1. Filippo di Ser Brunellesco, known as Brunelleschi (1377–1446), goldsmith, sculptor, architect, engineer and inventor; Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi, known as Donatello (c.1386–1466), sculptor; Lorenzo (Nencio) di Cione Ghiberti (1378–1455), sculptor and architect; Luca di Simone della Robbia (c.1400–82), sculptor; Tommaso di Giovanni di Simone Guidi, known as Masaccio (1401–28), painter.
2. The Dome of Florence Cathedral was constructed between 1420 and 1436. See H. Saalman, Filippo Brunelleschi. The Dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, London, 1980.
3. The Italian text – ‘mi piacerà rivegga questa mia opera de pictura quale a tuo nome feci in lingue toscana’ – might imply that Brunelleschi was already acquainted with the Latin text.
4. Giovan Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua (1407–44), whose son, Lodovico, was to become a major patron of Alberti’s architecture, including the churches of S. Sebastiano and S. Andrea.
5. For Alberti’s Ciceronian expression, ‘Minerva’, see the Introduction, p. 12.
6. The Latin reads: ‘Una quidem quae per extremum ilium ambitum quo superficies clauditur noscat, quem quidem ambitum nonulli horizontem nuncupant; nos si liceat, latin vocabulo similitudine quadam appellamus oram aut, dum it a libeat, fimbriam.’ Alberti uses a number of terms to indicate ‘boundary’, ‘borderline’, ‘contour’, ‘edge’, ‘outline’, etc.: ambitum, discrimen, extremitas, horizontem, fimbria, ora, rimula, terminus.
7. The Italian text at this point informs us that ‘more could be said about these reflections, which relate to those miracles of painting which many of my friends have seen made by me previously in Rome’. This suggests that his ‘miracles of painting’ involved mirrors in some kind of peep show. See below, Note 15. For the sources of the optics in the preceding passages on reflections, the visual pyramid, colours, etc., see the Introduction, pp. 10–13, and M. Kemp, The Science of Art. Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat, New Haven and London, 1990, pp. 20–26 and 264–6.
8. Aulus Gellius, Noctium Atticarum, I, i, 1–3, citing Plutarch.
9. Virgil, Aeneid, III, 655–8.
10. Virgil, Aeneid, IX, 177–448.
11. Protagoras’s axiom, much quoted and variously used by Alberti, was probably known to him from Diogenes Laertius, De Vitis… philosophorum, IX, 51.
12. Pliny, Historia naturalis, XXXV, 74. Alberti’s protégé, Cristoforo Landino, was to translate Pliny into Italian: Historia naturale…, Venice, 1476.
13. The braccio in Florence was equivalent to about 58 centimetres or 23 inches.
14. Superbipartiens is the mathematical term for the ratio 3:5.
15. The ‘miracles’ are described more fully in the anonymous Vita in Opere volgari, ed. Bonucci, pp. cii–ciii: ‘the pictures, which were contained in a very small box, were seen through a tiny aperture. There you were able to see very high mountains and broad landscapes around a wide bay of sea, and, furthermore, regions removed very distantly from sight, so remote as not to be clearly seen by the viewer. He called these things “demonstrations”… he called one of them “daytime” and the other “nighttime”.’ See also above, Note 7.
16. His Elementa picturae (Elementi di pittura) in Opere volgari, ed. Grayson, III, pp. 108–29, which contains basic geometrical definitions and instructions on the drawing of geometrical figures on the foreshortened ‘pavement’, does not meet the need to show how the pyramid results in the pictorial construction.
17. Plutarch, Alexander, LXXIV, 4, and Agesilaus, II, 2.
18. Quintilian, De Institutio oratoria, 12, 10, 9.
19. Pliny, Historia naturalis, XXXV, 62.
20. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 10, 2, 7.
21. Pliny, Historia naturalis, XXXV, 16, 15 and 22.
22. For Euphranor, Antigonous, Xenocrates and Apelles, see Pliny, Historia naturalis, XXXV, 129, 68, 79 and III. For Demetrius, see Diogenes Laertius, De Vitis… philosophorum, V, 83.
23. Asclepius, III, in W. Scott, Hermetica, Vol. I, Oxford, 1924, p. 339, 23b. Compare Lactanius, De Divinis institutionibus, 2, 10, 3–15.
24. For Aristedes and Protogenes, see Pliny, Historia naturalis, XXXV, 100 and 105.
25. Pliny, Historia naturalis, XXXV, 19–20, though the reference to Manilius has not been traced.
26. Socrates in Pliny, Historia naturalis, XXXV, 137 and XXXVI, 32; Plato in Diogenes Laertius, Die Vitis… philosophorum, III, 4–5; Metrodorus, Pliny, XXXV, 135; Pyrrho, Diogenes Laertius, IX, 61.
27. Nero in Suetonius, Nero, 52, and Tacitus, Annales, XIII, 3; Valentinianus in Ammianus Marcellinus, Rerum gestarum, XXX, 9, 4; Alexander Severus in Lampridius, Alexander Severus, 27.
28. Pliny, Historia naturalis, XXXIV, 27, and Diogenes Laertius, De Vitis… philosophorum, V, 75.
29. Pliny, Historia naturalis, XXXV, 135.
30. Possibly a misunderstanding of Pliny, Historia naturalis, XXXV, 147: ‘Iaia Cyzicena, perpetua virgo, M. Varronis iuventa Romae… pinxit.’
31. For such images, see H. W. Janson, ‘The Image Made by Chance in Renaissance Thought’, Essays in Honour of Erwin Panofsky, ed. M. Meiss, New York, 1961, pp. 145–66.
