Visual Culture in Early Modernity.

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Leon Battista Alberti and Nicholas Cusanus

Providing a fresh evaluation of Alberti’s text On Painting (1435), along with comparisons

to various works of Nicholas Cusanus—particularly his Vision of God (1450)—this studyreveals a shared epistemology of vision. And, the author argues, it is one that reects

a more deeply Christian Neoplatonic ideal than is typically accorded Alberti. Whether

regarding his purpose in teaching the use of a geometric single point perspective system,

or more broadly in rendering forms naturalistically, the emphasis leans toward the ideal

of Renaissance art as highly rational. There remains the impression that the principle aim

of the painter is to create objective, even illusionistic images. A close reading of Alberti’s

text, however, including some adjustments in translation, points rather towards an

emphasis on discerning the spiritual in the material. Alberti’s use of the tropes Minerva

and Narcissus, for example, indicates the opposing characteristics of wisdom and sense

certainty that function dialectically to foster the traditional importance of seeing with the

eye of the intellect rather than merely with physical eyes. In this sense these gures also

set the context for his, and, as the author explains, Brunelleschi’s earlier invention of this

perspective system that posits not so much an objective seeing as an opposition of nite and

innite seeing, which, moreover, approximates Cusanus’s famous notion of a coincidence

of opposites. Together with Alberti’s and Cusanus’s ideals of vision, extensive analysis of

art works discloses a ubiquitous commitment to stimulating an intellectual perception of

divine, essential, and unseen realities that enliven the visible material world.

Charles H. Carman is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Buffalo, USA.


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VISUAL CULTURE IN EARLY MODERNITY

Series Editor: Allison Levy

A forum for the critical inquiry of the visual arts in the early modern world, Visual Culture

in Early Modernity promotes new models of inquiry and new narratives of early modern

art and its history. We welcome proposals for both monographs and essay collections

which consider the cultural production and reception of images and objects. The range

of topics covered in this series includes, but is not limited to, painting, sculpture and

architecture as well as material objects, such as domestic furnishings, religious and/or

ritual accessories, costume, scientic/medical apparata, erotica, ephemera and printed

maer. We seek innovative investigations of western and non-western visual culture

produced between 1400 and 1800.


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Leon Battista Alberti

and Nicholas Cusanus

Towards an Epistemology of Vision forItalian Renaissance Art and Culture

Charles H. Carman


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© Charles H. Carman 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system

or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording

or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

Charles H. Carman has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to

be identied as the author of this work.

Published by

Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Carman, Charles H.Leon Battista Alberti and Nicholas Cusanus: towards an epistemology of vision for Italian

Renaissance art and culture / by Charles H. Carman.

pages cm. -- (Visual culture in early modernity)

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-4724-2923-0 (hardcover: alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-4724-2924-7 (ebook)—ISBN

978-1-4724-2925-4 (epub) 1. Visual perception—history. 2. Alberti, Leon Battista, 1404–1472.

De pictura. 3. Nicholas, of Cusa, Cardinal, 1401–1464. 4. Vision. 5. Knowledge, Theory of.

6. Renaissance—Italy. I. Title.

N7430.5.C275 2014

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2014012034

ISBN 9781472429230 (hbk)

ISBN 9781472429247 (ebk – PDF)

ISBN 9781472429254 (ebk – ePUB)


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To Karen


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Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Preface: Perspectiva ut Poesis xi Acknowledgements xvii

1 Alberti and Cusanus: An Overview 1

2 On Painting: Seing the Stage and “Tua la Storia” 25

3 The Eye of the Mind: Where it Goes, What it Sees 55

4 Divine and Human Vision: Perspective and theCoincidence of Opposites 83

5 Disclosing Metaphors 1: Ways into Perspective 111

6 Disclosing Metaphors 2: The Window, The Flower,

and The Map 135

Conclusion 161

Bibliography 173

Index 189

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List of Illustrations

Color Plates

1 Ambrogio Lorenzei, Annunciation. 1340. Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena, Italy. Photocredit: Scala / Ministero per i Beni e le Aività culturali / Art Resource, NY

2 Vincenzo Foppa, Virgin and Child ( Madonna of the Book). ca. 1460–1468. CastelloSforzesco, Milan, Italy. Photo credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY

3 Fra Angelico, Annunciation , Cortona Altarpiece , without predella. ca. 1432–1434.Museo Diocesano, Cortona, Italy. Photo credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY

4 Antoniazzo Romano, Madonna and Child. ca. 1475–1479. Galleria Nazionale

dell’Umbria, Perugia, Italy. Photo credit: Scala / Minstero per i Beni e le Aivitàculturali / Art Resource, NY

5 Giovanni Bellini, Eternal Father. 1507. Museo Civico, Pesaro, Italy. Photo credit:Scala / Art Resource, NY

Black and White Figures

1.1 Model for pyramids of vision and perspective space, based on Leon BaistaAlberti. Mutual interpretation of nite and innite. Author’s diagram

1.2 Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper. 1498. Post-restoration. (Author’s perspectiveoverlay.) S. Maria delle Grazie, Milan, Italy. Photo credit: Scala / Ministero per i Beni ele Aività culturali / Art Resource, NY

2.1 Raphael, The Disputa of the Sacrament. 1509–1510. Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican.Photo credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY

3.1 Leon Baista Alberti, Occhio alato and moo Quid Tum. ca. 1435. Florence,Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, cod. 11 iv, c. 119v. Courtesy of the Ministero dei beni edelle aività culturali e del turismo

3.2 Masaccio, The Tribute Money. 1426. Brancacci Chapel, S. Maria del Carmine,Florence, Italy. Photo credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY

3.3 Donatello, Trinity , detail from the niche on Orsanmichele (originally housing thestatue of St. Louis). 1423. Florence, Italy. Photo credit: Scala / Ministero per i Beni e leAività culturali / Art Resource, NY


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3.4 Domenico Veneziano, The Saint Lucy Altarpiece. 1439/40. Photo: Mauro Sarri.Uzi, Florence, Italy. Photo credit: Alinari / Art Resource, NY

4.1 Giovanni Bellini, St Francis. 1470s. © The Frick Collection, New York

4.2 Bonaventura Berlinghieri, St. Francis. ca. 1235. San Francesco, Pescia, Italy. Photocredit: Alinari / Art Resource, NY

4.3 Figure “P,” author’s diagram adapted from the Figura Paradigmatica of NicholasCusanus’s De coniecturis.

4.4 Alberti’s model of vision and Cusanus’s Figura Paradigmatica. HypotheticalCusan interpretation of Albertian perspective. Author’s diagram.

