Guided Pathway

The final sequence of this pathway is situated at the very end of the panel, in its bottom right corner. The lack of chronological rigor in this last sequence suggests again that the panel’s narrative does not yield a neat, cathartic conclusion. The first two images, a medal by Bertoldo di Giovanni (#14.1-2) and a tondo (#17) by Maso di Bartolommeo, both celebrate victories and triumphs in a classical style. The medal was a gift by the Florentine prince to a heathen emperor, Mehmet II, who extradited one of the prince’s arch-enemies to Florence. As a gift in return for this deed, the sultan is revered on the reverse of the medal by the depiction of a triumphal chariot. In this manner the self-styled Ottoman heir of the Roman empire is praised by unhesitatingly following a European, classical model. The tondo by Maso di Bartolommeo shows another neo-classical scene depicting power and obedience in imperial Rome. Content and form come together here in an organic reanimation of an antique pathos-formula, without any of the polarizing energy we saw above.

The final image in this sequence makes a strange and somehow defeatist endpoint. The etching by Marcantonio Raimondi after Raphael shows a scene from Virgil’s Aeneid, where the Trojans are struck by plague (thus the reference to the black death) after they had just settled on the island of Crete (#19). “Men gave up the sweet breath of life or dragged their bodies along” is inscribed on the pedestal of the herm, a monolithic monument that, standing in the foreground, dominates the image. But in contrast to the heroes and saviours depicted in the previous sequence, it is a rather discouraging emblem. All redemption is blocked by some kind of Terminus, the god safeguarding boundaries, often epitomized with “concede nulli” – I yield no ground. Consequently, we see another figure right next to the herm, turning around and running away. The gesture resembles the ones we saw in #9 & 15.1-2. But here, it is a gesture motivated by the immediate fear of contagion. The balanced “Ausgleich,” a metaphorically conjured middle-state finally gets lost, as one side surrenders and flees in fear.