EPICUREAN PHANTASÍA IN POST-CLASSICAL AND EARLY MODERN ART: AN EXPLORATIVE APPROACH

FANTASÍA EPICÚREA EN EL ARTE POSTCLÁSICO Y PREMODERNO: UN ENFOQUE EXPLORATORIO

JESÚS MUÑOZ MORCILLO

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9972-8645

POTESTAS, N.º 26, enero 2025 | pp. 7-31
ISSN: 1888-9867 | e-ISSN 2340-499X | https://doi.org/10.6035/potestas.7993
Recibido: 08/04/2024 Evaluado: 17/06/2024 Aprobado: 20/06/2024

ABSTRACT: This paper offers an explorative analysis of traces of Epicurean phantasía in post-classical and early modern art, with a particular focus on the reception of ancient ékphrasis and Epicurean perception theory in the Renaissance. It raises the question of whether an Epicurean phantasía did exist, what it was like, and how to recognize traces of it in pre-modern art theoretical literature and artistic practices. Keywords: Phantasía, Ékphrasis, Epicureism RESUMEN: Este artículo ofrece un análisis exploratorio de las huellas de la phantasía epicúrea en el arte postclásico y premoderno, con especial atención a la recepción de la écfrasis antigua y la teoría epicúrea de la percepción en el Renacimiento. Plantea la cuestión de si existió una PHANTASÍA epicúrea, cómo era y cómo reconocer sus huellas en la literatura teórica del arte premoderno y en las prácticas artísticas. Palabras clave: Fantasía, Écfrasis, Epicureísmo

.

INTRODUCTION

In the academic discussion about the early modern concept of phantasía, there is a broad consensus that the practical use of this term goes back to Aristotle.[1] However, theories of phantasía can also be found among the Stoics[2] and the Epicureans.[3] But how did these theories find their way into Renaissance art? Sometimes they are mentioned in theoretical texts, as in Pomponius Gauricus’ de scultura, but they also entered the sphere of art through the influence of ancient rhetoric. It is not by chance that Manuel Chrysoloras used the term phantasía not only in the sense of Aristotle but also in the sense of inventive ékphrasis.[4]

After a short reassessment of Epicurean phantasía, this essay focuses on the core feature of ékphrasis, enárgeia (ἐνάργεια, «evidence»), which as a technical term may go back to Epicurean gnoseology and is relevant to the discussion of the mímesis-phantasía problem.[5] Central to this assumption is Epicurus’s fourth criterion of knowledge, popularized by Diogenes Laertius,[6] «the inventive projection of the mind» (phantastikḗ epibolḗ tēs dianoías, i.e., φανταστικὴ ἐπιβολὴ τῆς διανοίας), which explains, among other things, the enárgeia of natural language and abstract thought.[7] This criterion seems to have influenced the late antique discourse on the connection between phantasía, painting, and sophía,[8] as well as the ekphrastic practice of the Second Sophistic. The reception of such texts in the Early Modernity led to an extraordinary pictorial production, from which some motifs are examined for Epicurean traces of phantasía: primitive mixed creatures (Piero di Cosimo), Dürer’s cloud faces,[9] living stone pictures,[10] Hans Baldung Grien’s depiction of creation, and Arcimboldo’s «composite heads».

ON THE ORIGINS OF THE CONCEPT OF PHANTASÍA

Plato already used the term phantasía in the sense of «appearance», as phantasía is related to the verb phaínesthai, which means «it appears». The main gnoseological issue of this term seems to have already been spotted in the platonic dialogue Theaetetus (152c1). According to Plato, we cannot go beyond our senses to decide if something that appears to us, such as coldness or wetness, is true or not. Therefore, our own perception is also what we call phantasía, i.e., appearance.[11] Other uses of phantasía in Plato imply the concurrence of perception and judgment (i.e., dóxa), which leads to false assumptions (e.g., in Philebus 38c). The technḗ phantastikḗ explained in Sophist is the art of imitation following our perception so that things appear to us as we perceive them and not as they really are. Subsequent philosophers declined this kind of subjective phantasía, but Plato made a persistent point: phantasía involves human experiences and external stimuli.

Aristotle’s main account of phantasía can be found in On the Soul 3.3: For him, phantasía seems to be a faculty located somewhere between sense perception and thinking. It is a dýnamis of the soul, a psychological faculty, and an experience. At 429a1–2, he defines phantasía as «a movement taking place due to actual sense-perception». But he doesn’t discuss any connections between phantasía and visualization, or even imagination. In other words, something is missing between this idea of phantasía and the notion of «putting before the eyes» (pro ómmatōn) from his Poetics and Rhetoric (Rh. 1411b 24–5), an expression that scholars often connect with the idea of Aristotelian phantasía.[12]

Stoics and Epicureans developed empiricist theories of knowledge that complete the picture of Hellenistic phantasía. Despite the fact that the sources are fragmentary, the most advanced idea of phantasía based on physical experience and visualization as a movement and a faculty of the soul comes from these two schools of thought.

The Stoics referred to phantasía in the sense of impression, distinguishing between the impression we receive when we perceive something and the figments of fanciful thoughts (phantásmata) that occur, e.g., in dreams. But according to Diogenes Laertius (DL 7.53), there are sensory and non-sensory impressions, i.e., those obtained by thought or affections that arise in the soul from no external stimulus (or phantastón, «impressor»). In this case, this experience is called phantastikón, i.e., imagination as empty attraction, also known as hallucination. The Stoics even knew methods to produce non-sensory impressions, such as similarity, analogy, transposition, combination, or opposition.

All Hellenistic philosophers dealt with the same issues; they tried to explain how we see images, dreams, and hallucinations and how we envisage things that we have never seen, such as hybrids or mythological beings. The most materialistic answer to this issue is the Epicurean one related to the pre-Socratic «intromission» theory of vision, which goes back to Democritus.[13] Objects emit subtle particles that interact with our sensory organs, resulting in aesthetic experiences. However, the eye is by no means passive. Already at the moment of sensory experience, «ordering impulses of the mind» arise, identified by Epicurus as epibolḗ tēs dianoías («projection of the mind») in the Letter to Herodotus.[14]

A possible reading of this letter interprets the epibolḗ as an iterative truth criterion present in every step of cognition, i.e., from physical experience to abstract thought.[15] Epicureans added a fourth criterion of knowledge to explain creative mental processes, «the inventive projection of the mind» (phantastikḗ epibolḗ tēs dianoías), as passed down by Diogenes Laertius (DL 10.31). This fourth criterion is as unique to Epicurean philosophy as it is difficult to reconstruct its whole meaning. However, recent research has pointed to a logical connection with the third criterion of truth,[16] the epibolḗ tēs diánoias as presented in the Epistula ad Herodotum.

