Images and Texts on the

"Artemidorus Papyrus"
Working Papers on P.Artemid.
(St. John's College Oxford, 2008)

Edited by
Kai Brodersen and Jas Elsner

@ Franz Steiner Verlag Stuttgart 2009

 las Elsner (Oxford)

P .Artemid.: The Images

Since it broke into scholarly consciousness about a decade ago (at roughly the
same time and in roughly the same place as the Posidippus papyrus), the debate
over the Artemidorus text, map and pictures has raged furiously. Obviously the
question of whether it is a clever fake is essential, since - if it is - we need proceed
no further. And in this respect it is perhaps a pity that the editors of the magisterial
new edition make no attempt to refute the various claims made against the
papyrus.
My brief here is the images. These are of inestimable importance, if genuine, as
Salvatore Settis - one of the three editors of the editio princeps - has rightly
recognised. 1 My remarks will focus on two issues. First, the matter of what the
drawings in their own right may contribute to the question of forgery; and second,
what - if they are ancient - the drawings may mean for the history of Greek and
Roman art, and - in a more limited arena - for the history of the illustrated book.
Let us begin with the forgery problem.

Genuine or Fake?

P.Artemid., as its editors call it following the usual prioritization of text over
images' (perhaps I should henceforth call it "P.Art." instead), has 3 sets of draw-
ings. These are the map on the recto (fig. 4),3 the two extremes of the recto which
show naturalistically rendered sketches of heads, hands and feet (fig.s 4, 12-14),4
and the entire verso which has 41 images or vignettes of animals and fantasy
animals each named in a short titulus (figs. 15-22).5 These correspond to the
"three lives" claimed for the papyrus - its first when it had the geographic text
written and the map drawn onto it, its second when the blank verso was re-used in
an artist's workshop to make the bestiary, and its third when the blank spaces of
the recto were used for workshop practice in making drawings of faces and body

1 See Settis 2006, 2008a.

2 cr. Knapp 2004,238: "Most importantly, the text on the papyrus ... ".
3 See Gallazzi/Kramer/Settis 2008,273-308.
4 See esp. Adornato 2008.
5 See Gallazzi/Kramer/Settis 2008, 309-460.
36 Jas Elsner

parts." All the drawings - from whatever period and whether on recto or verso -
assume a viewer in the same relation to the papyrus roll as the reader of its text:
that is, none are sideways on or upside down in relation to other images, as is often
the case in albums of Renaissance drawings or in some of the medieval pattern
books that survive.
It is perhaps odd that the map has no inscriptions (as there are in say the
Peutinger Table, which is I guess the Roman map it most closely resembles) but
that may be because it is unfinished.' Certainly, papyrus has a long history of being
used for maps, with a notable Pharaonic survival being the so-called "Map of the
Goldmines" on a Ramesside papyrus from the 19th-20th dynasties also in Turin.f
This has legends in hieratic script (unlike the Artemidorus map) but resembles our
papyrus in using the full height of the papyrus scroll without a border for the map -
in that case a height of 40 em by comparison with the Artemidorus map of 32.5
ern, It may be worth adding that for the consultation of texts in a hurry or on a site,
papyrus rolls are not an ideal form of book (and indeed Martial, Epigrams 1.2.1-6
implies that codices may have been in use for such purposes in the Roman empire
rather earlier than is attested widely by survivals)"; however, in the case of maps,
rolled papyrus is a rather convenient and practical medium.'? As far as concerns
what the editio princeps calls the map's "vignettes" (of mountains, landscapes and
buildings, figs. 35-39), while they are not exactly paralleled in any surviving
ancient map, the examples of such things in the Peutinger Table and the early
Medieval manuscripts of the Agrimensores seem to me not to be impossibly far
from (though rather more sophisticated than) what we find in P.Artemid.11 Again,
the pairing of maps with bestiaries (here I trunk of the images on the back of the
papyrus) is not unknown in a medieval context. 12
It is striking that while there has been much use of the drawings to imply for-
gery - especially in the juxtaposition of particular chosen body parts from the recto

6 On the three lives, see Gallazzi/Kramer 1998, 195 and Gallazzi 2006 with Ottranto 2008,
160-62 for a sceptical discussion.
7 A point made by Kramer 2001, 116. For some acute thinking on Roman conceptions of
space and conventions of rendering space, see Nicolet 1991, 95-114, 171-83 and Brodersen
1995/2003 and 2001b. On Ptolemaic and Roman maps, see Dilke 1985 and Stiickelberger
1994,56-73. On the Peutinger Table, see Brodersen 2003, Talbert 2004, and Salway 2005.
8 See Shore 1987, 121-24; HarrellBrown 1992, Gallazzi/Settis 2006,198-99 cat. 39.
9 Likewise Horsfall 1983,201-02, suggests that in general codices intrinsically were a much
better medium than rolls for book illustration.
10 For some interesting remarks on the problems of (un)rolling and (un)folding maps, see
Jacob 2006,82-87. In general on its subject, this is a superb and stimulating account.
liOn the images in the Agrimensores, see Dilke 1967 and 1971, 109-25; Stiickelberger 1994,
112-20. Note the earliest Roman land surveys we know of are from Egypt, like P.Artemid.
More generally, see Dilke 1987. On the similarity of perspective in the vignettes on the Arte-
midorus map and the Peutinger Table, see Salway 2001,30; on the similarity of the Artemi-
dorus map vignettes to those on the Dura Europos shield, see Brodersen 2001a, 16.
12 See Van DwyerlDines 2006.
 The Images 37

(e.g. figs. 28-34)with parallels from Renaissance and post-Renaissance art - there
has been no sustained or argued discussion of this issue. 13 Now this is a strategy of
attack by innuendo, where the implication must be that the papyrus drawings copy
the post-antique images reproduced side by side with them, and must thus post-
date them. But the argument has not been explicitly made and must be inferred. I
think on this point, frankly, the argument for forgery is not make-able. What we
have is a very restricted ancient set of images of body parts (if the papyrus is genu-
ine), which use a naturalistic visual idiom to render hands or feet from various
angles and in various kinds of foreshortening. Against this there is a virtually
unlimited range of possible comparative examples from the entire history of post
medieval art. Given that the limitations of how you can represent a hand or a foot
naturalistically are pretty high, what we would expect is that there is bound to be
replication of the kinds of poses found in the papyrus in later imagery. Only if a
very high proportion of its images could be traced to a single published source, to
which a forger could have had reasonable access, does the argument of the body-
part images in respect to the faking question become potent. Again, while the
body-part images might be copies of hands in Raphael or feet in Diderot's
encyclopaedia, they can only compellingly become so in the light of other non
visual evidence (such as a clinching papyrological, textual, palaeo graphical or
cartographic argument). In fact, images of body parts in naturalistic foreshortening
are not uncommon in ancient art - including in that area most akin to drawing,
namely, Greek painted pottery (e.g. fig. 59),14 but also in sculpture and especially
temple votives related to healing pilgrimage. IS
This swift survey of visual impressions convinces me that in the absence of any
conclusive evidence against the authenticity of the papyrus - either internal from an
analysis of its texts, inks and palaeography or external to it (such as a document
that proves it to be a fake) - the images do not in their own right help to support
the argument against it. On the contrary, the whole lot is so odd a combination of
elements and so peculiar and so risky a thing to forge, that my hunch - working
purely on the basis of its mix of visual elements - would be that it is genuine.

