8 “I Repair My Work That Was Let …”: Velázquez and the Uninished Story of Arachne Aneta Georgievska-Shine In one of the classic defenses of “idle conversation” as a mode of philosophical inquiry, Plutarch’s Table Talk, the author exempliies the virtue of this dialogical method by describing the reaction of his friend Florus to Aristotle’s Scientiic Problems as a mental puzzlement “normal and proper to all philosophical natures.”1 The kind of impasse that Plutarch speaks of here is familiar to any reader of Plato’s dialogues, where astonishment is consistently deined as the starting point towards any true knowledge, and simultaneous arguing of opposite sides of a question as one of the best remedies for dogmatic thinking. And it would certainly not be diicult to trace the legacy of this Janus-like perspective on truth among generations of later thinkers, from Cusanus and his “docta ignorantia” to Cervantes and his marvelous feats of paradox in Don Quixote.2 If discursive aporia is the purposeful stasis or deferral of meaning induced by the proliferation of possible vantage points on—and responses to—a given issue, Velázquez undoubtedly qualiies as one of its most proicient early modern practitioners. And though Las Meninas remains enshrined as his most intense and—for many—most intriguing engagement with the aporia of pictorial representation, Las Hilanderas (Fig. 8.1) has been no less capacious in terms of the range of readings that it has generated over the years. As Jonathan Brown notes in one of his recent returns to this late masterpiece of Velázquez, the most consistent thing about this enigmatic work is that it “atracts interpretations like lypaper.”3 Brown’s lypaper metaphor for the mise en abyme of Las Hilanderas can reasonably be applied to many others of the painter’s inventions. Once again, what it points to is Velázquez’s penchant for pictorial inventions that elicit puzzlement through their appeal for dialectical reading: any conclusion on the interpreter’s part turns into a springboard for new questions, in an endless process of proving and refutation. In his early works, such as the Water Carrier of Seville, this dialectical irresolution is implicit ashgate.com © copyrighted material ashgate.com 180 subject as aporia in early modern art 8.1 Diego Velázquez, The Spinners (Las Hilanderas), Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, oil on canvas, 167 × 252 cm. © Museo Nacional del Prado. in the painter’s transformation of the humble and the commonplace into an image of an inefable dignity. A similar tension between two conceptually and visually incompatible realities makes the feast of Bacchus and the Spanish boors in Los Borrachos so memorable, yet so diicult to describe. However, it is with the inventions from the last years of his life, such as Las Hilanderas, that Velázquez truly ensnares the viewer—and arguably himself—into seemingly inescapable perplexity. These are his most subtle, yet never sophistic riddles, whose skillfully crated compositions entice the beholder with multiple points of view, only to leave him suspended in a dialectical stalemate. Like most current interpretations, this essay relies on the assumption that the literary core of Velázquez’s aporetic procedure in Las Hilanderas is Ovid’s famously self-relexive fable about the contest between the low-born weaver Arachne and the goddess Minerva, in which human artiice eventually yields to divine authority. In light of the early modern appreciation for the art-theoretical lining of this myth, I am focusing on Las Hilanderas as a dialectical thesis about one of the insoluble problems of artistic creation: the simultaneous claim for the perfection of a work of art and the acknowledgment of the non-inite process of its making. ashgate.com © copyrighted material ashgate.com Aneta Georgievska-Shine 181 It has oten been observed that through the manifestly staged structure of the composition, Velázquez provides us with one of his most eloquent formulations on a recurrent theme within his oeuvre: the “artfulness” of artmaking. What I hope to illuminate here is the literary and visual scafolding of this argument about a work of art that, however uninished and still enmeshed in the process of its own making, already possesses an artistic “actuality.”4 The relationship between truth and iction, so crucial to the Metamorphoses, was widely recognized by commentators on Ovid in the late Renaissance, including the Spanish mythographer Pérez de Moya, commonly regarded as an important intermediary between the Latin poet and Velázquez. As noted by numerous scholars, in his Filosoia Secreta (1584) De Moya explicitly interpreted Arachne’s story as an allegory of the arts’ progress. Furthermore, like many other contemporary readers of the Metamorphoses, De Moya recognized Ovid’s emphasis on the continuance of this artistic competition across generations. As he observed, the rivalry between a master and his successor addressed within the myth of Arachne demonstrated the role of Time in increasing the value of their respective accomplishments.5 If the key literary