A unique lexicon of dress is found in medieval pastourelle poetry, a genre refashioned across Europe in hundreds of iterations and in multiple languages. Each poem was a unique variation on an established pattern. Dress constitutes one of several of its elements that could be tailored to make a new song. The familiar formula was told from the point of view of a narrator from an implicitly courtly or urban milieu. Many begin with a version of the formula “I was out riding the other day,” implying a cavalier, a man of enough status to have a horse. In what has been labeled the “classic” pastourelle model, he encounters a girl outside town in a “natural” setting, often a pasture. In another type, he finds peasants carousing. The girl encountered is usually a shepherdess (Old French pastourelle, pastore, pastoure, pasteure; Occitan pastora), hence the generic term. Sometimes she is of unspecified status or a dream vision. As poets vary the details of the encounter, the genre follows the fashionable modus operandi of personalizing smaller details while conforming to a generally recognized form. Usually there is attempted seduction, frequently with an offer of apparel to woo her. They debate in various ways whether or not she should accept his suit. “Joy” in the grass may ensue, or alternatively she may reject him, escape from him, or mock him. In other versions, he rapes her, which may also be represented through clothing.

Tropes involving clothing and accessories feature in both discursive modes of the genre's rhetoric, narration and dialogue, as observed the editor of the most comprehensive multilingual corpus, William D. Paden, and others. Many poems frame the proposed exchange with the narrator's description of the girl's initial dress, which is what compels him to approach her, and this will be the primary focus of the present study. The descriptions often offer glimpses of many kinds of clothing he finds attractive in some way, whether because they are humble, revealing, beautiful, or otherwise signal her availability.

Questions concerning what dress in the poems expresses about status have troubled critics. John Friedman observed that the pastourelle was “one type of medieval literature devoted specifically to the consideration of a lower class by a higher where the clothes of rustics form the subject of discussion.” While that is often true, it is not always the case.

The narratives in the Nibelungenlied and the Volsunga Saga are adventure stories on a level with the classical Iliad and Aeneid and might be partly based on Greco-Roman storytelling. They are stories of hunters and prey – and very well-dressed hunters and prey. It is due, in part, to their sartorial appointments that they are recognized as such – and they die because of it. The chief players – Sigurd and Siegfried – are, in fact, defined by their garments. In this paper, I will explore the costumes worn by key individuals in the Norse Volsunga-Niflung stories and the closely related Middle High German Nibelungenlied, in order to show how the actors are defined as well as disguised by their clothing. Of the numerous medieval epics written down during the Christian period, but undoubtedly reflecting pre-Christian oral traditions, the Volsunga Saga and Nibelungenlied both tell stories of great heroes and tragic deaths, many of them related to dress. Each epic looks at clothing in a different way and the clothing lends richness and texture to the story as a whole, permitting a modern audience to see apparel as status markers, or disguise, or camouflage. The paper also looks at, as a case study, the pivotal role of the disguised otter as a direct cause of mayhem in the Volsunga Saga and alluded to indirectly in the Nibelungenlied in the form of a hunting suit.

The cycle of stories of the Volsungs is found in various manuscripts beginning in the thirteenth century, but is assumed to date from the period before the Conversion of the Nordic area of influence – the 600s, or even earlier – and relates the history of the family that was the progenitor of Scandinavian royalty. The story of the Nibelungs, the Middle High German for Niflung, and usually assumed to be twelfth century, is known from over 35 manuscript fragments, dating as early as the thirteenth century. It covers a brief period, unlike the Volsunga Saga, and gathers players from all over north and central Europe. While the dates of the composition of both stories are hard to determine, the Volsung/Niflung cycle is primarily pre-Christian ,while the Nibelungenlied is more in the style of European courtly tales and is without doubt influenced by Christianity, differentiating between pagans and Christians.

THE MANUSCRIPT AND ITS PURPOSE

The present chapter concerns the Dominican Meditations, here referred to as the DM, an illustrated devotional manuscript once owned by the Dominican friars of Krakow, Poland's capital and the royal seat during the later Middle Ages. An Old Polish note claims the manuscript was made “in the Convent of the Holy Trinity the Year of the Lord 1532,” though most of the vernacular texts accompanying the pictures may have been written slightly earlier. Four scribes and two illuminators were involved in its production. One painter, the Garden Master, completed the first 33 of the DM's 117 extant miniatures (4 were apparently lost, since the Prologue records a total of 121); the other artist, the Passion Master, did the remaining 84.

