Multimedia Conversations: Love and Lovesickness in Sixteenth-century Italian Single-sheet Prints

Abstract

Engaging in a conversation with sixteenth-century prints, this chapter explores how particular Italian prints were designed to generate everyday conversations about love and lovesickness with the audience observing them. Through a close analysis of the images, but also the texts added to the pictures, the chapter shows the ways in which an envisioned narrator dissected the themes in classical allegories intended for display in private homes. Kocsis demonstrates how prints focusing on love engaged in a multisensorial conversation with the viewer.

Early modern single-sheet prints of high quality and intricate content were exchanged and discussed within the circles of erudite acquaintances. As art historian Peter Parshall has emphasised: “by the first decade of the sixteenth century prints had become a means of intimate discourse”.¹ A few sources mention prints as objects of lively discussions, like a letter from 1520 by the German humanist Johann Cochlaeus (1479–1552), reporting that he had a lengthy discourse with his humanist friend, Philipp Fürstenberger (1479–1540), on Albrecht Dürer’s two prints.² Unfortunately, the letter does not provide a description of what was talked about. This chapter intends to show that, notwithstanding the rarity and the laconic nature of such sources, it is possible to get closer to what was conversed over early modern prints.

Captions printed in many sixteenth-century sheets reveal how the images were framed with ideas and evoke a potential way of conversing with and about the images. Words were often incorporated into pictures in the history of art, and the combination of text and image was not an unusual experience for early modern spectators. Nevertheless, the sixteenth century was an important new phase for combining different media. The appearance and spread of printing made it possible to multiply visual and textual messages in hundreds of identical copies. Facing a wide audience, captions in single-sheet prints contributed to the standardisation of meaning. Inscriptions also accommodated the printed image to the new context and were intended to involve the reader-viewer into the world of the print by offering knowledge, exciting emotions, and provoking dialogue.

Some sixteenth-century single-sheet prints from Rome demonstrate that these paper objects were indeed designed to generate vibrant and intimate conversations—namely, on the popular topics of love and lovesickness. They are all composed of seemingly mythological scenes and Italian vernacular poems informed by Petrarchan poetry and widely circulated thoughts on love. While the images show classical deities or figures in all’antica costumes and settings, the explanatory verses interpret the images as visual embodiments of the forces and notions of the soul.

It is unsurprising that this subject appeared in the popular medium of single-sheet prints since it had become the focus of growing theoretical interest from the end of the fifteenth century onwards. Renaissance love theory received a new impetus with the publication of Marsilio Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s Symposium (titled De Amore, published in 1484) that gave rise to the literary genre of the treatise on love (trattato d’amore). Leone Ebreo (ca. 1465–after 1521), Mario Equicola (ca. 1470–1525), Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529), and Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) can be mentioned as the most famous authors of this new genre. These treatises—usually written in dialogue form and in the vernacular—based their discussion of love on Neoplatonic philosophical ideas.³ Pietro Bembo connected this theoretical framework to the poetry of Petrarch (1304–1374) and set the standard for courtly society’s attitude towards love for decades.⁴ In Bembo’s dialogue titled Gli Asolani (1505), the figure of Perottino formulated the concept of earthly love as bitter suffering, playing with the similarity of the two words amore and amaro.⁵ In the Book of the Courtier (1528), Baldassare Castiglione also expanded on the lovers’ sufferings: the figure of Ottaviano Fregoso condemned the continuous lamentation of male lovers while a fictive Pietro Bembo argued that even lovesickness was part of spiritual love because the soul could also suffer from the absence of the beloved’s beauty.⁶ At the same time, Petrarchism became a fashionable “social game” among the courtiers. After the publication of the first pocket-sized Canzoniere (1501), the enjoyment, recitation, composition, and exchanging of Petrarchan poems, imbued by the experience of lovesickness, was part of everyday life for educated sixteenth-century Italians.⁷ These ideas, theories, and practices are crucial for understanding the five Roman single-sheet prints that this chapter discusses with a focus on their conversational potential.

