From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation

by Umberto Eco

  A revised version of “Tipologia della falsificazione” [“A Typology of Forgery”], in Setz (1988), originally given at the Internationaler Kongress der MGH, Munich, September 16–19, 1986. My theoretical (rather than historical) essay, “Falsi e contraffazioni,” was developed on the basis of this publication (see Eco 1990a). [Translator’s note: Relevant also is Eco’s entry (published in English) “Fakes in Arts and Crafts” in Eco 2004c (4:3571–3580).

  1. Equally unsatisfactory are the German definitions in the Brockhaus Enziklopädie (1968) (“Zweck vorgenommene Nachbildung, Veränderung oder historisch irrefhrende Gestaltung eines Gegenstandes (hierzu Tafeln), eines Kunstwerkes, eines literar. Denckmals, einer Unterschrift usf.”) or the Meyers Grosses Universal Lexikon (“der Herstellen eines unechten Gegenstandes oder das Verändern eines echten Gegenstandes zur Tauschung im Rechtverkehr—dadegen Imitation”). The following definitions are from the standard Italian dictionary of Nicola Zingarelli (Vocabolario della lingua italiana). “Falso … A agg.:… 2 Che è stato contraffatto, alterato con intenzione dolosa … SIN. Truccato. CONTR. Autentico.… 4 Che non è ciò di cui ha l’apparenza … SIN. Illusorio.… B s. m.… 3 Falsificazione, falsità … 4 Opera d’arte, francobollo, documento e sim. contraffatto.” “Falsificare … Contraffare, deformare, alterare con l’intenzione e la consapevolezza di commettere un reato.” “Falsificazione … 1 Atto, effetto del falsificare … SIN. Alterazione, contraffazione. 2 Documento o atto artificiosamente prodotto per sostutuire un originale perduto o guasto o per creare testimonianza dolosa.” “Contraffare … 2 Alterare la voce, l’aspetto e sim., spec. per trarre in inganno … 3 Falsificare.” “Facsimile … 1 Riproduzione esatta, nella forma della scrittura e in ogni particolare, di scritto, stampa, incisione, firma. 2 fig. Persona o cosa assai simile a un’altra.” “Pseudo- … primo elemento … che, in parole composte della terminologia dotta e scientifica, significa genericamente ‘falso’… In vari casi indica analogia esteriore, qualità apparente, semplice somiglianza puramente estrinseca, o qualche affinità con quanto designato dal secondo componente.” “Spurio … 1 Illegitimo … 2 Privo di genuinità, di autenticità.” “Apocrifo … 2 Detto di testo, spec. letterario, falsamente attribuito a un’epoica o a un autore. SIN. Spurio.”

  2. See also Haywood (1987: 10–18).

  3. For the terminology of this section see the chapter “Theory of Sign Production” in Eco (1979b).

  4. Often a minimal material or formal variant serves to characterize the object as a unicum: two dollar bills of the same value are doubles as far as their use goes, but not from the bank’s point of view, since their serial numbers are different. Even in a case of perfect reproduction, the token that received the number first is considered theoretically “original.” Hence the interesting question whether we are to consider authentic a fake bill printed (with fraudulent intent) on authentic watermarked and security-threaded stock, with the plates of the Mint, by the director of the Mint in person, who assigns it the same number as another bill legally printed a few moments earlier. If it were ever possible to determine the priority of its printing, only the first bill would be authentic. Otherwise one would have to decide to arbitrarily destroy one of the two bills and consider the other the original.

  5. The modern concept of the work of art as an unrepeatable unicum privileges its originality and its formal and material complexity, which, taken together, constitute the concept of authorial authenticity. Naturally in the practice of critics and collectors the notion of originality often prevails over the presence of relevant structural features. As a result, even a perfect copy of a statue, which reproduces, using the exact same materials, every aesthetically relevant feature of the original, is downgraded only because it is denied recognition of the privilege of originality. Problems of this sort crop up for the plastic and figurative arts but not for written texts, since any reproduction, be it printed or manuscript, of the same poetic text is assumed, for critical purposes, to be a perfect double of the original type (see the distinction between autographic versus allographic arts in Goodman 1968). They do, however, occur among bibliophiles, where in fact value is placed on the particular material consistency which renders one token (a copy of a rare book) something unique compared with other copies of the same book (evidence of possession, state of preservation, width of the margins, etc.).

