Origins, Imitation, Conventions- Representation in the Visual Arts

Origins, Imitation, Conventions

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

J A M E S S . A C K E R M A N

Origins, Imitation, Conventions

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PR

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2001 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic

or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and

retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Berkeley and Frutiger by Graphic Composition, Inc., and was printed

and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ackerman, James S.

Origins, imitation, conventions : representation in the visual arts / James S. Ackerman

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-262-01186-7 (hc. : alk. paper)

1. Art criticismHistoriography. 2. ArtHistoriography. 3. Art, Renaissance. 4.

Modernism (Art) 5. Poststructuralism. I. Title.

N7480 .A29 2001

701'.18dc21 2001044155

vignettes by Jill Slosburg-Ackerman

For Anne, Tony, Sarah, and Jesse

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Preface viii

1 On the Origins of Art History and Criticism 1

2 The Origins of Architectural Drawing in the Middle Ages and

Renaissance 27

3 Leonardo da Vincis Church Designs 67

4 On the Origins of Architectural Photography 95

5 Imitation 125

6 Art and Science in the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci 143

7 The Aesthetics of Architecture in the Renaissance 175

8 The Inuence of Antiquity on Italian Renaissance Villas 185

9 Daniele Barbaro and Vitruvius 217

10 Palladio: Classical in What Sense? 235

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P R E FAC E

The following studies are based on articles and lectures written during the past decade,

since the publication of my earlier collection, Distance Points (MIT Press, 1991).

These studies reect mynot always consciousabsorption of poststructuralist criticism

of the traditional historical-critical mtier. Much of this is too pertinent to be ignored,

even by one whose age justies a relaxed attitude toward seeking rebirth. My earlier

work, like that of so many of my contemporaries, was guided by a narrative that assumed

a development of the arts as they responded to social, economic, political, and cultural

changes. I articulated this view many years ago in an article entitled Art and Evolution

(in Nature and the Art of Motion, ed. Gyrgy Kepes [New York, 1965], 3240). The idea

of progressor at least of continuous steps away from the pastwas intensied in the

romantic period, as art and criticism distanced themselves from the classical tradition (a

phenomenon discussed below in the essay Imitation). The idea gained momentum in

the age of modernism, intensifying the concept of an avant-garde (borrowed for the arts

by Saint-Simon from the military designation for small units that advanced beyond the main

force) whose function was to lead the arts into new territory. The possibility that artists en-

gagement with the past, which in many ways is inevitable, might also produce something

desirable rarely occurred to writers of my generation.

The papers in the following pages center on the tension between the authority of the

pastwhich may act not only as a restraint but also as a challenge and a stimulusand the

potentially liberating gift of invention. So the approach to history in these pieces, parallel in

some respects to that of anthropology, addresses the ways in which artists and writers on

art have related to and contended with ancestors and with established modes of represen-

tation as well as with contemporary experiences.

Origins in my title applies to the rst four pieces collected here: studies of the earliest

art history and criticism, the beginnings of architectural drawing in the Middle Ages and

Renaissance, the rst architectural photographs, and Leonardo da Vincis sketches for

churches, the rst in the Renaissance to propose supporting domes on sculpted walls and

piers, anticipating the design of St. Peter in the Vatican and much of later ecclesiastical

architecture.

Origins in this sense are innovations, more notable for their departure from than for their

dependence on preceding modes. Thus the term avoids, I hope, the strictures of Michel Fou-

cault and later Manfredo Tafuri (whom I regard as the outstanding architectural historian of

our time) against the presumption that a historical event can be shown to have had its ori-

gins in certain preceding events. The achievements discussed in the essays on art history and

criticism and on architectural photography were indebted to forms established previously

in practices outside the ne artsthe former to those of ancient Roman rhetoric, the latter

to representation in print mediaand are therefore in part dependent on imitation. Only

the achievement of architectural drawing was apparently without precedent; the architec-

tural elevations and sections of the thirteenth century appeared as spontaneously as the

theory of the solar system in the late Renaissance. But, as revealed in my nal essay, once

Pref

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these astonishing graphic inventions had been achieved, they immediately became con-

ventions and resisted change over the centuries.

Imitation, described in the essay of that name, a key concept of ancient rhetoric, had a

special meaning within the classical tradition. Prior to the modern era, whenever and wher-

ever a type of representation in the arts already existed, it was virtually impossible for the

artist not to be affected by it and in some way to relate to it. The concept of imitation, as

applied to the relation of the artist to his or her forebears, however, did not involve either a

suppression of individuality or a limitation on invention; it encouragedeven demanded

both, but with the understanding that the achievements of the past constituted a structure

of support and a challenge. So the inventiveness discussed in the sixth through eleventh es-

says was built, both consciously and unconsciously, on what had survived from the past and

was accessible in the present.

The graphic work of Leonardo da Vinci, the subject of the sixth essay, was a special case.

Leonardo was virtually alone among artists of the Renaissance in his minimal engagement

with ancient sculpture, architecture, and theoretical writing, yet his readings of ancient and

medieval scientic and technological texts inuenced his early theories and empirical in-

vestigations (which in some cases proved to be a detriment), and, like his contemporaries,

he pursued ancient themes in gural studies. His anatomical, mechanical, and cartograph-

ical drawings anticipated major advances in graphic conventions but had no impact on his

successors because they remained out of circulation in his notebooks and portfolios of

drawings.

Though conventions are the exclusive concern only in the nal essay of this book, they are

an issue in many of the preceding ones. They function like languages in facilitating com-

munication between the artist and the viewer, but they are both more universal (being read-

able by people in cultures whose languages differ) and more xed (resisting regional and

spontaneous variation that might diminish the clarity of their communication).

x

The categories of Origins, Imitation, and Conventions, then, are interactive; most acts of

representation partake to some degree in all three.

I am grateful for a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 1993 that

helped me to develop studies on Renaissance criticism and art theory, and to my wife, Jill

Slosburg-Ackerman, for keen criticism of each study and for enriching the text with her

drawings. I want also to acknowledge the exceptionally helpful editing of Matthew Abbate

and the enterprising contribution of my assistants, Kathleen Christian and David Karmon,

for whom I wish and augur distinguished careers as teachers and scholars.

Earlier versions of the studies in this volume have been published as indicated below.

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Origins, Imitation, Conventions

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On the Origins of

Art History and Criticism

ON

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For there to be a history of art, art-making must be perceived as an activity distinct from

other human activities and the sequence of past products of that activity as potentially

exhibiting some describable pattern of change. These preconditions did not effectively

exist in the Middle Ages, when art in the modern sense was rarely distinguished from

other functional productions of shop artisans, and when there were not even names to

differentiate classes or periods of artifacts of the past.

The history of modern art history begins in the Italian Renaissance, though with far-

reaching dependence on ancient antecedents. But the achievement of a historical con-

sciousness liberated from the unsophisticated mentality of the chronicler was a much

more difcult task than we have realized. It remained undeveloped in antiquity and it

was still inchoate in the mind of the Renaissance writer who is accepted as the father of

modern art history, Giorgio Vasari.

The problem was that the most obvious aspect of works of art that could be represented

as evolving or at least changing with time was their likeness to nature. History could be

an account of the progressive conquering of obstaclesin Renaissance terminology,

difcultiesto mimesis. The difculties were overcome by inventions, of which an

obvious example would be painters perspective; that meant that the history of art could

be constructed on the kind of model later adopted for the history of science or of tech-

nology. This was consistent with the denition of ars in antiquity and the Middle Ages

as technique or craft. That satised the ancient and pre-Vasarian writers, even

though it must have been obvious to them that the works of art themselves were pur-

suing other, less mechanical and more resonant goals. But those goals were embodied

in the artists imaginative reconstitution of nature, and in order for them rst to be rec-

ognized and described and second to become the motivator of change, a new critical

consciousness was required.1 In one sense, this essay concerns the role of art criticism

as the motivator of history.

A historical consciousness more subtle than the recognition of progress in mimesis or

in the imitation of the antique rst emerged in Vasaris Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and

Architects of 1550, and more fully in the enlarged edition of 1568. It was manifested in

2

a nascent sense of individual and regional style that became the foundation of an ex-

ceptional hypothesis, that of a period style. These represent two distinct levels of ambi-

tion. Vasaris predecessors could grasp the individuality of an artist by induction,

without caring to formulate the style of a period. The concept of a periodapart from

the gross distinctions of antiquity, darkness, and rebirthwas a historians invention, an

artifact, an abstraction of certain features selected from individual instances.

Vasaris style-determined period and sequence of periods have been the motivator of

modern art history, and have been established as the only plausible way to construct an

image of what has occurred over time in the production of what we call art. But while it

is legitimate to see the invention of period style as historically important in the forma-

tion of modern historical practice, its relevance and utility probably ended with the

eclipse of modernism. Contemporary art and criticism have made it no longer relevant,

or possible.