5.1 Antoniazzo Romano, Annunciation. ca. 1480. S. Maria sopra Minerva, Rome,Italy. Photo credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY

5.2 Piero della Francesca, Annunciation. Upper section of The St. Anthony Polyptych.

1470. Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, Perugia, Italy. Photo credit: Scala / Ministeroper i Beni e le Aività culturali / Art Resource, NY

5.3 Piermaeo d’Amelia, Annunciation. ca. 1475. Photo credit: Isalbella StewartGardner Museum, Boston

6.1 Giovanni Bellini, Coronation of the Virgin. ca. 1470. Museo Civico, Pesaro, Italy.Photo credit: Scala / Art Resource, NY

6.2 Leonardo da Vinci, The Vitruvian Man. ca. 1500. Accademia, Venice, Italy. Photocredit: Cameraphoto Arte, Venice / Art Resource, NY

6.3 Lucantonio degli Umberti, Chain Map. ca. 1500. Kupferstichkabine, StaatlicheMuseum, Berlin, Germany. Photo credit: bpk, Berlin/Kupferstichkabine. Photo JòrgP. Anders / Art Resource, NY

6.4 Aributed to an assistant of Bernardo Daddi, Madonna of Mercy , detail ofFlorence. ca. 1352. Museo del Bigallo, Florence, Italy. Photo credit: Scala / ArtResource, NY

6.5 Domenico Ghirlandaio, Portrait of an Old Man and a Young Boy. ca. 1480. Post-restoration. Louvre, Paris, France. Photo credit: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY

C.1 Raphael, The Marriage of The Virgin. 1504. Brera, Milan, Italy. Photo credit: Scala /Art Resource, NY


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Preface: Perspectiva ut Poesis

Having become interested in the how and why of single point perspective, I

greatly anticipated plunging into the intriguing title The Poetics of Perspective by James Elkins.1 This was aer a long initiation into the history of how

perspective was viewed, and it became quickly apparent that this was very

much the substance of Elkins’s book. In the meantime, I had decided that among

the dierent approaches, one rather pragmatic and another more poetic, my

sympathies lay distinctly with the laer. Not only did this approach hold my

interest but more importantly, it seemed to suggest a correlation between

the treatment of subject maer and the symbolic; or at least suggestive and

therefore more poetic than prosaic meanings given to its artistic employment.

I was, however, disappointed in the book, not for its lack of information,for it is the most complete discussion of the uses of perspective, its various

meanings, and those who have wrien about it. Rather it was the lack of an

emphasis, despite the title, on what I have come to see as something like a

poetics of perspective. In all fairness, nevertheless, one comes to appreciate

the fullness of the author’s undertaking, and certainly the caution he advises

in the tendency to read into the use of single point perspective either too lile

or certainly too much. But his was a much broader undertaking that anything

intended in this project.

In any case, I am convinced that disagreements will persist over whetherthe aim of perspective is a purely “meaningless” endeavor,2 by which

Elkins means those who assign only a mathematical/geometrical and non-

interpretive signicance to its use, or whether it has symbolic signicance.

Many will continue to see perspective as a purely rational feature of

Renaissance naturalism. Aer all naturalism—by which I mean the depiction

of people and things that appear more or less as the eye sees them in nature—

is the most generally distinctive feature of Renaissance art that distinguishes

it from the relatively more abstract art of the preceding Medieval period.

The Renaissance, now commonly termed Early Modern, is linked inexorablywith the advances leading steadily towards the modern world. And while

1 James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).2 Elkins, Perspective , 42.


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we all know there is much to contend about that, and surely a great deal

to be said about what the Renaissance has in common with the Late Middle

Ages (at least), there seems to be a lingering view that pays only lip service,

however overtly or subtly, to what the eenth century has in common with

the preceding two centuries, not to mention what it has in common with art

thereaer. Indeed even though religious subject maer continued to prevailin the eenth century, it is clothed in the new look of naturalism: full bodied,

proportionally arrayed with ever more accurate reections of how the eyes

sees motion and expression, and, of course, set within equally convincing

depictions of space. It would seem then quite understandable and justiable

that the subject maer can still be spiritual but that the interpretation of it

leans toward an admiration of secular, worldly concerns. But here is where

the poetry gets lost and the prosaic sets in. To understand and describe the

varying degrees of sophistication in how Renaissance artists render their

world as we see ours presupposes a pragmatic, and at the very least proto-scientic mentality. The problem is that this may not be as accurate as it is

tempting.3

Much of what I am exploring in the following pages is based upon a

concerted eort to nd the sacred in the worldly. What I have discovered

in the process—greatly inuenced by other scholars whom I will point out,

though none more so than the late S.K. Heninger Jr.—was the ever-present

sense of a dialectical relationship between vision as that which reads the

world in full bodied sensuous terms and vision as that which sees with the

mental, intellectual/spiritual eye. For, if we bear in mind this dialectical frameas the constant interpretant of what is seen, perceived, and consequently acted

upon, then we might temper the tendency to read a pragmatic naturalism into

our view of the Renaissance, and we might more easily see that it is ever so

subtly yet powerfully veiled by a poetic reading between the “this” of physical

vision and “that” of a mental, intellectual, and especially spiritual vision.

The former seeks this world’s haptic richness; the laer uses it to discover an

immaterial essence. So, to take the introduction of single point perspective in

purely rational terms is to deprive it of the possibility of having been intended

to enhance a spiritual context for interpreting the religious subject maer thatthe perspective system indicates. To put my point in somewhat dramatic

3 I have been very taken by the view of Renaissance individualism set forth by John Jeries Martin in his Myths of Renaissance Individualism (New York: Palgrave, Macmillan,2006). Especially in his concluding chapter “Myths of Identity—an Essay,” (123–33) hesummarizes his view that individualism in the Renaissance is neither that of Burckhardt’sproto modern person of condent, assertive and creatively self-made secular individualitythat seemed to so capture the modern view of mankind (and hence of the Renaissance inretrospect) nor that of a postmodern person as self fashioned (Greenbla) in response tosupercial stimuli. Rather Martin sees, and I think accurately, an identity responding bothto inner and outer reality: “the dening problem of identity in the Renaissance … [was] thequestion of how the experience of the inner world of each person was related to the largersocial environment in which he or she lived” (130–31). Though seemingly simple he hasavoided a reading of secularism back onto the Renaissance, leaving open what I understandas the crucial dialogue of worldly and spiritual, self and God, secular and divine that is sohelpful in reading the way just such dialogue or dialectic works in Renaissance religiousimagery.


