I consider it a great satisfaction to have taken the palm in this subject, as I was the first to write about this most subtle art. (On Painting, 63)
When a delegation of Florentines led by Lorenzo de’ Medici, ‘II Magnifico’, visited Rome in 1471 to pay respects to the newly elected Pope, Sixtus IV, they were conducted on a learned tour of the Forum Romanum by the resident genius of the ancient city, Leon Battista Alberti. For the generation of Lorenzo, particularly for the accomplished scholars and philosophers in his circle, the sixty-seven-year-old Alberti was a heroic figure in the ‘rebirth’ of literature and the visual arts. The great philosopher–poet Angelo Poliziano in his dedication to Lorenzo of the first printed edition of Alberti’s treatise on architecture, De Re aedificatoria (1486), gave glowing testimony to Alberti’s reputation: ‘he was a man of rare brilliance, acute judgement, and extensive learning… Surely there was no field of knowledge however remote, no discipline however arcane, that escaped his attention.’1 Alberti was revered as a leader in the revival of the true Latin tongue of the ancients in a variety of literary modes, as a pioneer in the refinement of the Italian vernacular so that it might be fit to stand alongside Latin, as an authority on the arts and sciences and, above all, as a moral exemplar in word and deed. It was in this last guise that Alberti featured as a worthy protagonist for Lorenzo in the Camaldulanian Disputations by Cristoforo Landino, another of Il Magnifico’s literary luminaries. In the course of the dialogue Alberti resolutely argues that the contemplative virtues of a scholarly life devoted to the pursuit of wisdom are superior to active engagement in the hurly-burly of political action.
It would have surprised Alberti and his many Renaissance champions to find his small treatise on painting promoted in later ages as the most significant of all his writings. Genuine originality – and few books can have been as unprecedented as On Painting – was less valued as a crucial measure of literary achievement in Alberti’s own day than it has been in our century. To be regarded as ‘a great imitator of the ancients’ was at least as important a criterion of excellence in the Renaissance as to be a promulgator of outright novelties. From the perspective of his own era, his considerable series of moralizing yet entertaining dialogues on themes of Stoic virtue in individual, family and civic life may be seen as occupying the central place in his literary career. They succeed in transposing the ethical codes of Roman authors, above all Cicero, into the context of fifteenth-century Italy. Alberti’s imaginative compositions in poetry and prose were prized as exemplary revivals of ancient genres, although they are little read today. And his De Re aedificatoria was both a homage and challenge to the treatise by the ancient Roman architect, Vitruvius. By contrast, On Painting has no precedent. Its originality of content, as the first known book devoted to the intellectual rationale for painting, does not mean, however, that it is atypical amongst Alberti’s writings with respect to language, form or underlying message. There is probably no author who more consistently aspired to shape his own life and work – and our concept of life and work in general – into a coherent whole. The central purpose was the cultivation of virtù (the power of individual talent sustained by moral worth and strength of will) as a bulwark against fortuna (the capricious whims of fate in the vagaries of worldly affairs). The true guide towards this end was the study of the natural order of things in God’s creation. It is within these contexts of human virtue and natural order that On Painting is to be understood.
A major shaping factor in Alberti’s attitude to life was the fate of his ancestors. He was an illegitimate son in a distinguished and well-to-do Florentine family, whose members had been successively sent into political exile during the years following 1387. Battista – a good Florentine name, since St John the Baptist was a patron saint of the city – was born in Genoa in 1404, and educated in the major north Italian centres of learning, first in Padua at the humanist school of Gasparino Barzizza, where he acquired fluency in Latin letters, and subsequently at the University in Bologna, where he studied jurisprudence. During the course of his studies he also laid the foundations of his knowledge of those precise sciences, particularly mathematics and optics, that were to give him such an exceptional range of mind. By the age of twenty he had mastered the classical heritage to such effect that he was able to compose a Latin comedy, Philodoxeos, that purported to have come from the pen of an ancient Roman playwright, Lepidus.
