Romance Quarterly
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Early modern clouds and the poetics of meteorology: An Introduction
Jeffrey N. Peters & Katharina N. Piechocki
To cite this article: Jeffrey N. Peters & Katharina N. Piechocki (2021): Early modern clouds and the poetics of meteorology: An Introduction, Romance Quarterly, DOI: 10.1080/08831157.2021.1900690 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/08831157.2021.1900690
Published online: 08 Apr 2021.
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Early modern clouds and the poetics of meteorology: An Introduction
Jeffrey N. Petersa and Katharina N. Piechockib aFrench and Francophone Studies, Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, USA; bDepartment of Comparative Literature, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
ABSTRACT KEYWORDS Since antiquity, philosophers and poets have understood clouds to be Clouds; poetics; cosmology; principles of generation and procreation. They can turn, Aristophanes tells gender; mediation us, “into anything they want.” They are bound up with the act of beget- ting and giving birth, of bringing into being the new – hollow vessels, as Seneca would later put it, with solid walls. And yet the creative force of clouds is a strange, even counterintuitive, one: what they generate and bring forth is often evanescent, incorporeal, and unsubstantial. In this essay, we explore a poetics of clouds as a site of tension between the empty and the procreative, the material and the immaterial, the percep- tible and the imperceptible. Clouds, we suggest, are instances of convey- ance whose power of mediation gives shape to the unsayable, the unrepresentable, and the apparently unknowable. Their meteorological trickery draws our attention to the infinity of the cosmos by obscuring it. Their rhetorical obfuscations – what medieval tradition called the integu- mentum – draw us into their truths by turning us seductively away from them. Expressions of both cosmological and poetic becoming, clouds are therefore inseparable from epistemological and esthetic considerations of the ways meaning and knowledge are at once hidden and revealed.
Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel? Polonius: By th’mass, and ‘tis like a camel indeed. Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel. Polonius: It is backed like a weasel. Hamlet: Or like a whale? Polonius: Very like a whale. (Shakespeare 180–81) Clouds, as Hamlet knew, are tricky things. In their fertile evanescence, they are both full and empty, many and none. They are anything we can imagine, pregnant with possibility, and noth- ing at all, hollow and shifting, if not shifty, like the fawning sycophant Polonius. They have shape, but are shapeless. They are material, but of vaporous concoction. They are bodies without surface, forms without line. They are fleeting, sinuous, and transient, and for these reasons, have often been associated with an esthetics of the baroque. As Hubert Damisch put it in a 1972 book which no student of clouds can today ignore, Italian painting of the early sixteenth century dis- solved the formal enclosures of orthogonal space and bathed them in the painterly magic of light (4–5). Following Heinrich Wolfflin€ ’s influential account, Damisch identifies the characteristic
CONTACT Jeffrey N. Peters [email protected] French and Francophone Studies, Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University of Kentucky, 1055 Patterson Office Tower, Lexington, KY 40506-0027, USA; Katharina N. Piechocki [email protected] Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University, Dana- Palmer House, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. ß 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC 2 J. N. PETERS AND K. N. PIECHOCKI indeterminacy of clouds as precisely the visual principle that draws the eye beyond the bounda- ries of linear perspective toward the infinite, toward that which exceeds the permanence and solidity of shape (145–48). In our introduction to this two-volume special issue of Romance Quarterly devoted to early modern clouds, we are especially interested in tracing the tension exemplified by Hamlet’s words. If they are often the condition and the origin of imagination, clouds are also insubstantial and formless, without being of their own. As Erasmus wrote of Durer€ and with reference to Pliny’s praise of the painter Apelles, clouds challenge the very act of painting. A second Apelles, Erasmus contends, Durer€ “painted what cannot be painted: even clouds on a wall” (Panofsky 1951, 36). Clouds, in fact, have the unique capacity to enable perspectival illusion while, at the same time, resisting representation itself. As such, early modern clouds gesture, the essays con- tained in this double issue show, to wider and more intricate esthetic and cosmological concerns. Not surprisingly, we may discern the origins of these cloud concerns in antiquity. In a passage that readily brings to mind Hamlet’s dialogue with Polonius, Aristophanes’s Clouds stages a dis- cussion between Socrates, the head of a sophistic educational institution, and Strepsiades, a wan- nabe rhetorician, on the topic of clouds. Socrates asks Strepsiades, if he has “ever looked up and seen a cloud resembling a centaur, or a leopard, or a wolf, or a bull.” Strepsiades indeed has, and Socrates goes on to explain: “Clouds turn into [gignontai] anything they want” (57). Aristophanes’s Clouds have the agency to take on any shape they want, thus stimulating and manipulating the beholder’s imagination. Situated halfway between heaven and earth, clouds also serve as powerful mediators between the macrocosm and microcosm: for Socrates, Clouds (Nephelai) occupy the intermediate position between “Void (Ch aos)” and “Tongue (Glotta)” (71). These three building blocks—Chaos, Clouds, Tongue—are powerful enough, Socrates argues, to be elevated to a new belief system and to supplant the traditional gods. It is as though Socrates’s clouds, strategically positioned between chaos and the tongue, had the poetic force to transform the unruly and uninformed (Ch aos) into entities articulated by the tongue (Glotta). Clouds are not only inextricably bound up with creativity—they stand for the poetic process itself.