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terms, one does not see God or how He was presumed to have created. The

very theology of how God and his creativity were understood must be the

substance of Renaissance art, not merely the fact that illustrations of New

Testament teaching were beginning to look “naturalistic.” If so, the very fact

that this geometric perspective system houses theological messages might

suggest that it was intended to enhance their understanding.This is not to say, however, that others have not explored and continue

to seek out how theological content is made manifest within the burgeoning

naturalism of the Renaissance, for there are many such authors whom I will

draw upon and reference throughout.4 My focus, however, is not on elucidating

these studies per se; rather, it will be on addressing what I perceive as a tension

in how Alberti’s role is emphasized. For it is he who rst fully recorded the

role of single point perspective and laid the context for understanding its

role in his book On Painting (Della piura) from 1435. Still, as I will endeavor

to point out, his text is oen, though by no means exclusively, read from aconservative and in that sense highly rationalist point of view. What I hope

to stimulate as part of the larger question of how this tension of the natural

and spiritual plays out is what I have come to see as Alberti’s seminal role in

articulating the importance of single point perspective for complementing a

deeply theological meaning.

More broadly, as I have read the relevant works on perspective, there are two

interrelated problems: either there is no recognition of a spiritual/theological

implication of perspective, or there is lile if any analysis of Alberti’s text itself

that might support a spiritual view. As we will see even where authors admitof some spiritualizing portent in the use of single point perspective it is all too

oen not in an analysis of Alberti’s text that this view nds justication. The

result as I have come to see it is that there is a lack of connection between what

a work of art emphasizing such a perspective system might be interpreted to

mean and the articulated context of that very system by Alberti and, which is

very important, Brunelleschi before him. Regarding the laer, I will also argue

that the very invention of the perspective system, conceived by Brunelleschi

some ten years before Alberti’s comments in On Painting , and carried out as

a demonstration within the highly charged sacred context of the piazza San

4 Of the rich vein of sources nourishing this view perhaps none is greater than thatof Augustine and the iterations of his teachings throughout The Middle Ages and intothe Renaissance. On the ideas of Augustine, among which is the importance of inner andouter seeing, see Meredith J. Gill, Augustine in the Italian Renaissance: Art and Philosophy from Petrarch to Michelangelo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Particularlyuseful as well is Margaret Miles, “Vision: The Eye of the Body and the Eye of the Mindin Saint Augustine’s De trinitate and Confessions ,” The Journal of Religion 63 (1983): 15–142.Among earlier art historical studies that strive to capture religious content as important forunderstanding meaning in Renaissance works Michael Baxandall’s Painting and Experience inFieenth-Century Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, rst published 1972)stands out for its culling of cultural contexts that can suggest religious, spiritual importance.This is particularly strong in his second chapter “The Period Eye,” though the section endswith a somewhat tepid conclusion that “this sort of explanation is too speculative to havemuch historical use in particular cases” (108). The more recent work of Peter Francis Howard,which I will draw from especially in Chapter 5, proves to be more assertively successful insuggesting important cultural/religious inuence in Florence.


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Giovanni in Florence, ought to be understood to play a major role in how

Alberti’s text is interpreted.

Exploring Alberti’s writing in relationship to more explicitly theological

notions of vision that are relevant to how the painter conceives a work and

elicits a sympathetic response in the viewer is, then, one major theme of this

work. My emphasis here on a poetics of perspective and naturalism in generalaims to address the metaphoric and transformative power that Renaissance

thinkers inherited and encompassed as the means for seeing between the

realities of the physical and the spiritual. It is, for example, no accident that

Dante’s work still loomed so large in the minds of humanists and theologians

(oen the same gures),5 so prominent for its ever rich evocations of the

pilgrim’s—the viator’s—journey through life, and most importantly a life that

included the enfolded ever present sense of the soul’s experience during that

journey all the way to the unseen but poignant reality of God “face to face”

(Paul, 1 Cor. 12–13). Heaven, the fullness of God’s creative and sustaining,though unviewable brilliant light was ever the goal, and its pallid prescience

(“in a mirror enigmatically,” again Paul, 1 Cor. 12–13) always the araction

that the spiritual intellect could seek out. There, in that mirror, a place of

speculation rather than recognition per se, we might discover what works of

art were produced to celebrate. So too Petrarch and Boccaccio had elaborated

notions of spiritual seeing that Alberti drew on by invoking Narcissus in

his text On Painting as “the inventor of painting,” a gure who I will argue

has critical implications in understanding Alberti’s notions of vision and is a

powerfully poetic force in stimulating spiritual identication with self and thematerial world.

Between those two worlds, the one physically seen and the one reected,

I have sought to nd ways of seeing how the sacred is manifest. Moreover, in

order to complement and indeed strengthen what Alberti and painters aim

for, it seemed important as another major theme to develop the importance of

Nicholas Cusanus as Alberti’s theological counterpart. While Alberti was the

rst to describe and recommend a full context for the naturalism of painting

that includes the use of single point perspective, I will argue that Cusanus

provides a theological complement to the basics of Alberti’s view. Aer all, ifAlberti articulates a notion of vision still grounded in theology then we ought

to look for something similar in a prominent theologian, especially one who

might speak of the importance of vision. While aempting to draw parallels

to Cusanus I do not mean, however, that we know he and Alberti consciously

cooperated either directly or indirectly for there is no conrming evidence to

that eect. Nevertheless, much has been made of their probable but unproven

relationship and what they seem to have had in common. I certainly agree

with many that they likely knew each other. But more important is the way

in which we might understand how their thinking reects a shared poetics ofperspective, of seeing into and through the material to the spiritual.

