Alfred Russell : The Great God Pan is Dead!,1970.

THE GREAT GOD PAN IS DEAD!

Note: Following the reunification of Berlin in 1989, a single color photograph of "The Education of Pan" was found in the archives of the Staatliche Museum and published in Tom Henry’s The Life and Art of Luca Signorelli (Yale U. Press, 2012).

Luca Signorelli's painting of 1498, "The Education of Pan," a painting which had been a prize of the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum until it was destroyed in the Second World War, has been long recognized by discerning minds, such as Bernard Berenson to be "one of the few most fascinating works of art in our Heritage." He speaks of its majestic pathos and its earth poetry, whispering the secrets of the Great Mother. My years of searching for a color reproduction of this masterpiece have proved fruitless, nor have I ever been able to find any concrete interpretation of its Cybelline message. Only in Mario Salmi's monograph of 1953 Novara is there to be found a brief iconographic description of it. No copy of the picture has been discovered thus far. Its loss then is a major calamity to humanity.

The surrealism of Signorelli's works, as well as those by other surrealist, gnostic, pagan-poetic painters such as Cosimo Tura, Ercole De’ Roberti, Lorenzo Costa, Antonio Pollaiuolo, Piero di Cosimo on to Polidoro da Caravaggio have never been adequately treated by art historians who possessed the philosophic and poetic intuition and creative vision necessary for such a labor of love. For that matter, even Botticelli, Raphael, Michelangelo and Dürer have yet to be explored for their positive intellectual content. For example, the direct quotations from classical antiquity which pervade their works is for the most part overlooked or incomplete in most art history. The artist seeking enlightenment in treatments of Leonardo's and Dürer’s theoretical works faces disappointment and frustration.

Only in Vasari has some creative biographical data been provided on this group of surreal, metaphysical painters. Of course, there are no colorful legends, love affairs, duels, intrigues, pacotilles, no "Agony and Ecstasy" about them. They remain as mysterious and enigmatic as their works. Yet the works of these men are so densely charged with positive intellectual and humanist content that they must have been deeply involved in that synchronization of the world mind that was the Renaissance.

If personalities can be judged by physiognomies alone Signorelli's self-portrait in the left lower corner of the Orvieto Anti-Christ Fresco — looking out upon humanity with the gravity of an Etruscan Seneca — and to be matched only again in art by Poussin's Jansenist self-portrait of 1650 — shows him at age 55 in the year of 1500, a man of austere and aristocratic bearing, a man who had never smiled or thought in trivial terms, it has been thought by some that he is portrayed by Raphael in the Vatican School of Athens above the group of Pythagoreans.

The "divine" Raphael had learned to organize his Stanza compositions under vaults from Signorelli's Orvieto frescoes, and had carefully learned to compose figures in movement from Signorelli’s ecstatic Loreto "Conversion of St. Paul.” Thus, he placed Luca among the mighty in the School of Athens where he belongs. Michelangelo of course learned all he needed for the last judgment in the Sistine Chapel from Signorelli's work.

Classical antiquity is evoked by Signorelli throughout his works, above all, by his attitude toward the human figure. His is a personal mannerism, a universally viable formula for figure construction based upon Vitruvian Canons of Proportion and thereby harking back to Polykleitos. Antinous' head, Heracles rugged anatomy, the dramatic movement and expressions of the Niobes appear throughout his work — but tempered by an Etruscan severity and laconic dignity. St. John the Baptist appears as Zeno, Christ as Alexander, San Sebastian as Antinous.