The difference between both terms may have involved the capability of creating mental images and stimuli with the potential for physical responses and truth verification. In this sense, David Konstan explains in a recent article that the epibolḗ could have been bidirectional to explain how impressions transmitted from the senses to the mind are subject to internal influences that could lead to misconceptions. Still, at the same time, these impressions stored in the mind can flow back to the senses and be compared with fresh phantasíai of the same object. Based on Epicurus’s Letter to Herodotus (esp. § 49–52) and new fragments from the Perì Phýseos («On Nature»), Konstan considers, therefore, that Epicurus relied on a perception theory that works with the «extramission» tradition as well, i.e., the platonic idea that vision consists of rays emitted by the eye towards the objects (Timaeus 45b–46a).[17] In any case, this approach stresses the fact that the epicurean theory of phantasía was related to the origin and handling of misconceptions.

In his Latin version (1433) of Diogenes’s Lives, Ambrosio Traversari translated the expression phantastikḗ epibolḗ tēs dianoías as «phantasticos intuitus mentis»,[18] i.e., «imaginary views of the mind», meaning the faculty of imagining physical appearances, even those that imply the creation of imaginary hybrid beings, as the result of misconceptions, to prove them false. However, the «imaginary views of the mind» only have potential for physical responses by others insofar they can be communicated, which in the epicurean philosophy is only possible through the materialistic and progressive production of language, from object-related names to abstract conventions, and through mímesis, which is a natural born faculty to learn and communicate (Ep. ad Hdt. § 75-76). Likewise, we may add, the production of images as a language is interwoven in materialistic processes of imitation and verification to achieve reliable representations or conventions of them.

Traversari’s translation of Diogenes Laertius’ Life of Epicurus and Lucretius’s De rerum natura were known among intellectual circles in mid-15 century Italy. Poggio Bracciolini’s first copy of the rediscovered Lucretian poem De rerum natura was send to Niccolò de’ Niccoli who didn’t return it for fourteen years. Later copies circulated broadly among other Humanists and eventually reached artistic circles south and north of the Alps.[19] Traversari’s translation of Laertius’s Lives also circulated among intellectual circles of the Quattrocento and it is quite sure that Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) knew it.[20]

It is also legitimate to assume that the fourth criterion of truth, «the imaginary views of the mind», as known in Antiquity (cf. DL 10.33), i.e., understood as the inventive cognitive step at the top of all materialistic perception processes – be it as genuine mind projection or as a perceptual corrective –, was most likely also known among Renaissance humanists and artists engaging with epicurean ideas, such as Piero di Cosimo, Albrecht Dürer, or Hans Baldung Grien.[21]

The field for this case of epicurean reception may even have been unexpectedly paved in scholastic circles. In the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas avoided the overly materialistic notion of the epicurean phantasía, but he reinserted the idea of discursive perception under the concept of visio («gaze»),[22] implying that the object and the perceiving person enter into a physical-intellectual dialogue. Perception becomes the interweaving of the mind with real things.

HOW DID PHANTASÍA THEORIES FIND THEIR WAY INTO RENAISSANCE ART?

Phantasía ideas and theories are sometimes explicitly quoted in theoretical texts, as in De sculptura («On Sculpture») by Pomponius Gauricus, who uses the terms euphantasíotos to refer to the sculptor’s main faculties (vgl. Méndez 2013). He also uses the term enárgeia, which means «vividness» and which, according to Graham Zanker,[23] is an Epicurean technical term denoting the idea of «evidence» that eventually became commonplace in school rhetoric, especially in connection with the production of ekphráseis.[24]

Occasionally, there are implicit mentions of Epicurean ideas, such as in Alberti’s Della pittura (On Painting) and De statua (On Sculpture), when he refers to ancient peoples discovering faces and landscapes depicted by Nature on stones and tree stumps (Della pittura 2.38) quoting an Epicurean example passed down by Lucretius in De rerum natura (DRN 4.129-142 and 722-749) and by Vitruvius in De architectura (Vitruvius, De architectura 2.1).

However, many ideas of phantasía entered the art sphere more inconspicuously – through the influence of ancient rhetoric, and especially through inter-artistic relations to ancient fables, narrations, anecdotes, and, above all, descriptions, i.e., ekphráseis. Alberti already recommended artists to look for inspiration in the vivid texts of the ancient authors and to make use of the practice of inventio to create their own works (Della pittura 3.53). For him, an excellent example of ancient literature’s inventive potential was Lucian’s ékphrasis of Apelles’s Calumny (Luc. Cal. 2-5) that Alberti even translated with a pedagogical function, following in this the steps of former translators of the Calumny, such as Christophoro Landino or Guarino da Verona.

Manuel Chrysoloras, the Byzantine polymath who introduced most of Greek literature to Western Europe, used the term phantasía not only in Aristotle’s sense of a faculty but also in the sense of the inventive ékphrasis,[25] which is capable of evoking mental images in the minds of the audience. The ekphrastic experience corresponds with the practical, materialistic tradition of rhetoric that connects with visual epistemology as understood by Epicurus.[26] Therefore, understanding what an ékphrasis was in the Renaissance is instrumental to explain the impact of Epicurean phantasía.

ÉKPHRASIS AS PHANTASÍA DEVICE

Ékphrasis was a rhetorical exercise, a progýmnasma, learned at school, and one that all rhetoricians and authors of progymnásmata handbooks defined as «a guiding speech that brings the subject matter vividly before the eyes».[27]

The motifs of an ékphrasis were more than just descriptions of pictures. An ékphrasis was a device to describe characters, incidents, places, periods, and situations, among other things. Aelius Theon (1st century) also mentions the ékphrasis trópōn, that is, the description of manners of manufacturing; Aphthonius (4th century) included plants and animals; and the rhetorician Nicholas of Myra added festivities, paintings, and sculptures to this list as late as the 5th century CE.