5 See Simon Gilson, Dante and Renaissance Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2005).


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I only want to add here that I do not claim any singularly correct reading of

Alberti or Cusanus, nor that they are exclusively necessary to understanding

the Renaissance, but rather that they are extremely useful and I believe

provocatively so in understanding what I am seing out as a poetics of

perspective, or perhaps more broadly the poetics of a dialectic interaction

between sensuous and intellectual vision that enlivens this new naturalism.Nor do I consider myself an expert on either Alberti or Cusanus. While I have

immersed myself as much as possible in their work and the ever-abundant

interpretations of it, I have looked especially to their concern with vision. In

the case of Alberti the primary text is his treatise On Painting (Della piura),

which he wrote in Italian and then translated into Latin during the years

1435–1436.6 With Cusanus I have tried to choose from his many works those

that most emphatically draw upon vision as a means of gaining knowledge

about the world and God, especially but not exclusively from his Vision of God

(De visione Dei , 1453).Finally, however, I must stress that the abiding sense of how we might have

condence in their similarity is only possible to the extent that the ideas they

share are actually manifest in works of art. There I think we will discern an

abundance of metaphors shared by both writers and artists alike: geometry

of perspective to be sure, but much else as well. A great deal of what I have

found helpful has come from outside my discipline, though one will nd

here many references to the art historical works I have consulted, especially

regarding Alberti, and in many cases to what extent I agree with them. The

volume of material on Alberti is daunting and I have tried to stick to sourcesthat portray the principal ways in which his treatise On Painting has been

understood. Works on Cusanus are also numerous, and though his role is

increasingly seen as signicant for understanding Renaissance intellectual life

he has not the same rmly-planted reputation as his erstwhile companion

Alberti.7 In using the ideas of each I have carefully consulted both translations

and original languages of their texts with the aim of interrogating the depth

of their notions of what vision means. In some cases with Alberti, this has

entailed questioning aspects of currently used English translations and

oering alternatives. In all cases my aim is to match what they seem to thinkwith what the painters portrayed.

Charles H. Carman

6 See Rocco Sinisgalli, The New De Pictura of Leon Baista Alberti (Rome: Kappa, 2006),25–6; and Lucia Bertolini, “Leon Baista Alberti,” Nova informazione bibliograca 2 (2004): 255.

7 I am delighted to note that the relatively recent volume The Cambridge Companion toRenaissance Philosophy , ed. James Hankins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)contains an article by Dermot Moran (“Nicholas of Cusa and Modern Philosophy”) whostates on page 173 that Cusanus is “one of the most original and creative intellects of theeenth century.” In the meantime, works on Cusanus continue to appear.


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to publish them: Francesca Gallori of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale

in Florence, Elizabeth Reluga of the Isabella Gardner Museum in Boston,

Penelope Currier of the Frick Collection in New York, as well as Kay Menick

and Gerhard Gruitrooy of Art Resource in New York. Among the many

students, current and former, who have generously oered thoughts and

exchanged ideas concerning many aspects of what has become this study,I am especially grateful to Denise Lang, Jessica Dipalma, Nancy Knechtel,

and Allison McGoldrick. Finally, the help and patience of Erika Ganey, my

editor at Ashgate, and that of Kathy Bond Borie, the advice of series editor

Allison Levy, as well as the comments and criticisms of outside readers who

greatly enhanced the process of rethinking and rening my approach and the

expression of ideas. I also want to acknowledge Meridith Murray’s ne work

in compiling the index.

For technical assistance I am happily indebted to my wife, Karen, and

especially to the expertise and generous assistance of Natalie M. Fleming, ourdepartmental Visual Studies Resources Curator, as well as to Jason Tedeschi

(ajarmedia.com). The College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Bualo

UB, and the Department of Visual Studies deserve a portion of my gratitude

for granting me a sabbatical during the 2007 academic year, which, along

with some nancial assistance from the United University Professors UUP for

several summer research grants, has allowed for more research time in Italy

than would have otherwise been possible during the working out of the ideas

that comprise this study.

As always I am eternally thankful for the patience and encouragement ofmy family: my wife, Karen, and our children: Erin, Moira, Devin, and Mark,

together with my daughter-in-law, Claudine, and granddaughter, Lucia—

whose precious light of life will forever illuminate those who, like her, seek

to understand.


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Alberti and Cusanus: An Overview

Roberto Rossellini’s lm The Age of Cosimo de’ Medici (1972) pairs the humanist

writer Leon Baista Alberti and the theologian/philosopher Nicholas Cusanus,invoking the storied but undocumented belief that they knew each other.1 He

includes as well the scientist and mapmaker Paolo Toscanelli in the conversation.

During the lm an array of famous artists, writers, political leaders, and

important church gures widens, all thriving and competing under the aegis of

Cosimo’s generous patronage. Among the artists mentioned are Brunelleschi,

Ghiberti, Masaccio, and Donatello, while Michelozzo and Bernardo Rossellino

are actually present. Cosimo himself is the featured political gure along with

allies and enemies, while the archbishop Antoninus makes a brief appearance.

Recently completed art works are viewed, notably Masaccio’s Trinity , and hisTribute Money in the Brancacci Chapel. One of Fra Angelico’s Annunciation

scenes among the cells of San Marco is also visited. Brunelleschi’s dome for

the Cathedral is admired as evidence of the city’s unique creative energy. Even

Alberti’s new façade for Santa Maria Novella eventually makes its debut. We see

a world recreated according to a civic humanist ideal notion of dedication to

church, city, the new learning, and not least, mercantile prosperity.2

Perhaps Rossellini had in mind examples of Florentine Renaissance

painting in joining historical gures together in the same spaces, which so

oen unite saints from disparate time periods, sometimes with contemporaryidentiable personalities.3 Such images evoke the power of memory, binding

past moments into the full conscious present of the inextricably intersecting

1 Karsten Harries opens a recent essay invoking the same lm, “On the Power andPoverty of Perspective,” in Cusanus: The Legacy of Learned Ignorance , ed. Peter J. Casarella(Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 105–26. I rst sketchedout this section prior to reading Harries’s essay and have decided to retain it in as muchas Rossellini’s lm oers such a stunning evocation of both the tenacity of the story ofthis relationship presumed by so many writers, as well as its powerfully suggested civichumanist environment that encompassed these thinkers, despite their seemingly dierentvocations.

2 It is Rossellini’s avowed intention to bring to life a particularly idealizing point ofview regarding the Renaissance.

3 One thinks of Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Benozzo Gozzoli, and Ghirlandaio to name afew of the more prominent artists to include contemporary gures in their images.

1


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domains of the secular and the sacred.4 A particularly provocative scene occurs

before Masaccio’s Trinity (1426–1427). While Alberti and company comment

on its modernity of naturalism and perspective, a nun observing them oers

the opposing view that the artist’s naturalism—his modernity—is shamefully

irreverent, essentially reducing the divine to the mundane. Clearly for the

other protagonists she has missed the point. Yet by introducing her view,which must have been inevitable and therefore historically accurate, Rossellini

has captured the crux of what became a continuous division of how to see

the sacred in the ordinary—a debate that as yet haunts modern viewers,

however sympathetic they may be. Our age certainly appreciates Masaccio’s

accomplishments of naturalism but has perhaps seled with less concern for

the sacred. And though it is unclear whether Rossellini’s Alberti in the lm is

suciently cognizant of the as yet sacred revelations that Masaccio oered, the

Alberti as we may come to understand him would have indeed understood.

