verses, which literary models he followed — these are questions still imperfectly answered.

Figure 7. Lucas Cranach. Martin Luther, 1521. Second state. British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum.

It is best to start with the last question. In his abovementioned survey of the portrait epigraph, Walther Ludwig argues that the inscriptions can be traced back to two ancient models.Footnote ⁹⁶ One is The Greek Anthology 9.594: “Life painter, seeing that you have reproduced his outward form, how I wish you could also have cast Socrates’s mind into the wax!”Footnote ⁹⁷ The other is Tacitus, Agricola 46.3: “Like people’s features, so too likenesses of those features are fragile and short-lived. The portrait of the mind is everlasting.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Ludwig is assuredly right in fingering Tacitus’s text as a source. Indeed, if anything, he understates its importance, inasmuch as all the essential elements in the Luther epigraphs are also found in Tacitus’s text: “the everlasting image of his mind” and “his ephemeral features” in the first inscription, “short-lived likeness” and “the everlasting [likeness] of his mind” in the second. In effect, the humanistic poet has done little more than versify Tacitus, adding only the names Lucas and Luther. This said, it still remains to account for “the wax of Lucas” in the first Luther inscription.Footnote ⁹⁹

Ludwig contends that the unusual metaphor was very probably suggested by the Greek epigram. As in the Luther inscription, it speaks of the artist’s wax while juxtaposing the mortal likeness with the immortal image of the mind. However, the wax in the Greek epigram is not a wax bust, as one might assume, but rather the wax-based paint that late antique artists commonly used.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ But no matter. Even if the modern poet used the Planudean Anthology and in so doing proved himself an excellent Grecist, how could he have expected his Greekless readers to understand “the wax of Lucas”? Such a trope could only have been attempted if the poet knew it would be instantly recognized by his humanistic audience. In short, there must be a much more accessible source somewhere in the Latin tradition.

There is no need to look far and long. The source is the same text that Konrad Celtis adapted for his woodcut medal: the Ovidian pentameter, “lend a voice to the wax, it will be Protesilaus.” Just as Celtis lauds the all-but-speaking portrait, so the inscription on Cranach’s first Luther engravings praises the artist for creating an effigy as perfectly lifelike as Laodamia’s wax. At the same time, the Ovidian wax is a reminder that the representation lacks a voice. The viewer is invited to look beyond the mute likeness and contemplate the eternally speaking image of Luther’s mind.

8. The Inscriptions for Cranach’s Engravings of Luther (1520–21): Date and Authorship

Apart from educated guesses, the author of the Luther epigraphs has never been identified. Equally unknown is the exact date when they were written. All that can be said for sure is that the earliest two portraits were engraved sometime in the autumn of 1520. Though the first version was not published until after Luther’s death, the second was already circulating at Wittenberg and Worms in late 1520. The third engraving, Luther in a doctoral cap, was finished a month before Luther set out for the Diet of Worms. This last bit of information comes from Luther’s letter of 7 March 1521. There Luther tells his friend and adviser Georg Spalatin (1484–1545), who was already in Worms with Frederick the Wise: “Lucas has asked me to supply these likenesses with a subscriptio and send them to you. You will see to them.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

There has been much discussion about the exact meaning of these two short sentences. The consensus now is that Luther refers to the third of the Cranach portraits, the one dated 1521. It is, however, conceded that he might just possibly also be referring to the two portraits of 1520.Footnote ¹⁰² Because Luther then asks Spalatin to see to the matter, it is presumed that he left the inscription-writing to Spalatin.Footnote ¹⁰³ Closer reading reveals several problems with this interpretation. First, Luther does not say “this likeness,” but “these likenesses” (“has effigies”), each still needing a subscriptio. There is nothing for it, then, but to infer that all three of the Cranach engravings — not just the third portrait dated 1521, but also the earlier two portraits — still lacked an epigraph in early March. Because the second print had been circulating for several months already, it must have done so without a Latin epigraph. The newly finished third portrait evidently also required a suitable text. By early March 1521, however, Cranach was getting anxious to publish his engravings in final form. Moreover, when Luther asked Spalatin in Worms to take the matter in hand, he must have realized that his friend was not the right man to write the inscriptions himself. An excellent Latinist who could manage a passable distich if he worked at it, Spalatin was no epigrammatist. That is why Luther did not tell him to produce the texts himself, only to take care of the business. Spalatin’s task, in brief, was to enlist a professional poet who also happened to be a wholehearted supporter of Luther’s.

Back in Wittenberg, the obvious candidate for the job was Luther’s right-hand man Philip Melanchthon, as accomplished in Latin verse as he was in Greek. But if Spalatin did ask Melanchthon, this could not have happened until the late spring of 1521 at the earliest. Until then, he was simply under too much pressure at the Diet of Worms.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ From March to early June, Spalatin did not write even once to Melanchthon, even though the latter had written him several times. On 2 March the Wittenberg humanist grumbles that he has no idea whether his letters are even reaching Spalatin.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ On 30 March he complains that Spalatin has not written him for a long time now.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ It was not until 11 June, after Spalatin had returned from Worms, that Melanchthon could finally acknowledge a letter from him (written at Coburg). In the meantime, he himself had stopped writing because he was thinking his friend would be back any day now.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Hence, if Spalatin asked Melanchthon to write inscriptions for the portraits, he could not have done so until mid-June of 1521.

