Spring 2016 Volume 42 Issue 3

341 David Foster Holbein and Plato on the Quadrivium 367 Nelson Lund A Woman’s Laws and a Man’s: Eros and Thumos in Rousseau’s Julie, or The New Heloise (1761) and The Deer Hunter (1978) 437 Thomas L. Pangle Socrates’s Argument for the Superiority of the Life Dedicated to Politics Review Essays: 463 Liu Xiaofeng How Philosophy Became Socratic: A Study of Plato’s “Protagoras,” “Charmides,” and “Republic” by Laurence Lampert 477 Matthew Post The Meanings of Rights: The Philosophy and Social Theory of Rights, ed. Costas Douzinas and Conor Gearty; Libertarian Philosophy in the Real World: The Politics of Natural Rights by Mark D. Friedman; The Cambridge Companion to Liberalism by Steven Wall

An Exchange: 495 Tucker Landy Reply to Antoine Pageau St.-Hilaire’s Review of After Leo Strauss: New Directions in Platonic Political Philosophy 497 Antoine P. St-Hilaire Strauss’s Platonism and the Fate of Metaphysics: A Rejoinder to Tucker Landy’s Reply

Book Reviews: 501 Rodrigo Chacón Arendtian Constitutionalism: Law, Politics and the Order of Freedom by Christian Volk 507 Ross J. Corbett Scripture and Law in the Dead Sea Scrolls by Alex P. Jassen 513 Bernard J. Dobski On Sovereignty and other Political Delusions by Joan Cocks; Freedom Beyond Sovereignty: Reconstructing Liberal Individualism by Sharon Krause

521 Lewis Fallis On Plato’s “Euthyphro” by Ronna Burger 525 Hannes Kerber Political Philosophy: What It Is and Why It Matters by Ronald Beiner 531 Pavlos Leonidas Western Civilization and the Academy by Bradley C. S. Watson Papadopoulos

543 Antonio Sosa Democracy in Decline? by Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner 551 Dana Jalbert Stauffer Making Religion Safe for Democracy: Transformation from Hobbes to Tocqueville by J. Judd Owen

557 John B. Tieder Jr. The First American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience by Alan E. Johnson

563 Shawn Welnak The Political Is Political: Conformity and the Illusion of Dissent in Contemporary Political Philosophy by Lorna Finlayson

©2016 Interpretation, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of the contents may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the publisher. ISSN 0020-9635 Editor-in-Chief Timothy W. Burns, Baylor University General Editors Charles E. Butterworth • Timothy W. Burns General Editors (Late) Howard B. White (d. 1974) • Robert Horwitz (d. 1987) Seth G. Benardete (d. 2001) • Leonard Grey (d. 2009) • Hilail Gildin (d. 2015) Consulting Editors Christopher Bruell • David Lowenthal • Harvey C. Mansfield • Thomas L. Pangle • Ellis Sandoz • Kenneth W. Thompson Consulting Editors (Late) Leo Strauss (d. 1973) • Arnaldo Momigliano (d. 1987) • Michael Oakeshott (d. 1990) • John Hallowell (d. 1992) • Ernest L. Fortin (d. 2002) • Muhsin Mahdi (d. 2007) • Joseph Cropsey (d. 2012) • Harry V. Jaffa (d. 2015) International Editors Terence E. Marshall • Heinrich Meier Editors Peter Ahrensdorf • Wayne Ambler • Marco Andreacchio • Maurice Auerbach • Robert Bartlett • Fred Baumann • Eric Buzzetti • Susan Collins • Patrick Coby • Erik Dempsey • Elizabeth C’de Baca Eastman • Edward J. Erler • Maureen Feder-Marcus • Robert Goldberg • L. Joseph Hebert • Pamela K. Jensen • Hannes Kerber • Mark J. Lutz • Daniel Ian Mark • Ken Masugi • Carol L. McNamara • Will Morrisey • Amy Nendza • Charles T. Rubin • Leslie G. Rubin • Thomas Schneider • Susan Meld Shell • Geoffrey T. Sigalet • Nicholas Starr • Devin Stauffer • Bradford P. Wilson • Cameron Wybrow • Martin D. Yaffe • Catherine H. Zuckert • Michael P. Zuckert Copy Editor Les Harris Designer Sarah Teutschel Inquiries Interpretation, A Journal of Political Philosophy Department of Political Science Baylor University 1 Bear Place, 97276 Waco, TX 76798 email [email protected] Holbein and Plato on the Quadrivium 341

Holbein and Plato on the Quadrivium

David Foster Ashland University [email protected]

[A] city could never be happy otherwise than by having its outlines drawn by the painters who use the divine pattern. —Plato, Republic

When Niccolo Machiavelli argued that a prince must know how to use force as well as law (Prince, chap. 18), he put his distinctive spin on the venerable argument that political rulers must be educated both for war and for peace. A pictorial variation on this important theme is presented by Machiavelli’s near contemporary Hans Holbein the Younger, in The Ambassadors, his famous double portrait of a soldier and a priest. The scientific instruments and other objects that occupy the center of the painting have been carefully studied, but scholars have had less to say about the significance of the two men depicted in it, and still less about the connection between the objects and the men. Yet, unless we know how the objects, or the arts and sciences suggested by them, are related to the pairing of a soldier and a priest, we cannot understand the painting as a whole. This essay explores that relation against the background of the curriculum developed in Plato’s Republic for the education of the philosopher king. Plato’s curriculum is strongly echoed in the painting, and although Holbein did not paint a philosopher king, Plato’s account suggests that The Ambassadors can be understood as a reflection on the education of leaders. The differences between the philosopher and the painter, on the other hand, suggest how Holbein might have understood the sixteenth-century Renais- sance, particularly in its implications for the Christian faith.

The Ambassadors was created in 1533, soon after Machiavelli’s Prince was printed and Martin Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses, and ten years before Copernicus published his attack on Ptolemy. Two sumptuously attired men are shown standing on either side of a what-not table gazing calmly at the viewer.1 Arranged on the table’s shelves are meticulously rendered scientific, mathematical, and musical instruments, several books, and globes of the earth and of the zodiac. The floor is beautifully tiled in a complex inter- locking geometric pattern and in the background hangs a luxuriant green tapestry. The dominant impression given is of two friends at the peak of their powers showing off the intellectual accomplishments made possible by great wealth and leisure. The men seem perfectly at ease in their luxury and learning and, with a calm alertness, accept the admiration they know to be their due. Their friendship seems to consist in mutual mastery and enjoyment of the arts and sciences suggested by the objects depicted. They are “Renais- sance men,” a type the painting seems to celebrate. At first glance the two men look alike. Their facial features are remark- ably similar and, standing at either end of the table, they frame the picture as its dominant vertical elements. In posture, too, they mirror one another: each has one arm casually resting on the top shelf of the table, the other hanging down to the side. There, however, the similarities end. Jean de Dinteville, on the left, is a soldier, or perhaps a statesman in whom the military aspect pre- dominates. His right hand rests on a dagger in a gold scabbard (upon which is inscribed his age: twenty-nine years) and just visible at his left side is the grip of a sword. His fashionable rose-red satin doublet covers a massive chest and shoulders, which are further accentuated by the construction of his black velvet coat. Hanging around his neck on a large gold chain is the medallion of the order of St. Michael, which depicts the saint slaying a dragon. De Dinteville’s companion, by contrast, is not half so large or colorfully attired. Unlike de Dinteville, whose athletic legs are visible, Georges de Selve wears a full-length, almost monkish brown coat. He bears no ornament. Even de Dinteville’s hat has gold tassels; de Selve’s is the plain square hat of a cleric (he was in fact soon to be consecrated bishop of Lavour). Similarly, both men gaze at the viewer, but they convey very different moods. De Dinteville’s coat is open, both his hands are relaxed and open, and the fashionable tears in his shirt hint at a powerful, active body beneath. De Selve, by contrast, is almost entirely closed and covered up. His left hand grasps closed his coat; his right

