Ross G. R. Caldwell wrote: 31 Jul 2020, 21:54
The banner underneath in BnF latin 5888 says:
Hic Iupiter rex cretensis, Venerem filiam suam iuniorem, copulat matrimonio Anchisi nepoti regis priami ac patris Enee.
Jupiter, king of Crete, his daughter Venus junior, joined in marriage with Anchises nephew of King Priam, and father of Aeneas.
I don't think anything more than lining up Saturn ("time"/creation) as the father of Jupiter
in Crete is intended by specifying Jupiter as king of Crete, to connect the genealogy to primeval roots (and more importantly to the
Aeneid; more on that below); Boccaccio:
...also a third Jupiter, a Cretan man and son of Saturn.... (Gen. II.2, Solomon p. 187)
The fact that the third Jupiter is specifically a man here fits in with Marziano's own euhemeristic emphasis and thus avoids impiety in positing a deity as ancestor (although they cross that line repeatedly in my book).
The bigger issue in my view is the addition of Saturn to the genealogy, connected with a dragon. Although depicted in the Semideus as neither strictly the biscione stemma nor uroboros, I do think it's ultimate meaning has to relate to the latter - the medieval symbol of time connected with Saturn, and critically depicted as such in the monumental fresco cycle in the city of "Anglus":
Angera - Saturno.JPG
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Anchises and Aeneas are also named with Cretan Jupiter in the banner in BnF latin 5888 due to the
Aeneid. In Book 3 of the
Aeneid, Virgil has Aeneas at Delos where Apollo speaks to him, instructing him to go to the land of his ancestors. Anchises interprets Apollo’s remark as a reference to the island of
Crete, where one of the great Trojan forefathers—Teucrus, after whom the Trojans are sometimes called Teucrians—had long ago ruled. Aeneas and his group sail to Crete and began to build a new city, but a plague strikes.
The gods of Troy appear to Aeneas in a dream and explain that his father is mistaken: the ancestral land to which Apollo referred is not Crete but Italy (and let's recall here that Saturn is also seen as the founder of Italy). More on the significance of Crete in the Aeneid here: Rebecca Armstrong, "Crete in the
Aeneid: Recurring Trauma and Alternative Fate", The Classical Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 1 (2002), pp. 321-340.
Crete thus belongs to the Visconti genealogy's origins but not its future (in the Aeneid's timeline sense of course), and that place connects Saturn with Jupiter as a man. Saturn unavoidably connotes something divine however....at least the creation of "historical time."