visual culture in early modernity
TRANSCRIPT
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
1/218
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
2/218
Leon Battista Alberti and Nicholas Cusanus
Providing a fresh evaluation of Alberti’s text On Painting (1435), along with comparisons
to various works of Nicholas Cusanus—particularly his Vision of God (1450)—this studyreveals a shared epistemology of vision. And, the author argues, it is one that reects
a more deeply Christian Neoplatonic ideal than is typically accorded Alberti. Whether
regarding his purpose in teaching the use of a geometric single point perspective system,
or more broadly in rendering forms naturalistically, the emphasis leans toward the ideal
of Renaissance art as highly rational. There remains the impression that the principle aim
of the painter is to create objective, even illusionistic images. A close reading of Alberti’s
text, however, including some adjustments in translation, points rather towards an
emphasis on discerning the spiritual in the material. Alberti’s use of the tropes Minerva
and Narcissus, for example, indicates the opposing characteristics of wisdom and sense
certainty that function dialectically to foster the traditional importance of seeing with the
eye of the intellect rather than merely with physical eyes. In this sense these gures also
set the context for his, and, as the author explains, Brunelleschi’s earlier invention of this
perspective system that posits not so much an objective seeing as an opposition of nite and
innite seeing, which, moreover, approximates Cusanus’s famous notion of a coincidence
of opposites. Together with Alberti’s and Cusanus’s ideals of vision, extensive analysis of
art works discloses a ubiquitous commitment to stimulating an intellectual perception of
divine, essential, and unseen realities that enliven the visible material world.
Charles H. Carman is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Buffalo, USA.
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
3/218
VISUAL CULTURE IN EARLY MODERNITY
Series Editor: Allison Levy
A forum for the critical inquiry of the visual arts in the early modern world, Visual Culture
in Early Modernity promotes new models of inquiry and new narratives of early modern
art and its history. We welcome proposals for both monographs and essay collections
which consider the cultural production and reception of images and objects. The range
of topics covered in this series includes, but is not limited to, painting, sculpture and
architecture as well as material objects, such as domestic furnishings, religious and/or
ritual accessories, costume, scientic/medical apparata, erotica, ephemera and printed
maer. We seek innovative investigations of western and non-western visual culture
produced between 1400 and 1800.
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
4/218
Leon Battista Alberti
and Nicholas Cusanus
Towards an Epistemology of Vision forItalian Renaissance Art and Culture
Charles H. Carman
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
5/218
© Charles H. Carman 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording
or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Charles H. Carman has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to
be identied as the author of this work.
Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
Wey Court East 110 Cherry Street
Union Road Suite 3-1
Farnham Burlington, VT 05401-3818
Surrey, GU9 7PT USAEngland
www.ashgate.com
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Carman, Charles H.Leon Battista Alberti and Nicholas Cusanus: towards an epistemology of vision for Italian
Renaissance art and culture / by Charles H. Carman.
pages cm. -- (Visual culture in early modernity)
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-4724-2923-0 (hardcover: alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-4724-2924-7 (ebook)—ISBN
978-1-4724-2925-4 (epub) 1. Visual perception—history. 2. Alberti, Leon Battista, 1404–1472.
De pictura. 3. Nicholas, of Cusa, Cardinal, 1401–1464. 4. Vision. 5. Knowledge, Theory of.
6. Renaissance—Italy. I. Title.
N7430.5.C275 2014
701’.8--dc23
2014012034
ISBN 9781472429230 (hbk)
ISBN 9781472429247 (ebk – PDF)
ISBN 9781472429254 (ebk – ePUB)
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
6/218
To Karen
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
7/218
This page has been left blank intentionally
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
8/218
Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Preface: Perspectiva ut Poesis xi Acknowledgements xvii
1 Alberti and Cusanus: An Overview 1
2 On Painting: Seing the Stage and “Tua la Storia” 25
3 The Eye of the Mind: Where it Goes, What it Sees 55
4 Divine and Human Vision: Perspective and theCoincidence of Opposites 83
5 Disclosing Metaphors 1: Ways into Perspective 111
6 Disclosing Metaphors 2: The Window, The Flower,
and The Map 135
Conclusion 161
Bibliography 173
Index 189
http://-/?-http://-/?-http://-/?-http://-/?-
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
9/218
This page has been left blank intentionally
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
10/218
List of Illustrations
Color Plates
1 Ambrogio Lorenzei, Annunciation. 1340. Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena, Italy. Photocredit: Scala / Ministero per i Beni e le Aività culturali / Art Resource, NY
2 Vincenzo Foppa, Virgin and Child ( Madonna of the Book). ca. 1460–1468. CastelloSforzesco, Milan, Italy. Photo credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY
3 Fra Angelico, Annunciation , Cortona Altarpiece , without predella. ca. 1432–1434.Museo Diocesano, Cortona, Italy. Photo credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY
4 Antoniazzo Romano, Madonna and Child. ca. 1475–1479. Galleria Nazionale
dell’Umbria, Perugia, Italy. Photo credit: Scala / Minstero per i Beni e le Aivitàculturali / Art Resource, NY
5 Giovanni Bellini, Eternal Father. 1507. Museo Civico, Pesaro, Italy. Photo credit:Scala / Art Resource, NY
Black and White Figures
1.1 Model for pyramids of vision and perspective space, based on Leon BaistaAlberti. Mutual interpretation of nite and innite. Author’s diagram
1.2 Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper. 1498. Post-restoration. (Author’s perspectiveoverlay.) S. Maria delle Grazie, Milan, Italy. Photo credit: Scala / Ministero per i Beni ele Aività culturali / Art Resource, NY
2.1 Raphael, The Disputa of the Sacrament. 1509–1510. Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican.Photo credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY
3.1 Leon Baista Alberti, Occhio alato and moo Quid Tum. ca. 1435. Florence,Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, cod. 11 iv, c. 119v. Courtesy of the Ministero dei beni edelle aività culturali e del turismo
3.2 Masaccio, The Tribute Money. 1426. Brancacci Chapel, S. Maria del Carmine,Florence, Italy. Photo credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY
3.3 Donatello, Trinity , detail from the niche on Orsanmichele (originally housing thestatue of St. Louis). 1423. Florence, Italy. Photo credit: Scala / Ministero per i Beni e leAività culturali / Art Resource, NY
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
11/218
L B A N Cx
3.4 Domenico Veneziano, The Saint Lucy Altarpiece. 1439/40. Photo: Mauro Sarri.Uzi, Florence, Italy. Photo credit: Alinari / Art Resource, NY
4.1 Giovanni Bellini, St Francis. 1470s. © The Frick Collection, New York
4.2 Bonaventura Berlinghieri, St. Francis. ca. 1235. San Francesco, Pescia, Italy. Photocredit: Alinari / Art Resource, NY
4.3 Figure “P,” author’s diagram adapted from the Figura Paradigmatica of NicholasCusanus’s De coniecturis.
4.4 Alberti’s model of vision and Cusanus’s Figura Paradigmatica. HypotheticalCusan interpretation of Albertian perspective. Author’s diagram.
5.1 Antoniazzo Romano, Annunciation. ca. 1480. S. Maria sopra Minerva, Rome,Italy. Photo credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY
5.2 Piero della Francesca, Annunciation. Upper section of The St. Anthony Polyptych.
1470. Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, Perugia, Italy. Photo credit: Scala / Ministeroper i Beni e le Aività culturali / Art Resource, NY
5.3 Piermaeo d’Amelia, Annunciation. ca. 1475. Photo credit: Isalbella StewartGardner Museum, Boston
6.1 Giovanni Bellini, Coronation of the Virgin. ca. 1470. Museo Civico, Pesaro, Italy.Photo credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY
6.2 Leonardo da Vinci, The Vitruvian Man. ca. 1500. Accademia, Venice, Italy. Photocredit: Cameraphoto Arte, Venice / Art Resource, NY
6.3 Lucantonio degli Umberti, Chain Map. ca. 1500. Kupferstichkabine, StaatlicheMuseum, Berlin, Germany. Photo credit: bpk, Berlin/Kupferstichkabine. Photo JòrgP. Anders / Art Resource, NY
6.4 Aributed to an assistant of Bernardo Daddi, Madonna of Mercy , detail ofFlorence. ca. 1352. Museo del Bigallo, Florence, Italy. Photo credit: Scala / ArtResource, NY
6.5 Domenico Ghirlandaio, Portrait of an Old Man and a Young Boy. ca. 1480. Post-restoration. Louvre, Paris, France. Photo credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY
C.1 Raphael, The Marriage of The Virgin. 1504. Brera, Milan, Italy. Photo credit: Scala /Art Resource, NY
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
12/218
Preface: Perspectiva ut Poesis
Having become interested in the how and why of single point perspective, I
greatly anticipated plunging into the intriguing title The Poetics of Perspective by James Elkins.1 This was aer a long initiation into the history of how
perspective was viewed, and it became quickly apparent that this was very
much the substance of Elkins’s book. In the meantime, I had decided that among
the dierent approaches, one rather pragmatic and another more poetic, my
sympathies lay distinctly with the laer. Not only did this approach hold my
interest but more importantly, it seemed to suggest a correlation between
the treatment of subject maer and the symbolic; or at least suggestive and
therefore more poetic than prosaic meanings given to its artistic employment.
