The life of Guglielmo Elzeviro

All the information concerning Gugliemo Elezeviro’s life comes from an autograph manuscript found in the Abraham Bredius’ archive at the Netherlands Institute of Art History, or RKD, in The Hague. Hidden in a folder (accession number NL-HaRKD-0380.1014), among crumbling papers and newspaper clippings, it is an octavo booklet made up of sixty-three leaves, probably acquired by Bredius during his grand tour in Italy. Scuffed and tremendously loose at the spine, the contents of the manuscript comprise scrawled notes penned in atrocious handwriting and hundreds of miniatures. Despite a silent life caused by his early accident, Guglielmo Elzeviro was very generous with the ink. He chronicled snippets of his life alternated by philosophical reflections and annotations about his color-making craft. There is no discernible order to the scribblings, and, coherently with Elzeviro’s beliefs, no chronological structure. The following is the best that can be inferred, arranged in a linear fashion, about his life.

As for the time and place of Elezeviro’s birth, such information remains elusive. He was probably born between the cities of Antwerp and Leiden in the year 1580 CE. Those were tumultuous times of continuous revolts by the inhabitants of the Low Lands against Spanish domination. For some people, the so-called Eighty Years’ War was a chance to affirm their individual prestige, an occasion to flaunt their economical power or a confrontation over theological technicalities. Yet for the common folk warfare was mostly an annoying turn of events. Guglielmo Elzeviro’s father, Jan van der Weld, was among the wise few who recognized that trading was best conducted during times of peace. He was a hawker from Leiden, a city he abandoned after the siege by the Spaniards in 1574. He moved South to Antwerp, where he met and married Maritje de Zetter, the daughter of a typesetter – and later a typesetter herself – employed in the prestigious printing workshop owned by Christophe Plantin. Following the wedding, Jan did not stay long: continuous plunderings by the Spaniards prompted him to move back and forth from Antwerp to Leiden. He established connections between several publishing houses, engaging in a small itinerant commerce of printed matter. His recollection of affiliations from his natal city proved to be a valuable asset in his trade, allowing him to navigate the complex web of alliances and rivalries that defined the publishing industry of the day. Maritje followed him on these journeys, giving birth to their only son – whose original given name remains unknown – before settling in the printing house of Lodewijk Elzevir in Leiden. She provided the family with a stable income, while the husband carried on buying and reselling vernacular bibles, woodcuts, incunabula, and folios, avoiding the inquisitive control of the Spaniards. As the conflicts dragged on, he later indulged in more hazardous business territories as an industrial spy, a middleman for plagiarism attempts, and even as a bare thief, until probably discovered. Either for his deteriorating reputation or for his intolerance to the clashes of the ongoing war, he decided to drift again southward, not before taking – without asking – several items from the publishing houses he was trading with, and his own son from the custody of the mother. The causes of his erratic behavior are to remain unknown, if not to be outlined as a mere lack of patience coupled with his zealotry for accumulation.

With a rickety cart stuffed with stolen prints and a confused boy – Guglielmo should have been around 15 years old – they trudged along the road built by Spanish rulers to move their armies. Jan aimed for less protestant and less riotous territories, but instead he just found on the road a permanent fix for his pains. He crossed paths with an Italian condottiero, recruited by the Spanish crown to fight in the Low Lands with his scant army and a horse that was unprepared for the rumbles of the cannons. The poor mare fell into madness, throwing the startled rider who, in turn, struck his head on the ground and, like his mount, descended into war-induced psychosis. The armyman was forced into a delirious and lonely retreat, until meeting Jan shortly before the Alps. After getting acquainted in an improvised lingua franca, the Duchtman made a desperate – or bluntly stupid – attempt to persuade the deranged Italian to purchase one of his smuggled books, the account of Angelum Merulam, a protestant clergyman and martyr. A not-so-pleasurable offer for the condottiero, whose catholic rage fermented in a damaged brain pushed him to slay the poor Jan on the spot, sever the tongue of his blameless son – you shan’t preach the wrong word of the Lord – and then run away with spirited eyes.