Of course, the well-connected Spalatin knew other poets too, most particularly Helius Eobanus Hessus (1488–1540), the Erfurt humanist whom Johann Reuchlin (1455–1522) had dubbed “king of poets” after reading his Letters of Christian Heroines in 1514.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Spalatin had been the best of friends with Hessus since at least 1506. Besides, Hessus knew Cranach personally. The two had met at Wittenberg in the late autumn of 1513. Half a year later, Hessus had asked Spalatin to give his greetings to “Lucas, Germany’s foremost painter, a friend, moreover, of our profession and fit to be immortalized by us [in verse].”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ During Cranach’s visit to the celebrated Gotha canon Mutianus Rufus (1471–1526) in late 1516, he delightedly wrote: “I hear that Lucas, that second Apelles, is paying you a visit. I know the man and greeted him at Wittenberg. He promised to paint a portrait of Eobanus in colors.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ More importantly, Hessus was by now a fervent supporter of Luther and Melanchthon.Footnote ¹¹¹ When Luther stopped at Erfurt on his way to Worms in early April 1521, Hessus met him several times and became so deeply impressed with the Reformer’s personality and message that he promptly wrote a set of Elegies in Praise and Defense of the Evangelical Doctor Martin Luther.Footnote ¹¹² Already on 1 June, he could send a printed copy to Spalatin. In an accompanying letter he says he is happy to hear that Spalatin has gotten back safely from Worms. Their mutual friend Justus Jonas (1493–1555), he adds, has just left Erfurt for Wittenberg.Footnote ¹¹³ Thus, if Eobanus Hessus had a hand in writing the epigraphs, Spalatin would not have asked him until at least mid-June, after he himself was back in Wittenberg and Hessus had sent him the Luther elegies.

Now on 26 July 1521, Justus Jonas wrote Hessus to let him know he had arrived in Wittenberg.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The academic atmosphere in this little town, he reports, is far more congenial than at Erfurt. And then, out of the blue, he reminds his friend: “I am looking forward to the poem for Lucas the painter.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ In conclusion he asks Hessus to give his regards to their mutual friend Johann Drach (Draconites). Already in June, then, Hessus had promised Jonas to write some verses for the painter Lucas Cranach. The added pictorem indicates that the poem was intended for a painting, not an engraving. Two additional circumstances will help pin this allusion down. First, Cranach was just then working on a portrait commemorating the death of the jurist Henning Goede at Wittenberg on 21 January 1521. Secondly, Jonas was obviously keen to receive the epigram. His interest is understandable only when it is realized that he had gone to Wittenberg expressly to take Goede’s place as university professor and provost of All Saints’ Chapter. Cranach’s portrait of Goede is no longer extant. A copy of the painting, with an updated epigram by Hessus, was made in 1536. For many years it hung in the Stuba facultatis of the Collegium maius at Erfurt.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Thus, if Hessus was working on a poem for Cranach’s portrait of Henning Goede in late July 1521, it really is not so far-fetched to assume that he might also have been asked to contribute one or more inscriptions for Cranach’s Luther portraits.

The conclusion that either Philip Melanchthon or Eobanus Hessus is the most likely author of the Cranach epigraphs can now be buttressed with unassailable documentation. For in a hitherto overlooked part of Hessus’s correspondence,Footnote ¹¹⁷ published at Marburg in 1543 by the Lutheran theologian Johann Drach (1494–1566), there are three epigrams by Hessus “on a portrait of Luther,” all of them in elegiacs. Immediately following these poems is a distich written by Philip Melanchthon: the famed inscription for Cranach’s third engraving. Here are the four epigrams, in translation:Footnote ¹¹⁸

HELIUS EOBANUS HESSUS ON A PORTRAIT OF LUTHER

ANOTHER

ANOTHER

ANOTHER BY PHILIP MELANCHTHON

There can now be no doubt: it was Philip Melanchthon who composed the inscription for Cranach’s third engraving of Luther. Because it is so similar to the inscription on the two earlier portraits, he must have written that one as well. Eobanus Hessus, too, had been asked to submit epigrams, but only for the portrait of Luther in profile. It has to be for that particular engraving, because his final epigram specifically alludes to the half-view portrayal.

Further conclusions are not so easy to come by. In Drach’s edition, the epigrams are printed without any context or editorial guidance. Readers are left to make their own inferences. The circumstance that Drach prints the four texts together does, however, suggest that they were originally copied on a single sheet of paper, perhaps as a set of proposals given to Cranach and Spalatin in the summer of 1521. Because Hessus’s epigrams appear to have been solicited in June or early July, but only for the portrait of Luther in profile, it is likely that by then Melanchthon had already submitted several alternatives for the first two Luther engravings. By July, one of those distichs had been selected for use in the 1520 portraits. When Hessus’s epigrams arrived, Cranach and Spalatin rejected them, perhaps for reasons of continuity or style or because they did not mention Cranach by name. Whatever the reason, Melanchthon’s second epigram was chosen. Thus, by August 1521, all three of Cranach’s Luther portraits had the required inscription and were ready for publication in their final form.

How the four epigraphs ended up in a book of Hessus’s correspondence is readily explained. The editor, Johann Drach, had been a member of Hessus’s circle at Erfurt since about 1515. He became friends with Melanchthon after paying a visit to Wittenberg, perhaps already in 1519.Footnote ¹²⁰ A canon at St. Severus, Drach became an enthusiastic supporter of Luther’s when the Reformer visited Erfurt in April 1521. After plague broke out a few months later, Drach went to Wittenberg to study Hebrew. He earned his doctorate in theology there in 1523. With close contacts to Hessus, Melanchthon, and Spalatin, Drach might conceivably have made a copy of the four epigrams in August of 1521 and even have taken part in the final discussions.

