Apollo and Daphne by Antonio del Pollaiuolo and the Poetry of Lorenzo de ’ Medici

MAAR 56/57, 2011/2012

1. Apollo and Daphne: Artist, Date, Patron, and Uniqueness

In the quattrocento Florentine art collection at the National Gallery (London) is a small painting (29.5 × 20 cm) on the theme of the classical myth of Apollo and Daphne. The collection catalogue

describes the work as “painted up to the edges all round”:1 it was not trimmed and was not meant to be viewed in a frame. It is painted in a mixed technique of tempera and oils on a panel of fruit-wood or, more probably, cypress.2 Either would have been an unusual choice since most paintings done in Florence at that time were done on poplar. These technical details make it clear that the artist intentionally produced a precious object, invested with particular significance for his patron.

The painting (fig. 1) is widely attributed to Antonio del Pollaiuolo (1431/32–1498).3 The figures of Apollo and Daphne reveal his predilection for depicting figures in movement, and the panoramic view of the Arno River valley in the background displays his mastery of landscape perspective. The costumes and the flowery meadow on the promontory might suggest the hand of Antonio’s brother Piero (1441/42–1495/96);4 but, since Antonio was the leader of the Pollaiuolo workshop, it is relatively safe to assign this painting to Antonio, especially since the landscape and the figures demonstrate Antonio’s mastery of disegno.5 The painting is fairly well preserved. The greenery of the foliage has darkened considerably,6 and some surface paint has been lost, especially in the landscape background.7 The painting depicts a pivotal scene from the myth of Apollo and Daphne, and it does so in a style that is unquestionably that of the Pollaiuolo workshop. The richness of pigments, the variety of techniques, the painstaking depiction of characteristic Tuscan attributes, the portrayal of main characters as expressive figures in motion, and the attention to their costumes—all attest to the importance of this commission.

The painting was purchased in Rome by William Coningham on 4 January 1845 from an unknown collection.8 Given the uncertain provenance and the lack of any identifying documentation, evidence

APollo AnD DAPhne by ANToNIo DEL PoLLAIuoLo

AND ThE PoETRy oF LoRENzo DE’ MEDICI

luba Freedman, The hebrew University of Jerusalem

My gratitude is extended to brian Curran for interest in this study and for the anonymous reviews that improved the text. The subject of the present study was explored using the library resources of the American Academy in Rome. My thanks are due to Corinna Salvadori Lonergan for her remarkable verse translations of phrases from Lorenzo’s two sonnets and Apollo e Pan and to barbara De Marco for her editorial revisions.

1 Davies 1961, 446, cat. no. 928.

2 bayer 2009, 291.

3 bayer 2009, 292 for the updated references.

4 only Galli 2004, 30 and Galli 2005, 26 advocates the at-tribution of the painting only to Piero but offer no specifics in support of his arguments.

5 See benedettucci 1991, 99 for the mention of the painting done by Piero from Antonio’s drawing and the painting by Piero performed by him alone.

6 Plesters 1956, 125.

7 Watson 1983, 62.

8 haskell 1991, 678.

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Fig. 1. Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Apollo and Daphne, The national Gallery, london, Wynn ellis Bequest, 1876, nG928 (photo ©national Gallery, london / Art Resource, nY).

Apollo And dAphne by Pollaiuolo aND the Poetry of loreNzo De’ MeDici 215

of authorship, date, and patron must be inferred from a study of the work itself and the milieu in which it was created. Assigning a date to the work remains problematic, primarily because paintings created by Florentine artists of Pollaiuolo’s circle display a remarkable stylistic uniformity. The ques-tion of date must therefore be resolved by appeal to circumstantial evidence of the artist’s commission.

I support Alison Wright’s assertion that the painting was done on behalf of Lorenzo de’ Medici (1 January 1449–9 April 1492) and that it may be dated to the late 1460s.9 The terminus ante quem is the date of the first documented meeting between Antonio and Lorenzo, 19 January 1467.10 A terminus post quem lies between 4 July 1469, when Lorenzo took charge of the city, and early autumn of the same year, when Antonio visited Spoleto.11 Antonio came to the attention of Lorenzo through the mediation of the Lanfredini brothers, who were Antonio’s patrons from the early 1460s to the early 1490s.12 Several documents help establish that Antonio was one of Lorenzo’s preferred artists.13 Further evidence is to be found in the painting itself, in Lorenzo’s poetry, and in his studies of po-etry and philosophy in the Studio lectures by Cristoforo Landino (1424–1498) and Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499). All suggest that the painting was completed about 1468 and was presented to Lorenzo as a gift from Jacopo and Giovanni Lanfredini. Lorenzo and Landino were among Ficino’s guests at a gathering on 7 November 1468 to celebrate Plato’s birthday; the festivities included Ficino’s discus-sions of Plato’s Symposium.14 This event is significant because the painting reflects Lorenzo’s percep-tion of the myth through the prism of Landino’s ideas of poetry and Ficino’s ideas of Platonic love.15

The painting offers an unusual interpretation of ovid’s version of the myth (Met. 1.452–567). To the well-known details of the classical narrative, Antonio has added the richly embroidered costume of Apollo, the background of the Arno River landscape, and, most importantly, a transformation of Daphne into a laurel tree in which her arms form two large branches, each so large as to seem to be an independent laurel tree. This unusual depiction may be better understood in light of Lorenzo’s studies of poetry and philosophy in the Studio and of Lorenzo’s poetry, which makes repeated refer-ences to the myth. The significance of the painting to Lorenzo made it likely that he kept the work on view as a constant reminder of an ethical issue that preoccupied him his entire life: the choice between the contemplative life of the poet (otium) and the active life of the statesman (negotium).

In the painting, Daphne is transformed into a laurel tree in the form of the Pythagorean letter rendered as the Latin y. Traditionally, this letter had symbolized the critical choice between two paths of life between virtue and vice, but with Petrarch this letter began to symbolize a choice between otium and negotium.16 Ficino’s teacher Landino, in his Disputationes Camaldulenses, reconciled these two paths in the course of four dialogues held in the Camaldolese Monastery of S. Maria degli Angeli in 1468, shortly before the protagonist, Lorenzo, is “summoned to the city by letters of state.”17 The parallel is clear: at this period Lorenzo de’ Medici, a young poet, stood

9 Wright 2005, 520.

10 See Cruttwell 1907, 264–267 for the transcribed docu-ment.

11 Wright 2005, 13 and 429 n. 114.

12 borsook 1980, 112: “Antonio’s association with the Lan-fredini brothers spanned three decades.”

13 Wright 2005, 11–15 on the Lanfredini patronage; Elam 1988, 819 cites letters in support of her contention that Antonio del Pollaiuolo was one of Lorenzo’s preferred artists.

14 Medici 2000, 1:496; also Ficino 1975–2009, 1:107 and 189 n. 2; Gooch 1982.

15 The expression “Platonic love” (amore Platonico) was coined by Ficino. See Kristeller 1943, 285–286 for references to Ficino’s preface to Plato’s Phaedrus and Ficino’s letter to Alamanno Donati.

16 For this interpretation, see Enenkel 1991, 317.

17 Landino 1980, 262; cited from Stahel 1968, 267; see Kristeller 1991, 144–145 for the dates of Landino’s opus (written ca. 1474, printed 1481) and Lackner 2002 on the hermitage of Camaldoli.

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poised on the threshold of his career as a statesman, a role that was forced upon him shortly after his father died, on 2 July 1469.18

Several scholars, including Maud Cruttwell (1907), Leopold Ettlinger (1978), Nicoletta Pons (1994), and Aldo Galli (2005), attempting to establish the corpus from the Pollaiuolo workshop, barely discuss this specific painting in detail. The painting was briefly mentioned in 1932 by Wolf-gang Stechow, in his classic monograph on the representation of the myth of Apollo and Daphne. yves F.-A. Giraud included the painting in his 1968 monograph on renditions of the myth in word and image from antiquity to the end of the seventeenth century. In 1983 Paul F. Watson discussed the painting in the light of commentaries on ovid, especially those written in the fourteenth cen-tury by Arrigo Semintendi and Giovanni bonsignori. It was included in the exhibition Renaissance Florence: The Art of the 1470s, held in 1999 at the National Gallery in London; the catalogue entry was written by Alison Wright, who in 2005 published a comprehensive monograph on the Pol-laiuolo brothers, attributing this painting to Antonio. The painting was also included in the 2010 exhibition on Art and love in Renaissance Italy at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New york. In her catalogue entry, Andrea bayer summarizes the various positions on the attribution, dating, and intention of the painting; she inclines to support the patronage of Lorenzo de’ Medici.19

by reading Antonio’s painting alongside Lorenzo’s poetry, I intend to show that the painting’s interpretation of the Apollo and Daphne myth closely accords with Lorenzo’s sense of his dual role as both the first citizen of Florence and its poet. The painting allegorically depicts the two personae: Lorenzo as the Petrarchan poet, who, according to Ficino, was awarded the laurel,20 and Lorenzo as Phoebus Apollo, who was awarded this title by Ficino.21 In Lorenzo’s time, the figure of Apollo-Phoebus, the Graeco-Roman god of light, healing, prophecy, and poetry, was interpreted euhemeristically as the mortal king or hero who was deified and metaphorically as the pursuer of glory.22

2. lorenzo as the Patron of the Apollo and Daphne

That Lorenzo was indeed the patron of the painting is critical to the argument presented here. Although there is no documentary evidence to support the assertion that the painting was com-missioned directly by Lorenzo, we may safely suggest that the painting was commissioned on his behalf.

As early as 1907, Cruttwell, writing under the guidance of bernard berenson, maintained that the painting was done either for Lorenzo or for his younger brother Giuliano,23 though she does not offer a detailed argument. her view is not confirmed by any inventory of the goods of the Medici family. The 1492 inventory, noted for references to artists by name,24 lists several paintings by Antonio and Piero del Pollaiuolo (including three paintings of the exploits of hercules by Antonio).25 The absence of Apollo and Daphne may parallel the more famous absence from the same inventory of

18 See Watkins 1978, 160 for Lorenzo’s Ricordi.

19 bayer 2009, 291–293.

20 Ficino 1975–2009, 1:39: “Poets, you have long since awarded him [Lorenzo] the laurel.”

21 Ficino 1975–2009, 3:15.

22 on these two interpretations of Apollo, see Ficino 1975–2009, 3:14–16.