The death of his father in 1421 and subsequent family squabbles over his right to an inheritance left Alberti uncertainly placed and coloured his views on the inconstancies of everyday life. His reaction was to concentrate on the enduring virtues of learning, and in 1428 he composed a treatise, De Commodis literarum atque incommodis (On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Scholarship), that reflects his disillusionment with the political and social vicissitudes of human affairs. This tract initiates what was to become a continuing dialogue between his devotion to learning for its own ‘immortal’ rewards and his instinctive sense that wisdom should be applied to the good of human life in the actual community. An extended series of works – including his Teogenius, Profugiorum ab aerumna (On the Retreat from Hardship, otherwise known as ‘On the Tranquillity of the Mind’, a dialogue set under the Dome of the Cathedral), De Iciarchia and, his greatest work in the vernacular, the four books of Della Famiglia composed between 1433 and 1441 – use various spokesmen from within and outside his own family circle to parade a range of arguments in favour of the contemplative and active lives. It is unwise to assume that any of the spokesmen in the semi-fictionalized dialogues precisely express Alberti’s own ideas, and the balance in his own beliefs appears to have shifted during different phases of his own public career, but the central tenets of his practical philosophy do emerge quite clearly. At the heart of his beliefs lies a conviction that it is our human duty to cultivate our individual virtù in those praiseworthy and improving pursuits that stand apart from fortuna: ‘fortune cannot give us various things… character, virtue, letters or any skill. All these depend on our diligence, our interest.’2 He steers a middle course between total immersion in such environments of the here-and-now as the stormy seas of commerce or the rough-house of politics, and a complete monastic withdrawal into a life of abstract contemplation. He was not predisposed towards philosophical abstractions for their own sakes, and was continually concerned to relate his underlying sense of God’s order to the actual behaviour of the individual in society. One of his spokesmen advocates that certain of the arts provide an arena in which profit and virtue can live together:
There are… activities in which the powers of body and mind function together to bring profit. Such are the occupations of painters, sculptors, musicians and others like them. All these ways of making a living, since they depend mainly on our personal powers, are what you call arts, and do not go down in shipwrecks but swim away with our naked selves. They keep us company all our lives and feed and maintain our name and fame.3
Through the circumstances of his illegitimacy and lack of guaranteed access to Alberti funds, Battista was himself forced to face the dilemma of reconciling a life dedicated to disinterested learning with the need to make a living. The solution, as for many other Renaissance humanists, lay within the system of patronage and clerical service. As an outstanding young man of letters, well versed in canon law, he was taken into the service of senior churchmen, perhaps travelling with Cardinal Albergati in France and neighbouring countries. By 1432 he was acting as secretary to Biagio Molin, Patriarch of Grado, who was in charge of the papal chancery in Rome. He was appointed as a papal ‘abbreviator’ (an official clerk, writer of briefs, etc.), a post that he held until its abolition by Paul II in 1465. Through the good offices of Eugenius IV he was sanctioned to receive the ecclesiastical benefices of S. Martino a Gangalandi in the diocese of Florence, and subsequently of Borgo S. Lorenzo in Mugello from Nicholas V. He also became a canon of Florence Cathedral. It was in the entourage of Eugenius that he returned in 1434 to Florence, ‘to this most beautiful of cities from this long exile in which we Albertis have grown old’.4 The ban on the Albertis had been lifted in 1428, and Leon Battista was to live in the city for substantial periods during the next decade. The revelatory impact of the achievements in architecture, sculpture and painting of Filippo Brunelleschi, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Donatello, Luca della Robbia and Masaccio did much to precipitate Alberti’s decision to write De Pictura in 1435 and to translate it into Italian a year later, with a dedication to Brunelleschi.
From his base of papal preferment and remuneration he was able to travel widely and to pursue an independent career in letters, attracting the patronage of such leading Renaissance princes as Leonello d’Este of Ferrara and the Gonzaga of Mantua. His prolific literary production embraced the dialogues on social philosophy, treatises on diverse moral and practical themes, collections of edifying tales and fables in the manners of Lucian and Aesop, a Latin satire on the disorder arising from capricious rule (Momus or ‘The Prince’), love poetry and the first grammar of the Italian tongue. Unusually for a humanist he was also active in scientific fields, though, as in his philosophy, his prime concern was with such ‘applied’ science as was relevant to particular human endeavours. A group of works may be characterized as employing mathematical systems to perform specific tasks: the Ludi matematici, in which he applies basic mathematics to various problems in the measurement of distances, dimensions and weights; the Elementa picturae, which describes some basic geometrical figures and their transposition on to foreshortened planes; the Descriptio urbis Romae, in which he tells how he has used a surveying disc similar to an astrolabe to make a measured survey of the ancient city; De Statua, which deals with human proportions and a device for replicating dimensions in figure sculpture; and De Componendis cifris, which explains his invention of a highly effective code wheel. The important instructions on perspectival design in Books I and II of On Painting may be recognized as part of this endeavour to endow practical skills with a mathematical base.
His vision of mathematical order expressed through tangible activities found its perfect realization in the work of the architect:
Him I consider architect, who by sure and wonderful reason and method, knows how to devise through his own mind and energy, and to realize by construction, whatever can most beautifully be fitted out for the noble deeds of men.5
His ten-part treatise on architecture, De Re aedificatoria, a draft of which was presented to Nicholas V in or before 1452, takes its inspiration in form and content from Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture, the only treatise on any visual art to have survived from antiquity. But Alberti’s substantial book is far from a work of imitation. Vitruvius’s material is critically subjected to a radical reordering in both presentation and underlying logic; and new considerations are brought to bear in the light of Renaissance circumstances. It was in this treatise, as we will see, that he arrived at his mature definition of beauty.
Architecture played an increasing role in the later part of his life, as he was presented with opportunities to put his theories into practice. Commissions from rulers and wealthy individuals outside Rome allowed him to exercise his talents on a series of buildings that survive today. Four major church projects were undertaken: the clothing of S. Francesco Rimini in Roman garb as the ‘Tempio Malatestiano’ between 1450 and 1470 for Sigismondo Malatesta; the conception for Lodovico Gonzaga in Mantua of the Greek-cross church of S. Sebastiano, probably commissioned in 1459, and of the monumental basilica of S. Andrea, designed in 1470–71; and the grand temple-front imposed on the Florentine church of S. Maria Novella in honour of the Rucellai family from 1458 onwards. The domestic buildings that can be most closely associated with Alberti are the Florentine palace and loggia of the Rucellai, for whom he also undertook the chapel in S. Pancrazio that contains the family tomb designed in emulation of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Under the humanist Pope Nicholas V his was a significant voice behind the ambitious plans to reshape Rome with a dignity and coherence worthy of its pagan past and Christian present. His voice as a consultant might also be discerned behind that most delightful piece of Renaissance town-planning, Pius II’s reshaping of the centre of Pienza.
In these and other architectural enterprises he placed his sense of ordered proportion and detailed knowledge of the grammar of ancient Roman buildings in the service of contemporary requirements. If we may describe Brunelleschi as the architect—engineer who refined the native Tuscan style according to the lessons of the ancients, we could characterize Alberti as the architect—scholar who showed how the ancient grammar of design could become directly relevant to his own age. In the process Alberti squared that most difficult of circles: he acted with impeccable reverence to the past and at the same time exercised his originality to meet present needs.
