A Taste of Bacon Sir? - The Secret of Shakespeare

[David Guyatt]

I was looking at the locations of "Shakespeare's" Italian plays, the non-historical ones at least, using them as a kind of travelogue on the hypothesis that Marlowe escaped to Italy and that the plays follow his travels there. It looks like the first one was The Two Gentlemen of Verona, set in Verona and Milan, Verona being about 160 kilometers (100 miles) east of the larger Milan. This is rather interesting in that Guglielma, whom her followers believed to be an incarnation of the Holy Ghost, arrived there from Bohemia in 1260, the tarot reappeared there in a version commissioned by Bianca Maria Visconti and painted by Bonifacio Bembo between 1441 and 1450, and Leonardo went to work there for Ludovico Sforza, the son of Bianca and later duke of Milan, in 1487 after disappearing (supposedly in the East) for 4 years. Marlowe would have arrived there shortly after 1593, though Stokes places the play at 1591 based on sparse evidence. One has to wonder what exactly was percolating below the surface in Milan that drew these disparate characters there over a period of 333 years. The timeline through Leonardo is here.

Perhaps a clue lies in the commissioning in about 1425 of a deck by the Duke of Milan that were painted by Michelino de Besozzo that are believed to consist of a deck of 60 cards including 16 trumps bearing representations of 16 Roman gods.


Was the choice of the 16 Roman gods that of the commissioner or the artist? If there is no clear evidence that the Duke particularly requested pagan gods, then a reasonable deduction is that the artist chose to include them, and the focus then would move to him.


De Besozzo doesn't appear to have amassed a large work that I can see, but he did paint the Mystical Marriage of Saint Catherine of Alexandria. She was the daughter of the pagan King Costus (Ruler of Alexandria) and Queen Sabinella. Catherine was exceptionally well educated and well versed in the arts, sciences and philosophy. She became a cult figure in the late middle ages (which covers the period of De Besozzo).


Another figure appearing in de Besozzo's painting of the Mystical Marriage of Saint Catherine of Alexandria was St. Anthony, attended by his pig (Bacon?). He was known by the title of Anthony of Egypt, amongst several others. A number of paintings of him by famous artists show him with a skull (David Teniers the Younger; the Temptation of St. Anthony; Dali, The Temptation of St. Anthony) which reverberate skull symbolism that appear in numerous other paintings (St. Jerome being fairly common - El Greco, the Ecstacy of St. Jerome; Jan Sanders van Hemessen, St. Jerome; Aertgen van Leyden, St. Jerome, Cavarozzi's Saint Jerome; Michelangelo's St. Jerome, Durer's woodcut, St Jerome and numerous others) One might additionally note the Skull in Shakespeare (Yorik) and the importance of the skull in alchemy.




De Besozzo also painted The Madonna in the Rose Garden (the Madonna was accompanied by St. Catherine), where the rose would, I think, have been the Rose of Sharon, from the Song of Songs, signifying the mystical child. The rose (and mystical birth) has a very considerable symbolic meaning in various schools of esotericism and alchemy.


Thus there is a very clear correlation between de Besozzo and Egypt and, in particular, Alexandria. There is a very clear correlation between de Bosozzo and mystical experiences that, in turn, connect to alchemy, mysticism, alchemy and, of course, psychology (Jung's Mysterium Coniunctionis - a treatise on the mystical marriage). And a very clear correlation between these subjects and the Tarot via the same artist.