23 Cruttwell 1907, 64.

24 Paoletti 1998, 84.

25 Spallanzani and bertelà 1992, 12 (6r) and 26 (13v).


a canvas identified with the painting of the realm of Pan, known from Vasari as having been done for Lorenzo by Luca Signorelli.26

The clue to the identity of Signorelli’s Pan (formerly in the berlin Gallery) as the work done for Lorenzo is the presence in it of a seated figure with her chin resting in the palm of her hand; Lorenzo’s sonnets describe a similar figure. The repetition of the motif prompted André Chastel in 1945 to interpret the painting as a projection of melancholy consonant with themes in Lorenzo’s poetry.27 Chastel adapted the approach of Aby Warburg who, in his 1893 dissertation on botticelli’s mythologies, searched for common motifs in the poetry of Petrarch, boccaccio, Poliziano, and Lorenzo.28 I follow Warburg and Chastel in exploring common motifs in the painting by Antonio del Pollaiuolo and in the poetry of Lorenzo.

In his 1964 study of Lorenzo’s artistic patronage, Enrico barfucci took up Cruttwell’s tentatively proposed thesis that the Apollo and Daphne was painted for Lorenzo. he based his argument not only on the poetic treatment of the classical subject in the painting but also on the depiction of the Arno landscape with the view of Florence.29 barfucci does not concentrate on what I consider to be the crucial detail, the unusual depiction of the laurel tree in the shape of the Pythagorean y. In 1970, following barfucci, Frederick hartt characterized the work “as an allegory of the invincibil-ity of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s government, for the laurel was his plant.”30 Recognition that the laurel was the personal device of Lorenzo is commonplace;31 nonetheless, it was barfucci, and then hartt, who firmly proposed the connection between the painting and Lorenzo.

Andrea bayer cites Paul barolsky as the major exponent of the connection between the Pol-laiuolo painting and Lorenzo’s poetry and repeats barolsky’s thesis: in his poem Ambra Lorenzo describes how Ambra was transformed into a rock during her flight from the river god ombrone; hence, the Apollo and Daphne must have been commissioned by Lorenzo.32 The poem refers to Lauro as Ambra’s love, characterizing him as “[a]n Alpine shepherd [he], with virtue blest / No flame of lust in his kind heart is placed” (“pastore alpino, / d’un casto amore, né era penetrata / lasciva fiamma al pecto peregrino,” 24.3–4).33 The poem, however, alludes not just to Lorenzo but to his favorite tree, mentioning it as part of a winter landscape: “The laurel stands luxuriantly ’mid trees / Now barren” (“Tra li àlbori secchi stassi il laur lieto,” 2.1).34 It should come as no surprise that the tree is the focal point of Antonio’s painting, created when the association between Lorenzo and the laurel began to be articulated in contemporary literature and art. because the poem shows Lorenzo’s talent for playing with ovidian themes rather than merely alluding to them, barolsky sees the link between this painting, with its “story of the origins of the lauro or laurel,” and Lorenzo, the true Petrarchist.35 I agree in principle with barolsky’s suggestion, though I would point out that the poem is usually dated to 1486,36 certainly not earlier than 1479, when Lorenzo began to design a villa named Ambra at Poggio a Caiano. In his poem Ambra, Lorenzo’s love is transformed into a rock that becomes the foundation of Lorenzo’s favorite villa; he links this rock to the laurel tree,

26 Vasari 1991, 1:506.

27 Chastel 1945, 66–67.

28 Warburg 1999, 95–96 and 118–125; Gombrich 1970, 58.

29 barfucci 1964, 152.

30 hartt 1970, 275.

31 See o’brien 1993, 72 for essential references on the subject.

32 bayer 2009, 292.

33 Lonergan 2004, 101; see Medici 1992, 902.

34 Lonergan 2004, 96; see Medici 1992, 893.

35 barolsky 1998, 457.

36 Lonergan 1976, 160–161; see her discussion of the connec-tion between the winter landscape, where only a laurel re-mains verdant, and the metamorphosis of Ambra into a rock.

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once Apollo’s first love, growing nearby. Ambra attests to Lorenzo’s continuous fascination with the myth of Apollo and Daphne.

barolsky’s argument leaves open the issue of the date of the painting. Wright, after a thorough study of the Pollaiuolo workshop, concluded that the painting should be dated between 1466 and 1468, when the brothers were working on the Chapel of the Cardinal of Portugal in San Miniato al Monte. She suggests that the Apollo and Daphne was intended for Lorenzo, then nearly twenty years old, as a didactic picture on the theme of male and female virtue.37 Following André Rochon,38 she mentions that the association between Lorenzo and Apollo, as well as the association of the names Lorenzo and Lauro, began with the poetry of Luigi Pulci, written at the same time the Pollaiuolo brothers were working in the chapel. Wright argues from the evidence of recurrent motifs, compar-ing the running Apollo to the dancing nudes of the Lanfredini family’s Villa La Gallina; noting that his costume is rendered in a manner similar to that of St. Eustace; and comparing the Arno landscape to the same landscape in the hercules paintings, dated by her to 1464. From this, she concludes that the Apollo and Daphne should be dated close to 1470, perhaps even as early as 7 February 1468, when Lorenzo participated in the joust at the Piazza Santa Croce organized in honor of the peace agreement with Venice.39 Pulci’s poem honoring the joust opens with an invocation to Apollo, for it is dedicated to Apollo’s “amato Lauro” (that is, Lorenzo).40 Lorenzo’s costume, standard, and device, with its broncone laurel, are all described in the anonymous Ricordo of the joust.41 Lorenzo’s own Ricordi, begun on 15 March 1472,42 document his December 1468 betrothal to Clarice, whom he married on 4 June 1469. The lauro was also visible on the adornments designed for celebrations in honor of Lorenzo’s nuptials.43 After the marriage celebration, the lauro became his personal device.

The 1492 inventory of the goods in the Medici Palace on the Via Larga has been used to docu-ment one or another art object, but recently it has been mined as a valuable resource for assessing Lorenzo de’ Medici’s tastes. In their study of domestic art in fifteenth-century Florence, Peta Mot-ture and Luke Syson describe Lorenzo’s scrittoio as a galleria of small-scale pictures, with works of Florentine masters set alongside works imported from the Low Countries.44 Thus, the Pollaiuolo painting shared space with works by Giotto, Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, Pesellino, Jan Van Eyck, and Petrus Christus. The same scrittoio held a collection of ancient coins, contemporary med-als, engraved gems, ancient gemstones set in new frames, and alabaster vases. E. b. Fryde, recalling Niccolò Valori’s remarks on Lorenzo’s deteriorated eyesight, suggests that “his defective eyesight may explain his predilection for small artistic objects which he could hold close to his eyes.”45 The Apollo and Daphne was one such work. The artist’s indulgence in the minutiae of the laurel leaves, the costumes, the flowery meadow on the promontory, and the background landscape ensures that the painting would have provided a visual feast for the near-sighted Lorenzo.

A panel of such small dimensions could be easily transported from Florence to Pisa—where in 1473 Lorenzo founded his famous Studio46—as well as to his cherished villas, including those

37 Wright 2005, 98.

38 Rochon 1963, 95.

39 Wright 2005, 93 and 97. The dating follows that of the Florentine calendar. on the joust, see Rochon 1963, 97.

40 Pulci 1986, 61.

41 See Fanfani 1864, 535–536; Ventrone 1992, 28 and 167–168.

42 Watkins 1978, 159.

43 Ames-Lewis 1979, 124 and 143.

44 Motture and Syson 2006, 281.

45 Fryde 1983, 126; see also Chastel 1959, 168 for the mention of Lorenzo’s predilection for “Kleinkunst.”

46 Davies 1998, 125–130. The Pisa Studio was founded after the closure of the Studio in Florence in the late 1460s.


built at Spedaletto, Poggio a Caiano, and, in particular, the old family estate at Careggi. Fryde cites Landino’s preface to Vergil’s Aeneid, published in May 1492, a few weeks after Lorenzo’s death. The preface lists the activities to which Lorenzo was devoted, including literature, architectural designs, and agriculture;47 together these explain his preoccupation with the Tuscan countryside. According to Vasari, Lorenzo engaged Ghirlandaio, Perugino, botticelli, and Filippino Lippi to paint frescoes in his hunting lodge near Spedaletto.48 The frescoes have perished, but the fact that Lorenzo engaged several artists to work on the same building suggests that he wanted to realize the idea of an antique pinacotheca. The lodge at Spedaletto supports the idea that the scrittoio of the city residence and the country villa, with its collection of exquisite objects, resembled a gal-leria, whereas the frescoed hunting lodge resembled an antique pinacotheca, with pictures painted on its plastered walls. In her study of Tuscan villas, Amanda Lillie remarks upon the portability of the paintings that wealthy Florentines brought to their summer houses on their farm estates.49 The Apollo and Daphne might well have been one of the works that accompanied Lorenzo on his numerous trips to and from Florence. Whereas earlier such a work would have been seen as integral to a piece of domestic furniture, the idea that this work was used as a portable object accords with recent studies of domestic art.

3. The Function of the Apollo and Daphne

Paul Schubring suggested that the Pollaiuolo painting functioned as a panel set into the end of a marriage chest, as was characteristic of panel paintings of two-figure compositions with mythological subjects.50 Attilio Schiaparelli, Martin Wackernagel, and Ettlinger averred that the small dimensions of the painting might have suited a small coffer.51 barolsky conjectured that the painting might have been used as “a cover for a portrait of the worthy poet,”52 perhaps Petrarch, whose Sonnet 60 describes the transformation of the poet into the laurel. An illustration to the first printing of Petrarch’s Rime (Venice 1470) depicts the poet’s hair and fingers as leaves of the laurel tree.53 barolsky’s conjecture was prompted by Angelica Dülberg’s inclusion of the Pollaiuolo work in her catalogue of paintings that might have functioned as covers for portraits.54 Wright argued, however, that the painting should be viewed as an independent work and that it was even stored in its own special case.55

I maintain that Lorenzo intended to keep the painting on view and not hidden in a special case, but that case could be used for carrying the work on trips. I fully agree with bayer, echoing Martin Davies’s observation that without new documentary evidence we cannot know the function and setting of this painting in fifteenth-century Florence.56 yet in light of recent studies on Florentine culture, a close examination of the painting may supply us with visible testimony to its significance as an object made specifically for Lorenzo, a visual reflection on the many allusions to the myth

47 Fryde 1983, 132.

48 Freedman 2011, 39.

49 Lillie 2005, 137–146.

50 Schubring 1923, 297, cat. no. 334.

51 Schiaparelli 1983, 1:286; Wackernagel 1981, 168; Ettlinger 1978, 28 and 141, cat. no. 9.

52 Cited from barolsky 1998, 457.

53 Stechow 1932, 7 and fig. 2; Trapp 1992–1993, 26 and 26 n. 66.

54 Dülberg 1990, 171 and 171 n. 1118, and cat. no. 320.

55 Wright 2005, 94.

56 bayer 2009, 292.

