Leonardo da Vinci Society Newsletter Editor: Maya Corry Issue 44, July 2017 and variety of people and other elements. But in a bal- Forthcoming event anced composition how many figures should there be? Using the example of Marcus Varro who limited his Conference dinner guests to nine, Alberti specifies nine or ten fig- ures: too few alas for the Last Supper. Latin and the vernacular in fifteenth-century Italy The optimum number of characters in a painted story Friday 1 December 2017, Warburg Institute mirrors that of characters in a stage play. Alberti had written his own Latin comedy Philodexeos fabula and he A one-day conference on the relationship between Latin understood how movements and expressions could reveal and the vernacular in fifteenth-century Italy at the War- feelings on stage. Though he did not speak Greek, he burg Institute. Speakers include Amos Edelheit knew the principle of empathetic participation expounded (Maynooth University), Simon Gilson (University of in Xenophon’s account of Socrates’ dialogue with Warwick), David A. Lines (University of Warwick), Parrhusius, and he mentions Pliny’s admiring accounts of Letizia Panizza (Royal Holloway) and Ben Thomson Apelles and Aristides of Athens. Alberti writes that we (Birkbeck). Organised by Stephen Clucas (Birkbeck) and ‘mourn with the mourners, laugh with those who laugh’. Guido Giglioni (Warburg). In this he is reflecting the classical concept of the dual personality whereby each individual has two characteris- Furthers details of this event will appear in due course on tics: ethos formed by education, custom and self- the Society’s website. discipline, and pathos the reaction to outside stimuli. A person’s character can be read in his face and posture, and imitated by a painter. Recent Events Capturing from nature the movements of the body and accurately depicting them is not the same as capturing the Leonardo da Vinci Society Annual Lecture motions of the soul. To engage the viewer the painter has to choose what parts of his subject to depict and ‘leave more for the mind to discover than is apparent to the Leon Battista Alberti’s Historia: the art of persua- eye’. It is not the precision of a portrait that matters but sion and motions of the soul the ability of the painter to make an observer think Pietro Roccasecca, Accademia di Belle Arti, beyond what he sees. A painted story is an invention, its Rome narration a work of the intellect, and this is where Alber- 5 May 2017 ti’s experience as a dramatist becomes relevant. The staging of humanist dramas was limited to actors miming Professor Roccasecca introduced his talk with a slide of the action while someone read the text aloud. This is Leonardo’s Last Supper, in this instance an ironically clearly how Alberti envisages a painted narration. He relevant image. Placing Alberti’s De pictura in the approves of ‘tragic and comic poets telling their story context of Aristotelian philosophy and humanist dis- with as few characters as possible’, of bodies moving ‘in course, Professor Roccasecca explained the significance relation to one another with a certain harmony in accord- of Alberti’s text as a cognitive theory of vision, the first ance with the action’, and he likes there to be ‘someone to propose a systematic theory of visual representation, in the historia who tells the spectators what is going on’. particularly in reference to the historia and the motions He cites The Sacrifice of Iphigenia by Timanthes in of the soul, taking into account conventions of anatomy, which Agamemnon covers his face with a veil to hide his decorum, rhetoric, poetics, and humanist theatre. Alberti emotions, and in so doing reveals them to the viewer. He divided composition into three parts: surfaces, members also praises Giotto’s La navicella for the variety of ways and bodies. To tell a story in painting the latter must in which the apostles reveal their agitated feelings as they become characters whose feelings can be understood by observe Jesus and St Peter walking on the water. the viewer. A charming and attractive historia will hold the eye and afford the spectator pleasure. It is not a Such painted narratives conform not only to the philo- question of how a painter reproduces what he sees but sophical principles that Alberti derived from antiquity but how the depiction involves the spectator emotionally. also to his experience as a writer of theatrical texts. He The pleasure of the story is sensual, the painting a ban- wanted painters to introduce a character, like the stage quet for the senses, which should include an abundance narrator, who would tell the spectator what was happen- ing. He believed that a pictorial representation of a story forces in the microcosm of a plant, flower or the human relies on the cognitive ability of our vision to recognise body – and monstrous lemons! people’s feelings, not just on the painter’s ability to depict gesture and expression and the spectator’s empa- In 1633 the first illustrated horticultural text on flowers, thetic