Through a Jewel, Darkly A Reading of the Frontispiece of Giambattista Vico’s

The image, which Vico refers to as the dipintura, was designed for the 1730 edition by Vico’s friend and fellow Neapolitan, Domenico Antonio Vaccaro, and was intended to serve as an alle

Ben DeForestSpring 2008214.748 – Vico and the Old ScienceProf Walter Stephens

Through a Jewel, Darkly: A Reading of the Frontispiece of Giambattista Vico’s

Scienza Nuova

Editions of Vico’s New Science published since 1730 have presented a detailed

frontispiece as an introduction to the text The image, which Vico refers to

as the dipintura, was designed for the 1730 edition by Vico’s friend and

fellow Neapolitan, Domenico Antonio Vaccaro, and was intended to serve

as an allegorical representation of the philosophical system about to be presented in the text, so as “to give the reader some conception of this work before he reads it, and, with such aid as imagination may afford, to call it back to mind after he has read it.”1 The particular engraving used for the frontispiece has varied some by edition, but the major features of the image remained largely uniform: a ray of light issuing forth from a divine eye, a female figure wearing a winged cap, the blind poet Homer, and various

instruments and icons representative of human history and civilization In the 1744 edition, another image of similar iconography was printed on the title page, overleaf of

the dipintura This image, which in the scholarly literature has become

known as the impresa, depicts a woman with a winged cap seated on a

sphere, holding a builder’s square and staring into a mirror, and it bears the inscription

“IGNOTA LATEBAT.”2

1 Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max

Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984) ¶1 Further references will be made parenthetically within the body of the essay.

2 Donald Phillip Verene, “Vico’s ‘IGNOTA LATEBAT,’” New Vico Studies, Vol 3 (1987): pp 79-82.

The scholarly literature still does not to present a uniform interpretation of all matters concerning the symbolism of the two images, but a few likely possibilities seem

to have emerged Verene, for instance, writes, “I believe that the impresa and the

dipintura are ‘before and after’ depictions of Vico’s ‘new science of metaphysic,’”3 and

he goes on to suggest that “[t]he impresa shows metaphysic as self-sufficient and thus the producer of abstractions The dipintura shows metaphysic as the mediator of the divine

and the civil and thus is a portrait of Vico’s new metaphysic.”4 Verene sees the impresa

as roughly equivalent to those metaphysical systems of the early modern era that Vico

outwardly denounces in his work, the dipintura as an approximate figuration of the world

of Vico’s philosophy

One should, therefore, be able to extract from the imagery of the dipintura the

structure of Vico’s philosophical system and to define his position vis-à-vis various early

modern philosophers by comparing the imagery of the dipintura with that of the impresa.

And so Verene writes,

The right-angled triangle held in the right hand of the figure of the

impresa has been merged with the circular shape of the mirror held in her

left hand and has become an equilateral triangle framing the eye of God in

the dipintura The mirror itself has been transformed into the convex

jewel that is placed on the breast of metaphysic in the dipintura and which

now reflects the triangle of the eye of God onto the statue of Homer

The triangle and the mirror no longer portray an internal relationship

within metaphysic (between the two hands) but are formed upwards into

the divine eye, and an aspect of the mirror, its reflective power, is retained

by metaphysic in the convex jewel In the dipintura metaphysic

becomes a mediator between the divine eye and the world of civil things

Through metaphysic the divine order is reflected into the world of civil

things.5

3 Ibid., p 86.

4 Ibid., p 88.

5 Ibid., p 87.

For Verene, the imagery present in the impresa all finds an analogue of sorts in the

dipintura, though the role played by the imagery in each of the two pictures differs In

particular, the figure of philosophical reflection—and, to borrow a modern English phrase that seems particularly apt given the appearance of the female figure’s paunch,

