Portraying Friendship by the Book

Abstract

This article responds to the philosopher Alexander Nehamas’ argument that “no gesture, look, or bodily disposition, no attitude, feeling, or emotion, no action and no situation is associated with friendship firmly enough to make its representation a matter for the eye.” The article proposes a “humanist exception” to Nehamas’ general rule. Building on Lorna Hutson’s argument that humanism “textualized” friendship, I contend that in the early modern period scholars and artists associated with humanism were engaged in the development of a set of recognizable signs of friendship connected to the distinctive humanist culture of the book and associated activities of reading, writing, and circulating texts. The article offers a case study of Quentin Metsys’ diptych of Erasmus and Pieter Gillis (1517) and then applies the lessons gleaned from that work to a picture that Nehamas cites as evidence of his claim, Jacopo Pontormo’s Two Men with a Passage from Cicero’s “On Friendship” (ca. 1522). Both pictures, I contend, not only depict friendship but also promote humanist ideals of friendship to the viewer.