Essay Review: Piero's Flagellation of Christ Elucidated?

King David Turner Gerard L'E. , “The astrolabe presented by Regiomontanus to Cardinal Bessarion in 1462”, Nuncius, ix (1994), 165–206.

King regrets that Holzschuh did not publish his ideas (p. 336). This book certainly makes it awkward for him to do so now.

Here context could strengthen King's point, for canon law sometimes uses ‘de cardine’ to refer to the cardinalate: “… dicti sunt cardinales a cardine …”, cited in Watt J. A. , “Hostiensis on per venerabilem: The role of the College of Cardinals”, in Authority and power: Studies on medieval law and government presented to Walter Ullmann on his seventieth birthday, ed. by Tierney Brian Linehan Peter (Cambridge, 1980), 90–113, p. 106.

In Manilius's Astronomica, ‘cardo’ occurs some 30 times, often in the ablative. Cf. “nunc age surgentem primo de cardine mundum respice” (Bk 2, line 939 or 923–4), and especially “Hic mihi surgit opus …” (Bk 1, line 114 or 111); cognates of ‘surgere’ occur more than one hundred times.

King's discussion of the angel moves much too quickly over a vast problem with many possible solutions, including the fact that the winds (venti cardinales) are often represented as angels, sometimes as movers of the planets or the celestial sphere. See Obrist Barbara , “Wind diagrams and medieval cosmology”, Speculum, lxxii (1997), 33–84, esp. pp. 82–3. This is probably the meaning of the angels in the 1461 Viennese ephemeris from the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg (King, p. 35).

ROMA, VIenna, VEnetia and P(T)OLEMAIOS, EVC(L)IDES, T(H)EON. pure coincidence; but it is nice (p. 64).

There may have been people in the fifteenth century who celebrated the multi-century round-number anniversary of a private physical object, but I cannot think of an example.

In Venice, Biblioteca Marciana 329, f. 20r, there are 15 instances of the colon-non-tilde, depending on how one counts, in headings at the beginning of the book and at the end of propositions. On f. 27r, it appears 15 times at the end of each proposition except for one, where he uses two horizontal dots above a vertical comma. On f. 16r, he seems to use it interchangeably (once) with this last form of punctuation, which predominates on the page. Regiomontanus also uses it in his Defence of Theon against George of Trebizond (St Petersburg, Archive of the Academy of Sciences), f. 17v, and at f. 40v to mark the end of George of Trebizond's dedication to Matthias Corvinus. For a facsimile of this autograph, see http://regio.dartmouth.edu/chapters (accessed 1 January 2011).

Whether coincidentally or not, V(L)AD (twice) TERTIUS and DRACU(L)A also appear in the 1462 dedication, where L is one of the two additional letters King allows. It was in 1462, of course, that Vlad III (d. 1476, like Regiomontanus) impaled thousands of Ottoman troops in Wallachia, tried to assassinate Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople, and was arrested by King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary on trumped-up changes of treasonous collusion with Mehmed.

The phone calls, but not their content, are reported on p. 96, n. 208. Pace King in that note, I never discussed my thesis in Kalamazoo, but I did at talks at the University of Wisconsin, the University of New Mexico, the University of Iowa, the University of Notre Dame, and most recently at the Deutsches Museum (Munich) and the University of Ghent.

Marchant Jo , “Science and art: A leap of faith”, Nature, cdxlvi (2007), 488–91.

Two drafts (23 September 2005 and 5 May 2006) contained the hyperbolic words: “only Carlo Ginzburg and Michael Shank have come close to understanding it [the painting] without access to the relevant text [= the astrolabe dedication]” (p. 2); “We further pay tribute to Michael Shank, a fellow historian of astronomy, for recognizing that the flagellation scene had a connection to George of Trapezunt” (p. 20).