Saturn on Imagine di Saturno, ò del Tempo divoratore de suoi figliuoli, the rest of the plate faded

Saturn on Imagine di Saturno, ò del Tempo divoratore de suoi figliuoli. Tap the picture to open it.

bodies

Saturn

Saturnus, Crono, Kronos, Time, lead, plumbum

The outermost planet of the old order, the metal lead, the black first stage of the work, and an old man with a sickle. One sign does all four jobs, and the books move between them without explaining themselves.

Saturn does four separate jobs in these books and answers to one name through all of them, which confuses a reader until he notices that the books never confuse themselves.

The first Saturn has a face. Vincenzo Cartari's handbook of 1615 was written to show a god and then explain every part of him, and it gives Saturn four blocks in a row. He bends his head into a child under a vine, with a temple behind him whose roof carries three half figures blowing conch shells. He walks through a field of stars, holding out at arm's length a serpent that bites its own tail. He stands with three heads on one neck inside a burst of rays. He stands beside a winged and crowned twin, with a woollen thread tying his ankles. Cartari names his authorities as he goes, Macrobius for the temple and for the bonds, Martianus Capella for the serpent and the slow step, Eusebius for the wings, and he tells the reader outright when he does not believe one of them.

The second Saturn works as a substance, and Michael Maier prints the working instruction in his twenty second emblem of 1618. He leads with colour. “Saturni in faciem (quae nigra) sparge nives”, scatter snows on the face of Saturn, which is black, “Et dabitur tibi materies albissima plumbi”, and a whitest matter of lead will be given you. Saturn carries the blackness the work starts from and the metal it starts in, and Maier's instruction tells the reader to whiten him. A century and a half later the Encyclopedie's plate of chemical characters still files him the same way: the salts of lead take the sign of Saturn, as iron takes Mars and tin takes Jupiter.

The third Saturn holds a position rather than a substance, and three men draw the same ladder. Fludd's monochord climbs from the moon at the bottom to Saturn at the top. Dee runs the Monas down the same axis, Saturn at the head and the moon at the foot. Knapp's chart of Dante's universe ends its rings at Saturn before the fixed stars begin. Highest, slowest, coldest, last. Cartari puts a number on the slowness that a reader can check against a sky: the sphere outruns the other six in width and takes thirty years to come round.

The fourth Saturn names a temperament, and it produced the most famous picture of Saturn in Western art without putting his name anywhere on it. Agrippa states the connection flatly in his first book of 1533, “praecipue Saturni, qui cum ipse frigidus sit atque siccus, qualis est humor melancholicus, illum quotidie influit, auget atque conseruat”: above all if some heavenly influence helps it, and chiefly Saturn's, who being himself cold and dry, as the melancholy humour is, pours it into a man daily, increases it and keeps it. Then he goes further, and the sentence repays having whole. “Praeterea cum sit ipse arcanae contemplationis autor, ab omni publico negotio alienus, ac planetarum altissimus, animam ipsam cum ab externis officiis ad intima semper reuocat, tum ab inferioribus ascendere facit, trahendo ad altissima, scientiasque ac futurorum praesagia largitur”: besides, since he himself authors secret contemplation, a stranger to every public business and the highest of the planets, he calls the soul back from outward duties to what lies innermost, makes it climb from lower things, drawing it to the highest, and grants it knowledge and forecasts of things to come. Dürer cut that description nineteen years before Agrippa printed it: a winged intelligence sitting still with every tool of making within reach and nothing made. Agrippa adds, a few pages earlier, that Saturn rules old men, and monks, and melancholies, and hidden treasures.

Kircher's engraver arrived at the same place from the other end. He set the seven planets down the Tree of the Sephiroth in 1653 and put Saturn beside Fear, with Jupiter across from him beside Mercy. Saturn answers to the sephira of severity, which a tree without it would lack.

One correction while Melencolia sits on the table. The square of sixteen numbers Dürer hung behind her head belongs to Jupiter and not to Saturn. Agrippa prints Saturn's table as a three by three, “ex quadrato ternario constat, continens numeros particulares nouem, & in qualibet linea tres quaquauersum, & per utrunque diametrum constituentes quindecim”, made of the square of three, holding nine particular numbers, three in every line each way, and making fifteen along either diameter. Jupiter's runs four by four and makes thirty four, and Dürer's follows the second with the rows reversed and the middle columns exchanged. Agrippa promises that table “conferre lucrum & diuitias, gratiam & amorem, pacem & concordiam hominum”, gain and riches, favour and love, peace and concord among men. He never says it works against Saturn, and nothing else printed in his century says so either.

