The Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena VI ASP Conference Series, Vol. 441 Enrico Maria Corsini, ed. c 2011 Astronomical Society of the Pacific Giorgio Vasari and the Image of the Hour Maia Wellington Gahtan Lorenzo de’ Medici Institute, Marist College, Firenze, Italy Universita` di Firenze, Firenze, Italy Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, Italy Abstract. Giorgio Vasari created the first allegories of the twenty-four hours in the mid-16th century. This essay explores Vasari’s novel images in the context of his vi- sual and literary sources, the rising importance of household timepieces, and the artist’s other works and writings. Although a focussed study of a single motif within Vasari’s oeuvre, it has implications for the broader transformation time perception and its psy- chological dimensions then taking place in Early Modern Europe. One significant, but gradual transformation that took place in European society over the course of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance was the adoption of twenty-four clock hours as the usual mode of counting time. With the invention, and then the public diffusion of large tower clocks in the 14th century, followed by table clocks in the later 15th and 16th centuries, the equal hours they measured grew in popularity, eventually replacing the canonical hours and more intuitive modes of time telling (such as the division of the day into four parts or the seasonal hour system), all of which were based on fixed points of time rather than continuous durations. Even sundials which in earlier times had represented seasonal hours, by the late 15th century became calibrated with slanting gnomens to measure clock hours1. By the mid-16th century, table clocks had become typical furnishings of wealthy homes and people began wearing the first watches so that clock time quite literally could be carried with you2. While we know quite a bit about the history of these fascinating objects and their owners, it is harder for us to appreciate how people felt about the hours they measured. Did the broad diffusion of clock hours elicit any special psychological response? One simple way of probing this question is to look at allegorical representations of the hours in the art of the period. This essay will focus on the images of a particularly thoughtful and articulate painter, Giorgio Vasari, whose works cluster in the middle 1A. M, Seasonal-hour Sundials, “Antiquarian Horology”, 19, 2, 1990, pp. 147-174. 2See G. D-V R, History of the Hour. Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders, trans. T. D, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1996, as well as C. C’s classic, Clocks and Culture, New York and London, W. W. Norton & Co., 1978. The earliest dated watch (1530) exists in the Walters Art Museum and belongs to Philip Melanchthon (on this latter, see M. W G- G. T, “GOTT ALLEIN DIE EHRE”, Engraved on Philip Melanchthon’s Watch of 1530, “Lutheran Quarterly”, 15, Autumn, 2001, pp. 249-272). 169 170 Wellington Gahtan Figure 1. Baldassare Peruzzi, Apollo’s Chariot and 12 Hours shadowed by Sat- urn, detail of frieze, 1520, Sala delle Prospettive, Villa Farnesina, Rome. (Credit: MIBAC Archive) decades of the 16th century–the period when the final and most intensive chapter in the transition to clock hours was taking place. These allegories by Vasari bear witness to a man in the process of working out his attitudes and making peace with hourly time. Giorgio Vasari was not the first to represent the hours in art: that honor goes to the Roman painter and architect, Baldassare Peruzzi. The year was 1520 and the place was the Villa Farnesina in Rome as a part of a frieze in this villa’s famous Sala delle Prospettive. An antiquarian artist serving an antiquarian-minded patron, the Sienese banker Agostino Chigi, Peruzzi took his inspiration for the context and form of the hours from ancient literature (Figure 1). According to Homer, Hesiod, and Ovid, the Horae were daughters of Apollo who prepared the horses of his chariot and guarded the gates of Olympus. Associated with the Seasons and the Graces, they numbered three or four, until later mythographers (such as the Pseudo-Hyginus, from the 2nd century and Nonnus, from the 5th century) sometimes offered twelve as an alternative. This alternative was based on real usage after the introduction of the Babylonian twenty-four seasonal hour system into Greece– so says Herodotus–sometime during the classical period3. Renaissance mythographic traditions and commentaries are based on the great poets and mythographers of ancient Greece and Rome, and they repeat the Hours’ association with the Sun, the Graces and the seasonal time, though Boccaccio and Giraldi also distinguish between the three or four mythological Horae (as Apollo’s handmaidens) and the more scientific division of the natural day into twenty-four hourly parts4. Although mentioned in such scholarly 3D-V R, History of the Hour (cit. note 2), p. 18. 