The two-portrait topos that Melanchthon adapted from Tacitus’s Agricola can also be documented in other works of his. In the spring of 1521 he rhetorically asks: “By what Apelles could that man [Christ] have been portrayed the way he is depicted in this letter to the Romans?”Footnote ¹²¹ Precisely the same thought occurs in his Latin and Greek epigram for Johannes Agricola’s scholia on the New Testament letter to Titus (1530): “The skillful Apelles could not have painted Christ the way Saint Paul depicts him with godly mouth.”Footnote ¹²² Apelles, in other words, would have been able to depict only the mortal man, not the mind of God. Most interesting of all is an epigram that Melanchthon wrote in May 1526 above a dilettantish miniature portrait of Rudolf Agricola. Quite possibly he had copied the image himself from the original painting while he was in Nuremberg for a visit. The elegiac distich goes as follows: “This portrait of Rudolf that you are looking at was amazing. His writings portray the everlasting one of his mind.”Footnote ¹²³ The first half of the pentameter (“Aeternam mentis”) is repeated from the epigraph for Cranach’s Luther engraving of 1521. The distich as a whole restates the two-portrait topos that characterizes both of Melanchthon’s Luther inscriptions, but without their emphasis on mortality. Agricola, after all, had been dead for over four decades already. Melanchthon once again gives the artist his due. The original portrait, he declares, was wonderfully lifelike. He also explicitly states what he had only hinted at before. It is in his books that Rudolf Agricola portrays the image of his mind. That is the portrait that will speak to us forever.

9. Dürer’s Engraving of Melanchthon (1526)

Eobanus Hessus and Philip Melanchthon teamed up again in May 1526, this time to celebrate the opening of the Humanistic School that Melanchthon had helped found in Nuremberg. The two men had been in contact with each other since at least 1520.Footnote ¹²⁴ Those contacts grew stronger as time passed, especially after the University of Erfurt, ravaged by plague and racked by internal dissensions, fell into steep decline in mid-1521. By 1523, Hessus’s professorship was becoming increasingly tenuous. Desperate to support his growing family, he started studying medicine, and even got as far as writing a bestselling dietetic poem. In the end, however, he had no choice but to leave Erfurt. Accordingly, when Melanchthon invited him to make a new start at Nuremberg as professor of poetics, Hessus jumped at the opportunity, all the more as he would be joining his friend Joachim Camerarius (1500–74), the school’s director and professor of Greek.

Having visited Nuremberg already in November 1525, Melanchthon seized the opportunity to renew his friendship with Albrecht Dürer. Dürer responded with a pen-and-ink portrait that he eventually turned into the famed engraving. That same summer he also made a striking silverpoint drawing of Hessus, with whom he had become fast friends in the meantime.Footnote ¹²⁵

Dürer’s original sketch of Melanchthon provides no space for an inscription. It was not until he recast the drawing into an engraving that he added a plaque below the image (fig. 8). It contains the date “1526,” a Latin verse inscription, and the monogram “AD.” The elegiac distich runs as follows: “Dürer was able to depict Philip’s features just as in life. The mind his masterly hand was not able to depict.”Footnote ¹²⁶ A compact masterpiece, the epigram consists of two perfectly balanced parts: praise of the artist for the lifelike depiction of the external features; and praise of the sitter, whose mind is beyond artistic portrayal.Footnote ¹²⁷ In short, the verses restate the two-portrait convention.

Figure 8. Albrecht Dürer. Philip Melanchthon, 1526. British Museum, London. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum.

The poet has not been identified, at least not with any degree of conviction. Dürer himself could not possibly have come up with it. Like his colleagues Hans Burgkmair, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Hans Baldung Grien, and Hans Holbein the Younger, he had no training in Latin, let alone in the technicalities of prosody. On such occasions, he invariably turned to one of his learned friends.Footnote ¹²⁸ For the Melanchthon portrait, the sitter himself was out of the question, because he had long since left town by the time Dürer started work on the engraving. Willibald Pirckheimer was also not available. He was then a chronically ill and increasingly bitter man, especially so as the Reformation took root in his native city and made life difficult for his sister, the abbess Caritas. For Dürer, then, the obvious choice was his new friend Eobanus Hessus, who also happened to be best of friends with Melanchthon.

It was Otto Clemen who in 1920 first proposed Hessus as the distich’s most likely author.Footnote ¹²⁹ Hans Rupprich followed in 1956.Footnote ¹³⁰ Neither Clemen nor Rupprich, however, were able to offer any proof apart from the inference that so elegant an epigraph could only have flowed from the pen of the king of poets. Indeed, with the exception of Joachim Camerarius, there was no one else in Nuremberg who could have written it. A close friend of Melanchthon’s since their Wittenberg days together, Camerarius was expert not just in Latin, but also in Greek. For this reason, Walther Ludwig suspects that Hessus and Camerarius might well have collaborated on the inscription. In proof, he cites the two epigrams from the Planudean Anthology discussed earlier in this essay.Footnote ¹³¹ And truly, if the Greek epigrams (possibly another one as well) are at the root of the 1526 inscription, then it almost certainly would have taken a Grecist like Camerarius to point them out to Hessus.Footnote ¹³²

