Ambrogio Traversari

I will start with the intriguing mention of Traversari and his Jewish associates in Tuscan Jewish Itineraries, quoted previously:

...It seems that the iconography of Lorenzo Ghiberti's Paradise Door (1425-1452) was designed by the Humanist Ambrogio Traversari after consultations with a Jewish philosopher. ...

Ambrogio Traversari (1386-1439) was a monk in the Camoldesian order, becoming its Prior General in 1431 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Ambrose_Traversari) and later honored by the order as a saint. Born near Forli, he joined the order at the monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli (Saint Mary of the Angels) in Florence, where he remained all his life, except for serving as Pope Eugenius IV's legate at the Councils of Basel and Ferrara. He was a major architect of the unification of the Eastern and Western Churches, achieved briefly at the Council of Florence in 1439 in the joint decree that he drew up. He died shortly after.

Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455) was the creator of two famous sets of doors for the baptistry next to the duomo of Florence. The first was the result of a competition in which many artists participated, including Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Quercia. He worked on the second set, called by Michelangelo the "Gates of Paradise", from 1425 until their installation in 1452 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Baptistery). Wikipedia says:

The subjects of the designs for the doors were chosen by Leonardo Bruni d'Arezzo, then chancellor of the Republic of Florence. (4)
_________
4. Scott, Leader (1882). "Chapter III. Baptistery Doors". Ghiberti and Donatello. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington. p. 65.

1882 is a rather old reference. In contrast, Grove Art Online says, in its article on Traversari (http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093 ... le.T086051):

Traversari knew Ghiberti personally (in 1430 he sought a Greek technical treatise on his behalf), and he had earlier criticized Leonardo Bruni’s programme for the sculptor’s Gates of Paradise (1425–52) for the Baptistery in Florence. Richard Krautheimer convincingly suggested that the iconography finally adopted was based on Traversari’s patristic exegesis.

The reference is to Krautheimer's highly acclaimed Ghiberti, a two volume work that first appeared in 1959.

Krautheimer's argument that Ghiberti's panels used Traversari's ideas rather than Bruni's is indeed strong. I cannot summarize what takes him 30 pages to present, but I will try to hit the highlights. Bruni's program involved 28 panels, 20 of them Old Testament scenes, each of one event, and 8 of Prophets. In contrast, the result had 10 panels, each combining several events of one story, and including some that were not traditional medieval subjects. Also, the prophets were presented as heads or figures along the frame rather than in the panels; there were 24 figurines and 24 heads. The majority of the figurines are prophets, but five are women, whom Krautheimer tentatively identifies from the Old Testament (pp.172-174).

The main subject of the last panel departs from Bruni the most dramatically; instead of his proposal, the Judgment of Solomon, a prefiguration of the Last Judgment, it shows the meeting of Solomon with the Queen of Sheba, shaking hands but with Sheba holding one hand on her heart. (For good reproductions of the panels (see http://www.kingsacademy.com/mhodges/11_ ... iberti.htm).

Usually Solomon and Sheba were depicted as prefigurations of the Adoration of the Magi or the Coronation of the Virgin. This seems to me no Adoration, but there is a girl carrying a crown on the left. The scene could be a prefiguration of the Marriage of the Virgin (with the Virgin slightly submissive, as indicated by the hand on the heart, a pledge of faith), or of Christ with his Church as allegorically presented in the Song of Songs--or the merger of the Western and Eastern Churches under one Pope, Traversari's dream since at least 1419 (p. 184). This panel, Krautheimer says, was cast in 1436 or 1437. He observes (p. 182-183):

The council that was to consolidate the pact did not assemble until 1438. Only in 1439, two or three years after Ghiberti had cast the plaque for the Queen of Sheba, were meetings transferred to Florence.

In 1435-36 Traversari was in Basel, Vienna, and Budapest, securing the Pope's supremacy over his rivals. In July 1436 he started pressing for a true council of union, advising the Pope to subsidize a group of visiting Greeks as encouragement and submitting names to the Pope for its Western representatives (p.185). Moreover, one of the men on the side of the panel in Western dress has certain unusual features in common with a probable portrait of Traversari as it appears with his translation of Diogenes Laertius: "The broad bridge of the nose, the S-curve of the brows, the small petulant mouth, the skinny neck, all are there" (p. 186), even if there is an age difference, the one in the Diogenes Laertius being of Traversari as he would have looked at the time of the translation, at age 38.

But it was not only this final panel. Krautheimer says (p. 171) that in 1424:

Bruni's program was neither the only one nor the first to be submitted to the Calimala. Whether Niccolo Niccoli had taken a hand in previous proposals remains conjectural. But opposition to Bruni's program was voiced immediately by Ambrogio Traversari, presumably in agreement with Niccolo Niccoli.

For his part, Ghiberti in his memoirs says that he "was given a free hand"; but he simply skips over the more difficult parts of the depictions. The program, Krautheimer shows, derives mostly from St. Ambrose's commentaries on the Old Testament, a figure for whom Traversari had expressed much admiration. Others admired St. Ambrose, too, of course. But more is involved.