“navel gazing”—that appears in the impresa is turned from something of a solitary act

despised by Vico to a sort of civil communion with the divine

Verene’s reading finds a very close echo in an essay by Angus Fletcher In his

reading of the dipintura, he remarks,

There we see the reflected ray of the light from the Eye of God Ancient

tradition spoke of light emanating from the Divine Eye Cartesian optics

continued to hold that light is an emanation of the human eye, such that

we see objects much the way a blind man feels them with his stick In this

context, it seems plausible to hold that Vichian sight, or “insight,”

amounts to an active illumination of the objective world The world’s

puzzling surface yields finally only to the mysterious capacity analogous

to God’s Eye, our equivalent emanating power and organ of sight, the

mind The Table thus sets up an analogy: as the Divine Eye emits divinely

radiant light, so the human “eye of the mind” emits a humanly (socially)

radiant light.6

On Fletcher’s reading, Vico is engaging in a sort of analogical appropriation: human beings reflect upon, illuminate and understand the world in the same way that God does

The spatial plane of the dipintura seems “twisted” and objects seem displaced, according

to Fletcher, and this at least in part because the characteristics of the human and divine are intermingled in an unusual manner Vico pieces together the neo-Platonic doctrine ofemanation as the productive force of truth in the world with the modern conception of human beings as the active, empirical perceivers of the nature of the world Thus, a very realistically depicted human eye is placed in the position of the divine As Fletcher takes

it, Vico means to suggest that just as God illuminates the world of divine creation and

6 Angus Fletcher, “On the Syncretic Allegory of the New Science,” New Vico Studies, Vol 2 (1986), p 37.

thereby knows it, the human being can illuminate the world of human creation and thereby know it For both Verene and Fletcher, the two pictures and the two bends of the

ray in the dipintura correspond to two distinct realms of analysis: two very different

kinds of metaphysics and two very different kinds of observation and illumination And they both together contribute to illuminating the system of Vico’s new metaphysics

I want to suggest that something slightly more complex is going on in the case of

the dipintura Even if Fletcher’s reading is correct in part, it does not capture everything

of the distorted character of the dipintura and the displaced positionings of its images

The “twist” that Fletcher finds in the “containing space of the picture plane” and in “the

Mannerist shape of the figura serpentinata”7 characteristic of Homer and dame

metaphysic, and which suggests for Fletcher a radical break in the strict logical coherence

of the image, can also be seen in the reflection of the divine ray off the breast of dame metaphysic That is, something very complex and ambiguous occurs with the bending of this illuminating ray, something that excludes the possibility of an interpretation of the two arms of the ray bearing a simple, analogical relation to one another

Both Verene and Fletcher seem to be aware that the ray of light in the dipintura

bears important implications for Vico’s account of human knowledge Its absence from

the impresa suggests that a certain kind of human knowledge can fail to exist when

certain conditions are lacking, and both Verene and Fletcher note that those conditions are clearly present in Vico’s new conception of metaphysics What I think they both

miss, however, is the complexity of the philosophical position implicit in the dipintura

If indeed, as I suggest with Verene, the dipintura represents a form of metaphysics elaborated and advanced in Vico’s New Science, and the impresa represents a

7 Ibid., p 35.

metaphysics still yet to receive the new Vichian upgrades, then there should be a great

difference in the complexity of the two images The dipintura should represent a much

more multifarious and sophisticated metaphysical system than that contained within the

impresa Indeed, there should be something deficient about the metaphysics of the impresa.

I want to suggest, beyond Verene and others, that the impresa represents

metaphysics not simply in a more primitive state, still yet to undergo the Vichian

philosophical advancements; rather, the metaphysics of the impresa is, I think, a destitute

philosophy, one that Vico wishes both to supplant and to condemn It is the metaphysics

of Descartes, Locke and others; it is a metaphysics that privileges the philosophical faculties and cognitive activities of the individual over and above the community, the world, or divinity; and it is a metaphysics incipient in an age in which “reflection” has emerged as the new guiding activity through which philosophy is said to be conducted This new activity of reflection is not only central to the terminology of modern

metaphysics, it even provides an accurate visualization of what characterizes this

metaphysics: this is a philosophy that reflects on its own ability to function as a

philosophy; it is a philosophy that looks at itself in the mirror It is a manner of thinking,

in Vico’s words, that leads human civilization into the “barbarism of reflection” (1106)