Ludwig’s argument must ultimately bow to the facts. For Hessus, as is now clear, had to all intents and purposes composed the epigraph for Dürer’s engraving already in the summer of 1521. One can imagine his impish delight when Dürer talked to him about contributing an inscription for their mutual friend. After seeing his epigrams for Cranach’s third Luther portrait passed over in favor of one of Melanchthon’s, Hessus was now free to reuse them — oh, sweet revenge! — for Melanchthon himself.Footnote ¹³³ All he had to do was to select the best of them and change a few words. And so, instead of “Omnibus expressit rationibus ora Lutheri, / Vitam non potuit pingere docta manus,” he now wrote: “Viventis potuit Durerius ora Philippi, / Mentem non potuit pingere docta manus.” At the hexameter close, “ora Lutheri” has become “ora Philippi.” Inspired by Melanchthon’s example in the Luther epigraphs, also because he had the highest opinion of Dürer, Hessus now also includes the artist’s name. The changed dynamic of the verse meant he could jettison the pedestrian “Omnibus expressit rationibus” and replace it with the rhetorically far more effective, grammatically more transparent “Viventis potuit Durerius.” The new phrasing focuses attention on Dürer’s artistry and thus anticipates “docta manus” in the next line. With “viventis” opening the hexameter, Hessus had to do something about “vitam” in the pentameter. Since that word was more appropriate for Luther as a hero of faith, rather than for the scholarly Melanchthon, he replaced it with “mentem.” These changes made, the opening words of each verse — “viventis” and “mentem” — are now linked by assonance, but contrasted by meaning, for the first hints at mortality, the second at eternal fame. As such, they are a perfect pendant to Melanchthon’s second epigraph for Cranach’s Luther.

The pentameter, “Mentem non potuit pingere docta manus,” has an interesting prehistory. Six years before he wrote the Luther epigraph on which the verse is based, Hessus published a set of epigrams that poked fun at artists who fancy they can paint the unpaintable: for example, God, the Trinity, the color of the soul. The poems are attached, for variety’s sake, to his Paschal Hymn (1515). One of the epigrams suggests a two-portrait theme: painters can depict Christ’s physical suffering, not his divine mind: “Here is how God suffered in human flesh. Except from this aspect, no one can paint a picture of God.”Footnote ¹³⁴ Another epigram already contains the words, “potuit pingere docta manus”: “What is beyond the ken of human thought and all eternity, that is something the schooled hand of an unschooled artist is able to paint.”Footnote ¹³⁵

Hessus did not coin the phrase potuit pingere docta manus. Some seventy years earlier, Janus Pannonius had written: “Offert picturas pingere docta manus” (“The hand masterful in painting offers pictures [for sale]”).Footnote ¹³⁶ While Hessus could not know that line (it was not printed until 1880), he certainly did read Giannantonio Campano’s verses about a bronze medallion of Pius II (1460): “Quippe animum invictum facundaque pectora nullo / Nec tractu potuit sculpere docta manus” (“Indeed, the masterly hand was in no way able to sculpt his matchless mind and eloquent breast”).Footnote ¹³⁷ He was also well acquainted with Ercole Strozzi’s epigram “On a Portrait of Lucretia,” published in 1513, the second line of which reads, “Conata est dominam pingere docta manus” (“The masterly hand has attempted to paint my mistress”).Footnote ¹³⁸ Thus it is from the Italian tradition that Hessus took his cue. As for docta manus, ancient poets routinely employed the phrase to praise the artisan’s deft hand. Ovid adopted it once for master sculptors. Via Ovid it became a standard trope for the masterful artist in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance.Footnote ¹³⁹

Hessus was to reuse the hemistich “pingere docta manus” several more times after 1526. In one of the epigrams he contributed to Camerarius’s translation of Dürer’s De symmetria partium in rectis formis humanorum corporum (1532), he says: “Or if it came to encircling cities with suitable walls, Dürer’s masterly hand was able to depict them.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ For a portrait of Duke Ulrich of Württemberg (1487–1550) he wrote a long inscription that opens with the words: “In this portrait the masterly hand has depicted the features of Duke Ulrich. It was able to paint nothing more.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ Among the seven epigrams that Hessus submitted in 1539/40 for a portrait of his dear friend Johann Meckbach (1495–1555), personal physician to Philip of Hesse, he also included this one: “If the artist’s hand had been able to depict the mind, you, Meckbach, would now be alive in this picture.”Footnote ¹⁴² As in Hessus’s epigram for Dürer’s Melanchthon, the distich compliments both the master’s hand and the sitter’s intellect. The artist has depicted Meckbach to the life. The portrait would speak, had he also been able to paint the mind.

10. Epigraphs for Painted Portraits

In the mass-disseminated prints and medallions, the inscriptions typically foreground the sitter’s mind and character that live on in memory and writing. In paintings, by contrast, the epigraphs typically foreground the artist and the image itself. The likeness is so true to life that it all but speaks. Linguistic and visual cues, however, point to the portrait’s memorial function and help depict the sitter’s mind.Footnote ¹⁴³