The main characteristics were «vividness» (enárgeia), «clarity» (saphéneia), and «concision». However, the latter was only mentioned by Aelius Theon in a long expression: «not to beat around the bush with useless information».[28]

Enárgeia (i.e., sensory evidence), however, is the most critical ingredient needed in order for an ékphrasis to be effective. Enárgeia involves the experience of sensory evidence not only as a visual experience but as an experience of all five senses, with the sense of touch (the haptic experience) being the second most relevant after the sense of sight.

Some Scholars have equated Epicurus’s phantasía with enárgeia,[29] but there is no need for that, since otherwise all appearances would be understood as infallible mimetic images. Enárgeia isn’t achieved as true evidence if the perceived phantasíai are influenced by other factors, such as variations of air density or the interference of our opinions (dóxa). According to Epicureans, when you see a cow in the distance, you can easily take it for a different animal because of the visual aberration that occurs as a result of the interaction between the atmosphere and the subtle flow of particles detaching from the body and flowing to meet our senses, i.e., the actual phantasíai (DL 10.33).

But the term phantasía also refers to the production of unverified images due to an innate faculty of the mind called epibolḗ. In an article dealing with the reconstruction of the Epicurean canon,[30] I already argued that there is one crucial concept for constructing abstract reasoning that also implies the capacity of creativity and imagination. This concept is called the epibolḗ, which can be translated as «projection». In this reconstruction of the Epicurean Canon, the Letter to Herodotus, which summarizes Epicurean physics, was used as primary source: I arrived at the conclusion that the epibolḗ has a comprehensive function, i.e., it deploys its agency at all cognitive levels, from sensory perception (aísthesis) to the affects (páthē), and the use of the mind.

Despite the brevity of the Letter to Herodotus, it seems that the fourth criterion of truth known as phantastikḗ epibolḗ tēs dianoías (φανταστικὴ ἐπιβολὴ τῆς διανοίας), the «imaginative projection of the mind», is an equivalent expression for a criterion of knowledge that is already present in nuce in the Letter. If there is a specific Epicurean aesthetics related to the idea of phantasía, this term, i.e., the phantastikḗ epibolḗ tēs dianoías, is the most important concept related to it, because it explains the origin of abstract and creative thinking, and yet is still connected to the realm of the senses, since the term phantastikḗ is related to phantasía, i.e., sensitive appearance and imagination in one and the same word.

The focus lies, therefore, on Epicurus’s fourth criterion of knowledge, as popularized by Diogenes Laertius (DL 10.31), i.e., «the inventive projection of the mind» (phantastikḗ epibolḗ tēs dianoías), with which the enárgeia of natural language and the origins of abstract thinking were explained from a materialistic point of view. Diogenes Laertius refers the phantastikḗ epibolḗ tēs dianoías to Epicureans in general terms but he does it while summarizing Epicurus’s Canon, i.e., his central work on the rules of true knowledge and perception.

This fourth criterion may have influenced the late antique discourse on the connection between phantasía, painting, and sophía, and the ekphrastic immersive practices of the Second Sophistic, whose members have also been connected to epicurean thinking – e.g., Philostratus the Elder (c. 190 – c. 230 AD), as explained by Peter Grossardt (2021)[31] or Lucian of Samosata (c. 125 – after 180), as claimed by Peter van Nuffelen (2011).[32] Philostratus’s claim that painting is related to truth and wisdom can’t be explained in Platonic nor Aristotelian terms fully (Phil. sen., Im. 1 and VA 2.22). In this regard, Epicurean materialistic notions of phantasía seem to be much more convincing, as we will see in the next sections.

PHANTASÍA AS MIND PAINTING OF CENTAURS IN PHILOSTRATUS THE ELDER

In Im. 2.3, Philostratus starts his description of the Centaurides with the sentence:

You used to think that the race of centaurs sprang from trees and rocks or, by Zeus, just from mares – the mares which, men say, the son of Ixion covered, the man by whom the centaurs though single creatures came to have their double nature.[33]

Furthermore, in Life of Apollonius of Tyana, we read the following on clouds with different shapes:

The things which are seen in heaven, whenever the clouds are torn away from one another, I mean the centaurs and stag-antelopes, yes, and the wolves too, and the horses, what have you got to say about them? Are we not to regard them as works of imitation? […] these figures flit through the heaven not only without meaning but, so far as providence is concerned, by mere chance; while we who by nature are prone to imitation rearrange and create them in these regular figures.[34]

Here, Philostratus claims that nothing randomly created by nature is to be seen as a work of imitation. Only human beings can connect the dots of random appearances to create different shapes. This is obviously not a metaphysical but a materialistic claim that involves a mental activity, such as the epibolḗ. Images on marble, stumps, or clouds, as well as distorted or anamorphic images or even «composite heads», are suspected of having something to do with Epicurean notions of phantasía, but influential scholars who have dealt with similar pictorial experiences, such as pareidolia[35] or anamorphosis,[36] above all Baltrusaitis,[37] did not necessarily link them with such traditions.

Baltrusaitis dated the first use of the term anamorforsis in the seventeenth century (i.e., first used by Gaspar Schott in Magia universalis, 1657–1669) but other authors, such as Castillo[38] and Maravall[39] see its origin in the art theory and practice of the Renaissance, the latter even linking it with platonic ideas of perception although without specific references.