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of Apollo and Daphne found in his poetry. before examining the evidence of Lorenzo’s youthful sonnets, it is worth recapitulating what characterizes the painting as a precious object intended for display in Lorenzo’s scrittoio.

The exquisite quality of its execution, visible in spite of some surface paint loss, is an eloquent testimony that the painting was intended to be more than simply decorative. The execution clearly distinguishes it from panels depicting the myth of Apollo and Daphne that were intended for do-mestic furniture. These panels, evidently predating Antonio’s painting, were done mostly in tempera, and their sides bear signs of wear from being set into a frame.57 Antonio’s painting is significantly smaller (29.5 × 20 cm) than these panels (each of which measures about 50 × 50 cm), a size easily portable or handheld. None of the panel paintings shows the costumes, the promontory, the meadow in flower, the hunting scene, or the Arno valley landscape. These elements of Antonio’s painting are among those featured in Lorenzo’s poetry.

Each of the panels stages the mythological event on one pictorial plane in two sequential scenes: Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne, and Daphne’s metamorphosis into the laurel. Antonio’s painting fuses the two scenes into one: the pursuing Apollo embraces Daphne as she turns into the laurel. The panel paintings usually adhere to the ovidian account of the myth, focusing on the myth of Apollo’s love story rather than on the myth as an etiological explanation of why the laurel tree is sacred to the god. by contrast, Antonio’s painting emphasizes the laurel tree into which Daphne began to transform, before Apollo’s eyes.

The painting commissioned for Lorenzo was influenced by his ideas about the laurel tree and served as the source of inspiration for his reflections on topics related to the myth. Visitors to Lorenzo’s scrittoio might make the association of Lorenzo the poet and patron of poets. The most striking element of the painting is Daphne, her uplifted arms transformed into two laurel branches. Apollo’s embrace of her transformed figure proclaims Lorenzo’s aspiration to glory, symbolized by the laurel tree. The laurel tree’s unusual form is thus a response to Lorenzo’s interpretation of the myth of Apollo and Daphne as an expression of the philosophic dilemma of choosing one’s path in life.

4. lorenzo, landino, and Ficino

Lorenzo was taught to memorize verse from the age of five. he had successfully memorized passages from ovid by the age of twelve, as we know from Gentile becchi’s report to Lorenzo’s father.58 In 1456, after John Argyropoulus was appointed Reader of Greek in the Studio Fiorentino, Lorenzo was exposed to the study of hellenic culture.59 The lectures Lorenzo attended at the Studio shaped his interpretation of the myth of Apollo and Daphne; the story is not simply an account of Apollo’s first love but an exemplum of aspiration to a virtuous life. The list of courses and lectures Lorenzo attended helped to clarify his perception of poetic accounts of myths as exponents of philosophic dilemmas of life. Knowing the way his charge thought about the myth, becchi, in a letter dated 14 February 1471, didactically used the figure of Apollo’s Daphne as a paradigm of the studious path that leads to the truth.60

57 Schubring 1923, 258, cat. nos. 154 and 155; Wright 2005, 96; Filippini 2003, 178.

58 Freedman 2011, 26.

59 Ady 1955, 17.

60 Rochon 1963, 62 n. 215: “…veggo essere maggiore fatica giungere una verità che a Phebo Daphnea.”


In 1456, when the Studio began, Landino joined it as a lecturer on Dante.61 his lectures formed the kernel of his commentary on the Divine Comedy, completed in 1481; it glosses the myth of Apollo and Daphne and also the Pythagorean letter y.62 In 1458 Landino won the Studio chair in rhetoric and poetry, with the support of Lorenzo’s father, Piero (1416–2 July 1469). According to Arthur Field, “[f]rom 1458 he probably lectured on Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations [a model for his Camaldolese Disputations]. he then spent four years on Latin poetry: horace’s odes (1459–60 or 1460–61), the Satires of Juvenal and Persius (1461–62), Virgil’s Aeneid, books 1–7 (1462–63), and the rest of the Aeneid and probably more Virgil (1463–64).”63 In 1465–1466, Landino again delivered lectures on Dante;64 a year later, he lectured on Petrarch’s Canzoniere.65 The lectures on Petrarch and Dante were given in Italian, not Latin. This fact is not without significance, for Lorenzo wrote all his poems in Italian, not only those poems in imitation of Petrarch’s Canzoniere. In the same year, 1466–1467, Ficino, Landino’s close friend and a tutor of the adolescent Lorenzo, joined the Studio as a lecturer in philosophy.66 It was Landino who suggested that Ficino begin lectur-ing with the commentary to Plato’s Philebus on the relative value of pleasure and knowledge—a subject Ficino interpreted as a quest for the Supreme Good.67 The earliest extant correspondence between Lorenzo and Ficino dates to 1473, but Lorenzo might have met Ficino as early as 1462, when Ficino was living at Careggi and translating Plato and Plotinus at the request of Lorenzo’s grandfather Cosimo (1389–1464).68 hence in 1466 Lorenzo could have attended Ficino’s lectures on Plato’s Philebus. There is little doubt that Lorenzo attended Landino’s lectures on poetry, as there is evidence that Lorenzo knew Landino from the late 1450s, and the extant correspondence dates from 1463.69

Landino, the faithful adept of Petrarch, had his own “Laura” in a young Florentine beauty named Alessandra70 but wrote poetry in classical Latin. The collection of poems Xandra (short for Alexandra) was dedicated in 1460 to Lorenzo’s father. Poem 23 of the second book of Xandra is entitled “To the City of Florence” (“Ad urbem Florentiam”). In the second verse Landino mentions his “special girl” while promising to sing of Florence in “loftier verse,” extolling the city’s ancient Roman origins. he then returns to praises of Xandra’s beauty. The colors of her face are as vivid as colors of the flowers adorning her hair, making her the “glory of the Florentine nymphs” (line 53). he praises “her charming ways in everything,” contrasting them to those that characterize nymphs as “pitiless” (line 64). one of the pitiless nymphs is Daphne, who “could have had Apollo as [her] husband” instead of being turned into a laurel. Landino follows ovid’s observation that “her arms sprang into branches” (Met. 1.550: in ramos bracchia crescunt), describing her arms as “transformed into unfamiliar branches” (line 70: in ramos brachia versa novos). because Daphne rejected Apollo/Phoebo and changed from her “former human shape” into the new arboreal one, she now tends her “father’s river, for [she has] now been made a tree” (lines 71–72).71

61 Field 1988, 235 mentions that Lorenzo was among his students.

62 Landino 2001, 290: 275–293 and 156: 25–34, respectively.

63 Field 1988, 236–237.

64 Field 1988, 266.

65 Field 1988, 238 n. 72

66 Field 1986, 16 and 16 n. 2.

67 Davies 1992, 787–788.

68 hankins 1991, 432 and 435 n. 20.

69 Field 1986, 28 n. 47. This is the letter, dated 1463, in which Landino consoles Lorenzo on the death of his paternal uncle Giovanni (1421–1463); see Cardini 1973, 18 and 18 n. 32.

70 Landino 2008, xi.

71 Landino 2008, 123.

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The recollection of Daphne’s transformation into the tree after her rejection of Apollo in the panegyric verses to Florence, a city whose affairs were then under Medicean control, is significant. by the time Landino completed writing them in 1459/60, Lorenzo began to be associated with Apollo-Phoebus and the laurel tree, as seen in Gozzoli’s frescoes, accessible to visitors of the Medici palace.72 Praising the beauty of Xandra, Landino paid tribute to two traditions. one was the Tuscan tradition, indicated by his nod to Dante and Petrarch, in which a chosen lady performs the roles of a cherished idol and inspiring Muse. The other was the tradition of courtly love, in which a poet/knight writes poems and songs in honor of a lady of his heart. Lorenzo followed his university tutor but preferred to write poems in the style of Petrarch.

In 1465 Lorenzo became enamored of Lucrezia, a non-personnagio of his poetry, as the real Lucrezia Donati (1449–1501) was then married to Niccolò Ardinghelli.73 he chose her as the Muse of his poetry and the lady of his heart for the joust to be celebrated on 7 February 1468. In 1465 he addressed two sonnets to Lucrezia, comparing his Platonic love for her to Apollo’s love of Daphne. The poets whom Lorenzo patronized began to associate one figure with another, often punning on his name and Daphne’s. In the same year (1465 or 1466), for example, Naldo Naldi (1436–ca. 1513), one of Ficino’s disciples,74 dedicated an eclogue entitled Daphnis to Lorenzo. The eclogue begins: Daphnis pastor erat, nymphae correptus amore.75 In Medicean Florence the references were clear: Daphnis was Lorenzo; Daphnis’s father Apollo (“the Etruscan Apollo”) was Lorenzo’s father Piero; Pan referred to Lorenzo’s grandfather Cosimo (“the Etruscan Pan”); and Daphnis’s unnamed Nymph was Lorenzo’s Lucrezia.76 In 1512 Valori mentions as common knowledge the fact that Lucrezia Donati was Lorenzo’s first love,77 just as Daphne was Apollo’s.