In moving from this destitute philosophy to his metaphysics, from the impresa to the dipintura, I suggest that Vico is attempting to counter the barbarism of reflection

Vico is well aware that reflection has become the dominant mode for conceiving of human understanding, in terms of both vocabulary and imagery; he knows that in his present day, in the age of human beings, he must render an account of his metaphysics in

terms of reflection His rendering of reflection, however, is drastically divergent,

profoundly subtler and more complex than that which one finds, for instance, in

Descartes In paying close attention to how Vico renders his conception of reflection,

and especially as it appears in the dipintura, I hope better to understand how Vico’s

philosophical system is intended to function Indeed, I hope to understand how, by coordinating the various branches of learning contained within his metaphysical tract, Vico aims to forestall, subvert, or even annul what he sees as following from the

“barbarism of reflection”—what Stephen Taylor Holmes refers to as “the ‘modalization’ of reality.”8 I intend, in other words, to imagine Vico’s philosophical system

As a way of addressing what I take to be lacking in the interpretations of the

philosophical meaning of the dipintura provided by Verene, Fletcher and others, I turn now to several questions regarding the imagery of the impresa and the dipintura that still

remain to my mind unanswered First among them: Whence comes the jewel? Why, as

Verene suggests, is the mirror from the impresa “transformed into the convex jewel that

is placed on the breast of metaphysic in the dipintura”?9 Why does it not, rather, remain

a flat mirror? Presumably not for purposes of fashion But if so, then why not a flat jewel? Whence the convexity?

I would be unconvinced by any suggestion that the transformation is not

meaningful We cannot, for instance, dismiss the jewel as a piece of imagery borrowed uncritically from other examples of Renaissance iconography that might have served as a

model for the dipintura Frankel suggests one such possible influence and cites Rossi on

8 Stephen Taylor Holmes, “The Barbarism of Reflection,” in Vico: Past and Present, Vol 2, ed Giorgio

Tagliacozzo (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981), p 221.

9 Verene, “Vico’s ‘IGNOTA LATEBAT,’” p 87.

two others,10 but none of the examples there given include any mention of a convex jewel If there are to be found other convincing accounts of possible models for the

figure of metaphysic in Vico’s dipintura, and if one of those possible models bears a

convex jewel on her breastplate, then perhaps the presence of the convex jewel might be chalked up to nothing more significant than staying faithful to the model image; but I know of no such suggestions Moreover, the question would still remain why the figure

of metaphysic in the dipintura should have a convex jewel on her breastplate and the otherwise similar figure on the impresa should have none—indeed, not even a

breastplate: just a loosely-hung, low-cut tunic of sorts, with more of a cleft showing than anything of convex shape The image of the jewel on the breastplate, even if it is to be

explained, as does Verene, as a transformation of the mirror from the impresa, is

something new in the dipintura, and it had no place in the picture until Vico refigured

things in his “new science of metaphysic.”

On my reading, then, the figure of the convex jewel marks an important

transformation from the previously reigning (or “lying hidden,” if you like) metaphysics

to what Vico creates in his New Science The first significant transformation to the reflective surface is to make it convex, rather than flat like the mirror in the impresa

Vico could not be satisfied with depicting his new dame metaphysic with a flat mirror or any other flat reflective surface on her breast Her jewel must be convex, so that, as Vicowrites in his explanation of the image,

it indicates that the knowledge of God does not have its end in metaphysic

taking private illumination from intellectual institutions and thence

10 Margherita Frankel, “The ‘Dipintura’ and the Structure of Vico’s New Science as a Mirror of the World,”

in Vico: Past and Present, Vol 1, ed Giorgio Tagliacozzo (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press,