The earliest Renaissance commentators on art have been keenly examined by Michael

Baxandall in his book Giotto and the Orators, a fundamental study of humanist views on

art and their relation to the classical rhetorical tradition. He begins with a fourteenth-

century text, Filippo Villanis De origine civitatis Florentiae et eiusdem famosis civibus of

13811382, which celebrates the distinguished citizens of the authors city and reviews the

painting of the preceding century in terms already suggested by Dante and Boccaccio.

So let it be proper for me . . . to introduce here the excellent Florentine painters, men who have

rekindled an art that was pale and almost extinguished. First among whom John, whose sur-

name was Cimabue, summoned back with skill and talent the decayed art of painting, wan-

tonly straying far from the likeness of nature. . . . After John, the road to new things now lying

open, Giottowho is not only by virtue of his great fame to be compared with the ancient

painters but is even to be preferred to them for skill and talent, restored painting to its former

worth . . . for images formed by his brush agree so well with the lineaments of nature as to seem

to the beholder to live and breathe. . . . Many people judge . . . that painters are of a talent no

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lower than those whom the liberal arts have rendered magistri. As from a most copious and

pure spring, glittering brooklets of painting followed from this admirable man and brought

about an art of painting that was once more a zealous imitator of nature.2

Villanis passage continues with accounts of a number of more recent painters, stimu-

lated by Giotto, who consolidated the salvation of the art. The whole sequence is pre-

sented in what Baxandall calls the Prophet-Savior-Apostle mode. It is not quite a

historical method, but also it is not simply a medieval chronicle; the metaphorsthe

road to new things that lies open, the brooklets issuing from a springsuggest a new

ambition, to give the sequence of events a common purpose. This common purpose is

to explore all aspects of the imitation of nature, an undertaking so demanding that those

who succeed in it must be regarded as the equal to university graduates in the liberal

arts. From the very start, the new effort to endow art with its own history is linked with

the identication of a category of craftsmen as ne artists, and with their social em-

powermenttheir escape from the guild and the stigma of belonging to the artisan

class. What is notable in this passage is not only that painters are represented as equiv-

alent to scholars, but that they appear in a chronicle of contemporary events, which im-

plies that their works are historical events.

The most ample model for this protoart history and for the motivating mechanism of

mimesis had been found in the accounts of Pliny the Elder, written as a section of his

encyclopedic Natural History in the rst century A.D., where one artist after another sur-

passes his predecessors in achievement measured by the attainment of verisimilitude.

Plinys account, which had been known in the Middle Ages, did provide a working vo-

cabulary for the discussion of painting and sculpture, which Lorenzo Ghiberti appro-

priated in his Commentarii. Plinys evolutionary historical framework was implicit in his

simplistic conception of the aims of art: since art moved ahead as it came closer to na-

ture, it could be discussed in the same way as the history of technology, each successive

achievement representing an advance toward a goal and in some way rendering its pre-

decessors obsolete.

4

Plinys lengthy chronicle had been anticipated in a paragraph written two generations

earlier by Cicero, who contributed perhaps more than any ancient writer to the forma-

tion of Renaissance art historical consciousness. E. H. Gombrich has called attention to

this passage in Ciceros Brutus, an essay on oratorical style, which was to be lifted es-

sentially verbatim by Vasari in the preface to the second section of his Lives.

What critic who devotes himself to the lesser arts does not recognize that the statues of

Canachus are too rigid to reproduce the truth of nature? The statues of Calamis again are still

hard, and yet softer than those of Canachus. Not even Myron achieved enough truth though one

would not hesitate to call his work beautiful. Still more beautiful are the works of Polycleitus,

and in my opinion, even quite perfect. The same may be seen in painting . . . and I take it to be

true of all the other arts.3

An important difference between the antique historical models and Villani, and subse-

quently Vasari, is that the ancients represented only a steady forward progress (Pliny,

writing centuries after the perfection of Polycleitos, wrote: Art has made extraordinary

progress, in technique rst and afterwards in audacity),4 while Villani and Vasari rec-

ognized that something had happened after the moment of perfection which, while it

was not exactly a decline, was primarily an exploitation of the achievements of the great

master or masters.

There are numerous texts in Pliny and other writers on ancient art intended to illustrate

the achievement of perfect mimesis. In one, horses led past a series of horse paintings

submitted to a competition neighed only at that of Apelles. In a competition between

Zeuxis and Parrhasios, the former exhibited a picture of grapes so convincing that birds

ew onto the stage to peck at them; elated by this verdict, he turned to his rival and

asked him to remove the curtain that covered his work, and was told that the curtain

was the work. Zeuxis forthwith ceded the palm, saying that it was far more prestigious

to deceive a painter than a bird.5 Stories of this kind, which are mythical in character,

must have lingered on from an earlier time when artists were simply craftsmen, either

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more or less skilled. It is odd that a culture that pursued discriminations of the subtlest

kind in discussing the nuances of rhetorical and poetic style could be so literally bird-

brained about the potentialities of visual art.

Such an unsophisticated representation of the purpose of painting and sculpture suf-

ced for most early Renaissance commentaries on the visual arts. This was not only be-

cause the formula had the prestige of anything ancient, but also because it t the sense

of pride felt at having overcome the imagined deciencies of medieval art, particularly

with respect to the command of verisimilitude. Gothic art was referred to as German

and Byzantine painting as Greek, the most disapproving terms Renaissance Italians

could devise.

Lorenzo Ghibertis Commentarii were written while he was nishing the second of his

two bronze doors for the Florence Baptistery in 14471448.6 They are preserved in an

unpublished and incomplete manuscript of three books, the rst on the art of antiquity,

the second on Italian and some transalpine gural art from the time of Giotto to his own

oeuvre (though he avoided discussion of any other fteenth-century art), and the third

on optics, light, anatomy, and proportions.

Ghibertis aim and preparation were entirely different from Villanis. Being a successful

painter and sculptor who had had contact with Florentine humanist scholars, he knew

not only the reputation of earlier Italian and transalpine artists but their individual

works. Though he was a craftsman trained in the medieval traditionwhich explains

some of his critical vocabularyhe was of the rst generation that sought to emerge

from the artisan class to a higher social status; his book was, in a sense, a bid to be ac-

cepted as an intellectual on a par with contemporary humanists.7 In contrast to Villani,

who discussed artists only as celebrated Florentines, Ghiberti presents gural art as a

distinct enterprise, though not in a historical context since he does not address the

problem of change in time. Though he boasts of his exceptional achievement, he does

not suggest that it represents an advance over the art of the preceding century.8

6

Ghiberti did not arrange Book II in a strictly chronological order (he discusses Ambro-

gio Lorenzetti before Duccio, and Giovanni before Andrea Pisano), and the century and

a half between Giottos work and his own Baptistery doors is not represented in terms

of an evolution. It was simply the post-Greek time in which painting began to arise

(sormontare). In spite of his adherence to Plinys history of ancient art, of which he pro-

vides virtually a condensed version in his rst book, Ghiberti avoided Plinys concept of

a progressive command of imitation as a motivating device. In fact, in cases where Pliny

had credited an individual with having advanced the history of his art, Ghiberti omits

that portion of the account; he also omits or emends anecdotes in which artists demon-

strate their mimetic skill. While he praises the command of perspective and the illusion

of relief, especially in his own second Baptistery doors, he never suggests that this sig-

nals progress; it is evidence of individual talent, skill, and learning.9 Though he men-

tions contemporaries (Brunelleschi, della Quercia, etc.) as competitors, they are not

included in his commentary. The reason was probably rivalry. While the decision, from

our historical point of view, resulted in placing him with the old guard of Trecento

artists, Ghibertis ahistorical disposition makes this observation irrelevant. Just as Plinys

view of the aims of art had led to an evolutionary historical structure, so Ghibertisthat

command of theoretical learning was the most exalted ambition of the artistencour-

aged, if it did not mandate, a nonevolutionary structure.10

Much of Ghibertis extensive critical vocabulary comes from Pliny (diligente, doctrina,

nito, nobile, perfetto, perito, copioso, dignit) rather than from Cennini and other writers

with workshop backgrounds. It is used primarily to indicate characteristics of the work

or artist rather than the impact on the viewer (bello appears only once). Several artists

are characterized as dotto because Ghiberti wants to underscore the intellectual nature

of his vocation, its need of the kind of learning and theory he is seeking to exemplify in

the Commentarii. In the rst book he often adds glosses to Plinys account attributing to

an artist undocumented theoretical writings. Little of this critical vocabulary survived in

later writers; it gave way to a more affective oneto some extent already employed by

Albertideriving from rhetoric, particularly the works of Cicero and Quintilian.