The selection of the prints is based on their remarkable connection to Petrarchan poetry which manifests itself under close observation but has not yet been the focus of art historical or literary historical research. Literary historians probably dismissed the verses because they seemed to lack originality and showed the symptoms of the Petrarchan trend characteristic of the period. The role that Petrarchan tradition played in the history of art has been elaborated upon in previous scholarship.⁸ The work of art historian Stephen J. Campbell is especially relevant to the present study. Campbell emphasised the role of Petrarchan lyrics in the emergence of Italian mythological painting and he introduced the term “visualising device” in connection to mythological images from the first decades of the sixteenth century that were installed in the Mantuan studiolo of Isabella d’Este (1474–1539).⁹ These panel paintings thematised the passions and perturbations of the soul caused by carnal love, lovesickness, and various further aspects of love. In Campbell’s interpretation, these images were used during the meditations of their beholders aiming at one’s maintenance of mental health, and their handling was also intertwined with humanist ideals about contemplation. In my opinion, the five single-sheet prints in focus here precisely demonstrate these ideas and practices in action within the frame of a multimedia experience. These prints engaged a much wider audience in philosophical, moralistic, and poetic conversations on love and lovesickness than did the studiolo paintings. They could have also functioned as catalysts of inner conversations as they encouraged the beholders to reflect on their inner selves.

Before delving into the rich fabric of meanings, the first section introduces the prints as private objects from the perspective of their materiality and possible mode of display. The detailed analysis of the five prints is organised into two parts, discussing separately three smaller prints from two larger sheets. First, I show how Petrarchan texts and ideas were used to psychologise mythological images. Reading pictures and texts against each other, I demonstrate how allegorical images of gods and goddesses combined with poems in the first-person voice could initiate discussion on the state of mind and heart of the beholder. Second, the examination of more intricate prints on the tragic symptoms of lovesickness reveals how mythological images were transformed into a symbolic repertoire of texts and images in order to guide the audience in contemplating and discussing their philosophical and moral stands in relation to love.

Five Single-sheet Prints from Rome on the Threshold of Public and Private

The five single-sheet prints in question reveal only scarce information about their authors and producers: only two sheets include the engravers’ monograms, one contains the date 1542, and there are vague attributions regarding the designers of the images in art historical scholarship.¹⁰ The authors of the Italian poems have not been referred to or identified either. Thus, the prints defy all modern expectations regarding authorship. However, there is one certainty in the history of these artworks: Antonio Salamanca (1478–1562), one of the first professional single-sheet publishers, released impressions from the five plates between 1540 and 1560 in Rome. Salamanca most probably bought three already-used copperplates at the beginning of the 1540s, added his own name, and published new impressions from them—the Jupiter, Apollo, Venus, and Amor, the Allegory of the Two Lovers, and The Sailing Amor.¹¹ In the case of two prints (Allegory of the Passions and Allegory of the Cruelty of Love), it is not clear whether they were older plates which had been reused or had been produced in cooperation with the publisher.¹² Thanks to Salamanca’s strategy of acquiring older copperplates, the five prints from different decades of the sixteenth century came together in one publisher’s stock.

The five prints create two groups based on their date and their size. Three sheets measure around 190 × 220 mm (Figs. 11.1–11.3). They are also structured in the same way: thin lines on all four sides frame the images while the eight-line texts are arranged in two stanzas, separately placed in stylised frames below the pictures. Two prints are much larger, measuring 390 × 474 mm and 362 × 259 mm (Figs. 11.4–11.5). In general, they appear similar to the smaller ones since the texts are also set below the images. However, their details are more refined: the longer poems (of twenty-four and fourteen lines) are put on illusionistic cartellinos. The decorative cartouches in the Allegory of the Cruelty of Love are put in a box-like space, thus adding a sculptural effect to the print (Fig. 11.4). The framed inscription in the Allegory of the Passions also plays with the viewer’s perception (Fig. 11.5). On the left, it looks like a cartellino pasted below the image while on the right, it transforms into a torn piece of paper that suddenly becomes part of the composition since the leg of the main figure casts a shadow on it. As such, the two larger prints are designed to have an illusionistic effect on their beholders.

Fig. 11.1

Master of the Die after Raphael (?). 1530–1560. Published by Antonio Salamanca. Jupiter, Apollo, Venus, and Amor. Engraving, 190 × 226 mm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The Elisha Whittelsey Collection. The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1949, acc. nr. 49.97.327

Alongside these material and visual characteristics, one can speculate about the mode of display. The smaller prints were easier to handle as single leaves while the two larger pieces could work as visual illusions pasted on the wall, as substitutes for more expensive forms of art.¹³However, all the prints could have been pasted in albums and preserved in private libraries since print collection started to become a cultural practice in the sixteenth century. It is likely that prints survived the centuries in this way, just as the impression of the Allegory of the Passions (Fig. 11.5)—now preserved in the Rijksmuseum—was part of a recently reconstructed sixteenth-century collector’s album from Bamberg.¹⁴ This important piece of evidence shows how far prints could travel after their purchase and also gives an idea about the setting and space of their use. Study rooms and libraries were, on the one hand, private and intimate spaces while also having the potential to accommodate (erudite) discussions.¹⁵