  6. A recent phenomenon is that of commercial facsimiles of precious illuminated manuscripts, in which the colors, the tactile feel of the gold leaf, the wormholes, and the transparency of the parchment are all reproduced with absolute fidelity, though the manuscript is not reproduced on real parchment but on paper (though it contrives to imitate the consistency of the original parchment). Even the reproduction of real parchment would display, when submitted to chemical tests, characteristics different from the antique original. And even if the reproduction were to be printed on recovered ancient parchment the same tests would demonstrate that the characters printed on it were made by mechanical means. And in any case the ancient parchment used for the reproduction would not be the original parchment of the manuscript.

  7. In the same way we do not have false identification in texts written under a pseudonym when A (usually a famous person or someone otherwise known) produces O but would have it believed that it was produced by an unknown B (the identity of two objects is not an issue in such a case); in cases of plagiarism, in which B produces an object Ob which he presents as his own work, but using wholly or in part an object Oa produced by someone else (where B however does all he can to ensure that Ob will not be identified with Oa); or in cases of aberrant decoding, in which a text O, written according to a code C1, is interpreted as if it were written according to a code C2. Examples of this last practice are the oracular reading of Virgil as a Christian author in the Middle Ages, in the Baroque period the false interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphics on the part of Athanasius Kircher, in modern times the reading of Dante as if he were writing in the secret code of the so-called sect of the Fedeli d’Amore (see Pozzato 1989). But in this kind of exercise there is no question of identification between two physical objects.

  8. This continuing ascendency of logic over grammar in the thirteenth century was accurately described by Gilson (1952) in the chapter of his Philosophie au Moyen Age entitled “L’exil des belles-lettres.”

  9. http://www.logicmuseum.com/authors/aquinas/superboethiumq2.htm.

  10. In the De pulchro et bono, another case of false attribution—to Thomas Aquinas—and this time not just on the part of the Middle Ages but all the way down to our own century (see Chapter 8 in this volume). For a discussion of kalon, see the introduction by Pietro Caramello to the Marietti edition of the De divinis nominibus.

  11. This of course is also the case with artistic fakes, like the fake Dutch masters painted fifty years ago by the extraordinarily talented contemporary artist Han van Meegeren.

  12. See Grabmann (1906–1911, esp. Part IV of the first volume, devoted to the transmission of traditional knowledge), and Chenu (1950: 128–129). On how anthologies may give rise to a series of misunderstandings concerning originals that no one reads any more, see Ghellinck (1939: 95 and 105).

  13. “Dicebat Bernardus Carnotensis nos esse quasi nanos gigantium humeris insidentes, ut possimus plura eis et in remotiora videre, non utique proprii visus acumine aut eminentia corporis sed quia quia in altum subvehimur et extollimur magnitudine gigantes” (“Bernard of Chartres used to say that we were like dwarfs seated on the shoulders of giants. If we see more and further than they, it is not due to our own clear eyes or tall bodies, but because we are raised on high and upborne by their gigantic bigness”), Metalogicon (1159) bk. 3, ch. 4. Translation from Henry Osborn Taylor The Mediaeval Mind ([1911]1919) vol. 2, p. 159. See Jeauneau (1967: 79–99) and Merton (1965).

  14. An interesting link between Priscian and Bernard could be William of Conches, who mentions dwarves and giants in his glosses on Priscian’s Institutiones grammaticae. William’s text preced
es that of John of Salisbury and was written in the years when William was chancellor at Chartres. But, while the first version of William’s glosses dates back to before 1123 (John’s Metalogicon is dated 1159), before Neckam, Peter of Blois, and Alain de Lille, all three cited by Merton, we find the aphorism in 1160 in a text from the school of Laon and later, around 1185, in the Danish historian Sven Aggesen. In the thirteenth century, the aphorism also appears in Gérard of Cambrai, Raoul of Longchamp, Gilles de Corbeil, Gérard of Auvergne, and, in the fourteenth century, in Alexandre Ricat, physician to the kings of Aragon, or other doctors like Guy de Chauliac and Ambroise Paré, as well as in Daniel Sennert. Gregory (1961) identifies it in Gassendi. Ortega y Gasset, in “Entorno a Galileo” (Obras completas V, Madrid 1947: 45), speaking of the succession of generations, says that men stand “one on the shoulders of another, and the one who is on top enjoys the impression of dominating the others, but he ought to realize that at the same time he is their prisoner.”