In 1478, Angelo Poliziano, in Stanze per la giostra, compared Lorenzo’s Lucrezia to the maiden who turned into “a laurel in Thessaly” (2.4; trans. David Quint, 69).78 Poliziano stresses the avoidance of eye contact between Lucrezia and Laurel/Lorenzo, alluding possibly to the absence of the eye contact between Daphne and Apollo in the painting, which presumably was on display in Lorenzo’s scrittoio. Poliziano’s poem on the joust celebrated in honor of Giuliano, Lorenzo’s younger brother, describes Vulcan’s intaglio of Apollo pursuing Daphne (1.109). he writes of Apollo’s “face complain-ing, as / if he were saying: ‘o, nymph, do not run away’” (“‘n sembianza si lagna / come dicessi: ‘o ninfa, non ten gire’,” lines 1–2).79 The poet, imitating Dante’s visibile parlare (Purg. 10.95), converts the intaglio’s mute image of Apollo into the speaking image of the god. The interpretation of the same scene in the painting is unique; Apollo gazes lovingly at Daphne’s face, but her half-lowered lids bid him farewell. Poliziano then describes the intaglio, which shows the conventional depiction of the myth, focusing on the element of Apollo’s chase. Antonio del Pollaiuolo depicts the moment in which Apollo’s plea had become futile. The poets surrounding Lorenzo elaborated the overt allusions between Laurentius, laurus, and Daphnis, and they also mention the tree lauro in implicit reference to Lorenzo. Reflecting these conventional allusions, Antonio depicted Daphne/laurel looming over Apollo. The painting visually conveys the importance the laurel tree acquired in Lorenzo’s poetry.

72 Gombrich 1978, 50 claims that everybody in the family knew, in view of Piero’s sickness, that Lorenzo would be the head of the family and that he was invested with the hope to continue a leading role in the city of Florence, the role assumed by his grandfather Cosimo. See Trexler 1980, 428–440.

73 Lonergan in Medici 1992, 39.

74 Grant 1963, 609 n. 17.

75 Naldi 1974, 23; see also Rochon 1963, 95.

76 Grant 1962, 145.

77 Valori 1991, 96–97.

78 Poliziano 1979, 69; see Quint’s commentary to the verses.

79 Poliziano 1979, 57.


5. The Myth in lorenzo’s Sonnets

Lorenzo first began writing poetry in 1464/65. Two of his early Petrarchan sonnets refer directly to the myth of Apollo and Daphne.80 Sonnet 11 is dated to June 1465; the titulus documents that it was written in Reggio, after Lorenzo had received the news that his lady Lucrezia had fallen ill. In this sonnet, Paolo orvieto finds allusions to several works of Tuscan poetry, among them boccaccio’s Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine (15. 9–10; 12.16), Luigi Pulci’s Morgante (15.99–100), and Giovanni Gherardi’s Che giova investigar (lines 5–8).81 The final tercet of the sonnet begins: “Apollo fair, if that first love you bore / be not forgot” (“Tu, biondo Apollo, se ancor ti rimembra / del tuo primiero amore”).82 At first glance, Lorenzo seems to follow closely ovid’s Metamorphoses (1.452): Primus amor Phoebi Daphne Peneia—“The first love of Phoebus was Daphne, daughter of Peneus” and Petrarch’s Triumphus Cupidinis (1:154),83 which refers to Phoebus as “il biondo Apollo”—again, an obvious borrowing from ovid’s Amores (1.15.35: flavus Apollo). Lorenzo adds his flourish to the familiar myth. he bids Apollo remember Daphne, his first love, using the verb rimembrare to suggest that he will remember his own first love, Lucrezia.

Antonio’s painting given to him by the Lanfredini brothers was meant to be a visual remem-brance of his Petrarchan love.

The first quatrain of Lorenzo’s Sonnet 14, also dated to 1465, again recalls the myth: “That laurel tree by Phoebus deeply loved, / bequeathing shade and richly green once grew / happier and joyous more than other plants, / pleased in itself and pleasuring its beloved” (“L’arbor che a Febo già cotanto piacque, / piú lieto o piú felice che altre piante / e per se stesso e per suo caro amante, / umbroso e verde un tempo, in terra giacque”).84 orvieto finds allusions to Petrarch’s Canzoniere, indicated by the play of the words piante and amante, by the phrase “umbroso e verde,” and especially by the direct borrowing of “l’arbor ch’amò già Febo in corpo umano” from Petrarch’s Sonnet 41.2.85 In the painting, however, what is prominent is the shady verdant promontory, where Daphne/laurel has taken root. The first tercet of Lorenzo’s Sonnet 14 expresses the laurel tree’s longing for the sun’s rays and the lover’s for a desired shadow cast by its crown. The second quatrain ends with a lover’s comparison of the laurel to other plants, stressing that the laurel is the only tree that was pleasing to Apollo and his beloved. Although the human Daphne escaped from the god Apollo, Daphne, in her arboreal form, is forever bound to Apollo the sun. Lorenzo adapts the Petrarchan animation of nature, endowing the laurel tree with the emotions of Daphne and Apollo. The painting expresses Lorenzo’s projection of human emotions onto the myth by emphasizing the tree and the landscape in the visual narration of the fate of Apollo’s first love.

The prominence Lorenzo gives to this myth may be understood as his tribute to Petrarch’s poetry. Eleven of Petrarch’s poems clearly refer to the myth, thirty-one poems contain variations on the motif of lauro, and eleven poems use the lauro to signify Laura, whose characteristic virtue is her chastity.86 yet Lorenzo’s allusions to the myth may be interpreted even more personally as expressing his desire to underscore his own association with both Apollo and the lauro, in his dual

80 Also Canzone 50, dated to 1465, contains allusions to the myth. Medici 1992, 110. See p. 113 for orvieto’s comments on lines 64–66.

81 Medici 1992, 46.

82 Lonergan’s unpublished translation. See Medici 1992, 47.

83 Petrarca 1996, 88 (the verse) and 89 (references to Pe-trarch’s sources).


85 Medici 1992, 51.

86 Cottino-Jones 1975, 153. See also Mann 1994.

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role as poet and patron of poets. In response to Lorenzo’s poems written in 1465, Luigi Pulci sent Lorenzo the canzone “Da poi che ’l Lauro” (dated 12 March 1466), in which lines 111–112 allude to the myth of Apollo and Daphne, in the spirit of Petrarch’s Latin eclogues.87 orvieto argues that Pulci’s lines reveal the influence not only of Petrarch’s Sonnet 60 but also Lorenzo’s Sonnets 11 and 14.88 The influence may be sensed in the shift of the emphasis from Apollo’s confession of love to the positioning of the laurel between the earth and sky. Poets, following ovid, usually recounted Apollo’s monologue, emphasizing the futility of his attempts to dissuade Daphne from her vow of chastity (as did Poliziano when describing Vulcan’s intaglio of Apollo in pursuit of Daphne). Apollo, interpreted euhemeristically in the painting as a precocious Florentine youth, is no longer able to have Daphne as his spouse (ov. Met.1.557: coniunx); in embracing her transformed figure, he has chosen the path toward glory.

6. Antonio del Pollaiuolo’s Unique Daphne/laurel

A full appreciation of the uniqueness of Antonio del Pollaiuolo’s image of Daphne’s metamor-phosis into the laurel tree requires a survey of the representations of the myth prior to 1470. The first recorded depiction of Daphne’s transformation into laurel in the fifteenth century is Filarete’s incised picture on the left border of the right door to the main entrance of old St. Peter’s Church in Rome.89 The work was completed in 1445 and consequently might have been seen by Lorenzo during his earliest official visit to Rome in 1466. The bronze relief shows Apollo embracing the trunk; the human head of Daphne is surrounded by laurel leaves. This visual interpretation was also employed by the master of the Earl of Crawford panel (fig. 2).90 The panel in the Villa I Tatti Collection depicts Apollo, in the costume of a Roman legionary, embracing the trunk of a laurel tree.91 The artist makes no attempt at a realistic depiction of the tree or the river landscape. In the panel from the bellini collection (Florence), Apollo, pictured as a Florentine youth, stretches his arms toward Daphne, who is depicted at the moment of her transformation.92 her leafy foliage crown consists of five branches; three spring from her head, the other two are her uplifted arms. The shape of these five branches is similar to the shape of the laurel foliage crown that frames the youngest Magus in benozzo Gozzoli’s painting in the Medici family chapel, frescoed in 1459–1460. The youthful figure of Caspar allegorically represents the ten-year-old Lorenzo, who was born five days before the Feast Day of the Magi.93 The laurel foliage behind Daphne in the panel from the bellini collection stands in contrast to the laurel garland encircling the head of the fair-haired Apollo. This garland, in turn, recalls the laurel with which Laura crowns the poet Petrarch, as shown in a miniature in the manuscript of the Canzoniere dated to 1440.94

87 Petrarch 1974, 222. Eclogue 3, Amor pastorius, is written in the form of a dialogue between Stupeus and Dane, that is, Daphne.

88 Pulci 1986, 48.

89 Roeder 1947, 153 no. 32.

90 Schubring 1913, 201 and pl. III fig. M.

91 Wright 2005, fig. 69.

92 See Paolini et al. 2010, 274 for the entry by Michela Palmeri, discussing the Apollo and Daphne from the bellini collection.

93 hanning 1979, 494 thought of this painting in relation to laurel as Lorenzo’s personal symbol; Ahl 1996, 93 and 95 discusses Caspar as the allegorical portrait of the ten-year-old Lorenzo; she sees the face of Lorenzo in one of the youths in this magus’s train; see fig. 113.

94 Trapp 2001, 72, fig. 46.


Francesco d’Antonio del Chierico, a registered jeweler and miniaturist in the brotherhood of the Compagnia di San Paolo, began to illustrate Petrarch in 1456;95 however, only from the early 1460s did he include miniatures of the myth of Apollo and Daphne.96 These miniatures show Apollo pursuing Daphne, whose uplifted arms reveal her fingers and locks of hair as the thin branches of a laurel tree.97 The leaves do not reveal the botanical precision that characterizes the panel from the bellini collection or the Gozzoli fresco, both of which predate the Pollaiuolo painting. The persistence in showing Daphne’s hands and hair transformed into an arabesque of laurel foliage contrasts sharply with Antonio’s depiction of Daphne’s arms, turned into two separate branches.

Fig. 2. Workshop of Apollonio di Giovanni, Apollo and Daphne, end panel, formerly in the collection of earl of Crawford, present location unknown (photo courtesy of Photographic Collection, The Warburg Institute).

95 Garzelli 1985, 1:121.

96 Garzelli 1985, 131–132.

97 Garzelli 1985, 2:figs. 305–309.

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The miniaturist shows Daphne’s hair interspersed with laurel sprigs, while her feet retain their hu-man form. unlike Antonio, the miniaturist does not show Apollo reaching the fugitive maiden. The element of Apollo embracing Daphne at the moment of her metamorphosis was probably borrowed from miniatures attributed to an artist from northern Italy, done at the beginning of the fifteenth century. These miniatures illustrate the commentary to ovid’s Metamorphoses penned by Petrarch’s friend from Avignon, Pierre bersuire. A miniature to one such manuscript shows Apollo embracing Daphne from behind, his hands placed on her hips. her arms are joined together above her head, as they begin to turn into the laurel tree.98 Antonio assimilated the motif of Apollo’s embrace of Daphne but depicted the clinch so that Apollo seems to be searching for stability in the figure of Daphne, his leg suspended in air, his left hand on Daphne’s hip, his right arm encircling her waist.