Man is the scale and measure of all things. (Protagoras, quoted in On Painting, 18)
Alberti adopted what may be broadly described as a Christianized Stoic viewpoint in his advocacy of the inherent and divinely ordained rationale within nature as the ultimate source for our standards in art as in life. It is therefore appropriate that the first book in On Painting, ‘which is entirely mathematical, shows how this noble and beautiful art arises from roots within nature herself’.6 By the time he wrote his treatise on architecture, over twenty years later, he was able to express his conviction in the form of a precise definition of beauty:
Beauty is a form of sympathy and consonance of the parts within a body, according to definite number, outline and position, as dictated by concinnitas, the absolute and fundamental rule of Nature.7
Concinnitas, ‘the spouse of the soul and of reason’, arose when the three visual properties – number, outline (or shape) and position (or location) – manifested an indissoluble harmony or proportional correspondence in the parts and in the whole, ‘so that nothing may be added, taken away or altered, but for the worse’.8 As he explained when discussing the characteristics of shape:
The outline is a certain correspondence between the lines that define the dimensions; one dimension being length, another breadth, and the third height. The method of defining the outline is best taken from the objects which Nature offers herself to our inspection and admiration… I affirm again with Protagoras: it is absolutely certain that Nature is wholly consistent. That is how things stand.9
Each of nature’s creations is perfectly fitted to its station in life and exhibits a complete propriety of form and function. The concept of ‘fittingness’ in nature provides the rationale for his artistic doctrine of decorum, to the effect that everything should be internally consistent, appropriate and well ordered in the whole and in the parts of every work of art and building. This rule, like all others, reflected God’s intention throughout nature, but such rules could only become manifest in the material world through the existence of the human observer or judge:
The Stoics taught that man was by nature constituted the observer and manager of things. Chrysippus thought that everything on earth was born only to serve man, while man was meant to preserve the friendship and society of man. Protagoras, another ancient philosopher, seems to some interpreters to have said essentially the same thing, when he declared that man is the mean and measure of all things.10
A perfect bridge between nature and our human powers of observation and judgement is provided by those arts that are ‘born of Chance and Observation, fostered by Use and Experiment, and matured by Knowledge and Reason’.11 His various speculations about the origins of the figurative arts all rely upon an observer’s alert perception of images made by chance in nature, to which intellectual principles are increasingly applied as artists strive towards the goal of rational imitation. His account of the discovery of sculpture in De Statua is typical:
I believe that the arts of those who attempt to create images and likenesses from bodies produced by Nature, originated in the following way. They probably occasionally observed in a tree-trunk or clod of earth and other similar inanimate objects certain outlines in which, with slight alterations, something very similar to the real faces of Nature was represented… So by correcting and refining the line and surfaces as the particular object required, they achieved their intention and at the same time experienced pleasure in doing so. Not surprisingly man’s studies in creating likenesses eventually arrived at the stage where, even when they found no assistance of half-formed images in the material to hand, they were still able to make the likenesses they wished… If they sought this objectively through correct and known methods, I believe they would make fewer mistakes and gain complete approval for their works.12
The striving of artists to reveal the concinnitas innate in nature was not devoted to the isolated end of beauty for its own sake. Beauty was an integral part of the philosophical, moral, political and social order that man should endeavour to realize on earth – not that this realization was readily apparent to Alberti in the society he could see around him. Man’s many undesirable propensities and the ravages of fortuna posed continual threats to the desired condition. Momus, his Latin prose satire cast in the guise of an allegorical fable, makes just this point. Momus is the pestiferous son of Night and Sleep, who, as his ‘gift’ to the world, supplies plagues of insects. Having been expelled from the heavens, this dubious character enjoys every success in the corrupt society of men. Faced with the ensuing chaos, Jove dithers uncertainly about the best way to establish a new world to replace the old, but he receives no help from the philosophers, who bumble around inconsequentially. A beacon of hope is provided by a magnificent piece of architecture, a huge Colosseum-like theatre, which signals the way to realize visual and social harmony in the cosmos. Eventually order is established in the original world with the help of Gelastus, a philosopher who assumes a noticeably Albertian outlook.
In a comparable if less sustained way, architecture also appears as a metaphor for social order in one of his tales or Apologhi. A fable concerning an ancient temple is used to show how ‘arrogance and ostentation always lead to ruin’.13 The lower stones in the temple, which have long played a valued role in supporting the whole, begin to question their lot and to envy their more elevated colleagues who bear lesser burdens. The result of the lower masonry withdrawing its services is the collapse of the whole edifice. The social moral is that ‘prudent men should not despise the position which fate has assigned to them’. For Alberti, the instituting of a well-regulated society was not to be accomplished through extreme measures and certainly not by a revolutionary disruption of social strata.
