On Alberti's "sign": vision and composition in quattrocento painting - Leon Battista Alberti's commentary 'On Painting'

Historians of art have lengthy regarded composition as a major achievement of Renaissance painting. In making this assessment, they are echoing the views of Leon Battista Alberti, whose commentary upon Painting offers the first critical appreciation of composition in pictorial art. Written in Latin in 1435 upon Painting was translated into Italian in 1436 and reissued in a definitive Latin edition around 1440(1) Scholars treat Alberti's famous account of one-point perspective construction as the lock opener to, and reason behind, the commentary.(2) on the contrary this account is only a small part of a work whose prime view is to demonstrate that painting is a liberal art when its practice conforms with three masterships (rationes) or underlying logical principles. This paper argues that these dominions locate the kind of painting that Alberti admires greatest in quantity within a philosophical tradition according sight a central character in human cognition.

For Alberti, composition is the next to the first and most important rule of art. Composition come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behinds "circumscription," the rule for drawing outlines, and go ahead ofs "the reception of light," the authority for applying colored pigment. Circumscription and coloring are for the use of all topics in ancient, Byzantine, and medieval art literature; composition is not. Before Alberti, it was seldom (if ever) discussed in connection with painting, and he set aparts more attention to it than to any other topic.(3) As his definition makes clear, composition bring into views the painter's "greatest work":

Composition is the authority of painting by which the parts are brought together to form a pictorial work. The greatest work of painting is not a colossus, on the other hand historia. For the praise of ingenuity is greater in historia, than in a colossus. The parts of a historia are bodies, part of the material part is a member, part of a member is a surface. Thus the prime parts of the work are surfaces, because from them tend hitherward members, from the members tend hitherward the bodies, and from those advances the historia, indeed the ultimate and absolute work of painting.(4)

In Giotto and the Orators, Michael Baxandall exhibits that the four-level model of artistic organization that Alberti calls composition was familiar to each Renaissance student of rhetoric) Rhetoricians described a period - a determination consisting of three, four, or more clauses - as an arrangement of words to form phrases, phrases to form clauses, and clauses to form the clean sentence. Baxandall argues that the diction of sentences was a matter of strife of words in the 1430s for Latin authors of neoclassical training. Humanist teachers like Guarino da Verona (1374-1460) promot a manner of writing of Latin prose that emulated hellenic ekphratic literature. They admired the abundance, diversity, and splendor of descriptions that enumerated the vivid details of spectacles put before the reader's organ of visions in loose series of appositive phrases, clauses, and simple judgments Humanist rhetoricians like George of Trebizond (1396-1486) upon the other hand, criticized Latin ekphratic unromantic as weak and dissolute. They favored the dignity, gravity, decorum, and restraint of a more compos phraseology in which descriptions are organized into prolix well-rounded periods with clearly delimited phrases and clauses. Baxandall maintains that Alberti applied George of Trebizond's critical standards for compos and dissolute prosaic to painting. In his view, Alberti's discussion of composition is predicated upon a belief that painting and writing have "cognate mode of expressions of organization." Accordingly, he maintains that historians "can make without a polarization of styles belonging to all to both painting and writing" when they apply Alberti's categories to early quattrocento art. Baxandall closes that the rule of composition expresse Alberti's predilection for pictorial works in a compos diction parallel to that of a Latin periodic sentence

Nonetheless, identifying particular paintings with which to illustrate Alberti's visual standard for compos and dissolute works is no easy matter. Alberti discusses alone two pictorial works that he and his contemporaries might actually have seen one as well as the other works, which unfortunately are now missing were located in Rome. individual is an ancient relief of the Death of Meleager (II. 37) the other, a famous fresco of the Navicella by the agency of Giotto (II. 42). Alberti not aways them as successful compositions. All other works that he clutchs up as exemplary, including those praised for composition, were familiar alone from ekphrases in classical literature. In fact, Alberti explicitly warns his readers that greatest in quantity of the ancient works that they might diocese do not provide a trustworthy standard for composition:

As we may easily justice [intelligimus] from the works of former times, this matter probably remained completely unknown to our ancestors, because it is sombrous and difficult. For you will scarcely find any historia of antiquity to be aptly compos not in painting, not in relief, not in plastic art (I. 21)

Giotto is the solitary postclassical artist mentioned in the material part of the commentary. Although Giotto had been dead for more than a hundred readers may well assume that his work provided a standard for the kind of composition that Alberti admired. However, the preface to the Italian edition explicitly links Alberti's commentary with the artistic situation in contemporary Florence. In the preface, Alberti dedicates his commentary to five Florentine artists whose talents, he says, are in no way inferior to those of the greatest in quantity famous artists of antiquity and whose accomplishments convinced him that contemporary practitioners have the ability to discover things about the arts and sciences that level their most illustrious predecessors did not know.(6) Four of the artists to whom the commentary is dedicated were working in Florence while Alberti was writing it: the architect Filippo Brunelleschi and the sculptors Donatello, Lorenzo Ghiberti, and Luca Della Robbia. The sole contemporary painter singled out for praise is Masaccio, who died prematurely in 1428 or 1429 without leaving artistic heirs capable of carrying his artistic program forward. Alberti's praise for Masaccio stands in sharp contrast to the negative allusions to contemporary painting scattered through every part of the commentary (for example, 112; II.39, 46; III.56). In a commentary advocating a novel form of artistic practice, the favorable regard to Masaccio in the dedication is sufficient to display that his work exemplifies the kind of contemporary painting that Alberti wished to aid A1berti may even have written his commentary with the faith of reviving the practice of neo-Giottesque, humanist painting, which Masaccio pioneered and which in 1435 was in danger of passing away with him.