1981), p 46: “According to Rossi, the image of the woman whom Vico identifies as metaphysics seems to

result from the combination of two images in Ripa’s Iconologia: Metaphysics and Mathematics I believe

that closer to Vico’s image of metaphysics is Ripa’s Contemplative Life ”

regulating merely her own moral institutions, as hitherto the philosophers

have done For this would have been indicated by a flat jewel, whereas

the jewel is convex, thus reflecting and scattering the ray abroad, to show

that metaphysic should know God’s providence in public moral

institutions or civil customs, by which the nations have come into being

and maintain themselves in the world (5, italics mine)

Herein, in part, consists the newness of Vico’s conception of reflection: the scientific reflection enacted by a practitioner of Vico’s new science is a reflection not solely limited

to the person engaging in the reflection and not solely consequent to his or her private morals, but a reflection that illuminates properly only when it casts light upon the whole

history of human civil institutions Nor should this illumination occur seriatim, dealing

with one age of history or one institution of society at a time; rather, the convexity of the jewel “scatter[s] the ray abroad,” illuminating all things at once, so that there is no need

to direct the ray at individual periods of history or aspects of society Vico’s conception

of reflection, like that of Descartes, describes how metaphysics can in the first place be established as a possible discourse For Descartes, reflection on the existence of the ego

is necessary for the establishment of a subject capable of metaphysical thought For Vico, reflection on the institutions of human civil history is necessary for the

establishment of a discourse that can save humans from the loss of their ability to engage

in the proper sort of reflection—a discourse that prevents the “barbarism of reflection.”

But the issue is more complicated than this The bending of the ray of light that emanates from the eye of God is a turn that represents the real distinction between the world of man and the world of God I referred before to this turn as a “reflection,” but this is not quite accurate In the above-cited passage, Vico claims that “the jewel is convex, thus reflecting and scattering the ray abroad.” Here Bergin and Fisch are guilty

of a significant inaccuracy in their translation: Vico does not use the word “reflecting,”

riflettere, but rather “refracting,” rifrangere.11 The distinction might perhaps seem minor,

but it is rather consequential for our interpretation of the dipintura The jewel on the

breastplate of dame metaphysic does not act as a mirror—an opaque surface which light can never enter, but off which light can only bounce Rather, the jewel is a prism: white light enters it as a single ray and comes out as the scattered colors of the rainbow This will have significant ramifications for our interpretation of Vico’s conception of

reflection,12 but before I deal with these, I would like to dwell further on this prism

In order to understand the role of the prism in the dipintura, it is necessary first to

discern what Vico understood about prisms Now, it is difficult precisely to determine what Vico did and did not know about the science of light, the production of colors, and the passage of light through prisms Even when it can be determined which optical treatises Vico had read, it is difficult to discern how Vico actually interpreted what he read It is certain, for instance, that Vico had read Descartes on the subject in question: in

what Ashley notes is Vico’s “sole reference to Descartes in the New Science,”13 Vico

11 Giambattista Vico, Principj di Scienza Nuova, a cura di Fausto Nicolini (Torino: Giulio Einaudi editore

s.p.a., 1976), ¶5 The passage italicized in the quotation above reads: “…lo che si sarebbe significato con

un gioiello piano Ma convesso, ove il raggio si rifrange e risparge al di fuori ” This error has

apparently escaped the notice of several generations of students of the Bergin and Fisch translation, and it

seems to have been at least in part repeated in David Marsh’s more recent translation, New Science (New

York: Penguin Books, 2001), p 4: “Instead, the jewel in my picture is convex, so that the rays of

providence are reflected and refracted outwards.” Though Marsh’s translation includes mention of

refraction, it seems to be in a very loose sense, and apparently intended to correspond more with risparge than with rifrange Of the translations I have seen, rifrange is taken strictly as a refraction only in

Prizipien einer neuen Wissenschaft über die gemeinsame Natur der Völker, Teilband 1, trans Vittorio

Hösle and Christoph Jermann (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1990), p 6: “Aber er ist konvex, so daß der Lichtstrahl sich bricht und nach außen ausstrahlt ”