Pasted in albums or put on the wall, early modern single-sheet prints existed on the threshold of private and public. They were produced in hundreds of identical copies, mostly for an open market and a wide, international audience. Hundreds of beholders faced the same paper object, but every one of them made sense of the image in their own private spaces. In this context, prints worked simultaneously as standardised but personal multimedia experiences and could stimulate intimate self-reflection and learned conversations. In fact, we can have a better sense of their conversational potential by paying detailed attention to their captions.

Gods, Goddesses, and the Perplexed Speaker

The three smaller and presumably earlier prints are not only similar in their size and layout but also in their content and meaning. Gods and goddesses appear in the pictures with their symbolic animals in triumphal chariots or with their attributes in clear and simple compositions. Most importantly, a first-person voice appears in the poetic captions, offering a new interpretation of the images.

The image of Jupiter, Apollo, Venus, and Amor (Fig. 11.1) shows a frozen moment of celestial conflict. On the left, Jupiter appears from among the clouds, ready to strike with his thunderbolt, while Apollo has just stopped his four large horses who were pulling the chariot. On the right, Venus is sitting in her cart driven by an eagle, a peacock, Cerberus, and a sea horse while a swan and Cupid appear above. Venus and Cupid seem to lose this moment of the combat: Phoebus Apollo takes up more space in the composition, as if he wanted to expel Venus and her entourage from the image. Cupid is already escaping in the background, and the beasts of Venus’s chariot spring back from Apollo’s huge horses. The figures are dynamic and the composition is full of tension. The image reveals the cause of the conflict for those who are familiar with ancient mythology. The beasts bound to Venus’s chariot are not her own symbolic animals but those of the main divinities: Cerberus is associated with Pluto, the seahorse belongs to Neptune, the eagle to Jove, and the peacock to Juno. As highlighted by Adam Bartsch, the subjugated status of the beasts may be understood as the work of the infinite power of the goddess of love.¹⁶

The vernacular poem accompanying the image first offers important clues to the reader-viewers in order to decipher the scene: it identifies the figures, describes their family relations, and sets up the opposing sides. Then it defines the roles of these gods in the working of the universe. In contrast to the apparently hostile atmosphere in the image, the verse explains how the harmonious interaction of Phoebus Apollo and Venus keeps the universe in motion and bloom. The dynamics of warmth and love are portrayed as positive forces of the visible world since they “perform wonders”. Understanding classical deities as allegories of natural forces goes back to a long tradition before the sixteenth century and had gained momentum with Renaissance philosophical thinking.¹⁷ In his commentary on Plato’s Symposium (1484), Marsilio Ficino also depicts love as a creative force that sets and maintains the universe in motion.¹⁸

Most of the poem is descriptive and explanatory, but it takes an unexpected turn in the last two lines: the first-person speaker appears and laments about the conflicting nature of the depicted gods. Aiming to serve both deities, he cannot decide which direction to take in life and feels like he has been left with nothing. With this new voice, the battle of the gods is shifted from the outside to the inside, from the celestial world of deities to the soul of the speaker. The continuous struggle of the conflicting forces is expressed with a line from Petrarch’s sonnet 132—“I myself do not know what I wish for myself”.¹⁹ This poem is about the bittersweet suffering and the double nature of love that confuses the senses and the intellect. Therefore, the use of its penultimate line might serve as a reference point for the meaning of the whole text. The hesitant speaker in the print is similarly perplexed between Apollo and Venus. At first glance, the text seems to be a didactic interpretation that channels different poetic and philosophical sources into the scheme of comprehension of the picture. However, with the first-person speaker appearing on stage and stepping between the beholder and the image, the poem provides a model to the audience, teaching them to react to the picture by scrutinising one’s own relations to the gods and their symbolic realm. The battle of Apollo and Venus, reason and desire, seems to be intentionally undecided, leaving the audience with the poetic image of a self-reflective, perplexed speaker in the face of the combating gods. Thus, the sheet is a witty invitation for the beholder to engage in a similar inner conversation on the subject.

