Erasmus did some (Herculean) Heavy Lifting

The Renaissance portraitist Hans Holbein worked in 1523 a contemporary image of Erasmus of Rotterdam, still today one of the most important humanist thinkers. One of our contemporaries says that Holbein's Erasmus "arguably is the most important portrait in England. It's where portraiture actually begins." I like the painting for Holbein's learned inclusion of the Labors of Heracles.

Hans Holbein the Younger, "Erasmus"
(1523) National Gallery L658

Although the British National Gallery, which owns the portrait, has not made the painting available for reproduction, digital images of it are publicly available on the internet. The Wikimedia version I include here (at left) is color "enhanced", washed out, a far cry from the rich detail you can see in the segment of the portrait the Gallery does share (visit nationalgallery.org.uk). Indeed, the NatGal's site is additionally worth visiting because of the lucid instruction by Prof David Starkey (cited above) who contextualizes Holbein's contribution to portraiture.

Erasmus had published in 1506 a compendium of essays — Renaissance equivalents of mythmatters blogposts? — called the Adages or actually the Adagiorum chiliades tres ("the three thousand adagios"). The term "adagio" from Italian ad agio "at ease" implies something written or done in a leisurely manner. A musical piece or technically demanding ballet movement that ends up looking easy but was actually torturously hard to achieve is an adagio. Even though the Adagia are sometimes now called his "Proverbs", Erasmus published a set of three thousand sayings that come out easy, whose acquisition, however, was really really hard.

Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam was a scholar of great consequence in the restoration of classical learning to Europe and the West. In the generation after the Fall of Constantinople, Erasmus took up residence in Venice because, among other things, that city at the top of the Adriatic was the cultural crossroads where speakers and scholars of Greek could and did meet up with scholars who wanted to learn whatever Ancient Greek thinking could be reborn in their new age. Erasmus learned Greek and advocated for writing and thinking in Latin as Cicero had done a millennium-and-a-half earlier.

The heavy lifting of the intellectual Renaissance was assumed largely by Erasmus and his peers. The humanist printer Aldus Manutius virtually invented the publication of Greek literature with Erasmus inspiring the efforts to forge ahead. It was Aldus who first published the Adagia in 1506 and then again in an expanded revision in 1508. Some wag once called Erasmus' Adagia the world's biggest bedside book. It spans actually seven volumes of the Toronto Collected Works (1982-2017).

If you were wondering, for instance, where the expression "She has eyes in the back of her head!" came from, you might find Erasmus' contribution worth your while. It's Adag. 3.3.41:

In occipitio oculos gerit — Ὄπισθεν κεφαλῆς ὄμματα ἔχει, He has eyes in the back of his head. Used of cunning and wary people [... like Mrs Dotson, my 6th grade teacher! RTM], and those whom it is by no means easy to deceive. Men of this sort are called by Perseus Januses: 'What a Janus you are! No stork can peck you from behind.' And Homer demands of a prince the he should have 'eyes before and behind.' Plautus in Aulularia: 'She has eyes in back of her head as well.' (Cited entire from Toronto edition.)

Erasmus could ... and did! ... go on in this vein for scores and dozens of scores of exempla, each one manifesting his mining of Latin and Greek literature and each one bringing to the surface some evidence of once ancient wisdom. This is what I mean by the heavy lifting of the Renaissance.

Holbein's portrait of Erasmus perches the scholar's hands on the rich leather volume. It bears the inscription ΗΡΑΚΛΕΙΟΙ ΠΟΝΟΙ ("The Labors of Heracles"). Erasmus himself equated the work of collecting proverbs from ancient texts with "Herculean Labor." The scholarly investigation of ancient adages is painstaking and not always well received.

All this time I need hardly say that any pleasure to be derived from compilations of this kind is entirely confined to the reader; nothing comes the writer's way except the unpopular and unvarying toil of collecting, of sweeping together, explaining, and translating. Yet pleasure, as Aristotle has truly said, is the one thing which makes it possible for us to remain at work for long spells of time. ... In this task [change] has not been 'twice-served cabbage,' as the Greek proverb has it; I have had to repeat the same things three thousand times — what does an adage mean, what was its original, and for what purpose was it suitable — so that never was there a context more suitable than this for that hackneyed Greek adage 'the twirling of the pestle.'

Erasmus concludes that paragraph, which forms about three percent of his essay on the adage "The Labors of Hercules", with a rumination on "the conditions in which I labor and the demands I have to meet! — On every single adage I must content the leisured reader, give the hungry man what he needs, and satisfy the disdainful." (Adage. 3.1.1) To get to his point, i.e. to expand upon the Labors of Hercules generally, Erasmus fills a fifteen-page essay with references to Catullus, Vergil, Ovid, Aristotle, Chrysippus, Clearchus, Didymus..."and other men as well of whom not the smallest fragment has come down to us." Toward its conclusion he summarizes: "I have been fearing for some time that my readers may find it a Herculean task to read through the discourse of inordinate length into which I have been drawn by an adage which has proved a task for Hercules. And so, I will make an end, but after adding a further point — that when this was first published I had surpassed all the labors of Hercules...."

By the time of Holbein's portrait, Erasmus' life-long labor of the Adagia properly filled a considerably larger volume than the elegant tome Holbein slips under the scholar's hands in the portrait. Even if the Paris edition had included only a couple hundred adages, the collection numbered over four thousand proverbs at the time of Erasmus' death. By any accounting, the intellectual gravity of Erasmus' scholarly accomplishment is monumental. Thus, the portraitist chooses wisely to tinge the humanist's hands with a little ink and to perch them on top of such a weighty accomplishment.

One subtle touch remains to be noted in the Erasmus portrait. Holbein uses the painting itself to comment with subtle irony on the magnitude of his own work. The fore-edge inscription Holbein paints on the book shelved above and behind Erasmus' head an original, learned (if imperfect) elegiac couplet in unpunctuated Latin:

Ille ego Ioannes Holbein non facile ullus 

  tam michi mimus erit quam michi momus erit.

This translates into something like this: "The famous Johannes Holbein, painted this. It seems more likely that somebody will copy my work than malign it." The wit at the heart of the boast spins blithely in the erudite wordplay that pits mimus (Lat. "imitator") against momus (Grk. μῶμος "reproach"). μωμήσεταί τις μᾶλλον ἢ μιμήσεται — "Somebody will more likely malign this than copy it" — is itself an adage of considerable background. Holbein the Elder used it in Latin, borrowed from Erasmus, a decade earlier: "Carpet aliquis citius quam imitabitur," is ascribed to Greek painters originally, according to Erasmus Adag. 2.2.84 and treated separately, s.v. "momo satisfacere" at Adag. 1.5.74.  All this learning goes back prodigiously to Erasmus, the sitter and subject of Holbein's portrait.

—— RTM

OGCMA references
    HeraclesLabors2.0001_Holbein
    HeraclesLabors1.0015_Erasmus

The piece is informed by J. Mähly (1868), "Miscellen," Jahrbuch des Vereins von Altertumsfreunden im Rheinlande, 44:269-70, and by
H. Vredeveld (2013) "'Lend a Voice': The Humanistic Portrait Epigraph in the Age of Erasmus and Dürer," Renaissance Quarterly 66.2: 549-50. doi:10.1086/671585.