Even as Alberti in the lm proclaims the glory of geometry, mathematics,and mapmaking in order to penetrate the essence of creation, Cusanus

responds with the desire to map the heavens, invoking his belief that God

unfolded his unity into the multiplicity of existence, which allows for endless

discovery and progressive knowledge of divine creation. A “coincidence of

opposites” is thereby oered as what nite humanity can know of and about

the innite. In this way Rossellini brings Alberti into direct contact with one

of Cusanus’s most fundamental principles expressed in his text On Learned

Ignorance (1440), no maer that it was wrien aer the presumed date of the

encounters taking place, which begin in 1434 with Alberti’s return to Florencein the entourage of Eugenius IV.

These scenes, like individual paintings, are feigned stories (istorie). Much

as Alberti describes in his text On Painting , the subject to be interpreted in

the scene of a painting is a reworking, a remaking of remembered events;

and as we know even from ordinary experience memory necessarily shapes,

re-assembles, and designs the fragments of what is mostly long gone into

expressions of lessons learned. Memory returns to its fragmentary past and

passes on what is understood to be important. For Rossellini, Cusanus’s and

Alberti’s point is to stimulate creativity, to exercise what Italian humanists(including Alberti) oen refer to as ingegno , meaning the ability to have insight

and create new meaning.5

4 See Michael Silverman, “Rossellini and Leon Baista Alberti: The CenteringPower of Perspective,” Yale Italian Studies 1 (1977): 128–42, in which the author points outthe central importance of Alberti, not only as the protagonist/spokesman for Renaissanceaccomplishments but as the champion of a perspective system that centralizes an interfacingof sacred and secular meaning. While he does not go as far as I will in framing the symbolic,sacred function of single point constructions as used in the Renaissance, his suggestions inthat direction are insightful.

5 Alberti uses the term in his preface to the Italian edition, which is dedicatedto Brunelleschi, and throughout the text. For the Italian, Latin, and English see RoccoSinisgalli, The New De Pictura. On the importance of the meaning of ingegno see ErnestoGrassi, Renaissance Humanism: Studies in Philosophy and Poetics (Binghamton, NY: Center forMedieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1988), 23–34, 67–8.


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Whether artists addressed by Alberti in his treatise On Painting , or

subsequent viewers of their works, all participate in a world visually remade.

Therein, imaginative recreations of sanctioned, traditional stories that are

recognized and in that sense, remembered, encourage transformations

in understanding. Rossellini’s conceit, his ingegno , if you will, allows us to

revel in the complete believability of the exciting and probable intellectualexchange of these important Renaissance thinkers. He creates, to take the

analogy to Renaissance practice even further, a kind of theatrical stage space

hosting a collective series of shiing scenes that constitute known historical

circumstances and places, much like naturalistic eenth century painting

in which history is rewrien, reimagined to accommodate the goals of the

chosen narrative, the istoria , as Alberti himself would conceive it. As in the

works we will examine, so in Rossellini’s rhetorical space actors make real a

reimagined history that expresses their highest goals of intellectual, artistic,

and scientic collaboration for the benet of citizens in their relationship tochurch and city.

Rossellini fashions in this exchange, moreover, a conjectural space in

which we can imagine Cusanus to know Alberti’s On Painting , though this

is unstated, and again the actual dates preclude Alberti having known

Cusanus’s text (1440) at the time of his writing the treatise (1435). Discussion,

nevertheless, of the laer’s notion of a “coincidence of opposites” and the

former’s single point perspective construction constitute what stimulates the

viewer, and certainly this writer, to ponder how they would have developed

those topics.6

There is much that can be said for the intellectual fertility ofsuch an imagined exchange. And, as has oen been pointed out the paths of

these men frequently crossed, in addition to having common friends, lending

credibility to Rossellini’s cinematic conjecture and the possibilities it invokes

regarding what we can hardly resist imagining they thought about and would

have discussed.

Briey, and without pretention to an all-inclusive survey, I will touch on

some of the recent writers and their thoughts that may help us to understand

Rossellini’s choice, and our present concern. Early on, the Italian scholar

Giovanni Santinello summed up the circumstantial evidence of Alberti’sand Cusanus’s relationship in an appendix to his book on Alberti in 1962.7

He recounts how they could have known each other through friends and

aliations with the papal court, within the circumstances surrounding

the councils of Ferrara and Florence (Rossellini’s context) during the years

6 Harries, pointing to the exchange between Cusanus and Alberti does not advocatefor their ideas being similar (“Power and Poverty,” 105). Of particular interest to this essay,and as Harries points out but does not develop in the way I will, is Cusanus’s notion ofa coincidence of opposites and Alberti’s description of the single point perspectiveconstruction. They are, in my view, very much one like the other as I will argue inChapter 4. Cusanus did own a copy of Alberti’s shorter treatise on The Elements of Painting ,

but there is no discussion of the development of perspective in this work.7 “Nicolo Cusano e Leon Baista Alberti: Pensieri sul Bello e sull’Arte,” Appendice

to Leon Baista Alberti: Una Visione Estetica del Mondo e della Vita (Florence: Sansoni, 1962),265–96.


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1438–1439 and the jubilee in Rome in 1450, as well as during Cusanus’s frequent

Roman stays between 1459 and 1464.8 Consequently, one can assume, or easily

imagine, the probability of their encounters,9 though the trail of evidence

seems to have stopped short of anything more conrming than their having

circulated among a tightly knit group of prominent intellectual, religious, and

political leaders.More important than the elusive proof of their acquaintance, Santinello

brings to life the environment in which to understand what Alberti and

Cusanus had in common, concentrating on their thoughts about beauty

and art.10 Among modern writers Santinello is most helpful, discerning a

concordance of thought distinctly esthetical and speculative (Pensieri sul

Bello), which stems from their common Pythagorean, Neoplatonic cultural

heritage. He nds that for Cusanus beauty in the world is not merely the idea

of God in an abstract sense but that “the world is the work of art of God.”11

For Alberti, whom he seems to see as a lile more disposed to the technicaland less to the speculative,12 Santinello, nevertheless, recognizes that he too

“knows how to nd the right moment in which to elevate the concrete to the

abstract in order to illuminate and understand the concrete itself.”13

He cites, for example, a passage from Alberti’s On Painting where he argues,

according to the model of Zeuxis, that to capture ideal female beauty the artist

must study not one example but many, creating a composite idea of beauty.14

Santinello seems to see them approaching the problem of locating the essence

of beauty by moving to and from physical reality of the world in dierent

directions: Cusanus starting from an unknown, unseable God, Alberti from

8 Giovanni Santinello, “Nicolo Cusano e Leon Baista Alberti: Pensieri sul Belloe sull’Arte,” Appendice to Leon Baista Alberti: Una Visione Estetica del Mondo e della Vita(Florence: Sansoni, 1962), 265–6.

