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Apollo?

What a iconographer does can perhaps best be shown using an example from practice. During the year 2000 partners of Mnemosyne devoted part of their time on a project of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague, The Netherlands (The Dutch National Library). The Koninklijke Bibliotheek has published their illuminated manuscript on the web (opens a new browser window). Our effort was iconographic, we assigned Iconclass codes to the illuminations and made captions to go with the illuminations.

Manuscript 66 B 13 of the Koninklijke Biliotheek contains Valerius Maximus' "Facta et Dicta Memorabilia". Apart from the rendition of the canonical text of Valerius Maximus, this manuscript contains extensive commentaries. The first illuminated page contains an interesting image (Fig. 1 on the right) that sofar was catalogued as Apollo?; the questionmark indicating that the cataloguer was not really sure about this interpretation.

That Apollo? is not the whole story depicted here is clear from the start: we see two persons embracing (meeting), soldiers, and a person on a horse. The illumination is damaged, making the identification of the scene troublesome. A name, still visible as a black spot with some traces of gold near the center, that was used to give a hint of the subject of the scene, can not be deciphered. Obviously, it was the leftmost figure, with the radiation around the head (Apollo the sun god), that must have triggered the interpretation of Apollo? However, looking at the depicted person, we think that it is the depiction of a woman. Furthermore, the starry sky behind her usually suggests a nocturnal scene. The man engaged in the embrace clearly holds a ring, reinforcing the idea of an embracing couple.

In the text of Valerius Maximus there are several references to Apollo. But before we have a look at them, we will take a closer look at the arrangement of the scene of Apollo? within the framework of the whole illumination.

Reading the image
The illumination has a central block of four layers consisting of three horizontal layers of images and a fourth horizontal layer with text. Around this central part of the illumination there is a sequence of smaller scenes.

The first horizontal layer of the central block depicts a so-called dedication scene: Simon de Hesdin presents his translation of the "Facta et dicta memorabilia" by Valerius Maximus to Charles V, King of France.

The second horizontal layer of the central block contains three scenes. They are, from left to right:

• Ten sons of leading Romans are sent to Etruria to be instructed in religious ceremonial
• Pontifex Maximus Metellus forbids Consul Postumius, who wanted to leave Rome on a military campaign to Africa, to abandon his religious duties
• The sacking of a city (Rome?)

The third horizontal layer of the central block consists, from a visual point of view, of two parts. The part on the left depicts Numa Pompilius, King of Rome, compelling the people to observe religious ordinances. The part on the right depicts several scenes:

• Jehoiachin, king of Judah, standing at the barred window of his prison in Babylon, hears Ezekiel prophesying outside
• The execution of Publicius Malleolus; after having killed his mother, he is sewed into a sack and thrown into the sea (A variant of the death of Marcus Atilius)
• The death of M. Atilius Regulus: he is enclosed in a nail-studded barrel by the Carthaginians

The remainder of the illuminations are placed around this central block, and are to be 'read' clockwise from the top at the right. They depict:

• Two scenes devoed to the cult of Hercules: Hercules and Appius (Appius Claudius Caecus) and after neglecting the celebration of Hercules' sacrifices, all adult members of the Potitii are killed and Appius loses his sight
• The scene we are interested in: Apollo?
• Tiberius Gracchus: Three ravens dropping a roof tile in front of the feet of Tiberius Gracchus
• Three scenes devoted to Lucius Aemilius Paul(l)us:
  • Lucius Aemilius Paulus before the senate
  • Lucius Aemilius Paulus and his daughter Tertia with a dead dog
  • The battle between Lucius Aemilius Paulus and Perseus, King of Macedonia; the imprisonment of Perseus
• Three scenes devoted to Servius Tullius:
  • While the young Servius Tullius, son of a slave, is asleep in the palace, his head catches fire, but it does not harm him
  • Tanaquil, wife of Ancus Marcius, adopts Servius Tullius
  • The coronation of Servius Tullius

What is interesting to note is that, if we stick to this reading of the images: central block left to right, top to bottom, then the scenes around that block, read clockwise starting from the top at the right, adhere to the sequence of paragraphs in the Valerius Maximus text:

The table suggests that our scene `Apollo?' must be located in Valerius Maximus somewhere between the paragraphs 1.1.17 and 1.4.2. In our next paragraph, we use an electronic version of Valerius Maximus published on the web to check our hypotheses.

An electronic text of Valerius Maximus
Plenty of electronic renditions of Valerius Maximus on the Web. We have worked with the text provided by the Georg Mason University, Virginia, USA. For convenience we downloaded the files, arranged in nine parts, on a local system.

The first thing we did was to see how many times, and where, the name Apollo appeared in the texts. For this we ran a simple grep on the nine files. The string Apollo, or to be precise the string "apollo" because we did a case-insensitive search, appears in five of the nine books of Valerius Maximus: 1, 5, 6, 7, and 9. Interestingly enough, the string appears in the first book of Valerius Maximus in paragraph 1.1.18, that is directly after the paragraph that addresses the cult of Hercules, the topic of the two previous scenes. However the text bears no apparent relation with our scene.

A quick scan of the other paragraphs in the books 5, 6, 7, and 9, learns that none of these passages seems related to our scene.

The new interpretation
Some old-fashioned reading to the rescue. We sat down with D. Wardle's translation of the first book of Valerius Maximus: "Memorable Deeds and Sayings, Book I, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998, and started reading while keeping in mind the following words: encounter between a man and a woman, ring, starry sky (night?), outside / countryside.

Starting with paragraph 1.1.18 we read about numerous "deeds on religion neglected". In the first paragraph of chapter 1.2, entitled "On pretended worship", we read the following: "(1.2.1) Numa Pompilius, in order to bind the Roman people to the sacred rites, wanted it to seem that he had meetings at night with the goddess Egeria and that on her instructions he was introducing the rites which would be most acceptable to the immortal gods." [Wardle, o.c., p. 38]

In his commentary on this paragraph Wardle writes the following:

"... wanted it to seem that he had meetings at night with the goddess Egeria and that on her instructions he was introducing the rites which would be most acceptable to the immortal gods. In essence Nepotianus has the same story. ... Egeria was a springgoddess from Aricia (e.g. Virg. Aen. 7. 763) with whom Numa consorted in the grove of the Camenae, outside the Porta Capena at the southern extremity of the CAelian hill. In some versions she was Numa's first wife (Livy 1.21.3, Ovid, Fasti 2.262, [Aur. Vict.] DVI 3.2; for the tradition see N. Lambardi, Prometheus , 14 (1988), 247-252."

This passage satifies almost all of the elements of our image: encounter between man and woman, night, outside, and, in the case of a marriage, the ring. Therefore, we can safely state that the scene depicted here is the meeting (marriage) of Numa Pompilius and Egeria (Valerius Maximus, 1.2.1).

What does this small example from practice learn us about iconography? First of all that a detailed inventory of the things and doings depicted on an image is important. Furthermore, that texts that shine light on what is depicted on an image are invaluable. The setting of an image, it's context, is very important. Here it was the sequence the image Apollo? is part of, a sequence reflecting the textual sequence of Valerius Maximus, that gave us a clue where to search for an illuminating text.

This small scene is also important in a broader context. It seems that someone must have made the association between the nightly meetings of Numa Pompilius an Egeria and the concept of marriage, because the embrace (kiss) and the ring are elements that belong to the context of marriage.

The context of marriage reappears when we study the interpretations of the famous Arnolfini portrait by Jan van Eyck.

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