“The City of Truth”: A Closer Look at Bartolomeo Del Bene’s Civitas veri sive morum

Bartolomeo Del Bene (b. 1514). Civitas veri sive morum... Aristotelis de moribus doctrinam, carmine et picturis complexa, et illustrata commentariis Theodori Marcilii.... Paris, Ambroise and Jérôme Drouart, 1609.

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In 1585, the diplomat and poet Bartolomeo Del Bene wrote his remarkable utopian work, Civitas veri sive morum, a poetic meditation in Latin hexameters, based on the Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle and dedicated to Henry III. It was, however, only published in 1609, posthumously edited by Del Bene’s nephew Alfonso, bishop of Albi, who dedicated the publication to Henri IV. This publication – offered here in its rare first edition – is further accompanied by the commentary of Théodore Marcile (1548-1617) and supplemented with a marvellous series of engravings executed by the publisher and print dealer Thomas de Leu (1560–1620). Altogether, it offers a fascinating look at the path toward “the ideal” as considered in Renaissance thought.

Del Bene’s poem is part of the Renaissance idea of the ideal city. The genre of utopian literary was popularized by Thomas More’s Utopia, first published in 1516, which described the nature of an ideal society. This society lives, however, in an ideal city, a particularly inspiring thought problem for artists and architects already in the 15th century. Notable examples include the seminal visionary city of Sforzinda, named after Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, and designed by the architect Antonio di Pietro Averlino (ca. 1400 - ca. 1469), and the panel known as The Ideal City, likely created in the early 1480s after a design by Giulio da San Gallo. With its allusions to the edifices of Greco-Roman antiquity and learned use of perspective, the panel presents the importance for architecture in the development of a cultivated, well-ordered society.

The Ideal City, after design by Giulio da San Gallo, ca. 1480-ca. 1484. The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore. PD-US.

Such utopian ideals were also the basis for the real city of Palmanova, founded in 1593, which was built by the Venetian Republic in the shape of a nine-point star (or star fort).

City plan of Palmanova, from Georg Braun and Frantz Hogenberg’s Civitates orbis terrarum. PD-US.

Del Bene’s City of Truth (Civitas veri) bares strong resemblance to these designs, but shifts the emphasis to the inward state. The elaborate city plan, an overview of which is presented in a double-page spread, elaborates Aristotle’s ideas on the work necessary to achieve and maintain an ideal character or soul. Del Bene’s poem describes a month-long journey undertaken by his patron Marguerite, Duchess of Savoy, who is led by none other than Aristotle himself. Starting from the canonical description of the five senses, it develops through a listing of traditional vices and virtues in hierarchical fashion and culminates in a discussion of philosophical wisdom.

The entrance to the City of Truth is via five architectural portals, each devoted to a different sense. The emphasis on the senses derives from the Aristotelian maxim (found in Thomas Aquinas’ De veritate), Nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu – there is nothing in the understanding which was not first in the senses. So, according to the Aristotelian tradition, thought derives from the senses. This also has important ethical implications which the trope of the architectural doorway was particularly well suited to represent. “One of the most common ways of imaging the senses was as doors, windows or gateways to the citadel of the soul… The gateway allows the senses to be conceived both as guardians of the soul, and as potentially dangerous breaches in its integrity.” (S. Connor, “Literature, Technology and the Senses” in The Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, eds. D. Hillman and M. Ulrika, Cambridge, 2015, p. 181). Following Aristotle, Del Bene therefore presents the senses as the intermediary between interior and exterior of the human body, but also between the private and public, inner urges and civic responsibility.

The Portal of Touch

The relationship between the senses and virtue is well depicted in the portal of touch, which is presided over by nude figures of Venus and Mars lying together while bound by Vulcan’s net. According to the myth, Vulcan (Venus’ husband) forged the net with fine metal wire and used it to ensnare the two lovers while they were in bed together. Trapping them in their indecency, he gathered the gods of Olympus to see the spectacle and further humiliate the pair. As Elizabeth Harvey remarks, this representation over the haptic gateway “serves a monitory function, a warning about the dangers of aggressive or seductive touch that can quickly convert into powerful feelings or affect that in turn translate into the social actions of war and illicit sexuality. The Mars and Venus narrative is linked to the iconography of touch precisely because the myth encapsulates so many of the features of touch as a sense: pleasure and pain, illicit sexuality, manual skill, and social tact.” (E. D. Harvey, “The Portal of Touch,” p. 392).