With a mouthful of cloth to halt the haemorrhage, a dead father by the roadside, and the few belongings Jan managed to carry from the Low Lands, the nameless and by now mute Dutch adolescent had no choice but to continue the journey alone, tracing the trail to Italy through the mountains. In the cart he had bottles of printing inks – vermillion and black – a few publications (including the infamous one), and a small leather bag full of valueless copper coins and few silver rijksdaalders, freshly minted with the armored bust of Willem the Silent adorning their obverse. These items spoke in lieu of the speechlessness of Guglielmo, as he journeyed through the Spaniard road. Silent as the prince on the coins he carried, he was christened by the Italians as “Willem”, quickly italianized to “Guglielmo”. Later, he adopted the surname of “Elzeviro”, taken from the frontmatter of that book of which his mother arranged the text, and his father’s dried blood emblazoned the spine. By the help of divine providence, he eventually arrived in the city of Venice where he settled for nearly a decade.

With the aid of the Dutch merchant community in the capital of the Serenissima, Guglielmo found work as an assistant of the vendecolori Maddalena Battistagno, a color merchant specialized in manufacturing of a wide variety of materials used as pigments and dyes. Under the tutelage of Pietro Maria Canepari, a regular visitor of Battistagno’s shop, Guglielmo learned the art of chromatic production. He mastered to craft verdigris, smalt, German blue, tin yellow, terrarossa, bone black, lead white, crimson derived from the cochineal insect of the New World, as well as brazilwood, fenugreek. Purpurinus, a gold substitute, was his signature product, as he invented a new technique melding brass, sulfur, and sal ammoniac into an amalgam that resulted in a more lustrous and stable preparation. The first annotations from Guglielmo’s messy hand date back from these years, as records of his experiments in a opaque broth of italian and dutch vernacular with a pinch of latin, extracted from intensive readings of polyglot and unauthorized bibles. Guglielmo’s fame as an enlightened color maker grew, as much as his blooming knowledge, which got parasited by Canepari and funneled in the alchemical publication De Atramentis cuiuscunque generis without proper recognition. The misdemeanor from his former teacher was combining with escalating frictions in the workplace caused by the decline of the specialized business of vendecolori. This mix poorly reacted with Guglielmo’s feverish temperament inherited from his father: all of a sudden, he disappeared, starting over the journey that from the Low Lands was pointing south.

Upon arriving in Rome in 1610, Guglielmo’s expertise in color-making secured for him a humble position in the workshop of Lodovico Cardi, also known as il Cigoli. The esteemed painter was occupied with a fresco on the dome of the Basilica of Saint Mary Major, and Guglielmo spent his days grinding iridescent stones mixed with egg yolks and linseed oil in utter stillness, beneath the scaffoldings or in a damp corner of the bottega. Guglielmo’s stay in the capital of the Holy decaying Church was brief, lasting only a handful of years, until the death of Cigoli in 1613. Yet, it was a dense and fertile period. The intellectual ferment around Guglielmo prompted him to leaf through the books owned by Cigoli, who was also working on his treatise on perspective. Moreover, the painter was good friend with Galileo Galilei. The scientist visited Rome, but he got too embroiled in heated debates with the Jesuits and was then too busy to engage in any meaningful conversation with Guglielmo, whose disastrous social skills paired with the amputed tongue prevented him any interaction deeper than nods and smirks. Nonetheless, the Dutch snatched an early version of Galileo’s De Motu, fragments of a draft intended as a gift – which regrettably got lost – to Cigoli. This marked Guglielmo’s first foray into Aristotelian philosophy, particularly physics. His insatiable curiosity led him to hoard as much knowledge as his brain could muster. Fascinated by the way colors seemed to flow and change as the painters applied them to the canvas or the plaster, he began to wonder the deeper connection between the shifts in the quality of chromaticism and the broader concept of change and motion.