I was, however, disappointed in the book, not for its lack of information,for it is the most complete discussion of the uses of perspective, its various
meanings, and those who have wrien about it. Rather it was the lack of an
emphasis, despite the title, on what I have come to see as something like a
poetics of perspective. In all fairness, nevertheless, one comes to appreciate
the fullness of the author’s undertaking, and certainly the caution he advises
in the tendency to read into the use of single point perspective either too lile
or certainly too much. But his was a much broader undertaking that anything
intended in this project.
In any case, I am convinced that disagreements will persist over whetherthe aim of perspective is a purely “meaningless” endeavor,2 by which
Elkins means those who assign only a mathematical/geometrical and non-
interpretive signicance to its use, or whether it has symbolic signicance.
Many will continue to see perspective as a purely rational feature of
Renaissance naturalism. Aer all naturalism—by which I mean the depiction
of people and things that appear more or less as the eye sees them in nature—
is the most generally distinctive feature of Renaissance art that distinguishes
it from the relatively more abstract art of the preceding Medieval period.
The Renaissance, now commonly termed Early Modern, is linked inexorablywith the advances leading steadily towards the modern world. And while
1 James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).2 Elkins, Perspective , 42.
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
13/218
L B A N Cxii
we all know there is much to contend about that, and surely a great deal
to be said about what the Renaissance has in common with the Late Middle
Ages (at least), there seems to be a lingering view that pays only lip service,
however overtly or subtly, to what the eenth century has in common with
the preceding two centuries, not to mention what it has in common with art
thereaer. Indeed even though religious subject maer continued to prevailin the eenth century, it is clothed in the new look of naturalism: full bodied,
proportionally arrayed with ever more accurate reections of how the eyes
sees motion and expression, and, of course, set within equally convincing
depictions of space. It would seem then quite understandable and justiable
that the subject maer can still be spiritual but that the interpretation of it
leans toward an admiration of secular, worldly concerns. But here is where
the poetry gets lost and the prosaic sets in. To understand and describe the
varying degrees of sophistication in how Renaissance artists render their
world as we see ours presupposes a pragmatic, and at the very least proto-scientic mentality. The problem is that this may not be as accurate as it is
tempting.3
Much of what I am exploring in the following pages is based upon a
concerted eort to nd the sacred in the worldly. What I have discovered
in the process—greatly inuenced by other scholars whom I will point out,
though none more so than the late S.K. Heninger Jr.—was the ever-present
sense of a dialectical relationship between vision as that which reads the
world in full bodied sensuous terms and vision as that which sees with the
mental, intellectual/spiritual eye. For, if we bear in mind this dialectical frameas the constant interpretant of what is seen, perceived, and consequently acted
upon, then we might temper the tendency to read a pragmatic naturalism into
our view of the Renaissance, and we might more easily see that it is ever so
subtly yet powerfully veiled by a poetic reading between the “this” of physical
vision and “that” of a mental, intellectual, and especially spiritual vision.
The former seeks this world’s haptic richness; the laer uses it to discover an
immaterial essence. So, to take the introduction of single point perspective in
purely rational terms is to deprive it of the possibility of having been intended
to enhance a spiritual context for interpreting the religious subject maer thatthe perspective system indicates. To put my point in somewhat dramatic
3 I have been very taken by the view of Renaissance individualism set forth by John Jeries Martin in his Myths of Renaissance Individualism (New York: Palgrave, Macmillan,2006). Especially in his concluding chapter “Myths of Identity—an Essay,” (123–33) hesummarizes his view that individualism in the Renaissance is neither that of Burckhardt’sproto modern person of condent, assertive and creatively self-made secular individualitythat seemed to so capture the modern view of mankind (and hence of the Renaissance inretrospect) nor that of a postmodern person as self fashioned (Greenbla) in response tosupercial stimuli. Rather Martin sees, and I think accurately, an identity responding bothto inner and outer reality: “the dening problem of identity in the Renaissance … [was] thequestion of how the experience of the inner world of each person was related to the largersocial environment in which he or she lived” (130–31). Though seemingly simple he hasavoided a reading of secularism back onto the Renaissance, leaving open what I understandas the crucial dialogue of worldly and spiritual, self and God, secular and divine that is sohelpful in reading the way just such dialogue or dialectic works in Renaissance religiousimagery.
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
14/218
P xiii
terms, one does not see God or how He was presumed to have created. The
very theology of how God and his creativity were understood must be the
substance of Renaissance art, not merely the fact that illustrations of New
Testament teaching were beginning to look “naturalistic.” If so, the very fact
that this geometric perspective system houses theological messages might
suggest that it was intended to enhance their understanding.This is not to say, however, that others have not explored and continue
to seek out how theological content is made manifest within the burgeoning
naturalism of the Renaissance, for there are many such authors whom I will
draw upon and reference throughout.4 My focus, however, is not on elucidating
these studies per se; rather, it will be on addressing what I perceive as a tension
in how Alberti’s role is emphasized. For it is he who rst fully recorded the
role of single point perspective and laid the context for understanding its
role in his book On Painting (Della piura) from 1435. Still, as I will endeavor
to point out, his text is oen, though by no means exclusively, read from aconservative and in that sense highly rationalist point of view. What I hope
to stimulate as part of the larger question of how this tension of the natural
and spiritual plays out is what I have come to see as Alberti’s seminal role in
articulating the importance of single point perspective for complementing a
deeply theological meaning.
More broadly, as I have read the relevant works on perspective, there are two
interrelated problems: either there is no recognition of a spiritual/theological
implication of perspective, or there is lile if any analysis of Alberti’s text itself
that might support a spiritual view. As we will see even where authors admitof some spiritualizing portent in the use of single point perspective it is all too
oen not in an analysis of Alberti’s text that this view nds justication. The
result as I have come to see it is that there is a lack of connection between what
a work of art emphasizing such a perspective system might be interpreted to
mean and the articulated context of that very system by Alberti and, which is
very important, Brunelleschi before him. Regarding the laer, I will also argue
that the very invention of the perspective system, conceived by Brunelleschi
some ten years before Alberti’s comments in On Painting , and carried out as
a demonstration within the highly charged sacred context of the piazza San
4 Of the rich vein of sources nourishing this view perhaps none is greater than thatof Augustine and the iterations of his teachings throughout The Middle Ages and intothe Renaissance. On the ideas of Augustine, among which is the importance of inner andouter seeing, see Meredith J. Gill, Augustine in the Italian Renaissance: Art and Philosophy from Petrarch to Michelangelo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Particularlyuseful as well is Margaret Miles, “Vision: The Eye of the Body and the Eye of the Mindin Saint Augustine’s De trinitate and Confessions ,” The Journal of Religion 63 (1983): 15–142.Among earlier art historical studies that strive to capture religious content as important forunderstanding meaning in Renaissance works Michael Baxandall’s Painting and Experience inFieenth-Century Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, rst published 1972)stands out for its culling of cultural contexts that can suggest religious, spiritual importance.This is particularly strong in his second chapter “The Period Eye,” though the section endswith a somewhat tepid conclusion that “this sort of explanation is too speculative to havemuch historical use in particular cases” (108). The more recent work of Peter Francis Howard,which I will draw from especially in Chapter 5, proves to be more assertively successful insuggesting important cultural/religious inuence in Florence.
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
15/218
L B A N Cxiv
Giovanni in Florence, ought to be understood to play a major role in how
Alberti’s text is interpreted.
Exploring Alberti’s writing in relationship to more explicitly theological
notions of vision that are relevant to how the painter conceives a work and
elicits a sympathetic response in the viewer is, then, one major theme of this
work. My emphasis here on a poetics of perspective and naturalism in generalaims to address the metaphoric and transformative power that Renaissance
thinkers inherited and encompassed as the means for seeing between the
realities of the physical and the spiritual. It is, for example, no accident that
Dante’s work still loomed so large in the minds of humanists and theologians
(oen the same gures),5 so prominent for its ever rich evocations of the
pilgrim’s—the viator’s—journey through life, and most importantly a life that
included the enfolded ever present sense of the soul’s experience during that
journey all the way to the unseen but poignant reality of God “face to face”
(Paul, 1 Cor. 12–13). Heaven, the fullness of God’s creative and sustaining,though unviewable brilliant light was ever the goal, and its pallid prescience
(“in a mirror enigmatically,” again Paul, 1 Cor. 12–13) always the araction
that the spiritual intellect could seek out. There, in that mirror, a place of
speculation rather than recognition per se, we might discover what works of
art were produced to celebrate. So too Petrarch and Boccaccio had elaborated
notions of spiritual seeing that Alberti drew on by invoking Narcissus in
his text On Painting as “the inventor of painting,” a gure who I will argue
has critical implications in understanding Alberti’s notions of vision and is a
powerfully poetic force in stimulating spiritual identication with self and thematerial world.