LITHIC IMAGES FROM PAULUS SILENTIARIUS TO LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI

In his ékphrasis of the Hagia Sophía from the sixth century, Paulus Silentiarius describes ornamental patterns resembling different figures, including, faces, landscapes in marble panels, and even stars produced by the glossy crystals present in the porphyry columns. Flood summarizes this as follows: «the veins of its book-matched marble veneers are said to describe figures resembling drawings or paintings, their veins divided into units of four or eight to form an ornamental pattern (kosmos)».[40]

It is worth it to draw the reader’s attention to the Greek word kósmos, which can be understood as «cosmic order» in a religious context and suits Silentiarius’s poetic order too. This can be interpreted as an anagogical projection similar to the one we’ll find much later in Suger of Saint Denis’s Liber de rebus in administratione sua gestis.[41] However, But Silentiarius invokes not only the Christian divinity but also the geniuses of Antiquity, and above all Homer, to fulfill his ekphrastic mission. He seems to have been aware of Philostratus’s reductio ad absurdum that arises when considering the creation of figures in clouds by the actual hand of the gods instead of as the result of making likeness with the mind (Phil. sen., Im. 1.1; see also Phil. sen. Vita Apollonii 2.22):

For one who wishes a clever theory, the invention of painting belongs to the gods – witness on earth all the designs with which the Seasons paint the meadows, and the manifestations we see in the heavens – but for one who is merely seeking the origin of art, imitation is an invention most ancient and most akin to nature; and wise men invented it, calling it now painting, now plastic art.[42]

In the actual church, the zoomorphic or anthropomorphic qualities of the existing marble patterns were even amplified by properly placed drill holes. We find similar descriptions and cases across the Mediterranean region.[43] Following epicurean gnoseology, human perception and creativity as a natural impulse of the mind (a phantastik epibolḗ) are involved in reading these patterns.

The aesthetic use of natural images in marble was a locus communis in the Middle Ages, especially concerning the inner decoration of churches and mosques.[44] Still, when the image-creating process is detached from its materialistic origins, such appearances become mystic projections. However, Albertus Magnus described an episode of an image appearing on marble plates in the Book of Minerals, linking this phenomenon with the Philostratean and Lucretian tradition of cloud images.

It happened that when one [piece of] marble had been cut in two and the cut slabs were placed side by side, there appeared a most beautiful picture of a king’s head with a crown and a long beard. […] I said that the stone had been hardened from a vapour, and in the middle the vapour had risen up too far because the heat was greater there. […] There is something of the same sort in clouds when they are not disturbed by winds, and all sorts of figures appear in them and continually melt away because of the heat that raises them.[45]

In the mid-fifteenth century, there was already a tradition involving faces, landscapes, and other figures made by Nature, to which human perception and its interpretative capabilities also belong. The phenomenon of lithic images has been studied above all by Baltrusaitis (e.g., 1984). However, it is still an ongoing topic in recent research conducted by Claudia Blümle[46] or Browen Wilson,[47] the latter with a focus on Ligozzi’s engravings for the book Descrizione del sacro monte della vernia (1612) as late as at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

In religious contexts, the connection of the above-mentioned cases of pareidolia to the Epicurean idea of phantasía is most likely replaced by metaphysical interpretations, but when we look at humanists and painters such as Alberti, Botticelli, or Piero di Cosimo, the connection with Epicurean philosophy becomes more evident. Alberti speaks of faces created by Nature in his book On Sculpture:

I think that the arts of those who wish to express and portray in their work a likeness, and the resemblances of subjects created by Nature, originated from this: that they by chance happened to see in some tree stumps, or in clay, or in various other materials, some features which could, with a little work, be transformed into something similar to faces made by Nature.[48]

Alberti explicitly mentions the involvement of perception and human creativity in the transformation of what I would call formes trouvées («found forms») into specific figures. It is possible to explain it in Aristotelian terms, i.e., in the sense of natura potentior ars, but it is also possible to interpret Alberti in Epicurean terms, i.e., as the result of the inventive epibolḗ. Indeed, Alberti made a materialistic point with his personal emblem of a winged eye[49] sprouting nerve fibers as if it touches everything it sees, and as if it sees everything it touches. This emblem embodied the idea of sight as the king of the senses and the ultimate gate to knowledge through sensory-based evidence. Furthermore, with this visual metaphor, Alberti placed the visual arts at the top of knowledge production alongside the sciences.[50]

A more specific connection with the Epicurean idea of phantasía can be found in On painting. Here, Alberti states:

Nature herself seems to delight in painting, for in the cut faces of marble she often paints centaurs and faces of bearded and curly haired kings. It is said, moreover, that in a gem from Phyrrhus all nine Muses, each with her symbol, are to be found clearly painted by Nature.[51]

Here, it is significant not only the role of human perception to complete what Nature has created, but also the details Alberti mentions, such as curly haired kings, the attributes of the nine Muses or the shape of centaurs. This note on complex figurations including hybrid beings (centaurs) is a possible conceptual precursor to Arcimboldo’s allegorical «teste composte» («composite heads»).

PIERO DI COSIMO’S PAINTINGS THE FOREST FIRE (C. 1505), A HUNTING SCENE (1485-1500), AND THE RETURN FROM THE HUNT (1494)

The theory that centaurs didn’t exist, but that their pictures were «painted by Nature» (in the sense of perception processes), comes from Lucretius’s De rerum natura (DRN 4.732–748). Otherwise, Lucretius denies that such hybrids actually existed in the early days of humankind. Centaurs are the result of a perceptive and cognitive process involving the use of a materialistic type of phantasía:

For soothly from no living Centaur is

That phantom gendered, since no breed of beast

Like him was ever; but, when images

Of horse and man by chance have come together,

They easily cohere, as aforesaid,

At once, through subtle nature and fabric thin.[52]

Knowing this, the contradictory use of hybrid beings in Piero di Cosimo’s paintings[53] on the origin of humankind can be read in different ways.[54] Indeed, di Cosimo’s paintings are suitable for putting the scenes represented into the epicurean philosophical context, with significant links to perception theory and the criteria of truth, enhancing the sources, among others, to the fourth book of Lucretius’s De rerum natura and Epicurus’s Letter to Herodotus.

According to Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), the paintings were produced for the wool merchant and Medici enemy Francesco del Pugliese (1458–1519) who probably used them as decorative spalliera (decorated backboard mounted on a wall) for one room in his Florentine palace. It is not known for sure if Francesco del Pugliese was a studioso of epicurean philosophy, as other contemporary humanists were, such as the members of the humanist circle around Bartolomeo Scala (1430–1497, Chancellor of Florence from 1465 to 1497). According to Alison Brown, Scala was a keen student of Lucretius’s didactic poem, as was Michele Marullo (1453–1500) and Scala’s successor, Marcello Adriani (1464–1521).[55] If del Pugliese also studied the Lucretian poem, this would have happened before he became a convinced supporter of the Dominican fundamentalist Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498).

