3 Composing with Painting

Alberti opens Book Two ofDella pittura with a eulogy to painting that, despite its slightly surprising emphasis, fulfills a precise purpose: justifying the pains he has already inflicted on his reader as well as those to which he will soon subject him. In effect, Alberti is preparing to take up his analysis of the device of perspective at the point where he left off at the end of Book One. Once the squared pavement that serves as the ground in the representation has been constructed, it must be given the appearance of a stage on which theistoria, the ultimate goal of painting, might take place. This operation implies going from a two-dimensional device (the base plane of a chessboard) to a three-dimensional device (the stage or scene as a plane of support but also of volume). By the end of Book One—a volumetutto mathematico, “entirely mathematical”—the reader is convinced that the construction of the scene in perspective is not without difficulties, as Alberti announces as early as the prologue to the “vulgar” Italian version of his treatise.1 Before going any further, however, Alberti deems it necessary to pause and attempt to persuade the painter—his reader—that the effort asked of him is justified. Is not painting something divine? Should the painter who can give the appearance of life to the beings he represents not himself be held as a god? For Alberti, however, the painter’s power does not stop there. Not content to confer a semblance of presence on the absent, and even on the dead, Alberti holds that painting is the mistress and principal ornament of all things:² mistress, if it is true that all the arts model themselves on painting; ornament, in that there is no art that painting cannot touch up or perfect.

Indeed, so great is painting’s inherent power to transform, to transmute, if not to metamorphose, that it can be said to be “the flower of all the arts” (fiore d’ogni arte). It adds to the pleasures of the soul, as well as to the beauty of things, and is able to render precious the basest of metals, such as lead, and even more so the most precious, such as gold. But what are we to make of the assertion that if all the arts in some way model themselves on painting, this holds true even for the art of the architect? “If I am not mistaken,” Alberti writes, the architect takes from the painter “architraves, capitals, bases, columns and pediments, and all the other fine features of buildings.”³ It is one thing for Alberti inDe re aedificatoria (which he wrote nearly twenty years afterDella pittura) to present the column as the principal, if not the primary, ornament of architecture,⁴ but the assertion that architecture is indebted to painting for this “ornament” might come as a surprise. We can understand why commentators have routinely preferred to pass over it in silence rather than having to reconsider, in this unexpected light, the whole question of ornament, and of ornament asaddition,⁵ indissociable as such from the notion of composition as defined, explicitly or not, in Alberti’s text.

The wordcomposition does not appear inDe re aedificatoria. If we really want to find a notion, or group of notions, in Alberti’s conceptual apparatus that could play a role analogous to the one the classical tradition assigned to the idea of composition, we must call on the notion ofconcinnitas—the proper relation (convenance) between the parts—and on the three principles that govern it: number (numerus), proportion (finitio), and especially the location or relative position of parts (collocatio). As Françoise Choay clearly understood, the notion ofconcinnitas, which the Renaissance took from Cicero, corresponds in Alberti’s essay to the organizing principle that requires the different parts of a living organism to be harmoniously subordinate to the law of the whole. But whereasconcinnitas goes hand in hand with a kind of inherent beauty based on “that reasoned harmony of all the parts within a body, so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse,”⁶ ornament corresponds to a form of auxiliary, or complementary, beauty. Resembling painting in this respect, ornament is of the order of added value. Yet there is an obvious difference between a complement and a supplement: a complement corresponds to a possibility, even a necessity, inscribed in the object itself, which would remain incomplete without it; a supplement remains external to the object to which it is added, just as the sign remains external to the object for which it stands in.⁷

To discover what Alberti meant by “composition,” we must return toDella pittura while bearing in mind that his proposition that architecture is indebted to painting for its principal ornaments comes just before he defines the three parts that comprise painting: circumscription, composition, and the reception of light. Of these three, which Alberti says he took from nature,⁸ only the first two hold our attention here, for reasons that will become clear. Circumscription (circumscriptio) corresponds in painting to the delineation of the contours of objects by means of the outline;⁹ composition (compositio) governs the articulation in the painted work of the elements thereby defined.¹⁰ All of the painter’s fame and talent rests in the articulation, or composition, of bodies, foristoria itself¹¹ consists of nothing but the articulation, or composition, of the bodies and their parts in the form of surfaces, which are brought together in projection on a plane according to the model of the visual pyramid and the intersecting plane, orintersegazione. On the plane of the painting, the surfaces thatcompose members and bodies should then fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle or, better still, like a piece of marquetry work.

