Beholding Violence: A Conference on Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Pollaiuolo’s engraving of ten naked men battling is a scene of unmitigated violence and rage. His subject has been a mystery for more than five hundred years. In the past two decades a few scholars have attempted interpretations of the print’s naked savagery, generally favoring a humanistic reading, suggesting the struggle of the soul against bodily impulses, the psychomachic struggle of the intellect against base urges. Such allegorical readings, however, are moot, given the definition of allegory as the drawing of a moral lesson from a specific subject. Until the subject of the print is identified, the meaning of its violence cannot be understood.

Evidence from the two states of the surviving 48 prints indicates that several hundred impressions in multiple printings must have been made for a large audience. But we know little of the engraving’s audience other than artists, such as Albrecht Dürer, to help identify the subject.

This study offers a subject for Pollaiuolo’s print based on two major literary sources, the Argonautica of Valerius Flaccus, and Petrus Berchorius’ Moralized Ovid. The subject is Jason’s search for the Golden Fleece, an adventure popularized in antiquity, the middle ages, and the fifteenth century by the writings of Apollonius and Ovid. John Phillips first suggested this subject in 1955 but never argued his case, and his interpretation received little notice. It was rejected because the print does not clearly identify Jason, and contains few elements from his complicated narrative. I show that Valerius Flaccus readily identifies Jason, and that Pollaiuolo’s focus on one aspect of Jason’s adventure can be explained by a similar concentration found in Berchorius’s Moralized Ovid, where the battling nude men are identified as humanists, or learned men, who battle ignorance in others. Its audience, then, would have been humanists, oligarchs of the various wool guilds, members of confraternities for the wool guilds, and churchmen.

A new attitude emerged among humanists beginning with Leonardo Bruni in the fifteenth century toward anger as a positive character trait, and as a necessary component of civic humanism. Poggio Bracciolini saw rigid control of emotions as reflective of a “slow and stupid mind.” Hercules’ anger was viewed as an expression of his moral passion. Nudity in art meant only that the warriors were clothed in the metaphorical armor of righteousness.



	Edward J. Olszewski (Professor, Art History, Case Western Reserve University) “Righteous Anger in Pollaiuolo’s Engraving of Ten *Battling* *Nude* *Men”* Pollaiuolo’s engraving of ten naked men battling is a scene of unmitigated violence and rage. His subject has been a mystery for more than five hundred years. In the past two decades a few scholars have attempted interpretations of the print’s naked savagery, generally favoring a humanistic reading, suggesting the struggle of the soul against bodily impulses, the psychomachic struggle of the intellect against base urges. Such allegorical readings, however, are moot, given the definition of allegory as the drawing of a moral lesson from a specific subject. Until the subject of the print is identified, the meaning of its violence cannot be understood. Evidence from the two states of the surviving 48 prints indicates that several hundred impressions in multiple printings must have been made for a large audience. But we know little of the engraving’s audience other than artists, such as Albrecht Dürer, to help identify the subject. This study offers a subject for Pollaiuolo’s print based on two major literary sources, the Argonautica of Valerius Flaccus, and Petrus Berchorius’ Moralized Ovid. The subject is Jason’s search for the Golden Fleece, an adventure popularized in antiquity, the middle ages, and the fifteenth century by the writings of Apollonius and Ovid. John Phillips first suggested this subject in 1955 but never argued his case, and his interpretation received little notice. It was rejected because the print does not clearly identify Jason, and contains few elements from his complicated narrative. I show that Valerius Flaccus readily identifies Jason, and that Pollaiuolo’s focus on one aspect of Jason’s adventure can be explained by a similar concentration found in Berchorius’s Moralized Ovid, where the battling nude men are identified as humanists, or learned men, who battle ignorance in others. Its audience, then, would have been humanists, oligarchs of the various wool guilds, members of confraternities for the wool guilds, and churchmen. A new attitude emerged among humanists beginning with Leonardo Bruni in the fifteenth century toward anger as a positive character trait, and as a necessary component of civic humanism. Poggio Bracciolini saw rigid control of emotions as reflective of a “slow and stupid mind.” Hercules’ anger was viewed as an expression of his moral passion. Nudity in art meant only that the warriors were clothed in the metaphorical armor of righteousness.