The whole of De Pictura and particularly the passages in praise of painting and of painters in the opening paragraphs of Books II and III demonstrate that painting need yield nothing to architecture or to any of the other arts in man’s endeavour to reconstitute the order of nature. Having rhetorically asked the question, ‘is it not true that painting is the mistress of all the arts and their principle and ornament’, he concludes that ‘hardly any art, except the very meanest, can be found that does not somehow pertain to painting. So I would venture to suggest that whatever beauty there is in things has been derived from painting.’14
Entirely comparable claims for the sovereign power of painting were made later in the century by Leonardo da Vinci, and coming from his mouth they do not sound surprising. By contrast, Alberti’s claims were wholly exceptional for a pioneer humanist in the early Renaissance. His personal emphasis upon visual matters is partly a consequence of his individual talent and taste – he indicates for example that he had delighted in creating his own ‘miracles of painting’ even before his residence in Florence in the 1430s – and is in part a reflection of his studies in medieval optical science. The theories of geometrical vision developed by such writers as the Islamic philosopher Alhazen, the Franciscans Roger Bacon and John Pecham, and Witelo from Poland, seemed to provide a perfect illustration of the way in which God’s rational design insinuated itself throughout nature. And we should remember that the immaterial splendour of light could readily be interpreted as the most direct manifestation of divine grace in the material world. This elevated science was represented in Padua during Alberti’s early years by Biagio Pelecani. Although On Painting is not the place for elaborate expositions of ophthalmology and optics, his references to those ‘philosophers’ who were expert in such matters of the eye and light clearly show his admiration for their science.
The eye had been revered in the Aristotelian tradition as the chief of the sensory organs. As Alberti himself wrote, ‘the eye is more powerful than anything, more swift than anything, more worthy than anything’.15 He adopted a radiant, winged eye as his personal emblem, most conspicuously on the bronze portrait plaque (probably a self-portrait) in the National Gallery, Washington. Alberti is depicted in profile in the all’antica manner of a medal, proudly displaying his leonine features and cropped mane of hair. His ‘auxiliary’ name, Leon (or Leo or Leone), had been adopted for its suitable allusions to the lion’s fabled courage and magnanimity, and perhaps also in deference to the legend that a lion’s eye was of such power that it did not decay with the death of its owner. In the light of the way in which he allied an interest in vision with his philosophical, literary, artistic and social concerns, he may fairly be regarded as the ideal person to write the first treatise on the principles of painting. Although On Painting was written comparatively early in his career, when he was little more than thirty years old, it is a mature expression of the characteristically Albertian attitudes we can discern throughout his writings.
On Painting builds systematically from first visual principles. He begins in Book I, rather as if embarking upon a treatise on Euclidian geometry, with basic definitions of the geometrical properties through which the forms of bodies can be analysed: point, line, surface (or plane), edge, angle, flatness, convexity and concavity. He is, however, concerned at the outset to emphasize that he is not dealing with the immaterial abstractions of pure mathematics but with the visual description of the material world. He relies upon the standard differentiation between such geometrical conceptions as point, line and surface, which have no physical presence since they lack one or more of the three dimensions necessary for tangible existence, and their equivalents in the kind of substantial reality we can perceive through our senses. Alberti’s ‘point’ is therefore a real ‘sign’ or mark on a physical surface. As he says in his brief essay ‘On Points and Lines Among Painters’, ‘from our definition a point is a sign because the painter perceives it as if it were rather like something between a mathematical point and a quantity that can be classified by number, as perhaps atoms can be’.16 Adapting a proverbial and somewhat strange expression from Cicero, he emphasizes in On Painting that he is speaking in terms of ‘Minerva’ (‘the coarser wisdom of our senses’), or ‘la più grassa Minerva’ as he describes it in the Italian text.17 In keeping with his emphasis upon sensate knowledge, he avails himself of a series of material metaphors and similes to describe the geometrical properties of bodies. Edge is described as an ora (brim) or fimbria (fringe or hem), conveying the sense of an ‘outline’ as actually used by the draughtsmen. A circle is like a ‘crown’, and the nature of concave and compound surfaces are respectively explained by reference to the inner surfaces of eggshells and outer surfaces of columns.
Such material bodies can only be fully perceived through light, as the earlier students of optics had stressed, and Alberti explains the process of vision in terms of a highly simplified version of medieval optical science. The basis of our perception of the relative sizes of objects is the visual pyramid or cone, comprising light rays converging to or diverging from a notional vertex within the eye (Fig. 1). The ‘centric ray’, which passes along our visual axis, plays a key role in the ‘certification’ of sight, as it had done for ‘the philosophers’, while the ‘extrinsic’ and ‘median’ rays convey information about outline and surface respectively. Unlike such medieval predecessors as Pecham, whose Perspectiva communis had become the standard textbook, he does not deal with the complexities of what happens to the light rays within the eye, nor is he concerned to debate the old and contentious question as to whether the rays only entered the eye or were emitted as ‘seeing beams’. He also declines to commit himself on the origins of colours, although he is clearly aware of the competing theories within the Aristotelian tradition that the basic or primary colours either arise as a result of mixtures of lightness and darkness in different proportions or are generated by the respective properties of the four elements. His sole concern in On Painting is to establish the rudiments of optical geometry external to the eye, and their consequences for the painter.
The picture is conceived as equivalent to the intersection of the pyramid by a plane which is perpendicular to the axis of sight (or the ‘centric ray’). The distance of the intersection from our eye will affect the actual size of the picture, but not the relative proportions of the objects in the visual array as recorded on the picture plane. It is through these relative proportions that the sizes and distances of objects become apparent by reference to an internal measure or scale of known dimensions. In line with Protagoras and the medieval opticians, Alberti regards the figure of man as the most appropriate standard of reference.
It is this human mean or measure that he uses when he begins to provide directions for the construction of perspectival space, though he nowhere explains why the properties of the pyramid result in the reciprocal geometry of his pictorial construction. He merely implies that he could undertake the proof if required to do so: ‘I used to demonstrate these things at greater length to my friends with some geometrical explanations.’18 His basic construction is outlined in a step-by-step manner and results in a foreshortened grid or tiled pavement. The vanishing point – his ‘centric point’ – lies on the horizon at the head-height of his modular man. Alberti apparently supplied no illustrations, and modern diagrams of his procedures, such as those provided in this edition (Figs. 8 and 10–11), have tended to place the ‘centric point’ in the middle of the horizon and half-way up the picture. This gives the impression of visual inflexibility, but he emphasizes that he is doing no more than introducing the aspiring painter to the ‘rudiments’ of the art; that is to say, to the principles upon which the artist can build his practice, exercising his inventiveness as appropriate to the particular task in hand. He is not telling us how the space should be arranged in every painting.