13 Can fora 2008a contains a set of plates (figs. I, 8 and 9, apparently collected by Maria
Martinelli, p. 518) that effectively make the point visually. See also the plates anonymously
placed without discussion or introduction under the heading "lconografia" in Quaderni di
Storia 66 (2007) 344-46 before an article by L. Can fora.
14 For a discussion of foreshortening and other naturalistic innovations in Greek painted pot-
tery, see Williams 1991.
15 See e.g. Roebuck 1951, 111-51, and esp. van Straten 1981. See also the brief discussions by
Spivey 1996, 89-90 and Petsalis-Diomidis 2006, 210-11.
38 Jas Elsner

Three Lives or One?

The question then arises as to what its evidence contributes to our understanding
of ancient art. The earliest discussions of the pictures envisaged P.Artemid. as
entering an artists' workshop and its unused verso becoming a pattern book for
drawings of the kinds of animals (real and fantastic) that appear on such Roman
pictures as the Palestrina mosaic." This is by no means impossible, and would
allow the papyrus to fill a huge gap in our knowledge by serving as our one surviv-
ing example of an ancient copy-book in Hellenistic style. 17 Indeed, the resemblance
of the animal images on the verso to certain surviving pattern books from frag-
ments of papyrus with images of animals and gods in mainly Pharaonic style from
Ptolemaic Egypt (probably 2nd century Be, figs. 62-64YS to impressive medieval
examples from Austria, England and Italy, 19 makes the hypothesis attractive.
However, this proposition appears perhaps over-schematically to suppose that
the papyrus must have moved from a specialist cartographical illustrator to a work-
shop that provided patterns for painters and mosaicists, before ending in a work-
shop of artists who sketched sculpture." unless all such contexts were in fact ser-
viced from a single workshop. I wonder about this. The evidence of the admittedly
very difficult-to-use edict on maximum prices issued by Diocletian in 301 AD
(again admittedly a long time after our papyrus was produced) might imply that the
different rates payable to different kinds of artists (among those listed are workers
in marble paving, wall mosaics and tessellated floors as well as figure painters and
wall painters) indicate different kinds of workshops. 21
A simpler hypothesis is that after the papyrus left the scriptorium, where the
geographical text was copied and where the spaces for the maps were carefully left
- that is, the space where the surviving map was drawn and the space to the right
end of the verso where a second map may have been intended, it then entered a
book-illustrators' workshop, which produced maps. On the abandonment of the
papyrus as an intended book-scroll - perhaps because the map drawn was the
wrong one or because it was wrongly copied - there is no reason necessarily to

16 See Settis 2006, 20-24, 28-35; Adornato 2006; Anguissola 2006; Gallazzi/Kramer/Settis
2008, 320-22. Meyboom 1995, 177-80, writing before the discovery of P.Artemid., did in
fact consider the possibility for the papyrus model books as the basis of the Palestrina
mosaic.
17 Postulating copy-books in general for ancient paintings, see e.g. Ling 1991, 217-19 and for
mosaics, see e.g. Dunbabin 1999, 303. Against pattern books, see Bruneau 1984 and 2000,
dismissing the evidence ofP.Artemid. at 196.
18 See Berlin StaatIiche Museen, Agyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung no. P.13558
with Erman 1909; Scheller 1995,91-93; GallazzilSettis 2006 287 and also the earlier New
Kingdom fragment from Turin, GallazzilSettis 2006, 286. " .
19 See Scheller 1995,149-54,201-10,265-301,331-40.
20 See esp. Adornato 2006; Settis 2008a, 606-16.
21 For Diocletian's price edict, see Frank 1940, vol. 5, 305-422.
 The Images 39

assume that the object left this workshop. It is in fact perfectly possible to envisage
the kind of illustrators' workshop that produced maps as being the sort of place
that did other kinds of book illustration as well.22 This reduces the "three lives" of
the papyrus to a single one - in which it moved from scriptorium to illustrator and
remained in the book-illustrator's workshop where it was subsequently reused. It
does not damage the significance of its first-hand evidence for the history of
ancient drawing.P but it does restrict that evidence to the sphere of book illustra-
tion (and the possible analogues of book illustration with the major arts) rather
than directly alluding to preparatory sketches made for sculpture or painting, or to
pre-project experimentation in a workshop." The very form of P.Artemid. is itself
extremely interesting for the history of the ancient book since it proves that very
large spaces for illustrations - in this case maps - were set out in advance in
ancient papyrus roll production.
On this model, the drawings became something like the sketches in the great
medieval album of Villard de Honnecourt, which was made in the first half of the
13th century and consists now of 33 parchment folios folded once and bound in
pigskin (figs. 55-58).25 These include drawings - many with inscriptions - in no
particular order or alignment on the page. While there are no maps, there are
several ground plans of churches (especially their eastern ends, fig. 55f6 as well as
a maze (fig. 56),27 numerous animals real and imaginary (fig. 56-58),28 including
various essays in different postures.i" and numerous images of figures and groups
which may be sketches for sculpture or painting (for instance the sleeping man with
his head towards the viewer in fig. 55), or copies from sculpture or painting, or just
creative doodles and ideas for future work. There is much else in Villard, less
directly comparable with P.Arternid. (for instance drawings of architecture and of
various engines and mechanical devices), and Villard was certainly no book illus-

22 Brodersen 200Ia, 16 makes a version of the same assumption, that all the P.Artemid. images
come from the same workshop context, but thinks of a single draughtsman - which is not
impossible but is perhaps (given the great difference between the drawings) less probable
than a collective; cf. also Settis 2006, 65 and Gallazzi/KramerlSettis 2008, 79-80 for a view
closer to one life than three. Settis 2008a, 582-92 gives a full review of the visual com-
paranda in illustrated papyri but without committing to the view that P.Artemid. might be
seen as primary evidence for book illustration.
23 See Settis 2008a, 592--606.
24 For collections of illustrated papyri, see esp. Horak 1992 and 1997; Whitehouse 2007.
25 See esp. Hahnloser 1935; Bechmann 1993; Scheller 1995, 176-97; Zenner 2004.
26 Accepting the plate-list in Hahnloser 1935, plates 28,29, 33 and 63.
27 Plate 14.
28 Real: pI. 1: pelican, owl and magpie; p1.3: snail; pl. 7: bear and swan; pI. 14: various insects,
cat and coiled dog; pl. 17: boar and hare; pl. 26: falcons, dogs; pI. 35 deer; pl. 36: dog; pI.
47: lion, dogs; pI. 48: lion, porcupine. - Imaginary: pl. I: goat-like demon; pl. 12: dragon as
an ornamental initial "s"; pI. 20 dragon. See Hahnloser 1935,268-72.
29 E.g. the lion from profile in pl. 47 and frontal in pl. 48 (fig. 58).
40 Jas Elsner

trator, but my point is that the kind of book kept and used in an artists' workshop
does indeed contain the kind and range of sketches we find in P .Artemid. - where
the body parts of the recto may indeed be copies from sculpture, sketches for
sculpture or ideal doodles, while the portraits (which may be divine and ideal heads
rather than real onesj'? parallel the range in Villard from images of Jesus and the
Virgin to ideal-typical figures (huntsmen, wrestlers, martyred saints, knights and
monarchs, allegorical figures) and probably not actual portraits from nature."

