Imagination in the Chamber of Sleep: Karel Van Mander on Somnus and Morpheus*
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Chapter 6 Imagination in the Chamber of Sleep: Karel van Mander on Somnus and Morpheus* Christine Göttler Self-Transformers: Proteus, Vertumnus, and Morpheus ‘As Proteus transformed himself amidst the waves out of burning love for the beautiful Pomona, so does Goltzius, the admirable engraver and origina- tor, change, with his varied art, for you, Oh Prince’.1 It was in these terms that Cornelius Schonaeus (Cornelis Schoon, 1540–1611), the Catholic rector of the Latin school of Haarlem, commended Hendrick Goltzius’s (1558–1617) engrav- ings of the Early Life of the Virgin, in a dedicatory inscription to Wilhelm V, Count Palatine and Duke of Bavaria. The inscription is located at the bottom of the first engraving in the series, an Annunciation that ‘reinvents’ and ‘restages’ the manners of various Italian masters [Fig. 6.1].2 Schonaeus’s use of the term ‘repertor’ in lieu of the more common ‘inventor’ signals the uniqueness of * I presented previous versions of this contribution at the conferences ‘Image, Imagination and Cognition: Medieval and Early Modern Theory and Practice’ (NIAS, Wassenaar, November 2012) and ‘The World from Above: New Studies and Approaches of the World Landscape Tradition’ (Lille and Brussels, January 2013), at lectures at the Kunsthistorisches Institut Florenz (Max Planck Institute, June 2013), the Universität Hamburg, and the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen (June 2015). I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all the participants at these events, especially to Hannah Baader, Frank Fehrenbach, Anna Pawlak, Maurice Saß, Caroline van Eck and Michel Weemans for their stimulating comments. Most especially, my thanks go to Claudia Swan for her attentive and generous close reading of this essay. 1 ‘SERENISSIMO PRINCIPI AC ILLUSTRISSIMO DOMINO D. GUILIELMO V COMITI PALAT. RHE. UTRIUSQUE BAVARIAE DUCI. ETC. Ut mediis Proteus se transforma- bat in undis,| Formosae cupido Pononae captus amore:| Sic varia PRINCEPS TIBI nunc se Goltzius arte | Commutat, sculptor mirabilis, atque repertor’. On Cornelius Schonaeus, see Bloemendal J., Spiegel van het dagelijks leven? Latijnse school en toneel in de noordelijke Nederlanden in de zestiende en de zeventiende eeuw (Hilversum: 2003) 60–63. Schonaeus fre- quently wrote verses for prints by Goltzius and Karel van Mander. 2 Leeflang H. – Luijten G. (eds.), Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617): Drawings, Prints and Paintings, exh. cat., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (Zwolle: 2003) 210–215, cat. 75; Melion W.S., “The Meditative Function of Hendrick Goltzius’s ‘Life of the Virgin’ of 1593–94”, in Falkenburg R. – Melion W.S. – Richardson T.M. (eds.), Image and Imagination of the Religious Self in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Proteus 1 (Turnhout: 2007) 279–426, especially 380–381. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004365742_008 148 Göttler Figure 6.1 Hendrick Goltzius, The Annunciation, first plate of The Life of the Virgin series (1594, third state). Engraving, 47.2 × 35.3 cm. London, The British Museum, Dept. Prints & Drawings (inv. no. 1857,0613.451). Image © The British Museum.