After the death of Cigoli, Guglielmo ventured southward in 1615, eventually stopping in Naples. The purity of his golden inks easily persuaded the painter Belisario Corenzio to invite Guglielmo to his workshop. Despite the artist’s renowned choleric temperament, these were peaceful times in which the colormaking task was accompanied by a forceful study of Avicennian philosophy and other classics. It was a research accomplished in a sort of monastic fashion, with tints of idiotic stubborness. Guglielmo’s writing started to expand to include more philosophical reflections, although the reader is put in front of the uneasy challenge of making sense for a lot of inconsistencies in the content, flimsy logical reasoning and dreadful prose. The lack of formal education is palpable in every line; even so, several passages testify notable ideas around the most diverse topics.

A keen observer of the artists with whom he worked, he began to question the very nature of the images they were reproducing. The use of his translucent pigments, reflective microparticles, and iridescent surfaces introduced an element of motion into the static figures. However, while the subjects drawn on the canvas might be caught in a dynamic pose, as was the trend in the emerging baroque style of the Mediterranean – artisan and craftsmen were already buzzing about this guy called Caravaggio – this trend did not fully address the nature of motion itself. Still, it seemed that the idea of movement could be suggested by images frozen in a perduring present. Guglielmo pondered whether motion was inextricably linked to time or whether it could exist independently of it, freed by the most ambiguous concept we ever fiddled with. As Saint Augustine had famously asked, “What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; but if I want to explain it to a questioner, I do not know.” Could time be unbound from motion, or was motion, in fact, the more fundamental concept?

Aristotle had already given ontological priority to motion over time, but Guglielmo was further inspired by a series of woodcut prints by Holbein that he had discovered in the dusty library of Cigoli’s workshop. Published in “Les simulachres and historiees faces de la mort,” these prints illustrated the inevitability of death through the depiction of dancing cheerful skeletons. Guglielmo saw in them a deeper truth about the nature of motion and its relationship to time. He wrote:

Life is often linked with movement, with the future moving forward to become the past. Death, on the other hand, is stillness itself, the force which puts an end to vital energy and delivers the soul to either the timeless heavens or eternal damnation. A death that dances may be an absurdity: the timeless Thanatos cannot participate in one of the most lively activities of all, twirling on its toes, and brandishing its scythe. However, if the eternal dance of death were possible, then movement without time would no longer be an absurdity.

Aristotle’s observations on motion are puzzling to the careful reader. Several contradictions are at play. For the Greek philosopher, motion – or change – is the actuality of a potential insofar as it is potential. That is, it is the process where the actual possibility for something to be something else is fully manifested. Here is an example provided by Guglielmo himself: the preparation of the vermilion pigment requires a fine grind of a compound that starts as black and slowly turns into the desired shade of red. Change is, according to the aristotelian view, the becoming red of the mixture, even when is still dark as pitch. Philosophers like Avicenna tried to understand if there is any difference between the qualities of becoming-red and being-red, to avoid the contradiction that things in motion are already the same as the things they are soon going to be. Guglielmo Elzeviro, sometimes insensitive to the trivialities of the thought, ditched this apparent paradox by questioning the nature of time itself.

Luckily for him, Guglielmo lived too early to be trapped in the oppressive metaphysical views promoted by Kant and Newton, who considered time and space as pregivens, schemata in our heads or the empty containers in which everything happens. In fact, before being trashed away by the scientific revolution, in Aristotle’s philosophy one can find a definition of time uncontaminated from the rigidity of the modern structure of reality. According to a passage in the fourth book of Physics, time is only a subjective feeling when we look at a process delimited by a before and an after. It is the perceived interval occurring from the seed to the full blooming of a rose. It exists only thanks to our ability – and choice – to distinguish the two different states of the flower, from its pure potentiality to its perfect actualization full of inebriating scent. In this view, between the forms of the seed and the blossom there is an ambiguous incompleteness on its way to be perfect, namely the change measured by temporal distance.