Antonio’s painting expresses Lorenzo’s interpretation of the ovidian account of the myth. un-like in other illustrations of this myth, Daphne’s transformation occupies most of the painted surface: her arms, now two treelike branches, reach up to the fleecy clouds in the sky; in the background is the Tuscan landscape, rich in flora, fauna, and human activity. Lorenzo adapted Landino’s attitude to poetry, which gave philosophical interpretations to the poems of Vergil and Dante.99 Landino’s adaptation of the Petrarchan view of poet as a vates100 and his promotion of the vernacular as a liter-ary and learned language no doubt influenced Lorenzo, who wrote Italian verse on subjects discussed in Latin philosophical treatises and dialogues.101 The myth of Apollo and Daphne represents not the poet’s futile efforts to win the love of his lady but instead his concept of the laurel wreath as the sign of virtue and noble deeds, which a fine Florentine citizen must attain.

The painting’s focus on the laurel tree would have been an obvious choice for Lorenzo, following the etiological interpretation of the myth of the laurel tree. The myth was interpreted by Isidore, bishop of Seville, to mean “praise”102 and, by extension, also “virtue.” Giovanni boccaccio expresses this line of thought in Trattatello in laude di Dante, influencing Landino’s interpretation of classical myths,103 which in turn profoundly influenced Lorenzo’s poetry. boc-caccio explains that laurel leaves were chosen for the wreaths that crowned poets and emperors because the tree recalls Daphne, loved by “Phoebus, the first writer and a patron of poets,”104 a euhemeristic characterization of Apollo that must certainly have appealed to Lorenzo. boccaccio expounded on the three properties of the laurel that caused Apollo to choose it as his sacred tree: its evergreen leaves represent everlasting fame; its immunity from lightning represents steadfast-ness in the face of others’ jealousy of his inborn talents; its fragrance represents the desire to savor the deeds described by poets and performed by heroes.105 The myth of Apollo and Daphne was thus a reminder of the desire for glory and fame. The fulcrum of Antonio’s painting is the fusion of Daphne’s body with a laurel tree: her head, the upper part of her body, and her right leg all retain their human shape, but her upraised arms have already become branches, and her left leg, from the thigh downward, is gradually turning into the tree trunk. The branches of the Daphne/laurel are not equally thick in their foliage; the laurel branch created by her right arm is thicker than the left one, as are the branches of the Latin letter y. This realization of the laurel

98 Stechow 1932, fig. 10; Girauld 1968, 151. This manuscript is preserved in Gotha, Die herzogliche bibliothek (Codex Membr. I, 98, fol. 9v).

99 Field 1986, 17.

100 boyle 1991, 44.

101 Gilson 2005, 137–138.

102 Isidore 2006, 342: “Laurel (laurus) is so called from the word ‘praise’ (laus, gen. laudis), because with it the heads of conquerors were crowned with praises” (17.7.2).

103 Kallendorf 1983, 524–525.

104 boccaccio 1990, 42.

105 boccaccio 1990, 42–43.


tree, in combination with the philosophical interpretation of the myth, implies that Lorenzo was responsible for the unusual depiction of Daphne’s metamorphosis and that Lorenzo’s ideas were known to the Lanfredini brothers, who gave this painting to Lorenzo.

7. Littera Pythagorae

The graphic outline of Daphne assumes the shape of the Latin letter y, the adaptation of the Greek upsilon, invented by Pythagoras of Samos as a symbol of human life. The famous littera Pythagorae consists of a trunk forking into two equal branches; however, the letter, with the right branch thicker than the left, appears on epitaphs carved at the time of Lorenzo.106 This difference is reflected in the painting: Daphne’s right arm with the thicker branch and her left arm with the thinner branch. It thus looks different from the reader’s view of the letter y, with the right branch thinner than the left one. The connotations of right and left as parallel to righteousness and sinfulness became prominent in Christian art, thanks to Aristotle’s mention of the Pythagorean Table of opposites (Metaph. 986a 22);107 see, for example, depictions of Christ on the Cross with the damned to the left and the saved to the right.

As Isidore explains (1.3.7), the littera Pythagorae stood for “the first stage of life.” he cites Persius (Satires 3.56) to explain its relationship to the education of youths: a youth, leaving the stage of innocent childhood before entering the stage of manhood, must make the decisive choice of his path in life.108 The youth stands at the intersection of the two life paths, the bivium vitae, signified by the littera Pythagorae. As a symbol of the transition from childhood to adulthood, the very phrase littera Pythagorae came to refer to the choice between an arduous path, leading to a blessed life, and an easy path of gratification of bodily temptations, leading to self-destruction. The illustration of the choice in the form of the littera Pythagorae was commonly accepted from antiquity.109 by the time of Lorenzo, the choice represented by the letter y had changed meaning: no longer just the symbol of the choice between virtue and vice, the littera Pythagorae represented man’s continuous engagement in an inner debate over the direction of his life. Various uses and interpretations of the Pythagorean letter-symbol from antiquity to Petrarch have been examined at length;110 the less-studied humanistic interpretations, from Petrarch to Landino, emphasized the choice between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa and strove to reconcile the two.

The significance of the littera Pythagorae for humanists was elucidated in Petrarch’s letter to zanobi Mazzuoli da Strada. Petrarch suggests that zanobi choose the vita contemplativa over the vita activa, that is, that he “abandon the teaching of grammar and aspire to greater heights.”111 (Petrarch considered the teaching of grammar to be mundane, whereas reflecting on the wisdom inherited from the ancient pagans and early Christian writers was a desirable occupation.) he describes the course of life as a long path leading to the point at which a person is forced to ask difficult ques-tions about his purpose in life. This use of the path as a metaphor for life, he explains, was known

106 Sperling 1989, 226 and fig. C on pl. 46.

107 Lloyd 1962, 59.

108 Isidore 2006, 40; Joost-Gaugier 2006, 68.

109 There is a sizeable literature on the subject. For the ancient and medieval uses of the littera Pythagorae, see Pascal 1910;

Panofsky 1930, 44–52 and 64–68 offers a broad survey of the history of the concept of the bivium vitae, tracing it from hesiod to Erasmus.

110 Tucker 2003 provides updated references to scholarship on the homo viator.

111 Petrarca 1975–1985, 2:141

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to “our Vergil and Pythagoras.”112 Petrarch’s association of Vergil with Pythagoras was based on a popular fable, according to which Numa Pompilius, the first king of the Romans, made his teacher Pythagoras a Roman citizen.113 The mention of Vergil was an established convention, thanks to the Servian commentary to Aeneid (6.136–138),114 but the appeal to Pythagoras required a gloss for those not thoroughly familiar with the classics. Petrarch reminds zanobi that the Samian sage invented the twentieth letter of the Greek alphabet, corresponding to the Latin y, meant to be symbolic of the life path. An epigram, attributed to Vergil, interpreted the Pythagorean symbol, or the “Littera Pythagorae,” as “the very image of human life”;115 as early as the eleventh century this epigram was attributed to Maximinus or Maximianus,116 a contemporary of boethius. First Lactantius (Div. inst. 6.3.6 and 6.4.1)117 and then Servius (ad Aeneid 6.136–138) equated Vergil’s “Golden bough” with the Pythagorean letter: both signified the moral choice to be made in adolescence.118 Following Lactantius and Servius, bernardus Silvestris, a medieval Platonist who taught at Chartres about 1150, likened the Pythagorean letter-symbol to a tree, itself a symbol of human life. Commenting on Vergil’s Aeneid (6.136), bernardus wrote: “Since humanity is divided like a tree, so here it is called a ‘tree,’ and is depicted by Pythagoras as the letter y, forked like a tree.”119 Artemidorus (on Dreams 4.57) recounted the interpretation of a dream in which the laurel tree signified life.120

Petrarch mentions the Pythagorean symbol of life in other letters, suiting his advice to the tem-perament and vocation of his addressee. To zanobi (12.3) he recommended the life of contempla-tion; to Marco Genovese (3.12) he suggests “a byway, as the Pythagoreans call it, the sinister path” and advises him not to worry “that your concern for your citizens, which requires so much of your time, appears opposed to that divine grace which you seek.”121 he reminds Marco of exempla set by Vergil and Ennius, and of the Christian way of life exemplified by Ambrose and Arsenius. In other words, Petrarch’s belief in the virtue of his addressee makes it possible to advise him to choose an active life. Petrarch recalls the Pythagorean symbol also in his letter to Giberto, a grammarian from Parma (7.17), suggesting that he imagine a young man who needs his advice as “he has now arrived at the Pythagorean crossroads of his life; never will his prudence be less nor his danger greater. The left path indeed leads to hell, the right to heaven; but the former is easy, level, very wide, and worn through usage by many people, while the latter is steep, narrow, difficult, and marked with the footsteps of few men.”122 Petrarch sees in the Pythagorean crossroads a universal symbol; he cites Vergil’s Aeneid (6.535–536) and especially the Gospel of Matthew (7.13–14) on the two paths of life. he strongly recommends Giberto speaking with the youths in his care about exempla virtutis, pagan and Christian, thus demonstrating the importance of an education in the liberal arts.

112 Petrarca 1975–1985, 2:142. on Petrarch’s frequent ap-peal to Pythagorean symbolism, see Mann 2004, 12 and Joost-Gaugier 2009, 20.

113 Courtney 1993, 30–31; see also Joost-Gaugier 2006, 74.

114 Jones 1961, 222.

115 Tucker 2003, 91 (I cite his translation of the second line of the epigram).

116 Sanford 1924, 216, no. 27 for the manuscript, dated to the eleventh century, which includes “Maximianus, de ‘y’ littera.”

117 on Landino’s introduction of Lactantius’s views on poetry, see Field 1986, 30.

118 Tucker 2003, 90. The only available English translation of the passage from Servius is that of Smith 1973, 349 and 349 n. 25.

119 Silvestris 1979, 57–58. on the association between the laurel tree and the Cross, see Stechow 1932, 17. on the y-shaped crucifix in the Prato Cathedral, attributed to Giovanni Pisano, see Lisner 1970, 20, fig. 27.