In any case, the paintings that di Cosimo carried out for del Pugliese seem to serve an epicurean-coded visual language that legitimates asking whether the enigmatic hybrid figures represented in them were conceived following Epicurus’s and Lucretius’s teachings. If so, then they can only exist under the following circumstances:

a) As erroneous perceptions due to atmospheric conditions or false opinion (dóxa),

b) As re-combinations of images created in dreams or by some internal interference,

c) As random images seen on marbles, stumps, or clouds that people, with the help of the phantastikḗ epibolḗ tēs dianoías, transform into figures.

An illustrative example of a possible phantasía misconception is the enigmatic representation of a hog and a deer with human faces in The Forest Fire (c. 1505). This phenomenon can be seen either as the result of a perception contaminated by dóxa – since it is tempting to see satyr heads in them – or as a playful allusion to the well-known verse where Horace identifies himself with an Epicuri de grege porcum («a hog from Epicurus’s herd», cf. Horace, Ep. 1.4, 16), i.e., as a literary reference motivated by previous knowledge. Also, Lucretius mentions that humankind «lived wandering around like wild animals» (DRN 5.932: volgivago vitam tractabant more ferarum).

However, the infra-red reflectograms of the deer and the hog with human faces, published by the Ashmolean Museum,[56] proved that the supposed satyr heads were added later, once the painting was done. Even the ears, which seem to be part of the satyr face, were actually just part of the underlying hog. This is an important piece of information that leads to question the human faculty of phantasía in terms of interpreting art: art historians were actually seeing something that wasn’t there. Could this painting be a phantasía-experiment conceived by Piero di Cosimo to activate the Epicurean sensory agency inherent in the picture? In any case, the superimposed faces led to the false assumption that di Cosimo depicted hybrid beings from the beginning.

Also, in the painting A Hunting Scene (1485-1500), a foreshortened horse is being tamed or hunted by a naked man and, at the same time, observed by one of the hybrids on the left side of the image. The perspective of this scene leads to what is happening in the background, where two centaurs are hauling their prey. Can this scene be read in terms of Epicurean phantasía?

The unusually foreshortened composition of man and horse becomes central since it avoids any canonical representation of a horse or a man, idealized or naturalistic. It doesn’t even resemble a wild horse, such as the kind depicted by Hans Baldung Grien three decades later. Instead, the struggling man-animal composition resembles a hybrid, boosted considerably by perspective and the distance vantage point of the beholder. Indeed, according to Lucretius (DRN 4.732–748), when images of humans and horses meet in the atmosphere, they may stick together finely woven, producing the vision of a centaur. This poses the question of whether Piero di Cosimo is applying the perceptual theory of phantasía (in terms of a perception affected by external factors) to demonstrate how the belief in hybrids such as centaurs could have started in the first place.

On the right side of the image, the man holding a bear is also looking in this direction. He carries an animal skin with two holes on his back, probably emulating a mask to create a deceptive image or eídōlon, perhaps to disguise himself as an animal to feint his potential prey.

In The Return from the Hunt (1494), the marble or wood patterns on the right side of the canvas evoke once again Lucretius’s account of the origin of centaur images (DRN 4.732–748) along with the tradition of lithic images discussed above. Furthermore, two women sitting on a boat made of reeds are looking at a mask, one probably made of animal skin. This image is most likely a metaphor for the theory of simulacra, which Lucretius expounds with a very similar metaphor: simulacra (gr. eídōla) are the thin atomic skins detached from their original bodies, flowing outward and interacting with the senses to convey a likeness of the object from which they proceed. (Lucretius, DRN 4.110-217).

In this sense, simulacra operate at the first level of sensory perception (aísthesis) and should, therefore, be considered part of the cognitive processes related to the construction of epicurean phantasía. The latter sums up sensorial appearance and ‘intuitive’ imagination (i.e., ‘projective’ as related to epibolḗ) in the same word. Di Cosimo may have produced a pictorial ground for discussions on the role of perception and mental projection in creating «fantastic» images, as it also suits the illusion of ancient wildness in the minds of early modern humanists.

ALBRECHT DÜRER’S ENGRAVING NEMESIS

Images created by chance on clouds, tree stumps, and marble stones are not created by the gods, according to the Epicurean tradition as formulated by Philostratus the Elder at the beginning of Imagines: It’s us that do rearrange those random patterns to create familiar forms based on prolḗpseis, i.e., evidence-based concepts. This is basically what happens in Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Nemesis.

Felix Thürlemann[57] pointed to a forgotten primary Greek source behind this image,[58] i.e., Pausanias’s account of a sculpture that was meant to serve as a trophy commemorating the victory of the Persians over the Greeks; but since the Persians were finally defeated and the marble piece hadn’t been carved yet, Phidias or his disciple Agorakritos (according to Paus. Graec. 1.33, 2-8; cf. Ant. Graeca 16.224) transformed the trophy into a Nemesis, the personification of divine retribution. However, there is another, long ignored Greek source that explains the use of many attributes present in both Albrecht Dürer’s Nemesis and Angelo Poliziano’s poem Manto that supposedly influenced Dürer’s design: Mesomedes of Crete’s Hymn to Nemesis. This poem is the most complete description of an ancient Nemesis image we have.

There is an insightful ekphrastic connection between Dürer’s engraving and Mesomede’s poem but we are interested in a meaningful detail here. On the left side of Dürer’s picture, where the clouds meet Nemesis’s drapery, there is a pareidolia that recalls the wavelike images that marble plates sometimes unveil to humanity’s imagination. According to Felix Thürlemann,[59] Albrecht Dürer perceived himself as a new Phidias who used the Nemesis engraving to articulate an artistic statement about the awareness of the tradition he was stepping into.

From this perspective, the Fratzen («grotesque faces») hidden between the clouds and the drapery behind Nemesis could be an implicit quotation of the Epicurean phantasía since clouds, drapery, and marble are contextually and thematically interwoven in this piece. The conscious use of pareidolia by Dürer in this engraving and other drawings (e.g., cushions and clouds)[60] also reveals his awareness of Philostratus’ defense of painting as a contributor to wisdom (sophía) at the same level as poetry and philosophy.[61]

HANS BALDUNG GRIEN’S THE CREATION OF THE MEN AND ANIMALS (1532)

Traces of epicurean ideas of phantasía can be found not only in Dürer’s works. Indeed, his disciple Hans Baldung Grien, who was most likely connected to Epicurean Lutherans in Strasbourg[62], depicted the creation of Adam, Eve, and the animals as a mímesis-phantasía event (The Creation of the Men and Animals, 1532): Adam visually emerges of a marble stone before the astonished eyes of God, who also seems to have created a fantastic being of a kind: a unicorn. The scene is intriguing since, according to the Bible, Adam didn’t emerge from a marble stone.