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Humanist contemporaries of Ghiberti, most of whom were at best dilettantes of the vi-

sual arts, nevertheless began to use the vocabulary of ancient rhetoric to establish a crit-

ical apparatus that greatly inuenced the future discourse on art. An early example is a

letter in verse of around 1427 from Guarino of Verona, who writes of the painter

Pisanello:

When you paint a nocturnal scene you make the night-birds it about and not one of the birds

of the day is to be seen; you pick out the stars, the moons sphere, the sunless darkness. If you

paint a winter scene everything bristles with frost and the leaess trees grate in the wind. If you

set the action in spring, varied owers, the trees, and the hills bloom; here the air quivers with

the songs of the birds.11

Although Guarino may have written the same kind of thing about other artists, what he

says is particularly apt for Pisanello, who made the most advanced nature studies of his

time, as his Florentine contemporaries did not. Among these, birds gure signicantly,

and it seems that Guarino might have had a feeling for individual style.

A notable extension of the Plinian scheme appears in a volume of 1456 called De viris

illustribus by Bartolomeo Fazio, which included a section on four famous painters and

three sculptors, preceded by an introduction which reads in part:

No painter is accounted excellent who has not distinguished himself in representing the proper-

ties of his subjects as they exist in reality. . . . There is hardly one of the other crafts that needs

greater discretion, seeing that it requires the representation not only of the face or countenance

and the lineaments of the whole body, but also, and far more, of its interior feelings and emotions.12

Baxandall, who introduced Fazio to art historians, has shown how the addition of a sig-

nicant psychological and affective element to his predecessors more simple-minded

prescriptions for naturalism is the result of reading the prologue to the Imagines of the

Greco-Roman third-century writer Philostratus the Younger, a book of detailed de-

8

scriptions, called ekphrases, of individual works of art that emphasized the interrelation

of motion and emotion.13 But Fazio lacked the ability to exercise critical judgment about

the visual arts; he was a literary man who does not appear to have looked hard enough

at actual works of art to see much besides their subject matter.14

Fazio wrote twenty years after the publication of the most important theoretical work

on the visual arts of the early Renaissance, Leon Battista Albertis De pictura, released in

Florence in 1435 (followed by his Italian translation, 1436). The naturalistic tradition

of the ancients is examined in Book II, in which Alberti examines another of the mime-

sis anecdotes that had been repeated ad nauseam in the Middle Ages and Renaissance,

because it represented a marginally higher level of subtlety than the norm. In this story,

Zeuxis of the grapes, commissioned by the town of Croton to make an image of Helen of

Troy, asked to see the handsomest girls in town; but rather than selecting the most beau-

tiful one as his model, he chose ve and took from each her most attractive feature. Alberti

may have had the story from Ciceros De inventione, but introduces it with these words:

The early painter Demetrius failed to obtain the highest praise because he was more devoted to

representing the likeness of things than to beauty. Therefore excellent parts should all be se-

lected from the most beautiful bodies, and every effort should be made to perceive, understand

and express beauty.15

This helped to distinguish the work of art from a mirror and to implant the concept that

the artist has something more to offer than his manual skill at reproduction. But unless

the perception of beauty is innate, which Alberti expressly excludes by saying that ef-

fort is required to attain it, it remains a mystery how one identies either the most beau-

tiful bodies or their excellent parts.

Alberti himself resolved that mystery in his treatise on architecture, completed around

1450, where he proposes that a man might prefer a thinner or a fuller woman:

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What it is that causes us to prefer one above all the others, I shall not inquire. But when you

make judgments on beauty, you do not follow mere fancy, but the working of a reasoning fac-

ulty that is inborn in the mind [animis innata quaedam ratio].16

This probably is related to the passage in Ciceros Orator:

We can imagine things more beautiful than Phidiass sculptures, which are the most beautiful

we have seen in their genre, and those pictures which I have spoken about; and indeed that

artist, when he produced his Zeus or his Athena, did not look at a human being whom he could

imitate, but in his own mind there lived a sublime notion of beauty; this he beheld, on this he

xed his attention, and according to its likeness he directed his art and hand.17

Albertis later characterization of judgment in the arts was surely inuenced by the

Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras, who came to Italy in about 1395 and taught

many of the humanists Greek.18 In a letter cited by Baxandall, written to an Italian col-

league during Albertis early childhood, he wrote:

We admire not so much the beauties of the bodies in statues and paintings as the beauty of the

mind of their maker. This, like well-molded wax, has reproduced in the stone, wood, bronze or

pigments an image which it grasped through the eyes to the souls imagination.19

These opinions may seem to resemble the key theme of Neoplatonic art theory, which

Marsilio Ficino and friends were developing in the mid-fteenth century, that ideal im-

ages are reected in the mind of the maker. But whereas for Chrysoloras this is by virtue

of a personal gift or genius, and for Alberti it is by virtue of the rational faculty of any

educated man, for a Neoplatonist it has to be the reection of a supernatural idea that

merely travels through the artist on the way to being incompletely reected in the base

material of the physical work of art.

10

Albertis discussion in De pictura is restricted to beautiful gures and doesnt extend to

the whole composition in which they appear, which he calls the historia. But in one pas-

sage, separate from the one quoted above, Alberti indicates that something more is in-

volved than choosing the best of what nature offers:

The principal parts of the work are the surfaces, because from these come the members, from

the members the bodies, from the bodies the historia, and nally the nished work of the

painter. From the composition of surfaces arises that elegant harmony [concinnitas] and grace

in bodies which they call beauty.20

So the artist, in putting together the surfaces of bodies, controls, independently of the

model, whether the result will or will not be beautiful. That is a foot in the door to crit-

icism, but not one that inuenced anyone. In Albertis construction, the historia as a

whole would be judged not in the formal terms implied by the references to female

beauty, and thus be translatable into a concept of individual style, but rather by how ef-

fectively and appropriately it is dramatized through the expressiveness of its action.

That is probably the source of Fazios identication of beauty with the representation of

interior feelings and emotions. On this score, Giotto would have seemed hard to beat

in Albertis time, so the only aspects of Albertis innovations that could lend themselves

to treatment in terms of historical evolution are those in his Book I: light, color, and per-

spective. These were inventions and concepts that could be treated like innovations in

science and technology, which in Renaissance terms could responsibly be seen as pro-

gressing regularly from darkness to light.

It results from Albertis propositions that as a result of the selection process and har-

monic construction of surfaces, a work of art can be more perfect than nature. Jan Bial-o-

stocki has pointed out that this did not bring an end to claims that the work of art must

imitate nature; it merely gave impetus to the distinction between natura naturata, nature

as it appears to us, and natura naturans, nature as an active force that rules the universe

and creates.21

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The path to the recognition of individual style leads to Cristoforo Landino, a Florentine

humanist who wrote the rst major commentary on Dantes Divine Comedy, in 1480.

Landino did not devote much space to art, but in the paragraph introducing his com-

mentary he showed for the rst time a willingness to reach beyond the formulas of Pliny

and Cicero, and he emerged as the earliest writer capable of transferring a rhetoricians

sensitivity to nuances of style to the visual arts.22

Masaccio was a very good imitator of nature, with great and comprehensive relief, good in com-

position, pure without being ornate because he devoted himself only to imitation of the truth

and to the relief of his gures. He was certainly as good and skilled in perspective as anyone

else at that time, and of great facility in working, being very young, as he died at the age of

twenty-six. Fra Filippo Lippi was graceful and ornate and exceedingly skillful; he was very

good at compositions and at variety, wielding the brush, relief, and very much at ornaments of

every kind, whether imitated after the real or invented. Andrea del Castagno was a great ex-

ponent of design and of great relief; he was a lover of the difculties of the art, and of fore-

shortenings, lively and very prompt [alert, vital] and at ease in working.

The list of artists mentioned does not overlap at all with Fazios; Landinos were all in-

debted to antique precedents to a greater degree than Pisanello and Gentile da Fabriano.

This is at least in part due to the fact that Fazio was writing in a court setting and

Landino in mercantile Florence.23

The so-called classic age of Italian art that followed, identied since Vasari as beginning

with the work of Leonardo da Vinci and encompassing Raphael and Michelangelo, fos-

tered almost no theoretical activity. Leonardos extensive writings were still based on me-

dieval Aristotelianism and prescribed an effort to reproduce inductively natura naturans,

nature in the active sense, though some of his precepts sound like those of the ancient

writers, e.g.: Painting is most praiseworthy that has the most similarity to the thing re-

produced, and I say this to refute such painters as want to improve upon the things of

nature.24

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Imitation, especially the imitation of ancient writers, pervades discussions of literature

and of history writing in the early years of the sixteenth century: in particular, which an-

cients to imitate, and whether to choose one model or several. The question is extended

to all the arts in a passage in Castigliones dialogue The Courtier, published in 1528.25

Castigliones major protagonist, Count Lodovico Canossa, raises the question of what

part imitation might have played in the work of great writers like Homer, Petrarch, and

Boccaccio, who initiated an art which, if not entirely new, was far superior to that of their

predecessors. Their master, he says, was ingegno combined with their own giudizio na-

turale. Further, there are many routes to excellence that are dissimilar one from another,

as in the various modes of music (and here he unexpectedly compares the styles of two

singers, one who inames the spirit and the other whose soft harmony arouses a de-

lightful passion). The same is true of visual art; Leonardo, Mantegna, Raphael, Mi-

chelangelo, and Giorgione are all dissimilar in their way of working, but in such a way

that none of them seems to lack anything in that manner [maniera] because one recog-

nizes each to be perfect in his style [stilo].