Machinic generation and the gender of clouds The ancient Greek word for “cloud,” m euo1 (nephos), is inextricably tied not only to Aristophanes’s ancient comedy, in which Clouds (Nephelai) are introduced as a female chorus, but also to the mythological figure Nephele, Athamas’s wife. Apollonius Rhodius, Hyginus, Ovid, and several other ancient writers tell the story of Nepheles’s children, Helle and Phrixos, who were forced to flee the ire of Athamas’s second wife, Ino—“veiled in clouds” (contectus nubibus) (Valerius Flaccus 24–5)—with the help of a flying ram (Nepheles’s gift to her children), whose golden wool resembled a cloud moving across the sky. While Helle fell off the ram and drowned in the strait between Europe and Asia that would be named after her (“Hellespont”), Phrixos arrived in Colchis unscathed: he sacrificed the ram to Poseidon and draped the animal’s Golden Fleece in Ares’s holy grove. We learn from Apollonius Rhodius that the “fleece had been hung … like a cloud that glows red from the fiery beams of the rising sun” (337–39). The affinity between clouds and wool was not lost on Lucretius, who wrote in On the Nature of Things that when clouds “take up a great deal of sea-water” they appear “like hanging fleeces of wool” (veluti pen- dentia vellera lanae) (531). Lending themselves as comparables, metaphors, and similes, clouds are like (velut) woolen fleeces, often imagined as vehicles sturdy enough to transport mythological figures such as Helle and Phrixos or deities across the skies. We learn in Apollonius’s Argonautica that Athena traveled to Colchis by means of a cloud: she “immediately rushed to set foot on a light cloud, which would carry her quickly, mighty though she was, and she hastened to the Black Sea with friendly intentions towards the oarsmen” (157). ROMANCE QUARTERLY 3
The seventeenth-century baroque stage transformed this vehicular quality of clouds into a stage prop: cloud machines, invented by stage engineers such as Nicola Sabbattini, who in his Pratica di fabricar scene e macchine ne’ teatri (1638) dedicated, in the book’s second part, twelve out of fifty-seven chapters explicitly to clouds. While the connection between theater and clouds was emphasized by writers such as Lucretius, who compared the clouds to “the canvas awning stretched over a great theatre” as it “cracks flapping between poles and beams” (501–03), seven- teenth-century cloud machines became so prevalent in operatic productions that they contributed in important ways to early modern meteorology and natural philosophy. The mechanistic concep- tion of clouds as cloud machines was powerful enough to invert metaphors such as that of the theater of nature. In “Clouds and Meteors: Recreating Wonder on the Early Modern Stage,” Fr ed erique Aït-Touati contends that in his M et eores, published with the Discours de la m ethode as an “essay” illustrating his new method, Descartes unmasks “the metaphor of [the] theatre of nature” as a “pi ece a machines,” translating what had earlier been perceived as the wonders of a divinely ordered nature into mechanized “scenographic techniques” (195–96). We might pause before Descartes’s emphasis on meteorology and question its pertinence for his project. Yet meteorological phenomena, and in particular clouds, appeared central to Descartes, because “they are the source of the human feeling of wonder,” what the Latins called admiratio, which is “the first of all passions,” as he specifies in Passions of the soul (Aït-Touati 2020, 195). This is the point of departure for Alison Calhoun’s essay “What Cloud Machines Tell Us About Early Modern Emotions,” included in this volume. Through a joint reading of the Discours de la m ethode, Trait edel’homme, and Les passions de l’^ame, Calhoun discloses contemporary concepts of human passion and emotion by examining Pierre Corneille’s machine tragedy Androm ede (1650) together with two operas by Lully and Quinault, Cadmus et Hermione (1673) and Isis (1677). Calhoun shows that cloud machines functioned as central stage devices allowing passions and emotions to come to the fore while remaining, at the same time, concealed— clouded, as it were. One is inclined to think here, with Gilles Deleuze and F elix Guattari, of cloud machines as “desiring machines,” striving to undo the distinction between the human, nature, and machine as they reach beyond their primary stage function to “deliver a heavenly figure to the stage.” Cloud machines engineer love and desire mechanically, constantly shifting affective limits as they work to enhance “the emotional complexity of a scene” (page TBD). Clouds equally induce affective complexity in their ability to gather emotions synesthetically. Eugenio Refini opens his essay for this volume, “Nuvole barocche: Clouds as Synesthetic Metaphors across Baroque Poetry and Music,” with the following question: “Do clouds have a sound?” In the course of the seventeenth century, musicians, poets, and painters alike shared a rich lexicon describing perceived phenomena and their own creative process alike. The English metaphysical poet George Herbert wrote in his poem “The Windows” (1633): Doctrine and life, colours and light, in one When they combine and mingle, bring A strong regard and aw: but speech alone Doth vanish like a flaring thing, And in the eare, not conscience ring (Herbert 6–15; qtd. in Ward 146). Transcending disciplinary boundaries and blending creative processes, Herbert’s “colours and light” disclosed a powerful synesthetic framework that merges musical “timbre” and “expression” with rhetorical and prosodic “rhythm” and “meter” (Ward 146). But Refini also contends that fleeting lights and colors are akin to the “ambiguous semantics of meteorology,” clouds in par- ticular. By examining musical settings ranging from John Dowland and Francesca Caccini to Sigismondo D’India and George Frideric Handel, Refini envisions clouds as a “metaphoric code” that, changing over time, synesthetically links poetry and music to one another and expresses shared anxieties and commonplaces conveyed through “topics such as the course of time, the volatility of love, devotional and spiritual concerns” (page TBD). 4 J. N. PETERS AND K. N. PIECHOCKI