12 Although “refraction” is indeed what takes place in the imagery of the dipintura, I see it as appropriate to

maintain the word “reflection” for referring to the philosophical activity under question “Reflection” is

simply the standard philosophical parlance, de rigueur since Descartes and Locke employed it variously for

their purposes (For an account of the development of “reflection” as a philosophical term in Locke and

Descartes, see Verene, “Vico and the Barbarism of Reflection,” in History and the Disciplines: The Reclassification of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, ed Donald R Kelley [Rochester, NY: The

University of Rochester Press, 1997], pp 146-47.) I am trying to demonstrate that Vico aimed to employ a figure of reflection different from that of Descartes, one which acts to subvert and supplant Descartes’s

“reflective” metaphysics.

13 James Ashley, “Vico and Postmodern Reflection,” New Vico Studies, Volume 18 (2000): p 59.

describes the Stoic doctrine that “from the eyes, through the pupils, sticks of light issue totouch the objects which are distinctly seen,” (706) and then goes on to attribute this same

doctrine to Descartes, citing his Optics (also known as the Dioptrics), I.2 Ashley also

notes, however, that Vico “distorts what Descartes actually says Descartes in the

Dioptrics is quick to reject this Stoical theory.”14

In light of this difficulty, I aim not to try to discern what precisely were Vico’s views about the natural science of optics It is, after all, rather likely that he may have

harbored some antipathy towards the discipline itself: Descartes’s Optics was published along with his Discourse on Method, the work against which Vico directed an attack with his On the Study Methods of Our Time Vico very likely questioned the validity of the

natural scientific project of determining the nature of light and color, and it seems

therefore unhelpful to try to piece together his thoughts on these issues I aim, rather, only to consider how Vico and Vico’s contemporary readers would likely have

understood the way light and color appear in the natural world—that is, how they would predict things would look if light of a certain kind were to pass through, for instance, a prism After all, Vico held an especial affinity for images and appearances, and it is the

relation of the figures in the dipintura and the manner of their appearance that chiefly

concerns us here

Since we know that Vico read Descartes’s Optics, we can assume that his beliefs

about how light might appear when it reflects off or passes through certain objects might

be obtained at least in part from his reading of this work On the issue of the reflection oflight off surfaces of various shape, Descartes writes,

14 Ibid., p 59.

when many balls coming from the same direction meet a body whose

surface is completely smooth and even, they are reflected uniformly and inthe same order, so that if this surface is completely flat they keep the samedistance between them after having met it as they had beforehand; and if it

is curved inward or outward they come towards each other or go away

from each other in the same order, more or less, on account of this

curvature All I need to do here is to point out that the light-rays

falling on bodies which are coloured and not polished are usually reflected

in every direction even if they come from only a single direction.15

Descartes understands the movement of rays of light to be similar to the trajectories of tennis balls Tennis balls, when they bounce off a flat surface, move all in the same direction; when they bounce off a convex surface, they “go away from each other.” In the same way, light rays that encounter flat surfaces move after reflection still as a uniform ray; those that encounter convex surfaces disperse in various directions This seems to be precisely what Vico describes as happening with the ray of light in the

dipintura: “the jewel is convex, thus reflecting and scattering the ray abroad.” It should

be noted, however, that on Descartes’s account, the surface need not be convex in order

to have the effect of “scattering the ray abroad.” The surface need only be “colored and not polished.” Vico seems to be rather explicit in claiming the convexity of the jewel as the reason for the scattering of the ray; but it would have been equally plausible,

according to Descartes’s description of things, to have chosen a colored and rough

surface, rather than a convex one, for the image in the dipintura That Vico did not

choose a “colored and not polished” jewel is significant

Later in the first discourse of the Optics, Descartes introduces the concept of

refraction He writes,

Finally, consider that the rays are also deflected, in the same way as the

ball just described, when they fall obliquely on the surface of a transparent

15 René Descartes, Optics, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol 1., trans John Cottingham,

Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, (Cambridge: CUP, 1985), p 156.