The atmosphere of mystery and stark silence suggest a nostalgia for the world of pre-Socratic philosophy. There is the disquieting note of oriental and gnostic mysticism, Crucifixions, Annunciations, Resurrections of Christ, Flagellation; the Conversion of St. Paul seems to create the marvelous symphonic movement to be seen in the Dionysius appearing to Ariana at Naxos from Pompeii, which he could never have seen for it was still buried under the cinders of Vesuvius. Magic, alchemy, hermetic writings invade the Christian legend. Signorelli must have been familiar too with the neo-pagan speculations of Pico de Mirandola, Ficino, Meister Eckert, Luca Pacioli, and Leonardo Fibonacci. Luca Pacioli had laid the foundations for the Renaissance painter's geometrical structure. Leonardo da Vinci had illustrated Pacioli's work on the Golden Section and Archimedean solids, Signorelli had carefully studied whatever he could find of Leonardo who was eleven years his junior, but recognized as the universal mind of the time. Careful study of Signorelli's composition and structure will reveal his intimate grasp of this "new" classicism. The great Leonardo was to learn from Signorelli, as was the great Michelangelo.

Luca Signorelli was born in 1441 in Cortona, a small Etruscan Hill town between Arezzo and Orvieto, and lived until 1523. He studied with Fra Angelico and later with Piero della Francesca and still youthful could imitate his style. He had close relationships according to Vasari with Melozzo da Forli, Perugino and the Renaissance surrealist masters, Francesco di Georgio, Bernardino Pinturicchio and Piero di Cosimo. From the latter he evolved his severe color schemes, the steel blue skies lightened to a cold grey at the horizon, the icy greens, and sharp notes of vermillion in draperies, flags and horse trappings. His solid hierarchic poses and modeling derive from Perugino. In 1480 at the age of 39 he painted the frescoes in the Basilica of Loreto which included the "Conversion of St. Paul.” Two years later in 1481 he collaborated with Perugino and Pinturicchio on the "Testament and Death of Moses" in the Sistine chapel of the Vatican. "The Education of Pan" was painted in 1500-02 during the time he was at work on the Frescoes of the Cathedral of Orvieto, "The Last Judgment," "Resurrection," "Inferno," "The End of the World." His later years were remarkable for a series of small predella panels painted in egg tempera with varnish glazes such as "The Cena at Emmaus." "Christ and the Apostles," which Berenson said had the fluid virtuosity of the painters of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Perhaps the best of these is the exquisite "Birth of St. John the Baptist" in the Louvre – 12.5” x 27.5” in which tiny faces about 3/8" are as delicately modeled as Pompeiian miniatures.

"The Education of Pan" was painted in 1488 on a wooden panel 76” x 101”, and had come to Berlin in 1873 from the collection of Cardinal Cosimo Corsi. The God Pan sits majestically at the center of a mythological landscape, a crescent moon behind his darkly radiant hair. His ecstatic face is rose tinted by the morning or evening twilight. Around his shoulders is the customary star-studded cape. In his right hand he holds a shepherd’s crook representing the year's orbit. In his left hand he holds the seven-reed syrinx, representing the seven realms of celestial harmony. This is the God Pan as described by Petrarch, Boccaccio, Poliziano, and Lorenzo de Medici: the God of all nature, the God of music, the Pan of Virgil's Second Bucolic. To Pan's right stands a youthful male figure, seen from the back and playing a single reed vertical flute. He seems to be the idealized Androgyne of the Stoa, or Antinous, or Narcissus, or Daphnis. To the left of Pan stands a grave, philosophic man in his sixties, leaning on his staff and beating cadence to the music with his fingers while he looks downward in a kind of absent revery.

In the left foreground stands a severely yet gracefully and stereoptically modeled Polykleitian-proportioned Venus, nude, and holding two reeds, indicating that she is Syrinx, the Arcadian nymph who changed herself into a reed in order to escape the advances of Pan. Pan made his reed flute, the syrinx, in order to assuage his melancholy over his loss of her. In the middle foreground lies a youthful male, flower garlanded about the loins, leaning on one arm, and looking upward towards Syrinx, as he sounds a single reed flute. He is probably Dionysus. The last of the large figures in the composition at the far right is a dry, ascetic, hoary old man in his seventies, bent downward under the weight of a goatskin water bag, leaning on his staff, and draped about the loins by a sheepskin. He is lean, muscular, with projecting clavicles, scapula, taut skin and tendons. He seems to be a wandering anchorite, a cynic philosopher, a Zeno or Diogenes who has chanced upon this idyllic scene after a long and toilsome journey over some vast desert wilderness. From him we may surmise the color scheme of the whole painting, for this same bearded ascete has appeared in other Signorelli works in the form of St. John the Baptist, modeled in steel grey umbers, green earth with mineral precision, and accented in draperies and strings of metallic alizarins and greens. In the left middle plane are two female figures, half draped, one seated, holding her head as in a dream, the other standing, in a trance. These are perhaps Echo, who was abandoned by Pan, and Iamb her daughter, the creatrice of iambic meter.

