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

125. The distinction between natural and conventional signs derives from Augustine and Boethius.

126. Bacon, DS, 3.

127. Bacon, DS, 3-8, 16-18, 162-66, 169. See Pinborg (as in n. 124), 406-8; and Thomas S. Maloney, "The Semiotics of Roger Bacon," Medieval Studies, XXXXV, 1983, 120-54.

128. The following discussion is indebted to Joel Snyder, "Picturing Vision," Critical Inquiry, VI, 1980, 499-526, esp. 514ff.

129. See, for example, Ackerman (as in n. 62), 73.

130. Alberti's Italian text also describes vision as a three-stage process but uses different verbs, because the vernacular does not offer cognates for aspicio and intueor. "Sub aspectu veniat" is rendered as "si veggano"; "cum quid aspicimus, id videmus" as "vedendo qual cosa diciamo"; "intuitum," as "rimirandolo"; and "aspicientes distinctius . . . discernimus" as "piu distinto determiniamo." See Leon Battista Alberti, Della pittura, Luigi Malle, ed., Florence, 1950, 81-82. By contrast, Ghiberti uses Latinate neologisms from the Italian translation of Alhazen. See Federici-Vescovini, 1980 (as in n. 69), 369-87. Alberti's avoidance of neologisms and Tuscanized Latin is characteristic of his commitment to giving clear vernacular explanations for technical Latin terms. This commitment to Tuscan, however, should in no way be interpreted as an abandonment of the Latin intellectual traditions on which his thought depends. Rather, it indicates that he regarded the Latin intellectual traditions as consistent with, and revealing of, everyday experience. Critics and historians who ignore Alberti's Latin sources and slight his Latin writings in the hopes of recovering his everyday experience miss both the meaning and the experiential basis of his thought.

131. Alberti's discussion of collinear and noncollinear surfaces and of equidistant and nonequidistant quantities is at places obscure, especially in paragraph 17, where he divides "nonequidistant quantities" into two classes: "collinear" and "equidistant." Considerable light is thrown on his discussion and vocabulary by consulting Ibn al-Haytham, II.3. [94-120].

132. In the 15th century space meant extent in general and was used as often in reference to time as to place. See the Oxford English Dictionary, 1971, s.v. "space," definitions 1-6. Here Alberti uses it in reference to an area or measurable extent on the picture plane, not to a three-dimensional expanse.

133. A similar point is made by Elkins (as in n. 66), 15: "the Renaissance notion [of constructed perspective] is 'object oriented' and the modern concept 'space oriented.'" Cf. Aristotle, Physics, 208a27-216b20.

134. Cf. Alberti, II.33-34, discussed by Greenstein, 43-44.

135. Kemp (as in n. 2), 344-45.

136. In his De prospettiva pingendi (ed. G. N. Fasola, Florence, 1942, 63), for example, Piero della Francesca calls the rule of painting that comes between outlining and coloring "prospettiva" or "commensuratio." It governs the "positioning of outlines and contours proportionately in their places."

137. Thomas Aquinas, H, I. introduction. 1-2.