What art can teach us about the simple life
The time is ripe for a local exhibition of paintings from the “beggar-philosopher” subgenre, which inspired some of the west’s greatest artists
As Christianity came to dominate the Roman Empire in the centuries of its fatal decline, mobs of zealots, who were very much like the more recent followers of the Taliban or Islamic State, did their best to vandalise Pagan places of worship and to destroy the statues of the gods. No doubt they thought they were gaining merits in heaven, unaware that the very concept of an afterlife of rewards and punishments was an invention of the old religion.
The memory of the gods, however, could not be entirely effaced. The Olympians survived the millennium before the Renaissance through their association with the planets, and the system of astrology that remained central to the Christian cosmos. They lived too in the literature of the Pagans, which some extremists wanted to banish, but which remained in practice inseparable from the learning of Latin, the international language of knowledge in the west for at least the next 12 centuries.
Pagan philosophy was even more impossible to avoid, since it was the basis of theology; Jesus’s simple teachings to a group of illiterate fishermen were developed, in the course of several centuries, into the complex intellectual edifices of theological thought through the adoption of Greek philosophy, particularly Platonic traditions in the early period.
The first five centuries after the fall of the Western Empire were dark and difficult; survival, not growth, was the priority. But as Europe settled into a peace and stability after the millennium and then experienced the dynamism of the Romanesque and Gothic periods, with the renewal of cities and the foundation of universities, a new movement of philosophy appeared, inspired by Aristotle. When philosophical thought arose in the Jewish and Islamic worlds, it too was based on the work of Aristotle, in the figures of Maimonides and Averroes respectively.
Several new currents appeared in the Renaissance. On the one hand there was the rediscovery of Neo-Platonism, which flourished in Medici Florence, inspiring both Platonic scholarship and interest in occult and hermetic traditions, as well as Botticelli’s most famous paintings. On the other hand there was the practical and proto-scientific thinking that was first articulated by artists and architects, most notably in the development of rational perspective as a new way of seeing and understanding the material world.
There was also the recovery in 1417, by Poggio Bracciolini, to whom we are indebted for the rescue of so many other important ancient texts lying hidden in central European monastic libraries, of the great didactic poem De rerum natura, on the nature of things. Its author, Lucretius, was a contemporary of Caesar and Cicero, and the poem is an elaborate articulation of the materialist and religiously sceptical views of Epicurus: the gods exist, but they take no interest in the affairs of men and it is futile to fear them.
This doctrine was so antithetical to all the tenets of the Church that it was inevitably a shocking as well as fascinating revelation; the book was printed as early as 1473, and there doesn’t seem to have been any attempt to ban it; Pope Sixtus IV had his own manuscript copy. There was much interest in Medici circles too, and some of the pictures of Botticelli’s eccentric contemporary Piero di Cosimo are inspired by Lucretius, particularly his account of the early life of man.
In the later 16th century, Montaigne, who was also deeply influenced by Lucretius, was particularly inspired by the sceptic Pyrrho, who may have been, as recent scholars have suggested, connected with Buddhism. But the most characteristic new tendency in the late 16th and early 17th centuries was Neo-Stoicism, whose leading intellectual representative was Justus Lipsius, and whose artistic exponents included Rubens, Poussin and Salvator Rosa.
Whereas Neo-Platonism had been concerned with a spiritual and even esoteric understanding of knowledge, and Lucretian Epicureanism with dispelling superstition, Stoicism was about finding the moral strength and poise to resist the buffeting of fortune.
The Stoic view of the world emphasised its rationality and necessity, reminding us that there is nothing we can do about what happens; all that is in our power is our response to what happens. The Cynic Diogenes, famous for giving away all unnecessary material goods, often seems like an extreme Stoic, but was in fact a precursor.
By good fortune, the high Renaissance has left us one extraordinary visual compendium of ancient philosophy in Raphael’s The School of Athens (1509-11) – a vast fresco on one wall of the Pope’s private library, assembling most of the famous thinkers of antiquity in an architectural setting that evokes the new Saint Peter’s, then under construction.
Plato (a portrait of Leonardo) and Aristotle are prominent in the centre, Socrates is seen teaching Alcibiades and others on the upper left, while Pythagoras and Euclid are on the lower left and right respectively. Interestingly Diogenes – identified by Vasari (1550) – is on the steps in the centre, and Heraclitus, a portrait of Michelangelo, is in the foreground.
Although there were many celebrated Stoic philosophers, from Zeno of Kition to Seneca, Epictetus, and the emperor Marcus Aurelius, Diogenes remained the most appealing figure to painters and seemed to sum up all those qualities of simplicity of life, constancy of mind and severity of principle for which the Stoics were known. The story in which he has reduced his worldly possessions to a cloak and a cup, but then discards the latter when he sees a beggar drinking from his hand, is represented many times, most famously by Poussin (1648).