1 The National Gallery of London has an excellent reproduction of the painting with a zoom feature: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/hans-holbein-the-younger-the-ambassadors. Holbein and Plato on the Quadrivium 343 holds a pair of gloves, as if he would prefer not to show even his hands.2 In comparison to de Dinteville, de Selve is retiring and austere, almost defensive. Suitably, as the patterned floor makes evident, the former steps forward one half step ahead of the latter. In short, while the two men appear to be broadly equal, the military or political man is in fact more prominent or assertive than the somewhat defensive man of faith. This depiction reflects the priority given to politics and war over faith in the thought of men like Machiavelli. We view, then, a soldier and a religious scholar, or perhaps a statesman and a priest. If the painting is a celebration of the Renaissance man, there seem to be two versions of him. That they are friends, everyone agrees,3 but what makes them both Renaissance men, that is, what unites them or what do they have in common? Almost every student of the portrait has admired the beauty and amazing detail of the objects in the picture and felt that they must have some symbolic significance.4 Resting on the table linking the two men, these objects, or the education and the arts and sciences they represent, seem to be a common possession. Are they also the basis upon which the two men are united? Is it because Renaissance politics and faith are shaped by or rooted in these arts and sciences that the two men are friends and stand in the relation they do? Let us take a closer look at the objects depicted.5 They are distributed on two shelves. The top shelf carries instruments related to the study of the

2 For more details on and a good discussion of the contrasting clothing of the two men, see Lisa Monnas, “Reviews of Exhibitions,” Renaissance Studies 12, no. 4 (1998): 553–54. 3 The evidence for their being friends is discussed most fully by Kate Bomford, “Friendship and Immortality: Holbein’s Ambassadors Revisited,” Renaissance Studies 18, no. 4 (2004): 544–80. 4 There is no doubt that the men represent particular individuals and to that extent the painting is merely a portrait. The iconographic aspect is, however, very prominent, and if the objects are treated as symbols, so too may other elements of the painting, including the men. And in that case, we cannot arbitrarily pick and choose which historical or biographical details to use in our interpretation, but must be guided by the painting itself. That, at any rate, is the approach taken here. Mary F. S. Hervey, Holbein’s “Ambassadors”: The Picture and the Men (London: George Bell and Sons, 1903) presents the most biographical information, but the best account of the painting in light of what is known of the two men and of the political context is Richard Foster and Pamela Tudor-Craig, The Secret Life of Paintings (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986). K. Charlton, “Holbein’s ‘Ambassadors’ and Sixteenth- Century Education,” Journal of the History of Ideas 21 (1960): 99–109, is one of very few scholars to deny that the instruments have any symbolic meaning. 5 The best general descriptions of the objects are given by Charlton, “Holbein’s ‘Ambassadors,’” and Elly Dekker and Kristen Lippincott, “The Scientific Instruments in Holbein’sAmbassadors : A Re- examination,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 62 (1999): 93–125. The latter give the fullest description of the likely models of the scientific instruments and agree with Stebbins that there is no significance in the settings painted on the astronomical instruments (F. A. Stebbins, “The Astro- nomical Instruments in Holbein’s Ambassadors,” Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada 56 [1962]: 45–52). 344 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 42 / Issue 3 heavens, or astronomy. There is an astrological globe and several instruments for measuring phenomena related to or using the heavenly bodies: a cylindrical, an equinoctial, and a decagonal sundial, a quadrant (to determine the altitude of objects), and a torquetum (to determine the position of celestial bodies according to the Ptolemaic system). De Selve’s arm rests on a large book whose title is not visible, but which has his age (twenty-five years) written on its fore edge. All of these objects rest on a magnificent oriental (Turkish) carpet. The bottom shelf carries objects from several different arts or sciences. On the side nearest de Dinteville is a globe of the earth, prominently reveal- ing Europe, and especially France, the home of both men (even Polisy, de Dinteville’s hometown and the original location of the painting, is marked). Nearest de Selve are various items connected with music: a lute, a hymn book, and a set of flutes. In between the items of music and geography is a book on mathematics, a certain page of which is marked with a T-square, and a compass or divider (visible under the bridge of the lute). Holbein has therefore painted objects belonging to astronomy, geography, arithmetic, geometry, and music. If geography (the terrestrial globe) is understood to be an application of geometry to the measurement of the Earth (as the very word geometry—“earth measurement”—implies, and as it is in that influen- tial work of medieval education, The Marriage of Philology and Mercury by Martianus Capella), the objects suggest the subjects of the traditional quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. The idea that a good education involves a circle or cycle of learning (an enkuklios paideia) goes back through Plato to Pythagoras; with Hellenistic, Roman, and Christian modifications and additions, it is in fact one of the most enduring elements in the Western tradition.6 It is, however, not clear what this curriculum has to do with the two men depicted here. In the first place, Renaissance educational thought is known at least as much for humanism as for science, mathematics, and astronomy, and humanism is an approach to learning based on literature that stressed the capacities and moral virtues needed to flourish in public and especially political life. This would indeed have been an education that might have produced the two ambassadors; but there is almost no hint of such an education in the objects depicted. One might think that the education of a soldier/statesman would include some allusion to the art of war, to justice and prudence, or to

6 Hardy Grant, “Mathematics and the Liberal Arts,” pts. 1 and 2, College Mathematics Journal 30, no. 2 (1999): 96–105; no. 3 (1999): 197–203, offer a good brief history of the idea. Holbein and Plato on the Quadrivium 345 biographies of captains or statesmen who might serve as models and teach- ers; but again there is no hint of any of this in the objects on the table. The case of de Selve is only a little less puzzling. The hymnbook on the lower shelf does allude to faith, but there is no Bible or other reminder of the theological training that one might expect to be the foundation of a priest’s education (unless the unidentified book on which de Selve rests his arm is taken to be such a reminder).7 It would seem then that the objects on the table are not intended to limn the sort of education that could directly produce a soldier/ statesman or a priest, much less both at once.

Plato on the Quadrivium and Its Purpose The Renaissance famously involved a rediscovery of the ancient classics, and above all of Plato, so it may not be amiss to keep Plato in mind as we consider the meaning of the picture, especially since his Republic offers one of the first and best accounts of the curriculum suggested in it.8 The discussion of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and harmonics in book 7 of the Republic is part of a broader discussion of rule in the best city and particularly of the education needed to produce the best rulers. In previous books, Socrates shows how, through music and gymnastic, or moral and physical education, a person comes to be a “guardian,” that is, a “champion” in war, and an incorruptible lover of his city.9 At the end of book 5, however, we learn that something more is needed to make this guardian fitted to rule. What that is is summed up in the famous suggestion that philosophers should rule as kings or those now called kings should genuinely philosophize (Rep. 473d). In a long and complex defense of this suggestion, Socrates argues, among

7 As Hervey takes it (Holbein’s “Ambassadors,” 202). I am inclined to take the unidentified book more broadly as an indication of a bookish or contemplative disposition in contrast to the disposition to action found in the other man. 8 I have been unable to find direct evidence that Holbein knew Plato, but it is not unreasonable to suppose some familiarity. Plato was widely studied at the time, and Holbein did know St. Thomas More and Desiderius Erasmus, two of the leading contemporary students of Plato. On Holbein’s education more generally and his awareness of the quadrivium in particular, see Erika Michael, “The Legacy of Holbein’s Gedankenreichtum,” inHans Holbein: Paintings, Prints, and Reception, ed. Mark Roskill and John Oliver Hand (Washington, DC: Trustees of the National Gallery of Art, 2001), 227–28 (Holbein’s pen and ink drawing for Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, titled A Scholastic Theologian Surrounded by Symbols of the Quadrivium, is reproduced on p. 228). We may also note that according to Hervey (Holbein’s “Ambassadors,” 157), while serving as a French envoy in Venice, de Selve “threw himself keenly into the learned interests by which he was surrounded, displaying special eagerness in the collection of classical manuscripts,” which would have included the Greek manuscripts then entering Europe from the East through Venice. 9 Plato, Republic 401d–402a, 521d–522b. In what follows, translations of the Republic are from The Republic of Plato, ed. and trans. Allan Bloom, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1991). 346 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 42 / Issue 3 other things, that a city can be well governed only if its rulers know the truth about what is noble, just, and good, and if they are not eager to rule.10 The latter condition will be met if those who rule have available to them a life better than ruling so that they do not “go to public affairs supposing that in them they must seize the good” (521a). As Socrates also puts the two conditions, the rulers of the best city are those men who are “most prudent in those things through which a city is best governed, and who have other honors and a better life than the political life” (521b). These conditions are met only by those engaged in a life of “true philosophy” (521a–b). In the passage of concern to us, Socrates considers in what way men who fulfill both requirements will “come into being” and how one “will lead them up to the light.”11 He proposes a series of “studies” that have the power to “turn” a soul around and lead it on “that ascent to what is which we shall truly affirm to be philosophy” (521c, 523a).12 This turning and ascent do not complete the education,13 but it is for this specific step that Socrates elaborates the curriculum that later became famous as the quadrivium (so called first by the early sixth-century Roman writer Boethius, in his De institutione arithmetica).

