15

RENAISSANCE HIEROGLYPHIC STUDIES:

AN OVERVIEW

Charles Dempsey

The first Renaissance book on ancient hieroglyphs was written by

Pierio Valeriano, whose Hieroglyphica appeared in 1556. Valeriano's
personal medal shows his portrait on the obverse; on the reverse
appears Mercury, the god who first taught the art of writing to man-
kind, standing proudly next to an obelisk inscribed with the sacred
writing that Pierio had claimed to recover for human understand-
ing.1 However, the Hieroglyphica marks not so much the beginning of
Renaissance hieroglyphic study as it does the end of its first phase.
In its early stages that study was stimulated above all by the recov-
ery of Greek sources (among them a Greek text of the Hieroglyphica
of Horapollo, a kind of dictionary of 189 hieroglyphs originally com-
posed probably in very late antiquity and brought by Cristoforo de'
Buondelmonti from Andros to Florence in 1419) and their transla-
tion by humanists like Poggio Bracciolini, Marsilio Ficino, and George
of Trebizond. The start of hieroglyphic study also coincides with the
rise of non-Jewish humanist study of the languages of the Levant,
especially Aramaic and Hebrew, motivated by a desire to bring to
Christian exegesis the subtlety of rabbinical interpretive techniques.
Hieroglyphs, moreover, as the very oldest form of writing, raised
questions of special and perennial interest. In the very origins of lan-
guage itself, before the catastrophe of Babel, what was the relation
between concepts and the forms by which they were expressed, the
relation between sign and signified, between words and things? What
was the language of God himself? [On 'hieroglyphic' language from
a Renaissance perspective, see chapter 12 (iii). O n concepts of pri-
mal language in other interpretive movements, see chapters 3, 13,
and 17. —ed.]

1
Illustrated in J. Graham Pollard, Medaglie italiane del Rinascimento nel Museo Nazionale
del Bargello (Florence, n.d.), Ill, 1415, no. 820.
366 CHARLES DEMPSEY

When God raised two inscribed pillars outside Eden how were
they inscribed? These were considered the prototypes for those immea-
surably ancient obelisks upon which the Egyptians, thought to be
the first inventors of religion, recorded, in the words of Ammianus
Marcellinus, the actions, vows and decrees of gods and kings by
engraving many kinds of beasts and birds. An example given by
Herodotus is the inscription on an obelisk erected by the semi-
legendary Sesostris (probably Rameses II) as a warning to his neigh-
bors: the king conquers the brave with his armies, and the cowardly
by his fame. Valeriano in his Hieroglyphica duly retranslated the Greek
back into hieroglyphics. (See fig. 1, with the Latin subtitle: Vicit armis
strenuos, vicit jama inertes)
When Adam named the birds and animals, what was the relation
between the beasts and the names he chose for them? It was thought
that the signifier somehow embraced the thing signified in its whole-
ness, so that concept and object became one, and both could be
immediately grasped in their totality. A hint of this appears in
Diodorus Siculus's report that the Egyptian hieroglyph of the hawk
also denotes swiftness, and that the concept embodied by the hawk
can also be transferred, 'by appropriate metaphorical extension, to
all swift things and to anything to which swiftness is appropriate.'
This seemed confirmed by the fact that some ancient authors say
that the hieroglyph of the open eye signifies God, and some say
judgment, which is no contradiction insofar as the concept of God
metaphorically incorporates judgment, one of the most conspicuous
of God's attributes. Such hieroglyphs as these approximate the
definition derived by Ficino from Plotinus. Both write that hiero-
glyphs express concepts analogously to the way God thinks, 'not by
discursive reasoning and deliberation,' but instantaneously, grasping
'understanding, wisdom and substance in its whole, all at once.' This
kind of hieroglyph I have named the Neoplatonic type. An exam-
ple appears in Alberti's famous medal with the winged eye encircled
by a laurel wreath (fig. 2), which is beautifully conceived precisely
because it cannot be literally translated but only weakly paraphrased.
Godlike, its essential meaning cannot be rendered discursively (and
Alberti himself gave different but metaphorically consistent readings
of the signs), even as its expression of divine intellect, judgment,
swiftness and glory can all be immediately grasped, in a flash.
The open eye is one of the most familiar of all Renaissance hiero-
glyphs. It variously appears with the meaning of judgment, God, or