P.Artemid. and the Illustrated Book

If the idea that the papyrus remained in an illustrator's workshop and acquired a
variety of the kinds of illustrations made there, has credibility, then its form and
content have much to tell us about ancient book illustration. First, it appears to be
the cartographic equivalent of the kind of illustrated literary papyrus with spaces
left for narrative illustrations attested by a small but distinctive sample of surviving
fragments.F One might include here the so-called "Romance papyrus" in Paris,"
or the surviving pictorial illustrations from papyrus rolls now in Florence and
Munich.l" There is no certainty that the last two were in fact book illustrations,
although if they were not they may themselves reflect the kinds of options available
to book illustrators. The evidence of large scale illustrations in a geographic work
must push us to think more broadly about the illustrative nature of ancient papyri
in general - in which quite a broad range of texts (and perhaps quite a large num-
ber of examples) may have been complemented with images. The model of a writ-
ten text on a papyrus roll with either ink-sketched or coloured illustrations is of
course common from Pharaonic times, stretching back at least to the Middle King-
dom."

30 See Adornato 2008, 496-510 for the heads identified as the philosopher Metrodorus and
Zeus Ammon, 556-76 for other ideal heads.
31 Hahnloser 1935,272-79, though Scheller 1995, 179-80 wonders if some of the insects in pI.
14 may have been "rare instances of observation directly from nature". The lion at pI. 48
which Villard inscribes as "drawn from life" may well have been (and looks like it was)
drawn from a sculpture (fig. 58), which is not an impossible interpretation of Villard's
phrase: see ibid. 179-80 and n.20.
32 For discussion, see Weitzmann 1947,47-57, and 1959, 100-1 I, 110-1 I. A recent survey of
illustrated texts in antiquity is Small 2003, 118-54.
33 Paris: Bibliotheque nationale cod. suppl. gr. 1294 (34 x 11.5 em), 2nd century AD, with
Gallazzi/Settis 2006, 280.
34 Florence: Museo Egizio Papiro, PSI VIII 919, 2nd century AD, 25 x 15 em, with an image
of Arnor and Psyche; Munich: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, P.Monac. II 44, 4th century AD,
14.4 x 13.2 em, with a scene from epic - perhaps the abduction of Briseis. See Gallazzi/Set-
tis 2006,288-89,292-93.
35 Weitzmann 1947, 57-f>9.
 The Images 41

If the animal and body-part illustrations on the verso and recto of P.Artemid.
do in fact come from the same workshop, then they represent not so much the
scope of ancient drawing and pattern books, but the range of illustrative products
available in rather different artistic styles for the ancient book. The spectrum of
ancient scientific treaties adorned with images includes (in Horsfall's words)
"ichthyology, surveying, military science, anatomy and notably astronomy'." In
this context, the various animals in the bestiary on the verso may constitute a pat-
tern book (or just sketches) for zoological illustrations." or (with suitable adapta-
tions) they may be models for the kinds of astronomical and astrological papyri
exemplified by the surviving papyrus in the Louvre based on a text ofEudoxus and
in a later codex-recension by the Leiden Aratus manuscript. 38 That is, similar kinds
of illustrations could serve rather different purposes depending on their contexts
and captions. The body-parts - whether sketched from life, from sculptures, or
from other model books - may be essays in illusionistic rendition or they may serve
for anatomical illustrations. Likewise the faces may be copies of objects in their
own right, but they may also demonstrate the kind of artistry available in what
might seem to us rather lavish pictorial illustration of fictional or even historical
texts. Certainly the scope and space for such illustrations is well attested by the
spaces left for maps in P.Artemid. itself or the fragment of a roll with badly
preserved illustrations of a cloaked nude figure in contest now in Cologne." The
range of styles and kinds of drawing attested by P.Artemid., from map to bestiary
to heads and body-parts is large and varied, reflecting perhaps the very wide spec-
trum of options available in the ancient book, even before the addition of colour.
It is interesting that the first kollema of the recto was not used for text
(fig. 5).40 This means that a large marginal space was deliberately left at the outset,
as well as the subsequent spaces for maps on the recto. Now such a space -
designated an "agraphon" - may be normal in papyri. But in cases where rolls were
subject to illustration, it does offer an ideal placement for an author portrait. Such
things are normal in medieval codices (especially evangelist portraits in the Gos-
pels), and in the late antique codices of Vergil they appear before the second,

36 Horsfall 1983, 202, cf. Weitzmann 1959, 5-22. See also now the impressive architectural
drawing (P.Oxy. LXXII 4842) in Whitehouse 2007, 301 and 304-06 (a long note by J.
Coulton).
37 See Weitzmann 1959, 15-18.
38 Paris: Louvre, P.Paris. I, 2nd century BC, 196 x 35 ern, with Weitzmann 1947, 49, and
1959, 6; Gallazzi/Settis 2006, 276. Leiden: University Library, Ms. Voss. lat. Q 79, 9th
century AD with facsimile in Bischoff 1987 and some discussion in Katzenstein/Savage-
Smith 1988. For the cosmological hypothesis in respect of P.Artemid., see Micunco 2006,
29-36.
39 Cologne: Institut fur Altertumskunde, Universitat zu Koln, P.Koln IV 179, 2nd century AD,
14 x 23 em, with Gallazzi/Settis2006, 278-79.
40 Further on kollemata, spaces before columns of text and tituli, see Bastianini 1995, 23-42,
and Caroli 2007.
42 Jas Elsner