10 Other requirements, such as age, experience (especially in war), and the possession of certain virtues, are not dependent on the quadrivial education and so are not discussed here. Concerning the second requirement mentioned in the text, one might desire not to rule for many reasons, most of which would not point to a life better than ruling. A private life devoted to making money is one example (525c–d); for others, consider Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 11. Socrates’s praise of philosophy is so successful that we moderns, who in any case begin with a prejudice in favor of private life, tend to denigrate ruling too quickly, but Socrates thinks that only one, very rare kind of life rightly looks down on ruling (521b). 11 See 521c; “light” is a reference to the cave image (e.g., at 515c–516a). The passage on the quadrivium (521c–531d) is part of an argument about ruling the city that begins at 473d or even at 449b (as 543a implies). Approximately halfway through this broader argument (at 502e–503a), Socrates begins to consider the rulers “as it were from the beginning.” As before, the main qualification required for the rulers is that they be “lovers of the city” and capable in war, but in the new section, although war is still mentioned, it is deemphasized; consequently, the gymnastic training for war, which was crucial to the earlier moral education, is now replaced by “gymnastic in many studies” (503e; see also 504d1 and 535aff.). The emphasis on studies in the reconsideration reflects the fact that Socrates is now considering the “most precise guardians,” who need to receive “the most precise education,” which is the education that relates to the soul, or still more precisely, to the “instrument with which each learns” or perceives the truth (503b and d, 521b). The earlier musical-moral training prepared the soul to recognize and take pleasure in the beautiful (to kalon) and in reasonable speech (401e–402a; see also 411d), and even the earlier gymnastic, although it is wholly concerned with the body (521e), contributed to the education of the soul (407c), but neither music nor gymnastic is education strictly speaking (see especially 522a). The passage on the quadrivium is the beginning of a more precise account of education. 12 The “course of learning” Socrates is about to expound will of course be undertaken only by those possessed of a suitable “nature” (492a, 521c–522a, 535aff., 539d), and who have excelled in the earlier moral and physical training (535d, 537b). 13 See 531c–d (consider especially the cautionary bearing of the word “something”), 533b–d, 534e, and 536d. Holbein and Plato on the Quadrivium 347

Most discussions of the quadrivium focus on the character of the various subjects to be studied and on their sequence. The Socratic account does address these questions, but it places them in the service of one overriding goal: to find “studies” that “by nature lead to intellection” or that “summon or awaken the activity of intellect” (523a–d, 532c). This awakening involves a “turning” of the soul’s concern from that which is accessible through our senses to that which “admit[s] only of being thought and can be grasped in no other way” (526a). It is a turning from the world of perceptible bodies, which, because they are perpetually changing, cannot truly be known, to things that can be known because they are always the same in all respects. In short, the quadrivium is intended to draw or turn the soul’s attention from “becoming” to “being.”14 This stage of the education explains how the soul’s capacity for intellection (noēsis) is, as it were, started up, and how that capacity is directed towards its proper object. It does not guarantee that that object is fully attained. Socrates begins his explanation of this “turning” or “awakening” with sense perception. This usually serves us adequately, he argues, but sometimes our senses convey contradictory information to the soul, as when the ring finger looks at the same time to be both bigger (relative to the pinky) and smaller (relative to the middle finger). In its attempt to clear up the confusion that arises in such cases, “a soul, summoning calculation and intellect, first tries to determine whether each of the things reported to it (by sense perception) is one or two” (524b). If the intellect determines that these two things (the bigger and the smaller) are different, so that each of them is one and distinct from the other, the intellect will have done the opposite of what seeing did (thus, incidentally, proving that the intellect is something different from sense perception): rather than mixing up two things, it will have distinguished them. It is “from here,” Socrates adds, that it first occurs to us to ask about something (in this case, about the big and the little), What is it? (524c). As distinguishing is an act of the intelligence rather than of sense perception, so also is the raising and pursuit of a “What is…?” question, which is answered by a definition. In this way, the attempt to clarify certain sense perceptions arouses the intellect and turns the soul’s attention to something that can be grasped only in thought.

14 See 523b and e; 521c and d; also 507b–c, 517b, and 518d. Another often overlooked purpose of the curriculum is as a test “to see whether it [the prospective ruler’s nature] will be able to bear the greatest studies, or whether it will turn out to be a coward” in learning (503e–504a). For further development of this point, see 526c, 535b–d, 494d, 495a, and 492a. 348 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 42 / Issue 3

As this sketch of the argument suggests, according to Socrates, the first and most elementary act of the intellect is to distinguish one thing from another, different thing, an act which involves distinguishing one from two. Socrates then elaborates a number of “studies” that engage and develop this capacity. Arithmetic, which comes first, deals with “number and calculation,” and is founded on the “lowly business of distinguishing the one, the two, and the three,” that is, on counting. There is nothing esoteric about counting. On the contrary, everyone learns it among his “first studies” and it is used by “all kinds of art, thought, and knowledge” (522c). Socrates’s interlocutor even considers the capacity to count an essential element of being a human being.15 But Socrates wishes to explain what is implied in this fundamental activity of the intellect. He argues that the basis of all counting and calculation, “the one,” is never seen “itself by itself” but always in conjunction with “some opposition to it.” This argument, whose details need not concern us here, means that “nothing looks as though it were one more than the opposite of one.”16 In other words, it is not just occasional sense perceptions, as in the example of the fingers, but anything we see as one—a dog, the moon, a truck—that involves a contradiction that confuses the soul. But in this case, the confusion “compels” the soul to investigate with the intelligence in a way that leads ultimately to our asking “what the one itself is” (524e; also 526a). The answer to that question will be something that is always the same in all respects, which is what Socrates defines as being, and again this is something that can be known only in thought.17 What is true of “the one” is true of all number, and since the “arts of calculation and number are both wholly concerned with number,” the argument about how counting or the one leads to being applies also to calculation and the arts of calculation and number (525a). In fact, calculation is that part of arithmetic that most of all “compels” the soul “to discuss numbers themselves,” the sort of “numbers that admit only of being thought and can be grasped in no other way” as distinct from the “numbers that are attached to visible or tangible bodies” (525d, 526a). Everyday attempts at calculating,

15 522e; see also Laws 818a–c; John Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding, II.xvi.1; and Hobbes’s remark that the “Savages of America…have a little Arithmetic, to adde, and divide in Num- bers not too great” (Leviathan, chap. 46, near the beginning). 16 524e; see also 525a (“we see the same things at the same time as one and as an unlimited multitude”) and 526a. For further elaboration of this point, see Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, trans. Eva Brann (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968), 77. 17 Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought, part 1, explains how the “one” itself satisfies Socrates’s requirements as a being, that is, as something that can be known. Holbein and Plato on the Quadrivium 349