9 In addition to Santinello’s recounting see also D.R. Edward Wright,Il De picturadi Leon Baista Alberti e I Suoi Leori (1435–1600) (Florence: Olschki, 2010), 69–108, whichincludes some interesting and promising suggestions on the relationship between Traversariand Alberti; two works by Kurt Flasch, “Nicolò Cusano e Leon Baista Alberti,” in Ingeniumn. 3, Leon Baista Alberti e Il Quarocento: Studi in Onore di Cecil Grayson e Ernst Gombrich , ed.Luca Chiavoni, Gianfranco Ferlisi, Maria Vioria Grassi (Cià di Castello: Olschki, 2001),

371–80, and “Cusano e gli intellectuali italiani del Quarocento,” in Cesare Vasoli: Le losoedel Rinascimento , ed. Paolo Costantino Pissavino, 175–92. In each case Flasch gives a broadoverview of the historiography of works proposing the similarities and dierences betweenAlberti and Cusanus, including detailed accounting of how their lives intersected. See alsoDermot Moran, “Nicholas of Cusa and Modern Philosophy,” 173–93, an excellent overviewof Cusanus’s life and philosophy. Most recently see Morimichi Watanabe, Nicholas of Cusa: ACompanion to His Life and His Times , ed. Gerald Christianson, Thomas M. Izbicki (Farnham:Ashgate Press, 2011).

10 See also Graziella Federici Vescovini, “Nicholas of Cusa, Alberti and theArchitectonics of the Mind,” Nexus ll: Architecture and Mathematics (Fucecchio: Edizionidell’Erba, 1998): 159–71. Perhaps the fullest and most concise review of the question is given

by Flasch, “Nicolò Cusano e Leon Baista Alberti,” 371–80.11 Santinello, “Pensieri,” 275: “Il mondo è quindi l’opera d’arte di Dio.”12 Santinello, “Pensieri,” 268: “nell’Alberti da una prospeiva tecnica, cioè della tecnica

artistica; nel Cusano da una prospeiva speculativa, metasico-teologica.”13 Santinello, “Pensieri,” 276: “Tuavia l’ingegno dell’Alberti sa sempre trovare il

momento felice in cui la meditazione si eleva dal concreto all’astrao per illuminare edintendere il concreto stesso.”

14 Santinello, “Pensieri,” 283–4. See Sinisgalli,The New De Pictura , 255.


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the physically known world. Santinello notes that though “one certainly is

not able to speak of a Platonism of Alberti in the same way as that of Cusanus,

certainly an element of the platonic is operative”;15 nonetheless, both seem

“to sense the reality and value of beauty as transcendent of its physical,

natural manifestation, and in this way we believe to have found an element

of Platonism, at lease implicit in Alberti that approaches that which is explicitin Cusanus.”16 Moreover, for each he imputes an interest in the underlying

essence of human creativity as a manifestation of a divine-likeness. Both men

are interested in perceiving reality from the standpoint of nature understood

as creative process, natura naturans , rather than nature understood from

deductive observation, natura naturata. Art for both, Santinello asserts, “is

imitation of the opera operante more than it is of theopera operata of nature.”17

Art as analogous to nature, or God’s creative process, signals a notion of art

as more than merely a rendering of nature as it seems to be at any observable

moment. For Santinello, both Alberti and Cusanus emphasize visualizingwhat may not be visible—God’s continuing creation in which mankind has a

share.18 This is a view with which I deeply concur, and which is important to

understand. It diers fundamentally from views that stress Renaissance art as

a kind of anthropomorphic drive toward copying what the eye sees. Again,

while a secularizing view is not hegemonic, my concern is that such a tendency

(and I will point out cases) clouds what I will argue is more fundamental—the

stimulus to theological visuality.19 Along the lines of Santinello’s point of view I

will aempt to elucidate that Alberti does suggest painting embraces a divine-

like creative process. Important, as well, is not so much the product, as the wayin which the object produced springs from and stimulates understanding of an

originating force or process through which things come into being—ultimately

the result of exercising image-likeness to God, one’s Imago Dei. This implication

of realities not directly seen in one’s ordinary visual experience is for Alberti

and Cusanus manifest in their mutual recognition of the importance of

number, proportion, and harmony. Santinello, again in an insightful and lile

recognized observation, brings this common thread together around Alberti’s

discussion of the single point, geometric perspective in his Della piura.

With its emphasis on mathematical laws and the importance of seing theproportions of the structure according to those of an ideal man, he compares

15 Santinello, “Pensieri,” 284: “Non si può certamente parlare di un platonismodell’Alberti alla stessa stregua di quello del Cusano; ma certo un elemento platonico èoperante …”

16 Santinello, “Pensieri,” 285: “Però abbiamo avuto modo di rilevare che anche l’Albertisentì la realtà ed il valore della bellezza come trascendenti le loro manifestazioni naturali,ed in questo crediamo di ritovare un elemento platonico, almeno implicito, che avvicina ilpensatore italiano al platonismo explicito del losofo germanico.”

17 Santinello, “Pensieri,” 293: “l’arte è imitazione dell’ opera operante prima che dell’opera operata della natura.”

18 Santinello, “Pensieri,” 275.19 On can nd in Peter Brown’sSociety and the Holy in Late Antiquity (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1982) a salutary examination of the importance of thefundamental impulse in developing Christian societies of the need to value the viability ofthe unseen presence in what came to be holy.


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Alberti’s perspective scheme and Cusanus’s characterization of God’s vision in

De visione Dei (On The Vision of God) (1453).

