Raphael's Ostrich by Una Roman D'Elia

Author:Una Roman D'Elia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penn State University Press

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Lovesick woman, woodcut, from Anton Francesco Doni, I marmi (Venice: Francesco Marcolini, 1552), 87. Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

Doni’s success did not last. He became implicated in another polemical dispute with a priest (probably over real estate), but he was now in a vulnerable position. Paul IV had declared in 1558 that monks were required to return to their monasteries. Doni, unwilling to return, needed the protection of a patron and tried, unsuccessfully, to plead with the Duke of Urbino. He settled briefly in Ancona, but the papal city was not a safe haven for a renegade monk, and so he soon had to move again. The Accademia dei Pellegrini wrote a letter recommending him to the Duke of Ferrara, again to no avail. Doni eventually settled on a farm in the obscure village of Monselice, essentially in hiding for the rest of his life. It was during his peripatetic years that Doni wrote his most complex work on allegorical imagery, Pitture.50

In Pitture Doni claims to be describing allegorical paintings in a building that he erected in Arquà to honor Petrarch, including an allegory of fortune with an ostrich. He wrote letters to patrons asking for money for the project, but it is clear from the text that the building never existed, except as a virtuoso literary description.51 The manuscript does not mention the building, and the printed discussion dwells upon the fact that most will not see the structure—printing will guarantee its fame. The book is not directly satirical in tone, though it does include jokes. Doni does not mock Petrarch but instead imitates the revered poet’s works, in particular the allegorical poem I trionfi. Petrarch’s famous triumphs included Love, Time, and Death, all of which are chapters in Doni’s book, and Petrarch is quoted as an authority throughout, but Doni is much more bitter. This is Petrarch without Laura and, for the most part, without God. Petrarch’s triumphs dramatize the vanity of earthly desires but offer three triumphs after Death: Fame, Time, and finally the redemption offered by Eternity. Doni ends his book with Death. His painting of Man (not a usual subject for an allegory) is a catalogue of ills, beginning with pain at birth, living through physical and mental anguish, including the constant threat of insanity, and ending in death. The “painting” depicts a heap of dirt, on which man is a tiny shadow.52 This is far from the sort of celebratory image a nobleman would want in his house.

Doni plays with the whole notion of allegory, which he recognizes as a kind of monstrous fantasy. He calls allegories “castles in the air” and “grotesques” and writes repeatedly that he will enter into the ranks of the insane by inventing his own allegories.53 In his otherwise sober treatise on art, Il disegno, he writes about classical grotesques, calling them chimeras, reflections of “the chaos in our brains.” He compares the invention of grotesques to seeing shapes in clouds.54 For the title page of

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