voice between Velázquez and the Roman poet was that of Pérez de Moya, his most signiicant pictorial lead towards the masterful artiice thematized by the story of Arachne was Titian’s Europa (Fig. 8.2), created for Philip II of Spain almost a century before Las Hilanderas. As it 8.2 Titian, Europa, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, oil on canvas, 185 × 202 cm. © Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. ashgate.com © copyrighted material ashgate.com 182 subject as aporia in early modern art 8.3 Peter Paul Rubens, Pallas and Arachne, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, oil on panel, 26.6 × 38.1 cm. © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. is widely recognized, Titian’s painting not only represents one of the most radical versions of this Ovidian myth in the late Renaissance, but also serves as a reference point for Velázquez, who deliberately recasts it as the irst tapestry displayed by Arachne in her artistic contest with Minerva (Fig. 8.1). By interpolating Europa in Las Hilanderas, Velázquez surely intended to extol Titian’s picture both as an unmatched interpretation of Ovid’s story, and as the closest modern counterpart to this mythic tapestry. Nonetheless, this quotation also leads towards a predictably frustrating array of interpretive possibilities. On the one hand, one could argue that the presence of Titian’s painting as an artifact endorses Ovid’s thesis, defended by De Moya among others, that Time augments artistic reputation and praise. On the other, one could maintain that the deliberate contrast between Titian’s masterpiece and the tapestry workshop aims to underscore the fragility of any artistic endeavor. As the artistic canon is inevitably destabilized by every instance of emulation, no work of art, even the Europa, is capable of securing its own immortality. Adding to the intricacy of Velázquez’s meditation upon art and its permanence as expressed in Las Hilanderas is his implicit allusion to another famous interpreter of Ovid at the court of Spain: Petrus Paulus Rubens. Though his voice may not be immediately audible in the painting, any of Velázquez’s fellow-courtiers would have been able to relate the mater-offact realism of Arachne’s punishment in the background of Las Hilanderas to Rubens’s version of the same myth, created as part of a cycle of mythological ashgate.com © copyrighted material ashgate.com Aneta Georgievska-Shine 183 paintings for the royal hunting lodge, Torre della Parada (Fig. 8.3). Furthermore, courtiers in Madrid were certainly well acquainted with the copy ater Titian’s Europa painted by Rubens for his own house-museum sometime in 1628–9, which was acquired for the Spanish royal collection shortly ater his death in 1640 (Fig. 8.4). Along with Titian and his seventeenth-century alter ego in Spain, Velázquez, Rubens was perceived as a paradigm of artistic perfection: by mediating between the one and the other, he was implicitly present in Las Hilanderas. Moreover, like Velázquez, Rubens had regarded Titian as his modelpainter. Precisely because of this shared passion, when Velázquez incorporated Europa in the back realm of Las Hilanderas as an artifact meant to acknowledge Titian’s historical distance, he might also have been voicing a subtle criticism towards Rubens’s atempt at recapturing the spirit of the Venetian original through a literal imitation. And yet, the familiar terms of the Renaissance debates on imitation do not come close to rationalizing the conceptual hall of mirrors of Las Hilanderas. As Svetlana Alpers has observed, while Velázquez’s argument for Art in this painting is remarkable for its generous compass and conident performance, it remains resolutely indeterminate in terms of its conclusions.6 This indeterminacy, which José Ortega y Gasset would memorably ascribe to the painter’s “disdainful remoteness,” can be deined with 8.4 Peter Paul Rubens ater Titian, Europa, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, oil on canvas, 181 × 200 cm. © Museo Nacional del Prado. ashgate.com © copyrighted material ashgate.com 184 subject as aporia in early modern art greater precision if Arachne’s tapestry in Las Hilanderas is construed as both a meditation upon emulation, and a re-enactment of Titian’s Europa. In this way, it will be evident that the conceptual tension in Las Hilanderas between the imperishability of art (ars longa) and its radical demystiication through the tapestry workshop underlies a dialectical balance. That is to say, the work of art can aspire to eternity (Horace’s monumentum aere perennius), even if—looked at in the short term of its making or in the longer perspective of time—any artistic endeavor partakes of a non-inito nature, as suggested and epitomized by Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The presence of Europa in the Spanish royal collection provided Velázquez with a singularly rich point of departure for his meditations on art and art-making. As noted earlier, this prize piece had arrived at the Prado almost a hundred years before Velázquez decided to