In the Allegory of the Two Lovers (Fig. 11.2), the image shows Juno and Venus in their chariots which are drawn by peacocks and doves, respectively, while Cupid flies between them. The power relations are more balanced here, with the real battle happening in the foreground where a peacock attacks two pigeons. The image has been interpreted as an allegory of marriage and love, based on Juno’s primary role as the wife of Jupiter and on Venus’s notorious reputation as a seductress.²⁰ However, the poem below the image allows a more nuanced interpretation. In the caption, the first-person speaker is talking about the rivalry between two lovers and the very similar feelings they generate in one’s soul. In the last line, the speaker asks for Cupid’s help in this difficult situation with questions borrowed from Petrarch’s sonnet 268—“What should I do, what do you advise me, Amor?”.²¹ The monologue peaks with this petition to Cupid: the poetic question concludes the self-reflective part and addresses the child-god who is actually depicted in the picture. The verse thus not only gives the beholder a model of thinking about the symbolic meaning of the goddesses but also initiates communication with the image. This can be read as an encouragement to the audience to similarly engage in intimate conversation with the image and to address their own issues to the god of love.

Fig. 11.2

Veneziano, Agostino after Raphael (?). 1530–1560. Allegory of the Two Lovers. Engraving, 180 × 222 mm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The Elisha Whittelsey Collection. The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1949, acc. nr. 49.97.329

Bartsch assumed that the masculine pronouns used by the speaker to address the two lovers were meant as references to the two allegorical figures of love and marriage (related to the two Italian nouns matrimonio and amore, both of which are masculine).²² However, the text talks about physical characteristics, such as beautiful eyes and sweet faces, and draws a lively picture of the two lovers. The speaker might represent a female voice hesitating between two men and two different life choices. In this case, the goddesses exemplify the two options in front of her, two role models with whom she could identify. A further possibility is that the print addresses a female audience. Art historian Malcolm Bull pointed out that there was presumably a link between the sphere of women and the spread of mythological imagery, which happened first on objects such as wedding chests, birth trays, and trinket boxes.²³ The print presenting a presumably female voice and the image of goddesses fits this hypothesis very well. Moreover, women from the elite sections of early modern society acted as patrons of the arts and they played a crucial role in courtly culture, especially in vernacular literature.²⁴ Petrarchan poetry was written and read both by male and female audiences. The subject of marriage versus love presented by a perplexed speaker could perfectly serve the purpose of scrutinising one’s soul with moral considerations. Notwithstanding the playful tone of the poem, the image seems to take the side of virtue by showing the more powerful peacock chasing two doves. However, the battle of the goddesses is still undecided, so it may have worked not only as a starting point for a meditation on the self, but also as a catalyst to conversations. Dressing up this quite pragmatic problem in ancient forms implied several directions for the discussion depending upon the preferences of the audience. The beholder could respond to the philosophy of Petrarchan love as well as to its moral or literary interpretations, but the personal, first-person voice of the poem framed the discussion as private and intimate.

Venus and Cupid are also protagonists in the third smaller print, this time within a completely changed scenery. While the first print shows the deities in the sky (Fig. 11.1) and the second one offers a glimpse into an earthly landscape (Fig. 11.2), the third sheet depicts a suffering male figure leaning on a tree trunk on the seashore (Fig. 11.3). Venus is riding on a scallop shell, Cupid is sailing in a small boat fabricated from his own weaponry and clothes, and three putti are flying above them in the clouds. The motif of the sailing Cupid can be found in antique mosaics, but this classical image received a completely new interpretation in the print.²⁵ According to the poetic caption, Cupid used all his tools to build the little bark with which he is sailing in the speaker’s humours or body liquids (“this is how Amor, without Tiphys and Jason, became the master in the open sea of my humour”). The man dressed like a mythological figure thus steps on stage as the speaker himself, and the stream running to the sea from behind him can be interpreted as his bodily fluids becoming visible. Thus, the print provides the audience with the medically oriented idea of the melancholic disease of love. Cupid conquering one’s body fluids—especially one’s blood—and causing melancholy was a popular idea in medical discourse from the medieval period onwards, and it was also addressed by Ficino in his De Amore as the problem of earthly love.²⁶

Fig. 11.3

Veneziano, Agostino after Raphael(?). 1520–1536. The Sailing Amor. Engraving, 191 × 223 mm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, object nr. RP-P-OB-36.621

