The puzzling Albrecht Dürer’s Apollo holding his flipped name can often be straightened out in the net. But the German painter thought it just like that: backward.
The pen drawing we are examining is currently conserved in British Museum, and known by the full title art historians gave it: “Apollo with the Solar Disc and Diana Trying to Shield Herself from the Rays with Her Uplifted Hand”, so they even give us a description.
The drawing appears to be finished only in the upper part and the figure of Apollo, but not yet fully refined concerning ( the supposed) Diana’s figure. To the extent that some critics put forward the idea that Dürer’s original purpose was the depiction of the male figure alone, who would represent the planetary god Sol/Sun. They affirm their view would be corroborated by the impressive rendering of the sun’s rays, but admittedly the celestial background, rich in painterly effect, was added later. The German artist probably drew the Apollo in 1504, and some think it was conceived as a variation on the Adam of 1504.
The drawing was left unfinished, but the halo of the mirroring idea remained to suggest a backward effect. The result is that the god Apollo is brought out from himself, with a spectacular effect. There are many aspects to analyze, especially considering the cultural depth of Albrecht Dürer. Let’s begin with the precarious stability and symmetry of the central figure, an unusual aspect for a painter of his time, as renaissance painters were known as masters of balance, and above all was Albrecht Durer, to the point of writing a treatise on the symmetry of bodies. With this in mind, too clumsy that cumbersome baton moved to the other side of the main action. However, since it is not a simple baton, that scepter is more than a deliberate balance. If we give it the value of a symbol of initiation, then its holder, or ruler, Apollo seems to observe strange correspondences.
The Architect of Olympus
Discovering a flipped-over painting and correcting it is outrageously easy with a computer. Many of the Dürer’s Apollo copies circulating in search engines are repaired by someone loving order and wondering how on earth a sixteenth-century artist could have done something so asymmetrical and against Renaissance decency. So, piously, they allow us to read the inscription without twisting our necks. And to provide this service, they do not hesitate to invert the symmetry of the anthropomorphic figure, in this going really against the basic laws of the classical and Renaissance symmetry, according to which figures always do their action to the right of the observer, this being a basic rule of art courtesy of all times ( which even Picasso used to do when deconstructing painting). But the modern purists of symmetry fail to grasp that it is not the figure of Apollo to be overthrown, but rather his name.
The word “Apolo” is written backward, or flipped if you prefer, with a view toward the engraving. The conspicuous incongruity of the inscription compared to its allotted space made many scholars think that “Apolo” was probably a substitute for an earlier name “Sol”. So, in their opinion, Dürer realized too late of having committed an error, which essence we cannot grasp at the moment, but we will deepen further. In any case, what is clear is that the inscription is inverted. and the main reasons could be two: We will see how the latter sentence is less extravagant than expected.
APOLO In this regard, it must be said that most art critics have only noticed the macroscopic anomaly of the name inversion, but not that the word Apollo is also incorrectly rendered as Apolo, which is hardly noticed. The ancient Greek for Apollo is Ἀπόλλων, Apóllōn; in Latin is Apollo. They state that the drawer contrived to delete a letter for the name to be contained in the little space. But what if Dürer meant exactly “Apolo”?
It is a fact that among the Romans scientific knowledge was heavily influenced by the ancient Etruscan religion and names, where we can find a consideration of Apollo as the god of Aplu or Apulo, the thunder. However, it is still unclear if the image of the Etruscan god was derived, or not, from the Greek god. Was Etruscan Apulo, the deity of the thunder, the same as the Greek Apollo, son of Zeus god of the thunder according to the ancient traditions, then the god of luminous ether? Nevertheless, Apollo is known as the god of the Sun, sharing the epithet with Helios, the real god of the astronomical sun, while Apollo was sometimes the light and sometimes the esoteric Sun.
We will never know if the German artist had chosen Apolo due to lack of space or if he really meant the Etruscan divinity. In any case, we have to deal with the inversion of the divine name. In Il Mistero dell’Amor Platonico nel Medioevo, or the mystery of the platonic love in the middle ages, London 1840, tome I page 42, the Italian historian of literature Gabriele Rossetti cites the inversion of the name Apollo among the Romans (to tell the truth he did it by quoting Vecchioni, another Italian historian of Italian literature): “... when the night overcomes the day, Pluto assaults Osiris; when the day wins over the night, Osiris triumphs on Pluto. In the six months the sun being at its highest point is Osiris; and in the six months when it is at its lowest, is Pluto 8 or the submerged sun during the winter solstice); the god of the good in the fecund season, the god of the evil in the sterile one. Between the two equinoctial points that include the winter, Pluto assaults Osiris; between the same points which include the summer, Osiris triumphs on Pluto; in the fall equinox, the maleficent god pounds the beneficent, and the fight lasts a semester; In the vernal equinox, the good overcomes the nasty, and the victory lasts the same. We can say the same about Apollo, and for this reason, he had two names in the arcane Taletes, that’s to say in the last revelation of the mysteries: … hence Heraclides of Pontus is cited when saying ” that Apollo is the same as the Sun, and being single numen he cannot but being decorated with two names, it is notorious to us through the mystic legends, on which the theology of the arcane Taletes is poured. And this is in the people’s mouth, and is preached upside down, Sun-Apollo, and Apollo-Sun.”