Between those two worlds, the one physically seen and the one reected,
I have sought to nd ways of seeing how the sacred is manifest. Moreover, in
order to complement and indeed strengthen what Alberti and painters aim
for, it seemed important as another major theme to develop the importance of
Nicholas Cusanus as Alberti’s theological counterpart. While Alberti was the
rst to describe and recommend a full context for the naturalism of painting
that includes the use of single point perspective, I will argue that Cusanus
provides a theological complement to the basics of Alberti’s view. Aer all, ifAlberti articulates a notion of vision still grounded in theology then we ought
to look for something similar in a prominent theologian, especially one who
might speak of the importance of vision. While aempting to draw parallels
to Cusanus I do not mean, however, that we know he and Alberti consciously
cooperated either directly or indirectly for there is no conrming evidence to
that eect. Nevertheless, much has been made of their probable but unproven
relationship and what they seem to have had in common. I certainly agree
with many that they likely knew each other. But more important is the way
in which we might understand how their thinking reects a shared poetics ofperspective, of seeing into and through the material to the spiritual.
5 See Simon Gilson, Dante and Renaissance Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2005).
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
16/218
P xv
I only want to add here that I do not claim any singularly correct reading of
Alberti or Cusanus, nor that they are exclusively necessary to understanding
the Renaissance, but rather that they are extremely useful and I believe
provocatively so in understanding what I am seing out as a poetics of
perspective, or perhaps more broadly the poetics of a dialectic interaction
between sensuous and intellectual vision that enlivens this new naturalism.Nor do I consider myself an expert on either Alberti or Cusanus. While I have
immersed myself as much as possible in their work and the ever-abundant
interpretations of it, I have looked especially to their concern with vision. In
the case of Alberti the primary text is his treatise On Painting (Della piura),
which he wrote in Italian and then translated into Latin during the years
1435–1436.6 With Cusanus I have tried to choose from his many works those
that most emphatically draw upon vision as a means of gaining knowledge
about the world and God, especially but not exclusively from his Vision of God
(De visione Dei , 1453).Finally, however, I must stress that the abiding sense of how we might have
condence in their similarity is only possible to the extent that the ideas they
share are actually manifest in works of art. There I think we will discern an
abundance of metaphors shared by both writers and artists alike: geometry
of perspective to be sure, but much else as well. A great deal of what I have
found helpful has come from outside my discipline, though one will nd
here many references to the art historical works I have consulted, especially
regarding Alberti, and in many cases to what extent I agree with them. The
volume of material on Alberti is daunting and I have tried to stick to sourcesthat portray the principal ways in which his treatise On Painting has been
understood. Works on Cusanus are also numerous, and though his role is
increasingly seen as signicant for understanding Renaissance intellectual life
he has not the same rmly-planted reputation as his erstwhile companion
Alberti.7 In using the ideas of each I have carefully consulted both translations
and original languages of their texts with the aim of interrogating the depth
of their notions of what vision means. In some cases with Alberti, this has
entailed questioning aspects of currently used English translations and
oering alternatives. In all cases my aim is to match what they seem to thinkwith what the painters portrayed.
Charles H. Carman
6 See Rocco Sinisgalli, The New De Pictura of Leon Baista Alberti (Rome: Kappa, 2006),25–6; and Lucia Bertolini, “Leon Baista Alberti,” Nova informazione bibliograca 2 (2004): 255.
7 I am delighted to note that the relatively recent volume The Cambridge Companion toRenaissance Philosophy , ed. James Hankins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)contains an article by Dermot Moran (“Nicholas of Cusa and Modern Philosophy”) whostates on page 173 that Cusanus is “one of the most original and creative intellects of theeenth century.” In the meantime, works on Cusanus continue to appear.
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
17/218
This page has been le blank intentionally
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
18/218
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
19/218
L B A N Cxviii
to publish them: Francesca Gallori of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale
in Florence, Elizabeth Reluga of the Isabella Gardner Museum in Boston,
Penelope Currier of the Frick Collection in New York, as well as Kay Menick
and Gerhard Gruitrooy of Art Resource in New York. Among the many
students, current and former, who have generously oered thoughts and
exchanged ideas concerning many aspects of what has become this study,I am especially grateful to Denise Lang, Jessica Dipalma, Nancy Knechtel,
and Allison McGoldrick. Finally, the help and patience of Erika Ganey, my
editor at Ashgate, and that of Kathy Bond Borie, the advice of series editor
Allison Levy, as well as the comments and criticisms of outside readers who
greatly enhanced the process of rethinking and rening my approach and the
expression of ideas. I also want to acknowledge Meridith Murray’s ne work
in compiling the index.
For technical assistance I am happily indebted to my wife, Karen, and
especially to the expertise and generous assistance of Natalie M. Fleming, ourdepartmental Visual Studies Resources Curator, as well as to Jason Tedeschi
(ajarmedia.com). The College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Bualo
UB, and the Department of Visual Studies deserve a portion of my gratitude
for granting me a sabbatical during the 2007 academic year, which, along
with some nancial assistance from the United University Professors UUP for
several summer research grants, has allowed for more research time in Italy
than would have otherwise been possible during the working out of the ideas
that comprise this study.
As always I am eternally thankful for the patience and encouragement ofmy family: my wife, Karen, and our children: Erin, Moira, Devin, and Mark,
together with my daughter-in-law, Claudine, and granddaughter, Lucia—
whose precious light of life will forever illuminate those who, like her, seek
to understand.
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
20/218
Alberti and Cusanus: An Overview
Roberto Rossellini’s lm The Age of Cosimo de’ Medici (1972) pairs the humanist
writer Leon Baista Alberti and the theologian/philosopher Nicholas Cusanus,invoking the storied but undocumented belief that they knew each other.1 He
includes as well the scientist and mapmaker Paolo Toscanelli in the conversation.
During the lm an array of famous artists, writers, political leaders, and
important church gures widens, all thriving and competing under the aegis of
Cosimo’s generous patronage. Among the artists mentioned are Brunelleschi,
Ghiberti, Masaccio, and Donatello, while Michelozzo and Bernardo Rossellino
are actually present. Cosimo himself is the featured political gure along with
allies and enemies, while the archbishop Antoninus makes a brief appearance.
Recently completed art works are viewed, notably Masaccio’s Trinity , and hisTribute Money in the Brancacci Chapel. One of Fra Angelico’s Annunciation
scenes among the cells of San Marco is also visited. Brunelleschi’s dome for
the Cathedral is admired as evidence of the city’s unique creative energy. Even
Alberti’s new façade for Santa Maria Novella eventually makes its debut. We see
a world recreated according to a civic humanist ideal notion of dedication to
church, city, the new learning, and not least, mercantile prosperity.2
Perhaps Rossellini had in mind examples of Florentine Renaissance
painting in joining historical gures together in the same spaces, which so
oen unite saints from disparate time periods, sometimes with contemporaryidentiable personalities.3 Such images evoke the power of memory, binding
past moments into the full conscious present of the inextricably intersecting
1 Karsten Harries opens a recent essay invoking the same lm, “On the Power andPoverty of Perspective,” in Cusanus: The Legacy of Learned Ignorance , ed. Peter J. Casarella(Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 105–26. I rst sketchedout this section prior to reading Harries’s essay and have decided to retain it in as muchas Rossellini’s lm oers such a stunning evocation of both the tenacity of the story ofthis relationship presumed by so many writers, as well as its powerfully suggested civichumanist environment that encompassed these thinkers, despite their seemingly dierentvocations.
2 It is Rossellini’s avowed intention to bring to life a particularly idealizing point ofview regarding the Renaissance.
3 One thinks of Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Benozzo Gozzoli, and Ghirlandaio to name afew of the more prominent artists to include contemporary gures in their images.
1
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
21/218
L B A N C2
domains of the secular and the sacred.4 A particularly provocative scene occurs
before Masaccio’s Trinity (1426–1427). While Alberti and company comment
on its modernity of naturalism and perspective, a nun observing them oers
the opposing view that the artist’s naturalism—his modernity—is shamefully
irreverent, essentially reducing the divine to the mundane. Clearly for the
other protagonists she has missed the point. Yet by introducing her view,which must have been inevitable and therefore historically accurate, Rossellini
has captured the crux of what became a continuous division of how to see
the sacred in the ordinary—a debate that as yet haunts modern viewers,
however sympathetic they may be. Our age certainly appreciates Masaccio’s
accomplishments of naturalism but has perhaps seled with less concern for
the sacred. And though it is unclear whether Rossellini’s Alberti in the lm is
suciently cognizant of the as yet sacred revelations that Masaccio oered, the
Alberti as we may come to understand him would have indeed understood.