The advantage of laying in the tiled pavement as a first step is that it provides a series of modular measures into and across the space of the picture to which any vertical and horizontal elements of known dimensions can be related. In Book II, under the aegis of ‘circumscription’, Alberti describes how walls can be constructed according to their due scale on the ground plan for the foreshortened grid (Fig. 13) and how a circle can be transposed on to the pavement in the painting by noting the equivalent points at which the outline of an unforeshortened circle would intersect an unforeshortened grid (Fig. 14).
Book II opens with an extended digression, addressed to ‘the young’, on the virtù of painting, using a cluster of citations from ancient authors to emphasize its ‘divine power’, moral worth and the high social status of its practitioners. The main purpose of the second book is to ‘instruct the painter how he can present with his hand what he has understood in his mind’.19 The art of representation is divided into three parts, ‘circumscription’, ‘composition’ and ‘reception of light’ – in a sequence that parallels the historical development of art from its primeval origins. ‘Circumscription’ deals with the basic draughtsmanship through which bodies are represented in terms of contours and outlines, using the foreshortened grid as the measure for all spatial relations. The concept of ‘composition’ is especially important, and represents one of Alberti’s most original contributions to art theory. ‘Composition’ is the way in which ‘surfaces’, ‘members’ and ‘bodies’ can be brought systematically together in decorous harmony. It provides the means by which variety and order can be reconciled, much as the rules of Latin sentence construction permitted the Roman authors he admired, above all Cicero and Quintilian, to express their meaning with measured power. Every surface, member and body must be organized so as to be in keeping with the whole, and the whole must be edifying at the highest level. Not surprisingly a transvestite Mars or rustic Helen would attract derision, but the requirements of decorous composition go further than such general prescriptions. Every smallest part of the human figure should be expressive of its physical nature, social status and mental state. Thus a dead figure should declare its deadness right down to its very fingertips, as in ‘a historia in Rome [a marble relief on an ancient sarcophagus] in which the dead Meleager is carried away’.20 The historia (a term that resists precise translation) was the supreme achievement for the painter, embodying all the moral worth which could be realized through his command of beauty, expression and significance. His one modern example of a historia is Giotto’s lost mosaic in old St Peter’s depicting Christ and St Peter walking on the water, in which each disciple exhibits ‘such clear signs of agitation on his face and entire body that the individual emotions are discernible in every one of them’.21
The expressions, gestures and motions of the figures should be potent and declamatory, like those of an orator, but they should not be violent or extreme. An indecorous tumult or cacophony is not to be admired, and he cites with approval ‘Varro’s dictum’ to the effect that ‘no more than nine guests’ should be invited to dinner ‘to avoid disorder’.22 He also knows the virtues of understatement, citing as an example the way in which Timanthes had veiled the head of Iphigenia’s grief-stricken father, leaving ‘more for the onlooker to imagine about his grief than he could see with the eye’.23 The need for temperate decorum is as great in the process through which the historia is realized as in the final product itself. Indeed, the latter is predicated on the former. ‘An extravagant artistic talent’, which begins painting in a furious transport of creative enthusiasm, will give rise to works that are devoid of dignity and deficient in finish.24
Alberti’s treatment of the ‘reception of light’ is no less original than his discussion of ‘composition’. He clearly identifies the roles of black and white (and by implication shades of grey) as modifiers of coloured pigments to give the effect of modelling in light and shade, and differentiates their visual properties from those of the individual colours – differentiating between what we call tone and hue. The individual hues are the ‘genera’ of colours, while black and white generate the ‘species’. Although he is far from insensitive to the charm of colours individually and in cunning combinations, he places the highest value on the use of black and white to achieve the illusion of solid forms. Even here, however, moderation is the watchword. Excessive use of white and black is harsh and disagreeable, leaving the painter with nothing in reserve for the few really brilliant highlights such as those on Dido’s quiver of gold. He is insistent that it is part of the merit of painting that gold can be evoked through the artist’s skill in manipulating hue and tone, rather than by the application of actual gold to the surface of the painting. The glitter of gold and jangle of gaudy colours will only appeal to the eyes of the ignorant.
Having laid down a demanding agenda for the making of art in his first two books, passing from the ‘roots in nature’ to the actual principles and methods of representation, Alberti proceeds in Book III to review some of the personal requirements for the painter who wishes to live up to the ideals of his vocation. The stipulations are both moral and artistic: ‘I would have this painter first of all to be a good man and well versed in the visual arts.’25 A knowledge of geometry and an acquaintance with literary matters (and with literary men) go hand-in-hand in providing form and content for the painter’s inventions. The capacity to devise a worthy ‘invention’ – that is to say, the conception of a compelling subject – is greatly prized in its own right, as for example in Apelles’s devising of his famous historia of ‘Calumny’, known to us from Lucian’s description. However, the painter should not believe on this account that he should resort only to his own imagination, believing it to be self-sufficient. Rather he must have continual recourse to nature as his ultimate guide.
