Erasmus, Man of Letters

The Construction of Charisma in Print - Updated Edition

Lisa Jardine

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781400866175
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophenbiographien

The name Erasmus of Rotterdam conjures up a golden age of scholarly integrity and the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, when learning could command public admiration without the need for authorial self-promotion. Lisa Jardine, however, shows that Erasmus self-consciously created his own reputation as the central figure of the European intellectual world. Erasmus himself—the historical as opposed to the figural individual—was a brilliant, maverick innovator, who achieved little formal academic recognition in his own lifetime. What Jardine offers here is not only a fascinating study of Erasmus but also a bold account of a key moment in Western history, a time when it first became possible to believe in the existence of something that could be designated "European thought."

CHAPTER ONE

‘A better portrait of Erasmus will his writings show’: Fashioning the Figure

WHOSE BOOK? THE QUENTIN METSYS DIPTYCH OF ERASMUS AND PETER GILLES

Early in 1517, Erasmus wrote from Antwerp to Thomas More in London:¹

Peter Gilles and I are being painted on the same panel, which we intend shortly to send you as a gift. On my return here, however, I found Peter seriously—indeed, dangerously—ill with some indeterminate sickness, from which even now he has not entirely recovered; as far as the portrait was concerned, this was extremely inconvenient. I myself was in excellent health; but somehow the physician took it into his head to tell me to take some pills to purge my bile, and the advice he foolishly gave me I even more foolishly agreed to take. My portrait had already been begun; but after taking the medicine, when I went back to the painter, he said it was not the same face, and so the painting has been put off for several days, until I look more cheerful.²

The joint gift was finally dispatched in September 1517, and More wrote letters of thanks to both donors (who had paid equal shares of the cost of the work). To Gilles he sent a verse tribute (verses which he described as ‘as clumsy as the painting is masterly’). The first part of this is a six-line epigram, in the persona of the diptych itself, celebrating the ardent friendship between Erasmus and Gilles, as there depicted, and between Erasmus, Gilles, and More, as made vivid by their correspondence.³ The second, in More’s own persona, plays elaborately on the conjunction of portrait-likeness, reproduced handwritings, books and letters, as combining to make the figures recognisable:

I am confident you will recognise those you see represented here, even if you only saw them once in the past. If you do not, the identity of the first will be revealed to you by the letter which he holds; the other, to enlighten you, is writing his own name; and in any case, even were he not doing so, the inscribed books, which are famous, and read worldwide, will be able to enlighten you …

The letter closes with a further enthusiastic outburst on More’s part on Metsys’s virtuosity in depicting, as it were, the writing of the writers:

My dear Pieter, marvellously as our Quintin [Metsys] has represented everything, [your portrait] shows above all what a wonderful forger he would have made! He has imitated the address on my letter to you so well that I do not believe I could make a better job if I tried to repeat the original inscription myself. And so, unless he wants it for some purpose of his own, or you are keeping it for your own ends, do please let me have the letter back: it will double the effect if it is kept handy alongside the picture. If it has been lost, or if you have a use for it, I will see whether I in my turn can imitate the man who imitates my hand so well.⁴

In spite of the modest disclaimer, this letter and its verses were clearly intended as a public tribute, and were published the following year.⁵

Meanwhile, More wrote privately to Erasmus:

Truly, even though this may be a proud thought, I judge it to be thus. I esteem what you have sent me to mean that you would wish to revive the memory of yourself in my mind, not just daily, but hourly. You know me so well that I need not labour to prove to you that although I am not without many shortcomings, nevertheless, I am far from being a common braggart. Yet to tell the truth, there is one craving for glory I cannot shake off, and I marvel at how sensuously and sweetly it appeals to me. It is when the thought comes to me that I shall be commended to the most distant ages because of the friendship of Erasmus, as testified to by the letters, the books and the pictures, as testified to, indeed, in every way.⁶

A more fanciful, public offering was published in the 1518 Auctarium volume of Erasmus’s letters, however, forming a matching pair with the letter to Gilles and its verse tribute:

I am delighted that my little verses on the painting pleased you. Cuthbert Tunstall thought the hendecasyllables more than passable, he was lukewarm about the six-liner. A certain inconsequential monk [fraterculus quidam], however, dared to take exception to my linking the two of you together as Castor and Pollux. He said that you ought rather have been joined as Theseus and Pirithous, or as Pylades and Orestes, who were as you are intimate friends one to the other, not brothers. Since I could not stand the monk, even if he spoke the truth, I replied to his good intention with a bad epigram, as follows:

Wishing to show two friends in little verses to be the greatest of mutual friends, I had said that they were such as Castor and Pollux once were. ‘Your comparison of brothers with friends is inept’ rejoined a trifling monk [fraterculus]. ‘What,’ I said, ‘Is there any closer kind of friendship than that between brothers?’ My interlocutor laughed scornfully at such ignorance of the obvious on my part, and said, ‘In our large and crowded monastery there are more than two hundred brothers, but I wager you anything that amongst those two hundred you will not find two brothers who are mutual friends!’⁷