Yet clouds functioned not only as vehicles and means of transport, as spatial Ubersetzer€ and emotional amalgamations, but also as translators and mediators between the divine and human realms. Numerous are the references to clouds in the Old and New Testaments, where God’s interaction with humans is established through clouds. In the opening of the book of Ezekiel (1:28), we find, “like the bow in a cloud on a rainy day, such was the appearance of the splendor all around. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord” (New Oxford Annotated Bible 1179). And in the Revelation to John (1:7), Jesus is said to be “coming with the clouds; every eye will see him, even those who pierced him; and on his account all the tribes of the earth will wail” (2206). In ancient Greek mythology, one of Zeus’s attributes was the “cloud-gatherer” (meuekgceqέ sa). In Book Twelve of the Odyssey, Homer tells us that Zeus, “the cloud-gatherer, roused against [Odysseus’s ships] a fierce wind with a wondrous tempest, and hid with clouds the land and sea alike … . And as soon as Dawn appeared, the rosy-fingered, [Odysseus and his crew] dragged [their] ship, and made her fast in a hollow cave, where were the lovely dancing places and seats of the nymphs [mtluέxm].” This passage discloses the surprisingly rich semantic articulations of the cloud. Not only is Zeus in command of the natural phenomena in his capacity of cloud-gath- erer, but the nymphs are etymologically linked to clouds: the Greek nymphe and the later Latin nympha, “young woman, maiden, bride,” is not only a cognate of “nubes” and “nebula,” the Latin words for cloud, but also of the verb “nubo,”“to marry, wed”: we are reminded that traditionally the bride “covers, veils” herself as she appears before the bridegroom. In a similar vein, we learn from Plautus’s Dyscolus, that “nupta verba” are “words not to be uttered by unwed women” (Pfeiffer 639). Delving into the intimate bonds among nymphs, poetics, and desire in On Style, Demetrius compares Sappho’s poetry to “the gardens of the nymphs [mtluaῖoi, nymphaioi], mar- riage songs, [and] loves [ἔqxse1, erotes]” (429). Isidore of Seville adds Neptune to the list of cloud-cognates: “Clouds (nubes) are named from ‘veiling’ (obnubere), that is, covering the sky; whence also brides (nupta), because they veil their faces, and also Neptune (Neptunus), because he casts a veil (nubere), that is, covers the sea and earth” (273). Clouds are evocative of amorous desires as much as they are of the act of (poetic) veiling. In the Dialogues of the Gods, Lucian narrates how Zeus modeled (eἴdxkom, eidolon) Hera “out of cloud” (ἐj meuέkg1 pkarάlemoi, ek neph eles plas amenoi) when she was pursued by the lustful Ixion. Believing to find himself in an amorous embrace with Hera, Ixion “ma[de] love to a cloud,” instead, and fathered monstrously shaped creatures: the Centaurs (279). Hera’s concern that Ixion could touch her essence despite her appearance as a cloud, is brushed away by Zeus: “The cloud could never become Hera or you a cloud. Ixion will be deceived, that’s all” (279–81). Reading Hera’s transformation into a cloud allegorically, Plutarch moralized this myth using it as an example for false friendship. In Moralia, he argued that “just as Ixion slipped into the cloud when he was pursuing Hera, so … people seize upon a deceptive, showy, and shifting appearance [eἴdxkom, eidolon] in lieu of friendship” (39). But in its evocation of questions pertaining to mat- ter and form, appearance and substance, the story of Ixion and Hera is equally pertinent for poetic thinking. Zeus’s seemingly innocent question—“What harm will the model do you [Hera], if Ixion makes love to a cloud?”—discloses, through the lens of the cloud, central poetic questions concerning res and verba, the literal and the metaphorical, and, what the medieval tradition would consider to be the opposition between proper sense and the integumentum, the poetic veil- ing as troping, as “turning” away from truth toward the seductive realm of rhetorical figures. The fourth-century theologian and former rhetorician Lactantius would seize upon the alluring quality of poetry defining it in terms of its deviation from reality: “a poet’s business lies in transposing reality into something else with metaphor and allusion and in covering up the misrepresentation with charm” (82). Lucian’s characterization of Hera and Aristophanes’s description of the Cloud chorus reflect the fact that clouds tend typically to be gendered female. When Socrates contends that “Clouds ROMANCE QUARTERLY 5 turn into [gignontai] anything they want” (57), he uses the Greek verb gignontai—a reminder that the process of “becoming” is also one of “giving birth.” In a suggestive passage of the Clouds, Socrates genders natural phenomena as he likens the moment of lightning and its release by the clouds to the act of begetting and giving birth: “When a dry wind rises skyward and gets locked up in these Clouds, it blows them up from within like a bladder, and then by natural compulsion it bursts them and is borne out in a whoosh by dint of compression, burning itself up with the friction and velocity” (67). Seneca the Younger also likened clouds to a bladder—a hollow vessel with solid walls. In his Natural Questions, Seneca writes that “not even a bladder pops if it releases air just any sort of way. If it is sliced with a knife, the air escapes without any audible evidence. In order to make a popping sound it should be burst, not cut. I maintain it is the same in the clouds” (145). In the Meteorology, Aristotle is very explicit about his association between clouds and the female womb as a solid vessel begetting new matter. In the medieval tradition, the cloud’s capacity to produce not only natural elements, but also animals, was vividly discussed. In the early years of the fifteenth century, the dean of the Faculty of Liberal Arts at Prague University and author of marginal notes on Aristotle’s Meteorology, Johannes of Borot ın, was asked “whether it is possible for metals and stones to be formed in the clouds, just as they are formed in the bowels of the earth” (Utrum lapides et metalla generari in nubibus sit possibile quemadmodum in visceribus terre) (Qtd. in Koc anov a 94). Medieval philosophers and commen- tators of the Meteorology such as Albertus Magnus believed that clouds were fertile containers in their capacity to give birth to animals. Following a popular medieval belief that rain is, at times, accompanied by “aquatic animals” such as frogs and fish falling from the sky, Albert put forth the theory that terrestrial components, born from exhalations released from the surface of the earth, combine with moisture and tend to “solidify in the cloud and [turn] into skin. The sub- stance attains life from the heat and soul [anima sensibilis] thanks to the effects of the stars, thus becoming an animal. That is why rain often includes falling animals—frogs, worms and fish” (Koc anov a 96; for the Latin see Albertus Magnus 58). Imagining the meteorological cycle through the lens of pregnant clouds was not lost on early modern philosophers and poets alike. In his 1621 Essay des merveilles de nature et des plus nobles artifices, the French Jesuit Etienne Binet writes that Quand le ventre des nu ees est gros d’exhalaisons chaudes, cela cause de grands eclairs qui tranchent les nu ees, les descouds, & monstre par la fente le feu qui est resserr ee l a dedans, ce feu voulant sortir choque de tous costez, brise les obstacles, froisse & rompt tout, & fait esclatter les nu ees. (578) When the belly of the clouds is pregnant with hot exhalations, great lightning is caused which cuts through the clouds, undoes them and reveals through the slit the fire enclosed in it. The fire wanting to escape clashes against all sides, destroys all the obstacles, crushes and breaks everything and makes the clouds burst.1 Just like many ancient Greek and Roman writers before him, Binet imagines clouds as robust, hollow matter strong enough to contain and give birth to new matter. The image of clouds as wombs is arresting: it stands in stark contrast to the cloud’s fleeting materiality in a state of con- tinuous becoming with which Aristophanes’s Socrates first associated it as he gazed into the sky. Clouds occupy a site between the two poles in tension: the corporeal and the incorporeal, the hol- low and the procreative, the material and the immaterial.
Clouds as an aesthetics of the unsayable The creative force of clouds is, therefore, an apparently counterintuitive one. Even as they seem endowed with a capacity of generation, the new they bring forth is often of insubstantial being. They give shape to—they in-form; they originate—the apparently absent, airy nothingness of the cosmos. As they do so, they make the imperceptible perceptible, even if only fleetingly. Virgil gives us a representative example of the way clouds make possible our perception of the 6 J. N. PETERS AND K. N. PIECHOCKI evanescent in Book V of the Aeneid. Turned aside by stormy seas, Aeneas heads with his fleet for the shores of Sicily where he will honor the memory of his father Anchises with rites of sacrifice and libation. As he does so, a giant serpent appears, in apparent approval of Aeneas’s vows. Virgil tells us that the snake’s scales shined with dappled gold, as when a rainbow (arcus) casts the sun’s rays against the clouds (nubibus) (ceu nubibus arcus mille iacit varios adverso sole col- ores) (88–9). Clouds are, in this respect, the paradoxical origin of that which seems to have no being: here, the rainbow, a figure, as Plato had put it in the Theaetetus (155d), of wonder itself (embodied by Iris, goddess of the rainbow, daughter of Thaumas “the wondrous” and Elektra, one of the nepheles, or cloud-nymphs) (54–5). Virgil’s poetic topos—ceu nubibus arcus—encloses a rich philosophical and meteorological genealogy. Rainbows, Aristotle writes in the Cosmos, “are only appearances.” They have no sub- stance of their own, but are instead “the reflection of a segment of the sun or of the moon seen, as in a mirror, in a cloud which is moist, hollow, and continuous in appearance” (631–32). Indeed, as Seneca later puts it in the Natural Questions, and this is a crucial point, “a rainbow never occurs unless there are clouds” (non fit enim umquam arcus nisi numbilo) (3). Rainbows, Seneca continues, are nothing real: “there is not a corporeality but only an apparition (menda- cium), a similarity without reality (sine re similitudo)” (3). They are at once beautiful and nothing, a constitutive doubleness Binet would capture succinctly in his Essay des merveilles. The rainbow, Binet writes, is “a deceitful beauty” (une beaut e mensong ere), a “void,” a “nothing” which none- theless figures Heaven’s “jewels” of nature (“ou la nature a cach ees toutes les plus rares pierreries”), the celestial treasures, which, citing the Psalms, Binet finds—again—against the back- drop of the clouds: “Magnifientia eius & virtus eius in nubibus” (590–91, our emp.). In these instances clouds seem to play a secondary role to the primary rainbow, the prosaic backdrop to a more spectacular drama. And yet Seneca puts his finger on the generative, though paradoxical, power of the transient clouds, which he calls the rainbow’s necessary mirror. Nothing, Seneca tells us, “is rendered so suddenly as an image from a mirror, for a mirror does not create anything, it only reflects it” (590–91). There are no rainbows—which are already, themselves, nothing—without clouds. Clouds are the rainbow’s precondition. They are both the originating condition of nature’s most awesome spectacle and the radical absence of its origin, or, strangely, of any origin. If they might be said to embody anything at all, they might take the momentary shape of Virgil’s Latin “ceu,”“as if” or “as in,” an adverb of metaphorical understand- ing. They may be the image of a specifically poetic power of generation: a “rich nothing,” in Binet’s words, which is finally “the miracle of the universe’s most beautiful things,” a divine absence, but a poetic miracle (590). Clouds would therefore