Rossetti goes on: “The sense of Heraclides words seems to me very clear, but I don’t know why Vecchioni writes: “the real sense of these words is not manifest, but we have to infer that in the mysteries they taught some very arcane doctrines which to the physical properties of the sun joined the theological opinions about a numen.” (P. 92) And because of the two positions of the planet, which with its presence causes the day, and with its absence the night, they consecrated to Apollo a white and a blackbird, that’s to say the swan and the crow, corresponding to the light and the shadow, the summer high and the winter drop, as Eusebius said.” (Ad Il. D., lib ii. page 449).
Quoting from Martianus Capella: When the sun rises, it makes sounds like long hair. Therefore it is called Phoebus with Hair of Gold… Martianus tells us that Apollo lives in the spaces of the air and restores what has been lost. Apollo is the sun that sings and makes everyone sing. Even Juno rejoices in the presence of Apollo. He takes on the task of not decomposing into space. The ancients say that the fact that Apollo invented music means that it is subtracted from any decay. Ultimately, Apollo is the architect of Olympus.
The Symmetry of Bodies
Albrecht Dürer has always been known as an aesthete who loved the perfect rendering of reality, more than being a fanciful storyteller. In fact, since his beginnings, he displayed evidence of his extreme accuracy of details and conformity to reality, as we can see from a watercolor of Innsbruck castle he painted in 1494, on his way to Venice. So he definitely could not have left behind a joke like a flipped name for no reason. In fact, in Apollo’s portrayal, he respected the symmetry of the anthropomorphic figure and the ancient hidden Roman knowledge, according to which Jupiter’s son’s name could be only written reversed, and we’ll see why. And we know how ancient Romans did love to write inverted names. But perhaps the term “backward” appears more appropriate.
The great German artist’s love for symmetry, as well as his conspicuous knowledge of mathematics, brought him to write and engrave his famous treatise Vier Bücher von menschlicher Proportion (Four books of human proportion), a substantial treatise in which the artist meditated on the proportions and harmony of the human body understood as dependent on precise geometric rules and therefore reproducible through drawing, which was published after his death in 1528 in two German and Latin editions De Symmetria partium in rectis formis humanorum corporum libri. Dürer instead of determining ideal proportions investigates nature to identify not an abstract typology but at least thirty for men, women, and children; the work contains 39 diagrams and 110 woodcuts with the representation of 142 human figures. The edition we are examining is the Italian translation by Giovanni Paolo Gallucci da Salò, printed in Venice in 1594, with the title Della Simmetria dei Corpi Humani (On the symmetry of human bodies).
In the preface, the translator begins by stating: that painting is so similar to poetry that there have been men who have declared that painting is silent poetry, and poetry is a speaking painting. And they stand together in balance. And these arts, one with words, the other with its colors, still imitate natural things.
The first book begins like this: when you want to paint the figure, or image, of a man or a woman, you must proceed as follows: prepare a line of greater size than the figure that you have set yourself in mind to want to make, in which you must draw a line just as long as you want the figure you intend to paint to be. And the first point of the line is the top of the head and the last is the heel or the sole. and from this, he must start according to the diversity of the images, which one wants to form short or long, to which you must adjust your lines… and so there are mathematical parameters that satisfy all physical conformations. Dürer does not impose celestial parameters but accepts and paints human parameters of all kinds. Because a true painter must paint reality, not impose celestial utopias. The German artist foresees a whole casuistry of “ugliness” to be faithfully reproduced with all their symmetries.
Below, for example, are some specimens of plump guys, from both genders.
After having developed a lot of human types, the German artist surprisingly expresses general guidelines not according to symmetry but to geometry. A reduction in numbers.
Dürer’s underlying concept is the ability to expand a body from a very small point while preserving symmetries, as shown in the drawings below. So, any increase takes place according to numerical parameters.