Much as I think this is an important comparison, and will develop my

understanding of it in Chapter 4, I am, however, not in accord with the

direction Santinello’s takes. Rehearsing Cusanus’s account of how the eyes

of God in an icon follow all the monks looking at it no maer their positionor motion, he argues that this perspective is dierent from that of Alberti,

which is governed by more rigid laws of optics and geometry. Exactly here

we encounter an early example of the tendency to see Alberti in terms more

rational than metaphysical. For Alberti, Santinello records, what is seen—and

in that sense what will become the subject painted—is received by the eye in

the form of a pyramid of rays. In which case, necessarily, “the point of view

is that of the human observer.”20 Moreover, since humans only see a scene

in nature (again what will constitute the image transmied to the surface of

the painting) from one angle at a time the viewer is essentially xed at thatideal viewing position. Consequently, where Cusanus’s perspective derives

from God’s omnivoyant viewing, Alberti’s is derived from limited human

viewing.21 Santinello goes on to discuss that in spite of this dierence, both

Cusanus and Alberti always utilize a subjective, imaginative aspect that the

viewer (now painter) employs to enhance what is seen. In this way he returns

to see the two men as sharing a larger goal of seeking to employ the idea of

vision as a way to discern deeper or higher meaning.

What I disagree with has to do with Santinello’s comparison of the use

of perspective: On the one hand, the monks see the eyes of God in the iconfollowing them wherever they go, heuristically capturing His mystical innite

seeing that is beyond ordinary human capacity; on the other hand, Alberti’s

seeing accords to the pyramid of vision where one sees only one angle at a

time. Santinello does not address what becomes in Alberti’s construction the

pyramid of perspective, that is, what is projected as a pyramid onto the surface

of the painting (Figure 1.1). For this pyramid is one that extends to innity

and therefore, as I will argue later, is precisely what ought to be compared

to Cusanus’s vision of God. Moreover, the eect of this construction with its

apex at innity is that it follows the viewer, much as the vision of God does forCusanus. The problem with Santinello’s comparison, therefore, is not the sense

of understanding a shared goal, but in his conception of Alberti’s perspective,

which he only conceives in terms of how the eye sees nature. What ends up

missing then is the fact that the pyramid of perspective extends to innity

(actually “almost as if to innity”) (quasi persino in innito)22 creating an

opposition to the nite pyramid of vision. Alberti’s new perspective, in my

view, is rather more like Cusanus’s.23

20 Santinello, “Pensieri,” 289: “Il punto di vista è quello dell’osservatore umano.”21 Santinello, “Pensieri,” 289.22 The translation is mine, slightly dierent from Spencer, Alberti On Painting , 56, and

Sinisgalli, The New De Pictura , 145.23 This describes the “robustness” of geometric perspective (and naturalistically

rendered three-dimensional space in general), which will be discussed more fully in Chapter 4.


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Among others who discuss Alberti and Cusanus more recently isKarsten Harries, where, in his aforementioned article, he too raises the

issue of perspective as a common ground.24 Also tracing the outlines of the

crisscrossing paths of Alberti and Cusanus, he suggests that a “shared interest

in mathematics would thus appear to have been one thing that joined Cusanus

and Alberti, their interest in the power of perspective another.”25 And while

we both seem to see Rossellini’s lm as a platform for seing the discussion of

what these men had in common, his assumptions about Alberti’s perspective

are quite dierent from my own. “I, too [as he suspects Rossellini to have

thought], understand Alberti as one of the founders of our modern world,a world whose material wealth is shadowed by spiritual poverty.”26 While

Alberti’s foundations pregure, for Harries, the path towards a poverty of

perception, Cusanus’s hold out hope still for understanding how to look, how

to understand that “in the visible world experiences of the beautiful open

windows to the transcendent ground of our knowing.”27 This is an elegant

expression of what Cusanus oers in his constant and clear assertions for

seeing in the world, and especially for seeing in the things created by mankind

the reection of creativity that is divine in origin. But what of the idea of

Alberti’s perspective interpreted as “spiritual poverty?”The method of argumentation here seems to rebound between physical

reality as experienced through the senses—Alberti—and higher perceptions

about the nature of that sense experience that is not only intellectual but results

from the Imago Dei principle—Cusanus. If created in the image and likeness

of God, it is then mankind’s intellect that aords him creativity akin to that of

God: Cusanus points simultaneously toward the material world’s wealth and

beyond toward the spiritual wealth of creative originality. Alberti, on the other

hand, seems not to have such perspective, focusing more emphatically on the

24 Harries, “Cusanus and Alberti.”25 Harries, “Cusanus and Alberti,” 106.26 Harries, “Cusanus and Alberti,” 107–8.27 Harries, “Cusanus and Alberti,” 125.

1.1 Modelfor pyramidsof vision andperspectivespace, based onLeon Battista

Alberti. Mutualinterpretation offinite and infinite.Author’s diagram


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world as it is. For Harries, Alberti’s perspective scheme—its introduction of

mathematical and geometric measuring—is to be associated with aempts to

precisely capture what is seen from a human, anthropocentric, perspective:

man is the measure. Moreover, Harries concludes that “artful pictorial illusion

invites us to mistake it for reality and to forget its merely articial being.”28

The assumption seems to be that Alberti’s intention is primarily to createillusion , even to the extent that “the artist usurps the place of God, substituting

for God’s creation his own.”29 Both Alberti and Cusanus use mathematics and

geometry, though the laer’s employment of such tools is seen rightly to lead

to comprehending eternal as well as ephemeral existence: here is the power

of perspective. Alberti’s use of the same tools does not lead to comprehending

the supernal: and here is the poverty of perspective. And with this we have

moved far from Santinello’s perception that Alberti and Cusanus worked

towards a common goal.

The very discussion of these two seminal Renaissance thinkers, one clearlymore theological than the other, naturally evokes consideration of the sense

that the Renaissance as “Early Modern” contains the kind of tension that

Harries sees and even Santinello senses. If these views serve as models for

how Cusanus’s and Alberti’s outlooks are compared, I would concur mostly

with Santinello’s. And though I don’t think he takes his understanding of

Alberti’s perspective far enough, he has laid the ground for thinking of Alberti

and Cusanus as similar rather than as fundamentally dierent.30 What I will

argue in the following chapters is that we can see Alberti and Cusanus in a

more closely related fashion. Particularly, it is my understanding that Alberti’sperspective functions rather more than less like that of Cusanus. But, before

continuing to variously unfold my arguments, let me suggest the importance

of two other major contributions to the discussion of Alberti and Cusanus,

which are still useful and basic texts. The rst is Joan Gadol’s book on Alberti.31

She too reminds us of the circle of friends that Alberti and Cusanus shared, 32

but it is the depth of her approach to Alberti that seems to me to pave the way

to a fuller sense of what the two men held in common.33

Cusanus is not the focus of the work, but the following characterization of

Alberti’s approach suggests a fruitful starting point for re-investigating hisideas vis-à-vis those of Cusanus. In her Epilogue: The Measure of the Man , Gadol

compares him to late eenth-century thinkers: “His conception of man’s

rational development, as growing into a kind of earthly god, foreshadows

28 Harries, “Cusanus and Alberti,” 110. See also by Harries,Innity and Perspective (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001). For a similar view see Anthony Graon, Leon Baista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

29 Harries, “Cusanus and Alberti,” 110.30 See Santinello’s concluding remarks on the similarities between Alberti and Cusanus,

“Pensieri,” 295–6.31 Joan Gadol,Leon Baista Alberti: Universal Man of the Early Renaissance (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1969).32 Gadol, Alberti , 196–7 (note 68 includes an excursus on their mutual friends and

probable relationship).33 Gadol, Alberti , 18, does not discuss Santinello’s analysis of Alberti and Cusanus,

though she does outline what she sees as the limitations of this view of Alberti.