fourth and sixth Eclogues in the Roman Vergil, an Italian or Constantinopolitan

manuscript of the later fifth or early 6th century,"! as well as before Book 7 of the
Aeneid in the earlier 5th century Vatican Vergil.f? The illustrations of both these
manuscripts have been seen as looking back to earlier papyrus-roll precedents."
When adapted to the codex, such portraits appear above or below written texts,
rather than to the side, or as whole page frontispieces without textual accompani-
ment, as was the case with the Vatican Vergil or the Vatican Terence manuscript
copied from a late antique model in the 9th century." I am not suggesting that
either of the heads subsequently drawn on this space (R 1 and R 2 in the editio
princeps, which identifies them with some optimism perhaps as respectively the
philosopher Metrodorus and the head of Zeus Ammon or Saturn; figs. 23 and 24)45
are portraits of Artemidorus. But it is striking that the two most accomplished
portrait drawings should have been placed here, in a space one might expect to be
reserved for author portraits.
The marginal nature of these portraits - and the enthusiasm of the images on
the recto to fill any space available - itself picks up a particular quality of the illus-
trated papyrus roll by comparison with codices. This is that the very extent and
shape of a roll, combined with its relative cheapness and hence disposability by
contrast with vellum, permits a more fluid relationship of illustration - especially of
small and informal illustrations - with text. First, making mistakes is not
catastrophic. All it costs is to do the work again, rather than the potential loss of a
hugely expensive cow-hide: P.Artemid. is a perfect example of this kind of throw-
away culture. Second, illustrations can be placed playfully all over the visual field
and especially in margins. In the famous "Gryllus Papyrus" now in Oxford from the
mid 3rd century AD, we find poems with comic sketches both interspersed and set
at the lower margin (fig. 60).46 This pattern would be developed in the codex with
some interesting papyrus examples from the late antique Alexandrian World
Chronicle showing the demolition of the idol of Serapis by Bishop Theophilus
(fig. 61),47 and developing a marked tradition of visual polemic in the so-called
marginal psalters of post- Iconoclast Byzantium. 4S

41 Ms. Vat. lat. 3867, fols 3v, 9r and 14r. On provenance, see the discussion of Cameron 2004,
519-25.
42 Ms. Vat. lat. 3225, fol. 57v.
43 See Weitzmann 1959, 116-18, Wright 1993,79-80, 92, and 2001,48.
44 Ms. Vat. lat. 3868, fol. 2r, with JoneslMorey 1931, vol. 1. 16,32,48-49; Wright 1996,41-
44, and 2006,6-7.
45 Adornato 2008, 496-510.
46 P.Oxy. XII 2331: see Hammerstaedt 2000, 36-41, and Nisbet 2002 with bibliography.
47 Pushkin Museum, Moscow: P.Goleniscev fol. 6v., with BauerlStrzygowski 1905, 122.
48 See Corrigan 1992.
 The Images 43

P.Artemid and the Problem of the Pattern-Book

Even ifP.Artemid. is direct evidence only for the practices in ancient book illustra-
tion, it may be fairly argued that it raises by analogy a series of key questions
beyond the history of the illuminated book. The workshop practices of papyrus roll
illustrators must in certain ways be close to those of other kinds of artists, and so
some of the claims made in the editio princeps (while perhaps too optimistic in
their direct linking of the papyrus with issues in ancient sculpture, painting and
mosaics) may nonetheless be broadly valid in reflecting the kinds of activity in
terms of sketching and model-use that must have gone on. But I think there are
two more fundamental issues at stake in the various pictures on P.Artemid. First,
the range and kinds of illustrations are striking and need further examination. Sec-
ond, the question of the pattern book, which has been central to discussion so far,"?
raises some key problems in the history of art and specifically in the relations of
ancient art to its later heritage in the west. I will explore each of these issues in
tum, but take them in reverse - starting with the question of pattern books and
then reverting to the range of illustrations in the papyrus at the end.
The theory of the model book has a hugely distinguished history within the his-
tory of art, and it is worth a brief digression into its complexities and ideological
baggage in order to throw light on the bigger questions involved. In 1902 - in the
same magisterial Viennese volume in which Alois Riegl published his ground-
breaking work on the Dutch group portrait - Julius von Schlosser, one of the
giants of the Vienna School of Art History, contributed his fundamental discussion
of the model book, which remains the classic intervention in its field.l" Surveying a
vast range of medieval and Renaissance material, von Schlosser made the case that
the medieval artist did not work from nature or from a direct relationship between
draughtsman and object, but from other works of art and mental images in which
the model drawing and ultimately pattern books of such drawings were the key
means for the generation and transmission of image-types.?' Of course this had
substantive repercussions in terms of pragmatism, thinking about workshop prac-
tices, image production and so forth. But the problem is much larger than this since
it directly pertains to the question of whether naturalistic art is merely conventional
or a direct and creative interpretation of the world exterior to it.
It is to this issue that Ernst Gombrich, one of von Schlosser's stellar students
in Vienna? devoted his greatest work, Art and Illusion, whose fifth chapter is

49 Settis 2006,20-35; Gallazzi/Kramer/Settis 2008, 317-22, 609-14.

50 Cf. von Schlosser 1902 with discussion by Scheller 1995, 6-8. See also Meder 1919, 194-
203.
51 von Schlosser 1902, 279-86, 318-26.
52 On Gombrich and the Vienna School, see Bakos 1996. See also Gombrich 1983 on the web
in the Gombrich Archive at http://www.gombrich.co.uk/showdoc.php?id=22.
44 Jas Elsner

concerned with pattern books. 53 In many ways, Art and Illusion, which is dedi-
cated to the memory of three of Gombrich's teachers - Emanuel Lowy, von
Schlosser and Ernst Kris, is a sustained attempt to confront the fundamental con-
ceptual heritage they had bequeathed him through the prism of Karl Popper's
scientific-philosophical method. For Gombrich, what matters about the "Greek rev-
olution" as he calls it, is that it broke through the schematism which he character-
ises through Egyptian and archaic Greek art (the kind of thing we see in the Berlin
papyrus with its squared grid, for instance, see esp. fig. 64).54 "The Greek
miracle", he writes"; "is unique in the annals of mankind":

What makes it unique is precisely the directed efforts, the continued and systematic modifi-
cations of the schemata of conceptual art, till making was replaced by the matching of reality
through the new skill of mimesis. We mistake the character of this skill if we speak of the
imitation of nature. Nature cannot be imitated or "transcribed" without first being taken
apart and put together again. This is not the work of observation alone but rather of ceaseless
experimentationP"

Note the scientific metaphors of "observation", "experimentation", taking apart

and putting together again, and the notion of systematicity. What is being rejected
is the pattern-book mentality of transcription and imitation (in the sense of copying
other works, rather than mimesis of nature). In Gombrich's case this was con-
nected with the conviction that naturalism is itself a less conventional form of rep-
resentation than other kinds of more schematic visual rendition.F The truth-value
of Gombrich's naturalism itself had an anti-totalitarian, anti-collectivist politics;
while his stance against schematism was also, I suspect, a stance against the Struk-
tur espoused by his Viennese compatriot, the Nazi art historian Hans Sedlmayc"