The diptych to which this correspondence refers will be familiar to anyone who has ever picked up a volume of Erasmus’s selected works or read one of the popular biographies. For the Metsys Erasmus panel alternates with Holbein’s portraits to provide the standard likeness of the great scholar, regularly reproduced as book jacket or frontispiece. Together with Albrecht Dürer’s engraving and Hans Holbein’s late portraits, Metsys’s painting has been the subject of a whole sequence of art-historical articles and monographs, whose focus is sometimes Erasmus himself, sometimes Thomas More, and sometimes the genre of scholar-portraits itself.⁸

The exchange of letters between intellectual friends ‘frames’ the diptych, which is itself a tribute to, and token of, that friendship. The letters provide a setting, an occasion, and a collection of harmonising sentiments which give the graphic representations additional meaning. They contrive an atmosphere of vivid excitement; they dramatise a flurry of delighted exchanges which supposedly attended the transportation from Antwerp to London (via Calais) of the double portrait. The letters—prominently and repeatedly reprinted thereafter—concentrate their own and the reader’s attention on the lasting significance of the gift ‘likeness’ which Desiderius Erasmus and Peter Gilles offer Thomas More. Is what is figured on the wood panels with such consummate skill a permanent record of a particularly humane friendship? Or is it rather an enduring monument to Erasmus, ‘man of letters’—a figure whose memorable qualities are those of the Master (pedagogus to perpetual student onlookers), the technically superlative translator, editor and circulator in print of the treasures of ancient secular and sacred learning?

I highlight such questions in order to begin to try to revive for us a sense of how thoroughly remarkable it is that the figure of Erasmus should so fully have formed our conception of the European teacher and man of letters. So strongly has Erasmus marked the ‘humanities’ or the ‘liberal arts’ that we fail to recognise the strangeness and unfamiliarity of the original figure he shaped in the years around 1520—we miss the virtuoso command of the media he displays as he models graphic and printed representations to his purposes. By 1520, Erasmus was over fifty, and a certain recognisable sort of scholarly ‘fame’ (academically circumscribed, geographically restricted) was already securely his. He was, that is to say, already a famous intellectual figure in the Low Countries. Yet the self-conscious programme of the gift-portraits, their studied publicising in the accompanying artful letters, suggests that he envisaged some kind of fame on a yet larger scale, with a yet more extensive reach (geographically, and in terms of its duration).

My suggestion is that he aspired to something more like the renown traditionally accorded only to the major ancient authors and teachers of secular and sacred texts—the international acclaim and recognition accorded to a Seneca or a Jerome. We fail to notice the extraordinary presumptuousness of this aspiration on Erasmus’s part only, I think, because in the end he was so entirely and consummately successful. The care with which Erasmus composed his version of himself as symbol of enduring success in the domain of ‘letters’ (or bonae litterae), out of available cultural models of timeless, universal scholarly and spiritual achievement, has shaped our own version almost entirely. It has so permeated our understanding of the effectiveness and impact of learning that for centuries since, academics in the humanities have taken it for granted that our professional practice—the professional practice of reading, commenting, and editing—is a source of, and means of access to, limitless power and influence in a world which values our undertakings.⁹ Learning elevates individual thought into universal significance, it knows no national boundaries, it can influence world events, it can shape and make political outcomes.¹⁰

Erasmus’s letter to More is studiedly disingenuous about the art of the portrait painter. Quentin Metsys cannot go on with the portrait of Erasmus which he has already started because Erasmus’s voluntary purging has left him looking unwell. The sittings cannot continue until Erasmus is once more ‘himself’—once more fits the image of himself which Metsys has begun to fix.¹¹ This little anecdote (much quoted by Erasmus biographers) makes vivid a particular type of resemblance which is to be Erasmus’s gift to More—an exact physical likeness, the likeness of now, a precious treasure to be sent posthaste to the friend who regrets his absence. We may compare this letter and its anecdote with another intimate exchange of letters, similarly charged with affection, more than ten years later, between Erasmus and Margaret Roper, More’s eldest, and intellectually gifted, daughter. That exchange is also about a portrait (or rather, a sketch for a portrait), this time Hans Holbein’s group portrait of the More family:

I can hardly express to you, Oh Margaret Roper, ornament of your native Britain, the deep pleasure I experienced when the painter Holbein set before me the portrait of your entire family. It has captured your likenesses so well that if I were personally with you I could hardly have seen more clearly. How often do I find myself wishing that just once more before I die I could see that group of friends who are so dear to me, and to whom I owe, in large part, my social standing and my fame. (At least I would rather be indebted to you than to any other living soul.) That wish has in large part been granted by the good office of the expert hand of the artist. I have been able to meet and recognise you all once more, and none better than you. I have even believed that I could discover, through that beautiful exterior, the reflection of your yet more beautiful soul. I congratulate you all on your good fortune, and above all your most dear father.¹²

To which Margaret Roper replied:

We have learned with joy and with infinite gratitude that the arrival of the painter gave you so much pleasure, because he was the bearer of the portrait he had done of my parents and the entire family. Our deepest desire is to see our tutor again one day, and to be able to talk again to him—he whose learned works have taught us everything that we know, he who is also the true and long-standing friend of our father.¹³

In both of Erasmus’s letters, intimate friendship is represented as a pleasure taken in a precise physical rendering of the absent friend. The gift he and Gilles offer Thomas More is to be an enduring testimony to the closest of personal commitments; it requir...