The extension of stilo (and, in the following paragraph, stile) from the discussion of lit-

erature to that of painting is unprecedented. Speaking later of amateur literary critics,

Castiglione dismisses those who aspire to judge i stili and to speak of numbers and of

imitation but know nothing of them. Unfortunately, stilo and stili do not gain currency

in sixteenth-century art criticism; the burden of supporting references to the character

of the work of an individual, group, region, or period is carried by the vaguer term

maniera, which could mean facture or formal styleor could designate the particular

style later called mannerist.26

Maybe in ages of supreme self-condence, art serves as its own theory. In any case, it

was Giorgio Vasari, writing long after the passing of the period he represented as hav-

ing achieved perfection, who rst drew together the scattered perceptions of the f-

teenth century. Vasari, himself an architect and painter, dened a historical pattern in

the sequence of artists from Giotto to his own time. He divided the Renaissance (he

called it rinascit) into three parts, or lets call them ages [et] . . . on account of the

manifest difference that one recognizes in each of them. In the rst, the three arts were

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very far from their perfection, though they had something good, while in the second

one sees clearly that matters had very much improved, in respect to inventions and to

handling them with more [competent] design, with a better style and with greater tech-

nique, and in this way that rust of old age was removed.27 The artists of the third et

greatly expanded the arts of architecture, painting, and sculpture, adding to the achievements

of the rst [et] rule, order [these two refer to architecture], measure, design, and style, if not

in every respect perfectly, still at least near to reality, which the third, of whom we shall speak

from here on, were able by virtue of that light to raise and to lead themselves to the highest per-

fection.28

And, describing the second age:

But who would say that in that time an artist existed who was perfect in every respect, who had

brought things to todays level of conception, disegno, and coloring and who had managed the

gentle diminution of gures in space with sureness of color and light falling only upon the relief

surfaces? That praise must be reserved for the third age, in which I think I can say securely that

art has done all that it is given to an imitator of nature to do; and that it has risen to such a height

that one would more readily fear its fall into the depths than hope now for improvement.29

Vasari may have picked up the concept of the collapse of art after its peak from

Michelangelo himself, whom he recalls as having expressed a similar concept in reac-

tion to a medal by Alessandro Cesati with portraits of Pope Paul III and Alexander the

Great: and Michelagnolo Buonarroti looking at them himself in the presence of Gior-

gio Vasari, said that the moment of the death of art had arrived, since one could not see

anything better.30

Vasaris three ages of postmedieval art constitute the rst attempt to establish a structure

for representing a history of the arts. His succession of et, each with a denable style

or character and together leading to virtual perfection, constituted a new way to repre-

14

sent a history of art. A number of modern studies of Vasari, among them Erwin Panof-

skys, have suggested that this format is rooted in the work of those ancient and medieval

historians whose accounts of historical development followed the biological life cycle

(infancy-youth-maturity-decline).31 But the cyclical structure was atypical in Greek and

Roman historiography; the majority of ancient historians dealt with recent, even con-

temporary, events and emphasized more or less accidental changenot progress

brought about by disruptive occurrences such as revolutions and wars.32

Moreover, while the cyclical tradition was revived by some early humanist historians

such as Leonardo Bruni, it no longer informed the new history of Machiavelli and Guic-

ciardini in the generation preceding Vasaris.33 In any event, Vasari did not actually pro-

pose a cycle. Though his development reached an apex with the art of Leonardo,

Raphael, and Michelangelo, it did not decline from that point, because that would have

relegated him and his contemporaries to an inferior position. He believed that his gen-

eration, like those that followed Giotto in the rst age and Masaccio in the second,

would just continue along at a high level which, if not as exalted as Michelangelos,

nonetheless still qualied as belonging to the third age. His format for the individual

lives also is not cyclical; he pays little attention to artists growth in effectiveness in the

course of their careers (the account of Raphael having made forward steps by studying

Leonardo and later Michelangelo is an exception) and only rarely says that an artist (e.g.,

Perugino) declined at the end of his career.

Indeed, Vasaris view of the historical process and of the et dened by achievements

in a similar style does not appear to depend on earlier or contemporary historians but,

like his criticism, on ancient rhetoricians, particularly Cicero. In Ciceros De oratore,

Greek oratory is seen as a sequence of masters who formed schools based on their spe-

cial style (genus or stilus dicendi). Referring to the period between Pericles and Isocrates,

he wrote: Their uniformity of style could never have come about had they not kept

before them some single model for imitation: . . . they all still retained the peculiar

vigor of Pericles, but their texture was a little more luxuriant.34 Cicero refers to each

successive style as an aetas, which Vasari appropriated as et.35 Vasari must have seen

the followers of Pericles as being in a position comparable to his own and that of his

contemporaries.

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Ciceros writings were not consistent: his ideas about imitation changed radically from

his early to his later work. He did sketch out a biological history of oratory in Tusculanus

2.6 (atque oratorum quidem laus ita ducta ab humilii venit ad summum, ut iam quod

natura fert in omnibus fererebus, senescat, brevique tempore ad nihilum ventura videa-

tur), but that work does not seem to have been read by Vasari and his contemporaries.

Vasaris construction of the history of art, then, was not so much a signicant innova-

tion as an inspired adaptation, by virtue of its capacity to turn a growing critical so-

phistication into an articulated historical evolution. It was derived more demonstrably

from classical sources than most of the allantica art of his time. To the extent that style

became an index of historical development, Vasaris system survived into modern art

history, and the concept of style evolutionat least until some twenty years agore-

mained central to art criticism. The connection was not inevitable; literary history and

criticism, in spite of their common roots in rhetoric and their proprietorship of the term

style, followed a quite different path.

Although the evolution of styles is dened in terms of the familiar imitation of nature,

this is understood in the sense anticipated by Alberti, as is clear from Vasaris denition

of the three rules of gural art: disegno, which I shall dene in a moment, misura, which

concerns primarily proportion with its connection to ideal harmonies, and maniera,

which has to do with tirelessly developing ones skill at drawing beautiful parts and

combining them into beautiful gures (notice that the composition of the whole is not

emphasized). Disegno, apart from being drawing, is what Vasari calls

father of our three arts [which] draws a universal judgment from many sources, as if a form or

idea of all things in nature. . . . And from this cognition is born a certain conception and judg-

ment which, when formed in the mind, may then be expressed by the hands and is called di-

segno. One may conclude that this disegno is no other than a visible expression and declaration

of the concept one has in the mind and which others have formed in their mind and built in the

idea.36

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As Svetlana Alpers showed in her incisive study of Vasaris descriptions and critical stan-

dards, disegno is what drives his historical system.37 Though Vasari often implies that

artistic progress is equivalent to the increasing capacity to reproduce nature, it is clear

that it is disegno that progressesthe capacity to form beautiful elements for the work

of art in the mind, and then to execute them. This resembles Platonic idealism to the

same degree as Albertis precept, but it similarly avoids attributing the idea to any power

other than the artists gift: Raphael, studying the achievements of ancient masters and

of the moderns, took the best from each and made a collection of them, whence nature

was surpassed by his colors and invention came to him easily and was his alone.38 This,

incidentally, is a far cry from mimesis. At the same time, progress is measured by the

overcoming of what Vasari calls difcolt, as it would do in the history of technology.

The best artists actually seek out difculties in order both to impress viewers with hav-

ing conquered them and to contribute to the progress of art. As Alpers pointed out, ev-

ery artist has the obligation to do this.

Nonetheless, although Vasari is sensitive to individual styleas suggested in the state-

ment that Raphaels invention was his aloneand to the development of style within

the career of an individual, Vasarian history is not simply, as modernist history has been,

an evolution of style. There is a strange disjunction between Vasaris general characteri-

zations of artists and periods and his approach to individual works. The latter he bases

most frequently on the formulas of antique ekphrasis, which focus exclusively on nar-

rative expression (which incidentally does not gure in his ve basic rules). These en-

comiastic accounts do not suggest progress in time; indeed, they stand in conict with

the concept of the evolution of the art to a perfection in the age of Michelangelo and

Raphael.