53 Gombrich 1959, 126-52. Oddly the note to p. 19 (p. 337) miss-cites the von Schlosser arti-
cle. Cf. Gombrich 1980/1982 on the attempt to "struggle free from the conventions of art
which had governed the Egyptians".
54 Though note the popularity of such nets or grids in Renaissance art from Alberti to Leonardo
and DUrer, with Meder 1919, 544-46. On the grid in Egyptian art, see Robins 1994, esp. on
the late period 160-81, 257-58. For Gombrich's comments on Egyptian drawing, see his
review 1983, 192: "students of European Medieval art have found it impossible to arrive at a
hard and fast distinction between sketchbooks and pattern-books. Evidently the same dif-
ficulties arise in the study ofthese Egyptian monuments."
55 Gombrich 1959, 120.
56 Gombrich 1959, 121.
57 Gombrich 1982, 297: "Western art would not have developed the special tricks of naturalism
if it had not been found that the incorporation in the image of all the features which serve us
in real life for the discovery and testing of meaning enabled the artist to do with fewer and
fewer conventions." Specifically on nature and convention in Gombrich, see Mitchell 1986,
75-94.
58 On Gombrich and Sedlmayr, see Elsner 2006a, 760-64. For a fundamental critique of Gom-
brich's position on naturalism in Art and Illusion, see Bryson 1983, 1-35.
 The Images 45

But what matters here for our purposes is the place of the pattern book in all
this. For it represents both an historical explanation for the non-naturalism of the
middle ages (following von Schlosser) and in transhistorical terms it epitomizes the
artistic paradigm of that deadly schematism of images (whether archaic, Egyptian,
late antique or medieval) that "no longer wait to be wooed and interpreted but seek
to awe [the beholder] into submission'Y?

To the Middle Ages, the schema is the image; to the postmedieval artist it is the starting
point for corrections, adjustments, adaptations, the means to probe reality and wrestle with
the particular ... to make and match and remake till the portrayal ceases to be a secondhand
formula and reflects the unique and unrepeatable experience the artist wishes to seize and
hold. It is this constant search, this sacred discontent, which constitutes the leaven of the
Western mind since the Renaissance and pervades our art no less than our science. For it is
not only the scientist ... who can examine the schema and test its validity. Since the time of
Leonardo, at least, every great artist has done the same, consciously or unconsciously.s"

Now this is high idealism .: especially when read today in a context where few
people would doubt the equal conventionalism of naturalistic images with other
kinds of representation, an equal conventionalism against which Gombrich railed.
But over the grand narrative of the Greek Revolution (and of the Renaissance, its
re-birth) hovers a myth of direct contact with nature, a rejection of pictograms and
stereotypes, a heroic adventure of great experimental scientists and great artists, of
which Gombrich himself remains perhaps the finest evangelist. And that back-
ground underpins the image of Classical art, and over the centuries has fuelled
some of its most powerful methods, such as Kopienkritik, which sought to recover
the living ideal of lost Greek masterpieces from the sorry Roman copies, which had
imitated them. 61
What P.Artemid. adds to this, it seems to me, is pretty compelling evidence for
the conventional nature of ancient naturalism as a pictorial and representational
technique, at any rate by the later Hellenistic period. We need assume no life-
drawing, no direct imitation of nature, no Gombrichian scientism or experimenta-
tion in any of the kinds of ancient naturalism exhibited on the papyrus. Indeed, in
the era of Damien Hirst, it seems unnecessary to posit anything but innovative play
with conventions as running the creativity of artists. On the contrary, if we take
P.Artemid.'s multiple animals on the verso (figs. 15-22), executed in broadly natu-
ralistic forms, side by side with the only slightly earlier animals in Pharaonic style
on the Berlin grid papyrus, then we have clear evidence that at any rate in Egypt
both forms of representation (parallel representative systems in Ptolemaic Egypt
since at least the 4th century Be) were in conventional use, with pattern-book type

59 Gombrich 1959, 125.

60 Gombrich 1959, 148.
61 On Kopienkritik, see most recently Marvin 2008, I42--{j7.
46 Jas Elsner

aids available in papyrus for both (figs. 62-64).62 Since these papyri were produced
just before the large-scale importation of Egyptian styles to complement Hellenistic
ones in Augustan and imperial Italian art, again the two together stand for the con-
ventionalism in the later Hellenistic period of styles of representation whose
aesthetics were shortly to become widely available in the entirety of the Roman
world.P Whether, in a Roman context, the sorts of animals depicted on P.Artemid.
came to connote a generally Hellenistic set of referents or had a more specifically
Greco-Egyptian range of implications (as in the Nile mosaic from Palestrina or the
Nilotic scenes frequent in both Roman wall painting and mosaicsj'" is perhaps too
fine a point to be able to answer with conviction. But the styles of these images
might be said to operate by contrast and contradistinction with the kinds of
Pharaonic images in the Berlin papyrus (e.g. fig. 64) - especially when the two
visual languages were juxtaposed, as in the Villa della Farnesina or a number of
villas and houses in 1st century AD Campania.f

Conventionalism and Image Production

The conventionalism issue takes us in two directions. First, it aligns the evidence of
the papyrus with the view of Later Hellenistic and Roman art as a hugely creative
pick-and-mix of competing stylizations and replications to be plucked out of a vast
memory bank of earlier styles and forms, all more or less canonical. 66 This is more
than the traditional question of pluralism in Roman art, though it is hardly unre-
lated to it.67 For here we have a variety of discrete and distinct styles evident on a
single object of Hellenistic-Egyptian provenance with very little that is obviously

62 In fact the pygmy and cockerel on the Berlin papyrus (figs. 62 and 63) look like distinctly
Greek-inflected versions of Pharaonic style (and indeed it is on the basis of their appearance
that the date is placed in Ptolemaic times), so strictly speaking we may describe this object as
in mixed PharaoniclPtolemaic style.
63 On the importation of Egyptian styles into Italy, see de Vos 1980; Vout 2003; Elsner 2006b,
276-90; Swetnam-Burland 2007.
64 On the Palestrina mosaic, see Meyboom 1995 and generally on Nilotic imagery Versluys
2002.
65 For the Farnesina, see Bragantini/de Vos 1982. A full discussion of the juxtapositions of
these styles in Roman and Campanian domestic imagery has not yet been attempted to my
knowledge. But see Elsner 2006b, 278-84 and Wyler 2006, 227-28.
66 On the memory bank and its appropriations, see Elsner 2006b, 270-76. On stylistic selec-
tivity and cultural communication in Roman art, see HOlscher 2004. On "self-styling" in
Roman portraiture, see Smith 1998; on body choices as forms of costuming in Roman
statuary, see Hallett 2005, 271-307 and Trimble (forthcoming). On Roman replication gen-
erally, see e.g. Marvin 2008, 168-247.
67 On pluralism in Roman art see von B1anckenhagen 1942; Brendel 1979, 101-37 (with the
important discussion by Settis 1982, 169-79); Settis 1989; Holscher 2004, 3, 10-21.
 The Images 47

