Raphael's authorship in the 'Expulsion of Heliodorus.' - interpretation of court painter Raphael's mural

34. See P. Watson, "To Paint Poetry: Raphael on Parnassus," in Renaissance Rereadings: Intertext and Context, ed. M. C. Horowitz et al., Urbana, Ill., 1988, 113-41.

35. G. Vasari, Le vite de'piu eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, IV, ed. G. Milanesi, Florence, 1879, 12. On Vasari's praise of Raphael's narrative skills (and for discussion of the passage that I cite), see D. Rosand, "Raphael, Marcantonio, and the Icon of Pathos," Source, III, Winter 1984, 49-50.

36. See M. Foucault, "What Is an Author?" in The Foucault Reader, ed. P. Rabinow, New York, 1984, 101-20.

37. For a different approach to the issue of pictorial authorship in the Renaissance, see Koerner, 111-12, who draws on Paul de Man's notion of autobiography in discussing Durer's authorial status.

38. The locutions "me fecit" and "me pinxit" evoked pious formulae appropriate for liturgical gifts, as with the inscription on a crucifx of 1129 in the Opera del Duomo at Siena: "Vos qui me videte rogate D[eu] M pro eo qui me fecit" (You who see me petition God on behalf of he who made me). See A.-M. Lecoq, "Cadre et rebord," Revue de l'Art, XXIV, 1974, 15-16. For further discussion and bibliography on such pious inscriptions, see H. Kessler, "On the State of Medieval Art History," Art Bulletin, LXX, no. 2, June 1988, 180. See also E. R. Curtius, "Devotional Formulae and Humility," in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. R. Trask, Princeton, 1953, 407-16.

39. I draw here on the researches of A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, London, 1984. For the sake of my argument, I have taken the liberty of condensing, collapsing, and overlooking the nuanced history of changes in the status of authorship during the 12th and 13th centuries.

40. See A. R. Ascoli, "The Vowels of Authority (Dante's Convivio IV.vi.3-4)," in Discourses of Authority in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. K. Brownlee and W. Stephens, Hanover, 1989, 23-46; and idem, "The Unfinished Author: Dante's Rhetoric of Authority in Convivio and De vulgari eloquentia," in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, ed. R. Jacoff, Cambridge, 1993, 45-66.

41. For some remarks, see A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott, Medieval Literary Theory, c. 1100-c. 1375, Oxford, 1988, 373ff. See also J. Glomski, "From Authority of the Text to Authority of Reason in the Sixteenth Century: A Matter of Interpretation," in Aequitas, Aequalitas, Auctoritas: Theoretical Reason and Legitimation of Authority in XVIth Century Europe, ed. D. Letocha, Paris, 1992, 291-94, which critically surveys several of the essays in the same volume.

42. On the Virgin's gesture in the Madonna of the Victory as one of favor and protection, see C. Schleif, "Hands That Appoint, Anoint and Ally: Late Medieval Donor Strategies for Appropriating Approbation through Painting," Art History, XVI, no. 1, Mar. 1993, 25. Cf. Shearman, 1986, 84, who sees the pope's gesture in the Heliodorus as one of protection over the women and children.