Ekphrastic descriptions emphasize the action and emotion of the protagonists rather

than the accuracy of representation, as in this description of Raphaels Transguration:

With the disciples below one sees a possessed boy who has been brought there to be freed by

Christ; while he stretches himself out with a contorted pose, eyes popping, he shows his inner

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torment in his esh, in his veins and in the pulses poisoned by the spirits malignity; with pal-

lid mien he makes that extreme and terrifying gesture. This gure is supported by an old man

who . . . shows by raising his eyebrows and furrowing his brow at once power and fear, all the

time watching the apostles, and it seems that his faith in them uplifts his spirit. And there is a

woman, among many, the principal gure in the panel, who, kneeling before the others and

turning her head toward them and moving her arms toward the possessed, indicates his mis-

ery. . . . And in truth, his gures and heads in this work, besides their extraordinary beauty,

novelty, and variety, have been judged in the general opinion of artists [arteci] to be, among the

many that Raphael has made, the most celebrated, the most beautiful, and the most divine.39

This is not unlike an account of a good theater performance; if you were to read this pas-

sage without knowing the author of the painting, you could not identify him other than

as an artist that Vasari thinks is particularly good. But, according to this account, he

could as plausibly have worked in the rst or second period of the Renaissance as in the

third.

Vasari gives no comfort to the modern representation of the history of what we call High

Renaissance art as classical. He is not interested in the structure of paintings. His ac-

count of some of the features of the third style as offering a wealth of beautiful gar-

ments, the variety of many fanciful [inventions], the charm of the colors40 might as well

be a description of Pisanellos workno emphasis on the classical requisites of

grandeur, equilibrium, or gravity.

The concept of a classical art of the High Renaissance was not formed by those who

made it. It could be seen as an invention of more recent art history calculated to get be-

yond the imitation of nature and to get out of the corner into which Vasari had painted

himself by having his history terminate, or rather apotheose like the resurrected Savior,

with Michelangelo.41 Following writers of the previous generation, starting with Ari-

osto, Vasari referred to Michelangelo as divino, even divinissimo.42 In passages cited

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above, he and Michelangelo entertained the possibility that after the age of perfection

the whole enterprise could collapse or, we might say, stagnate (as it threatened to do

with Vasaris mannerist contemporaries), and he must have seen that his conception of

history had encountered an insurmountable difculty. But since he couldnt condemn

his colleagues to inferiority, as it would diminish them and equally his Medici patrons,

he left this considerable problem unresolved. Later historians, however, could not es-

cape their responsibility to incorporate baroque and ultimately modern art into some

framework, and the invention of classicism proved useful in this task.

I have tried to show that the rst history and criticism of art could not have been con-

ceived without certain steps in critical sophistication, the effect of which was to formu-

late a more complex denition of what it meant to imitate nature. There were four

preparatory steps: that of Fazio, who added interior feelings and emotions to the exter-

nal appearances that had to be emulated; that of Chrysoloras and Alberti, who sug-

gested that the most important ingredient of a work of art was a beautiful idea or

harmony originating in the mind of the artist; third, the postulation of natura naturans,

which validated the inventiveness of artists on the grounds that it imitated nature in

making things that did not previously exist; and last, that of Landino, who found terms

for differences in style among artists of the same period. It remained for Vasari to apply

Ciceros proposition that styles evolve through ages each of which has its own general

character. Further, in accepting and emphasizing the potential divinity of an artist Vasari

also left a formidable legacy: the concept of creativity, a power previously conceded only

to God, and one that could be used to glorify artists and to justify a history of art de-

vised, like his own, in terms of the succession of works of great artists.

We are indebted to Vasari not for the specics of the historical system, but for conceiv-

ing that art could have a history of a different kind from that of the ancient and medieval

chroniclers and of technology and descriptive science, and also for suggesting that the

three stages in this history manifested period styles. What Vasari may have known but

did not say was that the difculties resolved by artist after artist on their way to the

perfection of his Raphael and Michelangelo were not immanent but had to be refor-

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mulated every time one of them was solved, so that history could not come to a halt;

Jackson Pollock could be as much the heir to Raphael as Morandi. The greatest chal-

lenge to the Vasarian tradition occurred when antique art no longer was accepted as a

paradigm; but essentials of Vasarian art history survived anyhow, at least through the

middle years of the twentieth century.

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NOTES

1 For the stages in the development of a con-cept of individual style in the early Renais-sance, see Michael Baxandall, Giotto and theOrators (Oxford, 1971); Nicola Ivanoff, Ilconcetto dello stile nella letteratura artisticadel 500, Quaderni dellIstituto di Storia del-lArte dellUniversit degli Studi di Trieste 4(1955), 515; Martin Warnke, Praxisfelderder Kunsttheorie, Idea: Jahrbuch der Ham-burger Kunsthalle 1 (1982), 5471; MartinKemp, Equal Excellences: Lomazzo and theExplanation of Individual Style in the VisualArts, Renaissance Studies 1 (1987), 126.Philip Sohm, in discussing the innovations ofVasari as a historian and critic, proposes thatVasari saw himself as the rst to integrate anunderstanding of style (based on his experi-ence as an artist) with historical narrative; thethesis is based on an interpretation of a pas-sage in the Vite (ed. G. Milanesi, 9 vols.[Florence, 1906], 7:681682) in which hedescribes a (ctional?) meeting in which theproject for the book is proposed to him by Car-dinal Farnese, Paolo Giovio, and other human-ists: Sohm, Ordering History with Style:Giorgio Vasari on the Art of History, in AlinaPayne, Ann Kuttner, and Rebekah Smick, eds.,Antiquity and Its Interpreters (Cambridge,U.K., 1999), 4054. In the same volume, seeCarl Goldstein, Writing History, Viewing Art:The Question of the Humanists Eye,285296. I became aware of the followingbooks relevant to my subject too late to takeaccount of their contribution: Robert Williams,Art, Theory and Culture in Sixteenth-CenturyItaly: From Techne to Metatechne (New York,1997); Hellmut Wohl, The Aesthetics of ItalianRenaissance Art: A Reconsideration of Style(New York, 1999).

2 Baxandall, Giotto, 70ff. (translation); 146ff.(Latin text).

3 Cicero, Brutus 18.70; quoted in E. H. Gom-brich, Vasaris Lives and Ciceros Brutus,Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Insti-tutes 23 (1960), 309ff. Cicero effectivelyequates truth to nature (ad veritatem) with

beauty (his adjective is pulchra); Pliny does notrefer to a uniform standard of beauty: NaturalHistory 34.38. See Leonard Barkans penetrat-ing analysis of the critical implications of theZeuxis story: The Heritage of Zeuxis: Painting,Rhetoric and History, in Payne, Kuttner, andSmick, eds., Antiquity and Its Interpreters,99109, and further analysis of Plinys achieve-ment as a historian and critic in Unearthing thePast: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Mak-ing of Renaissance Culture (New Haven,1999), 65117.

4 Pliny, Natural History 34.17.38.5 Ibid. 35.31.65.6 The standard edition is Lorenzo Ghibertis

Denkwrdigkeiten (I commentarii), 2 vols., ed.J. von Schlosser (Berlin, 1912). See RichardKrautheimer and Trude Krautheimer-Hess,Lorenzo Ghiberti (Princeton, 1956), esp. ch.20, Ghiberti the Writer; J. von Schlosser,Lorenzo Ghibertis Denkwrdigkeiten: Pro-legomena zu einer knftigen Ausgabe,Kunstgeschichtliches Jahrbuch der K. K.Zentralkommission 4 (1910), 105ff.; LeonardoOlschki, Geschichte der neusprachlichen Lite-ratur, I: Die Literatur der Technik und der ange-wandten Wissenschaften vom Mittelalter biszur Renaissance (Heidelberg, 1919), 88ff.

7 The bid was not entirely successful; for ex-ample, the third book of the Commentarieshas been shown to be a collage of unac-knowledged quotations from ancient andmedieval authors on the subject (G. tenDoesschate, De deerde commentaar vanLorenzo Ghiberti in Verband met deMiedeeuwche Optiek (diss., Utrecht, 1940);an exhaustive study of the sources has beenpublished by Klaus Bergdolt, Der dritte Kom-mentar Lorenzo Ghibertis (Weinheim, 1988).

8 This was observed by Janice Hurd, The Char-acter of Ghibertis Treatise on Sculpture, inLorenzo Ghiberti nel suo tempo: Atti del Con-vegno internazionale di studi, 2 vols. (Flor-ence, 1980), 302. Peter Murray, however, inthe same publication (Ghiberti e il suo se-condo Commentario, 284f.), refers to quel

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senso di sviluppo storico che comincia ademergere, without offering evidence.

9 In representing the decision of a jury on hiscompetition panel for the rst Baptistery doors(A tutti parue auessi passato glaltri in quellotempo sana veruna exceptione; Commen-tarii, 19), I believe he is saying that his designsurpassed those of the others (e.g., wasqualitatively superior), not that it had gonebeyond them as in Creighton Gilberts ad-mirable translation (Italian Art, 14001500:Sources and Documents, 2d ed. [Evanston,1991], 84).