"Roman" about it. Not only does P.Arternid. show the pluralistic eclecticism,
which we see as characteristic of Roman visual production, on the level of drawing
and book illustration for the first time, but it does so in an object which is in fact
Hellenistic and not Roman at all. In other words, once and for all, P.Arternid. is
proof that the notion of artistic "pluralism" is not a more nuanced and subtle form
of that dualism between Italic and Classical forms on which nearly a century of
scholarship has insisted from Furtwangler to Bianchi Bandinelli (and even as far as
Mario Torelli in our own day),68 but is rather a fundamental characteristic of the
conventionalisms of Hellenistic art which was adopted, expanded and turned into a
genuinely imperial model for the creation of imagery (including varieties of pro-
vincialism, not least those of Italy, as well as Egypt, the east and the north) by the
Roman empire.
Second, in its own right the papyrus offers evidence of several different kinds
of conventions in image-making all juxtaposed in a single sheet. There is the natu-
ralism of the hands, feet and male heads of the recto - with the faces in profile
(figs. 24-26), frontal and three-quarter view (figs. 23 and 27), with and without
beards and hair of different kinds; the feet in profile, frontal and foreshortened,
with sandals and without (figs. 28 and 32-34); the hands in a variety of postures
(figs. 29-34).69 Also on the recto, there is the map (fig. 4).70 This entirely avoids
any kind of naturalism and instead goes for a differently codified idiom of represen-
tation - more schematic than the images in such ancient maps as the Peutinger
Table or those in the Agrimensores manuscripts, but not more so than some of the
denotations on the "Papyrus of the Gold Mines". Here we have a quite different
pattern of conventionalism at work. Instead of the kinds of perspective that
imagine realistic space on the plane (as are instantiated in the animal and body part
pictures), the map takes a bird's-eye view - a form of envisaging space both essen-
tial to mapping and in fact quite normal in Greco-Roman landscape imagery." And
like a number of maps (such as the Severan Forma Urbis Romaei'? the Arternido-
rus map shifts perspectives in some of its vignettes (e.g. numbers 2, 8 and 10 -
which are identified as walled cities in the editio princeps, and number 4, a monu-
ment of some kind, figs. 35-37)73 to something more like an elevation or a building
with depth. The conventions in play, then, for the map involved mixed (which is

68 See among its principal advocates Furtwangler 1900,3,289-90; Rodenwaldt 1939, 546-47,
and 1944/45, 84 and 87; Bianchi Bandinelli 1978, 19-48, 1970,51-105; Torelli 1996,930-
31,956-58.
69 See the account ofG. Adornato in Gallazzi/Kramer/Settis 2008, 463-578.
70 See Gallazzi/Kramer/Settis 2008, 275-308.
71 See for instance Meyboom 1995, 181-85; Petsalis-Diomidis 2007, 255--69; Schrijvers 2007,
229-31 on the "bird's eye view" and its potential politics.
72 See Petsalis-Diomidis 2007, 255-57 and further on the graphic traditions at play in the Mar-
ble Plan and the interrelationship of parts and whole, see Trimble 2007,378-84.
73 See Gallazzi/Kramer/Settis 2008, 282-86, for these identifications and numberings.
48 Jas Elsner

also to say, shifting) perspectives - in ways that are in fact familiar for ancient
maps and for ancient landscape imagery," but are quite different from the other
drawings on the papyrus.
Finally, there are the animals of the verso (figs. 15-22).75 These are done in a
more sketchy and playful naturalistic idiom than the body parts - some fantasy
creatures, some highly conventional renderings of real animals (like the giraffe
V 21, fig. 19, or the tiger V 31, fig. 21/6, some with distinct resemblances to
caricature (like the "bull-fish", V 17, fig. 49).77 Most are conceived as individual
and separate specimens set on the page in a briskly indicated but individually
appropriate ground of land or water, but several are clearly and even dramatically
paired in an anecdotal or narrative relationship. Of these, the most striking perhaps
is the griffin and leopard (V 19, fig. 18) - which has the former seizing a leopard
cub and soaring into the air. The scene occupies most of the height of the roll and
has a sketched background of grasses and boulders, making a fine three-
dimensional pictorial vignette." While this kind of pairing is usually aggressive
(one thinks of the fights between the sword-fish (xiphias) and the tuna saw-fish
(thunno-pristis) V 9, fig. 52, elephant and serpent V 16, fig. 9, panther and snake
V 25, fig. 53, or lynx and goat V 38, fig. 54/9, it may take on the more irenic
flavour of a family group, as apparently in the case of the pair of panther-
crocodiles V 3, fig. 51.80 As the editio princeps demonstrates at some length, these
kinds of vignettes anticipate not only numerous examples of the kind of thing we
find in late antique floor mosaics, but also some of the illustrative conventions of
medieval manuscript illumination.
The animals on the verso fill the available space of the roll in something like
the way that animals, fish, people and so forth fill the available space of a mosaic
floor from roughly the period when the papyrus was made through to late antiquity
(for instance the 6th century floor mosaics of the Palace at Constantinople). The
fact that the verso images were made to be seen without turning the papyrus roll
round or upside down mayor may not have been normal for ancient sketchbooks
(how can we possibly know?) but it reflects a number of mosaic floors from the 1st
century BC marine mosaics in Pompeii via the great and small hunts at Piazza
Armerina to the peristyle floor of the Great Palace in Constantinople. Other

74 Traditionally art historians have regarded mixed perspectives as a form offailure. For exam-
ple, see Panofsky 1927/1991, 37-45; Wheeler 1964,186 ("the strange failure of Classical art
to work out the mechanisms of perspective") cf. 190-91; Meyboom 1995, 369 ("various
kinds of perspective, usually quite incoherent").
75 See GallazzilKramerlSettis 2008, 311-460.
76 See GallazzilKramerlSettis 2008, 391-93, 427-30.
77 See Gallazzi/KramerlSettis 2008, 378-80.
78 See GallazzilKramerlSettis 2008, 383-87.
79 See GallazzilKramerlSettis 2008,372-77,406-11,447-50.
80 GallazzilKramerlSettis 2008, 333-35.
 The Images 49

mosaics with similar subjects, it may be added, offer their animals and vignettes to
be seen from more than one orientation (although often with a central scene whose
direction implies an optimal or dominant viewing position)." The papyrus thus
supports in a medium outside mosaic and (if I am right about the priority of book
illustration) in a medium not directly related to mosaic-floor production, certain
longstanding ancient conventions about the relation of space with the images that
fill it. Did other kinds of images - panel pictures, for example, or embroideries -
offer similar taxonomies of animals isolated or in restricted vignettes?
The animals of P.Artemid. offer several kinds of visual narrativity, all implicit
in much later mosaic attempts to cover similar expanses of space with similar kinds
of images. Despite the coherent subject-matter of the verso images - that is, real or
imaginary fish and animals - they do not constitute a single or coherent narrative in
their own right except insofar as a viewer might supply such a thing. On the other
hand, the animals depicted follow two models. Most are in isolation, like a kind of
zoological "unswept floor" mosaic. Others occupy quite distinct and usually
aggressive vignettes of animals fighting. These are directly reminiscent of the kind
of vignette that characterises Roman floor mosaics - especially scenes of hunting
or of circus spectacles. Most of the vignettes are the closely intertwined battle of
two animals which together make a single scene and whose extraordinary longevity
as a subject of decorative art reaches beyond the opus sectile lions leaping upon
stags in late antique Ostia to the snake and eagle at war on the 6th-century palace
floor in Constantinople and the 8th-century lion leaping on a gazelle in the apse
floor of the diwan of the Ummayad palace at Khirbet el-mafjar.f The griffin and
leopard scene (fig. 18) belongs to a different pattern, and had it survived in isola-
tion alone of the images ofP.Artemid. we would now be writing ofthe remarkable
skills of ancient drawing and the brilliant suggestion of space and narrative over a
large expanse within ancient painting, for which it gives evidence. Here we have a
vivid narrative of parent and child, the seizure of a cub by a monstrous predator,
plenty of visual space for the imputation of emotional responses by the viewer, all
amid masterly sketched impression of earth and sky.
My point here is that P.Artemid. gives us not new evidence for ancient forms
of conventional depiction but their combination and great variety in one document.
What it offers is a picture of eclectic variation in a late Hellenistic context and a
potent range of possibilities - not in a set of grand public monuments or even in a
finished and completed artefact, but in the process of making itself in an artists' or
illustrators' workshop which may have been in a metropolitan centre like
Alexandria but may equally have been from a provincial backwater in Upper Egypt.