Niccolo (1364-1437), along with his friend Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459), had argued earlier with Bruni (1370-1444) about the Vulgate (p.178):

An attempt to edit the Old Testament on the basis of the Hebrew original can be traced back to the second decade of the century, namely to Niccolo Niccoli and Poggio. It was combated by no other than Leonardo Bruni. For the perfectly good reason that his Hebrew was nonexistent, he objected to Poggio's heretical mistrust of Saint Jerome (34).
___________
34. Poggio bibl. 418 [Epistolae, ed. T. de Tonellis, Florence, 1831ff], I, pp. 1ff (Lib. I, ep. 1); Bruni bibl. 78 [Epistularum Libri VIII, ed. L. Mehus, Florence, 1741], II, pp. 160ff (Lib. IX, ep. 12).

One might wonder where Poggio and Nicoli had acquired enough Hebrew to question publicly Jerome's translation. There were no texts or schools then, only Jews and converted Jews. Traversari, too, had a working knowledge of Hebrew (p. 179):

In addition to his other accomplishments, the learned Camaldolese had at least a limited knowledge of Hebrew (46). He could have studied it, as a few others did, from one of the Jews who had been recently admitted to Florence, and thus he may have become acquainted, if only indirectly, with the second Targum to Esther.
______________
46. Vespasianno di Bisticci, bibl. 54 [[i]Vite di uomini illustri..., ed. A. Mai and A. Bartoli, Florence, 1859], p. 241; Cassuto, bibl. 89 [Gli Ebrei a Firenze nell' eta del rinascimento (Pubblicazioni del R. Instituto di Studi Superiori di Filosofia e Filologia, 40), pp. 274ff. Dini-Traversari, bibl. 127 [Ambrogio Traversari e i suoi tempi (Florence, 1912)], appendix 1, p. 6.

The second Targum to Esther is a 12th century Jewish writing in Aramaic (the language of the Babylonian Talmud) which has been identified as the likely source of a peculiar detail in Ghiberti's panels. Krautheimer cites it after first pointing out other details in the panels that do not fit the Vulgate or the medieval cycles, but do fit the pre-Vulgate writings of Ambrose and Origen.

Before quoting Krautheimer on the Targum, I should first quote him on these departures from the Vulgate and from the medieval Western tradition. First (p. 176):

In the book about Noah and the Ark [De Noe et Arca] Ambrose discusses at length Genesis 6:18 in the pre-Vulgate version: nidos facies in arca, "thou shalt make birds' nests in the ark." The passage is lacking in the Vulgate; but the birds that flock about the summit of the ark in Gheberti's panel would appear to allude to a link between his design and Saint Ambrose' writing. Also in Ghiberti's relief the sides of Noah's ark are composed of square panels, recalling the pre-Vulgate text of Genesis 6:14; the patriarch was to make the construction ex lignis quadratis, instead of ex lignis levigatis, as was the accepted version throughout the Middle Ages, (22) from "square" timber, instead of from "well planed." Again, it is Saint Ambrose who among the Latin exegetes comments at length upon the allegorical significance of these squares. (23)
_____________
22. Walafrid Strabo, Glossa ordinaria (P. L. CXIII, col. 105).
23. Saint Ambrose, De Noe et arca, cap. VI (P.I. XIV, cols. 387f).

(Above is the rather badly damaged original. For the reconstructed copy now at the Baptistry, with the "lignis qudratis" that look more trapezoidal than square, see https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2581/4119 ... 6fb55a.jpg.

Other choices depart from the usual medieval depiction but not from St. Ambrose's emphasis, notably Noah's Shame, which is in Ghiberti but "absent from Bruni's program and indeed rare in Italian Old Testament cycles". This is where one of Noah's sons sees him lying naked on the ground, and the other sons avert their eyes.

Another departure from the Vulgate is in the shape of the ark itself, a pyramid, as opposed the usual shape "as an oblong structure with three decks and covered, as a rule, by a pitched roof". A variation, found more frequently in Eastern manuscripts but occasionally in the West, had it as "a square box covered by a truncated or stepped pyramid". But that is not Ghiberti's. Krautheimer observes (p. 177).

But of all church fathers only Origen interpreted Genesis 7:15, as referring to a regular four-sided pyramid. His second homily In Genesim, leaves no doubt but that this was the form he visualized, doing so at the price of some fancy figuring to make the text of Genesis fit his construction. (29)
_____________
29. I am greatly indebted to Mr. Edgar Wind for calling my attention to this passage and for allowing me the perusal in manuscript form of his paper (bibl. 555 ["The Revival of Origen," Studies in Art and Literature for Belle Da Costa Greene, Princeton, 1954, pp. 412ff]) demonstrating both the Originist character of Ghiberti's ark, and the revival of Origenism in Florence and Rome after 1460. Se also, Allen , bibl. 17 [D. C. Allen, The Legend of Noah (Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, XXXIII, 1949, 3-4), Urbana, Illinois], p. 167.