The pictorial scene echoes Lucretian perceptual notion of how images of centaurs came to life (Lucr. DRN 4.732-748). Furthermore, in Epicurean terms, the presence of a being that – despite the medieval bestiary literature – doesn’t exist outside our inventive imagination, i.e., a unicorn among the other animals created by the Lord, would theoretically question the very existence of God outside our imagination, which is an Epicurean assumption too.[63] Epicurus and Lucretius avoid to speak in terms of atheism only claiming that gods are real as a steam of atoms that has got into our minds, similar to a dream of the imagination but, in the end, attributing them, if they exist, to have a tranquil and undisturbed existence beyond human concerns (Lucr. DRN 1.44-49).

The busy god depicted by Hans Baldung Grien looks as unreal as the unicorn he presumably has created, subtly sharpening the Epicurean idea of divinity as a possible human projection.

EPICUREAN PHANTASÍA AND NATURAL SCIENCES

The ekphrastic tradition also shaped the visual culture of the early modern natural sciences. Microcosmic systems, i.e., ecosystems that are not visible without the use of instruments or theories, such as anatomical or atomic environments, are an excellent example of the incidence of the Epicurean phantastikḗ epibolḗ tēs dianoías in the creation of the images needed to explain some phenomena.

There is one exceptional case of phantasía-based ekphrastic tradition in Andreas Vesalius’s anatomical masterpiece De humanis corporis fabrica (1543). Vesalius illuminated the first letter of his book with the vivisection of a boar carried out by a group of cupids. This scene corresponds with the famous anatomical experiment, as vividly described by Roman physician Galen in De praecognitione (Gal. Praecog. 5.9-21; cf. Gal. AA 11.4 and 11; Gal. UP 16.4). With this experiment, Galen aimed to convince his detractors of the crucial role of vivisection in understanding how the body works—in this case, how the recurrent laryngeal nerve contributes to creating voice.

Description and visual motif became programmatic for the design of the more famous anatomical plates of a standing human body in different poses. Even if the vivisection of a boar can be taken as accurate, drawing vivisections of the human body relies on imaginative projections of the mind, in this case, inspired by Galen’s ékphrasis of a pig’s vivisection, to afford sensuous evidence about the inner functions of the body.

Seemingly unexplainable singularities are also suitable for the use of a materialistic, i.e., Epicurean type of phantasía. Those singularities usually have to do with human-made or natural catastrophes but also with the existence of real or imagined monsters – fantastic beings (understood as a deviation of the standards of nature). A good example is the ekphrastic explanation of the spontaneous origin of forest fires, as described by Lucretius (DRN 2.897–900; 5.1096–1100) and painted by Piero di Cosimo in The Forest Fire (c. 1505). In this case, the «singularity» connects with the microcosmic level of explanation.

Lucretius justifies the spontaneous emergence of fire due to the very structure and behavior of atoms in dry treetops when the wind provokes friction in them. Piero di Cosimo captures this very idea by dramatizing the first stage of a forest fire without any apparent external factor, such as lightning or human agency. For achieving this kind of conclusion, the use of the fourth criterion of knowledge, the phantastikḗ epibolḗ tēs diánoias, is a requirement since even if this phenomenon could have been observed, the explanation given by Lucretius concerns the abstract level of thinking about the «invisible structure of the visible world», in words of Clay.[64]

ARCIMBOLDO AND EPICUREAN PHANTASÍA

Finally, Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s «teste composte» («composite heads») from the mid-sixteenth century are also interesting in the context of a possible Epicurean informed phantasía. There is a connection between Arcimboldo’s «composite head» and the ancient enárgeia tradition. Ekphrastic poems by Giovanni Battista Fonteo confirm the allegorical intention behind the first versions of Seasons and Elements. Arcimboldo himself follows a description from Porpertius’ elegy to Vertumnus (Pr. 4.2) for the allegorical portrait of Rudolf II as the god of seasons and change. He even wrote an explanatory poem whose first words are quite similar to Vincenzo Catari’s translation of Propertius’s mentioned elegy.[65]

Literary descriptions are used to contextualize the different vegetables and fruits in relation to the whole picture deploying a symbolical political meaning on the start of a new golden age based on a special type of analogy or proportion principle that includes something new: a serious joke as aesthetical participation of the beholder. Indeed, the beholder can recognize both the parts and the whole at the same time being both tangible truths within the traditional code of an imperial portrait. Whether intended or not, the epicurean notion of phantasía would underscore the idea of Rudolf’s «composite head» as a serious joke.

As for the Four Elements paintings, these not only unite a perfect mimesis of nature with a parallel artistic reality in one bold pictorial act, but also visualize the cosmogony of Empedocles, on which Epicurus’s atomistic tradition also relies. In fact, the Four Elements series of paintings connects the «true to nature» with the «true to art», inducing perception and cognition processes associated with materialistic traditions and allegorical practices.

Concerning the painting Earth, Norbert Schneider[66] wrote in Die antiklassiche Kunst:

Der Eindruck von Haaren entsteht durch die herausstakenden Geweihe der Hirsche und das Gehörn von Widdern. Nur einmal vertritt ein tierisches Körperteil das analoge eines Menschen: so muss der Elefant, dessen Rüssel in die Wangenformation eingeschmiegt ist, dem Ohr der Personifikation Erde seines leihen. Der Gesamteindruck Gesicht ist nur von einer Ansicht aus möglich.[67]

The fact that this picture is a compositum capable of creating a new visual identity, i.e., a human head with a specific physiognomy – and this just from one specific vantage point –, leads to think that Arcimboldo was, at the very least, familiar with Lucretius’s poem, especially regarding the idea of the random creation of compound corpora out of primordial bodies. Connecting these pictures with the Lucretian theory of dreams is tantalizing. A contemporary approach can be found in the commentary written by Gregorio Comanini, Il Figino (from 1592), where the commentator states that Arcimboldo’s capriccio is an imitatione fantastica in the sense that Arcimboldo’s purpose is to recompose, with the help of the imagination, what is mediated by the senses – a very Epicurean thought.