About 1721 the DM passed to the Order of Discalced Carmelite nuns in Krakow, who in 1965 permitted a study and black-and-white facsimile containing eight color plates of a selection of the miniatures. Since then the DM has, to my knowledge, not been available to scholars. Shortly after receiving the manuscript the nuns copied all of its illustrations in tempera on paper through a system of exact tracings, relatively faithful to the colors of the original pictures. Consequently, these eighteenth-century paper copies can be used as guides in studying the clothing colors in the original parchment miniatures (Fig. 7.1a, b).

According to the DM's Prologue, the ostensible purpose of the text and picture ensemble was to allow the user to recite certain prayers while contemplating the miniatures in order to gain 160 days of indulgence from Purgatory per picture. But in a larger sense it was to place the user in a personal and dramatic relationship with events of Christ's life, particularly those involving his tormentors, about whom little is said in the canonical Gospels. To contemporize Christ's suffering, the artist has imaginatively “refashioned” these tormentors, by making the cut and color of their attire resemble garments and accessories worn by German mercenary soldiers called landsknechte (the term means literally servants of the country), a force created in 1487 by the Emperor Maximilian I to advance his political aims.4 In addition, the artist also drew on garment features of social outcasts in earlier medieval art, such as pagans, executioners, and even Krakow's royal fools.

The concept of eclecticism is actually quite simple. Both the term and its practice have a long history, which can be traced back to classical Greek philosophy. The Greek verb eklegein or eklegesthai means ‘to choose’. In its broader sense, eclecticism refers to picking and selecting different philosophical doctrines and combining them together—much like Seneca's bees, which made nectar gathered from different flowers into honey. Paleotti referred to the bees that produced sweet honey out of a variety of wildflowers, while also drawing an analogy to spiders, which, like Seneca's bees, gather wildflowers but use them to produce lethal poison rather than honey. This type of dichotomy is characteristic of Paleotti's method throughout his discourse. The bee metaphor also found expression in Malvasia's book Felsina Pittrice, in which he considered Ludovico as ‘an ingenious bee that extracted the sweet essences from all the flowers of paintings, not leaving even the gardens of the Vatican untapped’.

Eclecticism, then, expresses a need to pick and choose. It may be associated with a confused and casual combination of ideas, as perceived by the Greek physician and philosopher Galen. However, it may also be regarded as a distinguished and careful choice, as is evident in the writings of Diogenes Laertius, the biographer of the Greek philosophers.

In early modern discourse, eclecticism was regarded much as it was by the Greek philosophers, as expressed in Michel de Montaigne's Essays(1580).

When Winckelmann coined the term ‘eclecticism’, the cultural and artistic hegemony of the time promoted the artistic ideal of the belle nature, which largely built on Bellori's idea del bello. As Bellori stated, ‘painters and sculptors, selecting the most elegant beauties of nature, perfect the Idea, and their works come to surpass and remain superior to nature, which is the ultimate merit of these arts’. Painters and theorists alike were thus open to the term in its most general meaning.

It may be assumed that in applying this term to the work of the Carracci, Winckelmann, who borrowed it from philosophy and applied it to artistic creation, sought to refer to what was commonly known about the Carracci's connection to their classical heritage, as well as to the great masters of the sixteenth century. Yet by the nineteenth century, the original, comprehensive definition of this term had become distorted and limited. Eclecticism ceased to be viewed as a container encompassing all the stylistic possibilities among which one could pick and choose. Instead, it came to be viewed through the prism of Baudelaire's derisive metaphor of a ship advancing towards its destination with sails set to four opposing winds, and came to be derided as a mechanical attempt to incorporate different and even opposing styles into a single work of art. This distorted definition of eclecticism and its negative implications had a devastating impact on the popularity of the Carracci and of their immediate Bolognese followers.