The Labyrinth of Avarice

Once through the five gates, five avenues or highways lead inward toward the centre of the city. Between these highways are swampy valleys – dens of vice – while the highways themselves are each divided into several compartments reflective of different virtues. These are once again presented in accordance with the Aristotelian scheme: in his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle discusses moral virtue as midway between the extremes of passion; for example, Fortitude is described by the philosopher as being midway between the opposites of Audacity and Cowardice. Thus, in Del Bene’s visualization, at The Palace of Fortitude, the eponymous allegorical figure is similarly presented between those of Cowardice, on the left, and Audacity, on the right, while in front of her a pile of trophies reaches for the skies.

The Palace of Fortitude

The journey through these virtues and vices leads to the heart of the city where a large rock represents the centre of the soul. Upon this Acropolis are five temples dedicated to intellectual virtues (by Aristotle’s scheme, these are different from moral virtues), along with a single, central flame that rises powerfully above them all. Respectively devoted to knowledge, art, prudence, intelligence and wisdom, the temples are highly Aristotelian, representing the ultimate quest for truth.

At the centre of Del Bene’s City of Truth

At the temple of Intelligence we find a central statue of Orpheus who is shown playing his lyre and taming the wild beasts at his feet.

The Temple of Intelligence

The summit is reached via a set of staircases reflective of Aristotle’s concept of the three internal senses: common sense, imagination and memory. These are the internal senses that process the sense-impressions received from external stimuli. “The impressions which we take of the outer world through our five senses are absorbed by the inner faculty of common sense, whence they are passed on to other faculties of the soul which abstract from them their intellectual content. Then they are stored in memory. These three ladders which mount the rock are continuations of the highways leading from the gates of the five senses – there are two more on the other side of the rock which we cannot see… There are even some more detailed allegories of the Aristotelian doctrine in these little figures on the rock –  on the left sense impressions from the five senses being gathered together by common sense, on the right, a little sense impression is passing over from common sense to memory.” (Yates, “Architectural Themes,” p. 31)

Detail of the centre of the City of Truth.

The tall central flame, by contrast, belongs to the Augustinian tradition and represents the magnificence of the mind and the power of the will. Indeed, the very notion of a city also relates to Augustine. In his landmark De Civitate Dei (The City of God), the philosopher offered a highly important meditation on such profound theological issues as original sin and the suffering of the righteous.

A remarkable wide-margined and illuminated copy of the rare second edition – the first printed in Rome – of Augustine’s City of God, a typographical monument.

Aurelius Augustinus (354-430). De Civitate Dei. Rome, Conradus Sweynheym and Arnoldus Pannartz, in the house of Petrus de Maximo, 1468. See the full description here.

Augustine wrote the treatise in the 5th century AD, in response to pagan accusations that the Sack of Rome resulted from the abolition of pagan worship by Christian leaders. Augustine argues on the contrary, that it was internal moral corruption that led to the fall of the “Eternal City”, and elaborated his point with the description of two cities: the City of God and the City of Man – the elect and the damned.

Thus while highly Aristotelian, Del Bene’s City also demonstrates the Renaissance inheritance of medieval thought as well. “Like so many Renaissance allegories, the 'Civitas veri' grows from a medieval root. The commentator Marcile points out its indebtedness to St Augustine's 'City of God', and indeed the plan of the City of Truth recalls illustrations in medieval manuscripts of the City of God. The allegorical dream in the architectural setting has a strong hold on the Renaissance imagination, as exemplified by the 'Hypnerotomachia Poliphili', to which work the 'Civitas veri', though of a different temper, has a certain relationship”. (F. A. Yates, The French Academies of the Sixteen Century, p. 112).”

The rare second edition of the Poliphilo, the most famous illustrated book of the Renaissance.

Francesco Colonna (ca. 1433-1527). La Hypnerotomachia di Poliphilo… Venice, Sons of Aldo Manuzio, 1545. See the complete description here.

Certainly, the highly circuitous, disorienting journey imagined in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Poliphilo's Strife of Love in a Dream) seems a strange comparison to the orderly, didactic undertaking presented in Del Bene’s Civitas veri. Yet in their differences and affinities, the respective quests toward love and virtue – both set amidst highly architectural, surrealist dreamscapes and both representing a desire to synthesize Aristotelian moral philosophy with neo-Platonic Formalism – offer a striking testament to the important place of such allegories in the Renaissance vision of the ideal and the personal and public pilgrimage required to attain it.

How to cite this information

Julia Stimac, “'The City of Truth': A Closer Look at Bartolomeo Del Bene’s Civitas veri sive morum,” PRPH Books, 15 July 2020, https://www.prphbooks.com/blog/del-bene-civitas-veri. Accessed [date].

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