10 The scientic and theoretical sources cited inGhibertis third book are ancient and me-dieval; he does not refer to Albertis inven-tion of articial perspective (described in Depictura, 1436), though he must have used it inthe construction of panels in the second Bap-tistery doors.

11 Quoted in Baxandall, Giotto, 93 (translation);156 (Latin).

12 Ibid., 103ff.; 163ff.13 Ekphrasis is a genre that comes to the fore in

imperial late antique rhetoric; it is dened byHermogenes of Tarsus in the Photogymnastica(see Baxandall, Giotto, 85). For other refer-ences, see Reallexikon fr Antike und Chris-tentum (Stuttgart, 1959), 4:922ff.; its use todescribe works of art is exemplied in theImagines ascribed to Philostratus. See Re-bekah Smick, Vivid Thinking: Word andImage in Descriptive Techniques of theRenaissance, in Payne, Kuttner, and Smick,eds., Antiquity and Its Interpreters, 159173.

14 An instance of a subtler evaluation is LeonellodEstes discrimination of contrasts betweenportraits of him by Pisanello and Bellini, pub-lished by Baxandall, A Dialogue on Art fromthe Court of Leonello dEste, Journal of theWarburg and Courtauld Institutes 26 (1973),325ff.

15 Alberti, De pictura, 3.56; translation from LeonBattista Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture,ed. Cecil Grayson (London, 1972), 98f. For Ci-ceros version, see De inventione 2.1.34. Aninsightful study of the critical implications ofthe maids of Croton story has been publishedrecently by Leonard Barkan: The Heritage ofZeuxis: Painting, Rhetoric and History, inPayne, Kuttner, and Smick, eds., Antiquity andIts Interpreters, pp. 99109.

16 Alberti, De re aedicatoria, ed. Giovanni Or-landi (Milan, 1966), 9.5.813; English transla-tion from On the Art of Building in Ten Books,trans. Joseph Rykwert et al. (Cambridge,Mass., 1988), 302.

17 Cicero, Orator 2.89.18 Christine Smith, Architecture in the Culture of

Early Humanism (Cambridge, Mass., 1992),has recently detailed how extensive wasthe inuence of Chrysoloras on humanistthought, especially through his having intro-duced the later Greek rhetorical tradition intoItaly.

19 Baxandall, Giotto, 82; 151f.20 Alberti, De pictura, 2.35; translation by

Grayson from Alberti, On Painting and OnSculpture, 73.

21 Jan Bial-ostocki, The Renaissance Conceptionof Nature and Antiquity, in Acts of the Twen-tieth International Congress of Art History(Princeton, 1963), 1930. He cites (p. 20) Plo-tinus, Enneads 5.8.1: If somebody does notesteem the arts because they imitate nature, itshould be said rst that nature herself imi-tates. Then it should be borne in mind that thearts do not simply copy the visible things butdraw from the principles that constitute thesource of nature.

22 Fu Masaccio optimo imitatore di natura, digran rilevo universale, buono componitore etpuro sanza ornato, perche solo si decte allimi-tatione del vero, et al rilevo delle gure: fucerto buono et prospectivo quanto altro diquegli tempi, et di gran facilita nel fare, es-sendo ben giovane, che mori danni ventisei.Fu fra Philippo gratioso et ornato et articiososopra modo: valse molto nelle compositioni etvarieta, nel colorire, nel rilevo, negliornamentidogni sorte, maxime o imitati dal vero o cti.Andreino fu grande disegnatore et di granrilevo, amatore delle difculta dellarte et discorci, vivo et prompto molto, et assai facilenel fare. The passage is extensively discussedby Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experiencein Fifteenth Century Italy (Oxford, 1972),118ff. See also O. Morisani, Art Historiansand Art Critics, Cristoforo Landino, part III,Burlington Magazine 95 (1953), 267270.

23 Landinos critical approach, and some of hisvocabulary, were adopted by the author of themuch more extensive text Il libro di Antonio

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Billi, most recently edited by F. Benedettucci(Anzio, 1991), who dates the ms. 15061530.The denition of individual style was not ex-clusively the achievement of intellectuals.Martin Warnke (Praxisfelder der Kunsttheo-rie) discusses a number of instances from le-gal documents, contracts, and letters of thefteenth and sixteenth century in whichawareness by fellow practitioners of theunique style of an artist is discussed as a mat-ter of course, as equivalent to handwriting,with no reference to antique precedent orphilosophical positions. A key instance is theinquiry of 1457 mandated to determine whichportions of the Ovetari chapel in Padua hadbeen executed by Mantegna, as opposed tohis deceased partner Pizzolo. The clerk recordsthe testimony of an expert witness, a little-known artist called Pietro da Milano: Et prout ipse testis percepit ex dictis picturis, dictehystorie et picture sunt manu dicti magistriAndree. Et dixit se scire eo qua ipse testis benecognoscit picturas manu dicti magistri Andree,non tamen vidit ipse testis illas depingere, sedtamen ex longa pratica, quam habet in ea artepingendi cognoscit, quod dicte picture suntmanu dicti magistri Andree, et quia inter pic-tores semper cognoscitur manu cuius sit ali-qua pictura, maxime quando est manu alicuiussollemnis magistri. (The text is transcribed inCreighton Gilbert, Larte del Quattrocentonelle testimonianze coeve [Florence, 1988],58.) Warnke ingeniously suggests that the hu-manist theorists did not want to make muchof the distinctiveness of artists hand be-cause they associated it with merely physicalworkshop activity, as against the more ele-vated achievement of conceiving a historia.

Another document relating to Mantegna is inone of the letters of Lorenzo da Pavia, theagent of Isabella dEste (July 16, 1504, fromVenice), referring to the commissioning of apainting by Giovanni Bellini: de invencionenesuno non p arivare a messer Andrea Man-tegna, che invero l ecelentisimo et el primo,ma Giovane Belino in colorir ecelente, e tutiche abiano visto questo quadreto, ogneuno lcomendato per una mirabile opera, et bennite quelecose da vedere per sotile. (Pub-lished by Clifford M. Brown and Anna MariaLorenzoni, Isabella dEste and Lorenzo daPavia: Documents for the History of Art and

Culture in Renaissance Mantua [Geneva,1982], 84, doc. 92.)

For an incisive investigation of Quattrocentocritical terminology, see Martin Kemp, FromMimesis to Fantasia: The Quattrocento Vo-cabulary of Creation, Inspiration, and Geniusin the Visual Arts, Viator 8 (1977), 347398.Had I sufcient space, this account would in-clude the verses of Giovanni Santi (Gilbert,Larte del Quattrocento, 118ff.); Gilbert alsocites (pp. 161f.) a letter assessing Florentineartists by the agent of the duke of Milan thatshows an awareness of individual style com-parable to that of Landino.

24 Leonardo da Vinci, Trattato (Vatican, Cod. Urb.Lat. 1270), fol. 133r; ed. Heinrich Ludwig (Vi-enna, 1882), 411; ed. A. Philip McMahon(Princeton, 1956), 433: Quella pittura pilaudabile laquale ha pi conformita cola cosaimitata, questo propongo confusione diquelli pittori li quali vogliano raconciare le cosedi natura.

The brief biographies of Leonardo, Raphael,Michelangelo, and other artists by PaoloGiovio (ca. 15231527; in Paola Barocchi,Scritti darte del 500, 3 vols. [Milan andNaples, 1973], 1:3ff.) do not represent a sig-nicant advance in critical capacity overLandinos.

A short passage in a letter purportedly fromRaphael to Castiglione would, because of itspresumed author, carry great weight in this ac-count if we could be sure of its authenticity:In order to paint a beautiful woman I shouldhave to see many beautiful women, and thisunder the condition that you were to help mewith making a choice; but since there are sofew beautiful women and so few soundjudges, I make use of a certain idea that comesinto my head. Whether it has any artistic valueI am unable to say. I try very hard just to haveit. The authenticity has been questioned by anumber of scholars, among them WilhelmWanscher, Rafaello Santi da Urbino: His Lifeand Works (London, 1926), 148; DavidBrown and Konrad Oberhuber, Leonardoand Raphael in Rome, in S. Bertelli and G. Ra-makus, eds., Essays Presented to Myron P.Gilmore, 2 vols. (Florence, 1978), 2:84n. Themost recent and thorough study of the doc-ument is John Shearmans CastiglionesPortrait of Raphael, Mitteilungen des kunst-

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historischen Institutes in Florenz 38 (1994),6997.