Socrates seems to suggest, such as adding five apples to six apples, compel us to turn away from apples to think about the numbers themselves, for example, how six as such can be added to five as such or how an even number can be added to an odd number. Although he begins with sensible objects, the Socratic arithmetician at some point “turns around” or “awakens” to a concern with number as such. Socrates suggests that this turn from the sensible to the intelligible is implicit in all sense perception and is something that to some extent all humans do. To develop this turn is the main purpose of the quadrivium. The other studies are added for the same reason arithmetic is, because if used in the right way they help the soul “turn around” from sensible things to “being.” There are four more studies: geometry, stereometry (or the study of three-dimensional figures, which is sometimes included in geometry but usually omitted from accounts of the quadrivium), astronomy, and harmony. Like arithmetic, each of these studies is linked to something sensible, but the study as Socrates intends it is directed not to sensible objects (though it may use such objects as learning aids) but to mathematical or relational elements that can be grasped only by the intellect. The Socratic astronomer, for example, is concerned with motion, but not with the motion of those “decorations in the heaven” that can be seen with the eyes; rather, he is concerned only with how “the really fast and the really slow…in true number… are moved with respect to one another” (529d). In just the way a geometer might draw a sketch, but no one thinks his argument is about the ink marks on paper (see 510d), in Socratic astronomy the visible stars might serve as a pattern or model of movements that, however, must be “grasped by argument and thought not sight.” In fact, the true student of astronomy will “let the things in heaven go”: true astronomy is as purely mathematical as number theory (530b–c). The underlying idea is that, however beautiful the stars may be—indeed, however divine the “craftsman of heaven” might be—the stars, being bodily things, share the basic qualities of all sensible things, and “there is no knowledge of such things” (529c).18 The education Socrates has in mind is, as we would say, intellectual. More precisely, its purpose is to make the education of the intellect possible by “setting in motion” the intellect and by turning the soul’s attention from

18 Alexander Mourelatos, who writes that for the “Expert Geometer” the “aesthetic quality of the diagram is otiose,” is one of the few scholars to note the implication that beauty contributes nothing of cognitive value (Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, “Plato’s ‘Real Astronomy’: Republic VII 527D–531D,” in Science and the Sciences in Plato, ed. John P. Anton [New York: Eidos, 1980], 47, see also 54). Like most other commentators, however, he does not take up Socrates’s pregnant allusions in this passage to the divine. 350 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 42 / Issue 3 sensible things to things that are (purely) intelligible (524e). To repeat, this is not to deny that the intelligible things are first approached through sensible things. In addition, if “all kinds of art, thought, and knowledge (science)” make use of number and calculation, there will be a certain overlap between the Socratic studies and the arts that deal with sensible objects (522c; see also Laws 747b). The art of war in particular is singled out as making use of counting, geometry, and astronomy, studies that are also said to be useful for trade, farming, and navigation. It follows that the concerns connected with these practical pursuits may to some extent motivate the efforts needed to develop the intellectual studies. A merchant, for example, seeing how his business benefits from accurate calculation, might seek to develop his skill in it. Con- versely, improved capacity at calculation would improve one’s capacity in the practical pursuits. Indeed, Socrates points out that among the “byproducts” of these studies is greater quickness in other studies (from calculation) and a “finer (or nobler) reception of all studies” (from geometry) (527b-c, 526b). The person who is best at the intellectual arts will therefore also be the best at learning and pursuing such practical arts as trade, farming, navigation, and war. Because these arts, which supply safety, food, clothing, shelter, and so forth, seem to be necessary for the city’s survival, the person who is most capable in them—the one who has pursued the intellectual studies furthest— might seem also to make the best ruler. Socrates acknowledges that valuable practical advantages follow on study of the quadrivium, but it is not for the sake of those advantages that he advo- cates that study. As he puts it in the case of geometry, these studies are pursued for the sake of knowing “what is always, and not at all for what is at any time coming into being and passing away.”19 Or, as he also suggests, the whole study is pursued for the sake of knowing and not for the sake of action (527a). As we have seen, the mathematical studies are valued by Socrates primarily for their tendency to turn the soul away from its initial preoccupation with sensible things, and by implication, from the arts and ends associated with those sensible things, to attend to things that are the object only of thought.20 This central point as well as some of its meaning is conveyed dramatically

19 527a–b, my italics; see also 533b. 20 Besides the strangeness of speaking of music or astronomy as if they had no essential connection to hearing or seeing, that Socrates is aiming at something that is perhaps not so easily grasped is suggested by the frequent references throughout the passage on the quadrivium, on one hand, to that for the sake of which the study is being pursued (525c, 526e, 529c, 530c and e, 531c and d), and on the other hand, to how the manner of the intended study is different from conventional practices (523a, 525b–d, 529a, 531a–b). Socrates does approve the way of those who are clever in calculation (525d) and he acknowledges that the Pythagoreans get some things right (530d). Holbein and Plato on the Quadrivium 351 in the difficulty Socrates’s talented young interlocutor has in grasping it. As each study is introduced in the conversation, Glaucon (albeit with significant nudges from Socrates) defends it for its utility in war or for some practical art. Socrates grants these advantages, but he grows increasingly dismissive of this approach. The first sign of this change comes when Socrates argues that those who are going to “participate in the greatest things in the city” must learn calculation, but not “after the fashion of private men,” who pursue it “for the sake of buying and selling”; they must rather use calculation “for war and for ease of turning the soul itself around from becoming to truth and being” (525c). Here, Socrates appeals to Glaucon’s interest in war to suggest that the warrior and the philosopher, while they make radically different uses of calculation, can agree that the tradesman or merchant does not use calculation in the correct way. The argument implies that the ends for the sake of which the tradesman uses calculation—presumably, goods and money—will not be significant concerns for the ruler being educated in the quadrivium. But then, after having employed war in this way, Socrates goes on to say that the study of calculation is useful “for what we want if a man practices it for the sake of coming to know and not for trade” (525d). In this conclusion about “what we want” from the study of calculation, reference to war is conspicu- ously omitted: unlike trade, war may be among “the greatest things in the city,” but no more than the trader does the warrior practice calculation for the sake of “what we want”—to come to know. In the next step, Socrates drives home the point about war. After Glaucon tells him how useful geometry is in war, Socrates bluntly states that “only a small portion of geometry—as of calculation—would suffice” for the needs of an army (526d). Socrates is much more concerned with the effect on us of the “greater and more advanced part” of these studies, the part that goes beyond what is required for any practical need. And that effect, as we have repeatedly seen, is the “ease of turning the soul itself around” to the “region inhabited by the happiest part of what is,” that is, “what is always” or “being.”21 Simi- lar moments occur in the argument concerning astronomy and harmonics. When astronomy is first introduced, Glaucon praises it as useful not just for generalship, but also for farming and navigation (527d). After gently mock- ing him for this, Socrates suggests not only that the true astronomer does not have in mind practical uses in his study, as if he were applying for an NSF grant, but that he is unmoved even by the great beauty and possible divine character of the stars. Only when astronomy is transformed into a

21 526d and e, 527b, 525a and c; see again 503e. 352 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 42 / Issue 3 mathematical study that has no essential link to anything visible can it help to “convert the prudence by nature in the soul from uselessness to useful- ness” (530b–c; see also 529c). Similarly, harmonics becomes “useful…for the quest after the fair and the good” only when, using intelligence rather than ears, one treats music as a purely mathematical study, “but pursued in any other way it is useless” (531c). In sum, to turn away from “becoming” means to turn away from one’s concern for things like trade, agriculture, navigation, war, and indeed, from anything having to do with the senses of seeing and hearing (see also 533b3–5). For good reasons, war is the most frequently mentioned practical pursuit, but if one were to study calculation, geometry, or astronomy with a view to war, one would perhaps get as far as Agamemnon, who is the butt of a poet’s jokes for his incompetence in mathematics, but such a study would never achieve “our interest” in all of this education (522d, 530e). Up to a point, then, the concern for war is maintained, but it too must ultimately be transcended. If trade, navigation, agriculture, and war, and what they procure (wealth and the pleasures it makes possible, food, and independence or safety), are essential concerns of any polity, as they seem to be, how can a study that turns the student away from them be a necessary or even a proper prepara- tion for a ruler? The answer is that these things are not the primary concern of the ruler in the “most precise” sense. What is that concern is revealed in the first place in the sort of knowledge which those who are most “capable of guarding the laws and practices of cities” must have. This knowledge is limned when Socrates asks the following complicated question: [Is there] any difference…between blind men and those men who are really deprived of the knowledge of what each thing is: those who have no clear pattern in the soul, and are hence unable—after looking off, as painters do, toward what is truest, and ever referring to it and contem- plating it as precisely as possible—to give laws about what is fine, just and good, if any need to be given, and as guardians to preserve those that are already established? (484b–d; see also 500d)22 The task of the guardian is to give or preserve laws about “what is fine (noble), just, and good,” and to do this correctly, he needs more than a general, instinctive, or habitual knowledge of these things: he must have contem- plated them “as precisely as possible” and to the point where he has a clear

