Thomas Martin
Independent scholar
I submit for your consideration a paper about a unique and unstudied episode in the Italian quattrocento: the use of Greek letters and words by Antonio Averlino, better known as Filarete (c. 1400-late 1460s), on his sculptures. The appearance of Greek on any kind of object – painting, sculpture, ceramic — at this time is exceedingly rare and no other Northern or Southern European artist of the 1400s employed Greek as often or as extensively as Filarete did. (I am wrapping up an essay on this topic.)
The phenomenon is in itself fascinating, coming right at the time when Greek was again being taught in the West following the pioneering efforts of Manuel Chrysoloras in Florence. Indeed, my research indicates that Filarete, a Florentine, had some kind of contact with one or more of Chrysoloras’ students.
The focus of my presentation, however, would be on the five instances of Greek in his work. Two of them conform with an established use of Greek in the West, namely, to indicate a nomen sacrum. The other three instances are unique, and in more ways than one. Furthermore, c. 1450, the artist stopped using Byzantine-style letters in his inscriptions and switched to more classical, antiquarian letters – such as straight, not uncial, epsilon, straight, not lunate, sigma, omega open at the bottom, not at the top– almost at the very moment when renewed knowledge of these forms was circulating via the efforts of Ciriaco d’Ancona and others. Such use shows an awareness on Filarete’s part of matching ancient letters with ancient subjects and interests. He was the very first artist to do so.
This break with all previous visual practice in the West shows, in the work of a single artist, the end of a medieval legacy of Greek in the West and the beginning of a new legacy that continues today.