81 Generally on this topic see Dunbabin 1999,315-16.

82 On 4th century Roman opus sectile lions, see Guidobaldi 2000, 251-62; on the imperial pal-
ace in Constantinople, see Trilling 1989 with earlier literature; on Khirbet el-mafjar, see de
Laos-Dietz 1990 with earlier bibliography.
50 las Elsner

What matters, above all, about the art on P.Artemid. is the variety and versatility in
Greco-Roman image-making which it confirms.

*
I will end with a flight offancy. Let us assume that P.Artemid. is genuine and that
the story we are told is broadly right. It may be that it is more of an experimental
exercise book than a luxury book gone wrong, and it may be that there is some
argument possible about how the original form should be reconstructed.P But
basically, two chunks of geographical text - one a high blown preface and one a
rather basic description - were sent to a cartographer to have the space between
them filled with maps. For whatever reason only one map was produced, and left
unfinished; the key element of inscriptions to determine what the map maps was
left undone. We have two themes here - first, a combination of geographical repre-
sentation through the drawing of a map and the writing of a text, and second, the
question of unfinish. What is striking is that these two themes -- geographical rep-
resentation and lack of finish - may be said to determine the images that were then
added. The absent centre of an incomplete map generates, as it were, the peopling
of the recto with parts of bodies (specifically unfinished or incomplete bodies) and
the verso with a visual paradoxography of animals and imaginary animals
(incomplete, by definition, since they are only some of the numerous animals that
might have been represented) to fill the unfinished world represented by text and
map. Not only is it the incompleteness of worlds signified by the map that may be
said to generate the urge to fill the papyrus space with drawings, but the very sub-
jects and nature of those drawings - as an ethnography of body parts and animals -
appears to be determined by the geographic incompleteness (and cartographic
absence) of map and text. Despite its great variety of subjects and kinds of repre-
sentation (map, text, pictures) the papyrus appears to have attracted the elements
that came to adorn it on the basis of a common set of subjects. It is almost as if the
papyrus had an unconscious of its own; or that the reflexes of those who came to
scribble on it were never wholly free of the influence of what had earlier come to
be put there. This strange, almost instinctive, synchrony of elements applied to it -
pretty certainly by different hands if not at different times - is one of the most
intriguing aspects of all.

83 See the discussions Nisbet 2009, Obbink 2009, and Parsons 2009 (all in this volume).
 Gianfranco Adornato (Pisa)

Goya, Bramante and Others on P .Artemid. ?

In response to Elsner's discussion on the drawings on the verso and recto of

P.Artemid., my comments will focus on three main topics: techniques and tools,
workshop practices, and iconography. I believe that these aspects will allow us to
identify and highlight technical, formal and stylistic differences between the two
sets of drawings on the Papyrus and medieval-modem executions. Recently, the
animal sketches were attributed to the "manner of Goya'" or compared with the
astrological plates by Hevelius (1690);2 heads, hands and feet were instead associa-
ted with Raphael's paintings or with the Encyclopedie's plates.'

Techniques and Tools

Technical aspects are very important in the discussion of the authenticity or forgery
issue. The drawings were executed with vegetable ink diluted with water in differ-
ent proportions in order to allow different nuances of black. Two types of calami
were used. Combinations of different inks and calami allowed a variety of hatch-
ings and chiaroscuro. These techniques were wide-spread and used during the
whole of antiquity, as is shown on a 2nd-century papyrus in Florence" and a 3rd-
century papyrus in London depicting a coloured bear. 5 Technical differences can be
clearly detected in later works, particularly in medieval times. During the 13th
century, for instance, when Villard de Honnecourt made more than 250 drawings
on parchment leaves (e.g. figs. 55-58, his drawing technique was rather complex:
the preliminary drawing was sketched in leadpoint. This contour was then rein-
forced with a light sepia wash." In modem times artists have explored new techni-

Canfora 2006, 79: "Altri disegni sui 'verso' del rotolo: schizzi ('alla Goya' si potrebbe dire)
di lotte tra animali, disegni di pesci e di bestie rare 0 fantastiche. II disegnatore si burlava
dei posteri? 0 dimostrava una 'pratica di bottega' assolutamente insolita".
2 Micunco 2006; for the same conclusions Micunco 2008; on these iconographic aspects see
Adornato 2008.
3 Canfora 2008a, where formal parallels from Greek and Roman repertory are omitted.
4 Firenze, Museo Egizio (PSI VIII 919); Gallazzi/Settis 2006, 288, cat. 116 (A. Soldati).
5 London, British Library (P.Oxy. XXVII 2470); Gallazzi/Settis 2006, 290, cat. 117 (A.
Soldati).
6 On Villard de Honnecourt see Villard de Honnecourt 2001.
52 Gianfranco Adornato

ques and tools: parchment was replaced by paper, while bistre and pencils were
used for line tracing." According to these technical parameters, it is an unambi-
guous conclusion that no medieval or modern drawings were executed in the same
technique and with the tools identified on P.Artemid. Comparison with ancient
works offers strong evidence against the hypothesis that we are dealing with a
modern forgery. 8

Workshop Practices

A second important issue concerns the purpose of the apparently haphazard

sequence of animals on the verso, which is unrelated with the text on the recto?
Representations of animals were common in Hellenistic and Roman times. There
were sometimes distributed in a landscape, in other cases they were represented
side by side in an almost "catalogic" format. Examples include the painted decora-
tion of an early 2nd-century BC tomb in Marissa (fig. 65) and the mosaic in
Palestrina, from around 100 Be. 10 In these two cases animals are labelled with
their names, like very few later examples including P.Artemid. The editio princeps
considered a range of different interpretations for these drawings: II

They may constitute a preliminary sketch to an artistic work (a fresco or a

mosaic), as Bruneau proposed'", although in thi-s case we should expect a
continuous sequence drawn to scale, as on a 2nd-century BC papyrus in Ber-
lin.':' This option is not supported by the evidence, since the inscriptions were
not capitalized, as in the mosaic in Palestrina.