Now I am ready to quote Krautheimer on the Targum (p. 177):

An even more far-fetched source has been suggested for a detail in the panel of the Queen of Sheba. In the background, on the left, a man wearing a strange curved conical hat releases a bird, and this little by-play has been related to an incident in the legend of the Queen's visit to Solomon, as told by an Aramaic source, the Targum II ot the Book of Esther. (32). To our knowledge this Targum, written in the twelfth century, had never been translated into Greek, Latin, or Italian. If therefore, it is a source for this scene on the Gates of Paradise, it is an exotic intruder and hard to explain.
_____________
32. Semran, bibl. 489 ["Notiz zu Ghiberti," Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft, L (1929), pp. 151ff]. I am indebted to Mr. Harry Wolfson, Harvard University, for kindly confirming that the Targum was not known in translations in the fifteenth century.

I do not myself find the bird (see first picture above), although I do see that the man's gesture and gaze, as well as the gaze of the man behind him, are consistent with such a bird; but I bow to the experts. Krautheimer concludes:

All these factors, the close relationship to the writings of Saint Ambrose, the acquaintance with Origen and possibly with a Jewish source, are so many clues indicating the participation of a scholar in the formulation and possibly in the drafting of the program of the program for Ghiberti's door.

Krautheimer then goes on to describe Traversari's qualifications for being such a scholar. His lively interest for the works of Saint Ambrose and other early Fathers--including those, as he says later in the paragraph, writings in Greek--make him "one of the leaders of the neo-patristic movement" later championed by Lorenzo Valla. Also:

He fought on behalf of Bernardino of Siena, who, imbued with the Holy Spirit, had turned against the representatives of late scholasticism, "those who with their inflated scholarship...attempt to lay a new foundation and to destroy the name of Jesus and [who] want to seem rather than be, in the letter and in the spirit, experienced in all wisdom." (37)
_______________
37. ibid. [bibl. 526: Ambrogio Traversari (Ambrosius Traversarius), Latinae Epistolae..., ed. P. Cannetus and L. Mehus, Florence, 1759], II, cols. 313ff (Lib. VI, ep. 31).

Also:

He approved with enthusiasm the project of Leonardo Giustiniani to translate the Bible into Italian and thus make the Scriptures accessible to the uneducated as well.

That might align him with Poggio and Nicoli on the deficiencies of the Vulgate, although of course an Italian version could simply be a translation of the Vulgate.

CONCLUSIONS

Traversari is a name that figures prominently in my investigations of possible tarot personalities. Somehow he became interested in the subject of divine names and celestial hierarchy, two areas singled out by Idel as major topics discussed by the Jewish Kabbalist Abulafia. Traversari was interested enough to prepare a new translation of the works of pseudo-Dionysius, completed by 1437, of which the first of four, (not counting the Letters), is "The Divine Names" and the third is "The Celestial Hierarchies" (see e.g. http://www.iep.utm.edu/pseudodi/, which also testifies to their Neoplatonism). Later Traversari was the principal facilitator between Greeks and Latins in the conclave of 1438. He would have been the translator in any interactions between Cosimo and Plethon there. The similarities between Plethon's edition of the Chaldean Oracles (based on a 10th century Greek version) and pseudo-Dionysius (perhaps an influence on the earlier edition) would not have been lost on Traversari. I have found numerous similarities between both and the tarot sequence (the first half of the sequence, more or less, to "Divine Names" and the second half to "Celestial Hierarchies"; for details see my post at http://tarotandchaldean.blogspot.com/20 ... -form.html, reading what comes up for the word "Dionysius"). Now there is an indication of Traversari's contacts with a Jewish source, who either was a rabbinical scholar himself or in close contact with one.

It strikes me that Traversari was enough of a scholar and translator to know to go to the original source rather than depend on second-hand information, and if that was impossible, to hold one's peace. So probably he learned enough Aramaic to be able to look at the Targum with a Jewish scholar's help, just as Pico did in 1480-82 with del Medigo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_P ... _Mirandola). Such a Jewish scholar would not have been the usual one of the times; according to Idel, most reflected scholasticism and Aristotelianism; Alemanno is the only Platonist of that time that he mentions, and he was born in 1435. Similarly, Hanegraaff says of Alemanno that he "was unique among contemporary Jewish intellectuals for his interest in neoplatonism" (p. 83). However we have to remember that the bankers that the Medici brought to Florence, such as the da Pisas, were from Pisa, where the da Pisas were called Vitale, and before that Rome, and/or perhaps Lucca. It strikes me as likely that the rabbis associated with the bankers would have been in the tradition of the Kabbalah of Catalonia and Germany, of Abulafia who merged the two schools, and any previous tradition that might have survived in Lucca, Pisa's neighbor.

In another post I will discuss another reference to the same Targum of Esther.