WHY DID ALBERTI NOT ILLUSTRATE HIS DE PICTURA?

Robert Zwijnenberg

Introduction

Leon Battista Alberti's treatise De Pictura (1435-36) is best understood as an attempt to elevate painting from its lowly position as a craft, which it still had in Italy at the beginning of the fifteenth century, and endow it with the status of a liberal art. Alberti sought to restore the glory which painting enjoyed in Antiquity. To accomplish this goal, it was necessary to invent a theoretical foundation for it, includ• ing a specific technical vocabulary for discussing painting as a lib• eral art. The liberal arts differ from the mechanical arts precisely in that they are based on general theoretical principles. For such prin• ciples and vocabulary Alberti relied on two disciplines that were available to him in particular: mathematics, which he deployed for discussing the quantifiable aspects of painting, and rhetoric, by which he could elaborate subjects associated with form, content and com• position, as well as with the relation between paintings and their viewers. Specifically, Alberti tried to achieve his aim by concentrat• ing his discourse in De Pictura on linear perspective and its use of optical and geometrical principles; on an analysis of pictorial com• position that is couched in rhetorical terms; and on the connection between painting and poetry with respect to the proper selection and representation of subjects as well as regarding advice on the proper education and attitude of the painter. On account of his decidedly theoretical focus, he succeeded not only in giving painting the sta• tus of a liberal art, but also in making painting an appropriate sub• ject for civilized, humanist thought and discussion.* The author himself repeatedly emphasized the novel character of his project. In Chapter 63, for instance, he writes: 'I consider it a

* In the previous century, Caroline van Eck and I repeatedly discussed Alberti's De Pictura; the views and opinions she advanced at those occasions turned out to be indispensable for the development of my argument in this paper. 168 ROBERT ZWIJNENBERG great satisfaction to have taken the palm in this subject, as I was the first to write about this most subtle art.'1 His striving to be orig• inal has concrete ramifications for the genre of his text. For one thing, there are no theoretical treatises that have survived from Antiquity; the chapters on painting in Pliny's Maturalis hutoriae merely provide an anecdotal chronicle, a narrative style Alberti clearly was not interested in imitating.2 Moreover, his treatise can hardly be classified as a painter's manual in the tradition of Cennino Cennini's Libro deWArte (written c. 1400), because it ignores a number of essen• tial aspects of painting, such as the use of materials. Nor is his trea• tise a codification of existing workshop practice, because Alberti failed to mention or discuss any contemporary painter. That De Pktura was not intended to be a practical manual for painters is also shown by the importance the author attached to the analysis of linear per• spective in terms of mathematical and optical principles, as well as to framing his definitions of the art of painting in the vocabulary of optics and rhetoric.3 Rather than as a primer for young students of painting, De Pktura should be viewed as a theory of the art of paint• ing, offering strategies of invention for the painter and strategies of interpretation for the spectator.4 As such, Alberti's claim to origi• nality is being reflected in the actual character of his text. Scholarship on De Pktura has elucidated various aspects of its textual dimension. The role of mathematics, for instance, has been studied quite extensively.5 Moreover, scholars like Michael Baxandall, Edward Wright, Brian Vickers and Kristine Patz have convincingly

1 All quotations from De Pictura are taken from ALBERTI, On painting and On Sculpture. 2 Cf. ALBERTI, On Painting and On Sculpture, Chapter 26. 3 See FIELD, 'Alberti, the Abacus and Piero della Francesca's Proof of Perspective', 62 for a similar view: 'No reader could mistake De Pictura (...) for a practical man• ual destined for the instruction of would-be painters'. Cf. KEMP, Introduction, in ALBERTI, On Painting, 2: 'On Painting has no precedence [...] the first known book devoted to the intellectual rationale for painting'. 4 Alberti's contemporaries noted this double role. See for instance the poem on De Pictura by Pietro Barozzi (1441-1507), bishop of Padua, quoted in BAXANDALL, Giotto and the Orators, 121: 'Battista's talents, Reader, lead you to facility/In painting and in Latin volubility./He satisfies our ears and eyes:/For every hand and tongue a guide supplies'. (Pingere seu discas, seu dicere multa latine,/Baptistae ingenio, lector, utrumque potes./Auribus atque oculis fecit satis, et studiosis/Omnibus, hinc lingua profuit, inde manu.') 5 See KEMP, The Science of Art, 21-24, who gives an overview of recent literature, and most recently FIELD, 'Alberti, the Abacus and Piero della Francesca's Proof of Perspective'.