The ideological justification for non-assimilated eclecticism is found in Gabriele Paleotti’s Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre et profane). In his unique commentary on what constitutes a religious painting, Paleotti laid the fundamental principles for an eclectic approach that combines different styles in a single work of art. The Bolognese prelate began by distinguishing between truth and nature, a distinction essential to the separation between terrestrial and celestial scenes included within the same pictorial frame. Paleotti also formulated a new approach to the representation of saints, arguing that the portrayal of those whose visage was known should emphasize their unique features, while those whose features remained unknown should be depicted in a truthful manner. Once again, one can note a distinction between different modes of representations, culminating in the representation of two types of saints, which are combined in a single painting. Paleotti's theological emphasis corresponds to the artistic discourses of the time and especially that of Lomazzo.

In his 1590 Idea del tempio della pittura, Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo elaborated on Paolo Pino's comment on what constitute the two most perfect paintings.

As this book has argued, the term ‘eclecticism’ has important implications for the understanding of seventeenth-century painting and of the Bolognese reform of painting. The idea represented by this term was articulated in the seventeenth century, and is discernible in artistic treatises written during this period. In the work of Bolognese painters such as Ludovico, Annibale, Reni, and Guercino, one can recognize a type of eclecticism that was ideologically supported by the religious doctrine of Paleotti, and was acknowledged by Malvasia. What characterized Bolognese eclecticism was the use of more than a single style in a given work of art. This form of non-assimilated eclecticism was developed by the Bolognese painters in an attempt to resolve Paleotti's ideological distinction between representations of the celestial and the terrestrial realms, between vice and virtue, and between visually familiar and unfamiliar saints. These Bolognese painters understood the iconographic possibilities made available by this method. Over the course of his artistic career, each of the painters discussed in this book developed multiple styles that were uniquely his own, regardless of his inclination toward classicism or naturalism, a linear style or a painterly one. Especially notable in the work of Ludovico, this type of eclecticism should be regarded as an important contribution of the Bolognese school of painting.

This perception of eclecticism as a practical methodological tool or iconographical device, and the detection of different styles in a single painting or set of decorations, may direct us to additional layers of meaning in the art of the early seventeenth century. This is evident in the paintings discussed in Chapter Three, as well as in the work of other Bolognese painters who are not included in the present study. As the previous chapters have demonstrated, the type of non-assimilated eclecticism that is discernible in these paintings was deliberate and was meant to accentuate the meaning of each scene.

This understanding of eclecticism, however, did not persist over time. In the course of the nineteenth century, the term coined by Winckelmann in 1763 came to represent a mechanical process of imitating the works of numerous painters in a single composition, and thus as mediocre art.

In the following chapter, I consider several examples of non-assimilated eclecticism by the four leading Bolognese painters—Ludovico, Annibale, Reni, and Guercino. These paintings accord with Paleotti's ideas as expressed in his Discorso, revealing these ideas to have been, for the most part, stylistically applicable in practice. The first concern addressed by these painters is the dialectic of the celestial and the terrestrial realms and the distinction between virtue and vice. The second concern involves an emphasis on the distinctive visual characteristics of saints whose likeness is known, and their differentiation from saints about whose visual appearance we know nothing. Paleotti demanded that painters depict saints in this second category as naturally as possible without resembling a living person. Some of the paintings examined below were commented on either by Malvasia or by modern scholars as containing more than one style. In addition, I will examine a number of paintings that have never been considered in this context yet are most revealing in terms of non-assimilated eclecticism.

It is important to note, however, that the use of an eclectic method in the paintings discussed below by no means indicates that all the works produced by painters affiliated with the Bolognese school of painting can be designated as eclectic. Therefore, the last section in this chapter will be devoted to eclectic attitudes discernible in other Bolognese paintings that do not correspond directly to Paleotti's religious ideas.

The intriguing stylistic diversity of Bolognese painting had a tremendous impact on the development of artistic creation in seventeenth-century Italy. The flourishing of different stylistic approaches in the Mannerist paintings of the previous generation evolved, in the work of the three Carracci and their Bolognese followers, into an eclectic approach characterized by the combination of two or more styles in a single work of art. These painters each sought to formulate an individual approach characterized by more than one signature style, which they combined in accordance with what they were asked to portray, in order to convey specific ideas or messages.