body and penetrate this body more or less easily than the body from which

they come This mode of deflection is called “refraction.”16

Refraction, according to Descartes, occurs when light enters “the surface of a transparent body.” As we saw before, Vico describes the motion of the ray of light in the dipintura as

a refraction, not a reflection If we take it that Vico’s understanding of the way light appears when it encounters objects is drawn at least in part from Descartes’s account, then we can see why the jewel’s convexity, and not any colored and rough surface, causes the scattering of the ray: in order to be a refraction, and not a reflection, the light must encounter a transparent medium The “scattering [of] the ray abroad” could only take place, for Vico, on account of the convexity of the jewel, and not because of any

color or roughness, else his dipintura would fail to represent a refraction This still

leaves unanswered the question of why Vico wanted a refraction rather than a reflection

To answer this, we need only turn to another of Descartes’s pronouncements,

taken from the same passage in the first discourse of the Optics:

some bodies cause the rays to be reflected without bringing about any

other change in their action (viz bodies we call “white”), and others bring

about an additional change similar to that which the movement of a ball

undergoes when we graze it (viz bodies which are red, or yellow, or blue

or some other such colour).17

According to Descartes, when light reflects off surfaces that are flat and smooth, it behaves like tennis balls that bounce off flat and frictionless surfaces: just as the spin of the tennis balls remains the same, so does the color of the light Just as, however, when

“we graze” a tennis ball its spin does change, so too does the color of a ray of light when

it reflects off a convex surface On Descartes’s account, therefore, the reflection of Vico’s ray off the convex jewel would result in the ray’s changing colors The white

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

light emanating from the place of the sun in the figure of the divine eye would be tainted with color if it were to reflect off a convex surface If the surface were merely a flat and smooth mirror, however, the ray would not be scattered abroad and, hence, would not properly signify the way in which metaphysics should apply the knowledge of “God’s providence in public moral institutions or civil customs.” Vico’s solution is to think of the movement not as a reflection, but as a refraction, for nowhere in Descartes’s account

of refraction is the possibility of “spin” or change of colour entertained

Now, why for Vico would it be a problem for the divine ray to take on a color when it reflects off the breast of dame metaphysic? Why, in other words, should Vico describe the action as a refraction, and not a reflection? In order to answer this question,

I think it would be helpful to turn to one of the likely sources for Vico’s imagery of the ray of light illuminating the discipline of metaphysics: the beginning of the Descartes’s

Rules for the Direction of the Mind In the first of the rules, Descartes writes,

For since the sciences taken all together are identical with human wisdom,

which always remains one and the same, however applied to different

subjects, and suffers no more differentiation proceeding from them than

the light of the sun experiences from the variety of the things which it

illumines, there is no need for minds to be confined at all within limits

Consequently we are justified in bringing forward this as the first rule of

all, since there is nothing more prone to turn us aside from the correct way

of seeking out truth than this directing of our inquires, not towards their

general end, but towards certain special investigations If, therefore,

anyone wishes to search out the truth of things in serious earnest, he ought

not to select one special science; for all the sciences are conjoined with

each other and interdependent.18

In the rule, Descartes disparages the myopic pursuit of the aims of any one particular special science without the view of the whole of human wisdom to which the knowledge

18 René Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, trans Elizabeth S Haldane and G.R.T Ross, in Great Books of the Western World, Vol 31: Descartes and Spinoza, ed Robert Maynard Hutchins

(Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952), p 1.