7 According to his own words, Goya used a "earner de bolsillo, en papel holandes azulado,
encuadernado en el sentido de la altura"; the drawings were realized by pencil and iron gall
ink; on these issues see Goya 1988, 112. More recently Ottani Cavina (2008) proposed to
compare the drawings on the recto with the works by G. Moreau. This hypothesis is not con-
vincing since the techniques and the tools are completely different: the artist used lead point,
pencil, pennini on paper or beige paper, as one can detect on the magnificent book Mathieu
1998. Calvesi 2008 proposed to compare the drawings with the works by Durer and David.
8 According to Canfora, the modern forger could be able to make an ink very similar to the
ancient one, as the recipe is known after a quotation from Pliny the Elder. I remark, once
again, that the ink used on P.Artemid. is a vegetable one and does not contain metal ele-
ments, as in all the samples of modern forged papyri.
9 Contra Micunco 2008.
10 Respectively Jacobson 2005 and Meyboom 1995.
II GallazzilKramerlSettis 2008, 317-20.
12 Bruneau 2000.
13 Berlin, Staatliche Museen, inv. P.13558; Gallazzi/Settis 2006, 287, cat. 115 (G. Adornato).
 Goya, Bramante and Others? 53

They may have been copied after one or more friezes like the one in Marissa,
as a workshop exercise.

They may have formed a sort of workshop sketchbook, a repertory purpose-

fully assembled by a painter in order to show it to future clients or to prepare a
new artwork, such as an illustrated book, a mosaic, etc.

Of course, these different interpretations are not mutually exclusive: a preparatory

drawing, made for instance to be shown to a potential patron, may have been cre-
ated through copying from earlier works, and may have survived in the same work-
shop for some time as part of a "general repertory" for other commissions. The
execution of each single animal or animal group is noteworthy: the artist situated
each drawing in a more or less complex landscape; the isolation is the most evident
feature of the verso's drawings and this must be taken into consideration for a cor-
rect interpretation.
On the recto, the drawings differ strongly in nature and style from the animals
on the verso: all the drawings are after sculptural fragments of heads, feet, and
hands and this is very clear since they show a straight cut or a flat oval section
(figs. 5 and 12-14). We identified three-dimensional models from the late classical
period to the l st century AD. This is, however, a modem perspective: stylistic or
formal (if you prefer, archaeological) questions were most likely of no relevance to
the ancient pupil! Hands, feet and heads were reproduced as samples for an
anatomical position or a facial expression: according to Ptolemy's advice (Geogr. I
1, 3-4), the trainee must start with a simple object (an ear, a nose ... ) and work
towards a more elaborate one (say, a head). Repeating a drawing of the same
model (maybe from a plaster cast) is the most evident issue in this part of the
scroll: R 3-R 8, figs. 12-13, and R 6-R 13, fig. 13, reproduce a right and a left
foot, realized in two different moments; the results differ considerably. My autopti-
cal analysis makes me question Elsner's hypothesis to unify the purposes and func-
tions of the two sets of drawings (i.e. illustrated books on animals and anatomy).
The improvement by tracing the contour, the hatchings' learning, the employment
of the calami and inks, the unfinished drawings and the gradual difficulties (from a
simple feet or hand to a more complex head) represent the key factors from which
to interpret the recto's drawings: this must be related to the traineeship of the
draughts man and the manual progress of the pupil in the workshop. 14

14 Gallazzi/Kramer/Settis 2008, 469-73, 489-93.

54 Gianfranco Adornato

Iconography

Finally I would like to make few comments on the supposed arguments for
P.Artemid. being a modem forgery. Micunco " proposed that the verso drawings
represent modern constellations and stars: according to this hypothesis, the
astrokyon (fig. 50) is Sirius or Canis Maior, the chenapolex is Vulpecula cum
Ansere, the lynx and the aigagros are Centaurus against Lupus, etc. This is hard
to prove, and does not correctly consider some peculiar traits and differences of
astrological representations. Constellation drawings with no exception present
starry points along the profile and/or on the skin of the animal, but the drawings of
animals on the verso do not present this particular feature. A second proof against
this weak hypothesis is the presence of a landscape around the animal or the group:
astrological figures' iconography does not present this earthly element." Further-
more, the animals on the verso are not easily compared with the modem plates by
Hevelius or with the "manner of Goya", as Canfora suggested, because of their
fantastic (not zoological) features. Of course the traditional iconography, also
attested on P.Artemid., was later re-used for illustrated books (see the case of
V 16, fig. 17), including astrological books.
R I and R 2 (figs. 5 and 23-24) were recently compared to a Bramante's work
(1487) and linked to a quotation from Sidonius Apollinaris (Heraclitus jletu oculis
clausis; Democritus risu labris apertisi.'! This hypothesis must be rejected be-
cause:
I) R I and R 2 wear a beard; Heraclitus and Democritus are shaved;
2) Heraclitus is crying and his eyes are closed, while R 2 has wide-open eyes
and is not crying;
3) Democritus' smile is quite unlike the expression ofR I, who has opened his
mouth in order to speak.

As far as concerns the formal parallel between R 10 [fig. 29] and the hands from
Raphael's paintings, made by Canfora," we believe this only proves the icono-

15 Micunco 2006.
16 For more precise parallels see Katzenstein/Savage-Smith 1988; Adornato 2008.
17 Can fora 2007c; on the drawing R 2 Calvesi (2008, III) notes: "Questa strana barba, pet-
tinata lungo la gota in direzione della nuca, e un elemento classico che possiamo trovare
nella scultura roman a (si veda il Pugile delle Terme, Museo Nazionale Romano) come nei
disegni neo-classici, proprio, di David, tenendo anche presente il gusto del maestro per i
profili dell'antico; rna nel complesso a me sembra che l'impronta severa della figura
richiami soprattutto Durer, come potrebbe suggerire un confronto con la testa di Nicodemo
nel Compianto di Monaco, Alte Pinakothek, 0 anche con alcune delle teste barbute che cosi
frequentemente cornpaiono nella grafica diireriana". Furthermore, the scholar interprets R I
as a personification of the philosophy and R 2 as one of the geography. On these drawings
see Settis 2008b, 4446.
18 Canfora 2008a does not provide the reader with clear explanations.
 Goya, Bramante and Others? 55

graphical fortune of a specific motif and does not represent a terminus post quem
for the drawings on the Papyrus. Indeed this iconography has been attested on dif-
ferent media from the end of the 5th century Be onward and was widely used in
Roman times and Late Antiquity. Otherwise we must infer that a Renaissance
Florentine artist!" copied after Encyclopedie's plates!
In short, it is hard to accept the "innuendo" that the drawings on our Papyrus
might be a forgery as this ignores the technical, artistic and iconographical data
from antiquity.

19 For instance, the drawing of a sculpted fragment of a foot by a Florentine artist (ca. 1480-
90); Florence, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi, inv, 310 E; see Gallazzi/Settis 2006,
304, cat. 127 (E. Maggini). Further examples in Settis 2008b, 49-52.