CHAPTER 1

Vico

Giambattista Vico (figure 1.1) was born in Naples in 1668,the son of a bookseller. Due to ill health, his educationwas a little haphazard, conducted partly at home and partlywith the local Jesuits. He was an able student, however, andfrom 1686–95 he was employed as a private tutor, spendingmuch of his time outside of Naples at the Rocca family propertyat Vatolla. During this period he was also enrolled in thefaculty of jurisprudence at the University of Naples, fromwhich he graduated with a doctorate in canon and civil lawin 1694.

In 1699 he was appointed professor of rhetoric in the universityand in this capacity delivered an annual inauguraloration; the seventh of these, Study Methods of Our Time,became his first significant publication in 1709, quickly followedby On the Ancient Wisdom of the Italians in 1710. Vicotaught courses in rhetoric, from which his students' notes survive,now published as The Art of Rhetoric. However, he hadlarger ambitions, and set his sights on the more prestigious,and much better paid, chair of civil law. With this in mind hepublished the three treatises that make up his Universal Right(1720–22). But in 1723 the job was given to someone else, andhe remained in the chair of rhetoric until succeeded by his sonin 1741.

Though he gave up hope of finding a better position inNaples, Vico was an active member of the various academiesaround which the flourishing intellectual life of the city centeredin the early eighteenth century. And despite the fact thathe never traveled, he had a measure of international recognition.There had been a favorable review of the first two partsof Universal Right in the Bibliothèque Ancienne et Moderne,a leading journal with a European readership, and Vico wasclearly sufficiently well known to be asked to contribute anaccount of his intellectual development to a projected seriesof autobiographical writings by scholars, published in Venicein 1728. His major work, the New Science, first appeared in1725, was substantially revised for a second edition in 1730,and finally published posthumously in a third edition in 1744.Nevertheless, by the time of his death in 1744, it had receivedvery limited attention.

Geography played a part in this. Naples was the third-largestcity in Europe, after London and Paris, and perhaps themost densely populated, but for most of Vico's life, it was notan independent capital. Until 1707 it was governed by a Spanishviceroy, and then (following the War of the Spanish Succession)by a viceroy of the Austrian Hapsburgs. Only in 1734,after it was reconquered by a branch of the Spanish royal family,did Naples become the capital of the newly created kingdomof Charles of Bourbon. Being a "kingdom governed as aprovince" had made the population restive. The unsuccessfulRevolt of Masaniello in 1647 and the aristocratic Macchiaconspiracy of 1701 were reminders of the underlying tensions.Vico was a local historian, the author of the unpublished Historyof the Conspiracy of the Neapolitan Princes of 1701 (1703)and the Life of Antonio Carafa, a seventeenth-century Neapolitangeneral who had commanded the imperial forces (1716),but his sympathies were with the Spanish cause, and his mostsignificant official recognition came in 1735 when he was appointedthe royal historiographer to Charles of Bourbon.

The primary focus of Vico's historical interests lay elsewhere,for his philosophical inquiries were pursued throughthe philological investigation of the distant past. The full titleof his first work in this vein, On the Most Ancient Wisdom ofthe Italians Unearthed from the Origins of the Latin Language,accurately conveys the approach. This was also the methodologyof the New Science, in which Vico sought to uncover theessential characteristics of knowledge and society through theexamination of ancient history and mythology, within whichetymologies revealed the primitive significance of particularwords and thus the concepts and practices that had originallyconstituted human culture.

Vico saw his philosophical work as a refutation of skepticalphilosophers of the seventeenth century, such as Descartes,Hobbes, and Spinoza. But in fact the originality of his writingswas not fully appreciated until the nineteenth centurywhen his emphasis on the imagination resonated with romanticssuch as Coleridge, his conception of the primitivemind informed the emerging discipline of sociology, and hisacknowledgment of the collective nature of human achievementsinspired Michelet and other nationalist historians.

The Analogy of Painting

Analogies with painting are scattered throughout Vico's works.In one of his earliest, the History of the Conspiracy of the NeapolitanPrinces of 1701, he announces that he will "reproducemore accurately to the eyes of the reader the images that referto the principal misdeeds of the conspiracy," just as painters"depict the principal figures, placed in the foreground of theirpaintings, with greater liveliness and precision," but treat moresketchily those of lesser consequence. It is an uncontroversialambition, but the reference is revealing nevertheless. Vico notonly attributes to painting a degree of cultural authority, butalso assumes a familiarity with a certain style of execution—onein which there is a marked difference between the degreeof definition given to principal and secondary figures.