120 ogle 1910, 308. on the symbolism of the laurel for Re-naissance humanists, see Tervarent 1997, 277–279 and Levi D’Ancona 1977, 201–204.

121 Petrarca 1975–1985, 1:145–146.

122 Petrarca 1975–1985, 1:380.


Petrarch and his most dedicated followers, among them Coluccio Salutati, Matteo Palmieri, Landino, and Lorenzo, saw in the bivium vitae the need to make a decisive choice in life, in ac-cordance with one’s inclination and temperament:123 the goal was to pursue virtue. Petrarch’s let-ters mentioning the Pythagorean symbol of life were included in a manuscript of his Latin works, containing the first thirteen of twenty-four volumes of the Familiares. This manuscript, bound with Salutati’s treatise De seculo et religione, formed part of a codex that was prepared about 1470 for Lorenzo, as indicated by the lauro device in the margins.124 one of several Medici emblems, this device, taken in context, represented both the tree sacred to Apollo and Lorenzo’s devotion to virtue as the moral principle.

Theodor E. Mommsen discussed how the poet-philosopher reinterpreted Cicero’s description of the Choice of hercules; rather than seeing “two ways” (De officiis 1.32.118) hercules now finds himself in bivio. The Choice of hercules thus became linked to the Pythagorean letter-symbol, restoring to the latter concept the meaning it had had in antiquity.125 Petrarch referred to the symbol in several of his writings, discussing its use by both Latin and early Christian authors, among them Lactantius and Jerome.126 In the three dialogues of the Secretum, Petrarch (Franciscus) debates St. Augustine on how to reconcile the lessons learned from the pagan ancients with the morals propagated by Christian preachers.127 Recalling the Pythagorean letter-symbol (3.5.9), Franciscus explains that, though he knew he should have chosen the virtuous path, he nonetheless wanted to experience the other way of life.128 he confesses that he encountered difficulties in his efforts to return to the virtuous path, but the ennobling effect of his love for his virtuous lady (Laura) helped him find the true way of life. Petrarch’s description of the ennobling effect of his love for Laura had a profound impact on Lorenzo, who compared his love for Lucrezia with Apollo’s for Daphne and, by implication, with Petrarch’s love for Laura. In Antonio’s painting, the figure of Daphne represents the Pythagorean letter-symbol as the reminder of the two paths of life, no longer antagonistic. The background shows the Arno valley and is similar to the background shown in his paintings of the exploits of hercules, with which Lorenzo was familiar. The landscape in the Apollo and Daphne differs from the backgrounds of contemporaneous paintings of hercules at the Pythagorean crossroads, with their sharply contrasting barren, mountainous road and flowery, river valley glade.129

Following Petrarch, Salutati, in his De laboribus herculis, associates the Pythagorean letter-symbol with the Choice of hercules and with the Golden bough (3.7).130 Salutati cites the writings of Petrarch that explicitly mention the Choice of hercules.131 Salutati then made an essential link among Persius’s anonymous youth, Cicero’s hercules, and Vergil’s Aeneas: all three describe exemplary youths from antiquity at the critical juncture in their lives. Salutati also gives an etiological interpretation to the myth of Apollo and Daphne (3.38), similar to boccaccio’s but linked to the legend about the young hercules. he imagines hercules gazing

123 Kristeller 1991, 138–139 and 141.

124 Trapp 1998, 160.

125 Mommsen 1953, 183; see Enenkel 1991 and also Joost-Gaugier 2006, 74–75. This reinterpretation appears in De vita solitaria (Solitary life, 2.9.4).

126 For Jerome’s reference to the Pythagorean letter-symbol, see Scourfield 1987, 495. See also ullman 1923, 33 and Marsh 2004.

127 Petrarca 1993, 136–137.

128 Mann 2004, 19.

129 Panofsky 1930, 107 and fig. 52 and 111 and fig. 53 il-lustrate the Choice of hercules.

130 Salutati 1951, 182–183. See also Joost-Gaugier 2009, 20.

131 Mommsen 1953, 188 n. 3.

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upon the laurel at Mount Pindus in Thessaly, the view of which filled him with the desire to win glory and eternal fame.132

The image of the young hercules standing between Virtue and Vice became popular in Italian art exactly at the point that the story of Apollo and Daphne came to be represented in Florentine painting. According to the classic study by Erwin Panofsky, hercules am Scheidewege, the earliest depiction of hercules in bivio is Felice Feliciano’s miniature, dated to 1463.133 Whereas the story of hercules is directly related to his choice of the virtuous life, Apollo praises the laurel precisely because he saw in it Daphne’s virtue-preserving transformation. Therefore the landscapes in the two stories differ. For hercules in bivio the landscape divides into two contrasting views reflecting his deliberation over the path of life—mountainous versus fluvial. Antonio’s painting is more ambigu-ous: Daphne/laurel represents the Pythagorean bivium, yet the landscape is unified by the Arno valley, the river flowing between the hills. Daphne led Apollo toward the virtuous life (as Laura led Petrarch and Lucrezia led Lorenzo), and Salutati’s hercules reached the fatal decision to his dilemma by gazing at the laurel tree. The artist projects the myth of Apollo and Daphne onto the Tuscan landscape: the city stands in the distance; the cathedral is recognizable from brunelleschi’s dome, visible in the work (fig. 1), despite the loss of some surface paint.134 The Apollo and Daphne differs from Antonio’s paintings of the exploits of hercules, which do contain the Arno valley but lack a view of the city of Florence or any suggestion of human activity. his hercules and Deianira, which includes the panoramic view of Florence with its cathedral clearly delineated,135 seems to postdate the Apollo and Daphne. The representation of Daphne against the view of the Tuscan fluvial landscape, metamorphosed into the laurel so that its two branches form the Pythagorean letter-symbol, indicates that the contemporary viewers understood the reading of the classical myth of Apollo and Daphne as the allegory of the ethical choice in life. Salutati’s association between the legend of the Choice of hercules and the myth of Apollo and Daphne created a visual, if implicit, association between the Daphne/laurel and the Pythagorean tree. Salutati’s influence on Lorenzo’s perception of the myth may be inferred from Landino’s frequent citation of Salutati’s writings in his Disputationes.136

Palmieri followed Salutati in the use of ancient myths to instruct in civic morality. In about 1433/36 he wrote his magnum opus, Della vita civile, or merely Vita civile,137 a treatise in the form of four dialogues that discusses education and the proper formation of a Florentine citizen. The first dialogue, corresponding to the first stage of the life, integrates the Pythagorean letter-symbol into the program of education (1.91–93). The Medici acquired six manuscripts in the Laurentiana and three in the Riccardiana libraries, all from the middle of the fifteenth century.138

The Vita civile takes the traditional link between the Pythagorean letter-symbol and the Golden bough of Vergil’s Aeneas a step further, connecting it to Dante (1.94). Palmieri interpreted (1.98) the opening verse, “Nel mezzo del cammino di nostra vita,” in relation to the Pythagorean crossroads.139 Palmieri’s treatise is the first vernacular work on civic duties to bring the educational tenets used

132 Salutati 1951, 380–381.

133 Panofsky 1930, 107 discusses the emergence of Renais-sance images of hercules; the Feliciano drawing is given as the frontispiece to his book.

134 Watson 1983, 62.

135 Freedman 2010, 291–292.

136 Kallendorf 1983, 531; McNair 1994, 753.

137 Gilson 2005, 104.

138 Palmieri 1982, xii–xvii.

139 Palmieri 1982, 33. Gilson 2005, 106–108 notes Palmieri’s indebtedness to Francesco da buti’s commentary on Dante’s Inferno for connecting Dante with the Pythagorean y but observes that Palmieri is the first to suggest interpreting Dante’s verse in the light of the Platonic doctrine of the descent of souls.


in antiquity into the orbit of the Florentine youth. Dante, guided by Vergil, became the allegorical portrayal of youthful education, demarcated through the Pythagorean letter. A youth was supposed to descend in order to ascend, but if, when poised at the crossroads at the end of his journey, he chose the sinister path, then his choice indicates his shameful ignorance. Palmieri expounded the message of the Pythagorean letter-symbol by stating that the knowledge of the virtuous examples, drawn from Vergil’s Aeneid and Dante’s Commedia, would encourage Florentine youths to opt for the righteous path of life.140 Palmieri introduced the Pythagorean symbol of life into the civic life of Florence. his treatise is unique in advocating the civic life, or the vita activa. About twenty-five years later, with Landino’s lectures on Petrarch, Vergil, and Dante, the merits and deficiencies of the two kinds of life ceased to be self-evident.

Alberti and Lorenzo are the main protagonists of Landino’s Disputationes Camaldulenses. Alberti interprets for Lorenzo the metaphors that philosophers and poets used to illustrate the search for the Supreme Good. Ficino’s letter to bartolomeo Scala praises Landino’s work: “In these books he enters the shrines of Vergil, imitates to perfection the dialogues of Cicero, and most happily portrays a happy man.”141 The three dialogues follow bernardus Silvestris and Salutati in explaining how to use Vergil’s Aeneid as the allegory of human life;142 the fourth dialogue follows Palmieri in explaining how Dante adapted moral lessons he drew from Vergil. In the third dialogue Alberti, recounting how Aeneas found the Golden bough in Tartarus, explains to Lorenzo the dual character of life symbolized in Plato’s twin Venuses (or the celestial and terrestrial loves), in the twin horses of the Phaedrus charioteer (or the obedient and disobedient sides of the soul in relation to reason), and in the Pythagorean symbol that suggests two paths, that of vice and that of virtue. In the fourth dialogue, Lorenzo, hearing Alberti’s explanation of how it happened that Aeneas found himself at the point when the road divides in two, suggests that Vergil had in mind Pythagoras, who devised the letter y.143 Landino’s Lorenzo, acting as Alberti’s pupil, recalls that Persius interpreted the Pythagorean letter as an “expression of the uncertain wandering of life.”144 They conclude that it is not the way that one lives but the observance of ethically moral principles that assures a virtuous life.