To start with an early example: in 1509 Lucas Cranach painted his good friend Christoph Scheurl (1481–1542), then a twenty-eight-year-old.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ A professor of canon law at the University of Wittenberg, Scheurl had studied at Bologna with such scholars as Filippo Beroaldo the Elder and Antonio Codro Urceo. Cranach shows the sitter in half profile. At the top right corner of the painting is Scheurl’s personal motto, “Fortes. fortvna. formidat ” (“Fortune dreads the bold”). Scheurl uses it, for instance, on the title page of his academic lecture on the preeminence of literature, Oratio attingens litterarum prestantiam (Leipzig, 1509). The motto’s source, hitherto unidentified, is Seneca, Medea 159: “Fortuna fortes metuit” (“Fortune fears the bold”).Footnote ¹⁴⁵ By changing the verb from metuit to formidat, Scheurl creates triple alliteration. He has also changed Seneca’s word order, probably to associate it with the proverb, “Fortes fortuna adiuvat” (“Fortune favors the bold”).Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Directly below the personal motto are the majuscules, “A _* A _* A _* ”. The abbreviation was once a common formula on Christian tombstones, where it addresses the passerby: “Ave, Amice. Abi” (“Hail, friend. Go your way”).Footnote ¹⁴⁷ It thus tempers the youthfully optimistic “Fortune dreads the bold” with a discrete reminder of mortality. The triple initials “M M M” on the richly embroidered border of Scheurl’s shirt may be expanded as “Memento, Mortalis, Mori” (“Remember, mortal, that you must die”).Footnote ¹⁴⁸ They thus serve the same purpose. In the top left corner of the portrait an epigraph identifies the sitter, his title (“I.V.D., ” that is, “Iuris Utriusque Doctor,” Doctor of both Civil and Canon Law), and his age at the time (twenty-eight). Then follows a Latin couplet that, just like the formula “A _* A _* A _* ”, addresses the passerby: “If Scheurl is an acquaintance of yours, wayfarer, which one looks more like Scheurl? This one here, or the one over there?”Footnote ¹⁴⁹

The couplet, for once, is not in elegiacs, but Phalaecian hendecasyllables. The poet has traditionally been thought to be Scheurl himself. For near the end of the dedicatory letter to his Oratio of 1509, Scheurl praises Cranach as a consummately realistic painter, indeed, as a second Apelles, who, like Albrecht Dürer, paints portraits so true to life that they lack nothing but breath and mind. He then says that he explicitly instructed Cranach to add the verses to his portrait.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ But asking the painter to add a couplet is not the same as composing it himself. The fact is that Scheurl reuses an impromptu epigram by his old professor at Bologna, Antonio Codro Urceo (1446–1500). The verses are quoted in Filippo Beroaldo’s dedicatory letter to Codro Urceo’s Orationes (1502). The dedicatee Antonio Galeazzo Bentivoglio, so Beroaldo writes, had had Codro’s portrait made by the famed painter and goldsmith Francesco Francia (ca. 1450–1517). After looking at it closely, the sitter made up this couplet right there and then: “If Codro is an acquaintance of yours, wayfarer, which one looks more like Codro? This one here, or the one over there?”Footnote ¹⁵¹ Scheurl’s reasons for adapting Codro’s epigraph are not hard to fathom. He must have wanted to pay homage to his teacher, whose bon mot was well known among humanists. No doubt he also wanted to put Cranach on a par with the best of the Italian portrait painters, Francesco Francia, indeed on a par with the Greek Apelles and the German Dürer.

The compliment that Scheurl bestows on Cranach returns in the elegiac distichs that Dürer’s student, Hans Baldung Grien (1484/85–1545), printed at the top of his painting of an unidentified young man in 1515. The sitter speaks: “This is what I once looked like, after I had lived some five lustra, exactly as the painting shows with magnificent artistry. A second Apelles, Baldung has depicted me so faithfully that anyone who sees me will believe I am alive.”Footnote ¹⁵²

Epigraphs of this type are the norm in the painted portraits of Hans Holbein the Younger, starting in 1519 with his depiction of the humanist lawyer Bonifacius Amerbach of Basel (1495–1562).Footnote ¹⁵³ To the right of the sitter, Holbein places a tablet attached to a fig tree. Two elegiac distichs praise the living likeness: “Although a painted face, I yield nothing to the living one, but look exactly like my master — a noble portrait, thanks to the precise little brushstrokes. As he completes eight triads, the work of art thus faithfully portrays in me that which belongs to nature.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ In smaller letters, some concluding words note that Holbein painted Amerbach on 14 October 1519, that is to say, three days after his twenty-fourth birthday.

Amerbach composed the distichs himself. The sheet of paper on which he tried out a whole series of drafts is still extant.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Writing a suitable inscription was not so easy, even for a trained Latinist. Interestingly, the epigraph gives voice to the picture by making the portrait speak. All praise is reserved for the artist himself, for the portrait claims to be marvelously true to life. Only upon close reading does one realize that the inscription also hints at the sitter’s mortality and at an inner world that cannot be captured by the artist’s brushstrokes, however fine and precise they may be. The second distich insists that the artist was able to capture only “that which belongs to nature.” Whatever belongs to Amerbach’s character and mind must forever elude the artist’s brush. The inscription’s temporal framework — “at age twenty-four,” “on 14 October 1519” — points to Amerbach’s youthful age. So does the fig tree behind him, well in leaf already and just beginning to bear fruit. But the fig tree is also a symbol of the fall from paradise, and hence, of mortality.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ The reminders of mortality reinforce the portrait’s purpose as a commemorative picture presented to Amerbach’s siblings. At the time, Amerbach was planning to study at Avignon, then ravaged by plague. He could not be sure that he would come back safely.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