32. Pliny, Historia naturalis, XXXVII, 5.
33. Xenophon, Memorabilia, III, x.
34. Pliny, Historia naturalis, XXXV, 81–3, on the famous story of how the rivals strove to draw a line finer than the other. See E. H. Gombrich, ‘The Heritage of Apelles’, in The Heritage of Apelles, Oxford, 1976, pp. 3–18.
35. The term historia is roughly equivalent to what later academic theorists would call ‘history painting’, that is to say, a human narrative drawn from some significant secular or Christian story. Alberti’s use may also include allegorical representations and perhaps also such devotional images as the Virgin in company with the saints. For ancient colossi, see Pliny, Historia naturalis, XXXIV, 39–46, and XXXV, 51.
36. Vitruvius, De Architectura, III, 1.
37. A misreading of Pliny, Historia naturalis, XXXV, 71, where this painting is in fact attributed to Parrhasius.
38. A number of ancient reliefs of the Carrying of the Body of Meleager were known in the Renaissance. See P. P. Bober and R. O. Rubenstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture, Oxford, 1986, nos. 117–18.
39. Virgil, Aeneid, III, 588ff.
40. Cicero, De Natura deorum, I, xxx, 83.
41. The battle of the lapiths and centaurs as narrated by (amongst others) Ovid, Metamorphoses, XII, 210 ff, and as later sculpted by Michelangelo (Florence, Casa Buonarroti).
42. Aulus Gellius, Nocium atticarum, XIII, xi, 2–3.
43. Pliny, Historia Naturalis, XXXV, 90, and Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, II, xii, 12, as Piero della Franceses was later to do in his portraits of Federigo da Montefeltro.
44. Plutarch, Pericles, III, 2.
45. Alberti’s expression – ‘qua nihil sui similium rapacius inveniri potest’ – is derived from Cicero, De amicitia, 14, 50.
46. Euphranor and Daemon in Pliny, Historia naturalis, XXXV, 77 and 69, though the reference to Deamon results from a misunderstanding (see above, Note 37).
47. Pliny, Historia naturalis, XXXV, 98–100.
48. Compare Pliny, Historia naturalis, XXXV, 68.
49. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 2, 13, 13: Compare Pliny, Historia naturalis, XXXV, 73, and Cicero, Orator, XXII, 74.
50. Giotto’s mosaic of the Navicella, depicting Christ and St Peter walking on the water (over the entrance to old St Peter’s in Rome) was one of the most famous exemplars of narrative art during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but was destroyed in the seventeenth century.
51. As described in Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 11, 3, 105.
52. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 12, 10, 5.
53. That is to say, Io, as in Ovid, Metamorphoses, I, 583 ff.
54. For Polygnotus and Timanthes (and Zeuxis), see Cicero, Brutus, XVIII, 70; compare Pliny, Historia naturalis, XXXV, 50, where Apelles, Aetion, Melanthius and Nicomachus are said to have used four colours; for Aglaophon, see Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 12, 10, 3. See also J. Gage, ‘A Locus Classicus of Colour Theory. The Fortunes of Apelles’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XLIV, 1981, pp. 1–26.
55. Pliny, Historia naturalis, XXXV, 131.
56. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 12, 10, 5.
57. Cicero, Orator, XXII, 73, but citing Apelles not Zeuxis.
58. Vitruvius, De Architectura, VII, vii.
59. Pliny, Historia naturalis, XXXV, 129.
60. Virgil, Aeneid, IV, 125 ff.
61. Pliny, Historia naturalis, XXXV, 76–7.
62. Lucian, De Calumnia, 5. Alberti used the translation by Guarino da Verona. The opportunity to recreate Apelles’s famous painting was seized by a number of subsequent artists, most notably Botticelli (Florence, Uffizi). See D. Cast, The Calumny of Apelles. A Study in the Humanist Tradition, New Haven and London, 1981; and J. M. Massing, Du texte à l’image. La Calomnie d’Apelle et son iconographie, Strasbourg, 1990.
63. Particularly Seneca, De Beneficiis, 1, 3, 2–7, although Alberti refers to Aglaia as ‘Egle’. Compare the ‘Three Graces’ in Botticelli’s Primavera (Florence, Uffizi).
64. Strabo, Geographia, VIII, 3, 30.
65. This method of starting with the formal ‘elements’, as Quintilian recommended for rhetoric, is satisfied in part by his own Elementa picturae (see Note 16).
66. Symmetria, the Greek term, is used by Pliny, Historia naturalis, XXXIV, 65, and carries implications of proportion beyond our more limited sense of the symmetrical.
67. Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, 12, 10, 9.
68. Cicero, De Inventione, II, 1, 1–3, and Pliny, Historia naturalis, XXXV, 64.
69. Galen, De Usu partium, XVII, 1.
70. Pliny, Historia naturalis, XXXIV, 47, where Zenodorus copies Calamis.
71. Pliny, Historia naturalis, XXXV, 109, but attributing speed to Nicomachus, while Asclepiodorus is discussed in a preceding passage (107).
72. For Nicias, Zeuxis, Eraclides, Serapion, Dionysius, Aurelius, Phidias and Euphranor, see Pliny, Historia naturalis, XXXV, 129, 64, 135, 113, 119, 54, XXXVI, 18–19, and XXXV, 128. The reference to Alexander has not been traced.
73. Alberti’s expression modulos in parallelos dividere (Italian, segneremo i modelli nostri con paraleli) should be understood in the sense of preparatory studies that are squared for transfer on to a larger scale. The grid incised in the plaster on which the head of the Virgin has been painted in Masaccio’s Trinity is an early example of such a procedure. The use of squared modelli later became common, e.g. in Raphael’s design processes.
74. Plutarch, De Liberis educandis, 7.
75. Pliny, Historia naturalis, XXXV, 80.
76. Pliny, Historia naturalis, XXXV, 84–5.
77. Cicero, Brutus, XVIII, 71.