Abstract
Alberti'sDe Pictura (1435)—his seminal treatise on the art of painting—is subtly but unmistakeably riven by a fundamental contradiction. Though he aims to show that painting can move the beholder just as powerfully as speech can, that its silent rhetoric of gesture and expression can signify a whole inner world of thoughts and feelings, Alberti cannot sustain the would-be natural link between painted visible sign and invisible signified. Straining as the argument proceeds, the link breaks altogether when Alberti tries to illustrate the power of invention in art with a pointedly edited version of Lucian's description of an allegorical painting by Apelles. Here the expressive power of painting gives way to the regulative, determining power of words. In spite of himself, Alberti at last makes the rhetoric of painting depend on the rhetoric of speech.
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Leon Battista Alberti,On Painting and On Sculpture: The Latin Texts of De Picturaand De Statua, ed. and trans. Cecil Grayson (London: Phaidon, 1972), p. 3. Except where noted, quotations from Alberti's treatise are from this edition of the Latin orginal with facing English translation, cited as Grayson. Translations immediately following passages quoted from the Latin (and cited by paragraph number as well as page number) are my own attempts to render it as accurately as possible, with no pretense to elegance. I quote the English translation ofDella Pittura from Leon Battista Alberti,On Painting, trans. John R. Spencer, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale, 1966), cited as Spencer.
David Rosand, “Ekphrasis and the Renaissance of Painting: Observations on Alberti's Third Book,” in:Florilegium Columbianum: Essays in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. Karl-Ludwig Selig and Robert Somerville, (New York: Italica Press, 1987), p. 157.
David Cast,The Calumny of Apelles: A Study in the Humanist Tradition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 49, 56. Though Cast posits “some connection between” Alberti and Botticelli (p. 41), it is not at all certain that either Mantegna or Botticelli took Alberti as his source. But along with some works by Raphael and his school, the compositions of Mantegna and Botticelli come closer to Alberti's description than do any other compositions of the fifteenth or early sixteenth centuries; see Jean-Michel massing,Du Texte à l'Image: La Calomnie d'Apelle et Son Iconographie (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 1990), p. 82—hereafter cited as Massing. Massing's monograph on theCalumny complements two other studies that appeared shortly before it: Stanley Meltzoff, “TheCalumny of Apelles by Botticelli,” in: idem,Botticelli, Signorelli, and Savonarola: Theologica poetica and painting from Boccaccio to Poliziano (Studi e Testi XXXIII) (Florence: Biblioteca di ‘Lettere Italiane’, 1987), pp. 99–286; and Mark Jarzombek,On Leon Baptista Alberti. His Literary and Aesthetic Theories (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1989).
Subsignare is a problematic term. Since its counterpart in the Italian version of Alberti's treatise is notsignificare orsubsignificare butdisegnare, which commonly means “to draw;”subsignare may mean literally to make an underdrawing—to draw a figure that is overlaid with further drawing or pigment or both. But the final point of the passage is clear. The visible surface of the finished painting—the flesh and skin of the figure—should make intelligible what lies beneath them.
“By action the body talks… and nature has given us eyes… to indicate the feeling of the mind” (Cicero,De Oratore 3.59.223; Sutton 2:179). As Jacqueline Lichtenstein shows, Cicero believed that the dramatic expressivity of the body played a crucial part in moving the orator's audience. SeeCouleur éloquente. Rhétorique et peinture à l'âge classique (Paris: Flammarion, 1989) pp. 73–94; English:The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age, trans. Emily McVarish (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1993), pp. 74–77, 91–95.
Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), pp. 130–31.
On Alberti's use of Quintilian as a literary model, see D. R. Edward Wright, “Alberti'sDe Pictura: Its Literary Structure and Purpose”Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 47 (1984), pp. 52–71.
De Inst. Orat 2.13.13. Cf. Cicero, on whom Alberti draws for the first part of his description: “The painter, after portraying Calchas as sad at the immolation of Iphigenia, Ulysses as even sadder, Menelaus in deep grief, sees the head of Agamemnon covered with a veil, since his absolute sorrow cannot be imitated with a brush” (Orator XXII.74, qtd. Franciscus Junius,The Painting of the Ancients, ed. Keith Aldrich, Philip Fehl, and Raina Fehl, [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991], Vol.2, pp. 401–2) In theLaocoon, Lessing likewise uses the painting to show that expression should be kept in check. The concealment of Agamemnon's face, he writes, “is a sacrifice that the artist has made to beauty; it is an example, not of how one pushes expression beyond the limits of art, but how one should subject it to the first law of art, the law of beauty”. G. E. Lessing,Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins U Press, 1984), pp. 16–17. For the original, see McCormick's source, Hugo Blümner, ed.,Lessings Laokoon, 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1880), or Lessing'sWerke und Briefe, vol. 5.2, ed. Wilfried Barner (Bibliothek deutscher Klassiker 57) (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1990), pp. 27–29.
See for instance Cicero'sDe Inventione 1.7.9.