Banging his head on the question, Guglielmo realized that it was possible to achieve a pristine conceptualization of motion without time only by abandoning the perspective made of alternating potentialities and actualities. Instead, one must view each instant of motion as a perfect actualization, independent of any before or after. Guglielmo delved into this timeless zone while pulverizing cinnabar powder into silky dust, as he was able to be aware of each minute step of the process: from the carbon black to the peel of chestnut, diving into the hypnotic shades of burnt sienna, from coagulated blood to persian plum (still too coarse), auburn morphing into rust, and finally, the vibrant vermillion. Each of these hues was a splendid form in itself, and not a mere imperfection crammed between two most limpid essences. Thus, the only possible conclusion complementary to Aristotle’s: we perceive time only because we are unable to recognize a perfect order of things in each instant. Our limited, human perspective hinders us from discerning the infinite multitude of forms. Instead, we are compelled to organize the chaotic surroundings in terms of before and after, always in relation to the poor amount of tones and trembles of reality that we are able to apprehend. When we cannot see the absolute splendor of each istant, we wander aimlessly in the current of time, taking refuge within memory and expectations.

In his last years Guglielmo refined his craftmanship, testing his colours by drawing elaborate miniatures on his notebook. Eventually, he began to corroborate his ideas through visual reasoning. He yearned to capture the perpetual essence of things in motion: the stillness in the soaring flight of birds, the tranquil sway of a leaf being carried by the wind, the languorous pace of the ox as it ambled across the fields with drowsy eyes. Yet, these subjects proved too fleet for even his astute observational skills. Among a profusion of failed experiments, he chose a timeless subject: death, and its metaphorical representation in a still life reproduced around seven hundred times with the most imperceptible shift of details in each rendition. Unbeknownst to him, he predated the invention of cinema by three centuries, but his only aim was to show the inconsistency of time and the utter purity of each transient moment, remarking a memento mori in the most obsessive way. His final, too ambitious plan was to illustrate the infinite knowledge of God, and his eternal perspective, uncontaminated by our lowly temporal passions. The sudden mystical features in Guglielmo’s meditations might be explained by an intuition of his impending demise, but the focus of his endeavour was sharpening. For the nature of motion is the divine breath that unites instants together, and Guglielmo was striving to be present amidst them, in the faithful attempt of moving towards the heavens, away from time.

It is tempting to believe that Guglielmo was truly able to circumvent the constraints of Chronos. The written recollections of the events of his life, once the crooked phrasing has been straightened up, offer an astonishing amount of episodes described with the most meticolous care. Although, the historian cannot confirm nor deny the events recounted, linking them to other records: at present, the name of Guglielmo Elzeviro is nowhere else to be found. His existence appears plausible within the bigger picture of the history taught in schools, but Guglielmo Elzeviro’s life will perdure in a blurred area, where narrations cannot be confirmed nor denied, and never fully accepted as true facts or as the product of someone’s fervent imagination.

The last two entries in Guglielmo’s notebook are dated respectively the 11th and the 14th December of 1631. On the 11th, Guglielmo contemplates about the properties of basaltic rocks, a promising material for the preparation of black pigments. The last entry resembles a fragment of poetry, a pair of heptasyllabic lines in Italian:

nella morte si muore
nella morte si muove

which, sacrificing the assonance, may be loosely translated as “within death one dies, within death one moves”. The following three pages are empty. We can only assume that Guglielmo was already preparing himself for his last journey. Though, it is worth to notice several coincidences. Belisario Corenzio was known to be an irascible artist, and it is said he would use any nefarious means to wipe out any competition in the business of frescos, poisoning his best disceples, like Luigi Rodriguez, or maybe a skillful artisan who was showing an emergent talent. Furthermore, the mount Vesuvius suddenly erupted on the 16th of December: it is estimated that four thousands people were killed, including perhaps a loner who was looking for black rocks on the slopes of the volcano. If Guglielmo was murdered by toxic agents, turned into ashes, or if otherwise he just disappeared, forgotten by time, it is only a matter of conjecture.