CONCLUSIONS

In this explorative paper, I have reviewed Epicurean sensory and epistemic notions of phantasía that may have been relevant in the arts of the early modern period. The search for evidence starts in ancient rhetoric, especially concerning the practice of ékphrasis and the materialistic shaped notion of enárgeia that permeates Renaissance artistic practices through the progymnasmatic ekphrasis tradition and Alberti’s general recommendation for artists to look for inspiration in the vivid texts of the ancient poets (Della pittura 3.53). To a less rhetorical context belongs the conscious development of optical illusions as visual compounds, partly theorized by Alberti in the tradition of the Epicurean dóxa and phantasía theories, and transformed into spectacular ‘composite heads’ by Arcimboldo a couple of centuries later.

Traces of Epicurean ideas of phantasía can be found north of the Alps long before Arcimboldo. Those were not limited to Dürer’s awareness of the Philostratian notion of painting as a participant of sophía. Indeed, Hans Baldung Grien probably contributed to spreading a pictorial program shaped by Epicurean ideas under Lutheran intellectual circles.

On a philosophical level, the most mesmerizing tradition concerns, in my opinion, the fourth Epicurean criterion of truth, phantastikḗ epibolḗ tēs diánoias, probably known to early modern scholars through Ambrosio Traversari’s translation of Diogenes Laertius’s Lives and Opinions of Famous Philosophers as «phantasticos intuitus mentis» (gr. phantastikḗ epibolḗ tēs diánoias).

This criterion was adduced for abstract and imaginative thinking. Even if much more research is needed on this topic to achieve evidence, it can be assumed that the phantastikḗ epibolḗ tēs diánoias, or a similar materialistic criterion of truth, could have built the epistemological fundament for the imaginary creation of fantastic beings such as centaurs or unicorns, being the first of them a classical topos of Epicurean perception and dream theories, substantially passed down by authors of the second Sophistic such as Philostratus the Elder or Lucian, and popularized among Renaissance artist by Humanists, such as Ambrosio Traversari and Leon Battista Alberti.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ARMISEN MIREILLE: «La notion d’imagination chez les Anciens: I – Les philosophes», Pallas 26, 1979, pp. 11-51; «La notion d’imagination chez les Anciens: II – La rhétorique», Pallas, 27, 1980, pp. 3–37.

BALTRUSAITIS JURGI: Imaginäre Realitäten. Fiktion und Illusion als produktive Kraft, Köln 1984.

BELLARDI WERNER: Die Geschichte der ‘Christlichen Gemeinschaft’ in Strassburg (1546/1550), in Quellen und Forschungen zur Reformationsgeschichte, 18, 1934.

BERTOLINI LUCIA: Grecus sapor. tramiti di presenze greche in Leon Battista Alberti, Rome: Bulzoni, 1998.

BLÜMLE CLAUDIA: «Mineralischer Sturm. Steinbilder und Landschaftsmalerei», in Werner Busch, Oliver Jehle (ed.), Vermessen: Landschaft und Ungegenständlichkeit, Zürich 2007, pp. 151-164.

BREDEKAMP HORST: Der Bildakt, Berlin: Wagenbach, 2015

BROWN, ALISON: «Lucretius and the Epicureans in the Social and Political Context of Renaissance Florence», I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 9, 2001, pp. 11–62.

CAPRETTI ELENA, FORLANI TEMPESTI ANNA, PADOVANI SERENA, PARENTI DANIELA (eds.): Piero di Cosimo, 1462–1522: pittore eccentrico fra Rinascimento e Maniera. Exh. cat., Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, 2015.

CASTILLO DAVID: (A)wry Views: Anamorphosis, Cervantes and the Early Picaresque, Purdue University Press, 2001.

CID MARCIO: La filosofía epicúrea como psicoterapia integral, Universitat de Barcelona 2016. (Dissertation)

CLAY DISKIN: Paradosis and Suvival. Three Chapters in the History of Epicurean Philosophy, Ann Harbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1998.

ECO UMBERTO: Kunst und Schönheit im Mittelalter, München: dtv 1993.

FARINELLA VINCENZO: «‘La costruzione di un edificio’ di Piero Di Cosimo a Sarasota. Fantasia architettonica o invenzione lucreziana?», Università di Pisa, May 19, 2015 (talk)

FILIPPI ELENA: «La Nemesi düreriana: Un manifesto della Translatio artium verso il Nord», in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 84/1, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1515/ZKG-2021-1001.

FLOOD FINBARR BARRY: «‘God’s Wonder’: Marble as Medium and the Natural Image in Mosques and Modernism», West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 23/2, 2016.

GOTTLIEB ANTHONY: The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance, New York-London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000.

GRAHAM ALLISON: «Epicureanism and Cynicism in Lucian», in Pseudo-Dionysius, Vol. XVIII, March, 2016, pp. 41-48.

GREENBLATT STEVEN: The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, London-New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.

GROSSARDT PETER: «Zur Frage nach dem Umfang und der Bedeutung der Hinweise auf die Philosophie Epikurs in Flavius Philostrats Vita Apollonii und Heroikos. Eine Entgegnung auf die ‚Evaluation‘ von Gerard Boter», in Würzburger Jahrbücher, 2021, pp. 193–242.

HOWARD JONES: The Epicurean Tradition, London/New York, 1989.

KAISER CHRISTIAN (ed.): Epikur im Lateinischen Mittelalter: Mit einer kritischen Edition ees X. Buches eer Vitae Philosophorum ees Diogenes Laertios in der Lateinischen Übersetzung von Ambrogio Traversari, Brepols 2019.

KAUFFMANN HANS: Dürers Nemesis, Berlin: De Gruyter, 1951.

KONSTAN DAVID: «Epicurean Phantasia», ΠΗΓΗ/FONS 5/1, 2020, pp. 1–18.

LAERTIUS DIOGENES: Lives of Eminent Philosophers, ed. by Tiziano Dorandi, Cambridge University Press, 2017.