gained by that special science ought to contribute And, indeed, this is a rule to which Vico might willingly adhere For Vico, as well as for Descartes, there is a greater

discipline of knowledge to which the subaltern disciplines contribute: for Vico it is

metaphysics; for Descartes, or at least for the Descartes of the Rules, it is his mathesis

universalis Of particular significance in the passage, however, is not so much the

doctrine of knowledge espoused as the imagery by which it is elaborated Descartes likens the universal knowledge of all the combined sciences to the light of the sun: just asthe light of the sun may undergo a transformation of color when it shines onto convex or colored and rough surfaces, so too does human wisdom undergo a transformation in aspect when it is “applied to different subjects.” For Descartes, this transformation is only

one of outer comportment and is, thus, inconsequential The disciplines only appear to

be at work towards different ends In reality, they are aspects of the same thing, just as the various colored rays of light are just different aspects of the substance light The

problem for Descartes, at least in the Rules, is simply to coordinate the various

disciplinary endeavors by which humans aim to gain knowledge of different subjects so that they are all the same kind of endeavor, so that they are all the same in substance In other words, it would not bother Descartes that the ray that bounces off the breast of dame metaphysic is a colored ray: a unique and distinct appearance is really what one should expect from a particular science, and that science will, despite its singular

appearance, contribute to the whole of human wisdom, so long as it is identical in

substance to all of the other particular sciences Vico cannot be so easily appeased

For Vico, Descartes’s appeal to the substance of light as the characteristic

determinative of the nature of any particular ray of light—and, by analogy, to the

substance of discourse as the characteristic determinative of the nature of any particular discourse—is precisely the foundationalist move against which Vico reacts in his

“Reprehension of the Metaphysics of René Descartes, Benedict Spinoza, and John Locke.” In this work, which, according to Verene, Vico “intended to be added to

the section on ‘Poetic Metaphysics’ of Book 2 of the New Science,”19 Vico writes,

Thus, he, René, should have, as befitting a good philosopher, begun from

a very simple idea, that has no mixed composition, as is that of Being:

therefore Plato with weight of words called metaphysics Ontologia,

“science of Being.” But he fails to recognize Being and begins to know

things from substance, which is an idea composed of two things: of one

that stands under and sustains, of another that stands above it and rests

thereon.20

Vico chides Descartes precisely because his metaphysical system is based upon a dualism

of substance and appearance, of that which “stands under and sustains” and that which rests upon it For Vico, quite to the contrary, there is no essential rift in the nature of Being—Being is that which “has no mixed composition.” For Vico, then, the appearance

of things is not simply accidental, the consequential matter being the substance; rather, appearance is an indelible, inextricable characteristic of the nature of things Vico cannot, as does Descartes, say that light is really all the same because it is of the same substance—that the different colors of light appear differently, but they are all the same, because they are of the same substance For Vico, if one ray of light actually passes through the air bearing a color different from that of another ray of light, the two rays are

different things—they are different in their Being Thus Descartes’s analogy in the first

of his Rules is unsatisfactory for Vico: the comparison of variously-colored rays of light

19 Giambattista Vico, “‘Reprehension of the Metaphysics of Rene Descartes, Benedict Spinoza, and John

Locke’: An Addition to the New Science” (Translation and Commentary by Donald Phillip Verene), New Vico Studies, Volume 8 (1990): p 2.

20 Ibid., p 3, paragraph 1213.

to the various sciences would not indicate, as Descartes suggests, that the various

sciences are simply different in appearance but really the same in their nature; rather, for Vico, it would suggest that the Being of each of the sciences is really and truly different

—incommensurable with one another and incompatible with the truth of universal human

wisdom For this reason, Vico must not allow that the divine ray in his dipintura reflects

off the convex jewel on the breastplate, with the result that the reflected ray takes on a particular color, and not just white; rather, Vico must have it that the divine ray refracts through the jewel on the breastplate, with the result, as I shall suggest, that the refracted

ray remains the same in its appearance to the viewer of the dipintura.