reaction to them but also, crucially, on the power Giovanni Battista Ferrari’s De florum cultura, was of images to make us think of more than what we actual- published. The book was based on observations Ferrari ly see. had made in Cardinal Francesco Barberini’s garden. Ferrari, a Jesuit scholar, was part of a circle of men at the Angela Sheehan papal court who were fascinated by natural science and botany. This was an era in which new plants were arriv- ing from the Americas, garden design was in ascendance 30th Anniversary Lecture and efforts at the classification of species were intensify- ing. This last pursuit involved both scientific and artistic The Failure of Pictures: From Description to knowledge and skill. Ferrari’s interest in hybrids led him Diagram in the Circle of Galileo to focus on citrus fruits, which he analysed in the Hesper- ides sive de Malorum Aureorum cultura. Published in Professor David Freedberg, Warburg Institute 1646, this was one of the most lavishly and beautifully Friday 4 November 2016 illustrated botanical works of the period, with images of fruits by the leading artists of the day, including Domeni- chino, Nicolas Poussin and Guido Reni. Although the primary focus was always on observation from nature, in Ferrari’s books allegorical illustrations appeared along- side botanical ones. Horticultural knowledge, and its cultural significance, was expressed through both visual forms. The desire to catalogue, classify and meticulously de- scribe nature’s wonders was shared by many of Ferrari’s contemporaries. The drawings which were engraved to illustrate his horticultural works came from the collection of Cassiano dal Pozzo, the famed collector and patron of the arts. He assembled thousands of watercolours, draw- ings and prints in his ‘paper museum’, the Museo Cartaceo. (The bulk of these works have since found their way into the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle and British Museum.) Their subject matter ranges from zoology, botany, ornithology, ethnography and geology to the architecture of antiquity; they represent an extraor- dinary endeavour to study and comprehend the wonders of the natural world and mankind’s creations. This impulse even extended beyond the boundaries of the planet: in the same years Galileo was conducting his investigations into sunspots, the planets and the surface of the moon. Here too, visual representation was central to the communication of scientific discoveries. Giovanni Battista Ferrari, Hesperides (Rome, 1646) How do images encode and transmit information? In Maya Corry what ways do they do this differently from text? What University of Oxford distinguishes diverse forms of communication from one another, whether words, representational pictures or diagrams? These questions, which have long been of fundamental importance to the histories of art and sci- Conference reports ence, were at the heart of David Freedberg’s lecture. Delivered in celebration of the Society’s 30th anniver- Ingenuity in the Making: Materials and Tech- sary, Freedberg’s talk was replete with echoes of Leonar- niques in Early Modern Europe do’s preoccupations. It explored the representation and classification of the natural world, the codification of 10-12 May 2017, University of Cambridge knowledge in visual and diagrammatic forms, the early modern fascination with the revelation of macrocosmic The Leonardo da Vinci Society Page 2 Registered Charity 1012878 Leonardo’s achievements – bridge-building, painting, froy Tory’s Champ Fleury (1529), in which mathematics casting, theorising nature’s motions – spanned an impres- underpins ingenious allegories of the mythic and formal sive array already in his own time. But early modern origins of letters. Similarly Van Eck turned to Giovanni admirers had categories to hand that drew these various Battista Piranesi’s construction of artefacts out of ancient forms of invention together. In particular, ‘ingenuity’ was Alexandrian motifs. What made these authentic to his a key Renaissance term for naming engineering, fertile contemporaries was Piranesi’s practice of bricolage, seen invention, and crafty insight. A hoary genealogy fur- as reflecting the distinctive Roman genius for layering nished theorists with language for powerful invention: styles of different periods. Cicero and Quintilian had described the inborn powers of speech, painting and craft as ingenium; builders became ingegnieri, while Vasari and Castiglione defined artists and courtiers by their ingegno. But as ingenuity became a defining category of Renaissance culture, it developed ever richer dimensions particularly around activities of making. To explore this range of practices and materials, the European Research Council funded project Genius before Romanticism: Ingenuity in Early Modern Art & Science (University of Cambridge) held a conference on 10-12 May 2017. Sven Dupré opened the conference with a public lecture on how technical manuals such as recipe books became sites for recording and even codifying error.