ARTH217

Week 14

Leonardo and the Paragone

Important names and terms

· Leonardo da Vinci, Trattato della pittura

· Paragone

· Liberal arts vs. mechanical arts

· Cennino Cennini’s Il libro dell’arte (c. 1390)

· Leon Battista Alberti, Della pittura (On Painting)

· Piero della Francesca, De Prospectiva Pingendi (On the perspective of painting)

Discussion texts

· Excerpts from Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Urbinas (source: Farago, Claire J. Leonardo da Vinci’s Paragone: a critical interpretation with a new edition of the text in the Codex Urbinas. Leiden; New York: E.J. Brill, 1992):

- If you call painting mechanical because at first it is manual, the hands figure what is found in the fantasia, and you writers draw what you find in your ingegno [imagination] manually with the pen. If you say [painting] is mechanical because it is done for a price, who falls into this error more than you do, if it can be called an error? When you read in studios do you not go to whoever awards you the greatest prize? Do you ever work without some reward? ... If poetry embraces moral philosophy, [painting embraces] natural philosophy. If [poetry] describes the operations of the mind, [painting] considers how the mind works in movements. If poetry terrifies people with fictional hells, [painting], with the same things in action, does the same. (p. 213-215)

- Painting is a mute poem and poetry is a blind painting, and both proceed by imitating nature as far as their powers make it possible, and many moral habits can be demonstrated through both of them as did Apelles with his Calumny. Yet a harmonic proportion results from painting because it serves the eye, a sense more noble than the ear, which is the object of poetry. This [proportion] is like the harmonic proportion which results when many varied voices are joined together at one and the same time. [This harmony] so delights the sense of hearing that listeners are as if half-alive stupefied with admiration, yet the beautiful proportions of an angelic face in a painting will do much more. A harmonic concento [concord] results from this proportionality which serves the eye at one and the same time, just as music serves the ear ... Now a poem, which extends to the figuration of this designated beauty by the particular figuration of each part which composes the designated harmony in painting, does not result in any grace other than what is heard in music if each tone were [to be] heard only by itself at various times, which would not compose any concento. It is as if we would want to show a face part by part, always covering up the part which was shown before … A similar thing happens with the beauties of anything feigned by the poet: since their parts are said separately at separate times, the memory does not receive any harmony from them. (p. 217-219)

- Painting immediately presents you with the demonstration by which its maker generated it, and gives that pleasure to the greatest sense, as anything created by nature can. And in this case, the poet, who sends the same things to the common sense but by the lesser sense of hearing, does not give the eye any pleasure other than the pleasure of hearing a thing recounted. Now do you see what a difference there is between hearing a thing about something which pleases the eye recounted over a long period of time or seeing it with the immediacy that things in nature are seen? Even if things by poets are read over long intervals, often there are times when they are not understood and so several commentaries are needed on them. These commentators very seldom understand what was in the poet’s mind and many times the readers will read only a small part of their works for want of time; whereas the work of a painter is comprehended immediately by his onlookers. (p. 219-221)

- [The poet] says he surpasses the painter because, with diverse fictions in which he feigns that which is not, he makes men talk and reason. And he will rouse men to take up arms and he will describe the heavens, the stars, and nature and the arts and all things. To this, one responds that none of these things of which the poet speaks belong to his own profession; but if he wants to speak and makes orations, he needs to be persuaded that he will be beaten by the orator; that if he talks about astrology, he robs the astrologer; and philosophy from the philosopher; so that, in effect, poetry, does not have its own place and does not deserve one more than the monger who gathers merchandise made by different craftsmen [does]. Yet the deity of the science of painting considers human works as well as divine, [both of] which are bounded by their surfaces, that is, the lines at the boundaries of bodies. [The deity] directs the sculptor to perfect his statues by means of these lines. With his principle, that is dissegno [design], [the deity] teaches composers of different vases, goldsmith, weavers, embroiderers. The characters by which different languages are expressed were discovered by this principle] and this has given ciphers to the arithmeticians, this teaches figuration to geometry, and this teaches perspectivists and astrologers and makers of machines and engineers. (p. 225-227)

· Excerpt from Alberti’s Della pittura (source: Alberti, Leon Battista. On Painting. Translated with Introduction and Notes by John R. Spencer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970)

- Who can doubt that painting is the master art or at least not a small ornament of things? The architect, if I am not mistaken, takes from the painter architraves, bases, capitals, columns, façades and other similar things. All the smiths, sculptors, shops and guilds are governed by the rules and art of the painter. It is scarcely possible to find any superior art which is not concerned with painting, so that whatever beauty is found can be said to be born of painting. Moreover, painting was given the highest honour by our ancestors. For, although almost all other artists were called craftsmen, the painter alone was not considered in that category. For this reason, I say among my friends that Narcissus who was changed into a flower, according to the poets, was the inventor of panting. Since painting is already the flower of every art, the story of Narcissus is most to the point. What else can you call painting but a similar embracing with art of what is presented on the surface of the water in the fountain?