This study aims to redefine and re-evaluate Bolognese painting in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in relation to the concept of eclecticism. From the early nineteenth century until quite recently, this concept was perceived as a synonym for bad art. A new appreciation of eclecticism emerged only in the last few decades, in postmodern theory and writing—most notably in the work of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, who blazed the way for a rehabilitation of this term and of its aesthetic value. As I will argue in this book, by re-establishing the viability of the term, one gains a new understanding of the unique nature of early modern Bolognese painting, which expanded the limits of artistic creation and challenged the constraints evident in Vasarian unity. Significantly, eclecticism also challenges the traditional perception of linear stylistic development in the course of a given painter's artistic evolution. It is this study's aim to show that by accepting diversity as a major component of artistic theory and practice, one may uncover new layers of meaning in Bolognese painting at the turn of the seventeenth century.

When I first began my research on artistic theory as embedded in seventeenth- century painting more than a decade ago, I was under the impression that modern scholars overestimated the role of theory in the artistic production of this period. My point of departure at that time was Donald Posner's perception of the Carracci's practicality, together with Denis Mahon's opinion on their experimentalism. Yet as my research evolved, I came to realize the importance of theory in seventeenth-century Bolognese artistic conduct.

Paleotti's attempt to lay down the rules for the creation of religious art did not stop in Bologna. According to Prodi, Paleotti continued to advocate a reform in religious painting even after he moved to Rome, up until his death in 1597. Three years earlier, in 1594, his book Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre et profane diviso in cinque Libri was published in Latin as De imaginibus sacris et prophanis libri quinque, making it accessible to readers outside Italy. In 1596, he became the protector (in charge of the visual reform) of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, together with Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, the well-known patron of Caravaggio. In the summer of the same year, he delivered to Pope Clement VIII a memorandum, titled De tollendis imaginum abusibus novissima consideration (A fresh consideration of how to remove the abuses of images), in which he demanded much stricter supervision of religious paintings and suggested the compilation of an index of prohibited images. Yet it seems that although the ideas reflected in his treatise were appreciated, they did not create the desired effect of anchoring religious art in a restricted set of laws.

The extent to which Paleotti's ideas were received in early seventeenth-century Rome remains unclear. It is safe to speculate that in the case of the religious artworks commissioned for public spaces like churches, the patrons did not pursue Paleotti’s doctrine. One example in which an eclectic approach is evident in Rome may be found in Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani's palace. Giustiniani's stylistic approach can be gleaned from his famous letter to the Flemish poet Teodoro Amayden, who lived in Rome, which was written c. 1620. In this letter, Giustiniani expressed his thoughts on art and elaborated on the different methods of painting, dividing them into twelve categories.

In a revealing passage regarding Ludovico Carracci's St. Michael and St. George altarpiece in the church of Santi Gregorio e Siro in Bologna (Plate 1), Count Carlo Cesare Malvasia describes the painting in the following words:

In this short passage, Malvasia, the seventeenth-century biographer of the Bolognese school of painting, demonstrates his enthusiasm toward one of Ludovico's Bolognese altarpieces by emphasizing the painter's skills as a master of stylistic variety. Carracci, as his biographer tells us, possessed an ability to create a single work of art that combined three different styles. According to Malvasia, this stylistic diversity is discernible in the two main protagonists in the lower section of the altarpiece, the maiden and the saint, as well as in the three distinct yet combined compositions in the upper section.

Count Carlo Cesare Malvasia (1616–1693), a native of Bologna and the scion of a respectable local family, wrote what is still acknowledged today as the most comprehensive and detailed account of the development of painting in Bologna between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. At first glance, his description may seem surprising to contemporary twenty-first-century viewers accustomed to an ongoing flood of media images. Such viewers might pass through the chapel without noticing anything special about it, and might find it difficult to detect the subtle stylistic variations noted by Malvasia. Yet attention to these variations, which Malvasia described as mind-blowing to the point of driving him mad (impazzire), provides a glimpse into seventeenth-century sensibilities that may shed new light on the visual experience of Malvasia's contemporaries. The relative dearth of images in the seventeenth century may have been one of the reasons that seventeenth-century art lovers were meticulous in their observations, as made evident in the passage by Malvasia.