In Naples, however, Jusepe de Ribera, born in Spain, seems to have invented a subgenre that has become known as the “beggar-philosopher”. This kind of painting reflects both a prevailing interest in the austerity of the Stoic and the Cynic, and also the influence of Caravaggio’s naturalism, and the way that he would find models for his sacred paintings among the common people.
In Caravaggio’s case this was partly motivated by his practice of painting directly from models, although he clearly enjoyed the sense of physical actuality that such models contributed to pictures of religious subjects, evoking a characteristically baroque tension between the material and spiritual planes of reality.
Ribera, though, extrapolated from Caravaggio’s example to produce what were more or less direct portraits of street people and paupers, who were then presented with the attributes, especially books, of a learning that they clearly did not themselves possess; thus a poignant tension was evoked, making us ponder both the voluntary destitution of the wise, and at the same time the unconscious wisdom of very simple and illiterate people, resigned to their place in life.
As so often, these images of the very humble appealed to the very great; in the late 1620s, Ribera painted a series of 12 beggar philosophers for the Duke of Alcalà, who was the Spanish viceroy in Naples from 1629-31. Later, in 1636, he painted another series for the Prince of Liechtenstein.
The tension between the reality of the model and the role he is meant to be playing is particularly striking in what is considered the earliest of the first series, a picture in the Prado in Madrid which used to be identified as Archimedes but is now considered to represent Democritus, because the teacher of atomism and randomness was thought of as the laughing philosopher, often paired with Heraclitus as the weeping philosopher.
There is greater pathos in another picture in the Prado, now identified as Archimedes, in which the figure handles more actively than usual the attributes of learning on the table in front of him. He holds a large sheet covered in notes and diagrams in his left hand and has a quill pen in his right; but the eyes of the relatively young model stare blankly downward, for he can almost certainly neither read nor write.
Our Aesop is most probably one of this first series. Its popularity is attested to by the many copies which make attribution so difficult, especially because copies were frequently made in the master’s own studio. In such a case the question becomes one of priority – which was the first version and which was the copy – as well as the extent of the master’s own hand in the copies.
In this case there are at least half a dozen versions in circulation, but the art historian Roberta Lapucci, in writing about a version in Mdina in Malta, considered that and the one that has now been acquired by the Art Gallery of NSW as the two best extant. Both are sensitive, almost painful paintings of an ugly and crippled beggar, probably hunchbacked and leaning on a crutch, who stands in for Aesop, the famously ugly but wise teller of animal tales which are still familiar to us today.
It would, of course, be very interesting to see these two pictures side-by-side if Palazzo Falson were willing to lend its version; perhaps a few other copies could be included too. And this could be the opportunity for the Gallery to mount an exhibition of great interest, specifically focused on the beggar-philosopher theme, but more broadly including the representation of philosophers in baroque art.
This is the sort of exhibition which should not present insurmountable obstacles, since the paintings in question, though outstanding in many cases, are not “destination” works and many museums would no doubt be happy to be involved in a show that attempts to re-imagine the intellectual and cultural ambience from which their pictures emerged. The works on paper in collections of Australian museums would also furnish important material, particularly for individuals like Salvator Rosa.
The beggar-philosopher theme inspired Velázquez too, when he was in Naples in 1630 and undoubtedly met Ribera. He subsequently produced a Menippus (c. 1638) and his own version of Aesop (c. 1638), both of which are in the Prado. These impressive and mysterious paintings – especially if one is not aware of the history behind them – later had an impact that brings us up to very recent times.
Edouard Manet, who had been profoundly influenced by Velázquez from the 1850s and saw his beggar-philosophers on a trip to Spain in 1865, painted The Absinthe drinker (1859, Copenhagen, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek); The Ragpicker (c. 1865-70, Pasadena, Norton Simon Museum); Beggar with a duffle coat (c. 1865-67, Chicago, Art Institute); and Beggar with oysters (c. 1865-67, Chicago, Art Institute).
Manet follows the same format as Velázquez, with full-length, standing figures, although he does not give them the names of ancient philosophers; when the pictures were offered for sale to the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel in 1872, however, they were collectively titled Philosophers. By an interesting coincidence, the Norton Simon Museum has just closed (February 2022) an exhibition in which the two “philosophers” from Chicago were reunited with their own Ragpicker.
What better time for Sydney to have its own exhibition of beggar-philosophers?
Gallery puts female artists in the frame
Ethel Carrick Fox and Anne Dangar, the two subjects of the National Gallery of Australia’s latest exhibition of women in art, are of a very different calibre.
Sunk before it could swim
French or American? A new book examines the long road toward a new Australian submarine program.