  15. See, for example, the chapter on the spatial and temporal structures of the Middle Ages in Le Goff (1964).

  16. See McGarry (1955: 167).

  6

  Jottings on Beatus of Liébana

  Read today in a secular spirit, the Apocalypse or Revelation of Saint John the Divine can be savored as an exercise in Surrealism, without the reader feeling the urge to reduce its absurd or oneiric elements to a decipherable letter. Or it could be interpreted as an exercise in mystical symbolism, lending itself to every possible interpretation, a stimulus for the most unbridled flights of the imagination, and consequently anyone proposing to assign a precise meaning to the text would be accused of betraying its rich poetic suggestion. The Middle Ages on the other hand, true to the Pauline admonition, knew that, before seeing truth face to face, “videmus per speculum et in aegnigmate” (“we see through a glass darkly”), and enigmas or riddles, ever since the time of the Sphinx, are there to be solved. The Middle Ages, then, was within its rights to interpret the Apocalyse as an allegory; and the keys for interpreting any allegory correctly have to be absolutely precise.

  The text certainly employs similes—and metaphors as well—that present no problems of interpretation (“His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow.… and his voice as the sound of many waters.”). Nevertheless, taken as a whole, it is an allegory, a rhetorical figure in which the text may be taken literally (what is to prevent seven stars and seven lamps of fire from manifesting themselves?), though it seems more profitable from the hermeneutical point of view to interpret every character, figure, or event with reference to a key (hence, for example, the seven stars are the angels of the seven Churches and the seven lamps are the seven Churches themselves).1

  Once we are in possession of the necessary keys, reading allegory is like solving a puzzle—and etymological wordplay was never so legitimate as it is in this case, if we interpret this riddling as the enigmatic language of a form of mysticism.

  Interpreting the Apocalypse allegorically, however, is not all that easy, because the keys are not always supplied by the text. The Seer tells us what the seven stars are, but he does not spell out clearly who the beast rising up out of the sea is. He tells us the dragon is Satan, but he does not tell us immediately who the beast rising up out of the earth is—he will define him later as a false prophet, but he will confound his identity in a Kabbalistic conjuring of numbers and dynastic hocus-pocus. He speaks of a battlefield, Armageddon, recognizable in Hebrew tradition, and then he alludes to two witnesses who according to modern interpreters are Saints Peter and Paul, but whom Saint Bonaventure identifies instead as Enoch and Elijah (Hexaem I, 3, iii).

  The vision, then, is in the allegorical mode, but it seems to go only halfway toward out-and-out allegory. When, in describing the procession in the Earthly Paradise toward the end of Purgatory, Dante says: “Beneath the handsome sky I have described, / twenty-four elders moved on, two by two, / and they had wreaths of lilies on their heads” (Pg., XXIX, 82–84), his modern commentators inform us that these are the twenty-four elders of the Apocalypse. But in more than one modern commentary on the Apocalypse we are told that the four and twenty elders represent the twenty-four priestly classes (Rossano 1963), while equally frequent is the interpretation that would prefer to identify them with the twelve patriarchs and the twelve apostles. Saint Jerome, on the other hand, saw them as the twenty-four books of the Old Testament. Such an identification obliges us to interpret in turn the four beasts (the lion, the calf, the flying eagle, and the beast with the face as a man) as the four Gospels of the New Testament—something the traditional iconography usually does in fact do, on the evidence supplied once more by Saint Jerome. In another, modern commentary on the Apocalypse, however, Angelini (1969) suggests that the four beasts are beings of a superangelic nature. Can we assert that, for its author John, there existed a terminus a quo for this backward flight, from signifier to signified, a point at which they meant something precise?

  If we attempt to consider the Apocalypse of Saint John as a text that can be anchored to things, we discover that it too, like the episode in Dante’s Purgatory, is allegory in the second degree, an allegory that cites, as its own meaning, another allegory, namely Ezekiel 1:10; and who is to say that Ezekiel in his turn was not citing figures from Assyrian mythology? And so on and so forth. One signified functions only in the context of other signifieds linked to the same isotopy (books of the Old Testament-books of the New, or Heavenly Senate-cherubic intelligences, etc.), and the text as a whole, organized as it is as an open allegory, defies a univocal reading.

