Abstract
In the dedicatory letter to Lorenzo de Medici prefacing Il Principe, Machiavelli expressed his worries that Lorenzo might take offence that a mere citizen should presume to offer counsel on the conduct of princely affairs. He justified his unsolicited advice by means of an analogy.
I hope it will not be thought presumptuous if a man of low and humble station dares to discuss and advise on the conduct of princes. For just as those who draw up maps of countries place themselves in low lying valleys to observe mountains and high places and to observe low lying areas situate themselves high up in the mountains so, likewise, to understand clearly the nature of the people one must be a prince, and to discern clearly that of princes, he must be one of the populace.1
Machiavelli’s analogy evokes a passage in Leonardo da Vinci’s Treatise on Painting in which Leonardo declared that the artist who mastered perspective would become
lord of all types of peoples and of all things. If he wants valleys, if he wants from high mountain tops to unfold a great plain extending down to the sea’s horizon, he is lord to do so; and likewise if from low plains he wishes to see high mountains.2
Carlo Ginzberg argues that Machiavelli was attracted to this image of the “sovereign painter” with the world at his command because it posited an analytical distance between the painter and the world he represented.3
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Notes
Niccolò Machiavelli, Il Principe, ed. L. Arthur Burd (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1891), pp. 173–74.
Leonardo, quoted in Roger D. Masters, Machiavelli, Leonardo, and the Science of Power (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), p. 52.
Carlo Ginzburg, “Distanza e prospettiva: Due metafore,” in Ginzburg, Occhiacci di legno: Nove riflessioni sulla distanza (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1998), pp. 171–93.
John Gerard Ruggie, “Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations,” International Organization, 47:1, 1993, pp. 139–74, at p. 159.
Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, tr. C. S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 27.
Martin Kemp, Behind the Picture: Art and Evidence in the Italian Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 95–96.
Giulio Carlo Argan, “The Architecture of Brunelleschi and the Origins of Perspective Theory in the Fifteenth Century,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 9, 1946, pp. 96–121.
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 79.
Denis Cosgrove, “Prospect, Perspective and the Evolution of the Landscape Idea,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers: New Series, 10, 1985, pp. 45–62, at p. 55.
Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” in Hal Foster (ed.), Vision and Visuality (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), pp. 3–23. For Jay, Cartesian perspectival-ism, which combined philosophical ideas of subjective rationality with the artistic principles of perspective, was the dominant visual model or “scopic regime” of modernity. Although Cartesian-Perspectivalism was preeminent because it seemed to best express “the ‘natural’ experience of sight valorised by a scientific world-view,” it was challenged by two counter regimes: (1) an “art of describing,” as in seventeenth-century Dutch painting, based in cartographic principles; and (2) a “madness of vision,” as in Baroque art, which flaunted the opacity of the sublime subject and underscored the rhetorical conventionality of sight.
Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1983), p. 94.
John White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), p. 121.
Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York: Basic Books, 1975), p. 161.
James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 28–29.
Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (London: Penguin Books, 1961).
Richard Krautheimer, “The Panels in Urbino, Baltimore and Berlin Reconsidered,” in Henry A. Millon (ed.), Italian Renaissance Architecture: From Brunelleschi to Michelangelo (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), pp. 233–56, at p. 238.
Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, tr. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988).
For an overview of the theme of the ideal city in the Renaissance, with particular emphasis on Alberti ’s De re aedificatoria and Filarete’s Trattatod ’architettura , see Helen Rosenau, The Ideal City: Its Architectural Evolution in Europe, 3rd ed. (London: Methuen, 1983), pp. 42–67.
André Chastel, “Vues urbaines, peintres et théâtre,” quoted in Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, tr. John Goodman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), p. 225.
Alessandro Parronchi, “Due note, 2. Urbino-Baltimora-Berlino,” Rinas cimento, 29, 1968, pp. 355–61.
Richard Krautheimer, “The Tragic and Comic scenes of the Renaissance: The Baltimore and Urbino Panels,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 33, 1948, pp. 327–48. He retracted this reading in “The Panels in Urbino, Baltimore and Berlin Reconsidered.”
Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1979), p. 272.
Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1992), p. xv.
Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), esp. pp. 212–51.
Françoise Choay, The Rule and Method: On the Theory of Architecture and Urbanism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), p. 5. De re aedificatoria was presented to Pope Nicholas V in 1452 and printed by Poliziano in 1485.
K. J. P. Lowe, “Patronage and Territoriality in Early Sixteenth Century Florence,” Renaissance Studies, 7:3, 1993, pp. 258–71.
Niccolò Machiavelli, The History of Florence, Chief Works and Others, Vol. III, tr. Allan Gilbert (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), VII:xxxi, p. 1376. Machiavelli notes several subsequent shifts of allegiance by Federico. From 1447–8 Federico served Florence as a general against King Alfonso of Naples. However in 1452 he commanded 12,000 of Alfonso’s troops against Florence. Between 1467 and 1474 Federico was once again in the pay of Florence, campaigning against Venice and quelling disturbances in Volterra. Then as a papal soldier, Federico again fought against Florence, leading an attack on the city of Radda in 1478.
Pierantonio Paltroni, Commentari della vita et gesti dell’ illustrissimo Federico Duca d’Urbino, quoted in C. W. Westfall, “Chivalric Declaration: The Palazzo Ducale in Urbino as a Political Statement,” in Henry A. Millon and Linda Nochlin (eds.), Art and Architecture in the Service of Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), pp. 20–45.
Baldassarre Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano, ed. Ettore Bonora (Milano: Mursia, 1972), I:ii, p. 33. My translation.
A. Richard Turner, The Vision of Landscape in Renaissance Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 11–12.
Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art (London: John Murray, 1949), p. 14.
William E. Connolly, “Tocqueville, Territory and Violence,” Theory, Culture and Society, 11:1, 1994, pp. 19–40.
Andrew Martindale, “The Middle Ages of Andrea Mantegna,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 127, 1979, pp. 627–42, at p. 631.
Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 88.
Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr, “From Mental Matrix to Mappamundi to Christian Empire: The Heritage of Ptolemaic Cartography in the Renaissance,” in David Woodward (ed.), Art and Cartography: Six Historical Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 10–50.
Dana B. Durand, “Tradition and Innovation in Fifteenth Century Italy: ‘Il Primato dell’Italia’ in the Field of Science,” Journal of the History of Ideas, IV, 1943, pp. 1–20, at p. 5.
P. D. A. Harvey, The History of Topographical Maps: Symbols, Pictures and Surveys (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), p. 58. The following discussion draws heavily on Harvey. John Marino accepts that in Europe only Italy had a “map consciousness” but warns that it was premised in “an integrated cosmography of spiritual and geographical knowledge,”
John Marino, “Administrative Mapping in the Italian States,” in David Buisser et (ed.), Monarchs, Ministers and Maps: The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of Government in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 5–25, at p. 5.
Denis Cosgrove, “The Geometry of Landscape: Practical and Speculative Arts in Sixteenth-Century Venetian Land Territories,” in Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (eds.), The Iconography of Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 254–76.
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© 2010 Jeremy Larkins
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Larkins, J. (2010). Picturing Renaissance Territoriality. In: From Hierarchy to Anarchy. Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101555_8
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