An elegiac distich in Holbein’s portrait of Erasmus, painted in 1523, does not make the sitter or portrait speak, but rather the artist himself.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ One can just barely make it out, that little inscription printed on the gilt edge of a book behind the humanist: “I [am] that [famous] Hans Holbein. Not so easily will anyone be a mimic [mimus] to me as he will be a critic [Momus] to me.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Like the earlier epigraphs for a painting, the text praises the artist’s mastery. One will sooner criticize Holbein than imitate him. There is not a word about Erasmus’s immortal mind, no allusion to the idea that a better portrait may be found in his writings. Such thoughts can be inferred, however, from the book upon which Erasmus, much like Celtis in the “Death Portrait,” rests his hands. On the volume’s edges are the words, plainly written for all to see, “The Herculean labors of Erasmus of Rotterdam.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰ The phrase alludes to Erasmus’s Herculean labors in the realm of scholarly editing. The Dutch humanist speaks of them at length in his essay on the adage, “The labors of Hercules.”Footnote ¹⁶¹

As for the verse epigraph, it alludes to another of Erasmus’s adages, one that was originally used by the ancient Greek painters: “People will sooner criticize than imitate.”Footnote ¹⁶² A decade earlier Holbein’s father, Hans Holbein the Elder (ca. 1465–1524), had included that very adage in his “Madonna Montenuovo” (1513).Footnote ¹⁶³ The complimentary distich is usually attributed to Erasmus himself, but on nothing more than a guess.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Technically, the hexameter falls short of the great humanist’s standards. The fifth foot ends in elision, an irregularity that Erasmus avoids in his own verse.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ The line ending “facile ullus” is cacophonous and prosaic. Erasmus would also not have been pleased with the spelling michi for mihi in the pentameter. By 1523 he had not used that medieval orthography in well over two decades. Even the form of the name Holbein is suspect: in 1523 Erasmus himself called the artist “Olpeius.”Footnote ¹⁶⁶

A metrical error in the hexameter can probably be laid at Holbein’s door — always assuming, of course, that Holbein inscribed the Latin text himself. As Jacob Mähly remarked in 1868, a long syllable is lacking immediately after “Holbein.”Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Mähly remedies the lacuna by inserting “en” (“look”). While metrically possible, the conjecture seems unlikely. It is just a filler. In 1886, Gustaf Leithäuser filled the lacuna with the verb sum (“I am”).Footnote ¹⁶⁸ The conjecture makes excellent sense, though one has to wonder how Holbein could have overlooked the verb when copying the lines out. More recently, William S. Heckscher has suggested adding the nominative singular ending “–us” to “Holbein.”Footnote ¹⁶⁹ If so, Holbein overlooked the abbreviation “9” after his name in the copy text or mistook it for a comma.

Because the focus is now on Holbein’s lapses in Latin, it is appropriate to turn next to his roundel portrait of Philip Melanchthon, painted inside a small wooden box.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Created in ca. 1535/36, when Holbein was King’s Painter to Henry VIII of England, the portrait was not taken from life, but from an unknown image. On the box’s ornamental lid, an elegiac distich lauds the painter’s art: “qvi cernis tantvm non, viva melanthonis ora, / holbinvs rara dexteritate dedit. ” (“You who look at the all but living face of Melanchthon: Holbein has rendered [it] with exquisite skill”). A contemporary replica of the portrait, now in the Sir William van Horne Collection at Montreal, has the same text, but with “Quae” rather than “Qui.”Footnote ¹⁷¹ Puzzled by this variant, critics either shrug it off or ignore it completely. Despite the authority of the text copied down by Holbein, however, it is no heresy to ask if Holbein made another mistake in his Latin, or if the text in the replica offers a corrected reading.

In the version painted by Holbein himself, the sentence starts off with the relative pronoun “Qui” (“You who”). Unattached, the pronoun dangles uncomfortably and superfluously. Because there is no grammatical connection between the first and second verse, one is forced to add something like a colon at the end of the hexameter. But now a new problem arises: “dedit” in the pentameter has no direct object. To accommodate, one has to supply “ora” from the hexameter. That makes “ora” the direct object of two different verbs, “cernis” as well as “dedit.” If, by contrast, the distich opens with “Quae,” the object of “dedit” is “Melanthonis ora,” while “ora” connects smoothly to the relative clause starting with “quae.” The result is a syntactically solid, stylistically effective sentence that translates: “The all-but-living face of Melanchthon you are looking at, Holbein has rendered with exquisite skill.” The correction, first made in the Van Horne copy, was proposed independently by Karl Hartfelder in 1892.Footnote ¹⁷²

As soon as one realizes that Quae is the intended reading, one can also recognize the model for the hexameter. It is Martial 9.76.1: “Haec sunt illa mei quae cernitis ora Camoni” (“This face you are looking at is that of my dear Camonius”).Footnote ¹⁷³ Imitating the same verse, Simon Lemnius (1511?–50) opens an epigram on the portrait medallion of Achatius of Brandenburg with the words: “Haec sunt ora mei quae cernis, lector, Achati” (“This face you are looking at, reader, is that of my dear Achatius”).Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Joachim Camerarius adopts similar wording in an undated epigram on a picture of Philip Melanchthon: “Picta manu artificis quae cernis muta Philippi / Haec sunt ora. Loqui si cupis, adde libros” (“Depicted by the artist’s hand, this mute face you are looking at is Philip’s. If you want it to speak, add his books”).Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Most interestingly of all, the English court poet and antiquary John Leland (1503/06–1552) writes in another epigraph for Holbein’s portrait of Melanchthon: “Quae cernis tantum non viva Melanctonis ora / Holbenus pinxit. Bella tabella nitet” (“The all but living face of Melanchthon you are looking at is Holbein’s work. This painterly painting dazzles”).Footnote ¹⁷⁶