The vernacular poem transforms the magnificent seascape into the speaker’s inner world. The extent of his pain is visualised and verbalised in the print. With some vocabulary reminiscent of Petrarch, the poem mentions the dangerous gate of death—a reference to the torments that make the lover feel like dying.²⁷ Moreover, the suffering male figure is depicted in the pose of ancient funerary statues of Eros with his legs crossed and his left hand in front of his chest, under his head, thereby emphasising the speaker’s misery.²⁸ Image and text clearly complete each other: the poem highlights Cupid’s mastery while it brings in erudite references from Petrarchan poetry through the theory of bodily fluids to the classical mythological figures of the story of the Argonauts. At the same time, the picture shows the image of the tormented speaker. The first-person voice literally makes the image speak: the tormented lover presents his suffering in image and text to the audience. This might have provoked the beholder to respond to the object either in a self-reflective or conversational mode.

In the three prints, texts and images complement each other in an efficient way. The first-person voice could make the prints emotionally more accessible and would encourage the audience to analyse their own psychic condition in allegorical and poetic terms.²⁹ Petrarchan lines were used not only to accentuate melancholic anxiety but also in order to show the author’s familiarity with both fashionable and famous poems as well as mythological references. Thus, conversations could take different turns over the prints and could be both very intimate and truly erudite. All the sheets mediate controversial aspects of love, providing the audience with allegorical means to reflect on the perturbations of their soul, thereby provoking an inner conversation. The intense, emotional monologues of the speakers are aimed at activating the beholders’ response to the subject.

As Malcolm Bull has observed, it was one of the biggest challenges of Renaissance artists to give new meanings to mythological stories and to accommodate them to the tastes and views of early modern audiences.³⁰ In the first two prints, the images do not evoke a specific mythological story but rely on the allegorical understanding of the depicted gods and goddesses. In the third print and in those to be analysed in the following section, all’antica images were completely reinterpreted in line with medieval and early modern concepts of lovesickness. The widely known visual language of mythology was used to express new ideas. In this way, the producers of the prints succeeded in differentiating between various levels of meaning and, consequently, different ways of conversation. The verses offered an opportunity for a closer, more intimate reading while the mythological interpretation provided a more standardised set of meanings. In this context, the audiences might have recognised the position of the prints on the threshold of public and private as well as their capacity to engage in both open and confidential conversations.³¹ These small prints present the ideas of love and lovesickness in a playful, clever tone and provide their audiences with an elegant, fashionable, multimedia version of the Petrarchan pose. As objects initiating conversations on the topic, either with company or with the self, they could have perfectly played a role in the social game of Petrarchism.

The Horror of Lovesickness

The Allegory of the Cruelty of Love and the Allegory of the Passions (Figs. 11.4–11.5) elaborate on the suffering of male lovers. The depiction of the effect of love on the self is not affirmative in these prints: Cupid appears as a cunning and cruel force and the positive value of the Petrarchan pose of lovesickness is questioned instead. Both the visual and the textual parts are more complex than in the smaller prints, and greater emphasis is laid on the sensations of the first-person speakers.

Fig. 11.4

Anonymous engraver after Baccio Bandinelli (?). 1535–1550. Allegory of the Cruelty of Love. Engraving, 375 × 470 mm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, object nr. RP-P-OB-38.814

Fig. 11.5

Monogrammist O.O.V. Published by Antonio Salamanca. 1542. Allegory of the Passions. Engraving, 362 × 259 mm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, object nr. RP-P-OB-38.519

The Allegory of the Cruelty of Love (Fig. 11.4) includes many allusions to ancient mythology, although the image has not been convincingly identified as the illustration of a specific story.³² In the middle of the composition, Cupid is playing dice with a woman in an all’antica architectural setting. There are human body parts on the table—hands, eyes, a face, and hearts—next to the dice. A naked child is sitting behind the table and a wounded male body appears next to him, the heads of little putti with arrows peeking from inside the wound. Cupid is feeding dogs with a human heart and the animals are standing in his triumphal cart, a chariot of fire with four horses depicted according to Petrarch’s description.³³ Around the main characters, there are several figures following their game or engaged in discussion, with two groups of three men and two couples with children arranged on either side. In the foreground, five putti torment an unconscious child in a cauldron put on the fire. Smoke coming from Cupid’s chariot fills the background, while a horse and another chariot with four horses and a male figure appear in the sky.