This static and subIime dream-like atmosphere, so rare in Signorelli, is invaded in the distant plane, however, by the typical Signorelli vehement and startling movement, for a group of horsemen gallop through a Roman triumphal arch, a note of the blind violence and sinister forces which threaten the sublime and ecstatic calm of Pan's entourage from without.

The landscape setting is composed of the dry, hard, sandy, and mineral soil and rocks, with incisively drawn plants and flowers. The colors are probably those characteristic of his, known to us today and those of the landscape settings of Mantegna, Cosimo Tura, Ercole De’ Roberti etc., earth colors, steel greens, cold ultramarine skies, metallic clouds, all saturated by a lunar penumbra. The mystery is enhanced by long and dark transverse shadows, creating a morbid chiaroscuro which would inspire the later works of Leonardo.

The only letters in the picture can be seen on the little scroll attached to the reed held in the right hand of Syrinx: LUCAC, ORTONDI. These are the Latin abbreviations for Lucas Cortona.

The mathematical and geometrical contents of the composition are clearly evident. The picture plane is a golden rectangle; in which a diagonal will divide it into its gnomons. The axes of the figures and the accoutrements of the figures, staffs, draperies, and the details of the landscape all fall into key geometric points of tension. Pan is enclosed in a pentagon formed by the arms and legs of the figures surrounding him. The Crescent moon bites into the top edge of the pentagon, and Pan's navel is the center of the pentagon. Moreover, the plastically trained mind can find that from this pentagon is generated the dodecahedron, that solid most sacred to all ancient philosophers and to the alchemists. Indeed, Plato in the Timaeus called the dodecahedron, the container of the total cosmos. Thus, it is appropriate that Pan, the god of the universe should be within it, and at the same time of it. Ptolemaic triangles, equilateral triangles, hexagons with their circumcenters, orthocenters, bisections, and perpendiculars from one apex to the opposite side can be discerned in the studied arrangement of the staffs, syrinxes, raking shadows, strings of mist. Curves spiral in and out of the rigid straight-line structures. The composition is dense to the extreme, leading one almost to imagine it to be an atomic pile, radiating energy — or an entelechic structure greater than the sum of its parts.

The figures are not based upon studies from life but are synthesized from Roman sculptures in which canons of Polykleitos and their reinterpretation by Vitruvius have endowed with a mysterious geometry down to the last phalange of the fingers. All is measured, plotted, animated by geometric and arithmetic progressions. Only Giorgio de Chirico, among moderns, has been able to recapture this magic geometry of figure construction as is evident in such paintings as his "Hector Saying Farewell to Andromache" of 1917. And Marcel Duchamp, perhaps, in his "Nude Descending the Staircase," of 1912, understood this geometry.

The geometricization of the visual world was the foundation upon which all of the major 16th Century Italian Renaissance painting was constructed, geometry not as a means of representing reality, but geometry as the sacred essence of reality. Did not Plato say that only those who knew geometry would be admitted to his academy. Art history has forgotten or perhaps has never been aware of this vital fact. This geometric structuralization had dominated the art of the Gothic Cathedral throughout Europe, and through an ever-pervasive undertone, the painting of North Italy, in the metaphysical painting of Ferrara, Mantua, Cremona, Milan, and Venice. Geometry served as the vehicle or catalyst in the works of Carlo Crivelli, Ercole De’ Roberti, Andrea Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, Lorenzo Costa, Bartolomeo Bramantino, Vincenzo Foppa, Francesco di Giorgio. This Northern geometricization reached Florence in Antonio Pollaiuolo to endow his work, too, with a psychic, phenomenological energy which we have conveniently labeled "surreal."