25 Baldassare Castiglione, Il cortegiano, 1.37, 38.See David Summers, The Judgment of Taste(Cambridge, 1987), 317320.

26 See Willibald Sauerlnder, From Stilus toStyle: Reections on the Fate of a Notion, ArtHistory 6 (1988), 257259.

27 These quotations are from the proemio to thesecond part of Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de pieccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori(1568), ed. G. Milanesi, 9 vols. (Florence,1906), 2:9596: parti, o vogliamole chia-mare et per quella manifestissima differenzache in ciascuna di loro si conosce. The rstet: molto lontane dalla loro perfezione; ecome che elle abbiano avuto qualcosa dibuono. The second: si veggono manifestoesser le cose migliorate assai e nellinvenzioni,e nel condurle con pi disegno e con migliormaniera e con maggior diligenza; e cos toltovia quella ruggine della vecchiaia. I think vec-chiaia does not imply the old age of the rststyle but its retention of medievalespeciallyByzantinetraits. The development of a his-torical consciousness among writers on art hasbeen discussed by E. H. Gombrich, The Re-naissance Conception of Artistic Progress andIts Consequences, in his Norm and Form:Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London,1966), 110.

28 Vasari, Vite (1906 ed.), 4:7: proemio to Part III.29 Again from ibid., 2:95f.: proemio to Part II.30 Ibid., 5:385 (life of Valerio Vicentino). Eugenio

Battisti identied this passage as indicating thesource of Vasaris statement on the future col-lapse of art (Battisti, La critica a Michelangelodopo il Vasari, Rinascimento 1 [1956], 141).

31 E.g., Erwin Panofsky, The First Page of Gior-gio Vasaris Libro, in his Meaning in the Vi-sual Arts (New York, 1955; Chicago, 1982),216218, citing the Roman historian AnniusFlorus, Epitome rerum Romanorum, preface;published in Italian in 1546: If one were toconsider the Roman people as something likea human being and to survey their entire life-time, how they began, how they grew up,how they attained, as it were, to the ower ofmaturity, and how they subsequently, in amanner of speaking, grew old, one may dis-cover therein four stages or phases. The rst

age was under the kings, lasting about twohundred and fty years, when they foughtwith their neighbors about their own mother;this would be their childhood. The next ageextends for another two hundred and ftyyears . . . during which they conquered Italy;this was the period most intensely lived withmen and arms, wherefore it may be calledtheir adolescence. Then follow the two hun-dred years up to Augustus during which theysubjected the whole world; this is the youth ofthe Empire and, as it were, its vigorous matu-rity. From Augustus up to our own day a littleless than two hundred years have passed.During this time the Romans aged and boiledaway, because of the Emperors lack of energyunless they put forth their strength under theleadership of Trajan, so that the old age of theEmpire, against all hopes, revives as though ithad regained its youth. Florus, however, wasan obscure historian, and not much discussedin Vasaris time.

32 See Arnaldo Momigliano, Tradition and theClassical Historian, in his Essays in Ancientand Modern Historiography (Middletown,Conn., 1977), 161178. I am grateful toDaniel Sherer for the reference.

33 See Robert Black, The New Laws of History,Renaissance Studies 1 (1987), 126154. Inter-est in historical theory, spurred by PontanosActius of 1499, focused on the issues of theaims of history writing and of evidence ratherthan on explaining historical development. Asin rhetorical and literary studies, the questionof choosing one or many models was exten-sively discussed.

Zygmunt Wazbinski, Lide de lhistoire dansla premire et la seconde dition des Vies deVasari, in Vasari storiografo e artista (Flor-ence, 1976), 126, has shown that thehistorical realism of Machiavelli andGuicciardini, particularly in incorporatingarchival research, documentation, and inter-views of individuals who recalled past events,inuenced Vasaris rewriting of the Vite be-tween 1550 and 1568. The essay demon-strates the role of Vincenzo Borghini ininuencing Vasaris method of documentingthe past; it is based on Wazbinskis book Vasarii jego dzieje Sztuk rysunku uwagi nadgeneza nowozytnej biograki artystycznej

25

On

the

Orig

ins

of A

rt H

isto

ry a

nd C

ritic

ism

(Vasari et son histoire des arts de dessin lasource de la biographie artistique moderne)(Torun, 1972, with French summary), anda work I have not found, also in Polish butcited by the author as: Vasari et lhistoriogra-phie artistique moderne (Warsaw, 1975).

34 Cicero, De oratore 2.22: Non potuisset ac-cidere ut unum genus esset omnium, nisialiquem sibi proponerent ad imitandum. Con-secuti sunt hos Critias, Theramenes, Lysias.Multa Lysiae scripta sunt, nonnulla Critiae, deTeramene audimus; omnes etiam tum retine-bant illum Periclis sucum; sed erant paulouberiore lo.

35 Ibid., 2.90f.: dicendi ratio voluntasquecuiusque aetatis. In 91 he asks what [be-sides imitation] has determined the specialstyles of oratory which characterize each suc-cessive generation? (Quid enim causaecensetis esse, cur aetates extulerint singulaesingula prope genera dicendi?)

36 Vasari, Vite, 1:168f.: padre delle tre arti nos-tre . . . cava di molte cose un giudizio univer-sale; simile a una forma ovvero idea di tutte lecose della natura, la quale singolarissimanelle sue misure. . . . E perch da questa co-gnizione nasce un certo concetto e giudizio,che si forma nella mente quella tal cosa chepoi espressa con le mani si chiama disegno; sipu conchiudere che esso disegno altro nonsia, che una apparente expressione e dichia-razione del concetto che si ha nellanimo, edi quello che altri si nella mente immaginatoe fabbricato nellidea.

37 See Svetlana Alpers, Ekphrasis and Aes-thetic Attitudes in Vasaris Lives, Journal ofthe Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23(1960), 190215.

38 Vasari, Vite, 4:1112; proemio to Part III: stu-diando le fatiche de maestri vecchi e quellede moderni, prese da tutti il meglio; e fattoneraccolta . . . laonde la natura rest vinta daisuoi colori; e linvenzione era in lui . . . facile epropria.

39 Vasari, Vite, 4:371f.: dove si vede condottoun giovanetto spiritato, acciocch Cristo scesodel monte lo liberi; il quale giovanetto, mentreche con attitudine scontorta si prostende gri-dando e stralunando gli occhi, mostra il suopatire dentro nella carne, nelle vene, e nepolsi contaminati dalla malignit dello spirto, e

con pallida incarnazione fa quel gesto forzatoe pauroso. Questa gura sostiene un vecchio,che . . . mostra, con lo alzare le ciglia ed in-crespar la fronte, in un tempo medesimo eforza e paura; pure mirando gli Apostoli so,pare che, sperando in loro, faccia animo a sestesso. Evvi una femina, fra molte, la quale principale gura di quella tavola, che inginoc-chiata dinanzi a quelli voltando la testa loro ecollatto delle braccia verso lo spiritato, mostrala miseria di colui. . . . E nel vero, egli vi fecegure e teste, oltra la bellezza straordinaria,tanto nuove, varie e belle, che si fa giudizio co-mune degli arteci che questa opera, fra tantequantegli ne fece, sia la pi celebrata, la pibella e la pi divina.

40 Ibid., 4:12 (proemio to Part III).41 Ibid., 4:9. On this issue, see Hans Belting, Das

Ende der Kunstgeschichte?, 2d ed. (Munich,1984), part II; English ed., The End of the His-tory of Art? (Chicago, 1987).

42 Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso (1516),canto XXXIII, 2.4: Michel, pi che divino, an-gelo. Other attributions of divinity to Michel-angelo are discussed by Paola Barocchi in heredition of Vasaris life of the artist (Milan andNaples, 1962), 2:2122. The divinity of theartist already was claimed in Marsuppinis epi-taph for Brunelleschi (1446), and the conceptof creativity was extensively discussed byLeonardo da Vinci, whose writings, however,were not published during the Renaissance;see Kemp, From Mimesis to Fantasia,376ff.

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TW

O

The Origins of Architectural Drawing

in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

Part I: Villard de Honnecourt at Reims Cathedral

Among the Reims drawings of Villard are several that reect a milestone in the forma-

tion of the conventions for the representation of architectural works and projects.

The best way to understand the nature of a convention is to discover for what reason

and under what circumstance it originated, and how it was modied in the course of

time. We can nd the roots of modern architectural representation in a large body of

drawings surviving from the sixteenth century onward. The evidence is sparser from

earlier times. Virtually nothing survives from antiquity and the early Middle Ages

some Egyptian papyruses, the marble plan of Rome, a newly discovered full-scale ele-

vation of the pediment of the Pantheon, and the parchment plan of the abbey of St. Gall

being notable exceptions.