22 When speaking of the relative importance of knowledge, experience, and “any other part of virtue” to the task of giving or preserving the laws or practices of a city, Glaucon says without correction by Socrates that those who have “knowledge of what each thing is” have what is “just about the most important” thing (484c–d; see also 506a2–b1 and 520c). Holbein and Plato on the Quadrivium 353 pattern of them in his soul.23 And it is this knowledge that the quadrivial or turning education helps to make possible. In the first place, like the one itself and the other mathematical things, the noble, the just, and the good cannot be seen, touched, or heard. Not being bodily things, to the extent that they can be known they are known not through the senses but only in thought (see Laws 898d). In other words, there is a certain kinship between the “one itself” and the noble or the just as objects of knowledge. In addition, as we have seen, the mathematical studies are what by nature “awaken” or turn us to thinking about objects of this sort and give us practice in it: the mathematical studies accustom the intellect to the “region” where the noble, the just, and the good exist (526d–e).24 The precision of mathematical thinking is also useful training for and perhaps a model of the sort of contemplation Socrates has in mind. For the mere “sketch” (504d–e) of the virtues that is elaborated in books 2–4 of the Republic is insufficient for those who would be the “most precise” rulers. Socrates’s rulers must know the noble, just, and good as much as possible in themselves, what they are “by nature,” and not as they may understand them from habitual practices, childhood education, or the authorities in their city. If every society is a “cave” with a particular set of conventional opinions, the knowledge Socrates is speaking of must involve a “turn” away from these opinions and an attempt to know “by nature.” The mathematical studies show that this kind of learning is possible and are a model for it. But could not the mathematical studies be understood as the foundation for practicing the arts the city needs? This possibility is implicitly rejected in Socrates’s complex introduction to astronomy. When astronomy is proposed as the third study, Glaucon praises it as useful “not only for farming and navigation, but no less so for generalship” (527d). Glaucon implies that the study is undertaken for the sake of action, or for the sake of the arts that handle or care for bodies. In correcting this suggestion, Socrates asks what kind of man Glaucon thinks he is conversing with: the kind who thinks that if a study

23 Socrates suggests here that one must have a “pattern in the soul” before one can see and contem- plate what is truest, but elsewhere he suggests that constant contemplation of something you admire makes you like that thing (500c–d). The same reciprocal relation between what one admires and what is already in the soul appears when Socrates says that there is a part of the soul that is “akin” to that which is, and that it is this part that grasps that which is and thereby gives birth to intelligence and truth, and lives truly (490b). 24 Nicomachus of Gerasa likens these studies to “ladders and bridges that carry our minds from things apprehended by sense and opinion to those comprehended by the mind and understanding,” which, “in their immateriality and eternity [are] more akin to our souls, and above all to the reason which is in our souls” (Introduction to Arithmetic, in Great Books of the Western World, ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins [Chicago: Encyclopedia Brittanica, 1952], 11:812). 354 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 42 / Issue 3 does not serve some practical purpose it is useless, or the kind who, looking beyond practical uses, sees in the study some benefit to the man himself, to his soul? And, he now asseverates, it is not just that the quadrivial studies turn and draw the soul towards being, but that in them “a certain instrument of everyone’s soul—one that is destroyed and blinded by other practices— is purified and rekindled, an instrument more important to save than ten thousand eyes. For with it alone is truth seen” (527d-e).25 Whereas Socrates had earlier suggested a certain overlap and harmony between the practical arts and the mathematical or intellectual studies (the philosophers just had to go further or pursue them in a different way than the arts required), he now suggests that the arts harm the man who practices them. A few people recognize this and in them the mathematical studies apparently bring into being a concern not so much for knowledge itself as for the part of the soul that knows. This crucial point reveals the second and most important reason why the education of the intellect cannot be understood as being for the sake of the practical arts. It is not just that the practical arts aim to satisfy the needs, desires, and pleasures of the body, for which the true lover of learning has a relatively weak concern (485d). Nor is the primary issue the particular knowledge or opinions one might have. Rather, the issue is what the various pursuits cause one to be, for in educating the rulers, Socrates is attempting to form a certain type of human being, the type which regards the part of the soul with which one perceives the truth, the so-called eye of the soul, as being more valuable than ten thousand eyes. Now, this person will be the one whose attention to the intellect has prepared him to learn the practical arts quickly and finely, but if practicing those arts “destroys” the part of the soul he cares so much about, he will also, if he is aware of this effect of the arts, be the person least willing to engage in them. Socrates’s statement about the “eye of the soul” suggests a tension between the practical pursuits, on one hand, and true education or the full existence of the intellectual capacities in the soul, on the other. Looked at another way, Socrates’s statement implies that the pursuits mentioned—agriculture, trade, navigation, and war—would draw us away from genuine care of the soul, less because of the time those pursuits occupy than for the direction of concern they imply. Thus, to the extent that war (for example) is a necessary pursuit for a ruler, to that extent

25 In addition, in comparison with the other virtues of soul, which are produced by habits and exercise, the virtue of this part of the soul is “more than anything somehow more divine” because it never loses its power (518d–519a; see also 500c2–d1). Holbein and Plato on the Quadrivium 355 will ruling be an obstacle to true education of the soul.26 Not only is the good the philosopher seeks not to be obtained through ruling, but ruling is an obstacle to the good he does seek. It follows from these things that while the most precise education makes it possible to rule well, that education would also make one most unwilling to rule: the most qualified person would be the least willing to rule. This is why Socrates can say that this person would “very much” rather be “‘on the soil, a serf to another man, to a portionless man,’ and to undergo anything whatsoever” than to opine the things, and live in the way, that would result in his being honored and holding power in a city (516d). It is, however, precisely because the philosopher has such a good reason for not wanting to rule that he should be king. We recall that Socrates’s ruler was not only to be someone who knew the just, noble, and good as precisely as possible, but also someone who had available to him a life better than the political one, that is, someone who was pursuing a good that was better than the good(s) that can be obtained in or through political life. Why this is a qualification for rule becomes apparent when we see that it is presented here by Socrates as the solution to the problem of factional conflict. Prudence, Socrates maintains, exists “by nature” in the soul, but education can determine how or to what prudence is directed, and on this depends whether or not prudence is useful and good for the city (as well as for the individual himself).27 Now, according to Socrates, in most people (and apparently, by nature), prudence serves the desires for “eating and such pleasures as well as their refinements” (519a–b; see also 505b). In other words, most people use their intelligence, not to attempt to grasp being, but to figure out how to satisfy their bodily needs and pleasures. But this tendency, which is sown in the nature of man, is ultimately the origin of factional conflict. Bodily pleasures, and especially their refinements, are always changing, and since the things needed to satisfy these pleasures are both difficult to get and cannot be enjoyed by everyone in common, to obtain and enjoy them requires helpers and allies. When, therefore, people of this kind enter politics, they can be expected still to aim at bodily pleasures and to use their prudence to secure them for themselves and their friends. Factions and factional conflict are the inevitable result. Socrates suggests, perhaps with Glaucon and Adeimantus (see 419a–420a) in mind, that the way to obtain rulers who will not lead the