In poetry, meter, cesura, alliteration, onomatopoeia, metaphor (especially that of Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry in modern times) can be compared to the abstract structural devices used in classical painting. In painting, poetic devices totally averbally speak a mysterious hidden language from some other universe. The enigmatic utterances of Heraclitus and Hermes Trismegistus were not meant to veil meanings but to evoke meanings beyond the powers of word and thought. When the oracles became silent the world dissolved! Guillaume Apollinaire and before him Stéphane Mallarmé in his "Coup de Dés" tried to arrange their words on the page in geometric order. Numbers to the Greeks were geometric arrangements of points, triangular, square, hexagonal, and pentagonal numbers. In architecture the Doric order was a geometric organization or poem in stone.

Albrecht Dürer's "Melancholia” is perhaps the most significant example of the mystique and ecstatic power of geometry to evoke the powers of the supra-real. Here the power of geometry evoke the mysteries of Alchemy, Astrology, Philosophy, Architecture, and casts a spell of melancholy and Faustian world sickness upon the Great Mother who leans looking outward in ecstatic despair beyond the deformed dodecahedron, the rays of Sirius and the power of the magic number square about her head.

If we accept the fact that the mysteries of pagan antiquity were generated first by geometry, GEO - PONDERAT, and then by the complex consequences of the action of geometry upon the mind, the depiction of constellations and stellar movements, the vast reservoir of astrological beliefs, the national organizations of cities, societies, armies, and the world image, we must then understand that the Renaissance was more than simple phenomena of return to a few superficial classical mannerisms and trappings from antiquity.

Oswald Spengler, Jerôme Carcopino and Arnold Toynbee have interpreted the Renaissance as a complete syncretization of forces, Pagan, Christian, Arab, Neo Platonic, Gnostic which would create in Italy, where the Roman Empire had never totally disappeared, a revitalized self-conscious sense of belonging to the Hellenistic Oriental-imperial-Roman mode of civilization, the final and only possible way for a civilized man to live.

When the Renaissance accelerated into its full momentum, it was the art of Hadrian, Virgil and Lucian of Etruria, of Asia Minor and Alexandria, of Theocritus which molded the self-image of the Renaissance man. Signorelli, Raphael, Michelangelo had faint notions about the Golden Age of Greece of the 5th century B.C. Raphael thought himself to be Apelles; Michelangelo imaged himself to be the sculptor who could continue the work of the master of the Farnese Hercules.

The secularization of the Church which reached Italy as a result of the Northern Reformation permitted the undercurrent of ever-present pagan heresies to assert themselves openly on men's minds and endow them with the ineffable sense of mystery of human destiny and existence mirrored on the thousands of artifacts and literary fragments left over from the glorious days of the Roman Empire. The Knights Templars and Crusaders had brought back an awareness of the terrifying powers of the Great Cybil from Syria, and the Diana of Ephesus, of the neo-Pythagorean, and Orphic cults, Chaldean and Zoroastrian astrological divinations. Secular minds learned about forbidden alchemic lore and Masonic rituals. The anti-heretical writings of Origen, Tertullian, Marcion, St. John of the Apocalypse served as source materials for the very works they had set out to destroy (for in them were quoted all of the key passages which although they had refuted, had inadvertently, or astutely preserved for posterity).

It was these heresies, together with the flood tide of black arts, alchemy, dissonant world sickness and melancholia from the German North that tinged the surrealism of such 16th Century painters of Northern Italy as Mantegna, of Tuscany as Antonio Pollaiuolo, of Umbria as those of Francesco di Giorgio, Signorelli's friend. The morbid terror of such engravings as Hans Burgkmair's “Death and the Lovers,” the pagan cruelty of Dürer’s engraving of 1494 "Orpheus torn to pieces by the Thracian Maidens," Lucas Van Leyden's engraving of “Mars and Venus" with its wild and tormented eroticism. Mario Salmi has identified the source of Signorelli's Orvieto Anti-Christ to be a series of earlier anonymous German engravings of the Anti-Christ.