reinterpret the myth of Arachne. Speciically, Europa was the last of the poesie that Titian painted for Philip II within a famous series begun with Danae (1553–4) and Venus and Adonis (1553–4), and which grew to include Perseus and Andromeda (1554–6), Diana and Actaeon (1559), and Diana and Callisto (1559), before its conclusion with this abduction scene par excellence.7 However, as Titian would emphasize in a leter of April 26, 1562, the poesia of Europa that he was about to send to Philip II also represented a “seal” (soggello) of the many other works painted for his great patron.8 As I have argued elsewhere, the etymological links of this term to the Greek sphragis and the Latin signum carry important implications for Titian’s atitude towards his inal ofering to Philip II.9 As a sign, token, or impression, “soggello” qualiies Europa as the artist’s ultimate statement on the manifold facets of love, which is, ater all, the essential theme of the series as a whole. At the same time, read as a “proof of authorship,” this word implies that Europa is a signature-piece similar to the sphragis poems used by classical authors to conclude a cycle, restate an overall theme, and oten express a hope for their survival for posterity.10 One of the earliest known instances of this term occurs in a sixthcentury B.C. composition by Theognis of Megara, where the poetic practice is said to be the seal (σφρηγίς) that will protect the poet’s words from future imitators.11 Horace’s Carmen 2.20 and Carmen 3.30 are traditionally considered sphragis poems as well.12 In Carmen 2.20, Horace declares to Maecenas that he “shall not taste of Death, nor chafe in Lethe’s thrall,” but ly on the wings of his verses across the world, “leeter than Icarus.”13 Similarly, in Carmen 3.30, he compares his work to the greatest monuments of the past, emphasizing his role as a translator of the accomplishments of other cultures into the Latin tongue.14 The idea of cultural transmission is also the sub-theme of Ovid’s sphragis elegy to Venus at the conclusion of his Amores. In an extended parallel between his work and those of Virgil and Catullus, he observes that just as they had secured fame for their native Mantua and Verona, his poems shall preserve the memory of his Peligne.15 ashgate.com © copyrighted material ashgate.com Aneta Georgievska-Shine 185 Though the legacy of the sphragis topos is readily discussed in the context of Renaissance poetics, Titian’s use of the term “seal” as a descriptor of Europa has remained completely overlooked.16 And, however skeptical one might be about the precise meaning of this word in Titian’s leter to Philip II, one must reckon with the widely recognized function of Ovid’s account of Europa’s myth in Book II of The Metamorphoses as a sphragis. In fact, the poet uses this story of abduction as a counterpoint to Io’s change into a cow from Book I, whereby he ties together a whole series of divine loves with a particularly emphatic statement about the incongruity of majesty and love (maiestas and amor).17 It is precisely through Jupiter’s self-willed transformation into a meek bull that seduces Europa that Ovid paints his most starkly contrasted pendant to the portrait of the divine ruler from the opening pages of the Metamorphoses. Thus, the poet’s account of the rape of Europa becomes a perfect example of the self-conscious incongruities between the epic format of his poem and its erotic, un-epic subject mater.18 It is surely possible that Velázquez was not as atuned to the literary topos of sphragis, or to its particular relevance with regard to Ovid’s use of the story of Europa as a thematic seal of Book II. Nonetheless, Velázquez’s familiarity with Ovid’s Metamorphoses via Ludovico Dolce’s Italian translation (1558) certainly allowed him to perceive the intrinsic relationship between the subject of Europa’s abduction in Book II and the myth of Arachne and her tapestry in Book VI of the poem.19 In Dolce’s loose translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (recorded in Velázquez’s library) the tapestries of Arachne and Minerva are discussed in terms speciic to painting, such as chiaroscuro and varietà: just as the rainbow represents the pinnacle of nature’s own artiice, Arachne’s and Minerva’s works incarnate the quintessence of artistic mimesis and variety.20 It is also no coincidence that Aretino’s praise for Titian’s verisimilitude would be framed by the competition between art and nature.21 Thus, even if Velázquez was not aware of Titian’s mention of the soggello in his leter to Philip II, he must have recognized Europa as an artistic tour-de-force, and thereby as a particularly suitable exemplum of pictorial mastery for his depiction of the Ovidian contest between Arachne and Minerva. As a court painter of Philip IV, Velázquez had privileged access to all the paintings in the Spanish royal collection, which aforded him unparalleled opportunities for close and repeated investigation of the inimitable fatura of this rendering of the story of Europa. Since this seal of Titian’s poesie had belonged to the Spanish crown for