Even as Alberti in the lm proclaims the glory of geometry, mathematics,and mapmaking in order to penetrate the essence of creation, Cusanus
responds with the desire to map the heavens, invoking his belief that God
unfolded his unity into the multiplicity of existence, which allows for endless
discovery and progressive knowledge of divine creation. A “coincidence of
opposites” is thereby oered as what nite humanity can know of and about
the innite. In this way Rossellini brings Alberti into direct contact with one
of Cusanus’s most fundamental principles expressed in his text On Learned
Ignorance (1440), no maer that it was wrien aer the presumed date of the
encounters taking place, which begin in 1434 with Alberti’s return to Florencein the entourage of Eugenius IV.
These scenes, like individual paintings, are feigned stories (istorie). Much
as Alberti describes in his text On Painting , the subject to be interpreted in
the scene of a painting is a reworking, a remaking of remembered events;
and as we know even from ordinary experience memory necessarily shapes,
re-assembles, and designs the fragments of what is mostly long gone into
expressions of lessons learned. Memory returns to its fragmentary past and
passes on what is understood to be important. For Rossellini, Cusanus’s and
Alberti’s point is to stimulate creativity, to exercise what Italian humanists(including Alberti) oen refer to as ingegno , meaning the ability to have insight
and create new meaning.5
4 See Michael Silverman, “Rossellini and Leon Baista Alberti: The CenteringPower of Perspective,” Yale Italian Studies 1 (1977): 128–42, in which the author points outthe central importance of Alberti, not only as the protagonist/spokesman for Renaissanceaccomplishments but as the champion of a perspective system that centralizes an interfacingof sacred and secular meaning. While he does not go as far as I will in framing the symbolic,sacred function of single point constructions as used in the Renaissance, his suggestions inthat direction are insightful.
5 Alberti uses the term in his preface to the Italian edition, which is dedicatedto Brunelleschi, and throughout the text. For the Italian, Latin, and English see RoccoSinisgalli, The New De Pictura. On the importance of the meaning of ingegno see ErnestoGrassi, Renaissance Humanism: Studies in Philosophy and Poetics (Binghamton, NY: Center forMedieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1988), 23–34, 67–8.
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
22/218
A C: A O 3
Whether artists addressed by Alberti in his treatise On Painting , or
subsequent viewers of their works, all participate in a world visually remade.
Therein, imaginative recreations of sanctioned, traditional stories that are
recognized and in that sense, remembered, encourage transformations
in understanding. Rossellini’s conceit, his ingegno , if you will, allows us to
revel in the complete believability of the exciting and probable intellectualexchange of these important Renaissance thinkers. He creates, to take the
analogy to Renaissance practice even further, a kind of theatrical stage space
hosting a collective series of shiing scenes that constitute known historical
circumstances and places, much like naturalistic eenth century painting
in which history is rewrien, reimagined to accommodate the goals of the
chosen narrative, the istoria , as Alberti himself would conceive it. As in the
works we will examine, so in Rossellini’s rhetorical space actors make real a
reimagined history that expresses their highest goals of intellectual, artistic,
and scientic collaboration for the benet of citizens in their relationship tochurch and city.
Rossellini fashions in this exchange, moreover, a conjectural space in
which we can imagine Cusanus to know Alberti’s On Painting , though this
is unstated, and again the actual dates preclude Alberti having known
Cusanus’s text (1440) at the time of his writing the treatise (1435). Discussion,
nevertheless, of the laer’s notion of a “coincidence of opposites” and the
former’s single point perspective construction constitute what stimulates the
viewer, and certainly this writer, to ponder how they would have developed
those topics.6
There is much that can be said for the intellectual fertility ofsuch an imagined exchange. And, as has oen been pointed out the paths of
these men frequently crossed, in addition to having common friends, lending
credibility to Rossellini’s cinematic conjecture and the possibilities it invokes
regarding what we can hardly resist imagining they thought about and would
have discussed.
Briey, and without pretention to an all-inclusive survey, I will touch on
some of the recent writers and their thoughts that may help us to understand
Rossellini’s choice, and our present concern. Early on, the Italian scholar
Giovanni Santinello summed up the circumstantial evidence of Alberti’sand Cusanus’s relationship in an appendix to his book on Alberti in 1962.7
He recounts how they could have known each other through friends and
aliations with the papal court, within the circumstances surrounding
the councils of Ferrara and Florence (Rossellini’s context) during the years
6 Harries, pointing to the exchange between Cusanus and Alberti does not advocatefor their ideas being similar (“Power and Poverty,” 105). Of particular interest to this essay,and as Harries points out but does not develop in the way I will, is Cusanus’s notion ofa coincidence of opposites and Alberti’s description of the single point perspectiveconstruction. They are, in my view, very much one like the other as I will argue inChapter 4. Cusanus did own a copy of Alberti’s shorter treatise on The Elements of Painting ,
but there is no discussion of the development of perspective in this work.7 “Nicolo Cusano e Leon Baista Alberti: Pensieri sul Bello e sull’Arte,” Appendice
to Leon Baista Alberti: Una Visione Estetica del Mondo e della Vita (Florence: Sansoni, 1962),265–96.
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
23/218
L B A N C4
1438–1439 and the jubilee in Rome in 1450, as well as during Cusanus’s frequent
Roman stays between 1459 and 1464.8 Consequently, one can assume, or easily
imagine, the probability of their encounters,9 though the trail of evidence
seems to have stopped short of anything more conrming than their having
circulated among a tightly knit group of prominent intellectual, religious, and
political leaders.More important than the elusive proof of their acquaintance, Santinello
brings to life the environment in which to understand what Alberti and
Cusanus had in common, concentrating on their thoughts about beauty
and art.10 Among modern writers Santinello is most helpful, discerning a
concordance of thought distinctly esthetical and speculative (Pensieri sul
Bello), which stems from their common Pythagorean, Neoplatonic cultural
heritage. He nds that for Cusanus beauty in the world is not merely the idea
of God in an abstract sense but that “the world is the work of art of God.”11
For Alberti, whom he seems to see as a lile more disposed to the technicaland less to the speculative,12 Santinello, nevertheless, recognizes that he too
“knows how to nd the right moment in which to elevate the concrete to the
abstract in order to illuminate and understand the concrete itself.”13
He cites, for example, a passage from Alberti’s On Painting where he argues,
according to the model of Zeuxis, that to capture ideal female beauty the artist
must study not one example but many, creating a composite idea of beauty.14
Santinello seems to see them approaching the problem of locating the essence
of beauty by moving to and from physical reality of the world in dierent
directions: Cusanus starting from an unknown, unseable God, Alberti from
8 Giovanni Santinello, “Nicolo Cusano e Leon Baista Alberti: Pensieri sul Belloe sull’Arte,” Appendice to Leon Baista Alberti: Una Visione Estetica del Mondo e della Vita(Florence: Sansoni, 1962), 265–6.
9 In addition to Santinello’s recounting see also D.R. Edward Wright,Il De picturadi Leon Baista Alberti e I Suoi Leori (1435–1600) (Florence: Olschki, 2010), 69–108, whichincludes some interesting and promising suggestions on the relationship between Traversariand Alberti; two works by Kurt Flasch, “Nicolò Cusano e Leon Baista Alberti,” in Ingeniumn. 3, Leon Baista Alberti e Il Quarocento: Studi in Onore di Cecil Grayson e Ernst Gombrich , ed.Luca Chiavoni, Gianfranco Ferlisi, Maria Vioria Grassi (Cià di Castello: Olschki, 2001),
371–80, and “Cusano e gli intellectuali italiani del Quarocento,” in Cesare Vasoli: Le losoedel Rinascimento , ed. Paolo Costantino Pissavino, 175–92. In each case Flasch gives a broadoverview of the historiography of works proposing the similarities and dierences betweenAlberti and Cusanus, including detailed accounting of how their lives intersected. See alsoDermot Moran, “Nicholas of Cusa and Modern Philosophy,” 173–93, an excellent overviewof Cusanus’s life and philosophy. Most recently see Morimichi Watanabe, Nicholas of Cusa: ACompanion to His Life and His Times , ed. Gerald Christianson, Thomas M. Izbicki (Farnham:Ashgate Press, 2011).