When Leicester Bradner discovered the last-quoted distich — plainly a variant of the one Holbein adopted — he immediately used it to make a strong case for Leland’s authorship of the Holbein epigraph. Bradner notes that Leland also composed epigraphs for Holbein’s portraits of Henry VIII and Erasmus. He notes too that Leland was a great friend of Brian Tuke, the royal paymaster to artists and an art collector par excellence. To these observations, Meinolf Trudzinski and Susan Foister have added further arguments.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ They point out that rara dexteritate is one of Leland’s favorite expressions. At Epigram 50.4 and 184.2, for example, Leland writes, “Iuditii rara dexteritate boni”; at Epigram 223.8 he has, “Sic rara pinxit dexteritate manu.”Footnote ¹⁷⁸ For Holbein’s portrait of the young Prince Edward he composed the distich: “Immortale decus pictorum Holbenus amoenum / Pinxit opus rara dexteritate manus.”Footnote ¹⁷⁹ For Holbein’s portrait of Erasmus he contributed: “Holbenus pictor, quo non illustrior alter, / Exhibuit rarae sedulitatis opus.”Footnote ¹⁸⁰

All this evidence points inescapably to three conclusions. First, in the epigraph for Holbein’s Melanchthon, the intended reading is not “Qui,” but “Quae.” The replica has it right. Second, it was John Leland who wrote the epigraph.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Third, the variant rediscovered by Leicester Bradner is one of several versions that Leland proposed to Holbein for his approval. As became apparent with Cranach’s Luther engravings, such advice and consent was normal procedure.

It remains to discuss the phrase viva ora in line 1 of the epigram that Holbein (or his patron) selected for the Melanchthon miniature. Leland uses a variant of the phrase in his epigram for a painting of Henry VIII (first distich): “If ever a hand has painted true-to-life features in a portrait, this vernal painting takes the prize in artistry.”Footnote ¹⁸² There “true-to-life” is taken bodily from Virgil, Aeneid 6.848, of sculptors: “shall draw from the marble features true to life.”Footnote ¹⁸³ Leland may also have known the elegiac distich that appears in Holbein’s painting of the merchant Georg Gisze (1532).Footnote ¹⁸⁴ In that portrait the verses are written on a slip of paper attached to the wall behind the sitter. First comes the heading: “Distichon on the likeness of Georg Gisze.”Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Then follows the couplet itself, along with the sitter’s age and year: “This likeness that you are looking at represents the features of Georg. This is what his eyes, this is what his cheeks look like in life. At age thirty-four, in the year of our Lord 1532.”Footnote ¹⁸⁶ The epigram as a whole invites the viewer to admire the painter’s artistry. Its pentameter is based on Virgil, Aeneid 3.490: “This is what his eyes, his hands, his mouth looked like.” Unlike Schwarz’s medallion (1518) and Dürer’s engravings (1519 and 1523) of Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg, all of which retain Virgil’s ferebat in the imperfect past tense, Holbein’s text uses the present tense, habet. The added epithet vivos underlines the all-but-living quality of his portrait.

11. Deciding Which Convention Goes Where

The humanistic portrait inscriptions are, by and large, elegantly worded commonplaces, individualized only by the personal names they contain.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Change the names, and they are transferable from one depiction to another. Codro Urceo’s epigram is easily applied to Cranach’s portrait of Scheurl (1509). Eobanus Hessus’s submission for Cranach’s third engraving of Luther (1521) is soon adapted to fit Dürer’s Melanchthon (1526). A distich that Ursinus Velius wrote for a portrait of himself by Dürer (ca. 1515) is reused in Holbein’s painting of Derich Born (1533). The main question to be decided, it seems, was which convention to apply to which image.

On this point there was never a hard and fast rule. The decision was always ad hoc. Still, distinct patterns quickly emerged. By far the strongest determining factor appears to have been the portrait medium. Because paintings can apply a far greater range of trompe l’oeil effects than monochromatic images, their epigraphs typically focus on the artist and hyperbolically emphasize the illusionistic achievement.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ In the mass media of woodcuts, engravings, and medallions such hyperbole must often have seemed out of place. Here the texts generally follow the two-portrait convention. While still gracefully praising the artist, they contrast the mortal likeness with the immortal image of the sitter’s mind and soul.

Economic value would have played a role too. Easily reproducible portraits were created and sold at relatively low cost.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ Someone who acquired or received such a portrait would hardly be upset to learn from the accompanying verses that the artist could not depict the sitter’s mind, or that a better image might be found in his books. In fact, one would expect nothing less when contemplating the likeness of a revered intellectual. Paintings are a different matter altogether, especially when done by a Cranach or a Holbein himself. Such masterpieces are one of a kind.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Time-consuming to make, consisting of multiple layers of expensive paints and protective varnishes, they are a costly luxury item. Accordingly, if an epigraph is to be included in such a work, its wording has to enhance the portrait’s value to the future owner. In Holbein’s paintings, this is invariably done by extolling either the likeness or the artist himself. Indeed, it seems fair to say that Holbein insisted on this type of compliment. Other painters were not so insistent. When Cranach the Elder, for example, painted the Brandenburg court astrologer Johann Carion in ca. 1530, he included an epigraph lauding the sitter, not the likeness: “If any of you know of my renown by reading the books that my zeal has produced with ingenious labor, I am the Carion who treats of the constellations of heaven and made his name in the art of the stars.”Footnote ¹⁹¹