appear to enclose a power of poetic generation, not only because, as we have already seen, they bring new matter forth, but also, paradoxically, because what they gen- erate seems to lack substance, or, even, fails to coalesce as an object of knowledge. In the early seventeenth century, Binet’s Essay des merveilles gives voice to the ancient topos of the productive cloud for a new generation of artists and writers. As Descartes would write on the first page of the M et eores, not many years after Binet, the irrational, often ineffable wonder to be found in the sky above us requires an artist—a poet, a painter—to describe the generative force of clouds, safely located by Descartes, turning to his own near-poetic language, in God’s hands: “m^eme les po etes et les peintres en [des nues] composent le trone^ de Dieu, et font que l a il emploie ses propres mains a ouvrir et fermer les portes des vents, a verser la ros ee sur les fleurs et a lancer la foudre sur les rochers” (even the poets and painters make of the clouds God’s throne from whence he uses his own hands to open and close the doors of the winds, scatter dew on the flow- ers, and cast thunder among the rocks) (719). Clouds give (often temporary) form to the inexpressible, to the unsayable—to the wonder to be found in beauty. This is Cesare Ripa’s point in his Iconologia when, in the 1603 second edition, the first to include woodcut images, Bellezza (Beauty) is portrayed with her head shrouded in ROMANCE QUARTERLY 7 clouds. Bellezza is a woman, Ripa tells us, “che habbia ascosa la testa fra le nuuole, & il resto sia poco visibile, per lo splendore, che la circonda” (whose head is hidden by clouds and the rest is little visible due to the radiance that surrounds her) (40), a description amplified in 1636 by Jean Baudoin in his French translation of Ripa’s Iconologia: she “cache la teste dans les nu€es, pource qu’il n’est rien de si obscur al’esprit humain, ny rien dequoy la langue des hommes puisse parler plus difficilement que de la Beaut e” (hides her head in the clouds because nothing is more obscure to the human mind, nothing is more difficult for the language of men to speak about, than Beauty) (38). Beauty is a divine light whose brilliance blinds the eyes and minds of mortals and, because of this blinding splendor, beauty must be defined, Baudoin continues, “by meta- phor.” We cannot gaze upon beauty without the mediating cloak of the clouds. Only when she is veiled does she become perceptible to artists and philosophers (38). It is precisely in this sense that clouds are bound up with the unsayable, the imperceptible, the unknowable. From the seventh century of Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae through to the mid-fif- teenth century of Nicholas of Cusa’s De docta ignorantia and De visione Dei, theology and phil- osophy cross paths with meteorology when clouds point to and make possible the counterintuitive spectacle of the absent. Isidore compares the air itself, an emptiness (inanitas) without body or substance, to the invisibility, eternity, and immeasurability of the Christian God (154). Only when it is agitated and compressed does the invisibility of air become temporarily visible in the form of a cloud (273); only when it is described by human expression does the impossibility of conceiving God take the fleeting and deficient shape of verbal figuration: “human poverty of diction has taken up this term [God’s perfection] from our usage, and likewise for the remaining terms, insofar as what is ineffable can be spoken of in any way—for human speech says nothing suitable about God—so the other terms are also deficient” (154). Just as air is a fig- ure of the imperceptible, so too is God an example of the unsayable. Isidore’s meteorological work takes a place in the genealogy of what Catherine Keller has called “the apophatic figure of the cloud.” Drawing on the anonymous medieval author of the fourteenth-century Cloud of Unknowing, Keller finds in the cloud a figure of the unknowable—God, being, space, the cos- mos—but also the possible. Unknowing, for the fourteenth-century author, signifies not ignorant finitude but rather knowledge of an unknowable infinity. The cloud of unknowing is forward- looking, concerned with what might be, as when Moses (Numbers 14:14) says to God in the wil- derness of Sinai where the Israelites are gathered, “[t]hey have heard that you, O LORD, are in the midst of this people; for you, O LORD, are seen face to face, and your cloud stands over them and you go in front of them, in a pillar of cloud by day and in a pillar of fire by night” (212). Keller reads this verse as an oscillation of light and dark in which the cloud expresses the possibility of creaturely involvement in an unknowable divine: “[f]ar from cloaking an inaccess- ible transcendence, the cloud reveals the entangled immanence: ‘in the midst’” (Keller 51). Only later, however, does apophasis make thinkable the notion of an interrelated universe in which God’s creature might know an unknowable infinity. It will be Cusa who, on the threshold of the Renaissance, brings, as Isidore had done, the immeasurability of God into direct contact with cosmology. What Cusa called a “cloud of impossibility” in De visione Dei draws its force from the earlier reflection in De docta ignorantia on physics, on, specifically, the infinite and perspective (Cusa De visione Dei 251; Keller 331, n. 43). Cusa, a central influence on Giordano Bruno, closes the door on medieval cosmology by transferring the infinity of God to the infinity of the cosmos itself: “the universe is limitless, for nothing actually greater than it, in relation to which it could be limited, can be given” (Cusa De docta ignorantia 131). The perspectivism through which knowledge is derived, Cusa tells us, requires that we recognize its limitations and become aware of what it cannot reveal to us. Learned ignorance implies that reality, logically derived, remains imperceptible to the senses, a principle summarized in the famous metaphor of God as an infinite sphere whose center is every- where and circumference nowhere (Harries 50; Gaukroger 138). The formulation is found in 8 J. N. PETERS AND K. N. PIECHOCKI