The relationship between the notions ofcompositio andconcinnitas is thus established. Both refer to the way in which the parts of the same object, the same body, the same organism respond and adjust to each other. Is not the function of the architect himself to project and realize—through the distribution of weights and the gathering together and conjugation of bodies—buildings that fulfill the needs of mankind in the most dignified way,¹² with the parts of a building having to be in harmony with each other just like the limbs of an animal?¹³ Yet whereas a body, a living being, finds its place in a three-dimensional space, the notion of composition (as well as that ofdecomposition, as advanced by Peter Eisenman¹⁴) makes sense only if it is brought back to the two dimensions of the plane of projection or inscription. Hence the analogy Alberti made between an apprenticeship in painting and one in writing, at least as it concerns the alphabet:

I would like to see young people who are learning the art of painting today do what I see practiced by teachers of writing. They first teach all the signs of the alphabet, which the Ancients called elements, separately; and then how to put syllables together, and then whole words. Our students should follow this method with painting. First they should learn how to draw the outlines of surfaces, as the first elements of painting, so to speak, then the way in which surfaces are joined together, and after that the individual forms of all the members; and they should commit to memory all the differences that can exist in those members, for they are neither few nor insignificant.¹⁵

I consider it significant that Alberti resorts to this same paradigm of writing when he comes to describe the different orders of columns inDe re aedificatoria. The contoured profiles (modénatures) that ensure the connection between (or mark the articulation of) the different parts, or members, of architecture indeed allow themselves to be decomposed, if not spelled out, into a certain number of elements, each one of which presents, as a projection on a plane, a characteristic profile that refers back to the graphic model of writing. This is the case with the lintel or the fillet, the projection of which corresponds to the outline of the letter L, as well as with the “neck” or concave moldings, placed beneath, that are shaped in the fashion of a C or an S.¹⁶ Thus, by way of this operation of projection (or of transcription), ornaments are reduced to a succession of elements that combine on the plane in a strictly linear fashion, just like letters on a page.

As if to further underscore this connection between the agency of the ornament and that of the letter, Alberti points out thatmodénatures can be decorated with sculptures in the form of shells, scrolls, or even letters of the alphabet. If ornament does indeed present itself as being of the order of the supplement, this is because it refers back, in its economy and its own logic, to the dimension of writing—the writing that an entire tradition (at the heart of which Alberti thus finds his place) has placed precisely under the title of the supplement—what Derrida proposed to call the “graphic” of the supplement, the better to reveal the constitutive, foundational relationship that such a supplement maintains with the order of the brushstroke, the outline, the line.¹⁷ Ornament, then, would be added to the built object in the same way that writing is supposedly added to speech as its image. (In his translation ofDe re aedificatoria, James Leoni went so far as to compare it to the quarter-round ivy that runs along a building’s members and attaches itself to them.¹⁸) Ornament adds to (or attaches itself to) the built thing as a sign, if not as a mask, that passes itself off as the built thing itself, which from then on is posited as absent and will have no other presence than the one conferred on it by ornament—in much the same way as painting can give presence to the absent and the dead in effigy.

The same goes for the column. Whether Doric, Ionic, or Corinthian, the column as ornament takes on functions quite different from the purely mechanical and static functions assigned to it as an element in a vertical skeleton in the constructional apparatus.¹⁹ It assumes the value of a sign within a system that works, as the Saussurian metaphor would have it, according to the double dimension—syntagmatic and paradigmatic—of language, with the syntagmatic relationship resting on the effective presence of several elements in a real series and the paradigmatic relationship referring to terms given in absentia in a virtual series (e.g., in the classical orders).²⁰ Yet Alberti’s reference to alphabetical writing signals that from the very beginning ornament is not a matter of syntax or semantics; it proceeds as supplement from an order of concatenation that has nothing grammatical about it—an order that is strictly graphic, if not orthographic—and springs as such from a power of prior articulation that is, ontologically speaking, the power of speech.

If we now return to the apparently paradoxical proposition that first caught our attention, we see that the idea that architecture drew its principal ornaments from painting is neither rhetorical nor conjectural and that its significance is not limited to the field in which a treatise on painting might belong. If architecture (architecture, that is, not building) pertains to the order of the supplement, it is not (however much we might be tempted to agree with Schelling) as the metaphor of the art of building. Architecture is bound to painting, and painting to architecture, by a bond that is equally fundamental to both disciplines (or practices). This is indicated by the fact that the notion of composition has been able to migrate (or spread) from one domain of expertise to the other. It has often seemed astonishing that, whereas Vitruvius deals with perspective under the heading ofscenographia,De re aedificatoria leaves no room for perspective, save implicitly, and then only to exclude it—that very same perspective to which, inDella pittura, Alberti devotes the arguments we have discussed. But this is because theperspectiva artificialis was the business of painters, even if it was an architect—the same Brunelleschi to whom Alberti dedicated the Italian version of his treatise on painting—who invented it. No doubt the perspective of painters (theprospectiva pingendi, as Piero della Francesca was to call it) acquires a specifically constructional dimension to the extent that all perspective is ultimately architectural, the very architecture of representation essentially deriving from the representation of architecture.²¹ We cannot claim, however, that theres aedificatoria, architecture as built object, must necessarily find a way of externalizing, asserting, and expressing itself in graphic terms through the detour of a construction (in the geometrical sense of the term) that assumes the perspectival scene as its precondition.