The claim that brings most readers to this page does not stop at the cube. It runs Saturn to Kronos to Moloch and arrives at child sacrifice, and the archive can follow that chain to its far end because it holds the far end. Johann Lund printed two copperplates of Moloch at Hamburg in 1738 and his sources describe “ein eherner oder kupfferner Götze gewesen, mit einem Ochsen- oder Kalbes-Kopffe und ausgestreckten Händen, wie man die Hände ausstrecket, wenn man etwas empfangen wil”, a brazen or copper idol with an ox's or a calf's head and hands stretched out as one stretches out the hands to receive something, hollow inside, divided into seven chambers, heated from below until the whole figure glowed. No planet enters Lund's chapter. He writes about the idols of Israel's neighbours, credits Kircher and two others by name, and disagrees with his own first plate on the facing leaf. Nothing here files Moloch under Saturn, and the two plates sit in their own series for that reason.

And Maier's twelfth emblem tells the story the rest of them assume. Saturn swallowed a stone in place of his son, brought it back up, and they set it on a mountain as a monument for mortals. Cartari tells the same story on his page 27 and follows the stone further: they kept it at Delphi in the temple of Apollo and guarded it with the greatest respect, poured oil over it, more on feast days than on others, and wound unwashed wool round it afterwards. That wool reappears on his fourth block as the thread at Saturn's ankles, wound round a god instead of a stone.

Contested

No cube. Cartari's handbook exists to draw a god and label his parts, it spends four blocks on Saturn, and it hands the reader a sickle, a staff, a serpent biting its tail, three heads on one neck, a veil, a crown, wings at the head and at the shoulders, a field of stars, a vine, a temple and a thread of wool. No cube. No hexagon. Where Cartari cannot source a meaning he prints his refusal to guess at it, which tells a reader what his silences are worth. No other book in this collection draws Saturn as a cube either.

The pieces the modern claim assembles are individually old and individually sourced, and this entry holds most of them: the lead, the blackness, Kronos eating his children, the cube that Plato assigns to earth among the five solids. The hexagonal cloud at Saturn's pole belongs to none of that. Voyager photographed it, and a photograph of weather cannot be a symbol anybody cut in 1533. Whoever first joined the pieces did it recently, and no picture in this archive joins them.

Where this entry quotes Latin the original sits beside it and the English belongs to the archive. Agrippa reaches this page through the Latin of the 1533 Cologne printing, with J. F.'s English of 1651 on the records that carry it. Cartari's Italian is read off the Getty Research Institute copy of the Padua edition of 1615, the one Lorenzo Pignoria revised. Conway is a reader of 1889 describing Melencolia I, not Dürer explaining it.

Sources

Vincenzo Cartari, Le vere e nove imagini de gli dei delli antichi, 1615: Four woodcuts of Saturn on printed pages 24, 28, 30 and 32, each with its own printed caption, and the expositions on pages 25 to 33, read against the page images of the Getty Research Institute copy.
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, De occulta philosophia libri tres, 1533: Book I chapter 60 on the melancholy humour and Saturn, page LXXVIII; Book I on what Saturn rules, page XXIX; Book II chapter 22 on the tables of the planets, pages CXLVI and CXLIX. Read against the page images of the U.S. National Library of Medicine copy.
Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens, 1618: Emblems XII and XXII, motto and epigram, Oppenheim 1618, read against the page images of the Getty Research Institute copy.
Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert, editors, Encyclopedie, the plates of Chimie, 1772: The table of chemical characters, where the salts of lead carry the sign of Saturn.
Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi Historia, 1617: The monochord, the planets ordered from the moon lowest to Saturn highest.
John Dee, Monas Hieroglyphica, 1564: Theorem XVIII, the planets on the axis of the egg, Saturn at the head.
Athanasius Kircher, Oedipus Aegyptiacus, the Systema Sephiroticum plate, 1653: The engraver's planets down the tree: Saturn beside Fear, Jupiter beside Mercy.