Bruno and, later, in Pascal, and much later still, in Borges. Cusa himself borrowed it from Meister Eckhart who, in turn, refers us to the twelfth-century pseudo-Hermetic Liber XXIV philo- sophorum (Harries 59). That the infinity of both God and the cosmos should be further bound up with late medieval concepts of physical space should not be surprising given that Cusa’s fas- cination with perspective in painting directly underlay his postulation of a physical universe plot- ted, as Michel de Certeau put it, “according to an arrangement that is not subject to a cosmographic symbolism (where, for example, the center would be the Orient), but an abstract framework presupposed by a geographical construction” (15). The world’s center may be any- where, or everywhere, just as the spectator’s gaze, in Cusa’s speculations of painting in De visione Dei, may originate from anywhere and observe the universe from any point in space. Perspectivism is, for Cusa, the name given to the “cloud of unknowing.” It is the figure of that which exceeds the visible frame of the work’s illusion of space, which makes what we cannot per- ceive knowable in its imperceptibility. As Erwin Panofsky has put it in a crucial analysis, the frame of a mid-fifteenth-century perspectival painting like Jan van Eyck’s Virgin in the Church no longer encloses a finite, wholly visible space, but cuts through a space imagined to reach out beyond the space represented on the canvas. The visible finiteness of the frame and the image it surrounds make the infinite continuity of space available to the imagined derivations of the mind. Infinite space is imagined, but imperceptible, the viewing subject ignorant but learned. In an extraordinary statement, Panofsky concludes that such paintings represent “the first example of a coordinate system: for it illustrates the modern ‘systematic space’ in an artistically concrete sphere, well before it had been postulated by abstract mathematical thought” (Panofsky 1996, 58). In this sense, Cusa’s cloud of impossibility is a principle not only of learned ignorance, of specu- lative non-knowing, or apophatic expression, but the very principle by which knowledge is derived. In the early modern period, clouds are therefore inseparable from both an epistemological and esthetic consideration of the unrepresentable. In Renaissance painting, as Damisch showed, clouds no longer merely designate “sky” or “the heavens,” but neither do they simply function like Panofsky’s image frame, bisecting a newly continuous space and projecting us out into a concep- tually derived, but imperceptible, infinity. Instead, they are a figure of that which falls outside and passes beyond the linearity of perspective. They are also in this sense a specifically veiling force, a temporarily obscuring screen which reveals precisely because it hides (Damisch 253–54; 77–84). As Baudoin puts it in the preface to his edition of Ripa’s Iconologia, clouds are the figure through which knowledge is first cloaked and then derived: “L’on en peut dire de m^eme des autres Figures qu[e les Anciens] ont invent ees et couvertes d’ epais nuages afin que les ignorants et les doctes les pussent comprendre d’une diff erente mani ere et qu’ils ne p en etrassent egalement dans les secrets de la nature” (We can say the same of the other figures the Ancients have invented and covered with thick clouds so that both the ignorant and the learned may under- stand them in different ways and penetrate equally the secrets of nature) (n.p.). Baudoin’s mag- nificent definition of allegory is therefore exemplified by the figurality of clouds, a temporary, and clarifying, obfuscation. Clouds, as and like allegory, offer access to truth by way of a simul- taneous veiling and unveiling. If, moreover, it is pulled simultaneously in two directions, between the exegetical tradition of divine revelation, on the one hand, and the rhetorical tradition of styl- istic ornamentation, on the other, allegory is entirely bound up with an expression of the unrep- resentable (Spica 19; 22). As the poet Jean de La Cepp ede put it in a 1621 sonnet, drawing on Saint Thomas’s meditation on Christ’s ascension on a cloud, “Aux myst eres divins la nue sert toujours,/Car elle tient un peu de la nuit et du jour” (Clouds always foster the divine mysteries, for they partake of both the night and the day) (Rousset 178). Clouds, like allegory, embody both the obscure and the clear. La Cepp ede therefore embeds in his verse a medieval understanding of the heavens that is at once cosmological and poetic. ROMANCE QUARTERLY 9
As they draw us out beyond the frame of perceptibility toward meanings they temporarily hide, clouds offer a figural surface without body, a Senecan similarity without reality, that is repeated often in early modern natural philosophy wherein imagined fictions substitute for poten- tial realities. Renewed clouds of cautious unknowing, early modern treatises on physics emplot perspectival frames whose vanishing point is constituted by the imagined worlds their philoso- phies present. In Le Monde, to give one well-known example, Descartes generates his own poetic work of art, framed and set out of direct reach at the perspectival regress of his cosmology. Natural philosophy here take the shape of allegorical emplotment through which the story the philosopher tells contains a second one, imperceptible and unknowable, but possible, a realm of fiction where creaturely invention and divine creation are entwined. Descartes writes: “afin que la longueur de ce discours vous soit moins ennuyeuse, j’en veux envelopper une partie dans l’inven- tion d’une fable, au travers de laquelle j’esp ere que la v erit e ne laissera pas de para^ıtre suffisamment” (in order to keep this lengthy treatise from boring you, I would like to envelop part of it within a story I have invented, through which I hope the truth will still sufficiently appear) (342–43). Descartes’s gesture in this passage is as much poetic as it is philosophical. The