10 See also Graziella Federici Vescovini, “Nicholas of Cusa, Alberti and theArchitectonics of the Mind,” Nexus ll: Architecture and Mathematics (Fucecchio: Edizionidell’Erba, 1998): 159–71. Perhaps the fullest and most concise review of the question is given
by Flasch, “Nicolò Cusano e Leon Baista Alberti,” 371–80.11 Santinello, “Pensieri,” 275: “Il mondo è quindi l’opera d’arte di Dio.”12 Santinello, “Pensieri,” 268: “nell’Alberti da una prospeiva tecnica, cioè della tecnica
artistica; nel Cusano da una prospeiva speculativa, metasico-teologica.”13 Santinello, “Pensieri,” 276: “Tuavia l’ingegno dell’Alberti sa sempre trovare il
momento felice in cui la meditazione si eleva dal concreto all’astrao per illuminare edintendere il concreto stesso.”
14 Santinello, “Pensieri,” 283–4. See Sinisgalli,The New De Pictura , 255.
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
24/218
A C: A O 5
the physically known world. Santinello notes that though “one certainly is
not able to speak of a Platonism of Alberti in the same way as that of Cusanus,
certainly an element of the platonic is operative”;15 nonetheless, both seem
“to sense the reality and value of beauty as transcendent of its physical,
natural manifestation, and in this way we believe to have found an element
of Platonism, at lease implicit in Alberti that approaches that which is explicitin Cusanus.”16 Moreover, for each he imputes an interest in the underlying
essence of human creativity as a manifestation of a divine-likeness. Both men
are interested in perceiving reality from the standpoint of nature understood
as creative process, natura naturans , rather than nature understood from
deductive observation, natura naturata. Art for both, Santinello asserts, “is
imitation of the opera operante more than it is of theopera operata of nature.”17
Art as analogous to nature, or God’s creative process, signals a notion of art
as more than merely a rendering of nature as it seems to be at any observable
moment. For Santinello, both Alberti and Cusanus emphasize visualizingwhat may not be visible—God’s continuing creation in which mankind has a
share.18 This is a view with which I deeply concur, and which is important to
understand. It diers fundamentally from views that stress Renaissance art as
a kind of anthropomorphic drive toward copying what the eye sees. Again,
while a secularizing view is not hegemonic, my concern is that such a tendency
(and I will point out cases) clouds what I will argue is more fundamental—the
stimulus to theological visuality.19 Along the lines of Santinello’s point of view I
will aempt to elucidate that Alberti does suggest painting embraces a divine-
like creative process. Important, as well, is not so much the product, as the wayin which the object produced springs from and stimulates understanding of an
originating force or process through which things come into being—ultimately
the result of exercising image-likeness to God, one’s Imago Dei. This implication
of realities not directly seen in one’s ordinary visual experience is for Alberti
and Cusanus manifest in their mutual recognition of the importance of
number, proportion, and harmony. Santinello, again in an insightful and lile
recognized observation, brings this common thread together around Alberti’s
discussion of the single point, geometric perspective in his Della piura.
With its emphasis on mathematical laws and the importance of seing theproportions of the structure according to those of an ideal man, he compares
15 Santinello, “Pensieri,” 284: “Non si può certamente parlare di un platonismodell’Alberti alla stessa stregua di quello del Cusano; ma certo un elemento platonico èoperante …”
16 Santinello, “Pensieri,” 285: “Però abbiamo avuto modo di rilevare che anche l’Albertisentì la realtà ed il valore della bellezza come trascendenti le loro manifestazioni naturali,ed in questo crediamo di ritovare un elemento platonico, almeno implicito, che avvicina ilpensatore italiano al platonismo explicito del losofo germanico.”
17 Santinello, “Pensieri,” 293: “l’arte è imitazione dell’ opera operante prima che dell’opera operata della natura.”
18 Santinello, “Pensieri,” 275.19 On can nd in Peter Brown’sSociety and the Holy in Late Antiquity (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1982) a salutary examination of the importance of thefundamental impulse in developing Christian societies of the need to value the viability ofthe unseen presence in what came to be holy.
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
25/218
L B A N C6
Alberti’s perspective scheme and Cusanus’s characterization of God’s vision in
De visione Dei (On The Vision of God) (1453).
Much as I think this is an important comparison, and will develop my
understanding of it in Chapter 4, I am, however, not in accord with the
direction Santinello’s takes. Rehearsing Cusanus’s account of how the eyes
of God in an icon follow all the monks looking at it no maer their positionor motion, he argues that this perspective is dierent from that of Alberti,
which is governed by more rigid laws of optics and geometry. Exactly here
we encounter an early example of the tendency to see Alberti in terms more
rational than metaphysical. For Alberti, Santinello records, what is seen—and
in that sense what will become the subject painted—is received by the eye in
the form of a pyramid of rays. In which case, necessarily, “the point of view
is that of the human observer.”20 Moreover, since humans only see a scene
in nature (again what will constitute the image transmied to the surface of
the painting) from one angle at a time the viewer is essentially xed at thatideal viewing position. Consequently, where Cusanus’s perspective derives
from God’s omnivoyant viewing, Alberti’s is derived from limited human
viewing.21 Santinello goes on to discuss that in spite of this dierence, both
Cusanus and Alberti always utilize a subjective, imaginative aspect that the
viewer (now painter) employs to enhance what is seen. In this way he returns
to see the two men as sharing a larger goal of seeking to employ the idea of
vision as a way to discern deeper or higher meaning.
What I disagree with has to do with Santinello’s comparison of the use
of perspective: On the one hand, the monks see the eyes of God in the iconfollowing them wherever they go, heuristically capturing His mystical innite
seeing that is beyond ordinary human capacity; on the other hand, Alberti’s
seeing accords to the pyramid of vision where one sees only one angle at a
time. Santinello does not address what becomes in Alberti’s construction the
pyramid of perspective, that is, what is projected as a pyramid onto the surface
of the painting (Figure 1.1). For this pyramid is one that extends to innity
and therefore, as I will argue later, is precisely what ought to be compared
to Cusanus’s vision of God. Moreover, the eect of this construction with its
apex at innity is that it follows the viewer, much as the vision of God does forCusanus. The problem with Santinello’s comparison, therefore, is not the sense
of understanding a shared goal, but in his conception of Alberti’s perspective,
which he only conceives in terms of how the eye sees nature. What ends up
missing then is the fact that the pyramid of perspective extends to innity
(actually “almost as if to innity”) (quasi persino in innito)22 creating an
opposition to the nite pyramid of vision. Alberti’s new perspective, in my
view, is rather more like Cusanus’s.23
20 Santinello, “Pensieri,” 289: “Il punto di vista è quello dell’osservatore umano.”21 Santinello, “Pensieri,” 289.22 The translation is mine, slightly dierent from Spencer, Alberti On Painting , 56, and
Sinisgalli, The New De Pictura , 145.23 This describes the “robustness” of geometric perspective (and naturalistically
rendered three-dimensional space in general), which will be discussed more fully in Chapter 4.
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
26/218
A C: A O 7
Among others who discuss Alberti and Cusanus more recently isKarsten Harries, where, in his aforementioned article, he too raises the
issue of perspective as a common ground.24 Also tracing the outlines of the
crisscrossing paths of Alberti and Cusanus, he suggests that a “shared interest
in mathematics would thus appear to have been one thing that joined Cusanus
and Alberti, their interest in the power of perspective another.”25 And while
we both seem to see Rossellini’s lm as a platform for seing the discussion of
what these men had in common, his assumptions about Alberti’s perspective
are quite dierent from my own. “I, too [as he suspects Rossellini to have
thought], understand Alberti as one of the founders of our modern world,a world whose material wealth is shadowed by spiritual poverty.”26 While
Alberti’s foundations pregure, for Harries, the path towards a poverty of
perception, Cusanus’s hold out hope still for understanding how to look, how
to understand that “in the visible world experiences of the beautiful open
windows to the transcendent ground of our knowing.”27 This is an elegant
expression of what Cusanus oers in his constant and clear assertions for
seeing in the world, and especially for seeing in the things created by mankind
the reection of creativity that is divine in origin. But what of the idea of
Alberti’s perspective interpreted as “spiritual poverty?”The method of argumentation here seems to rebound between physical
reality as experienced through the senses—Alberti—and higher perceptions
about the nature of that sense experience that is not only intellectual but results
from the Imago Dei principle—Cusanus. If created in the image and likeness
of God, it is then mankind’s intellect that aords him creativity akin to that of
God: Cusanus points simultaneously toward the material world’s wealth and
beyond toward the spiritual wealth of creative originality. Alberti, on the other
hand, seems not to have such perspective, focusing more emphatically on the
24 Harries, “Cusanus and Alberti.”25 Harries, “Cusanus and Alberti,” 106.26 Harries, “Cusanus and Alberti,” 107–8.27 Harries, “Cusanus and Alberti,” 125.
