Toufa, Toupha: Part Two

I gave a light-hearted paper on the toupha-toufa this weekend at the Medieval Academy of the Pacific in Tacoma, Washington,  to answer the question: what did Gozzoli think he was doing with this feathered crown? He clearly has heard of the diadem with feathers traditionally worn by the Eastern emperor in a triumph, a diadem bearing a circle of peacock feathers, called a toupha. I didn't answer it adequately there.

It is a representation -- not a portrait -- of John VIII Palaiologos in procession in Florence for the Council of Union, painted between 1459 and 1461 for the Medici Chapel in their palazzo, although Gozzoli was in Florence and saw John in 1439.  John came for humiliation, not a triumph, but Gozzoli has turned the procession into a triumph.

In preparation for this paper, a few images new to me turned up. For want of writing time, I am kindly making these images available here. This first is carved on an 11th-C ivory box that has various representations of emperors or horseback. Since the toupha is generally associated with a military triumph, it is odd to see it in the context of hunting and I am a bit curious about the way the emperor sits his horse.

The next one I showed before, a toupha portrayed in an 11-th C fabric found in the tomb of a German bishop, but its perspective may help to explain the shape of the headdress on Cyrenius, Governor of Syria, in the 14th-C mosaic in the Kariye Djami in Istanbul.

 

 

Do the striped feathers in Gozzoli's interpretation of the toupha have anything to do with the striped feathers on Ag. Alexandros of Pydna, shown here in the Cave of the Theotokos at Prespa?  Especially as this Ag. Alexandros is wearing, like Gozzoli's, a short-sleeve robe.  This robe is covered with Palaiologan double-headed eagles. He seems to have originated as one of those martyred soldiers, but it does look as if, being in northern Greece, a sainted soldier Alexandros -- soldiers are often shown wearing helmets with a crest which is called a toupha -- became conflated with Alexander the Great, and an emperor is entitled to a right royal toupha and robe. 

Another Ag. Alexandros, from Ag. Athanasios in Kastoria.

Finally, the toupha Piero della Francesca painted about 1447 in his glorious fresco sequence on the Legend of the True Cross in S. Francesco in Arezzo. Ten years ago I visited the church when the frescos were being restored, and was taken up on a scaffolding so that I was as close to the hand of Piero as I am to my computer screen. It represents the emperor Heraclius at the moment of victory.

Piero probably took his toupha from a Roman or Greek image, such as this 500BC toupha I photographed through a reflective glass case in a museum in northern Greece whose name I cannot remember. I was on a tour and it was a three-museum day.

So at the conference, in the question period after the panel I was on, Linda Williams of the University of Puget Sound made a suggestion that elegantly finished off my explanation of the crown as a toufa. She said that the Medici coat of arms had feathers on it.

Looking into that, I find that the Medici arms -- Cosimo and Lorenzo provided the pope with the cash to finance his council and the expenses of the 700 Greeks -- bore a ring mounted by three ostrich feathers.  And look at this Medici marriage tray at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with red, green, yellow, and white feathers around the inner rim of the frame.

Now look again at the colors of the feathers around John's crown -- red, green, and white, with gold replacing the yellow -- and see if you don't think that Gozzoli has adroitly transformed the gawky peacock-feather imperial toupha into a graceful compliment to his patron.

Toupha, Toufa

When Cyriaco of Ancona was in Constantinople, he sketched as best he could the great bronze statue of Justinian (527-565). The statue was made of gilded bronze, and stood on a column 50m. high. The most remarkable thing about the statue itself -- otherwise your basic equestrian statue -- was the headdress, called a toupha, which an earlier traveller drew in great detail in 1340 (right) and you can see that this drawing and Cyriaco's are pretty much in agreement.
[Late correction: I now believe this drawing has been erroneously attributed to Cyriaco.]

.A number of different headdresses have been called the toupha, or toufa as you prefer, but we are currently concerned with the one on the statue, and will describe it a diadem with a lot of peacock feathers. It probably came from the East, perhaps Persia, which is an all-purpose explanation for various Byzantine appurtenances not otherwise explicable.

The toupha had been in use for quite a while before Justinian -- coins of Constantius II (337-361) like the gold here show him wearing one -- and notice the little thing in front that looks like the tuft on a hawk's hood.

When Justinian came along, 200 years later, it was apparently well- established as part of the emperor outfit, regardless of how silly it must have looked, and was worn when an emperor rode in procession to celebrate a triumph.

A hundred and seventy years ago, an extraordinary piece of fabric was discovered in Bamburg, Germany, in the tomb of Gunther, Bishop from 1057 to 1065, a fabric he had obtained in Constantinople. Splendidly colored, it showed a tyche -- a representation of a city, here Constantinople -- presenting presenting a toupha to the emperor John I Tzmiskes (971-976), unless it was to Basil II (976-1025) for defeating the Bulgarians, but either way it was already an antique when Gunther acquired it on pilgrimage. Gunther died on that pilgrimage, and his cloth was buried with him. The tyche seems to be dressed as a bride so this fabric is emphasizing that the Emperor is married to the City, much as Elizabeth II was given a ring as part of her coronation ceremony

John VIII Palaiologos who gave so much pleasure to artists with his dramatic hats went to the Council of Ferrara-Florence in late 1437. Now, Cyriaco who drew the first toupha pictured above, and who was a friend of John, was at the Council when it moved to Florence in early 1439. And the young painter Benozzo Gozzoli (1421-1497), being a Florentine, was there, too.

John didn't wear a toupha in Florence. Florence was a humiliation, not a triumph, and if he had worn a toupha, there would be twice as many pictures of him wearing it as there are of him wearing the melon hat. But one can imagine a variety of ways in which a young painter might have met up with Cyriaco who had recently been in Constantinople, and might have looked at his travel notes and diaries. And might have seen that image of a mounted emperor wearing a toupha.

Or young Benozzo talked to other people who had been in Constantinople and or saw other drawing. He may have made his own copies of them. He may have thought that it was a silly headdress, too, and that he could improve on it. Or he may have only understood that it was a crown with feathers. So that when he came to paint his amazing frescos for the Capello dei Magi in the Palazzo Medici twenty years later, he included the emperor John, wearing carefully curled hair, exotic Eastern robes, imperial red buskins, and a toupha -- a crown bejewelled with the rubies and pearls which John is known to have worn in Florence, and with red, white, and green feathers. 

[An explanation for Benozzo Gozzoli's particular feathers is here.]