What is important in the present context is that Landino pictures Lorenzo reflecting on the significance of the Pythagorean letter and listening to Alberti’s explanation of the contrast between the sensual and the spiritual forms of love—and, accordingly, between the active and contemplative forms of life—just at the turning point in his own life when he was obliged to part from the life of otium and to start the life of negotium.145 The conversation described by Landino started in 1468, when Lorenzo, then nearly twenty years old, was still in love with Lucrezia Donati; the conversation ended in 1469, when he married Clarice orsini and became head of the city. Antonio’s painting reflects Lorenzo’s interest in the Pythagorean letter-symbol as the starting point for discussing the subject of otium/negotium with its parallel to vita activa/vita contemplativa, not the choice between virtue and vice, understood traditionally as antagonistic. Lorenzo’s poetry alludes to the myth of Apollo and Daphne not only in his youthful sonnets but also in his debates on the merits and

140 on the interlocutors of Palmieri’s Della vita civile, see Carpetto 14–15; on Palmieri’s views of youth versus adult-hood, see Carpetto 1984, 52 and Fulton 1997, 32 and 39 n. 4. See also Robb 1968, 41–45.

141 Ficino 1975–2009, 1:155.

142 Kallendorf 1983, 533.

143 Stahel 1968, 56; Landino 2001, 121.

144 Stahel 1968, 216; Landino 2001, 247–248.

145 Vickers 1990 discusses the contrast between negotium and otium.

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deficiencies of country life and city life. It is not accidental, then, that in Antonio del Pollaiuolo’s unique representation, the Daphne, as she is transformed into a laurel tree, forms the Pythagorean letter-symbol, pictured as the Latin y.

8. The otium/negotium in lorenzo’s Poetry

Niccolò Machiavelli wrote a famous description of Lorenzo, as he in whom “one might see two different persons, joined in an almost impossible conjunction.”146 Poliziano, in a letter describing the last days of Lorenzo in his villa at Careggi, writes that “he had decided to spend the rest of his life on these scholarly pursuits in my company and in that of Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, far, that is to say, from the city and its noise.”147 The tension of city versus country is also conveyed in Poliziano’s nutricia, written to establish Lorenzo’s place within the ancient tradition of practitioners of “the august Art of Poetry that carries off human minds with her to the secret recesses of the starry heavens” (lines 21–22).148 nutricia, A Silva Treating of the Poetic Art and of Poets (written on 27 May 1491), describes Lorenzo the poet-statesman considering “the pastoral leisures of a quiet life and the hardships of the city” (lines 765–767). Poliziano praises Lorenzo for his frequent return to Fiesole: “wearied by civic duties you come hither to sharpen your proven poetic powers” (lines 771–772). Poliziano praises several of Lorenzo’s poems; two are of particular relevance here: l’Altercazione alludes to the myth of Apollo and Daphne and discusses the merits of the two forms of life; the first stanzas of Apollo e Pan speak of the laurel as the perpetual reminder of Daphne’s beauty and chastity. In both poems, Lorenzo bids Apollo recall his first love, paraphrasing Petrarch’s famous line “my idol carved in living laurel” (“l’idolo mio scolpito in vivo lauro,” 30.27).149 This simile became a frequent motif in Lorenzo’s poems, written in imitation of Petrarch, conveyed by Antonio’s depiction of Apollo in the guise of a Florentine youth gazing lovingly at Daphne and embracing her gently with his delicate fingers.

Lorenzo—as poet, patron of poets, and representative of the Medici dynasty— was associated with Apollo and, by extension, with the laurel. Apollo, in Ficino’s words, “is both the discoverer of medicine and the master of poetry.”150 Two epistles by Ficino to Lorenzo foster the link between Lorenzo and Apollo.151 Ficino reminds Lorenzo of Pythagoras’s four sources of wisdom, urging him to behave like Apollo against those who oppose philosophers. For Lorenzo, the figure of Apollo is enhanced by the fact that Apollo was the only god whom Pythagoras worshipped,152 making the Pythagorean letter-symbol of notable importance for humanists from Ficino’s circle whom he patronized; hence the depiction of Daphne/laurel in the form of the Pythagorean letter translated into the Latin y.

Lorenzo’s poem l’Altercazione, also known as De summo bono (The supreme good), dedicated to Marsilio Ficino, was written in response to Landino’s Disputationes Camaldulenses and to

146 Machiavelli 1988, 362. The description appears in Flo-rentine histories 8.36; the work was commissioned on 8 November 1520 by Pope Leo X, Lorenzo’s son.

147 Poliziano 2006, 243. The letter (4.2.14) was written on 18 May 1492 from Fiesole.

148 Poliziano 2004, 113. See orvieto 1973.

149 Petrarca 1976, 89.

150 Ficino 1975–2009, 8:36. These words can be found in the preface to the book on life, dedicated to Lorenzo in 1489.

151 The letters, 2.34 and 3.10, were written between August 1476 and May 1477.

152 Joost-Gaugier 2009, 28; see also Joost-Gaugier 2006, 46 and 53. Ficino knew about this fact from biographers of Pythagoras, Iamblichus and Diogenes Laertius.


Ficino’s lectures on Plato’s Philebus.153 This long philosophical poem (ca. 1474) expresses Lorenzo’s reflections on the debate, going back to antiquity, on the respective merits of city life (negotium, or vita activa) and country life (otium, or vita contemplativa).154 Lorenzo wrote his poem in the vernacular, not in Latin, as a demonstration that the vernacular was suitable for debates on serious ethical questions.

The first capitolo of the l’Altercazione describes a valley near a mountain in Careggi, where a laurel tree relieves all cares: “And having reached a pleasant shady glen / within the shadow of that mountain which / in its old age preserves its ancient name, / there, where a verdant laurel cast some shade / below that lovely peak, I found a seat, / my heart untrammeled by a single care” (“Et pervenuto in parte humíle et bassa, / amena valle che quel monte adombra, / che ‘l vecchio nome per età non lassa; / là dove un verde lauro faceva ombra, / alla radice quasi del bel monte / m’assisi, e ‘l cor d’ogni pensiero si sgombra,” 1.10–15).155 At the sight of the laurel, Lauro (Lorenzo’s “I”) recalls Apollo’s love for Daphne, and he implores Apollo to aid him: “If you, Apollo, still do love the chaste locks of your much-desired Daphne, help then / him [Lauro-Lorenzo] in whom her lovely name endures” (“Apollo, se ami ancor le caste chiome / della tua tanto disiata Damne, / soccorri a chi ritiene il suo bel nome,” 4.37–39) so that Lorenzo may convey “Marsilio’s thoughts in verse as I perceive them in my mind” (“che soggiunse Marsilio / ne’ versi chiuga come è nel concetto,” 4.44–45).156 The laurel, evoking memories of Apollo’s first love, inspires Lauro to seek virtue rather than fleeting happiness. Daphne in Antonio’s painting becomes the visual symbol of Lorenzo’s aspirations to a virtuous life, conveying in the language of art his thoughts expressed in verse.

Lorenzo’s l’Altercazione explores a common philosophical topos: the nature of true felicity and the means by which it may be achieved. Lauro, fleeing the turmoil of the city, meets the shepherd Alfeo, who asks Lauro why he has left behind the manifold delights of Florence. They enter into a discussion of the respective merits of city life and country life. The two are joined by Marsilio, who explains that true felicity is to be found not in the city or in nature but rather in the knowledge and the love of God: “our chaste and lovely soul, then, has two wings, / desire and intellect, by which it rises, soaring to sovereign God, beyond the stars” (“Due ale ha la nostra alma pura et bella, / lo intelletto e’l disio, ond’ella è ascensa / volando al sommo Dio sopra ogni stella,” 4:91–93).157 If we consider Antonio’s painting in the light of Lorenzo’s search for the virtuous life, then we may see it expressed in the figure of Daphne, her arms now upraised as the laurel branches, forming the letter y, reminding the viewer of life’s choices.

Lorenzo’s bucolic poem Apollo e Pan (ca. 1486), like his youthful sonnets, also expresses his personal reading of the myth of Apollo and Daphne. he narrates this myth at some length (lines 10–75),158 offering his own interpretation of the ovidian account. he does not subject the myth to the interpretatio christiana in the manner of the ovide moralisé,159 and he says nothing of

153 Wadsworth 1952, 23–31; Robb 1968, 97–102. Medici 1992, 915–926.

154 Ady 1955, 133–134 and Sturm 1974, 117–27. McNair 1994, 760–763 discusses how Lorenzo, the protagonist of Landino’s dialogues, was taught by Alberti, another pro-tagonist, to reconcile the two modes of his life rather than consider them mutually exclusive. Landino’s Disputationes Camaldulenses was dedicated to Federico da Montefeltro, duke of urbino; most probably the duke was Lorenzo’s life-ideal in the late 1460s and the early 1470s. Lonergan 1986, 146 remarks that “Lorenzo is too complex and our modern formation too specialized for one scholar to be able to do

justice to all the aspects of so versatile a man.”

155 Medici 1991, 65. See Medici 1992, 927.

156 Medici 1991, 79–80. See Medici 1992, 953.


158 Medici 1992, 879–882; see 875 and 875n for the question of dating the poem.

159 barnard 1987, 61–69.

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Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne. Rather, he dwells on Apollo’s love of Daphne while praising her de-sire to remain a virgin. The surrounding nature with its lush greenery provides the suitable milieu to nurture the laurel into which Daphne was metamorphosed to preserve her virginity. Lorenzo describes in detail the beauty of the landscape: the flowing river gives rise to luxuriant trees and flowers: “The foliage ever green, the flowers awakening: / ’Tis spring’s true handiwork, and now unchanging” (“Le fronde sempre verdi e’ fior’ novelli / come producer primavera suole,” lines 34–35).160 The location in the poem is Mount Pindus in Thessaly, where the Peneus River has its source. According to Lorenzo, “Phoebus loves the place, and loves indeed / his own true laurel here” (“Phebo ancora ama il loco, e ancora cole / il lauro suo,” lines 37–38).161 Lorenzo portrays the location as if it were the garden, flourishing because of the felicitous combination of sunlight and fresh water. Antonio renders in great detail the flowers that bloom on the site where Apollo embraces Daphne, from which a vista opens up to the Arno River. The flowery meadow would seem to be an obvious feature in the representation of this classical myth, and yet it is absent from its earlier illustrations, and it is missing from the fluvial landscape in the backgrounds of other works created in the Pollaiuolo workshop before 1470. Even though Lorenzo’s bucolic poem postdates the painting, I still would argue that it expresses Lorenzo’s idea of the classical myth and that its presence in his scrittoio caused Lorenzo to continue to reflect on the laurel, seeing in it Daphne’s perpetual call for virtue.