26 Consider in this light Alexander Hamilton’s remark about what things interest those whose minds are dominated by the passion of ambition (Federalist, No. 17, beginning). 27 See 530b8–530c1, 518c–519a. 356 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 42 / Issue 3 city into factional conflict is to “cut” the tie to eating and such pleasures and put some better aim in their place (518a–b; see also 517c). This is what the “turning” education assists in doing when it directs one away from becoming or sensible things, and therewith from the pleasures of the body, to being. As we have seen, the quadrivium by itself does not deliver full or final knowledge of the noble, the just, and the good, but by developing the capacity and desire for learning “and all that’s like it,” this education directs the soul away from bodily pleasure towards the pleasure of the soul (485c), and it points in the direction where knowledge of the noble, just, and good becomes possible.28 In these ways the quadrivium helps to produce those who are most prudent in the things through which the city is best ruled. Paradoxical though it is, the best ruler is the one who least desires to rule because the good he envisions for himself is a good that cannot be obtained in or through a political life. Before we turn back to Holbein, it is worth noting that Socrates suggests another way of understanding the kingly or ruling activity of the philosopher. If the part of the soul with which we perceive truth is more precious than ten thousand eyes, might not the task of the “most precise” rulers be to care for this part at the level of the city? This may be the suggestion when Socrates argues that, after participating in “the affairs of war and all the offices suitable for young men,” and only then being led to see the good, the philosophers must use their knowledge “as a pattern for ordering the city, private men, and themselves for the rest of their lives.” “For the most part,” Socrates continues, each one spends his time in philosophy, but when his turn comes, he drudges in politics and rules for the city’s sake, not as though he were doing a thing that is fine, but one that is necessary. And thus always educating other like men and leaving them behind in their place as guardians of the city, they go off to the Isles of the Blessed and dwell. (539e–540b; see also 497c and 500d) It is unclear from this statement whether spending one’s time in philosophy involves educating other like men, but “drudging in politics,” or ordering the city, is part of the philosopher’s educative task. In other words, when it comes their turn to rule, the philosophers’ task is to arrange the city so as to educate “other like men” (and women—540c), that is, other philosophers, so that there is always someone in the city who has the founder’s understanding

28 Another consequence of the quadrivium that is not developed here is that the intellectual education helps to give one a “single goal in private or public” life, without which no one can be a good steward of a city (519c). Holbein and Plato on the Quadrivium 357

(497c–d). To rule in the most precise sense means to order the city so as to cultivate the “eye of the soul.” Even this high political task, however, is something philosophers must be “compelled” to do (540a–b). That compulsion is required implies that while a philosopher may be a king, there is no time when the activity of philosophy coincides with the activity of ruling, even in the best city.29

Holbein’s Quadrivium Returning now to Holbein’s painting, we see three main differences with the Socratic education. First, in contrast to Socrates, the painting strongly emphasizes sensible objects and the practical arts, or things that Socrates would classify under “becoming.” Even allowing that painted objects might have an allegorical significance, the education Holbein sketches emphasizes practical utility. The mathematics text, for example, could have been a theoretical treatise on the properties of number, which would point in a Socratic direction, but Holbein painted a practical guide for businessmen, titled Eyn Newe unnd wohlgegrundte underweysung aller Kauffmanss Rechnung (A new and reliable instruction book of calculation for merchants, published in 1527 by Peter Apian).30 Similarly, geometry is linked in the painting, not, say, to Euclid, but to geography, the measuring or mapping of the globe for the sake of travel and trade (hinted at perhaps by the oriental carpet), as if that were this science’s proper use. Again, the purpose of the various astronomical tools is to tell the time, determine altitude, and determine one’s own location or that of the heavenly bodies. These would be useful in navigation and other practical arts or sciences (apparently the white quadrant on the top shelf was frequently adopted for use by land surveyors in the sixteenth century).31 The objects on the table thus reflect the expanding knowledge of the world through the application of the sciences to it.32 This emphasis on

29 In the Republic Socrates first tries to solve the political problem by educating guardians to be wholly devoted to the common good. That proves to be impossible, above all because the body and its loves, especially those related to the family, cannot be entirely communized. In the passages we have been considering, Socrates tries to solve the problem in a different way, by finding rulers who would be just because they have no good of their own to gain from ruling. 30 See Hervey, Holbein’s “Ambassadors,” 224. 31 Charlton, “Holbein’s ‘Ambassadors’ and Sixteenth-Century Education,” 101. 32 In fact, as Stephen Greenblatt points out, there is “nothing in the painting that is not the product of human fashioning—no flower, no lapdog, no distant landscape.…The heavens and the earth are present only as the objects of measurement and representation, the objects of the globemaker’s art” (Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980], 20). 358 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 42 / Issue 3 observation and measurement distinguishes Holbein’s curriculum not only from the Socratic one, but also from the medieval approach which, although based in the study of authoritative texts and directed to knowledge of God, was also theoretical.33 The only objects in the painting not obviously linked to practical pursuits are those related to music. Perhaps they are intended to be symbols of the quadrivial study of music, as it is found in the tradition of St. Augustine’s De musica or Boethius’s De musica, where harmony, intervals, and so on are treated as a purely theoretical form of mathematical order, the study of which had nothing to do with listening to sounds. But this more Socratic approach (see 531a–b) hardly seems consistent with the details in the picture. Mary Hervey was the first to suggest that the Lutheran hymnal and the broken string on the lute should be understood as symbols of the religious dishar- mony then causing so much turmoil in Europe, especially since de Selve was known for his desire to reconcile Protestants and Catholics.34 But if this is true, these reminders of music would be directed to “human opinions and desires” (533b); they would point to a practical political purpose rather than to a study designed to direct our attention away from everything practical, to “being.” Lutheran music was in any case distinctive for its popular and practical significance, and the particular songs depicted—a version of the Ten Commandments and “Come Holy Spirit”—also suggest a moral intention rather than a theoretical one. On the other hand, if Hervey is wrong, it would be natural to see in the broken string an indication that the lute is actually used, again a sign of music as a pursuit linked to the senses rather than as a theoretical study. The sole unambiguous reminder of religion in the curriculum, then, is not the Bible or some symbol of theological study, but a book of popular hymns noteworthy for their ability to move the passions.35 Had Holbein intended his depiction of music to point away from practice, he could easily have presented it allegorically in a way that did not emphasize

33 Charlton (“Holbein’s ‘Ambassadors’ and Sixteenth-Century Education”), who does not reference Plato, argues that the practical nature of the arts indicated in the painting means that they cannot represent the university studies of the day, bookish Scholasticism. Even if we grant this, as I am inclined to, the theoretical quadrivium is not identical with bookish Scholasticism and the practical arts are based upon and remind of the theoretical sciences. 34 Hervey, Holbein’s “Ambassadors,” 227–31. The best account of this view is Foster and Tudor-Craig, Secret Life of Paintings, 86, which uses evidence in the picture to argue that the scene is represented as having been painted on April 11, 1533, a decisive moment in King Henry VIII’s breach with the Catholic Church. 35 As for the crucifix in the upper left corner, it will be discussed below. Holbein and Plato on the Quadrivium 359 practice. In its practical emphasis, then, the education Holbein depicts is distinguished from the Socratic approach’s theoretical character. The second way in which Holbein differs from Socrates concerns the order in which the studies are presented. In Plato, the sequence is: arithmetic, geometry, stereometry, astronomy, harmony. The underlying order is from the simplest to the more complex: Socrates moves from anything we can identify as one, to plane figures (two dimensions), to that which has depth (three-dimensional objects, what we would call body), to bodies in motion, and finally, to harmonies made by bodies in motion. Whether or not this implies an ascending order of importance, there is a logical progres- sion from one study to the next. But this characterization emphasizes too much what Socrates calls becoming. If, following Socrates’s main purpose, we look to that which can only be thought rather than to that which can be seen or heard, we might characterize the principle of order as a development from number (and calculation) to ratios or proportions in plane figures, in motions, and in harmony. In this view, geometry, astronomy, and music have some important commonalities. Accordingly, astronomy and music are said to be “antistrophes” (530d4); moreover, since both astronomy and music deal with proportions or ratios and culminate in the study of problems, which are features borrowed from geometry, it would appear that both of these studies are forms of geometry. There are then really only two studies: arithmetic and geometry, the study of number and the study of ratio or proportion. At the end of his description of the quadrivium, however, Socrates says that if the inquiry into all the things we have gone through arrives at their community and relationship with one another, and draws conclusions as to how they are akin to one another, then the concern with them contributes something to what we want, and is not a labor without profit, but otherwise it is. (531c–d; see also 537b–c) Thus, however much the studies Socrates has considered might differ from one another, they contribute “something to what we want” only when their kinship or similarity is understood. Whatever the “community and relationship” to which Socrates points might be, it is not so easy to understand the sequence or order in Holbein’s curriculum. One difficulty concerns the fact that the objects are arranged on two shelves, which suggests two groups or categories: the entire top shelf is occupied by astronomy, while arithmetic, geometry, and music share the bottom. Perhaps this distribution or grouping implies no order or ranking, but that would run contrary to virtually every extant discussion of the 360 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 42 / Issue 3 quadrivium. If, then, we take the upper shelf to be a place of honor or distinction, astronomy would be the most important study, a view which may also be signaled by the fact that Holbein accords to astronomy as much space as the other three studies combined. But what then is the relation between astronomy and the studies represented on the lower shelf? If the latter studies are taken to lay the foundation for astronomy, the painting would differ from the Socratic presentation in two main ways. One is that while Socrates depicts a sequence in which a more complex study follows a more elementary one, he also indicates that there is a fundamental kinship among all the studies and that that kinship rather than the differences is decisive. It is not clear that Holbein would accept this Socratic view. The second difference concerns the relation between music and astronomy. Our hypothesis suggests that music is preparatory for astronomy, whereas, although Socrates had discussed astronomy before music, suggesting that it would be the preparatory study, he calls the two studies “antistrophes” or counterparts of one another, as if they belonged together or were akin to one another. Thus, however we understand the order in Plato, Holbein appears to give astronomy a more privileged position relative to music than he did. We cannot attempt to unravel this puzzle here, except to say that the history of the quadrivium suggests that the relation of music to astronomy is one of the most vexed problems.36 However we explain the relation of music to astronomy, the fact that Hol- bein gives astronomy a certain priority may be significant in the context of his curriculum. The only distinctively Christian element in that curriculum is the open hymnbook (the flutes are associated with Greek mythology and the lute in the Renaissance was a common instrument of folklore with roots in and perhaps lingering associations with the orient).37 The hymnbook is depicted with great precision: It is the tenor partbook of the second edition of Johann Walther’s Geistliches Gesangbüchlein [Holy hymnbook] (Worms: Peter Schöffer, 1525). The hymns Holbein has chosen to reproduce are no. 2, Walther’s