The analogy between the verbal and the visual is developedmore systematically later. It was a classical commonplace thatpoets and rhetoricians were like painters, and Vico was both.According to his Autobiography, he abandoned himself topoetry at an early age, and although his style changed withtime, he never stopped writing occasional verses on deaths,aristocratic marriages, and public events. It was this interestin the practice of poetry that led him to the study of Horace'sArs poetica. He wrote a commentary, and once claimed thatthe whole of the New Science was a sort of perpetual commentaryon the poem. This was obviously an exaggeration,but Vico repeatedly rehearses Horace's trope of ut picturapoesis, noting that "the poet rightly compares poetry to painting,and in fact it is often said that painting is a mute poetryand poetry a speaking painting." Vico also cited Simonidesof Keos's famous saying about "mute poetry" in his class onthe Art of Rhetoric, where it served as an example of the rhetoricaldevice of antimetabole. And from his students' notes,it appears that Vico's deployment of the trope was not merelyformulaic but an analogy for which he could furnish an example:Ariosto could be compared to Andrea del Sarto, "themost celebrated artist of his time and the prince of the Florentineschool."

In the first edition of the New Science, he returned to thetheme again: the whole of poetic reason "reduces in its entiretyto this: that a fable and an expression are one and thesame thing, i.e., a metaphor common to poets and paintersalike." And why not, if, as he explained in a letter to Gherardodegli Angioli of December 26, 1725, the ideas of poetsand painters "are the same, and do not differ from one anotherexcept as to words and colours."

It was not just the words of poets that could stand in forcolors but those of orators as well. The topos of ut pictura rhetoricais used by both classical and Renaissance authors, andVico deploys it too. At the start of his book on rhetoric, heexplains that the best manuals for orators are those that havean abundance of illustrious examples, and that "not even thepainters who wish to excel in art spend long hours in subtlediscussions, but rather invest their many years in sketchingand painting from the models of the best artists." He willtherefore follow the same practice himself, teaching "withlimited precepts, but ... with the most extensive number ofthe very best examples."

In this respect, as Vico pointed out in Study Methods, hisstudents had little excuse for failing to learn, for they were fortunateenough to live in Italy, where in the arts "we possessa wealth of supremely accomplished productions, on whichthe admiration of posterity has conferred the prestige of archetypalexemplarity." Yet all this artistic achievement wasitself related to language. It was because "We Italians ... areendowed with a language which constantly evokes images[that] we stand far above other nations ... in the fields ofpainting, sculpture, architecture, and music." However, theanalogy with painting also suggests that exemplars are not inthemselves sufficient: "any one of you can look at paintingsdaily, but may not see the innumerable features observed byartists ... why is this, why?" Vico himself provides the answer:someone finds himself in this position because he "has not yetdeveloped the art of looking at pictures."

Vico's repeated asides suggest that he thought history,poetry, and rhetoric all had visual parallels. This was a viewpromoted by sixteenth-century art theorists like LodovicoDolce who, mindful that Petrarch had called Homer the "firstpainter of ancient memories," argued "that writers are painters;that painting is poetry; that painting is history; that anycomposition by a skilful man is painting." Vico was disposedto think of himself as being like a painter as well. In the dedicationto the first treatise in Universal Right, he directly compareshimself to "the painter who hidden from sight listens tothe judgments the experts are expressing about the paintings,"and claims that he did the same when presenting this topic "inorder to hear the reactions of the learned." The reference isto the Greek painter Apelles who, according to Pliny, used tohide behind his paintings in order to eavesdrop on his critics,thinking them better judges than he was. Alberti had referredto the story, and advocated that contemporary painters followApelles's example and take heed of the viewers' reactions.Here, Vico follows his advice.

Vico's Visual World

To imagine oneself a painter was to use and develop the imaginationat the same time. Believing childhood and adolescenceto be ages rich in fantasy, Vico encouraged the naturalinclination of the young toward those arts, like painting, thatuse imagination and memory. Such advice implies that Vicohimself was susceptible to the visual arts as a child, and feltthat he had learned something from them. Growing up in theheart of Naples at Via San Biagio dei Librai 31, the street of thebooksellers, it could hardly have been otherwise. A hundredyards or so from his house, farther along Spaccanapoli, stoodan antique statue of the Nile (figure 1.2). Rediscovered in thefifteenth century and placed on a pedestal in this location in1657, it was only then that a bearded head was added in keepingwith the statue's identification as a river god. But the headlessbody was already known as the Corpo di Napoli, and the namestuck. When Vico wrote that "the great fragments of antiquity,hitherto useless to science because they lay begrimed, broken,and scattered, shed great light when cleaned, pieced together,and restored," he had at least one example near at hand.