long, Velázquez might have discussed it not only with his father-in-law, Francisco Pacheco, but even with Rubens, who became his familiar during his extended visit to Spain in 1628 and 1629. It was during this time that the young Velázquez witnessed Rubens’s most undisguised emulation of Titian in countless copies ater his paintings from the royal collection, most of which were, like Europa, intended for his housemuseum in Antwerp.22 Given this context, one cannot help but imagine the reactions of Velázquez and the connoisseurs at the Madrid court in comparing Titian’s ultimate poesia for Philip II with Rubens’s copy, in which the Flemish ashgate.com © copyrighted material ashgate.com 186 subject as aporia in early modern art master had wholeheartedly sought to absorb the substance of Titian’s picture and refashion it into new form in competition with his model. In addition, Velázquez and his fellow courtiers probably recognized Rubens’s atempt to recapture Titian’s sprezzatura as a crucial step towards his ever greater humanization of mythological narratives, which culminated in the huge cycle of Ovidian pictures executed between 1636 and 1638, and destined for the royal hunting lodge of Torre della Parada. Although most of these mythological paintings were executed by studio assistants, they unequivocally reveal Rubens’s intents. As the surviving preparatory studies demonstrate (Fig. 8.3), the aged Rubens was now returning to Ovid with a conidence of touch that was profoundly indebted to Titian’s late manner. Furthermore, as Svetlana Alpers pointed out in her seminal study of the Torre della Parada cycle, by downplaying the intricacies of allegory and history painting for the sake of demystifying the pagan gods, Rubens was also commenting upon the comic and mock-heroic diction of the Metamorphoses.23 By the time Velázquez painted Las Hilanderas in the late 1650s, he had already become the unrivaled master of the Spanish court. Like Titian and Rubens, he too had demonstrated a profound engagement with Ovid’s poetics and mastery of ekphrasis.24 However, it was this representation of the favola of Arachne where he most decidedly renounced simple description for the sake of a visual allegory that addresses the semantic essence of the Ovidian myth. In his explicit juxtaposition of pictorial modes and signature styles, the inset with Arachne’s punishment evokes Rubens’s eponymous composition for the Torre della Parada (Fig. 8.3), whereas the tapestry at the center of the contest reproduces Titian’s unrivalled Europa. Through his simile between Titian and Arachne, Titian’s mastery is thus deined as a paradigmatic, yet impossible model of perfection for both Rubens and Velázquez himself. Like Arachne before, Titian, Rubens, and Velázquez had deied nature and created unsurpassed works of art paradoxically doomed to be superseded through their emulation. Thus through the double reference to Titian and Rubens, Velázquez yoked the myth of Arachne to its deeper allegorical meaning: the ephemeral nature of artistic excellence. For, as De Moya reminds the reader, “no mater how skilled one is in a particular art, someone yet more skilled may appear, adding various new features, as is the case in all trades and sciences, in which the new is added to the old.”25 The historic process whereby artistic excellence emerges and is relentlessly replaced is illustrated by the making of the tapestry in the background: a new version of Arachne’s work in which Titian and Rubens perform the roles of two compelling, yet transient models of perfection. As a modern emulator of these greatest masters, Velázquez, in Las Hilanderas, elaborated on both of them, becoming himself a part of Arachne’s tapestry: that is, another thread of perfection in the self-weaving of art over time. To the paradox represented by his pictorial subject Vélazquez responded with dialectical ambivalence: he depicted a model of excellence subject to a fatal verdict, thereby implying ashgate.com © copyrighted material ashgate.com Aneta Georgievska-Shine 187 both the imperishability of art and the defeat of any artifact that is bound to engender, and then merge into, a new one. In Rubens’s copy ater Titian’s Europa, the faithfulness to the source turns the imitative act into an end in itself.26 In Velázquez’s interpretation of Arachne’s myth—an archetypal story about the power of mimesis as well as its elusiveness—the imitative act serves as the central question within a broader inquiry into the concept of artistic succession. At the same time, Velázquez’s self-conscious departure from Titian’s source brings up the question of translation so integral to the discourse on imitation in the Spanish Golden Age literature. Among the host of authors that one can cite in this regard, it is perhaps Cervantes who comes closest to the spirit of Velázquez’s interpretive gesture in Las Hilanderas: It seems to me that translation from one language into another, if it be not from the queens of languages, the Greek and the Latin, is like looking at Flemish tapestries on the wrong side; for though the igures