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On Alberti's "sign": vision and composition in quattrocento painting - Leon Battista Alberti's commentary 'On Painting'
Art Bulletin, The, Dec, 1997 by Jack M. Greenstein
Historians of art have long regarded composition as a major achievement of Renaissance painting. In making this assessment, they are echoing the views of Leon Battista Alberti, whose commentary On Painting offers the first critical appreciation of composition in pictorial art. Written in Latin in 1435, On 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 key to, and reason behind, the commentary.(2) But this account is only a small part of a work whose prime purpose is to demonstrate that painting is a liberal art when its practice conforms with three rules (rationes) or underlying logical principles. This paper argues that these rules locate the kind of painting that Alberti admires most within a philosophical tradition according sight a central role in human cognition.
For Alberti, composition is the second and most important rule of art. Composition follows "circumscription," the rule for drawing outlines, and precedes "the reception of light," the rule for applying colored pigment. Circumscription and coloring are common 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 devotes more attention to it than to any other topic.(3) As his definition makes clear, composition produces the painter's "greatest work":
Composition is the rule of painting by which the parts are brought together to form a pictorial work. The greatest work of painting is not a colossus, but historia. For the praise of ingenuity is greater in historia, than in a colossus. The parts of a historia are bodies, part of the body is a member, part of a member is a surface. Thus the prime parts of the work are surfaces, because from them come members, from the members come the bodies, and from those comes the historia, indeed the ultimate and absolute work of painting.(4)
In Giotto and the Orators, Michael Baxandall shows that the four-level model of artistic organization that Alberti calls composition was familiar to every Renaissance student of rhetoric) Rhetoricians described a period - a sentence consisting of three, four, or more clauses - as an arrangement of words to form phrases, phrases to form clauses, and clauses to form the complete sentence. Baxandall argues that the style of sentences was a matter of controversy in the 1430s for Latin authors of neoclassical training. Humanist teachers like Guarino da Verona (1374-1460) promoted a style of Latin prose that emulated Greek ekphratic literature. They admired the abundance, diversity, and splendor of descriptions that enumerated the vivid details of scenes put before the reader's eyes in loose series of appositive phrases, clauses, and simple sentences. Humanist rhetoricians like George of Trebizond (1396-1486), on the other hand, criticized Latin ekphratic prose as weak and dissolute. They favored the dignity, gravity, decorum, and restraint of a more composed style in which descriptions are organized into lengthy, well-rounded periods with clearly delimited phrases and clauses. Baxandall maintains that Alberti applied George of Trebizond's critical standards for composed and dissolute prose to painting. In his view, Alberti's discussion of composition is predicated on a belief that painting and writing have "cognate styles of organization." Accordingly, he maintains that historians "can make out a polarization of styles common to both painting and writing" when they apply Alberti's categories to early quattrocento art. Baxandall concludes that the rule of composition expresses Alberti's preference for pictorial works in a composed style parallel to that of a Latin periodic sentence.
Nonetheless, identifying particular paintings with which to illustrate Alberti's visual standard for composed and dissolute works is no easy matter. Alberti discusses only two pictorial works that he and his contemporaries might actually have seen. Both works, which unfortunately are now lost, were located in Rome. One is an ancient relief of the Death of Meleager (II. 37), the other, a famous fresco of the Navicella by Giotto (II. 42). Alberti presents them as successful compositions. All other works that he holds up as exemplary, including those praised for composition, were familiar only from ekphrases in classical literature. In fact, Alberti explicitly warns his readers that most of the ancient works that they might see do not provide a trustworthy standard for composition:
As we may easily judge [intelligimus] from the works of former times, this matter probably remained completely unknown to our ancestors, because it is obscure and difficult. For you will scarcely find any historia of antiquity to be aptly composed, not in painting, not in relief, not in sculpture. (I. 21)
Giotto is the only postclassical artist mentioned in the body of the commentary. Although Giotto had been dead for more than a century, 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 most famous artists of antiquity and whose accomplishments convinced him that contemporary practitioners have the ability to discover things about the arts and sciences that even 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 only 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 throughout the commentary (for example, 1.12; II.39, 46; III.56). In a commentary advocating a new form of artistic practice, the favorable reference to Masaccio in the dedication is sufficient to show that his work exemplifies the kind of contemporary painting that Alberti wished to promote. A1berti may even have written his commentary with the hope of reviving the practice of neo-Giottesque, humanist painting, which Masaccio pioneered and which in 1435 was in danger of passing away with him.