  Such is the text that Beatus (730–785)—abbot of Liébana, chaplain to Queen Osinda, wife of Silo, king of Oviedo in northern Spain—finds himself confronted with in his Apocalipsin libri duodecim. Though the Apocalypse itself occupies no more than a few dozen pages, in the Sanders edition (1930) Beatus’s commentary occupies 650, and in the edition published by Italy’s Poligrafico dello Stato more than 1,000, while one of its average manuscripts runs to 300 leaves, written recto and verso and including the illustrations.2

  To speak of Beatus is in fact to speak also and above all of the Mozarabic miniatures that illustrate all the so-called Beati produced between the tenth and eleventh centuries, in an amazing spate of fabulously beautiful books, such as the Beatus of Magius (970), the Beatus of San Millan de la Cogolla (920–930), the Beatus of Valcavado (970), the Beatus of Facundo (1047), the Beatus of San Miguel (tenth century), the Beatus of Gerona (975), the Beatus of the Catedral de Urgell, the Beatus of the monastery of the Escorial, and the Beatus of San Pedro de Cardeña (all three between the tenth and eleventh centuries), and the Beatus of Saint-Sever (1028–1072).

  In theory, the study of the written commentary and the study of the miniatures constitute two distinct problems (the history of biblical exegesis and the iconography of Christian art),3 which would eventually require us to consider the connection between the boom of the Beati (two or three centuries after the composition of the commentary itself) and the history of millenarianism (see Eco 1973). But, though it is our intention to deal only with Beatus’s commentary, we must constantly bear in mind the miniatures it inspired, since, while not always faithful to the commentary, they are heavily indebted to the fascination it exerted.

  6.1. Apertissime

  Beatus is not what we would call a “great” writer, and not simply because he lived in one of the most unsettled centuries of the Early Middle Ages, if we consider that the Venerable Bede—who died when Beatus was still a child—displays far greater intellectual vigor. Naturally Bede lived at the dawn of the English renaissance, while Beatus writes in a Christian Spain entrenched in its isolation at the edges of a hostile world of infidels. But this is not the point, and we must concede that Beatus was a farrago-prone epigone whose Latin syntax would make anyone’s hair stand on end, even somebody accustomed to the piquant corruptions of medieval Latin. It is a miracle that it was not included among the voluptuous readings of Huymans
’s Des Esseintes, who might well have savored its “stammering grace, the often exquisite clumsiness of the monks stirring the poetical left-overs of Antiquity into a pious stew.… the workshop turning out verbs of refined sweetness, substantives smelling of incense, and strange adjectives, crudely fashioned out of gold in the delightfully barbaric style of Gothic jewellery.”4

  If what distinguishes this “Gothic jewelry” is a taste for accumulation and obsessive verbal entrelacs, Beatus is a past master of the art, combining as he does his lack of originality with an excess of earnestness. He acknowledges his role as compiler—bringing together all of the commentaries that authors more famous than he have previously composed; he lines them up without citing his sources at all or citing them incorrectly, unendingly repeating his own long-winded explanations, getting lost in rambling analyses of one passage while dismissing another with no more than a passing allusion; he borrows or steals wholesale from Augustine or Tyconius, seemingly without stopping to ask himself whether what he filches makes sense (such as when, for example, he speaks of the persecutions of the Christians in Africa as if they were taking place in his own day, whereas in fact the Christians involved were those contemporary with Tyconius, several centuries earlier). And yet, just when you are getting used to the idea that all he is doing is repeating what other people have said, you unexpectedly discover that he has changed a word, eliminated a clause, altered an inflection—and all of a sudden the entire meaning of the commentary has been altered. Without letting it show, Beatus has renewed the tradition.

  At the beginning of his commentary, Beatus transcribes an entire passage which he attributes to Saint Jerome, but eleven centuries later we discover it is by Priscillian of Avila (Sanders 1930: XX). He inserts texts several pages long by other writers without any acknowledgment, and then confesses debts of little or no account. He is not agreeable reading, he resists interpretation, he blatantly contradicts himself time and time again, he uses the same Latin citation in two different crucial places, once with the ablative, the other with the accusative (“mille annis” … “mille annos”). His contemporaries could not help noticing his interminable repetitiveness, and yet the success he enjoyed was unprecedented. He influenced generation after generation of readers and spawned a plethora of illuminated manuscripts such as not even the Four Evangelists inspired. His own time probably admired him for his excess of mediocrity—if you utter one banality you sound foolish, if you utter two you’re a bore, but utter 10,000 and in no time you’re Flaubert, the author of that catalogue of clichés, Bouvard et Pécuchet. Or maybe the secret of Beatus’s popularity lies in his ability to transport his reader into a cultural discourse of the past, constructing a world of his own unrelated to the world of reality—something that appealed in general to the people of the Middle Ages, and which must have been even more attractive in a period in which reality was not always easy to take.