Another fragment, even closer to home, and visible inthe courtyard of the Palazzo Carafa di Columbrano, was thebronze head of a horse by Donatello, given by Lorenzo de'Medici to Diomede Carafa in 1471. By the seventeenth centuryits origins had become obscure. It was thought to be allthat remained of the great horse that Virgil (in his medievalrole of magician) had caused to be made under an auspiciousastrological alignment that rendered it capable of curing thesick if they so much as looked at it. An archbishop of Napleswas said to have tried to put a stop to the superstition by meltingdown the body for the bells of the cathedral.

This statue was invested with meanings far beyond its originalsignificance, in part perhaps because of the relative scarcityof antique statuary in Naples at this time. Vico was notsurrounded by antiquities as he would have been in Rome.He grew up surrounded by paintings, and throughout hislife there were more and more of them as the churches in thenearby streets were transformed in ambitious programs ofrenovation and decoration. To the right of Vico's childhoodhome on Spaccanapoli, just before the statue of the Nile, is thechurch of San Nicola a Nilo. It was remodeled in 1705, but thealtarpiece (now in the Museo Civico di Castelnuovo), completedten years before Vico's birth, was Luca Giordano's SaintNicholas of Bari, shown in glory with the nuns and pupils ofthe convent to one side, and below, the three small boys thesaint resurrected after an innkeeper butchered them to feed tohis guests. The subject stayed with Vico, for the inventory ofhis possessions made at his death lists one of the largest paintingsas a "Saint Nicholas in Glory."

A little farther along the street, on the other side, is thechurch of San Michele Angelo, known as Sant'Angelo a Nilo,which also housed the substantial library that Cardinal FrancescoMaria Brancaccio left to the city on his death in 1675.In the church itself, there was a monument by Donatello andMichelozzo to Cardinal Rinaldo Brancaccio, the fifteenth-centuryfounder of the church. Over the altar itself, MarcoPino's Saint Michael shows the archangel standing in triumphover the defeated devil. Beyond Sant'Angelo is the Piazza SanDomenico Maggiore, dominated by the Dominican conventfrom which the university had developed, and to which theuniversity returned from 1701 to 1736. The Gothic church wasadorned with innumerable works of art, an Annunciation byTitian, Caravaggio's Flagellation, and on the ceiling of the sacristy,Francesco Solimena's Triumph of the Dominican Orderof 1704–6.

Many of the paintings executed in late seventeenth-centuryNaples were the work of one man, Luca Giordano, not fornothing known as Luca fa presto. In 1678, when Vico wasten years old, Giordano had made a great impression with agroup of paintings celebrating the return of Messina to Spain,which were publicly exhibited in Via Toledo, at the far end ofSpaccanapoli, near the Monte dei Poveri Vergognosi. If Vicofollowed the crowds, he would have seen a mythological allegoryshowing Jupiter and the council of the gods decidingthe preeminence among the powers of Europe and giving it toSpain. This painting is now lost, but a closely related work,Spain Receiving Messina (figure 1.3), shows Spain crowned byVictory welcoming Messina (the naked woman with a castleon her head), accompanied by allegorical figures representingBenignity (with the branch of pine), Justice, and Prudence.The jumbled composition gives an indication of just howiconographically complex these paintings must have been.

Around this time, Giordano was also working on the frescoesin San Gregorio Armeno. The convent was immediatelybehind Vico's house, and though, in 1684, the whole familymoved along the street to San Biagio dei Librai 23, it wasonly a few steps to the other side of the junction with Via SanGregorio Armeno. Vico was going back and forth to Vatollabetween 1686 and 1695, and this house remained his base inNaples until, following his marriage in 1699, he moved withhis wife to a property located on Vicolo dei Giganti (a narrowstreet parallel to San Paolo Maggiore and the Chiesa dei Girolamini)but entered from Vico dei Girolamini.

Five years later, he moved his growing family to a largerproperty on Largo dei Girolamini 112 (figure 1.4) at the footof the steps outside the church (where today a plaque recordshis presence). It was while living in this house that he publishedStudy Methods, Ancient Wisdom, and the life of Carafa.And although from 1718 he lived beyond the cathedral atvarious addresses in the area around Via San Giovanni a Carbonara,his association with the Girolamini continued. It wasthe church he most frequently attended, and it was here thathe chose to be buried.

Returning to his house a few feet away, Vico would havepassed beneath Giordano's fresco of Christ Driving the MoneyChangers from the Temple on the back wall of the church(figure 1.5). Executed in 1684, the painting shows how muchGiordano had learned from his time in Rome and Venice.Like Jupiter brandishing a thunderbolt, Christ stands whipin hand, bathed in supernatural light (figure 1.5a). All aroundhim, merchants and street vendors hurriedly gather up theirwares and tumble down the steps, some threatening to fallheadlong into the viewer's space below. Leaving the churchthrough the doors beneath the fresco and descending thesteps into the piazzetta, the viewer inevitably becomes part ofthis chaotic exodus.