language of “truth enveloped” runs throughout the French seventeenth century in the principles of allegorical representation (the poet Jean de La Fontaine called his allegorical fables “envelopes” veiling moral truths). But when Descartes writes that his imagined, “fictional,” world is a poetic cloak surrounding the truth of his materialist system, he engages exactly the vocabulary of clouds found throughout the work of his contemporaries. Were he not to create this fiction, Descartes suggests, the theory presented in Le Monde would be too spare, naked, in effect—“si je l’exposais toute nue” (if I presented it completely nude) (343). And though he does not turn here to the homonymic relation between nue (naked) and nue (cloud) available in French, it very likely sub- tends the phrase, as it does when Scipion Dupleix describes ancient Greek poetry as a kind of cloudy representation in Logique ou l’art de discourir et raisonner of 1603. The Greeks imitated the Egyptians, Dupleix writes, by cloaking their knowledge in allegorical attire: “la naïve et nue v erit ea et e par eux envelopp ee comme dans un nuage epais et sombre, sous le voile t en ebreux de certaines fictions et inventions fabuleuses” (innocent and naked truths have been enveloped by them in a thick and gloomy cloud, under the dark veil of incredible fictions and inventions) (22, our emp.). Descartes’s poetic gesture in Le Monde is not without similarity to the epistemological modesty offered by the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing: we know by not knowing. It is not unlike Cusa’s assertion in De visione Dei that poetry is a necessary response, as De Certeau main- tains, to the absence of a representable object of sight in the new visual regime Cusa’s book presents (De Certeau 18). There is no longer a single center of vision from which the creator observes his creatures. The gaze, Cusa tells us, is now everywhere and nowhere at once. Poetry, Cusa seems to suggest, is the necessary, mediating response to a world in which scale and dis- tance are rethought and point of view is transformed.
Tesauro’s Cannocchiale: Clouds, sunspots, scale In 1654, the Italian Jesuit rhetorician, playwright, and literary scholar Emanuele Tesauro pub- lished the first edition of his Il cannocchiale aristotelico (The Aristotelian Telescope), a monumen- tal volume on the intricate workings of metaphor (whose generative power leads him to call this master-trope “mother”) and the baroque concept of “argutezza” (wit). Tesauro’s paradoxical title—and the seven-hundred-odd pages that follow—are a sophisticated comment on Aristotle, whose rhetoric and poetics he transposes into his own times: the early modernity of the Copernican Revolution and scientific discoveries spearheaded, in particular, by Galileo Galilei and Christoph Scheiner. Poetic and cosmological thinking form a complex unity in Tesauro’s work. For Tesauro, the trope of argutezza is a crucial mediator between different scales. As Jon Snyder has pointed out, “the genuine figure of wit, in overcoming distance as does a telescope, not only 10 J. N. PETERS AND K. N. PIECHOCKI brings together in a single word-image objects that are normally separate and remote from one another, but breaks down the conventional order of words and things” (87). While Tesauro emphasizes Aristotelian poetics and rhetoric in Il cannocchiale aristotelico, Tesauro’s friend Galileo dramatically overturned cosmology in the first years of the seventeenth century: by eliminating barriers previously considered insurmountable between the mobile and corrupt sublunar world and the permanent and immobile supralunar realm, Galileo brought earthly corruption into the realm of the celestial sun. A casus belli became the discovery of sun- spots, which uprooted the very foundations of seventeenth-century society and culture (McClure 1). When he began to observe “spots” traversing the disk of the sun in 1611 alongside the German Jesuit Christoph Scheiner, Galileo suggested that the sun’s surface, previously considered to be perfectly and permanently smooth, was subject to the same imperfections and blemishes as sublunar bodies. In the world of seventeenth-century Christianity, and with absolutism on the rise, Galileo’s statement and the subsequent publication of Macchie solari in Rome in 1613, which contained Galilei’s and Scheiner’s correspondence outlining their observations of the sunspots, were subversive not only for scientists. They posed a major threat to a political and theological system steeped in the metaphorical power and symbolic impact of the sun. The sun was not only a celestial body. It was also a metaphor for God and terrestrial rulers alike. Suggesting that the sun might not be exempt from blemishes was at once a l ese-majest e and a blasphemy. Interestingly, clouds feature prominently in the sunspot debate. In fact, Galileo suggests that clouds and sunspots are comparable, indeed equivalent: I have demonstrated that the sunspots are neither stars nor permanent materials, and that they are not located at a distance from the sun but are produced and dissolved upon it in a manner not unlike that of clouds and vapors on the earth. (Drake 143, qtd. in Noyes 467) The shock of this juxtaposition was not lost on Tesauro, who was “a staunch defender of the Copernican system” (Snyder 78, n. 6). In an elaborate allegorical frontispiece (Figure 1) which opens the 1670 edition of Il cannocchiale aristotelico, Tesauro blends antiquity and modernity by positioning the sister arts Poetry and Painting as female allegories next to the figure of Aristotle, dressed as a Capuchin friar (see Snyder 77–80). Poetry gazes directly at the sun through a tele- scope, while Painting, seated in front of Poetry, reproduces on the canvas in front of her not Poetry’s features, but the emblematic image of a conical mirror, which reflects, in anamorphosis, the motto omnis in unum (all in one). The mirror functions in the image as a figure of the tele- scope itself. It joins and unites, and makes visible the indecipherable. It closes distances and changes scales. It mediates what