1.1 Modelfor pyramidsof vision andperspectivespace, based onLeon Battista
Alberti. Mutualinterpretation offinite and infinite.Author’s diagram
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
27/218
L B A N C8
world as it is. For Harries, Alberti’s perspective scheme—its introduction of
mathematical and geometric measuring—is to be associated with aempts to
precisely capture what is seen from a human, anthropocentric, perspective:
man is the measure. Moreover, Harries concludes that “artful pictorial illusion
invites us to mistake it for reality and to forget its merely articial being.”28
The assumption seems to be that Alberti’s intention is primarily to createillusion , even to the extent that “the artist usurps the place of God, substituting
for God’s creation his own.”29 Both Alberti and Cusanus use mathematics and
geometry, though the laer’s employment of such tools is seen rightly to lead
to comprehending eternal as well as ephemeral existence: here is the power
of perspective. Alberti’s use of the same tools does not lead to comprehending
the supernal: and here is the poverty of perspective. And with this we have
moved far from Santinello’s perception that Alberti and Cusanus worked
towards a common goal.
The very discussion of these two seminal Renaissance thinkers, one clearlymore theological than the other, naturally evokes consideration of the sense
that the Renaissance as “Early Modern” contains the kind of tension that
Harries sees and even Santinello senses. If these views serve as models for
how Cusanus’s and Alberti’s outlooks are compared, I would concur mostly
with Santinello’s. And though I don’t think he takes his understanding of
Alberti’s perspective far enough, he has laid the ground for thinking of Alberti
and Cusanus as similar rather than as fundamentally dierent.30 What I will
argue in the following chapters is that we can see Alberti and Cusanus in a
more closely related fashion. Particularly, it is my understanding that Alberti’sperspective functions rather more than less like that of Cusanus. But, before
continuing to variously unfold my arguments, let me suggest the importance
of two other major contributions to the discussion of Alberti and Cusanus,
which are still useful and basic texts. The rst is Joan Gadol’s book on Alberti.31
She too reminds us of the circle of friends that Alberti and Cusanus shared, 32
but it is the depth of her approach to Alberti that seems to me to pave the way
to a fuller sense of what the two men held in common.33
Cusanus is not the focus of the work, but the following characterization of
Alberti’s approach suggests a fruitful starting point for re-investigating hisideas vis-à-vis those of Cusanus. In her Epilogue: The Measure of the Man , Gadol
compares him to late eenth-century thinkers: “His conception of man’s
rational development, as growing into a kind of earthly god, foreshadows
28 Harries, “Cusanus and Alberti,” 110. See also by Harries,Innity and Perspective (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001). For a similar view see Anthony Graon, Leon Baista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).
29 Harries, “Cusanus and Alberti,” 110.30 See Santinello’s concluding remarks on the similarities between Alberti and Cusanus,
“Pensieri,” 295–6.31 Joan Gadol,Leon Baista Alberti: Universal Man of the Early Renaissance (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1969).32 Gadol, Alberti , 196–7 (note 68 includes an excursus on their mutual friends and
probable relationship).33 Gadol, Alberti , 18, does not discuss Santinello’s analysis of Alberti and Cusanus,
though she does outline what she sees as the limitations of this view of Alberti.
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
28/218
A C: A O 9
Pico della Mirandola’s famous oration which grounds human dignity in the
spiritual activity of self-formation.”34 Alberti’s “theory of art,” she continues,
“as a symbolic embodiment of Nature’s intelligible forms is likewise caught
up in Ficino’s idealistic theory of man who ‘recognizes’ the Divine Ideas and
reconstitutes them in art as well as in thought.” This, it seems to me, ts well
with the following statement coming a few lines later where she compareshim still to Ficino who, she says
found cosmological signicance in the logical act by which the mind drawstogether the concrete and the abstract in its syntheses of thought and art. As artistand thinker, man nds the disparate order of things, his divinely implanted ideascorresponding harmoniously to the actual structure of the world.35
All this is framed, however, by the position that Alberti’s thought avoided
philosophical and metaphysical speculation, which certainly Ficino and Pico
did not. I am certain that there is truth to that distinction. Yet, my inclination isnot to make one. For inasmuch as Alberti was neither expressly a philosopher
nor a theologian, he writes, nevertheless, from a cultural point of view not
yet divested of an inherent theological grounding, a point that I will discuss
extensively in the following chapters.36
Parenthetically, I do not want to suggest that Alberti was a Neoplatonist like
Ficino or Pico, or even that he was driven to explore justication of theological
principles, but rather that like the Florentine Neoplatonists, like Cusanus,
and like humanists in general he shared notions of mankind’s responsibility
in earthly, specically civic, activity.37 Therein, it is important, still, that moral justications of the virtue necessary to fulll that responsibility resided
inevitably in one’s relationship to God, indeed in a responsibility to God that
was recognized to indwell, and even to dene the soul of the city, its essence
as a Heavenly Jerusalem.38 This was a notion of responsibility to be realized
through interaction with material reality for the purpose of being God-like,
being creative, doing good work, fullling a spiritual obligation. In that sense,
at least, I believe Alberti can be shown to share much with both civic humanism
and with Neoplatonists of the later century.39 My more specic concern, once
34 Gadol, Alberti , 231–2. Her starting point is Cristoforo Landino’s DisputationumCamaldulensium , ca. 1468 that includes Alberti among the dialogue’s participants.
35 Gadol, Alberti , 232.36 It is worth noting regarding the issue of Alberti’s concern with the spiritual that he
was a priest, though not active.37 On Alberti’s relationship to Florentine humanism see Timothy Kircher,Living Well in
Renaissance Italy: The Virtues of Humanism and the Irony of Leon Baista Alberti (Tempe: ArizonaCenter for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012).
38 On Florence as a Heavenly Jerusalem see, for example, Donald Weinstein, “TheMyth of Florence,” Florentine Studies: Politics and Society in Renaissance Florence , ed. NicolaiRubenstein (London: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 15–44; and Savonarola: The Riseand Fall of a Renaissance Prophet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).
39 Regarding the notion of “civic humanism,” see most recently the essays inRenaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reections , ed. James Hankins (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2000); John M. Najemy, A History of Florence: 1200–1575 (Singapore: Blackwell, 2006); and Albert Rabil, Jr., “The Signicance of ‘Civic Humanism’in the Interpretation of the Italian Renaissance,” in Renaissance Humanism: Foundations,
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
29/218
L B A N C10
again, will be to read his Della piura from the standpoint of its inherent
philosophical/theological underpinnings, and to examine how that is evident
in painting. My second concern is how Alberti’s thinking coincides with that
of Cusanus, especially as they share notions of vision as a basis of knowing.40
What, however, did Joan Gadol say of Alberti’s art theory? What was its
relationship to his instructions to the painter in Della piura , to his uniquespatial construction? It is interesting that in light of the kind of concluding
remarks considered above the author introduces her work by distinguishing
Alberti, the Alberti she wishes to reveal, from previous views that tended to see
his work as not unied and responding either to a scientic or a metaphysical
aim. Rather, she sees that:
For Alberti, however, there was as yet no such division between the ‘inner’ andthe ‘outer’ world … ‘Science’ and humanism were not conicted in directions ofthought for him, but dierent aspects of one intellectual vision and pursuit …
We shall [she soon continues] recover the ‘inner logic’ of one of the mostcomprehensive spirits of the early Renaissance.41
In fact she had already told us, just prior to this what the ‘inner logic’
consisted of, if not how it was derived:
ideas of measure, harmony, and proportion, ideas that bespeak a moral andintellectual outlook quite at variance with the conicts, disparateness, and despairthat have been aributed to him; … they point towards a systematic unity thatunderlies and adequately explains the diversity of his many achievements.42
I very much agree, yet when she goes on to explain The Painter’s Perspective
(chapter 1), we nd that Alberti “was not concerned with ontology,” and that
he “was bound to reality qua appearance or phenomenon,” then proceeding
to “the momentous assumption that appearances conform to the rules of
simple, plane geometry.”43 Perhaps most to the point, she indicates that Alberti
Forms, and Legacy , 1 Humanism in Italy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,1988), 141–74. On Neoplatonism see Arthur Field, The Origins of the Platonic Academy of
Florence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); and James Hankins,Plato in the ItalianRenaissance (Leiden: Brill, 1991). For Neoplatonism and the arts see, for example, JohnHendrix, Platonic Architectonics: Platonic Philosophy and the Visual Arts (New York: Peter Lang,2004); and Neoplatonic Aesthetics: Music, Literature, and the Visual Arts , ed. Liana De GirolamiCheney, John Hendrix (New York: Peter Lang, 2004).
40 Many scholars have pointed to a certain level of cynicism among contemporaryhumanists, including and especially Alberti. During what was a prolonged period of crisisstemming from the Papacy’s tenure in Avignon through the years following its restitution inRome, there was much to question about the sincerity and eectiveness of the church thatperhaps widened the gap between lay secular concerns and traditional theology. Amongthe approaches to situating Alberti, that of Timothy Kircher’s Living Well presents Alberti asgenuinely concerned with dening real virtue within the realm of existential reality thoughnot divorced from the fundamental moral charge of being a Christian. See also RiccardoFubini, Humanism and Secularization: From Petrarch to Valla (Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress, 2003).