Nature is also responsible for the way in which different painters best exhibit their gifts in different branches of painting – some excelling in male and others in female figures, some in ships, some in animals and so on – but any painter who aspires to achieve true excellence should not limit his ambitions to the field in which he feels most naturally at home: ‘it is a tremendous gift, and not one granted to any of the ancients, for a man to be, I will not say outstanding, but even moderately learned in everything.’26 No painter should find the path towards excellence barred, providing he equips himself properly, correctly reads the signposts in the natural world, and undertakes his arduous journey with sufficient resolution: ‘the gifts of Nature should be cultivated and increased by industry, study and practice, and nothing that pertains to glory ought to be overlooked and neglected by us’.27
On Painting as a whole is designed to inculcate in the painter, particularly one who is still young, awareness of the systematic means and elevated ends of painting. The prize for the cultivation of genuine virtù in art is the praise of those who are knowledgeable and a lasting fame that resists the vagaries of fortuna. Thus equipped, Alberti is confident that the painter can play a significant role in the realization of human potential in those pursuits that possess tangible and enduring values. The message is an archetypal statement of Renaissance optimism.
Alberti, like other leading figures in the arts of the Renaissance, was simultaneously a reviver of ancient ideas and a creative voice in the establishment of a new age. His production of his treatise On Painting in two versions, one in Latin and the other in Italian, is symptomatic of this double ambition. An inscription on his copy of Cicero’s Brutus testifies that ‘on the day of Friday at 20.45 hours on 26 August 1435 I completed the work De Pictura in Florence’. The manuscript of the Italian version in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence is inscribed, ‘finished praise be to God on the 7th day of the month of July 1436’.28 The advantage of making his treatise available in two languages was not only that it became accessible to different kinds of readership – groups of humanist scholars and practitioners of the visual arts – but that it satisfied his desire to establish the merits of a refined vernacular alongside Latin.
A substantial amount of his literary production was in Latin, and many of Alberti’s works directly emulated his favourite Roman authors. His revival of ancient genres was not dry and humourless. He was particularly drawn to witty and satirical tales, composing his own pithy Intercoenales (what we would call ‘after-dinner stories’) in the manner of Lucian, and dedicating a collection of them to Paolo Toscanelli, a doctor who was a leading student of mathematics, astronomy and optics. His humanist friend in Ferrara, Guarino da Verona, dedicated his translation of Lucian’s Musca (The Fly) to Alberti, who on his own account composed an ironic work on the same theme which he sent to Landino. In a similar vein Alberti wrote a ringing eulogy of his faithful dog. His encomium of canine virtue is not only a virtuoso display of knowledge of the ancients, but also mocks the formulas and pomposities that can all too easily dominate humanist writing. His dog is said to have been ‘born of most noble ancestors… and amongst his ancient ancestors were an infinite number of famous persons’, including ‘ancient and learned persons of Egypt’.29 This paragon of the doggy race displayed a virtù worthy of the ancients: ‘in every moment of his life he was involved in praiseworthy deeds’.
For a number of the leading Tuscan humanists, the qualities of their own vernacular tongue could, if subjected to the rule of grammatical law, achieve a status equal to that of Latin as a literary vehicle. In Della Famiglia Alberti writes,
I fully admit that the ancient Latin language was rich and beautiful, but I see no reason why our present-day Tuscan is so contemptible that anything written in it, however excellent, should fail to satisfy us… As to the great authority among all nations which my critics attribute to the ancient language, this authority exists simply because many learned men have written in it. Our tongue will have no less power as soon as learned men decide to refine and polish it by zealous and arduous labours.30
Alberti played his own part in these ‘zealous labours’, not only by composing exemplary works in the vernacular such as Della Famiglia, and by organizing a public competition in Florence for Italian poetry in 1441, but also by devising the first systematic book of grammar for Tuscan, his Regule lingue florentine (otherwise known as the Grammatichetta Vaticana). Cristoforo Landino, himself a great student of the vernacular as a commentator on Dante, warmly acknowledged Alberti’s contribution: ‘notice with what industry he has contrived to transfer to our tongue all the eloquence, composition and nobility which is found in Latin.’31
On Painting, whether in its Latin or Italian versions, perfectly embodies the twin aspirations of retrospective emulation and progressive innovation. The form of On Painting – its organization into three books and its systematic progression through rudiments, practice and ends – is deeply influenced by Roman treatises on rhetoric, most especially Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria. And, like any composition by a good humanist, it makes regular reference to classical precedent, whether by direct quotation and citation, particularly from the section on ancient artists in Pliny’s Natural History, or by the kind of allusion his learned audience would have been ready to appreciate. The polished version of the Latin text was dedicated about 1440 to Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, and, although we may doubt the marquis’s own enthusiasm for reading learned treatises in Latin, Alberti was shrewdly placing his work in an environment where it would be appreciated. In Mantua Gianfrancesco sponsored the influential humanist school, La Giocosa, run by Vittorino da Feltre, who had previously succeeded Alberti’s teacher, Barzizza, in the chair of rhetoric at Padua. At this school such future patrons as Federigo da Montefeltro of Urbino and Lodovico Gonzaga were to receive their grounding in the arts and philosophies of the ancient and modern worlds. In the dedication of On Painting Alberti’s pitch is clear, praising the virtù of the marquis in arms and letters and expressing the hope that the contents of his treatise ‘may prove worthy by their art of the ears of learned men, and may also please scholars by the novelty of their subject… And I shall believe my work has not displeased you, if you decide to enrol me as a devoted member among your servants [inter familiares].’32
In judging the intended audience and function of On Painting, this original context of humanist patronage has to be borne in mind. There are numerous indications in the text and in the overall organization of the treatise that it is aimed at the ‘young painter’, but it is not an instructional book of the kind intended for the average studio apprentice. Rather, Alberti exploits the vehicle of a pedagogic treatise, in the manner of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, to expound the principles of the discipline in such a way as to impress fellow students of the liberal arts, particularly the young and those entrusted with the education of the young. His success may be judged by the survival of twenty or so manuscripts of the Latin text. Only three manuscripts of the Italian version are known. Although we have to allow for the possibility that the survival rate of the Italian text in artistic circles may have been less than that of the Latin manuscripts in libraries, the relative proportions do appear to reflect the original aim of the treatise.