In order that the resultant ray might be refracted and scatter its light abroad, as Vico says, and yet remain unchanged in color, as is implied, the jewel on the breastplate

of dame metaphysic must be acting as prism Now, Vico’s knowledge of prisms could

not have come from Descartes Descartes Optics, which really is a dioptrics—a study

devoted to the refraction of light—never mentions the refraction of light as it passes through a prism The first major study of prisms was that of Newton, who first shared hisdiscoveries about them with the Royal Society in February of 1672 Upon observing the behavior of rays of light as they pass through prisms and cast their illumination upon a

backdrop, Newton concludes that “light itself is a heterogeneous mixture of differently

refrangible rays,”21 and further,

As the rays of light differ in degrees of refrangibility, so they also differ in

their disposition to exhibit this or that particular color Colors are not

qualifications of light, derived from refractions or reflections of natural

21 Sir Isaac Newton, “The New Theory about Light and Colors: Communicated to the Royal Society,

February 6, 1672,” in Newton’s Philosophy of Nature: Selections from his Writings, ed H.S Thayer (New

York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1953), p 72 The italics are in the original.

bodies (as it is generally believed), but original and connate properties,

which in divers rays are divers.22

In claiming that “colors are not qualifications of light,” Newton is disclaiming a

fundamental precept of Cartesian optics—that color is a property only of light that reflects off colored surfaces (i.e surfaces that bestow a color to light, in the same way that a non-frictionless surface bestows spin to a tennis ball) As Newton demonstrates, color can be made to appear in any beam of white light, even when that beam does not reflect off a surface but simply passes through a transparent medium—a prism All light

is a “heterogeneous mixture,” and not a uniform ray that admits to various qualifications,

as Descartes held Had he this conception of optics, Descartes would have been unable toconceive of the various sciences as mere variations that ultimately together compose the universal human wisdom; for they, if they should appear differently, would indeed be different rays—“divers rays” composed diversely Vico, although he seems mostly to have accepted Descartes’s conception of disciplinarity by way of the analogy of different rays of light to the different scientific disciplines, rejected both Descartes’s metaphysics and his optics His is a Newtonian conception of the behavior of light

Since we now have some idea of how Vico must have understood the behavior of

light, we can begin to fill out the picture that Vico gives us in the dipintura We can be

reasonably sure that the divine ray that emanates from the eye at the top left of the

dipintura is a ray of white light It comes from the sun, after all, and there is no reason to

think that it should have taken on any color It should, then, appear to the viewer of the

dipintura as white The jewel on the breastplate of dame metaphysic seems almost

certainly clear It functions as a prism, as I have just argued, and it is transparent and its

22 Ibid., p 74 The italics are in the original.

surface smooth, such that the ray of light refracts as it passes through it Moreover, the jewel is convex It is not obvious whether the jewel has a smooth convex surface or whether its surface presents a single smooth facet.23 Both interpretations seem to be consistent with the requirement of a smooth surface, and neither, to my knowledge, directly contradicts anything Vico likely would have known about the behavior of light

The crucial aspect of our new reading of the dipintura is the appearance of the ray of

light once it has refracted through the prism: this ray appears to the viewer of the

dipintura not as a ray of white light, but as a rainbow of all of the “heterogeneous

mixture” of colors contained in the ray of white light The ray is not different in its

Being, in its nature: according to Newton, and as Vico must have known, pure white

light, such as that which emanates from the sun, contains within it all the colors of the visible spectrum Considered through the internal logic of the image, the refracted ray is the same ray, is of the same nature as the ray of white light emanating from the divine

eye Considered through the eyes of the viewer of the dipintura, the ray emanating from

and illuminating within the realm of the divine appears white, whereas the ray refracted through the human science of metaphysics and scattering light upon the various

institutions of human civil history appears as a rainbow of colors

That the second bend of the beam of light in the dipintura is intended to be seen

as a refracted beam—as containing a rainbow of different rays—should be evident from

nothing more than a close inspection of the image In the 1730 imprint of the dipintura,

23 Yet another possibility might be that the convex surface of the jewel is composed of an array of smooth facets, as would be, for instance, the crown of a Peruzzi-cut diamond In this case, however, it would be

impossible for the ray to appear, as it does in the dipintura, as a single beam of light Yet it would account

for Vico’s claim that the convex jewel “scatter[s] the ray abroad.” In this case, as I hope to show also in the case of refraction and reflection, it is impossible to follow one or the other interpretation exclusively.