41 Gadol, Alberti , 19. See the entire “Introduction” for discussion of prior viewsincluding Santinello’s.
42 Gadol, Alberti , 19.43 Gadol, Alberti , 28.
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
30/218
A C: A O 11
wished to join abstract mathematical principles to something sensuous—
that is, to concretize them, join them with the phenomenal world, which he
expressly insists be a union guided by wisdom (Minerva). Yet, the author does
not account for what that wisdom is. And here lie essential questions: what
does Alberti mean by wisdom, where does it come from, and how does its
relationship with the sensuous world manifest itself? If, as Gadol suggests,like many later authors, Alberti’s new perspective denes a new artistic aim
that “was no longer to refer to something that transcends experience, but to
represent visual experience itself,”44 then, this does not address a concern
with what I will argue he understood by “wisdom.” In this regard we can see
emerging in the historiography of Alberti (whether also discussing Cusanus or
not), along with Santinello (to a degree) and with Harries (to a greater degree)
what I have suggested is a more or less anthropomorphic view of the role of
art. I will say more on this when discussing in greater detail the conicting
notions of the meaning of single point perspective in Chapter 4, but it is worthmentioning here that, for example, two fairy recent and prominent works,
another by Harries,45 and the other by Anthony Graon,46 both nd Alberti to
be paradigmatic of a modern rational outlook. And while they are not alone,
others we will discover also argue vigorously for a purely rational view of
single point perspective, defenders of a more metaphysical outlook have a
voice as well in this dichotomous judging of perspective.47
For the present, however, returning to the discussion of Gadol’s work,
if we take Alberti’s concern with wisdom seriously I do not think it could
be reduced to a material maer. Perhaps before asking what wisdom is, thequestion ought to be: what is or how is visual experience? If it only concerns
something in and of itself, then we have to reconcile that with Alberti’s
evidently ambiguous phrase that introduces the entire question, his notion
of “a greater sensate wisdom” (la piú grassa Minerva).48 Though variously
translated I am in agreement with those who take Minerva as a reference to
wisdom, which if correct calls into question what he means by a “sensate
wisdom.”49 Even more fundamentally we have to consider his notion of
how looking or seeing constitutes a basic understanding of painting as a
creative art. He has very intriguing things to say in this regard, seeminglycontradictory things that play o the tensions set up by his intention that the
painter be concerned with that “greater sensate wisdom”! On the one hand,
Alberti claims that “painting is in fact the ower of all the arts.”50 Yet when he
44 Gadol, Alberti , 103–4. Here the author is extrapolating from Alberti’s De architectura ,which she nds more developed in terms of explicit art theory. In contrast she nds Della piura “to not yet express any new theoretical development” (131).
45 Harries,Innity and Perspective.46 Graon,Leon Baista Alberti.47 The reader is referred again to Elkins’sPoetics of Perspective for a most comprehensive
bibliography and discussion of views regarding perspective.48 This is John Spencer’s translation. See hisLeon Baista Alberti On Painting (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 43.49 For a fuller discussion, see Chapter 2.50 Sinisgalli,The New De Pictura , 162, “ché già sia la piura ore d’ogni arte.”
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
31/218
L B A N C12
comes to describe the invention of painting he credits Narcissus, famous for
his aachment to self as a material sensuous/sensual araction. We know that
Narcissus in Ovid’s account was metamorphosed into a ower, which Alberti
acknowledges, but how does this claim square with his previous association of
painting with Minerva—that is, wisdom? Moreover, how do these references
function in framing the ensuing discussion of a geometric space? Here tooI will argue that they function dialectically, even ironically, to challenge the
centrality of a materialist naturalism, and to foster an understanding of what
resides unseen within the visible world.
But, again to Gadol, it is not my intention to say that she is entirely wrong.
More than anything it is to suggest that there is a tension in seeing Alberti
as “scientist” and “humanist,” a tension that indeed Gadol noticed.51 It is
not one that she resolves, however, at least not in the discussion of Alberti’s
view of perspective. This, I believe, is because she sees his treatise as
fundamentally guided by a drive towards rationality. It pervades her work,and that of many modern writers—certainly Harries and Graon, though
less so Santinello—and stands in the way of recognizing that Alberti, like
other humanists, did not see the world so much in rational terms as in
metaphorical/poetical terms.52 It is striking, for example, here and elsewhere
that there is precious lile discussion of how perspective functions to
illuminate the religious subject maer that it so oen articulates.53 The
importance of Alberti’s sense of a moral and theological concern only
emerges with any force in the laer sections of her book when discussing his
general philosophical outlook, which she considers to be inseparable fromhis contemporary religious environment. I will argue that it is precisely that
environment of a humanistic, theological nature that embraces and nurtures
a dialectical relationship between the objectivity of physical vision and the
subjectivity of spiritual vision.
One does not in the eenth century sensuously or intellectually objectify
the essence of anything spiritual. How would that be done to Christ, the
Trinity, the Virgin Mary, or any compilation of holy images? Their “reality”
can only be constituted by some belief in transcendence of the material,
objectively reasoned existence as it is experienced by humanity. Nevertheless,I do not mean that images of holy gures do not take on a naturalistic, or
51 For a fascinating and brilliantly informed discussion of the role of “science” and itsmeaning in understanding astrology and astronomy functioning in God’s universe to aecthuman aairs, see Mary Quinlan-McGrath, Inuences: Art, Optics, and Astrology in the ItalianRenaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
52 For an enlightening discussion of Alberti’s poetic tendencies within the well knowtradition of Florentine poetics, especially regarding Petrarch and Boccaccio, see TimothyKircher, Living Well , 187–223.
53 Samuel Y. Edgerton is a notable exception, for example in his most recent workThe Mirror, the Window, and the Telescope: How Renaissance Linear Perspective Changed Our Vision ofthe Universe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009); as is S.K. Heninger Jr.,The Subtext of Formin the English Renaissance: Proportion Poetical (University Park: University of PennsylvaniaPress, 1994). So, too, is Leo Steinberg’s Incessant Last Supper (New York: Zone Books, 2001),which recognizes the theologically symbolic aspects of Leonardo’s use of perspective. Alsonotable in this regard is Nicholas Temple’s Disclosing Horizons: Architecture, Perspective andRedemptive Space (New York: Routledge, 2007).
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
32/218
A C: A O 13
if one insists “objective” characteristic—that is, that they appear more or
less as we appear to each other. They do, but always in a problematized
fashion, in a way that causes one to think beyond any simple identication
with material meaning. Certainly there is scholarship, art historical and
otherwise, that has been guided by an understanding of these parameters,
as has been mentioned above and in notes, and which will be called forthto support my own arguments. Still, what concerns me in this study is the
degree to which Alberti has been seen in rationalizing terms, especially
regarding analysis of his book On Painting , a concern addressed in the
chapters that follow. What I believe we will nd and what needs emphasis
within this obviously new art of the Renaissance is that its naturalism is
simultaneously leveraged, manipulated metaphorically to cause one to
“see” through apparent material reality to a higher transcendent truth
signaled by the gures depicted and the way the stories they constitute are
composed. A modern rationalistic, scientic notion of reality was not yet born and I will argue that it is not the meaning to be found in Alberti’s
On Painting. And while one might argue that Renaissance humanism led
to anthropomorphism, I would think it more fruitful to suggest that it did
not. Something may have become of the humanism that was constituted
and practiced during Alberti’s period, but that was later and evidently
lasting, aaching a tension to notions of humanism itself and certainly to
the meaning of single point perspective.54
Among the more modern works on Alberti, especially regarding his book On
Painting , in my view Gadol’s is the nest. I believe this even though it conveysa dualistic view of Alberti and Humanism and in spite of her eorts to see
an integrated, holistic gure.55 The eort to examine Alberti’s formulation of
a geometric perspective, together with discussions of intellectual similarities
to Cusanus will, I hope help to foster and buress a sense of unity to Alberti
and the general humanist, artistic eort to visualize the sacred within the
secular. I would be remiss, however, not to mention at least briey one other
54 Harries, “Cusanus and Alberti,” sees the turning point in Descartes, but also
beginning in Alberti (107–11). Moreover, Erwin Panofsky’s seminal text, Perspective asSymbolic Form , trans. Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1997) seems to haveinherited the kind of tension implied in seeing perspective as spiritual and yet inherentlyanthropomorphic, a division I will take up at the end of Chapter 4. On the topic of a turnto science and objectication of the universe that splits the spiritual and the rational andthe reaction of European artists of the seventeenth century, see Ths Weststen, The VisibleWorld: Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Art Theory and the Legitimation of Paining in the Dutch Golden Age , trans. Beverley Jackson and Lynne Richards (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UniversityPress, 2008).