9. Apollo and Daphne: The Painting in the Poem

I have argued that the salient focus of the painting, the figure of the Daphne/laurel in the form of the Pythagorean letter-symbol, reveals Lorenzo’s influence. Several other details of the painting reveal the artist’s intention to have his work appeal to Lorenzo. These details are contained not only in Lorenzo’s poetry but also in his unfinished Commentary on My Sonnets:162 the tenderness with which Apollo embraces Daphne, reminiscent of his exaltation of the sense of touch; the costumes that interpret the Greek myth in a Tuscan frame; and the background view of the Arno valley, a constant feature of his poems. The Arno valley is common in religious art of fifteenth-century Flor-ence, but it is novel in secular art, introduced in Antonio’s paintings of the exploits of hercules and expanded to embrace the human activity in his Apollo and Daphne. The representation of the Arno valley in the Apollo and Daphne is Antonio’s tribute to Lorenzo’s fascination with the natural views of Tuscany.

Antonio shows the two figures in movement, as if catching the exact moment when Daphne finally eludes Apollo, whose swift movement is suddenly arrested by her transformation. Daphne’s right leg overlaps Apollo’s left leg (placed close to the front edge of the painting). his right leg is suspended in air; this feature, along with the billowing scarf, conveys the swiftness of his movement or his ardor to capture her. With his left hand touching her girdle, symbol of her female chastity, and his right hand stretched out in an embrace, Apollo addresses his glance to the maiden. The gentleness of his embrace is underscored by the delicacy of his fingers—the little finger is lifted slightly, as if he is holding her waist in an imaginary dance. Apollo’s lifted finger on Daphne’s waist, together with the position of his legs, brings to mind a dance created especially for Lorenzo, called



162 Medici 2000, 2. This commentary was written between 1473 and 1491, in imitation of Dante’s Vita nuova.


the “lauro.”163 The optical intertwining of Apollo’s leg with Daphne’s echoes the tenderness of the touch of his graceful fingers on her girdle.164 her uplifted arms reflect Apollo’s plea and her silent resistance, a strange dialogue that ends in his reconciliation with her vow of chastity. Moral chastity metaphorically unites the peaceful country with the walled city, Florence, whose Latin name Florens means flowering.165 The Florence of the painting is the ideal city, peaceful and flourishing, and not the tumultuous city from which Lorenzo sought refuge in his country estates.

Inasmuch as the story represented in the painting may be interpreted as the transformation of earthly desire into spiritual love, these details of Apollo’s embrace of the transformed Daphne reflect a philosophical discussion that is taken up in Lorenzo’s poetry. Lorenzo, in his unfinished Commentary on My Sonnets, exalts the sense of touch. he writes that the touch of his lady’s hand will produce a greater effect on his heart than, for example, her laughter and sighs: “if she touches him, that will seem by far the greatest of all.”166 The sense of sight provokes the flame of love, but the sense of touch sets it on fire. In the commentary to his Sonnet 33, Lorenzo recalls that ovid, in his Ars amatoria, exalted physical love.167 Lorenzo does as well, as the starting point for ascent toward the spiritual love. In this he follows the notion of “amorousness” that was presented in the immensely popular Fior di virtù, a book circulated widely throughout Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: “The pleasure of touching is greater than any other physical pleasure” (Fior, chap. 5).168 however, the anonymous author warns against the slavery of love, in which love of desire replaces the love of good and beautiful things.169 The Pollaiuolo painting, rich in sensory associations, presents the futility of Apollo’s earthly desire. The laurel tree appeals to all five senses: the taste and feel of the laurel leaf, the fragrance and color of the tree, and the sound of its rustling foliage. Through none of the senses, however, is Apollo able to provoke a reciprocal love in Daphne’s soul. Lorenzo writes of the changes wrought in his life by his love for the beautiful and chaste lady. In this light, the painting may be read as the expression of this change: Daphne’s transformation into a tree, spanning earth and sky, expresses the transformation of love from earthly to spiritual.

The costumes of Apollo and Daphne reflect Lorenzo’s poetry and his Commentary, which are replete with allusions to classical images. The costumes offer contemporary interpretations of mythological figures.170 Antonio had sufficient familiarity with sarcophagus reliefs and engraved gems to have been able to replicate the visual arts of antiquity;171 that is, had he been commissioned to create an all’antica depiction of the myth, the models were available to him. Whereas Daphne wears a garment that suggests the costumes of ancient Greece, Apollo is dressed more in the fashion of fifteenth-century Florentine youths. yet neither fully conforms to the fashion of either period. Daphne’s dress is not sleeveless, as would be expected of Greek tunics, and the ample neckline is decorated, most uncharacteristically, with rubies. her red girdle is similar to Apollo’s girdle-like belt, perhaps more reddish in hue; it contrasts with her green tunic, the underside of which is red. An authentically antique dress would not be of two colors, nor decorated with precious stones, and

163 Padovan 1992 notes that one of the dances, known as ballo in tondo, was called “lauro” and its choreography was de-scribed in De pratica by Guglielmo (or Giovanni) Ambrosio.

164 For an interpretation of the “slung leg motif,” which, since Leo Steinberg, is thought to be latent with erotic implications, see Watson 1983, 65 and 71 n. 24.

165 Poliziano 2006, 11 (1.2.3)

166 Medici 2000, 231.

167 Medici 2000, 233: “ovid, a most talented poet, [who] put [them] in that book where he gave his amorous precepts.”

168 Fersin 1953, 11.

169 Fersin 1953, 13.

170 Meyer 1893, 264–267 and haussherr 1984.

171 See Fusco 1979.

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the girdle would be a simple braid, as was seen, in the age of Lorenzo, on antique reliefs. Apollo’s garment is no more Florentine than Daphne’s dress is antique. his brocade doublet (farsetto) is embroidered with golden threads and precious stones, and the collar is studded with pearls and a ruby star. With the short pleated tabard (giornea), worn over a long-sleeved tunic, his costume is Florentine in style.172 Even so, Apollo does not wear the hose and soft leather boots of the Florentine youth of the time; rather, his legs are bare and his feet are clad in sandals, the upper straps of which loosely encircle his shins. The scarf billowing over his right shoulder has nothing in common with either an antique chlamys or a Florentine surcoat.

The details of the landscape, too, find their reflection in Lorenzo’s poetry. The figures stand on a high mountainous plane; the background landscape is seen from above. The natural scenery is divided in two: the plane adjacent to the promontory and the Arno valley. Daphne’s uplifted arms divide the landscape: to her right, the castle; to her left, the hunting scene. The plateau of the Arno valley unites the two scenes, not unlike the base of the Pythagorean letter, that is, the trunk of the Daphne/laurel. The plane to her right, dominated by the castle, is smaller and darker than the plane to her left, which depicts a hunting ground. The castle view is peaceful and quiet, in strong contrast to the scene of the hunt, which recalls the details of Daphne’s story and her desire to remain as chaste as the huntress Diana. The hunt scene suggests Lorenzo’s Uccellagione di Starne (The partridge hunt), the first stanza of which mentions that the sun “loved the laurel tree of old” (“si vedea quasi quel ch’amò l’alloro,” 1.6).173 beyond the river valley, with fishermen, sailors, equestrians, and the hunting scene, lies the city of Florence. The previously mentioned codex includes Salutati’s treatise De seculo et religione, which invites the reader to imagine a similar panoramic view of Florence seen from a high promontory, either the hill of San Miniato or the double mountain of Fiesole.174 The promontory with the Daphne/laurel opens up the vista stretching toward the view of Florence, implying that the city is protected by Apollo’s lauro and, by extension, Lorenzo, as expressed in the famous verse by Poliziano: “And you, well-born Laurel, under whose shelter / happy Florence rests in peace” (“E tu, ben nato Laur, sotto il cui velo / Fiorenza lieta in pace si riposa”; Stanze 1.4.1–2).175 In the poem Il Driadeo d’Amore, dedicated to Lorenzo in 1464/65 by Luca Pulci, Lauro calls Florence “queen of all other cities, enriched by property, castles, a university, a seaport, and divine liberty.”176 The city-state, embracing the country villas on the banks of the Arno valley, invites Florentine citizens to engage alternately in two forms of life, active and contemplative.177 Familiar with the metaphoric significance of the myth of Apollo and Daphne for his patron, Pulci mentions Florence as the place where Lauro fell in love with Daphne, later transformed into a laurel (Argomento 103).178

In the spirit of Lorenzo’s poems, Antonio interprets the mythological event of Apollo’s encoun-ter with Daphne not as one that took place in the geographically and temporally remote location of Thessaly but as one that takes place in contemporary Tuscany. he emphasizes that the drama of the scene is played out against a view of the Arno valley, thus bringing this classical myth into

172 on male costume in Florence, see Levi Pisetzky 1964–1969, 2:312–388, esp. 313, where she comments on the costume of Tobias in Pollaiuolo’s painting now in the Galleria Sabauda, Turin. Lorenzo’s use of costume as a status symbol is discussed in Carocci 1859, 18–23 and in Watkins 1978, 150–155.


174 Witt 1983, 204; Salutati 1957, 60.

175 Poliziano 1979, 3.

176 baldassari and Saiber 2000, 89 (Luca Pulci is the elder brother of Luigi); Pulci 1916, 96.

177 Medici 2000, 227 and 229 speaks of the Florentine custom to leave in April “their civil and private cares and to enjoy some rustic ease” in their “delightful villas.”

178 Pulci 1916, 102: “Nel loco dove avea seduto Lauro, / Apparve Dafne in un bel verde Lauro.”


Lorenzo’s Tuscany. A similar panoramic view of the Tuscan landscape was earlier introduced into the religious paintings, including the nativity, frescoed between 1460 and 1462 by Alesso baldovinetti in the atrium of the SS Annunziata.179 Antonio’s innovation consists in introducing the panoramic landscape into the painting of Apollo and Daphne, and this innovation was encouraged by Lorenzo. by presenting the episode of Apollo and Daphne against the background of the Arno valley, Antonio del Pollaiuolo implies that the myth’s boundaries transcend temporal and geographical limitations, and so he reiterates the blending of classical and Tuscan elements in Lorenzo’s poetry. The painting remains the allegorical portrait of Lorenzo’s “due persone diverse” engaged in the Pythagorean conflict of private versus public paths of life.

179 Kennedy 1938, 101–111.

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Apollo and Daphne by Antonio del Pollaiuolo and the Poetry of Lorenzo de ’ Medici

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