If we accept Rudolf Wittkower’s hypothesis, it was in response to a properly architectural (and not merely constructional) requirement that Brunelleschi was led to invent perspective. Keen to prove that the metrical coherence of a building was not altered by the distance from which it was viewed, Brunelleschi needed to demonstrate that the apparent diminishing of objects in space obeyed a regular and constantratio. The consequence was that a building’s proportions could only be judged in perspective and with reference to an ideal plane of projection—the difference between architecture and painting thus being merely a matter of the medium, not the essence.²² But to use the termmedium might again be going too far. For what I have called “the Brunelleschi demonstration” might seem as though it were reviving what Edmund Husserl would regard as the inaugural act of geometry: the reduction of visible bodies to “limit-forms”—that is, to a set of surfaces with clearly drawn edges—such that one no longer knows, and no longer can know, anything about a volume except what is said by the planes on which, in a sense, it projects itself (theplane in this case being as important as theprojection).²³

Alberti, who is perfectly explicit on this point, offers an entirely different view: “The difference between the drawings of the painter and those of the architect is this: the former takes pains to emphasize the relief of objects in paintings with shading and diminishing lines and angles; the architect rejects shading, but takes his projections from the ground plan and, without altering the lines and by maintaining the true angles, reveals the extent and shape of each elevation and side—he is one who desires his work to be judged not by deceptive appearances but according to certain calculated standards.”²⁴ This statement responds to the definition ofdisegno with whichDe re aedificatoria opens: “All the intent and purpose of lineaments lies in finding the correct, infallible way of joining and fitting together those lines and angles which define and enclose the surfaces of the building,”²⁵ and thus obviating any need for shading (the “reception of light”) or scenography.

Is this to say that there is no architecture, nor should there be, at this stage, unless by the relay of paper? The fact that, according to Vasari, Brunelleschi was able to construct his “views of architecture” in perspective from a building’s plan and elevation says enough about the value and constructional significance of these two modes of graphic representation, which constituted a primordial frame of reference for perspectival construction and at the same time provided the information necessary for its establishment. Similarly for Alberti, there is no ornament (or composition, in the sense we have defined) except in relation to the two dimensions of the plan, whether a ground plan, an elevation, a section, or even a perspective view. Yet if architecture is right to claim a kind of beauty that is something other than natural and, so to speak, organic, it no less owes this beauty to painting, that “flower of all the arts,” and of architecture itself. It is painting that provides architecture with the means of articulating—ofcomposing—in the two dimensions of the plane of projection the surfaces that might be seen (or “read,” as the metaphor of writing would have it) in the three dimensions of an imaginary space that perspective teaches us to build, but also in the three dimensions of the built object, given that the “wall architecture” attributed to Alberti only conceives of the column as a type of pilaster that corresponds to its projection on the wall, a process whose operation only painting can describe. At this stage, it is most definitely from painting that architecture borrows its ornaments, starting with the first and principal among them. Indeed, it is true that there is no ornament unless it is designed, developed, and worked in the two dimensions of the plane that carries it; and painting, when it chooses to be itself, necessarily participates in the décor and thus is naturally decorative.

Without architecture, as Serlio said, there is no perspective. Yet without perspective, there is no (or no longer) architecture. An affair of the trace, composition refuses to be separated from the delineation with which it ultimately merges, for the outline represents nothing other than the line of demarcation, of separation, the hinge between two surfaces. But it is also an affair of concatenation, of spacing, distribution,collocatio. After all, does the principal ornament of towns not lie in their geographical situation, in their implantation, their trace, as much as in the relative distribution of buildings, insofar as they allow themselves to be translated into graphic, even pictorial, terms?²⁶ Architecture is indebted to painting for its ornaments—but it must first compose with, come to terms with, and make an alliance with painting, as painting must do with architecture, to achieve by this detour the projective dimension to which it aspires: the dimension that refers back, following a henceforth acknowledged play of oppositions, to the order of theproject.