Abstract
For twentieth-century viewers looking backward across the artistic revolution effected by Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso, Renaissance painting seems unproblematically naturalistic, a representation of figures and events in a legible approximation of the real, three — dimensional world. Indeed this notion that Renaissance art attempts — with progressively greater success—to faithfully transcribe the appearance of the natural world first finds expression in the Renaissance itself. We see this, for instance, in Leon Battista Alberti’s 1435 comparison of painting to the reflective surface of the pool of Narcissus, or Giorgio Vasari’s 1568 account of Giotto, the founder of “modern” painting, who is said to have learned his art from nature itself.1
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Notes
Near the beginning of Book II of his De pictura, Alberti muses that Narcissus must have been the inventor of painting, for this art is nothing other than “the act of embracing by means of art the surface of the pool.” See Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture,ed. and tr. Cecil Grayson (London, 1972), 61–63. Vasari (Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori ed architettori, ed. Gaetano Milanesi [Florence, 1906], 1: 370–371) writes of Giotto’s “discovery” by Cimabue (who was to take him into his studio): when the older artist first saw him alongside a road, Giotto was making a drawing of a sheep from life on a rock, “without having being instructed in any way by anyone except nature.” Although Vasari notes that Giotto’s skills were honed by his subsequent apprenticeship with Cimabue, he nonetheless claims that Giotto “deserves to be called a disciple of nature, and not of anyone else” (1: 378).
Boccaccio, Decameron, VI, 5.
Theodor Mommsen, Petrarch’s Testament (Ithaca, 1957), 78–81.
Lawrence G. Duggan, “Was Art Really the ‘Book of the Illiterate’?,” Word & Image 5 (1989): 235–236.
Petrarch’s Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul,ed. and tr. Conrad Rawski (Bloomington, 1991), 1: 126–127. The Latin text may be found in Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators (Oxford, 1971), 140–141.
A sampling of Petrarch’s writings on poetry may be found in Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics, Vol. 3: Modern Aesthetics (The Hague, 1974), 9–11; Boccaccio’s most complete defense of poetry is found in Book XIV of the Geneologia deorum gentilium; see Charles G. Osgood, Boccaccio on Poetry (New York, 1956), especially 39–40, for Boccaccio’s explanation of how poetry “veils truth in a fair and fitting garment of fiction.”
On the inability of the vulgar horde to penetrate the integumental surface of poetry, see Tatarkiewicz, 10 (Petrarch, Invectivae contra medicum), and Osgood, 44, 51.
See Paola Barocchi, Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento (Bari: 1960), 1: 134.
Petrarch’s words in the De remediis would seem to indicate that his “peasant” viewer is not totally unable to understand pictorial artifice; though the clever man is so taken by the artist’s illusion that he dwells for a long period before a painting, even the less sophisticated viewer experiences “brief enjoyment.”
Coppo di Marcovaldo, Madonna and Child,Orvieto, S. Maria dei Servi; reproduced in Frederick Hartt, A History of Italian Renaissance Art, 4th ed. (New York, 1994), 50. Giotto, Ognissanti Madonna, Florence, Uffizi; reproduced in Hartt, 89.
Sandra Bandera Bistoletti, Giotto: Catalogo completo dei dipinti (Florence, 1989), 92. The polyptych that was placed on the main altar (parts of which are now in the Uffizi) was painted by Giovanni da Milano.
Reproduced in Bandera Bistoletti, 38. the cycle of paintings in the upper church at Assisi has been attributed to various masters. In the opinion of Miklos Boskovits, followed by Bandera Bistoletti (34), Giotto designed the scene, though it was probably painted by another artist.
For the story, which occurs in two separate Lives of St. Francis, see Erwin Rosenthal, “The Crib of Greccio and Franciscan Realism,” Art Bulletin 36 (1954), 57–60.
Rosenthal, 57–58 (citing texts by L. White and L. Olschki).
Reproduced in Giuseppe Basile, Giotto: The Arena Chapel Frescoes (London: 1993), 32 (whole) and 37 (detail).
Reproduced in Basile, 122 (whole) and 128 (detail).
Basile, 74 (whole), 79 (detail). While the bath is normally included in such nativity scenes in early Renaissance art, this is the only scene I know of, of the eyes being washed.
Basile, 32 (whole), 46 and 48 (details).
Basile, 198 (whole), 248–249 (detail).
Dante makes reference to Giotto’s fame in Purgatorio, XI, 91–95.
For examples of the gaze used in these ways, see Eugenio Savona, Repertorio tematicodel dolce stil nuovo (Bari, 1973), 170–171, 182–186; Petrarch, Rime sparse, poems XXX, L, CCLXX; Boccaccio, Rime, part one: poems XIII, XV, XVI.
The most sustained example of the use of this language is found in Petrarch’s Rime sparse; see, for instance, poem XVII, 8; LXXVII, 1; CCLXI, 3; CCCXXIII, 31; CCCLVI, 10; CCCLX, 140 (for mirar fisso and its variants); XXXVII, 83 (for bel guardo sereno); LXX, 40 (bel guardo soave); CXXIII, 12 (bel guardo gentile).
For a discussion of the significance of vision in Trecento culture generally (with some discussion of the art of Giotto), see Margaret R. Miles, Image as Insight: Visual Understanding in Western Christianity and Secular Culture (Boston, 1985), especially 64–75. On the Trecento interest in the science of optics, see Graziella Federici Vescovini, Studi sulla prospettiva medievale (Turin, 1965), 137ff.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, III, 407ff.
The relationship between vision and touch in Renaissance painting, with reference to the erotically displayed female nude, is discussed by Mary Pardo in “Artifice as Seduction in Titian,” in Sexuality & Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images,ed. J. G. Turner (Cambridge, 1993), 55–89.
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Bolland, A. (1998). The Education of the Eye and the Experience of Art in Renaissance Italy. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Reincarnating Mind, or the Ontopoietic Outburst in Creative Virtualities. Analecta Husserliana, vol 53. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4900-6_22
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