55 This seems to be typical as we noted in citing Harries,Innity and Perspective , andGraon, Alberti: Master Builder. More positive in viewing Alberti’s relationship to advancinghumanist, moral imperatives is M. Barry Katz, Leon Baista Alberti and The Humanist Theoryof the Arts (Washington, DC: The Catholic University Press of America, 1977). Most recentlysee Kircher’s Living Well (6), where he assigns a unique role for Alberti in relationship tohumanism, one critical of humanist pretensions to virtue: “Alberti’s irony focused on thehuman proclivity to deception and self-deception, and exposed the contradiction withinhumanism between appearances and reality. It identied the gap between the phenomenaof cultural authority and their actual value, between the pretension of moral wisdom andgenuine ignorance.”
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
33/218
L B A N C14
important work that takes a broad humanistic view of Alberti, by Dorothy
Koenigsberger.56 Without developing Alberti’s concept of perspective in any
detail she does capture some essence of its importance by emphasizing that
its geometry lent a theoretical quality and signaled a direct relationship with
nature’s underlying geometrical structure and therefore is reective of a
divine universal harmony.57
Moreover, she sees Alberti’s view of harmony in nature, as well as his
positing of an innite space (the point at innity in his pyramid of perspective)
to be analogous to Cusanus’s view of nature as harmoniously organized in
relationship to the innite divine.58 Perhaps most importantly, Koenigsberger
perceives Alberti’s thinking process as similar to what she refers to as
Cusanus’s “knowing power in the mind.”59 Although not developed in the
detail that I will aempt, she relates this to Alberti’s perspective scheme,
which posits an innity, and to Cusanus, who posits God as innity. Her
perception embraces the notion that Alberti intends the viewer to struggle tosee the innite (ultimately God) just as Cusanus did, who explicitly sets this
relationship within the context of mankind’s inability to actually know the
innite while at the same time nding it necessary to exercise the power of
the ability to apprehend God, which is realized in ever greater degrees in the
comprehension of His creation—that is, nature. Indeed, apparently for each
“the mind is made so that its seeing is an image of God’s knowing.”60 I believe
that her perceptions are accurate and in terms of a broad approach to Alberti,
Cusanus, and the Renaissance (and in no small measure to art, especially
regarding Leonardo), I nd my views bear out much of what she intimates.61
Regarding my sense of how Alberti and Cusanus express important
aspects of a Renaissance epistemology of vision, I mention here the following
interpretive works that more exclusively embrace the works of Cusanus.
Most helpful have been Clyde Lee Miller’s Reading Cusanus in a Conjectural
Universe;62 Nancy Hudson’s Becoming God: The Doctrine of Theosis in Nicholas of
Cusa ,63 as well as numerous articles dealing with aspects of the various texts
of Cusanus, which will appear in citations throughout the following chapters.
56 Dorothy Koenigsberger,Renaissance Man and Creative Thinking: A History of Conceptsof Harmony 1400–1700 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979).
57 Koenigsberger,Renaissance Man , 39, passim.58 Koenigsberger,Renaissance Man , 115, also relates this train of thought to the
importance of the Christian Neo-Platonic tradition and extends this inuence in importantways to the art and thought of Leonardo da Vinci: “Alberti and Leonardo appear to havetaken their assumptions about the powers and processes of the human mind from Cusa.”Greater emphasis is placed throughout, however, on a closer, even direct inuence betweenCusanus and Leonardo.
59 Koenigsberger,Renaissance Man , 121.60 Koenigsberger,Renaissance Man, 118. She refers in this section to Cusanus’sOn
Learned Ignorance in relation to Alberti’s On Painting.61 I will return to Koenigsberger’s work at various points, especially regarding her
recognition of the importance of the meaning of the “point” (as in point, line, surface, etc.) asan idea that ultimately references divine origin. See Chapter 3.
62 Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy 37 (Washington, DC: The CatholicUniversity Press of America, 2003).
63 (Washington, DC: The Catholic University Press of America, 2007).
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
34/218
A C: A O 15
Though these studies treat Cusanus as a theologian and philosopher, and for
the most part do not touch on his relationship with Alberti or with painting,
they are instructive in oering broadly useful ways of understanding how
Cusanus brings God and humanity into a necessary dialectical relationship.
I found Miller’s work particularly informative in the way he pulls together
Cusanus’s writing around the theme of conjecturing—that is, aempting toput into metaphorical terms what is beyond reason and rational vision:
Knowers are always making new proposals and constructing dierent conceptualand verbal metaphors and symbols as they engage the created and uncreatedrealities they yearn to know. Nicholas’ best metaphors, whether for God or theuniverse, involve thinking moving through and beyond varying perspectiveswhile remaining aware that our progress and any resulting understanding areprovisional. The theoretical world Nicholas constructs, especially in philosophicaltheology, is thus always conjectural, always metaphorical, and always dialectical.64
Alberti too, as I have suggested already, set forth a perspective (in both
the broad sense of seeing into, and in the specic seeing into of single point,
geometric perspective) that is metaphorical and dialectical in nature. There is
much to draw upon in both writers to bear this out.
Hudson’s work is particularly illuminating, as she develops the guiding
theological notions of theosis and theophany:
Just as theosis is a transformative movement returning the created order toGod, it is matched by an outward movement of divine self-manifestation. This
movement, known as theophany, is foundational to theosis because of the originalunitive relationship between the two orders that it establishes.65
The complementary nature of salvation as humanity moves towards God
and His manifestation within creation and especially as the Logos in being
(Christ) empowers the ability to achieve a return. All this, I will argue,
is fundamental to what Alberti implies about how vision is understood to
facilitate the interaction of God’s immanence and humanity’s share in it. This
relationship is essential, moreover, for understanding how naturalism in
general functions not just to capture the world as seen but also as an avenue
towards glimpsing God’s imminent presence. Both Alberti and Cusanus share
a sense of this dialectical vision that depends exactly upon the interrelationship
of theosis and theophany as Hudson explains it.
Another work that has greatly reinforced the direction of my thinking in
these essays is Elizabeth Brient’s The Immanence of the Innite: Hans Blumenberg
and the Threshold to Modernity.66 Here we nd a very targeted thesis that
refutes, on the one hand, Blumberg’s justication of the modern world as a
nal resolution to the dualism of man/God, maer/spirit (his notion of the
persistence and power of Gnosticism) by the “realization of this-worldly
64 Miller,Reading Cusanus , 248.65 Hudson,Becoming God , 9.66 (Washington, DC: The Catholic University Press of America, 2002).
-
8/17/2019 Visual Culture in Early Modernity.
35/218
L B A N C16
possibilities through the mastery and alteration of reality.”67 On the other
hand, her argument seeks to uphold the ancient Greek notion of Cosmos as
developed through the Middle Ages in Neoplatonism, including importantly
Cusanus, as the force that keeps man/God, body/spirit in a functioning
relationship: “indeed, throughout the Christian tradition emphasis on divine
transcendence was at the same time balanced with a corresponding emphasison divine immanence.”68
Brient, Hudson, Miller, Gadol, Koenigsberger, and Santinello in my reading,
help to frame the context of much of what I argue in this project regarding
Alberti and Cusanus: that the Renaissance as articulated in the works of
Alberti (especially his On Painting) need not be understood as a turning
point in the development of a secularist, materialist epistemology—at least
as implied by some of the prominent modern authors we have noted—and
that the ideas found in his work and in the visual manifestations of a theology
depicted in worldly, or naturalistic, terms need not seem at odds, one with theother. The overarching point that I am seeking to stress is that the Renaissance
is not so much a beginning of anthropocentrism as it is a point of discovering
how the divine is perceived to be evident in the natural world, allowing it
to serve as the avenue to the improvement of human life and ultimately to
transcendence in the aerlife. All of this seems to me to strengthen the need to
know how that functions in Alberti’s ideas about painting and in works of art
that so ubiquitously display the divine in naturalistic guise, which leads me
to the following section.
The Reality of Nature and the Nature of Reality: Reassessing Renaissance
Notions of Vision
Having outlined some of the fundamental concerns of this study along with
inuential historical views on Alberti and Cusanus, I want to establish rst
what is perhaps most fundamental: the meaning of “nature” as it applies to
our understanding of Italian Renaissance art and culture. Is “nature,” for the
Renaissance, the physical substance of reality, or can it refer to a conception ofunderlying laws? If the laer, “nature” is not so much what is grasped by the
senses as it is what is understood by the mind. This, of course, reects a long
tradition that reached an evident level of maturation in early eenth-century
humanism, but which was certainly present in the late medieval period.69
67 Brient,Immanence of the Innite , 9–10.68 Brient,Immanence of the Innite