Conjectures about the “man without attributes” ( f85r2 )

[Koen G]

According to Elizabeth Sears (The Ages of Man), "gesture" may serve as one of the attributes. She writes about the rather unwieldy Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal. Ms-1234 You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. :

The illustrations are lively, if of dubious quality, and several are accompanied
by verse inscriptions. Migratory, these verses appear in different contexts, both
alone and within schemata. The lines inscribed with the temperaments were
extracted from the Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum, a popular medical poem sup- |
posed to have been shaped by members of the school of Salerno in the twelfth
or thirteenth century.°° Those which accompany the ages of man normally
appear as the third, second, seventh, and sixth members of a set of seven verses
in diagrammatic “Trees of Wisdom,”’ to be discussed at a later point (figs. 82-
85). The artist represented the ages as half-length figures bearing attributes
and, in creating them, was influenced to some degree by the juxtaposed inscriptions:

Informans mores, in me flos promit odores.
Est michi sors munda, nature purior unda.
In dubio positus est homo decrepitus.
Hoc reor esse senum, sensum discernere plenum.

Adolescencia holds the flower which “gives forth its perfumes’; iuventus, inappropriately aligned with boyhood’s verse, carries a ball; senectus, ‘‘cast into
doubt,’’ bends over a stick; and wise senium extends a hand outwards. 
The ages, once again, are those named by Johannicius in his Isagoge, but no longer
interpreted in the light of their physical qualities.