Signs of Friendship: A Response to Alexander Nehamas’s ‘The Good of Friendship’

Abstract

This piece responds to Alexander Nehamas’s claim in ‘The Good of Friendship’ (2010) that painting has difficulty representing friendship, an issue exemplified for Nehamas by Jacopo Pontormo’s double portrait Two Friends (c.1522). I argue that friendship has not been as elusive for the painter as Nehamas suggests, using as a counter-example Quentin Massys’s diptych of Erasmus and Pieter Gillis (1517). My exposition of Massys’s picture, moreover, reveals dimensions of modern friendship, particularly its concerns for communications media and publicity, neglected by Nehamas’s account.