MARAVALL JOSÉ ANTONIO: La cultura del Barroco. Análisis de una estructura histórica, Barcelona: Ariel, 1980.

MCLAUGHLIN MARTIN: «Alberti and the Classical Canon», in Carlo Caruso & Andrew Laird (ed.): Italy and the Classical Tradition Language, Thought and Poetry 1300-1600, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013, pp. 73–100.

MÉNDEZ SIGMUND: Classical Sources on phantasía in Pomponius Gauricus’ De Sculptura, Humanitas 65, 2013, pp. 141-159.

MILLER MICHAEL: «Epicureanism in Renaissance Thought and Art: Piero di Cosimo’s Paintings on the Life of Early Man», American Philological Society Annual Meeting, Boston, January 2005 (talk)

MUÑOZ MORCILLO JESÚS: Renaissance der Ekphrasis – Ekphrasis der Renaissance, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024.

MUÑOZ MORCILLO JESÚS: «El Kanón de Epicuro en la Epístola a Heródoto», Cuadernos de Filología Clásica. Estudios griegos e indoeuropeos 28, 2018, pp. 141-157.

NIEBELSKA-RAJCA BARBARA: «The Poetics of Phantasia: Some Remarks on the Renaissance Concepts of Imagination and ‘Fantastic Imitation’», in: Zagadnienia Rodzajów Literackich LXI/1, 2018, pp. 37–51.

NUFFELEN PETER VAN: «Lucian, Epicureanism and strategies of satire», in: Peter van Nuffelen (eds.), Rethinking the Gods, Cambridge University Press, pp. 179-199.

OPPERMANN HANS: «Epikurs Erkenntnistheorie», Das humanistische Gymnasium 41, 1930, pp. 193-199.

PANOFSKY ERWIN: «Virgo & Victrix, a note on Dürer’s Nemesis», in Carl Zigrosser (ed.), Prints, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962, pp. 13–38.

PANOFSKY ERWIN: Albrecht Dürer, Princeton University Press, 1948.

PANOFSKY ERWIN: «The Early History of Man in a Cycle of Paintings by Piero di Cosimo», in Journal of the Warburg Institute 1, July 1937, pp. 24–30.

PALMER, ADA: Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance, Cambridge, Mass., 2014.

PARISET FRANÇOIS GEORGES: «L’épicurien et l’art, le cas de Baldung Grien», in Marc Lienhard (ed.), Croyants et sceptiques au XVIe siècle: le dossier des “Epicuriens”: actes. Librairie ISTRA, 1981.

PATILLON MICHEL, GIANCARLO BOLOGNESI (eds.): Aelius Théon. Progymnásmata, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1997.

PFISTERER ULRICH: «‚Soweit die Flügel meines Auges tragen‘. Leon Battista Albertis Imprese und Selbstbildnis», in Mitteilungen des kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 42, 1998, pp. 203–251.

PLETT HEINRICH F.: Enargeia in Classical Antiquity and the Early Modern Age, International Studies in the History of Rhetoric, vol. 4, Leiden-Boston: Brill 2012.

POCHAT GÖTZ: «Rhetorik und bildende Kunst in der Renaissance», in Heinrich F. Plett (ed.), Renaissance-Rhetorik, Berlin-New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1993.

RATH MARKUS: «Albertis Tastauge. Neue Betrachtung eines Emblems visueller Theorie», in kunsttexte.de, 1, 2009, pp. 1–7.

REEVE MICHAEL D.: «The Italian Tradition of Lucretius revisited», Aevum 79/1, 2005, pp. 115–164.

REEVE MICHAEL D.: «The Italian Tradition of Lucretius», Italia medioevale e umanistica, 23, 1980, pp. 27–46.

ROSEN VALESKA VON: «Die Enargeia des Gemäldes. Zu einem vergessenen Inhalt des Ut-pictura-poesis und seiner Relevanz für das cinquecenteske Bildkonzept», in Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft, 27, 2000, pp. 171-208.

RUDOLPH KELLI: «Sight and the Presocratics: Approaches to Visual Perception in Early Greek Philosophy», in: Michael Squire (ed.), Sight and the Ancient Senses. The Senses in Antiquity, Routledge 2015, pp. 36-53.

RUMMEL ERIKA: The Confessionalization of Humanism in Reformation Germany, Oxford University Press, 2000.

SCHNEIDER NORBERT: Die antiklassische Kunst. Malerei des Manierismus in Italien, Münster: LIT Verlag, 2012.

SHEPPARD ANNE: The Poetics of Phantasia. Imagination in Ancient Aesthetics, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.

SILVERMAN ALLAN: «Plato on ‘Phantasia’», in Classical Antiquity, 10/1, 1991, pp. 123–147. https://doi.org/10.2307/25010944

THÜRLEMANN FELIX: Dürers doppelter Blick, Universitätsverlag Konstanz 2008.

THÜRLEMANN FELIX: «Im Schlepptau des großen Glücks: die doppelte Mimesis bei Albrecht Dürer», in Manier – Manieren – Manierismen, 2003, pp. 17–39.

WHISTLER CATHERINE, DAVID BOMFORD: «The Forest Fire by Piero di Cosimo», Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 1999.

WILSON CATHERINE: Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008.

WILSON BRONWEN: «Lithic Images, Jacopo Ligozzi, and the Descrizione del Sacro Monte della Vernia (1612)», in: Motion: Transformation, CIHA 2019, Bononia University Press, 2021, pp. 345-52.

WIRTH JEAN: «Hans Baldung Grien et les dissidents strasbourgeois», in Marc Lienhard (ed.), Croyants et sceptiques au XVIe siècle: le dossier des “Epicuriens”: actes, Librairie ISTRA (1981)

ZANKER GRAHAM: «Enargeia in der antiken Poesiekritik», in Rheinisches Museum für Philologie CXXIV, 1981, pp. 297–311.

ZANKER GRAHAM: «Heinrich F. Plett, Enargeia in Classical Antiquity and the Early Modern Age: The Aesthetics of Evidence, International Studies in the History of Rhetoric 4. Leiden – Boston 2012: Brill. Pp. xii +240. ISBN 978-90-04-22702-6», The Ancient History Bulletin Online Reviews 3, 2013, pp. 7–9.