Qui Succederet Operi: Completing the Unfinished in Maffeo Vegio’s Supplementum Aeneidos

Abstract

PLINY THE ELDER , in an anecdote repeated by Renaissance writers from Petrarch to Vasari, tells the story of the renowned Greek painter Apelles and his uncompleted painting of Venus of Cos. Apelles had intended this Coan Venus to surpass all his other paintings, including his earlier Venus Anadyomene, a picture of Venus rising from the sea, celebrated in poetry and so admired by the emperor Augustus that he dedicated it in the temple of his adopted father, the Divine Julius Caesar. But Apelles did not succeed in his intention. He died before he could finish the painting, and other painters were left to decide what to do with the partially executed panel. With a touch of hagiographic awe, Pliny recounts the inevitable outcome of the quest to find someone to bring the great artist’s work to completion: “nec qui succederet operi ad praescripta liniamenta inventus est” (no one could be found to carry on the task in conformity with the sketched outlines). Retelling Pliny’s story in hisDialogo di pittura (1548), Paolo Pino adds that when no wouldbe finisher presented himself, the unfinished painting was preserved by the people of Cos for many years after Apelles’s death “come cosa maravigliosa,” as a thing to be marveled at. Not only was the painting preserved exactly as Apelles had left it, but it was admired in its very incompleteness. Pliny’s anecdote and the play of its repetitions across the Renaissance in both words and images testifies to a powerful and persistent strain of Renaissance thinking about unfinished and incomplete works of art. In the hundreds of drawings of