For all that, certain it is that early sixteenth-century artists were not passive recipients of humanistic texts. Untrained in Latin and Greek though they were themselves,Footnote ¹⁹² these masters were businessmen who made their living by selling art. As such, they had to make sound choices to fit their vision and their clients.Footnote ¹⁹³ Sometimes it was they who approached the sitter for a suitable epigraph. Sometimes the sitter proposed one of his own accord. Often, the artist or the sitter would commission a professional poet. The poet would then, as a matter of course, submit a set of variations. Thus for every epigraph actually used, several others had to be discarded. Melanchthon offered at least two variants for Cranach’s earliest Luther engravings. For the third Cranach engraving, Eobanus Hessus sent three more. In consultation with Spalatin and, conceivably, Melanchthon or Luther, Cranach rejected Hessus’s submissions. At liberty to reuse his epigrams, Hessus modified one of them for Dürer’s Melanchthon engraving. But the inscription that Dürer eventually selected must itself have belonged to a set of proposals, discussed with the poet and, quite likely, their mutual friend Joachim Camerarius. For a portrait of Johann Meckbach, Hessus submitted no fewer than seven different inscriptions. The same procedure can be glimpsed in Holbein’s miniature painting of Melanchthon, for which John Leland wrote at least two versions. Too good to waste, the unused variant found a place in Leland’s book of epigrams on English and Continental intellectuals.

12. Conclusion

The humanistic portrait epigraphs in the age of Erasmus and Dürer are a form of epideictic rhetoric. Like the title epigrams that contemporary poets so often wrote to commend their own or their colleagues’ books, the inscriptions aim above all to laud the sitter or the artist, or both. They must do so with elegance of style, within the strict limits of convention and commonplace, and in the span of a few lines.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ If the object of praise is a man of letters, the epigraphs extol him for speaking evermore in his books. If a man of faith or true nobility, he is worthy of eternal remembrance. If an artist, he is the equal of the ancient masters, a second ApellesFootnote ¹⁹⁵ who creates depictions so true to life that they all but speak: “Lend a voice to the wax, it will be Protesilaus himself.”

Adopted by such writers as Francesco Petrarch, Janus Pannonius, and Rudolf Agricola, the Ovidian verse becomes the ultimate humanistic compliment for a portrait. In Germany it first emerged in Celtis’s portrait medallion. Thereafter it appeared, more or less closely imitated, in many different variations. In Holbein’s 1533 portrait of the merchant Derich Born an elegiac distich proclaims: “If you added a voice, this would be Derich in very person. You would be in doubt whether the painter made him, or his father.”Footnote ¹⁹⁶ Ovidian in origin though it is, the wording itself is adapted from an epigram by the Silesian humanist Kaspar Ursinus Velius (ca. 1493–1539). In his Poemata, published at Basel in 1522, Ursinus praises a now-lost portrait that Dürer had made of him some seven years earlier: “If you added a voice, this would be Ursinus in very person. You would be in doubt whether the painter made him, or his father.”Footnote ¹⁹⁷ But Ovid’s verse can be sensed wherever a humanist lauds the likeness as the very sitter himself.

Praise of the lifelike representation dominates the inscriptions for painted portraits. It recurs in the graphic portraits too, but then much more discretely, compressed into such phrases as ad vivam effigiem expressa (“stamped to create a living likeness”), cera Lucae (“the wax of Lucas”), ora viventis Philippi (“Philip’s features just as in life”), docta manus (“the masterly hand”), and then relativized by contrasting the mortal body, which the artist is able to portray, with the immortal mind, which he can not.

In histories of art, the assertion that “the masterly hand” cannot portray the mind is widely misinterpreted. Under the impression that the artists wrote the epigraphs themselves, many scholars mistake the avowal as a gesture of modesty and humility on the portraitist’s part, or as a critique of art’s shortcomings. Others recognize these texts as the work of humanists, but understand the assertion as expressing disdain for the artist or skepticism of art itself. Still others see here a kind of competition, or paragone, between the arts.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ All such interpretations are wide of the mark. As has been shown, not one of these epigraphs was written by the artist. They all flow from the pen of humanistic poets. To them, however, a portrait worthy of the name is, by definition, always illusionistically “to the life,” ad vivum. The only real question was whether to embrace the illusion or to acknowledge it. The answer depends purely on the focus of praise. When lauding the artist, the humanists will embrace the illusion by highlighting the all-but-breathing, all-but-speaking image. When lauding the sitter, they will acknowledge the illusion by contrasting the portrayable, but mute body to the unportrayable, but forever speaking mind.

Nowhere is this dichotomy more clearly expressed than in the writings of Erasmus of Rotterdam. A few months after Dürer died on 6 April 1528, Erasmus eulogized the master for his uncanny ability to paint even those things that cannot be painted, “the feelings, all the emotions — in brief, a man’s whole mind shining through the body’s outward features, and almost the very voice.”Footnote ¹⁹⁹ That is the essence of the humanistic inscription when it applauds the portrait: “Lend a voice to the wax, it will be Protesilaus himself.” Change the focus, however, and the same Erasmus will tell you that even the most brilliant artist is unable to paint the sitter’s mind. In an epitaph intended for a likeness of the deceased humanist Jérôme de Busleyden (ca. 1470–1517), Erasmus apostrophizes the painter: “O artist who drew the shape of this body so beautifully, you ought also to have done a portrait of the mind. Then we could have viewed on the ground of this one painting the lovely choral dance of all the virtues.”Footnote ²⁰⁰ The epigram goes on to extol the virtues of Busleyden’s mind: his reverent piety and dignified self-restraint, his honesty and erudition. That is the essence of the humanistic inscription when it eulogizes the sitter. True to life as they may be, artistic portraits cannot depict the mind. It is the poet’s part to fill out the likeness and lend a voice to the wax.