are visible, they are full of threads that make them indistinct, and they do not show with the smoothness and brightness of the right side; and translation from easy languages argues neither ingenuity nor command of words, any more than transcribing or copying out one document from another.27 Furthermore, the mixed genre of Las Hilanderas—where a distant fable and a tapestry workshop are positioned as incongruous mirrors of one another— is also in line with the vogue for Ovidian parodies among men of leters contemporary to Velázquez, which ranged from slightly mocking, free-spirited variants to compositions that pushed these favole to their ridiculous extremes.28 Like his fellow courtiers, Velázquez exploits the tension between the form and content of mythoi, at times pushing the mockery almost to the point of the burlesque, as many of his other mythological paintings have oten been described.29 Yet, to the extent that burlesque belongs to the broader category of parody as a “meta-iction,” to wit a iction-within-the-iction whereby an author can raise questions about the process of writing, his authorial role, and the social context of his work, the depiction of Europa in Las Hilanderas reassesses, but also reairms Titian’s status.30 Ultimately, this meditation upon the theoretical and artistic implications of Arachne’s favola directs the beholder back to Ovid and his copious metanarrative in the Metamorphoses. This meta-narrative is announced already with the opening lines of the poem, when Ovid vows to speak of “bodies changed into new forms” in a self-conscious echo of earlier epic authors who had woven “a continuous song from nature’s irst remote beginnings” to their own time.31 This statement is reiterated in Book XV, when the poet compares the paradox of inevitable change (omnia mutantur) of forms within the undying mater (nihil interit) to the manner in which the wax retains its substance even as it is stamped with new designs (novis signatur iguris).32 Reminding us that everything, including Time, is formed as a leeting image (omnisque vagans formatur imago), Ovid inally completes the sphragis of this poem: ashgate.com © copyrighted material ashgate.com 188 subject as aporia in early modern art Now stands my task accomplished, such a work As not the wrath of Jove, nor ire nor sword Nor the devouring ages can destroy. Let, when it will, that day, that has no claim But to my mortal body, end the span Of my uncertain years. Yet I’ll be borne, The iner part of me, above the stars, Immortal, and my name shall never die. … If truth at all Is established by poetic prophecy, My fame shall live to all eternity.33 Neither the compositional nor the iconographic structure of Las Hilanderas leaves any doubt about the relevance of this message for Velázquez. Ovid’s deinition of his poem as perpetuum carmen only adds to the resonance of the insistent non-inito of the painting. The act of parodying Arachne’s myth and the simultaneous preservation of Titian’s Europa is, indeed, the master trope whereby Velázquez reminds the viewer of Ovid’s mock-epic interpolation of past and present (ab origine mundi) into a iction that gives new corporeal form to the same mater (in nova … animus mutatas … formas corpora).34 Seen in this light, this juxtaposition of crat and art, of the rough fabric of invention and its canonical achievement (Titian’s Europa) can also be understood as a metaphor of Ovid’s ine oxymoron about the poem that always is in the process of making, while already complete and presented as the author’s seal. The dichotomy in Las Hilanderas between art’s quest for permanence and the non-inito of artistic practice gains further resonance when read against Ovid’s celebration of his epic as a monument to the unresolved nature of Being.35 To paraphrase Joseph Solodow, Ovid’s narratives of change transform the “lux” of events into the ixedness of the poetic form.36 In the process, Ovid exhibits his mastery of enargeia (illustratio), that ability to make the absent graphically present before the eye, or to supply abstraction with a sense of tangibility. In a sense, in Las Hilanderas Velázquez invoked the Ovidian rendering of lux into image through the endlessly turning wheel as the most marvelous index of this metamorphosis. In one of the most insightful analyses of this compositional element, Jan Baptist Bedaux suggested that Velázquez may have intended the wheel as an allusion to ancient painters such as Antiphilus and Aristides, eulogized ever since Pliny for their capacity to capture motion itself.37 I argue here that, as a metaphor for motion, the wheel not only declares Velázquez’s skill in giving form to the formless, but that it also hints at Ovid’s statement about the inevitability of change as formulated in the Metamorphoses. With a characteristically conceited humility, Velázquez admits the viewer into the liminal space between the workshop—the “rag and bone shop of [his] heart” at the source of his creation—and the distant tapestry as its inished product. And it is through this assimilation of the process of production to painting