One of my favorite Aries women, Isabella Stewart Gardner, collected Tura before it was fashionable to do so. According to her trusted friend and art dealer, historian Bernard Berenson:

Of the young men who flocked to Padua, none brought greater gifts, none drank deeper of Donatello’s art, and none had a more remarkable destiny than Cosimo Tura. It was destined that from him should descend both Raphael and Correggio.

Professor Stephen Campbell, author of a biography on Tura, also states:

Tura was eulogized again in the writings of the great Italian scholar Roberto Longhi, who published his influential Officina Ferrarese in 1934. The preceding year, a great exhibition in Ferrara that was devoted to the city’s Renaissance artists received international attention. Tura was the central figure in this exhibition, with twenty-two works displayed - about half of his surviving oeuvre.

Another history, the rise of humanist culture in Italy, was one of the central manifestations of the Renaissance. A magnificent example of this thought is one of Tura’s greatest paintings: the image of a goddess — most likely Calliope, leader of the nine Muses, who in Greek and Roman mythology presided over the arts and sciences, particularly poetry. Despite its visual splendor, the work does not merely exemplify courtly values of ostentatious display; it refers to humanist theory.

That may be very true, yet to my eyes, A Green Woman emerges through the trees of Tura's allegorical forest.

Campbell: The Muse has the rare distinction of being one of the earliest large-scale mythological images from the Renaissance, and one in which the scholarly values and literary enterprises of the humanist movement are clearly reflected. The Ferrarese court was a source of patronage for some of the leading Greek and Latin scholars of the age who introduced the myths and arts of ancient times. To a remarkable degree, these scholars concerned themselves with the visual arts: They wrote poems in the ancient manner that extolled the beauties of painting and tapestry and paid lavish tribute to celebrity artists such as Pisanello. A new way of valuing painting came into being at the court of Ferrara, a tendency to think of painting not merely as a mechanical art (the normal point of view of men of letters), but as something akin to literary discourse. ... Tura’s Muse can be seen as an icon for humanists, whose poetry shows that they thought of antiquity not in terms of sober moral probity and Stoical ethics, but as an endorsement of intellectual curiosity and sensual experience.

I suggest we contemplate Tura's emerald throne and wonder what clues it may conceal concerning another Primavera: the Spring of Occult Wisdom. Perhaps the Muse is none other than the Lady who first taught humankind the Language of the Doves - Pallas Athena.

The Green Language is the alphabet of the Emerald Tablets. To return to the source, I quote Ovason again:

Zosimus [note: an ancient alchemist] explains why the teacher of the arcane lore, Thoth, should be called "the first man." According to Zosimus, the ancient mystery centers (he names among these only the Chaldeans, the Parthians, the Medes and the Hebrews) called Thoth by the name "Adam." This latter name, he says pointedly, "is a word in the language of the Angels." [note: Doves look quite similar to Angels.]

To return to Zosimus - why was Thoth called "the first man" in the Language of the Angels? The name is almost certainly connected with the notion that Adam was the one who, in esoteric mythology, first gave the secret names to all created things - Adam was, indeed, the inventor of the arcane language of the Angels, our Language of the Birds. It is in this sense that Thoth was the first man, and the explanation accounts for why another term for the arcane tingue is the Language of Thoth, the hermetic tongue.

Or, the Language of Seshat, of Sekhmet, of Mary Magdalene, of the Dove - a Book of Love. Let us be as wise as serpents, and as innocent as those beautiful white birds, my sisters, as we train for the mission before us - the recovery of a Lost Language Book of Green.

See Genesis II : 22 for a clue.

UXL,

Miss Olivia Peyton









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