we can see and understand. Quite significantly, Poetry gazes at a sun blemished by numerous sunspots. The spots covering the otherwise immaculate body of the sun are evocative of Christ’s stigmata. But in light of Galileo’s bold comparison, they are also reminiscent of clouds floating above the surface of the sun. Indeed, there are clouds hovering faintly behind Poetry’s conical mirror, further reinforcing the idea that the distances lying between the human and divine realms can be overcome through the mediating instances of both natural philosophy (il cannocchiale) and poetry (l’argutezza). The visual representation of sunspots was an artistic challenge, not only on Tesauro’s frontis- piece (and it is interesting to note that not every edition of Il cannocchiale aristotelico contains sunspots: some earlier editions present a spotless sun). When the German artist Mattheus Greuter was given the task of illustrating Galileo’s and Scheiner’s Macchie solari, he produced, in 1612 and 1613, a series of intaglio prints illustrating the sunspots. As Ruth Noyes has pointed out, Greuter’s imprints evince his use of an unprecedented experimental copperplate etching technique … which recapitulated Galilean methods and metaphors for recording and interpreting the sunspots. They also manifest an exceptionally subtle linear manner adapted from burin-engraved devotional prints, their fine style inflecting Lucretian mechanics and metaphors of vision. (466) ROMANCE QUARTERLY 11
Figure 1. Emanuele Tesauro, Il cannocchiale aristotelico, 1670. Frontispiece (“Egregio inspersos reprehendit corpore naevos”). Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2838–484). 12 J. N. PETERS AND K. N. PIECHOCKI
Greuter’s burin engraving technique was entirely new—as was the discovery of sunspots them- selves. The use of the burin, a tool typically used to incise engravings, allowed the artist to render the subtle shadows of the sunspots with great subtlety. But it was a new technique and not easy to master. Before he produced the illustrations for the Macchie solari, Greuter experimented less successfully with the burin in his rendering of sunspots whose individual incised lines, Noyes writes, feature “blurred edges,” while “the spots’ splotchy forms—their hazy contours and stainlike cores—bespeak his experimentation with the technique of etching” (474). The intricate relationship between burin and cosmology, between Greuter’s technique and the subject matter he was engraving, is further strengthened by the word’s Latin etymology. As Juliette Cherbuliez emphasizes in her essay included in this volume, “Jacques Callot’s Billows, Puffs, and Plumes,” the “Latin word for burin or chisel is coelum, the same word for heavens or sky” (Cherbuliez [page TBD]; see Viljoen 122). By using the eighteen prints of Jacques Callot’s Les Mis eres et malheurs de la guerre from 1633 as a paradigmatic example of a perfected burin technique which allowed a “new practice of viewing,” Cherbuliez’s essay brings together the dual articulation of coelum: the burin as a new tool and the cloud “at the intersection of the environ- mental and the medial,” whose pertinence had reemerged with the discovery of the sunspots. Coelum, in its intimate relationship with both burin and cloud, allows for a reading practice focused on mediation. It steers us away from understanding etching in general and Callot’s Mis eres in particular “as [an] unmediated historical archive” and directs us instead toward the materiality of the medium itself. As Cherbuliez insists, “etching depends on a manipulation of fire, water, and earth in the fabrication of acid, ink, copper, resin, and paper” (TBD). Bringing a new technology to perfection, Callot experimented with the manifold shapes and forms of clouds so that he was able to distinguish between clouds, smoke, vapors, and fumes, despite their often subtle differences. Working two decades prior to Callot, Greuter worked with novel tools on new celestial bodies. It is perhaps not surprising that today Greuter’s visualization of sunspots “verge on the indescribable, even the imperceptible. They ghost across the paper’s surface, adumbrating the sunspots’ analogous transmutations—disappearing, reappearing, metamorphosing—their seeming immateriality belied by their inky being” (Noyes 466). It is not difficult to discern in Greuter’s sunspots the faint and barely perceptible clouds that Tesauro depicted in Painting’s canvas. Erasmus’s famous praise of Durer,€ inspired by Pliny’s story about Apelles, reverberated in the autumn of 1611 when Christoph Scheiner published, together with Galileo, his revolutionary findings on sunspots in Macchie solari under a telling pseudonym: “Apelles hiding behind the painting.” Erasmus’s specific praise originates in Durer€ ’s ability to rep- resent the multiple aspects of an object or phenomenon which the senses cannot perceive. As Erasmus puts it, Durer€ expresses, “from the position of one thing, more than the one aspect that offers itself to the beholder’s eye … . Nay, he even depicts what cannot be depicted … even, as the saying is, the clouds upon a wall” (qtd. in Panofsky 1951,38–41). Erasmus here expresses the power of art to represent what we cannot perceive: an object’s hidden surface, the cloud’s insub- stantial being. Erasmus’s Latin—“ex situ rei unius”—reminds us of Tesauro’s allegory of poetic mediation wherein the conical mirror floats among the clouds, telling us, as we have seen, that “omnis in unum” (all [is] in one): from the position of one thing (ex situ rei unius), we, like Durer,€ conceive of more than one. Clouds are themselves mirrors, as Seneca wrote, and Tesauro’s cloud-mirror is telling. Its anamorphic conceit, like the Aristotelian telescope, changes scale and gives meaningful shape to what cannot be directly perceived. It suggests that clouds, insubstantial and fleeting though they are, are the mediating principle through which the imperceptible is imagined into being.
Note 1. Translations into English are ours if not otherwise indicated. ROMANCE QUARTERLY 13
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