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The critic John Sutherland once observed that private book collections can become for their assemblers 'intimate parts of themselves.' As an example, he cited John Keats's arrangements for the posthumous [...]

This article responds to the philosopher Alexander Nehamas' argument that "no gesture, look, or bodily disposition, no attitude, feeling, or emotion, no action and no situation is associated with friendship firmly enough to make its representation a matter for the eye." The article proposes a "humanist exception" to Nehamas' general rule. Building on Lorna Hutson's argument that humanism "textualized" friendship, I contend that in the early modern period scholars and artists associated with humanism were engaged in the development of a set of recognizable signs of friendship connected to the distinctive humanist culture of the book and associated activities of reading, writing, and circulating texts. The article offers a case study of Quentin Metsys' diptych of Erasmus and Pieter Gillis (1517) and then applies the lessons gleaned from that work to a picture that Nehamas cites as evidence of his claim, Jacopo Pontormo's Two Men with a Passage from Cicero's "On Friendship" (ca. 1522). Both pictures, I contend, not only depict friendship but also promote humanist ideals of friendship to the viewer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes the relationship between technology and modern friendship. Topics covered include the concerns about technology's impact on friendship, the definition of modern friendship based on the account which appears in the history Keith Thomas' study "The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfillment in Early Modern England," and the 1517 portraits painted by Quentin Massys which portray friendship and technology. It also points out that modern friendship's immersion in technology.