Signorelli's golden monochrome miniature embellishments of the arches and spandrels of his Orvieto Resurrection of Christ, and that of the "Shores of the Acheron” electrifies the portraits of Empedocles of Agrigentum who leans backward in terror of blackness, of Horace who gazes in Baudelairean introspection at his fragile scroll, his "EXEGI MONUMENTUM AERI PERENNIUS," of Virgil almost a self-portrait of Signorelli himself straining upward to the infinite, and finally the meeting of Dante and Virgil in the first canto of the Inferno.

Christ and Christianity in Signorelli and the 16th Century in general became not the culmination of the repertoire of myth and tragedy of antiquity, but another episode, concurrent intertwined, and often conflicting with the complex repertory and amalgams of oriental — pagan — Hellenic Roman mysteries — Apollo — Diana of Ephesus, Orpheus, Dionysius, Pan, Cybele and Atys. The new cult of Mary and Christ became the re-interpretation of the cult of Cybele and Atys, Christ driving himself to inexorable crucifixion, Atys to self-castration.

In this light we return to "The Education of Pan" and see it as Signorelli's synchronization of these myriads of cosmic and atavistic forces, which caused that sudden mutation of the universal intelligence of his day.

The dissonant chords represented by the onrush of ignorant and violent horsemen from under the arch of triumph in the background of this composition is the fulfillment of the dreadful prophesy of the calamity which befell humanity from the breaking of the oath of silence and secrecy that all initiates of Pýthagorean, Orphic, and Cybelline cults had taken.

Thus, the present day Götterdämmerung of world wars and computers, of the Faustian tragedy of the Modern Soul - came from this Renaissance that cosmic “gaffe”, unleashing upon the profane and ignorant hordes of the ever-present botched and bungled human masses, "The Education of Pan" was destroyed in a rain of U.S. phosphorus bombs upon Berlin, but not erased from the memory of Stendhal's "Happy Few."

Plutarch in his enigmatic "Way the Oracles Became Silent" had said, "When the ship reached the marshes, the wind hushed. Then Thamus, the helmsman standing on the prow raised his eyes upward and landward and cried out that he had heard a muffled voice from the heavens say 'THE GREAT GOD PAN IS DEAD.'" Then came the distant lamentations and moanings from unseen personages from the phosphorescent mists over the marshes.

This is the Pan of Luca Signorelli's "Education of Pan."

ALFRED RUSSELL

Nemi, Italia 1970

Bibliography: The Great God Pan is Dead, Essay on Luca Signorelli, edited by David Carbone.

Bernard Berenson. Italian Painters of the Renaissance, Phaidon 1952
Jérome Carcopine. De Pythagore aux Apôtres. Flammarion 1956
Massimo Carrà. GIi Affreschi de Signorelli, Skira 1965
Erest Cassirer. The Renaissance Philosophy of Man. U of Chicago 1948
Andre Chastel. L'Art Italian. Paris 1956
Franz Cumont. Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism. Dover 1956
Oskar Fischel, Raphael. Keygan Paul London 1948
Matila C. Ghyka. Esthetique des Proportions. Gallimard 1927
Gustave Rene Hocke. Die Welt als Labyrinth. Hamburg 1957
Irwin Panofsky. Albrecht Dürer. Princeton 1955
Jean Paulhan. Les Fleurs de Tarbes. N.R.F. 1941
Louis Pauwels et Jacques Bergler. Le Matin des Magiciens. Gallimard 1960
Mario Salmi, Luca Signorelli. Novara 1953
Hans Sedimayr. Der Tod des Lichtes. Salzburg 1961
Oswald Spengler. Der Untergang des Abendlandes, Verlage C.H. Beck Munchen 1963
Charles Sterling. Les Peintres Primitifs. Paris 1948
Arnold J. Toynbee. A Study of History, Vol. 8, Heroic Ages. Oxford 1963