36 Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought, 30–32, argues that it is in music that proportion is first studied. By contrast, according to Boethius, for whom the order is arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy, the first two studies concern multitude or quantity—as it exists in and of itself (arithmetic) and as it exists in relations (music)—while the second two studies, also a pair, deal with magnitudes, immobile (geometry) and mobile (astronomy). Thus, the main distinction in Boethius is multitude vs. magnitude, rather than number vs. proportion (or ratio), as it is in Plato. Astronomy is a particularly sensitive topic in the pre-Christian writers because of its link in law and popular opinion to the gods (see Republic 529e–530a and Laws 820ff.). 37 Foster and Tudor-Craig, Secret Life of Paintings, 86, uses a book contemporary with the painting to argue that the lute is an emblem of treaties or harmony. Holbein and Plato on the Quadrivium 361

setting of Martin Luther’s translation of Veni sancte spiritus, Kom heiliger geyst [Come holy spirit], and no. 19, the beginning of Luther’s shortened version of the Ten Commandments, Mensch wiltu leben seliglich. The tenor partbook was the only one containing both texts. As a work common to both Protestant and Catholic faiths—and as the sequence for Pentecost, which celebrates the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the disciples—Kom heiliger geyst / Veni sancte spiritus is a particularly apt choice.38 A particularly apt choice, that is, to support the view that Walther’s hymnbook is a symbol of de Selve’s preoccupation to reconcile Protestant with Catholic. But if this was de Selve’s preoccupation, why is it represented in the picture as being less important than astronomy? An alternative interpretation is that while the hymnbook may represent what Protestant and Catholic have in common—that is, it represents Christianity39—Holbein intends also to use it to suggest the restricted or subordinate place given to Christianity in the Renaissance course of studies (and thus in the Renaissance concep- tion of man). In the interpretation most favorable to Christianity, the lower shelf could represent those studies that are most foundational, upon which the higher sciences are built. As Socrates had said, counting and calculation are involved in all thought, art, and science. But this would mean that morality (the Ten Commandments, or law) and theology (“Come Holy Spirit”) are somehow preparatory to the study of astronomy, a ranking no Christian would admit. Even if we do not assume that the shelves indicate the priority of one study to another, the painting implies that de Selve gives at least as much attention to astronomy as to morality or theology, and it seems unlikely that as a priest he would do so. Finally, the Turkish carpet on which the astronomical instruments rest may suggest that the prominence given astronomy, or even the study itself, is Asiatic or pagan in origin or character. That view would be compatible with the foundational biblical statement on the heavenly bodies, according to which those bodies were created not, as seems to have been a common view in the ancient world prior to the monotheistic revelation, as gods to be worshiped, but as lights to rule the day and night: that is, they are meant to serve man (and the earth), not he them.40 For a Christian, the stars are no more divine than God’s other creations and the study of astronomy would rank lower than the study of the

38 Mary Rasmussen, “The Case of the Flutes in Holbein’sThe Ambassadors,” Early Music 23, no. 1 (1995): 115. 39 See Hervey, Holbein’s “Ambssadors,” 219–22 and Foster and Tudor-Craig, Secret Life of Paintings, 87. 40 Contrast Genesis 1:14–18 with Plato, Apology 26d; see also Apology 18b8–c3. 362 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 42 / Issue 3

Ten Commandments or revealed law.41 In other words, if the placement of an object implies the rank of the study suggested by that object, the picture indicates that the Renaissance has taken a decisive step away from biblical faith. No wonder de Selve looks chilled. The third and most important way in which Holbein differs from Plato has to do with the human beings who are the result of the education. The painting appears to suggest what is explicit in Plato’s account, that education is intended to produce a certain type of human being. Both accounts involve a duality: for Socrates, philosopher and king, for Holbein, a soldier (or statesman) and a priest. And both suggest that the same education is somehow relevant to both men. At the simplest level, if “all kinds of art, thought, and knowledge” use the kind of thought Socrates is concerned to cultivate, the objects on the table represent the basic intellectual education common to both men in their claims to know. The great difference, however, is that whereas the Socratic education is intended to culminate in a single man who is philosopher and king (warrior) in one, Holbein’s painting depicts two different men, a warrior and a priest. In Holbein, the two men appear to be friends who might work together, but there is no hint that they can or should be combined into one in the way that Socrates suggests philosopher and king must be, so that we would have a priest-king or something like the prophet-king of medieval Jewish and Islamic thought. For Socrates, philosopher and king must be one if we are to obtain the best or most precise ruler and so that the city can be “perfectly ordered” (506b). Holbein’s double portrait, therefore, implicitly rejects the Socratic idea of a single human perfection.42 Plato’s teaching is, however, not so simple as our summary has suggested. We recall that the philosophers had to be compelled to take their turn at ruling even in the best city and when considering the highest task. Moreover, in a sort of preface to the discussion of the philosopher king, Socrates indicates that his suggestions are not made with the intention of proving that they can

41 The observations made in this paragraph lead me to disagree with Kate Bomford’s suggestion that the astronomical instruments allude to a “heavenly” (i.e., spiritual) realm, while the objects on the lower shelf allude to the “earthly” (bodily or temporal) realm. Her suggestion that the two men embody “the guardians, respectively, of bodies and souls” is, however, very good (“Friendship and Immortality,” 567–68). 42 Someone might object to the comparison developed in this paragraph on the grounds that, unlike the passage in the Republic, the picture is not an exploration of the education necessary for rule. But leading in war and in matters related to the divine both involve public supervision of other human beings and throughout history (and even now outside the world of liberal democracy) have been considered part of ruling. Consider also the opinion of Plato’s Athenian stranger that to become “capable of exercising serious supervision over humans” requires some mathematical education (Laws 818c). Holbein and Plato on the Quadrivium 363 come “into being in every way in deed as we described it in speech” (473a). Rather, they are made for the sake of a “pattern in speech,” meant to teach us something about justice, the just man, and the simply good city (472c).43 Socrates does argue that the best ruler (and the good city) is by nature possible, if highly unlikely, but his arguments are not policy proposals, even if his interlocutors (and some readers) wish to take them as such. For these and other reasons, we are not surprised to find that in the more practicalLaws , where a Platonic character who sounds a lot like Socrates advises an actual founder of a city, the philosopher king is not mentioned; his role is apparently filled by a somewhat mysterious council of elders. In addition, in theLaws , the Athenian converses with two men who think (at least at first) that war is the aim of the city, and priests and divine worship have an immeasurably greater presence in the proposals of the Laws than in those of the Republic. In other words, when we look to Plato’s more practical discussion of politics, we find much more attention to warriors and priests, the very combination Holbein has painted. If a single man who is both philosopher and king at once is not available, the next-best thing may be a sort of diarchy of warrior and priest. The question would then arise as to what principle would guide their efforts to a common goal. One possibility is that the warrior would look up to the priest. Something like this is sketched by Aristotle towards the end of the Ethics, where he indicates that the morally serious man, whose life of action emphatically includes warfare, should regard the men who lead a contemplative or theoretical life as leading a higher life—higher in part because somehow more divine.44 There is no suggestion that de Selve is a philosopher in Aristotle or Plato’s sense, but it seems possible to understand him as a practical substitute for the philosopher. Socrates’s argument in the Republic suggests that political life needs awareness of another and higher life, and when philosophy cannot represent that life, a priest may be an acceptable substitute. The objects of a priest’s reflection are not practical in the way trade and war are, and they may turn men away from politics in a way analogous to how the concern to know being does for Socrates.45 The difficulty with this

