Benozzo Gozzoli's Byzantine-Florentine Advent Calendar (Part 4)

Continuing on from my previous posts on Benozzo Gozzoli's masterpiece "The Journey of the Magi". This time, I would like to focus on the Renaissance scholars and humanists included in the entourage behind the Medicis...


The Greeks
In the left-hand crowd of Gozzoli’s masterpiece we find the true wise men of the painting. Most of the recognisable figures are members of the Byzantine delegation from the council of Florence: Bessarion, Gaza, Isidore of Kiev, Argyropoulos and Plethon and mingled with them are some Italians who drank in their teachings: the Pulci brothers, Marcilio Ficino and Enea Piccolomini (Pope Pius). 

Ficino, who was commissioned by Cosimo to make the first translation of Plato from Greek into Latin, stands to the right of Plethon, the man whose lectures at Florence mark the return of Plato into the western philosophical consciousness. 

Just above Pleton’s magnificently exotic hat is the bearded face of Ioannis Argyropoulos, who returned to Italy after the Fall of Constantinople to teach Platonic philosophy at the university of Florence (Ficino was his pupil).

At the far end of Plethon’s row is the low bearded face of Theodoros Gaza. He had moved to Italy earlier, following his native Thessaloniki’s fall and was took part in the council of Florence before making a career in Rome. Like many exiles of Byzantium, in 1459 he was part of Bessarion’s retinue.

Bessarion himself is the other bookend to this eminent row and he has a rather splendid (and I think significant) hat. It appears to be a skiadion, a tall, melon-shaped hat of a type which John VIII had worn in Italy and which several artists copied into their work. Bessarion’s hat is decorated with a thistle pattern. 

The Italian word for thistle is ‘cardo’. The same word in Latin means ‘hinge’ and is the root word of Cardinal. In 1459, Bessarion – who had come to Italy in 1439 as a Byzantine monk among the Greek delegation - was probably the most significant Cardinal of the Latin church and the real impetus behind Mantua’s call for crusade for Constantinople. I think Gozzoli has chosen the hat and the thistle symbol to mark out Bessarion’s duality as the Greek-Cardinal.

Interestingly there is a similar hat with the thistle emblem further back in the crowd. If there is a code to be drawn from the ‘red hats for Italians, exotic for foreigners’ and the ‘cardo for Cardinal’, then this figure must be a non-Italian humanist cardinal, probably linked in someway to the Council of Florence. The figure who would fit that bill would be Nicholas of Cusa.

Pope Pius was at the Council of Florence as Cardinal Piccolomini, although he did not play a prominent role. When Callixtus died in 1458, Bessarion was favourite to become Pope but his Byzantine heritage appears to have weighed heavily against him (not for the last time) and Piccolomini took the triple tiara. It was the second time Bessarion was frustrated in a conclave and there would be two more disappointments to come but in Pope Pius, Bessarion at least had an ally for his campaign to reclaim Constantinople which began with the Mantua council and ended, sadly with Pius’s death at Ancona as he waited for the crusading fleet to assemble.


When the delegation returned from Florence to Constantinople, a change of heart came over many of the Greeks who had agreed to the church union. Some, such as Gennadios, became violently opposed to the measure. The new patriarch, Metrophanes, found the mob had dubbed him “mother-killer” for signing the union. Still, Florence did engender a crusade of sorts. Bessarion had read the act from the Cathedral pulpit in Greek and Cardinal Cessarini read it in Latin. But six years later Cessarini was dead in the swamps outside Varna and the crusade collapsed in disastrous defeat without achieving any sort of victory against the Turks. The Union, always unpopular, then looked utterly pointless and the Greeks quietly pretended they had never signed it. So when their situation grew even bleaker and Constantine once again appealed for help, the Latin prelates wanted something more concrete than a shaky signature to seal the bargain. 

A cardinal was dispatched to ordain Hagia Sophia into the Latin church. The man given the task, Isidore, had come to the Council of Florence as a Greek monk but, just like Bessarion, remained there to become a Latin cardinal. He seems to have been given all the tough assignments – firstly dispatched to Moscow to persuade the Rus to accept the union. They declined and imprisoned him for two years before he escaped to Lithuania and back to Rome. Then a decade later he was given the task of consecrating Hagia Sophia. He survived the siege, having the presence of mind to switch his Cardinal’s robes with a corpse as the city fell and later escaped slavery to return to once again to Rome.