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

A comparison between the work of Masaccio and that of Gentile da Fabriano illustrates Alberti's visual standard for the polarization of styles in Florentine painting. One standard for humanist artistic patronage in Florence was set by the pioneer Greek humanist Palla Strozzi, when he commissioned Gentile to paint the Adoration of the Magi. Historians (including Baxandall) agree that Alberti's commentary offers an implicit criticism of Gentile's painting. In Gentile's Strozzi Altarpiece [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 7 OMITTED], a multitude of richly attired figures and an abundant diversity of plants and animals, including birds, dogs, monkeys, dozens of horses, and even a leopard, are rendered with painstaking attention to details of costume, accessory, ornament, material, and texture. Alberti explicitly condemns such characteristic features of Gentile's art as the liberal use of gold (II.46), the tumultuous crowding of figures (II.39), and the too plentiful diversity that results from packing the picture plane with an unbridled mixture of people, goods, animals, and architecture (II.40). Masaccio, on the other hand, rendered the same subject [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 9 OMITTED], as Cristoforo Landino put it, "simply and without ornament."(7) In his Adoration of the Magi [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 9 OMITTED], visual attention is concentrated in the restrained and dignified actions and interactions of a small company of characters. Alberti praises such characteristic features of Masaccio's art as the expressive representation of bodily movement (II.36, 41-42), the modest variety in the dress, poses, ages, and features of the figures (II.38-40), and the clear presentation of three-dimensional form through tonal modeling (II.46-47). The result is a coherence of narrative that Gentile's deliberately casual composition eschews.

Some might object that these differences in handling are due to differences in the scale, format, scope, and social function of the two paintings. Gentile's painting is the main scene of an altarpiece for the sacristy of S. Trinita, Florence. Measuring 173 by 223 centimeters, it joins four episodes of the Magi story into a single scene spread over three panels. Masaccio's painting is a predella from a (disassembled) altarpiece for the Chapel of St. Julian in the Chiesa del Carmine, Pisa. Measuring 21 by 60 centimeters, it shows only the culminating episode of the story in which the Magi offer their gifts to Christ. Although both are devotional narratives painted on panels for important subsidiary altars in urban churches, these factors surely conditioned the way that the two artists handled the subject.

Yet the internal organization of painting is more important to Alberti than these other factors. Before Alberti, art was most often discussed in terms of its format and function. Manuals written by craftsmen focused on the materials, media, and shop techniques of artists. Tracts written by theologians focused on the religious content, appropriate placement, and devotional significance of images. By contrast, Alberti is most concerned with the pictorial aspects of painting. A signal characteristic of his commentary is that the rules of art apply equally to works of different scale, format, medium, subject, and use. For this reason, a comparison between Gentile's altarpiece and Masaccio's predella may serve to illustrate Alberti's visual standard for composed and dissolute painting.