The Italian text is not a straight translation. There are a number of passages in the Latin that have been omitted in the Italian, as denoted in this edition by the sections printed in italics. The omitted passages include some of the more ‘scientific’ asides which allude to traditional optics, and some of the learned references, such as ‘Varro’s dictum’ about the number of guests at a banquet. Very occasionally the Italian helps clarify the meaning of the Latin, but it is generally the case that the original text conveys Alberti’s sense with more precision. Indeed, the steps of the perspective construction cannot be unambiguously understood from the Italian text alone. The single most valuable aspect of the vernacular translation for the modern reader is the letter dedicating it to Filippo Brunelleschi, which contains a classic statement of the ‘rebirth’ of the arts and bears vivid witness to the impact of the great Florentine pioneers of the Renaissance style in the visual arts. In his dedication of Della Pittura, Alberti was not addressing a typical ‘artist’. Brunelleschi, as the son of a notary, was probably given a good education, and may already have expressed his admiration for De Pictura in its original Latin form. The other contemporary artists eulogized by Alberti in the Preface – ‘our great friend the sculptor Donatello’, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Luca della Robbia and Masaccio – may not all have been well-read to the same degree, but they belonged to the elite band that was reforming Tuscan art in the light of Roman ideals. Ghiberti was himself to write ingenious Commentaries on the figurative arts later in his career.
The achievement of Brunelleschi which is singled out for praise is his construction of the huge dome of Florence Cathedral, rather than his invention of perspective. Alberti’s failure to mention Brunelleschi in connection with perspective should not be taken to mean that he was attempting to claim all the glory for himself, or even that Brunelleschi’s early biographer was wrong to credit his hero with its invention. Rather, it most likely reflects the fact that Brunelleschi’s achievement did not provide a precise precedent for Alberti’s system. Brunelleschi had accomplished, probably before 1413, the perspectival projection of two of Florence’s most prominent buildings, the Baptistery and the Palazzo de’ Signori (now the Palazzo Vecchio), in two demonstration panels which no longer survive. His procedures, whatever their actual nature, worked from known structures rather than pre-establishing an abstract space into which forms could be placed. During the mid-1420s, Donatello in relief sculpture and Masaccio in painting had adapted Brunelleschi’s invention for the a priori laying down of imaginary settings in mathematical perspective. Masaccio’s famous Trinity in S. Maria Novella provides the most developed example. Alberti’s innovation was to extract from the most advanced pictorial practice the ‘rudiments’ of the construction – the underlying rules or general case – so that its principles might be readily communicated.
Alberti was obviously a perceptive observer of artistic practice. His rules on narrative and characterization suggest a close study of Donatello, Ghiberti and Masaccio, and we have already noted his praise of Giotto’s historia in Rome. He was also, by his own testimony, a dilettante artist in his own right, although no surviving painting can be convincingly attributed to him.33 On Painting is not at all concerned with the material aspects of the craft of painting, unlike Cennino Cennini’s Il Libro dell’arte, which had been written around the turn of the century and contained careful instructions on the preparation of surfaces, the handling of pigments, etc. However, there are numerous signs that Alberti was speaking as someone who had striven on his own account to make paintings. He recommended an invention of his own as practical aid for the draughtsman who wishes to imitate nature, namely the ‘veil’ or ‘intersection’, which consists of a translucent cloth divided into squares. The object to be copied is observed through the ‘veil’ from a fixed point and its outlines transposed on to a drawing surface that has been divided into corresponding squares. He also provides other practical hints, noting how the painter moves his viewpoint back and forth to find the ideal position for representing a particular form, how looking at objects through half-closed eyes will help consolidate the masses of light and shadow, and how studying a painting in a mirror will show it in a new way to reveal its faults. His occasional remarks on actual effects in the seen world, such as his comments on different types of draperies and his observations of green reflections in the faces of those who walk through meadows, show a ‘painter’s eye’ at work.
Alberti was fully conscious of the fresh and novel qualities of On Painting as a whole and in its details. No doubt he hoped that it would be influential. One aspect of its influence has already been suggested when we noted the humanist audience for the Latin text. A prospective patron of the arts who had read On Painting would be more likely to act as a knowing patron for an artist such as Piero della Francesca than one who was ignorant of the intellectual basis of painting. The more direct aspect of its influence would be on the actual practice of the figurative arts. There are clear signs in the practice of Florentine art in the 1430s and 1440s of the impact of Alberti’s ideas. Ghiberti was probably one of the first to respond, during the course of his design of the perspectival bronze reliefs on his second set of doors for the Florentine Baptistery. Fra Angelico and Domenico Veneziano both adopted aspects of Alberti’s prescriptions for space and narrative. Fra Angelico’s frescos in the Vatican chapel for Nicholas V, the humanist Pope who was the recipient of Alberti’s De Re aedificatoria, are an almost perfect embodiment of Albertian principles. And Piero della Francesca understood Alberti’s message to such effect that he was able to extend Alberti’s intellectual aspirations both in pictorial practice and through his own theory of perspective in De Prospectiva pingendi. Alberti’s detailed analysis of classical subjects, such as the ‘Three Graces’ or the ‘Death of Iphigenia’, and his recommendation of Apelles’s ‘Calumny’ as an exemplary historia, seem only to have borne full fruit later in the century in the practice of Mantegna and Botticelli, both of whom were employed by patrons who were fully cognizant of Alberti’s significance.