4B, Genealogie deorum gentilium libri, Bari, Giuseppe Laterza & Figli, 1951, chap. XIV.xx on Day, Son of Herebo, pp. 63-66, and L G G, De deis gentium, Basel, 1548, Syntagma XIII, Charites, Gratiae, pp. 574-575. Giorgio Vasari and the Image of the Hour 171 literature, before the mid-16th century, the Horae are absent from art and are rarely depicted in poetry5. When they do appear in poetry, they attend Apollo, and usually number three or four6 In appropriate antiquarian fashion, Peruzzi’s Hours surround the Chariot of A- pollo, but here the ancient inspiration stops. Instead of further associating the Hours with the Seasons or Graces, Peruzzi presents his viewers with twelve mythological hours. He also chose to include another unorthodox element: the sinister figure of Saturn, the pagan god most associated in the Renaissance with linear and destructive time. Like a shadow, Saturn lurks behind the radient sungod, Apollo7. It would seem that for Peruzzi, Apollo’s daughters, the Hours, serve more as expressions of time’s shortness and witnesses to its ultimately destructive nature, than as companions to the solar circuit. Peruzzi’s treatment of the hours is more conceptual than antiquarian, not unlike Raphael’s own conceptual vision of hourly time dating from 1515, also produced in Rome. In Raphael’s case which occurs on the borders of a tapestry for the Medici pope, Leo X, Apollo and Diana–the Sun and the Moon–are backed up against an hour- glass, and black and white nudes standing for day and night sit on a twenty-four hour clock8. Raphael’s timepieces most likely refer to the shortness of linear time, a primary meaning that hourglasses and clocks had only recently acquired. Timepieces of various types were familiar in the visual representations of the Mid- dle Ages and early Renaissance as attributes of Temperence. A famous example is Am- brogio Lorenzetti’s allegory of Temperance which forms part of his Good Government 5The Sun as Apollo alone or with Aurora as his companion is frequently represented in both the art and the poetry of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. On medieval and Renaissance visual representations of the Sun and his companions, see C. C V, La Casa del Sole, Fonti e Modelli per un’iconografia mitologica, in S. R-S. V (eds.), Le due Rome del Quattrocento, Roma, La Sapienza, 1996, pp. 245-253, by the same author, I luoghi del mito fra decorazione e collezionismo, in Immagini degli dei. Mitologia e collezionismo tra ’500 e ’600, Roma, Fondazione Memmo, 1996, pp. 29-48, S. P, Le drame de la lumier´ e e de l’ombre: La tradizione iconografica della sequenza notte-aurora-giorno, “Studi romani”, 50, 2002, pp. 279-301, F. N A, L’iconographie du soleil dans la renaissance italienne in Le soleil a` la renaissance. Sciences et mythes, Brussels and Paris, Presses Universitaires de France e de Bruxelles, 1965, p. 538, and also my own, Observations on Apolline Imagery in Italy: 1450-1750 in S. S (ed.), The Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena III, “Memorie della Societa` Astronomica Italiana”, 73, 1, 2002, pp. 129-135. An exception to this rule in art (discussed by C V, La Casa del Sole, this note) is Filarete’s description of ideal solar imagery which he felt should include the twenty-four hours. 6In poetry, for example Poliziano describes three Ore in his Stanze per la Giostra (1.92). Dante, however, provides an exception on two occasions in his Purgatorio (XII.80-81 and XXII.118-20) in which the solar chariot is accompanied by six and five handmaidens (“ancelle”) respectively, implying a total of twelve hours. Dante refrains from naming them Horae or hours, perhaps so as not to create too close an association the classical tradition. Since in his Convivio, Dante makes the point that the church uses seasonal hours as a basis for its liturgical hour system (Book 3.6.2), it would appear that he adapted his poetic presentation of the Hours to conform to Christian church practice. This would be consistant with his other adaptations of pagan mythology throughout the Divine Comedy. 7On Saturn as a figure for destructive linear time, see E. P’s still fundamental essay, Father Time in Studies in Iconology. Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance, New York, Harper and Row, 1972, pp. 69-94. C V, La casa del Sole (cit. note 5) and P, Le drame de la lumie´re (cit. note 5) discuss Peruzzi’s unusual image. 8On these tapestry borders, see J. C-R, Dynasty and Destiny in Medici Art: Pontormo, Leo X, and the Two Cosimos, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 30, 1984, p. 52.