The poem in the print is the first-person speaker’s lament on the cruelty of Cupid. In the first stanza, the physical symptoms of love are described with contradictions and oxymorons (affetti contrari), often applied by Petrarch in his sonnets.³⁴ After this Petrarchan account of the lover’s physical and emotional state, the speaker introduces the story. As he narrates, the horrific symptoms do not, however, stop people from falling in love—something which had happened to his own mother. She had lost her mind in the throes of passion and subsequently lost her child when playing dice with Cupid. The second stanza elaborates upon the situation further. The speaker describes himself as a child sitting on the table where the game takes place, and thus, we can identify him with the infant pointing towards himself in the middle of the image. The third stanza lists Cupid’s trophies taken from tormented lovers. In the end, the audience is presented with the image of the cruel infant god who “is living on robbery and stealing cries”.

Two antique authors, Catullus and Virgil, are mentioned in the second stanza. They are not cited as models for the text and image but as authorities who did not write about such a topic, story, or scene. This may explain why art historians could not find the antique mythological source of the account. As the speaker points out, the horrific story does not have a classical origin—it was the narrative of the early modern age. The classical references are also meant to set up the erudite context: Catullus was a “model for personal poetry” in the Renaissance, and his works were seen as obscene but sentimental and elegant at the same time.³⁵ Virgil wrote the famous quote amor vincit omnia (Eclogues 10.69) and was regarded as an authority on love and mythological matters. References to these writers could show the poet’s erudition in Latin while also situating the vernacular poem in opposition to the classical literary tradition.³⁶ Indeed, an episode closest to the meaning and story of the print can be found in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), a vernacular work based partly on antique sources and partly on early modern invention.³⁷ A similarly cruel Cupid appears here and kills two women who rejected his power, slices their bodies into pieces, and feeds a dragon, a lion, and a wolf with their remains.³⁸

The suffering of the dismembered lovers and the pain of the first-person speaker reveal the horrors and the dark side of love in the print. Lovesickness is depicted here as a negative experience, one which is better to avoid. The Petrarchan affetti contrari and the agonising state of the hopeless lover serve to horrify the readers.³⁹ The terrifying effect of image and text may have mediated a moralising pretext through the story of the mother who lost her child through gambling: blaming the mother for the misery of the offspring could remind early modern audiences of Eve and the Original Sin. According to the print, the vicious circle of love started with the mother and continued with the son who inherited the tendency for suffering. The image expresses this idea by showing the different ages of man—from a newborn child to a bearded adult. The ultimate message of the print is that the omnipresent power of Cupid determines one’s fate from the moment of birth. This universal story is presented in a remarkably personal tone. The horrifying visual details of torments are matched with a verse that aims at the most powerful psychological effect.

Through a personal account, the speaker acts as the interpreter of the visual symbols and verbalises what is mostly invisible in the picture—the physical sensations and the perturbations of his soul. The passionate voice makes the print relatable while the repeated descriptions of the emotional and physical suffering and horrors make the multimedia experience impressive and provocative. While encouraging the audience to respond to the speakers’ gruesome monologue, the print also prompts self-reflection and inner conversation and guides the audience towards a moral resolution.

The Allegory of the Passions (Fig. 11.5) shows a similarly terrifying allegory of lovesickness. In a barren landscape with dying trees and cracked soil, the twisted, nude body of the protagonist leans towards a rock while tormented by a snake and a small lioness. Behind him, another male figure is running away in panic, and Cupid is preparing his arrow in the sky. In the distant background, a rock in a phallic shape appears behind lush vegetation and ancient ruins. The main figure is a visual reference to one of the most famous ancient sculptures—the marble Laocoön. The painful expression of his face, the twisted pose of his muscular body, and the attacking snake must have been recognised by the audience.⁴⁰ However, if any doubts persisted, the sonnet of fourteen lines below the composition makes a clear reference to the sculpture. The very first line states that the image depicted is not the horrific example of the Laocoön. One encounters here the same strategy as in the previously examined print. There, the poetry of Catullus and Virgil were counted as counterpoints of the depiction while in this case, the verse draws attention to a pictorial tradition that is completely reinterpreted. Furthermore, the first stanza is essentially a list of what the image is not about. The second line is an allusion to Petrarch’s Triumph of Love where famous figures (e.g. Caesar) are conquered by Cupid.⁴¹ Petrarch himself is also mentioned: as the poem declares, the male nude is not the Tuscan who was tormented by cruel Love. On the one hand, these visual and literary allusions to famous stories build the erudite context of the print, conversing with different strains of knowledge and tradition. On the other hand, however, these lines also read like answers to the guesses of the audience about the subject of the multimedia object. With these strategies, the text effectively engages the audience in a dialogue with the print, preparing for the inner conversation which will happen during the deciphering of the riddle.