The quoted phrase is from Rosand, p. 154. It is hard to say precisely what Alberti means byinventio because, as Rosand notes, the word is “absent from his tripartite definition of painting” (p. 155). Massing writes that for Alberti “Le terme inventioenglobe le choix du sujet, mais, également la définition de la composition (compositio)” (p. 80). Yet if Alberti's account of theCalumny exemplifies this concept ofinventio, one wonders why he fails to mention such important compositional features as the position and posture of the judge. As Massing himself says, Alberti's “recension” of Lucian's text “est moins précise que l'original grec; elle n'indique pas la place du juge ni son attitude charactéristique” (pp. 78, 80).
Lucian,Calumn. 2–3=Lucian, trans. A. M. Harmon, 8 vols (Loeb Classical Library), (London: Heinemann, 1913), vol. 1, p. 363. As. Harmon notes (p. 363n), the story is apocryphal, since Apelles flourished 332–29B.C.E., over a hyndred years before the conspiracy against Ptolemy occurred (in 220B.C.E.). But there is no evidence that Alberti doubted the truth of the story.
As Massing observes, Guarino's approach to painting was essentially literary: his knowledge of art came chiefly from verbal versions of it (ekphrasis) and he was “plus sensible aux formules littéraires qu'au monde visuel, ce monde que Brunelleschi et Alberti ont commencé a structurer au début du siècle” (Massing, p. 79). Again Massing is helpful, but he fails to note the remarkable irony that his own point helps us to see: Alberti's account of a painting that for him exemplifies the silent eloquence of visual art comes from a literary source, from a man whose first allegiance was not to the world of paint but to “formules littéraires”. Guarino's version of Lucian's text, which is itself—as Massing notes—“plus qu'une simple description” (Massing, p. 80), highlights the distinctively verbal art of interpretation.
I quote Guarino from Baxandall, p. 154. Panofsky says that Alberti makes the change because he already imagines Truth “as a naked figure of the ‘Venus Pudica’ type”—the way artists such as Botticelli would represent her later. SeeStudies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of The Renaissance (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 158–59. On the other hand, Alberti may simply have mistaken the nominativepudibunda in Guarino's manuscript for an accusativepudibundam modifying theveritatem just before it.
See Richard Förster, “Die Verleumdung des Apelles in der Renaissance”,Jahrbuch der Königlich-Preußischen Kunstsammlungen 8 (1887), pp. 29–56, 89–113ibid. See Richard Förster, “Die Verleumdung des Apeeles in der Renaissance”,Jahrbuch der Königlich-Preußischen Kunstsammlungen 15 (1894), pp. 27–40, and “Wiederherstellung antiker Gemälde durch Künstler der Renaissance,” ibid. See Richard Förster, “Die Verleumdung des Apelles in der Renaissance,”Jahrbuch der Königlich-Preußischen Kunstsammlungen, 43 (1933), pp. 126–36; N. Maraschio, “Aspetti del bilinguismo albertiano nel ‘De Pictura’,”Rinascimento 12 (1972), pp. 183–228; Massing, pp. 56–57. On Alberti's use of Lucian as a literary model throughout his writings, see the bibliography furnished by David Marsh inDinner Pieces: A Translation of the Intercenales (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 45) (Binghamton, NY: The Renaissance Society of America, 1987); p. 222 n. 30.
“Towards a Theory of Reading in the Visual Arts: Poussin's The Arcadian Shepherds,” in:The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation, ed. Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 305.
Emile Benveniste,Problèmes de linguistique générale, Vol I (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), pp. 237–50; Marin, pp. 295–96, 305–06. When Marin writes (following Benveniste) that narrative enunciation excludes the present tense as well as all references to the speaker, the listener, and the circumstances under which the story is told, he is of course defining what might be called “pure” narrative and excluding fromthat such things as first-person and present-tense narratives, not to mention third-person narratives that may address the reader as “you.” Also, Marin's claim that pictorial narrative makes no address to the viewer—contains no figure who speaks to us “as a representative of the sender of the message”— ignores the distinction between extroverted and introverted paintings—what Michael Fried has called theatricality and absorption. See Fried,Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
Cast says that Alberti distinguishes betweeninventio, which denotes the subject matter of a speechor painting, andhistoria, which denotes a theme fully realized in paint: “if it was found in writers before Alberti to mean simply the subject or theme of a painting, he chose to extend its significance to include not only the theme but the expression of the theme” (Cast, p. 36). Yet in the passage on Apelles'Calumny, Alberti uses the two key terms almost interchangeably. After offering the description to show that invention by itself without a picture can please (“ut sola inventio sine pictura delectet”), he concludes by comparing the effect of thishistoria when recounted (“quae…historia…dum recitatur”) to the effect of the samehistoria in an actual painting (#53, Grayson, pp. 94–96).
Cast, pp. 53–54. According to Vasari, who saw the picture at the Segni home in 1550, Fabio Segni attached to it a brief poem in which he glossed the painting as “a warning to the rulers of the earth to avoid false judgements” (qtd. Cast, p. 29).
See Cast, pp. 41–42. The labels are just barely readable in the reproduction.
For more on Pirckheimer's knowledge of Lucian, see Niklas Holzberg,Willibald Pirckheimer: Griechischer Humanismus in Deutschland (Humanistische Bibliothek, Reihe 1: Abhandlungen 41) (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1981), pp. 298 ff.
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Heffernan, J.A.W. Alberti on Apelles: Word and image inDe Pictura . International Journal of the Classical Tradition 2, 345–359 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02678063
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02678063