that Velázquez underscores his kinship with ashgate.com © copyrighted material ashgate.com Aneta Georgievska-Shine 189 Arachne, who according to Minerva’s curse, must continue to mend her work ad ininitum: Live [vive quidem] but hang … and know You’ll rue the future too: that penalty Your kin shall pay to all posterity [tuo generi serisque nepotibus]!38 The early modern emblem literature oten encapsulates Arachne’s fate through images of a spider’s web accompanied by the moto “interrupta retexam” (“I repair my work that was let”).39 This moto, in turn, paraphrases Ovid’s assimilation of Arachne to the creative spider endlessly secreting from her misshapen body a “ine-spun thread” as she keeps pursuing “her former skill” (et antiquas exercet aranea telas).40 When Ortega y Gasset spoke of Velázquez’s ability to “convert the everyday into permanent surprise,” he too underscored this quality of the painter’s aesthetic— where mimesis is an act of epiphany endlessly “repeating itself” while its object is “forever coming into existence.”41 The “permanent surprise” in Las Hilanderas is fundamentally related to Velázquez’s aporetic meditation upon Ovid, Titian, and Rubens, who in succession meditated on Arachne’s myth and the tapestry lying at its allegorical core. Athena’s sentence of the artful spider resonates in Velázquez’s serio-ludic representation of a painting that is at once complete, in the process of its making, and continuously repairing itself. And it is through this paradoxical coincidence of diferent temporal planes that Velázquez makes his most profound admission: like Arachne, his Italian and Flemish predecessors at the Spanish court had atempted to weave the tapestry of artistic perfection. Now it was his turn to do so, if only to airm the words of Pérez de Moya that “everything we know is as fragile as a spider’s web.”42 This essay is dedicated to my mother. Notes I am indebted to Alexander Nagel and Lorenzo Pericolo for inviting me to participate in the 2007 RSA panel that led to this publication. Their insightful critique and atentive editing helped greatly in reining the argument of my essay. I would also like to thank Frederick A. de Armas for his reading and positive response to the conference paper, as well as David Rosand, for his much valued encouragement to pursue this project. 1 Plutarch, 734d. 2 For an excellent account of the tradition of paradox in the Western thought, with a particular emphasis on Renaissance Spain, see Presberg 2001. 3 Brown and Perez 1998, 195. The literature on this painting would warrant a separate bibliographic publication. Yet, aside from Brown’s repeated returns ashgate.com © copyrighted material ashgate.com 190 subject as aporia in early modern art to Las Hilanderas in several important publications on the artist, one cannot fail to mention some of the early studies dedicated to this work, such as Angulo Iñiguez 1948; Tolnay 1949; Birkmeyer 1958; Cavallius 1972; Kahr 1980; Burke 1981; Moit 1985. More recent discussions of this work include Bedaux 1992; Warnke 2005; Alpers 2005; Davies 2006; and Portús 2005; Portús 2007; Knox 2009. 4 The speculations on the meaning of this compositional device go back to the irst modern-day study of Velázquez by Carl Justi, Diego Velázquez und sein Jahrhundert (1888), who perceived it simply as a realistic genre scene. While Aby Warburg was probably the irst to propose that the backstage of the composition should be understood as an allegory on art, Angulo Iñiguez 1948 was the irst to discuss this meaning and relate it to the irst description of this painting (1664) by the Spanish courtier Pedro de Arce as “Fabula de Aragne.” For this bipartite structure in relation to multi-frame illustrations in Renaissance editions of Ovid, see Welles 1986, 149–50; and Warnke 2005, 149. See also Warnke 2005, 146, for the note on Warburg. 5 De Moya II: 65–6; as discussed by Moit 1984, 82, n.33; 88. Cf. Portús 2007, 287. 6 Alpers 2005, 151. 7 For the leter of April 26, 1562, where Titian mentions that he has inally completed Europa, see Cloulas 1967, 253, with reference to Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1877, 2, 296–7. For the leter of June 19, 1559, in which he notes that he has begun this painting, see Cloulas 1967, 233; Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1877, 2, 242–3. 8 “Ho inalmente con l’aiuto della Divina bontà condoto a ine le due piture ch’io cominciai per la Cath. Md. V.: l’una è il Christo che ora nell’orto, l’altra la poesia di Europa portata dal toro, le quali io le mando, e posso dire che elle siano il soggello delle molte altre che de lei mi furono ordinate e che in più volte le mandai …” (Cloulas 1967, 253; Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1877, 2, 296–7). The English translation reproduced here follows Goldfarb 1998, 13. 9 Georgievska-Shine 2007. The following discussion of the importance of the term soggello for Titian’s invention derives largely from this essay. 10 For a deinition of the literary usage of this term, see sphragis in Hornblower and Spawforth, 1996, 1435. 