My interest was rst sparked by Wolfgang Lotzs study of the representational conven-

tions of fteenth- and sixteenth-century architectural interiors.1 Lotz showed that the

major achievement of Renaissance architects had been to establish for architecture the

convention of orthogonal drawing. The change was rst called for in Leon Battista Al-

bertis prescriptions for drawing:

Between the drawing of a painter and that of an architect there is the difference that the former

seeks to give the appearance of relief through shadow and foreshortened lines and angles. The

architect rejects shading and gets projection from the ground plan. The disposition and image

of the facade and side elevations he shows on different [sheets] with xed lines and true angles

as one who does not intend to have his plans seen as they appear [to the eye] but in specic and

consistent measurements.2

Alberti was attacking the convention prevailing among Italian architects of representing

at least projecting and receding features of a building in perspective.3 He rst argued that

28

perspectival representation was the affair of painters, that architects had to do their draw-

ings orthogonally so that measurements could be taken from them. Lotz identied draw-

ings by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger in the second decade of the sixteenth century

as the rst to meet Albertis demands.4 Later nished drawings by Antonio, Baldassarre

Peruzzi, and Andrea Palladio, whether for their own projects or to illustrate existing

buildings, were primarily orthogonal. In Palladios drawing reproduced in g. 2.1, a ver-

tical line separates an elevation of the facade from an elevation of the court and section

of the side wing, revealing the relationship of the parts of the building to one another.

29

The

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2.1 Andrea Palladio, elevation study for the facade and section through the court of Palazzo I. Porto, Vicenza, ca.

1550. London, Royal Institute of British Architects, Palladio XVII/3.

30

Given the academic tendency to divide knowledge into elds and periods, it is un-

derstandable that few observers have noticed that the same problems and to some

extent the same solutions had already been faced by Gothic draftsmen. It was

an orthogonal representation of the exterior and interior elevationlikewise divided

by a vertical lineof a bay of the Reims Cathedral choir in the album of Villard de

Honnecourt, of about 12201235 (g. 2.2), that drew me to look in Villards album for

evidence of the early formation of the conventions of drawing.5

2.2 Villard de Honnecourt, Reims Cathedral, exterior and interior elevation, ca. 1230. Paris,

Bibliothque Nationale, 19093, p. 62.

The

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We know little about Gothic architectural drawing. All but a few examples are lost;

probably drawings were rarely made.6 In the absence of a concept of scale drawing, the

utility of drawings as a means of communication between the designer and builder

would have been minimal. Consequently, according to textual evidence, full-scale draw-

ings (1:1) of plans for large edices such as cathedrals were often drawn directly on the

ground. Also, a few full-scale engravings of elevation details such as rose windows or

spires were incised in the masonry of the building in which they have been found. We

have to assume that architects and master masons were able to design in their heads and

that they explained their ideas verbally and through models and templates.

Prior to the invention of paper in the fourteenth century, architects did not normally de-

velop ideas in sketches or put design solutions in graphic form. They could use parch-

ment, but the difculty of preparing it made it too expensive for everyday purposes and

caused drawings, once they were no longer needed, to be scraped away so that the

sheets could be reused.7 An example is the set of original drawings for the cathedral of

Reims preserved in a volume of parchment leaves on which the drawings were made in

layers, each successive one partly obliterating its predecessor.8

This situation explains the great interest aroused by an album of drawings executed on

parchment in the early thirteenth century by the Picard draftsman Villard de Hon-

necourt. The 63 pages of this album, from which at least 8 sheets have been lost, are de-

voted to architectural and mechanical construction, measuring and surveying, and

architectural sculpture. The choice of subjects and the inscriptions accompanying the

drawings show that the volume was conceived as an instructional manual useful rather

to lay readers interested in technology than to artisans and designers. Though some

commentators on the album have represented Villard as an architect or master mason,

he probably was a more modest technician, yet well enough trained to have worked out

a theoretical project for a church choir with a double ambulatory with the architect of

Cambrai Cathedral, Pierre de Corbie, inter se disputandum.9 The character of the al-

bum is closer to that of fteenth-century and later compilations of machinery and mil-

itary equipment than to architectural treatises.

31

32

Among the architectural drawings, the choir devised with Pierre de Corbie (g. 12.3)

is the only one that does not represent an existing contemporary building from the area

around Villards birthplace. Although, according to his text, he was called to Hungary

for an unspecied task and, whatever routes he may have taken going and returning,

would have been exposed to a number of different late Romanesque and Gothic mon-

uments, he recorded only a Hungarian pavement design and the rose window of the

cathedral of Lausanne (which could have been copied from a drawing). Nor did he re-

veal knowledge of the important early and mature Gothic achievements at St. Denis,

Paris, and Amiens, which he could easily have visited.

The most exceptional sheet among Villards Reims drawings is the one in which exterior

and interior elevations of one bay (with a portion of the anking bay on either side) of the

choir are joined side by side, separated at the center of the sheet by a thick vertical line.

2.3 Villard de Honnecourt,

Reims Cathedral, clerestory

window. Paris, Bibliothque

Nationale, 19093, p. 20.

The

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These are the only orthogonal elevations in Villards book, apart from details such as single

windows, and no precedent survives from earlier times. There is no reason to believe that

Villard invented this extraordinarily sophisticated and advanced mode of presentation; he

must have copied the sheet from the drawing of one of the designers of the cathedral.10

This interpretation is also supported by the fact that the drawing could not have been done

from the building itself, which, at the time Villard visited, had risen only to the triforium

level. Moreover, the denitive design differed in numerous details from this drawing (what

are drawn as crenellations are actually creneaux, small brackets to support narrow walk-

ways while breaking the fall of water; the three blind arches on the lowest level of the side

aisle wall were not built; the existing clerestory oculus is substantially larger than that of

the side aisle windows). The drawing is distorted by lack of space on the page, which one

supposes was not the case in the one from which it was copied.

The elevations are not completely orthogonal. A kind of perspective affects the repre-

sentation of one feature of the exterior: the setbacks of the ground-oor buttresses have

an illusionistic thrust to the left; in an orthogonal drawing, the right sides would mir-

ror the left, which would make it impossible to showin the absence of a sectionthat

the lower part projected forward. Exterior galleries are indicated by heavy dark lines at

clerestory level (the position is better seen in the section: g. 2.5), though they would

not show in an orthogonal elevation. The ying buttresses are indicated only by a curi-

ous pair of back-to-back L-shaped elements that presumably support the lower yer;

the spired tower that receives the outer yers (cf. g. 2.5) is not represented. At

clerestory level, capital-like brackets indicate the upper supports of both the lower and

the upper yers. At the base of the clerestory windows, where the sill slants outward on

the exterior toward the top of the side aisle roof, the socles of the colonnettes have no

horizontal line to indicate their base. In the interior elevation, the springing of the vaults

is only vaguely suggested; wavy lines at the vault level also either represent the rough

inner face of the exterior wall, or simply symbolize the unknown.

A more summary sketch of one side aisle window elsewhere in the album (p. 32; g.

2.3)11 is described in the legend alongside: Voici une des fentres de Reims, des traves

de la nef, comme elles sont entre deux piliers. Jtais appel en Hongrie, quand je la

33

dessinai; par ce que je laimais mieux.12 It shows more of the framing than the full ele-

vation, in which the nave piers incorrectly hide the edges of the window. The enfram-

ing arch and the two internal ones supporting the oculus spring from the same

colonnette and capital (in the actual construction each has its own capital), and the prin-

cipal transverse rib crossing the side aisle springs from an equally small colonnette and

capital, which would have been improbable structurally. At the base of the central

colonnette, Villard drew a horizontal section showing the actual window frame behind

the colonnette. The same section appears among the proles that Villard seems to have

drawn directly from templates in the workshop (p. 63; g. 2.8). In contrast to the ele-

vations in g. 2.2, that of g. 2.3 must have been made from the building itself, a judg-

ment supported by Villards statement that he liked this window the best. The fact that

he could make substantial mistakes when drawing from the actual building supports

the hypothesis that he was not an architect or master mason but an artisan with more

limited capacities.

The two pages preceding the elevation drawings are devoted to perspective elevations of

the central apsidal chapel (p. 60; g. 2.4: on p. 61 Villard has employed the same con-

ventions for the exterior). These are seen in perspective, rather than orthogonally, in

the sense that Villard attempted to reect the recession of a wall curving away from and

toward the observer, though not by having horizontals recede to a central point or axis

so as to make more distant elements smaller. His convention has the effect of an or-

thogonal drawing made on a at surface which is then bent into a semicylindrical form,

so that horizontal and vertical measurements are not essentially altered. Only a few el-

ements, like the arches and the width of the exterior buttresses, are distortedthe

wrong way to suggest recessionby the curvature. The heavy dark bands by the sup-

ports of the interior clerestory again suggest passages through the piers that would not

be visible in an orthogonal elevation. The vaults of the interior are not shown; the wavy

lines used in g. 2.2 appear in their place. Construction had not proceeded to that

point, and in any case Villard probably had no convention for representing vaults in an

elevation. In g. 2.4 he indicates on the right sidebut not the leftthe springing of

the rib vaults (incorrectly, since the outer ribs should support the window arches and

frames).

34

The orthogonal representation of curvilinear or polygonal elevations poses