Amongst later generations of Renaissance painters, no one paid closer heed to Alberti than Leonardo da Vinci, whose own extensive injunctions on the theory and practice of painting contain repeated echoes of his predecessor’s ideas. Although Leonardo’s remorseless insistence on scientific naturalism made far more extensive demands on the painter’s knowledge of natural law than Alberti’s relatively simple prescriptions, there is no radical departure from the tenor of Alberti’s message.
Following the first printed editions – the Latin text in 1540 in Basel, and Lodovico Domenichi’s Italian translation from the Latin in Venice in 154734 – On Painting was well placed to play an influential role in the establishing of principles in the earliest academies of art. The decade that saw Giorgio Vasari’s foundation of the Florentine Accademia del Disegno in 1563 also witnessed editions of Italian translations in Florence and Venice.35 Vasari’s own major work on the visual arts, his Lives of the artists, is not primarily theoretical in intent, but the underlying precepts often have an Albertian flavour. The newly emergent Royal Academy in Paris was the setting in the next century for Dufresne’s first French edition in 1651, while the first English translation by Leoni in the eighteenth century appeared at a time when the English artists were belatedly acquiring academic aspirations.36 The European wave of Neoclassicism in the later part of the eighteenth century was accompanied by a series of editions in Italy and Spain, as artists strove to recapture the classical purity of ancient art, both directly and via the Renaissance authorities.37 This close association with the academic institutionalization of art worked against the reputation of Alberti’s treatise when the academies fell into progressive disrepute during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But read with an appreciation of its original setting, On Painting is far from being a dreary work of academic orthodoxy. Rather it is a vigorous and creative assertion of ideas that were reforming the theory, practice and social implications of painting.
The nineteenth century saw the first scholarly editions of Alberti’s treatise as a historical text. In 1847 Bonucci published Alberti’s own Italian version (rather than Italian translations by others from the Latin edition) as part of his Florentine edition of Alberti’s works in Italian.38 Subsequently, for obvious reasons of modern convenience, it was this Italian text that became the standard point of reference. It was republished and translated into German by Janitschek in 1877, and a superior edition published by Mallé in Florence in 1950.39 It was this edition that provided the basis for John Spencer’s new English translation in 1956, revised in 1966.40 Spencer’s translation, widely available, has continued to serve the needs of students and the general reader, in spite of the appearance in 1972 of Cecil Grayson’s edition and translation of the Latin text.41 Not only is the Latin text superior to the Italian, for the reasons already indicated, but Grayson’s translation is to be trusted far more than any other. Grayson was Serena Professor of Italian Studies at Oxford, and is the greatest scholar and editor of Alberti’s literary works in this century. In establishing the Latin text on which it is based Grayson primarily used six manuscripts of the version presented to Gianfrancesco Gonzaga, but he also consulted other manuscripts as well as the first printed edition. He subsequently produced (1973) a critical text of the vernacular Delia Pittura for his edition of Alberti’s Opere volgari, with the Italian and Latin versions on facing pages.42 His 1972 text of On Painting, issued in a volume that also contained a Latin text and translation of De Statua, has long since been out of print and is not widely available outside academic libraries. The present publication of his translation is intended to rectify this and to make publicly available the best possible version of Alberti’s text for the modern reader of English.
Grayson’s translation has been left largely untouched. Where alternative readings initially seemed to be preferable, it was generally found that Grayson’s solution represented the best way of rendering Alberti’s sense for the modern reader without indulging in unnecessary anachronisms. I did, for instance, consider altering his translation of fimbria (literally ‘fringe’ or ‘hem’) from ‘outline’, which seemed to carry too specific a modern meaning, to a more neutral term such as ‘edge’. On reflection, ‘outline’ did seem to convey Alberti’s sense of a contour drawn with an actual line by the draughtsman. A number of Alberti’s terms carried specific and loaded meanings in their humanist context, and any straight translation is likely to be inadequate. The term ingenium is a case in point. There is a temptation to translate it as ‘genius’, which Grayson does on occasion, but its Renaissance meaning was closer to ‘talent’, with connotations of ‘mind’, intellect’, ‘ability’ and ‘merit’, which are also terms used by Grayson to render Alberti’s ingenium. I considered altering the rendering to ‘talent’ throughout, but this would result in a stilted sense in some passages, and it is preferable to retain Grayson’s more flexible response. A few minor adjustments have been made. I am grateful for Professor Grayson’s advice on a number of points in the introduction and translation.
The dedicatory letter to Brunelleschi has also been included here in Grayson’s translation, although it preceded the Italian rather than the Latin version. Sections that were omitted by Alberti from the Italian text are here printed in italics, to give the reader an indication of the small but significant contractions made by the author when he presented his work to a different audience. The paragraph numbers are those supplied by Grayson. The notes and diagrams are provided by the present editor, drawing heavily upon Grayson for references to the classical sources cited by Alberti. The diagrams are the most complete in any edition to date, and I believe they are the first to be placed at appropriate points in the actual text.
Grayson’s original Introduction can be read with profit by those with some knowledge of Alberti’s career and the cultural background, but the present Introduction is designed to serve the broader purpose of setting On Painting in the context of the author’s life and philosophy, as well as highlighting some of the characteristics of the treatise itself. The greater part of Alberti’s literary legacy remains little known and under-explored. If the present publication not only brings On Painting to the notice of a wider public but also stimulates a productive curiosity about his other writings, it will have served a double purpose.