The real subject of the print is revealed in the second stanza. Here, the speaker explains that the image symbolises his own suffering, “the living temple of all the deep pain [that] clearly demonstrates my bitter life”. The savage beasts symbolise the torments of sensual desires to which he had fallen prey. In the third stanza, he laments about all his miseries which have been caused by love. A typical symptom of Petrarchan lovesickness, the lover’s melancholy, is described as caused by the absence of the beloved which generates further impulses of desire. The last stanza emphasises that the image is an example of love’s cruelty, explaining once again how the protagonist is condemned by Cupid to bear the torments of the beasts. He is in absolute despair, “dying alive”.

Lovesickness is expressed in Petrarchan poetic language: four lines in the third and fourth stanzas allude to sonnets from Petrarch’s Canzoniere (sonnets 179, 6, 310).⁴² In this, the print is similar to the smaller sheets with gods and goddesses. However, this image of the tormented lover is rather ambiguous. One option is to understand the image and text as a satirical presentation of the Petrarchan model of mental suffering. The closest example to the print’s iconography is a painted panel—the Allegory of Passions by Correggio (1489?–1534) (Fig. 11.6), created around 1528 for the studiolo of Isabella d’Este that has been mentioned in the introduction.⁴³ The screaming faces of the central printed and painted figures are especially similar, and the motif of the tormenting snakes is also common in the two works. According to Campbell’s interpretation, Correggio’s picture depicts the mental pain of someone who falls prey to his own emotions and psychic perturbations. The figure of the satyr-Laocoön, himself more like a beast than a human being, adds a parodic overtone.⁴⁴ The print differs from the painting since the athletic, young protagonist does not belong to the mythological world of beasts. Nevertheless, he is presented in the passionate poetic caption as a victim of Cupid and his own desires and, in this, is similar to the figure of the satyr.

Fig. 11.6

Correggio. 1528. Allegory of the Passions, Painting on canvas, 148 × 88 cm. Département des arts graphiques, Musée du Louvre, Paris, inv. nr. 5927

This print reveals a terrifying moral example against the emotional and sensual excesses of the soul, just as had been presented by the Allegory of the Cruelty of Love. In the Allegory of the Passions, this meaning is supported by the escaping figure who is looking directly at the audience outside of the image, trying to make eye contact.⁴⁵ While in the other prints, the vernacular text and the speaker provided the beholder with a model of behaviour, in this case, the image includes a strong advice for the audience: beware of Cupid and escape the excesses of the soul. Conversation could happen in more than just words over this print—the audience was captivated not only emotionally by the speaker of the poem, but also visually by the escaping figure. Thus, the print could engage the audience in a truly multisensory conversation.

The visual connection with one of the studiolo paintings is an important argument for the print’s role in self-reflection. However, it is important to point out that the painting and the print represent a different level of privacy. The paintings of the studiolo were personally commissioned by the elite owner while the prints were intended for a wider audience, both socially and geographically. The private experience of the print had to be regulated and guided by a framework of ideas. The audience purchased the object and could not influence its content. For instance, the openness of the image was limited by the captions of the two larger prints which included strong moral tones. This is an important feature to bear in mind when we talk about private conversations regarding the prints. While all the objects analysed here are aimed at provoking response and self-reflection, this inner conversation of the audience is not only enabled and encouraged but also limited and regulated by the captions.

Turning now to the audience, it is interesting to note how the moral warning was understood. It has already been mentioned that an impression of the Allegory of the Passions was reconstructed as part of a collector’s album. The context in which the print was placed may provide some evidence about its reception, at least in the eye of a northern collector. The print was included among mythological images and placed directly before the images of Hercules’s heroic fights.⁴⁶ This arrangement may imply that the owner thought of the allegorical print as parallel to the stories of Hercules. The beasts of sensual desires might have been regarded as similar to the monsters that the ancient hero had to defeat—an interpretation which was consistent with theoretical works on love. Pietro Bembo compared the suffering lover to the heroes tormented by the Furies.⁴⁷ The owner of the album might have attempted to express that struggling with the beasts of desire is a heroic battle similar to the labours of Hercules by arranging these topics next to each other. Unlike the smaller prints, the gruesome images and texts of the larger prints analysed here no longer embody a game. Rather, they are didactic—one may even call them heroic—objects with moral messages, intended to initiate more serious conversations with the self.