11 “Kyrnos, by me as I practice my art let a seal [σφρηγίς] be set on these words, and never will they be stolen unobserved. / Nor will anyone substitute something worse for the good that is present, / and everyone will say, ‘The words are Theognis of Megara’s. Among all mankind he is named’ …” Theognis, in Prat 1995, 174. 12 On this, see Frankel 1945, 299. 13 Horace, Carmen 2.20. 14 “I shall not wholly die: large residue/ Shall ’scape the queen of funerals. Ever new / My ater fame shall grow, while pontifs climb / With silent maids the Capitolian height. / ‘Born,’ men will say, ‘where Auidus is loud, / Where Daunus, scant of streams, beneath him bow’d/ The rustic tribes, from dimness he wax’d bright, / First of his race to wed the Aeolian lay To notes of Italy.’ Put glory on, / My own Melpomene, by genius won, / And crown me of thy grace with Delphic bay.” Horace, Carmen, 3.30. A similar claim is found at the end of Book 4 of the Georgics (and de facto epilogue to the poem) where Virgil speaks of the escape that his poetry aforded him at a time of political turmoil. ashgate.com © copyrighted material ashgate.com Aneta Georgievska-Shine 191 15 Ovid a, 3.15. For a recent discussion of the prevalence of this practice among Roman poets, see Williams 2002. 16 On the importance of the sphragis convention in Renaissance lyric, see Lainer 1996. For the use of this term in the context of the truthfulness of an image as an imprint, albeit in the Byzantine theology of the icon, see Pentcheva 2006. 17 Otis 1966, 309. 18 Ibid., 125–6. 19 For Velázquez’s access to the editions of the Metamorphoses, see most recently Knox 2009, 89, n. 20; Portús 2007, 287. The self-humbling of Jupiter for Europa from Book II becomes one of Arachne’s examples of “divine crimes” for the sake of love. This she weaves into a tapestry depicting a series of divine rapes—of Europa, Asterie, Leda, Antiope, Dane, Alcmena, Aegina, Mnemosyne, and Proserpina (all of these with Jupiter)—as well as the sexual exploits of Apollo, Liber, and Saturn (Ovid b, 6, 104–26). On this point, see Knox 1986, and Smith 1997, especially 58. 20 Velázquez owned at least two editions of the Metamorphoses, one of which was Le Transformationi, which Lodovico Dolce dedicated to Charles V in a direct echo of Ovid’s dedication of his poem to Augustus. The passage in question reads: “Di porpora è il contesto, e con l’inganno / Di diversi color gratia le danno. / Perché formando in lei varie igure / D’aspeto ogn’una e d’ato diferente, / Osservan l’ombre e i lumi, con testure / Sì buone, e cosi posti unitamente, / Che non si vede segno, o commissure, / Perche iso vi stia l’occhio e la mente. /Essempio a questo ugual veder potreste, / Se guardate talhor l’arco celeste” (Dolce a, 131, as cited in Fehl 1980, 9). As Fehl observed, Dolce’s relish in conceptual puns extended to the very end of Le Transformationi and his invocation of the phoenix as a reminder of the printer’s mark of his publisher and its moto “semper eadem” (Fehl 1980, 10). Arguably, just as this phoenix salutes the printer (and Dolce) for the “resuscitation” of these stories into a vernacular form, so is Velázquez similarly updating Titian’s original. The importance of his departure from the source is even clearer in view of Dolce’s comparison between the ancients and the moderns, from Ovid’s description of Europa to anything ever accomplished by a painter, whether Zeuxis and Apelles, or Raphael and Titian. 21 One classic place is Aretino’s description of the now-lost composition on the theme of the Annunciation: for instance, he would extol the “blending” (unione) of Titian’s “coloring” (colorire), which transforms pigments into the “milk and blood” of the cheeks of the angel Gabriel, or of the “rainbow crossing the air of the landscape,” which is more real that “that which appears ater rain” (più vero che quel che si dimonstra doppo la pioggia; Aretino, 223). 22 For an excellent summary on the relationship between Rubens and Velázquez, with a particular focus on Rubens’s Spanish sojourn of 1628–9, see Vergara 2002, 62–7. 23 Alpers 1971, 78. 24 One of the greatest examples of this engagement is certainly the mysterious Mercury and Argus, which Vélazquez painted around 1659 for the Salόn de los Espejos of the Alcázar. The other three mythologies from this group (Apollo Flaying a Satyr, Venus and Adonis, and Cupid and Psyche) were destroyed in the 1734 ire that devastated the Alcázar. For a summary account, see Portús 2007, cat. 49, 336–7. 25 De Moya, II: 65–6, as reproduced by Portús 2007, 287. ashgate.com © copyrighted material ashgate.com 192 subject as aporia in early modern art 26 For this deinition of pastiche as a subcategory of parody, see Falk and Teague in Preminger and Brogan 1993, 881. 27 Cervantes, LXII, 706. See the translator’s note, ibid., on the similarly deprecating words on translation by Lope de Vega. On the tapestry topos in the Spanish literature of the Golden Age, see also Portús 2007, 292. 