ΓΝΩΘΙ ΚΑΙΡΟΝ (gnōthi kairon): Personifications of the Awareness of Time in the Italian Renaissance

Time flies, Fortune is fickle, and Opportunity knocks but once. Nonetheless, Life rolls on. Some of the most common clichés that permeate Western tradition arose as figurations of ideas deeply rooted in the need of individuals to confront their inner world and external circumstances. These ideas rarely die. They rather transform and migrate, allowing us to detect a series of disruptive continuities in the ways humanity has recurringly given a ‘face’ to the fears and anxieties that prevent us from living well and acting well over the course of history. My doctoral thesis examines the dynamic interplay between proverbial wisdom, humanist thought and contemporary artistic resourcefulness in the visual culture of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, when new iconographies were devised to represent the gravest concerns of human existence. Structured as a retrospective narrative from classical antiquity to the Renaissance, and from the Greak East to the Latin West, the thesis shows how images imbued with entrenched beliefs about adversity, the passage of time, and the brevity and unpredictability of life reemerge during the early modern period as corresponding manifestations of a universal principle for timely action, originating from ancient Greek thought. 'Gnōthi kairon', an ancient Greek maxim attributed to Pittacus of Mytilene, one of the Seven Sages of antiquity, is employed as an interpretative tool to explain the meaning and implications of new personifications of Time, Opportunity and Fortune in Renaissance iconography and thought, thereby revealing that the reception of antiquity and the early conception of modernity have together reconstructed a fundamental precept for the proper course of human conduct: that the awareness of time can become an effective remedy for the vicissitudes of life, urging individuals to recognise their opportunities and act wisely as time passes by.