Conclusion: Private Conversations with the Self

Combining new ideas and ancient forms, the five prints present a special early modern iconography of love. The differences between them also reflect the changes in Renaissance love theory. Three smaller prints are witty, playful, and less dramatic. They offer a glimpse into the never-ending battle of the forces of the soul, presenting perplexity rather than extreme suffering. In contrast, two larger prints provide the audience with a horrifying image of love that implies a strong moral warning. While the smaller sheets present Petrarchan ideals, the larger prints question and argue against this model by showing the horrific consequences of desire. The differences can not only be explained by the dates of the prints, but also coincide with the difference in their size. Larger sheets were more likely to be pasted on the wall and thus more openly displayed in the houses of their owners. Depicting the excesses of the soul in a negative way, these prints could function as devices of conversation while remaining on the safer side of a controversial topic. On the other hand, the handling of the smaller sheets might have guaranteed more privacy. Their content was also more in line with their materiality, presenting the concerns of lovers in a more open-ended and intimate way for both male and female audiences. While this hypothesis is based on the close analysis of the selected prints, we must keep in mind that the use of prints must also have varied according to the material and intellectual circumstances of their users.

All the five prints presented in this chapter include a subtle play of intertextual and visual references, constantly balancing between teaching and touching the audience. The emotional involvement of the beholder is just as important as the exhibition of erudition. These frameworks serve to stabilise the prints on the threshold of private and public in order to fulfil their self-reflective and conversational potential at the same time. Using the widely known traditions of mythology and Petrarchan poetry, the prints offered a complex but approachable language for their audiences to talk about intimate ideas. In the guise of artistic and literary imagery, the owners and their guests could enjoy conversations on the confidential issues of love and lovesickness.

Discussions could happen in and over the prints in various directions: the texts are in conversation with the images and with the beholders but also encourage communication between the image and the audience. The prints could have an important social role by publicising personal stories and by making sense of the intimate matters of love and lovesickness. They taught the audience by their dramatic effect, and with the help of a range of traditions and theories, they conventionalised the image of spiritual suffering. They initiated discourse on and with ancient and modern poetry as well as antique visual sources. Through words and images, the prints engaged their audience in truly multisensory conversations. The captions gave a completely new meaning to the images: they guided the reader-viewers from the outside to the inside, from the world of mythology to the soul of the poetic speaker. Revealing the speaker’s inner world, the verses offered a model of self-reflection and urged their audiences to join the discussion and scrutinise the notions of their own soul. The personal voice of the Italian poems gave an opportunity for the reader-viewers to identify themselves with the allegorical meaning and to reflect on the images at a deeper level. While three prints (Figs. 11.3–11.5) present the voice of male lovers in image and text, one sheet (Fig. 11.1) is neutral in its viewpoint (although the allusion to Petrarchan poetry might imply a male speaker). Another sheet (Fig. 11.2) allows the peculiar hypothesis of identifying a sixteenth-century print intended for a female audience albeit being a male creation.

The combination of an image and the first-person voice was a traditional mode of communication in prints, especially in religious sheets.⁴⁸ However, the five prints analysed in this chapter reinterpreted the tradition of the “speaking image”. The first-person speakers achieved an ambiguous position in relation to the audience and the depiction: they describe and interpret the images from an outside point of view, even though the prints visualise their inner selves. In the Allegory of the Cruelty of Love, the speaker, even though he appears in the image as a child, sets himself outside the image with the use of the past tense. Similarly, in the Allegory of the Passions, although the speaker talks about the picture as the symbolic image of his suffering and emotions, he does not address the viewer from within the image; he does not speak as the figure depicted but explains its symbolism. Through this intermediate position, the poems advance a self-reflective attitude towards one’s inner world, feelings, emotions, hesitations, and suffering.

There was a great demand for the topic of love and lovesickness. The popularity of the prints is clear from the presumably high number of impressions. Some plates were already used when bought by the publisher, indicating that hundreds—or perhaps even more than a thousand—of impressions were printed from the plates.⁴⁹ The conversational potential of the prints proves their place in daily life. This chapter has demonstrated how they could be used to guide self-analysis or talk about the perturbations of one’s soul. The audience had to be erudite in order to decipher the stories, references, and meanings in both text and image and to evoke popular theories and recognise widely used poses. Even if they contemplated the sheets on their own, they conversed with a range of traditions and practices.