28 Some of the beter-known mock-favole included the 1528 Pyramus and Thisbe by Cristobal de Casillejo (c.1490–c.1550), and the Ovidian compilation of “Poesias satiricas y burlescas” by Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (1503–75). For an overview of these Ovidian parodies in Renaissance Spain, see Welles 1986, 9. See also Acker 2000, 10f. 29 On the critical reception of Velázquez’s mythologies as burlesques and the problems with this qualiier, see Orso 1993, especially chap. 1, 11–39. As noted by Falk and Teague, while imitation in parody strives for congruence, burlesque displays incongruity, as in cases where a formal style is deployed for topical, or even vulgar content; Preminger and Brogan 1993, 881. 30 Preminger and Brogan 1993, 881. For a sustained treatment of parody and metaiction in literature, see Rose, 1993. On the perception of this image as “homage” to Titian in the more recent literature on the artist, see Schwartz 2002, 146; Portús 2007, 291–2; Knox 2009, 63–5. 31 Ovid b, I, 1–4. 32 “Omnia mutantur, nihil interit: errat et illinc / huc venit, hinc illuc, et quoslibet occupat artus / spiritus eque feris humana in corpora transit / inque feras noster, nec tempore deperit ullo, / utque novis facilis signatur cera iguris / nec manet ut fuerat nec formam servat eandem, / sed tamen ipsa eadem est, animam sic semper eamdem / esse, sed in varias doceo migrare iguras.” (“Everything changes, nothing dies: the spirit wanders, arriving here or there, and occupying whatever body it pleases, passing from a wild beast into a human being, from our body into a beast, but is never destroyed. As pliable wax, stamped with new designs, is no longer what it was; does not keep the same form; but is still one and the same; I teach that the soul is always the same, but migrates into diferent forms”). Ovid b, XV, 165–72. 33 “Iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iovis ira nec ignis/ nec poterit ferrum nec edax abolere vetustas. / cum volet, illa dies, quae nil nisi corporis huius / ius habet, incerti spatium mihi iniat aevi: /parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennis / astra ferar, nomenque erit indelebile nostrum, / quaque patet domitis Romana potentia terries, / legar populi, perque omnia saecula fama, / si quid habent veri vatum presagia, vivam.” Ovid b, XV, 871–9. The earlier passage reads: “Et quoniam magno feror aequore plenaque ventis / vela dedi: nihil est toto, quod perstet, in orbe. / cuncta luunt, omnisque vagans formatur imago; / ipsa quoque adsiduo labuntur tempora motu, / non secus ac lumen; neque enim consistere lumen / nec levis hora potest: sed ut unda inpellitur unda / urgeturque prior veniente urgetque priorem, / tempora sic fugiunt pariter pariterque sequuntur / et nova sunt semper; nam quod fuit ante, relictum est,/ itque, quod haut fuerat, momentaque cuncta novantur.” (“Since I have embarked on the wide ocean, and given full sails to the wind, I say there is nothing in the whole universe that persists. Everything lows, and is formed as a leeting image. Time itself, also, glides, in its continual motion, no diferently than a river. For neither the river, nor the swit hour can stop: but as wave impels wave, and as the prior wave is chased by the coming wave, and chases the one before, so time lees equally, and, equally, follows, and is always new. ashgate.com © copyrighted material ashgate.com Aneta Georgievska-Shine 193 For what was before is let behind: and what was not comes to be: and each moment is renewed.”) Ovid b, XV, 176–85. 34 “In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas / corpora; di, coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illas) / adspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi / ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen.” Ovid b, I, 1–4. 35 If art is ixedness of the lux, then Ovid’s poem would be seen as one of those monuments (the statues or paintings described throughout the poem). Yet, as Solodow notes, the paradox of this poem is that while “it strives for visible clarity” and the permanence of a monument, it is also ever-shiting, inconsistent, always asserting its continuity (perpetuum carmen). On this, see Solodow 1988, 220–1. 36 Solodow 1988, 174. 37 Bedaux 1992, 296–305. 38 Ovid b, VI, 136–8. 39 For a late-seventeenth-century example of this emblem, see De La Feuille, 8, nr. 12. 40 Ovid b, VI, 143–5. 41 Ortega y Gasset 1972, 99–110. 42 De Moya, II: 65, as reproduced by Portús 2007, 287. Even in Las Meninas, his most self-conident and self-conscious pictorial sphragis, Velázquez would portray himself under a signiicant artifact—Rubens’s version of the fable of Arachne. Clearly, by leaving Rubens’s “punishment” of the hubristic tapestry weaver as an index of the endless interruptions and returns to the task of painting, Velázquez is reminding the next court painter of his prerogative and predicament—that in establishing oneself by an eristic strife against one’s master, an artist only reairms the interminable nature of this creative contest. At the same time, through his unsentimental gaze from behind the easel, he efectively traps within this cycle all future interpreters of his pictorial conundrum. ashgate.com © copyrighted material ashgate.com