43 Interestingly for our comparison with Holbein, in this same preface Socrates likens what he is doing in describing the best city and the most just man in speech to what a “painter” does when he “draws a pattern of what the fairest human being would be like” (see 472d). 44 Compare Nicomachean Ethics 1177b 6–19 and the treatment of courage and the noblest actions in X.8 with 1177a11–18, 1177b26–1178a4, 1178b6–28, and 1179a23–33. 45 Concerning this possibility, consider that the god (or gods) in Socrates’s reformation of Greek theology is (or are) as changeless as the philosophers’ ideas, and may be a sort of prefiguring of them (see 364 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 42 / Issue 3 possibility as a clue to interpreting the painting is that it would require de Dinteville to look up to de Selve, but in fact, while the statesman is friendly towards the priest, it seems unlikely that he considers the priest’s life to be a higher life than his own. If anything, as we have seen, de Dinteville is the more prominent figure. We conclude, then, that the picture depicts a world shaped by a scientific education with a distinctly practical thrust, a world in which the priest has a significant part, but not so great a part as the soldier. So understood the picture can be read as a critical commentary on Plato’s understanding of politics. How then does the painter evaluate the Renaissance itself? The answer may be suggested in the broader context of the men and their studies. The two men share or are united by three elements of the picture: the table and its objects, the geometric pattern in the floor tiles, and the green curtain in the background. Concerning the tiles, they are arranged in a pattern of inter- locking and overlapping circles and squares in such a manner that no one of these shapes can be said to predominate: it is as if to say that de Selve and de Dinteville are similarly bound together in a, so to speak, geometric harmony. But we cannot attend to the tiles without becoming aware of a strange shape cutting at an odd angle across and marring this clear, carefully balanced geo- metrical order. Viewed from the correct angle, that shape turns out to be an anamorphic skull. Skulls, hourglasses, and other reminders of mortality were of course commonplace in Renaissance painting. But what is striking here is that the skull is not simply a memento mori. It is not lying on the floor, for it casts a shadow, and it appears to be moving from left to right into the picture. It enters at an angle that clashes with almost all the planes in the picture and seems to come between the two men. These features suggest that the plane on which the men and their accomplishments are so exalted is at odds with the plane on which the skull exists. The viewer is led to wonder about the relation between the wealth, order, learning, and worldly splendor of the two men and the inevitable approach of death.46

380d–381e, 382e). 46 Foster and Tudor-Craig, Secret Life of Paintings, 92, makes the nice observation that only when we shift to a perspective outside that from which we normally view the painting do we see the shape as a skull, “so the meaning of our painting shifts its ground” and from the new vantage point, worldly knowledge is revealed as truly vain (see also Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 17–21; Ras- mussen, “Case of the Flutes,” 116; and Bomford, “Friendship and Immortality,” 561). Rejecting this interpretation, Charlton, “Holbein’s ‘Ambassadors,’” points to the relentlessly practical nature of the studies depicted to argue that while the picture is a rejection of the futile “learning” of the university Schoolmen (including the purely theoretical quadrivium), it is not a rejection of the new practical sciences. The difficulty with Charlton’s interpretation is that it treats the anamorphic skull only as an exercise in visual perspective and does not explain why a skull is used. Holbein and Plato on the Quadrivium 365

Neither man shows the least awareness of the skull, even de Dinteville, whose motto was apparently “memento mori” and whose hat is ornamented with a small silver skull. Does this lack of awareness suggest that the education we have been discussing does not prepare them to reflect on their own mortality, indeed, that it diverts them from such reflection? To the extent that the impedimenta remind of Socrates’s curriculum, this would make sense, for that curriculum is nothing if not a diversion from the things that come into being and pass away, one of which things is of course the human body with its continually renewed needs, for the sake of seeking that which is always.47 In addition, death, although depicted in the painting with extraordinary artistic skill, is the one thing that cannot be known or shaped through the arts or manmade instruments.48 The humanistic accomplishments that are the basis for the friendship or alliance of warrior and priest—the reconciliation of church and state on the basis of practical science—thus seem to be purchased at the price of an active forgetting of death. And this might amount to a fundamental criticism of the Renaissance ideal and perhaps even of the Socratic idea as we have seen it. And yet, if death comes to us like the mysterious shape entering the picture, why not plunge into the pursuit of science and reap its practical benefits?49 This attitude might be justifiable if death were a merely natural fact. But while the anamorphic skull, which seems to enter the painting from the viewer’s plane, is in the foreground, the background contains a very different perspective on death. The curtain behind the two men is drawn aside in the upper left-hand corner just enough to expose half a crucifix. In the light of this central Christian symbol, which suggests that mortality can be overcome through the right kind of faith (and thus not through knowledge of being), the skull appears to represent the mere natural fact of mortality. The crucifix is almost hidden; indeed, at one point in the history of the painting, it was even painted over, perhaps to make the panel more saleable.50 The

47 Consider also 486a–b. 48 See Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 20. 49 Greenblatt argues that in this painting death is depicted “not in its power to destroy the flesh, or… in its power to horrify and cause unbearable pain, but in its uncanny inaccessibility and absence” (Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 19; see also Bomford, “Friendship and Immortality,” 563). Edgar R. Samuel, “Death in the Glass—A New View of Holbein’s ‘Ambassadors,’” Burlington Magazine 105, no. 727 (1963): 436–41, points out that the skull, which would normally appear as a sphere, lines up in the painting with the other two spheres among the objects on the table. Thus, Holbein has added to the spheres representing the heavens and the terraqueaous globe another one representing mankind, the being who could be said to live between the two former spheres. 50 Susan Foister, Ashok Roy, and Martin Wyld, Making and Meaning: Holbein’s Ambassadors 366 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 42 / Issue 3 crucifix is the only thing in the painting that lies outside the immediate present depicted in the panel; this gray reminder, in suffering and death, of the promise of eternal life is something from the dark, almost forgotten, medieval background. And for all these reasons, it contrasts even more sharply than does the skull with the shimmering accomplishments, the learning and exploration, the implicit hopes depicted in the foreground of the picture. The suffering and nearly naked man on the cross makes the fancy clothes, the confident worldliness, and even the learning of the two men seem like hollow or boastful showiness.51 The two men are even more unconscious of the crucifix than they are of the skull. For if they are unaware of death, what reason would they have for seeking out the Christian means for overcoming it? By putting the crucifix in such an obscure place, the painter may be suggesting that the Renaissance obscures knowledge of Christianity, and perhaps that it is on the verge of erasing it altogether. Or perhaps he means that Christianity, though almost forgotten, cannot be entirely obliterated: it is there if you look for it, and this fact can assume its correct significance if one studies in the right way. Does the Renaissance scheme of education then have the effect of effacing the memory of the core doctrine of Christianity? The answer to this question—which is apparently the key to the meaning of the picture—depends on whether one thinks the curtain is about to be closed or is being opened; for there is some sign that the curtain is in motion.

(London: National Gallery, 1997), 88 and 92. 51 Samuel, “Death in the Glass,” 441, following Baltrusaitis, points out the striking similarities between the Holbein and two marquetry panels in the Louvre entitled Vanité scientifique and Vanité des puissances terrestres, ecclésiastique et laïque (see also the discussion of Agrippa in Foster and Tudor-Craig, Secret Life of Paintings, 93–95).