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Pico della Mirandola’s famous oration which grounds human dignity in the

spiritual activity of self-formation.”34 Alberti’s “theory of art,” she continues,

“as a symbolic embodiment of Nature’s intelligible forms is likewise caught

up in Ficino’s idealistic theory of man who ‘recognizes’ the Divine Ideas and

reconstitutes them in art as well as in thought.” This, it seems to me, ts well

with the following statement coming a few lines later where she compareshim still to Ficino who, she says

found cosmological signicance in the logical act by which the mind drawstogether the concrete and the abstract in its syntheses of thought and art. As artistand thinker, man nds the disparate order of things, his divinely implanted ideascorresponding harmoniously to the actual structure of the world.35

All this is framed, however, by the position that Alberti’s thought avoided

philosophical and metaphysical speculation, which certainly Ficino and Pico

did not. I am certain that there is truth to that distinction. Yet, my inclination isnot to make one. For inasmuch as Alberti was neither expressly a philosopher

nor a theologian, he writes, nevertheless, from a cultural point of view not

yet divested of an inherent theological grounding, a point that I will discuss

extensively in the following chapters.36

Parenthetically, I do not want to suggest that Alberti was a Neoplatonist like

Ficino or Pico, or even that he was driven to explore justication of theological

principles, but rather that like the Florentine Neoplatonists, like Cusanus,

and like humanists in general he shared notions of mankind’s responsibility

in earthly, specically civic, activity.37 Therein, it is important, still, that moral justications of the virtue necessary to fulll that responsibility resided

inevitably in one’s relationship to God, indeed in a responsibility to God that

was recognized to indwell, and even to dene the soul of the city, its essence

as a Heavenly Jerusalem.38 This was a notion of responsibility to be realized

through interaction with material reality for the purpose of being God-like,

being creative, doing good work, fullling a spiritual obligation. In that sense,

at least, I believe Alberti can be shown to share much with both civic humanism

and with Neoplatonists of the later century.39 My more specic concern, once

34 Gadol, Alberti , 231–2. Her starting point is Cristoforo Landino’s DisputationumCamaldulensium , ca. 1468 that includes Alberti among the dialogue’s participants.

35 Gadol, Alberti , 232.36 It is worth noting regarding the issue of Alberti’s concern with the spiritual that he

was a priest, though not active.37 On Alberti’s relationship to Florentine humanism see Timothy Kircher,Living Well in

Renaissance Italy: The Virtues of Humanism and the Irony of Leon Baista Alberti (Tempe: ArizonaCenter for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012).

38 On Florence as a Heavenly Jerusalem see, for example, Donald Weinstein, “TheMyth of Florence,” Florentine Studies: Politics and Society in Renaissance Florence , ed. NicolaiRubenstein (London: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 15–44; and Savonarola: The Riseand Fall of a Renaissance Prophet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).

39 Regarding the notion of “civic humanism,” see most recently the essays inRenaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reections , ed. James Hankins (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2000); John M. Najemy, A History of Florence: 1200–1575 (Singapore: Blackwell, 2006); and Albert Rabil, Jr., “The Signicance of ‘Civic Humanism’in the Interpretation of the Italian Renaissance,” in Renaissance Humanism: Foundations,


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again, will be to read his Della piura from the standpoint of its inherent

philosophical/theological underpinnings, and to examine how that is evident

in painting. My second concern is how Alberti’s thinking coincides with that

of Cusanus, especially as they share notions of vision as a basis of knowing.40

What, however, did Joan Gadol say of Alberti’s art theory? What was its

relationship to his instructions to the painter in Della piura , to his uniquespatial construction? It is interesting that in light of the kind of concluding

remarks considered above the author introduces her work by distinguishing

Alberti, the Alberti she wishes to reveal, from previous views that tended to see

his work as not unied and responding either to a scientic or a metaphysical

aim. Rather, she sees that:

For Alberti, however, there was as yet no such division between the ‘inner’ andthe ‘outer’ world … ‘Science’ and humanism were not conicted in directions ofthought for him, but dierent aspects of one intellectual vision and pursuit …

We shall [she soon continues] recover the ‘inner logic’ of one of the mostcomprehensive spirits of the early Renaissance.41

In fact she had already told us, just prior to this what the ‘inner logic’

consisted of, if not how it was derived:

ideas of measure, harmony, and proportion, ideas that bespeak a moral andintellectual outlook quite at variance with the conicts, disparateness, and despairthat have been aributed to him; … they point towards a systematic unity thatunderlies and adequately explains the diversity of his many achievements.42

I very much agree, yet when she goes on to explain The Painter’s Perspective

(chapter 1), we nd that Alberti “was not concerned with ontology,” and that

he “was bound to reality qua appearance or phenomenon,” then proceeding

to “the momentous assumption that appearances conform to the rules of

simple, plane geometry.”43 Perhaps most to the point, she indicates that Alberti

Forms, and Legacy , 1 Humanism in Italy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,1988), 141–74. On Neoplatonism see Arthur Field, The Origins of the Platonic Academy of

Florence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); and James Hankins,Plato in the ItalianRenaissance (Leiden: Brill, 1991). For Neoplatonism and the arts see, for example, JohnHendrix, Platonic Architectonics: Platonic Philosophy and the Visual Arts (New York: Peter Lang,2004); and Neoplatonic Aesthetics: Music, Literature, and the Visual Arts , ed. Liana De GirolamiCheney, John Hendrix (New York: Peter Lang, 2004).

40 Many scholars have pointed to a certain level of cynicism among contemporaryhumanists, including and especially Alberti. During what was a prolonged period of crisisstemming from the Papacy’s tenure in Avignon through the years following its restitution inRome, there was much to question about the sincerity and eectiveness of the church thatperhaps widened the gap between lay secular concerns and traditional theology. Amongthe approaches to situating Alberti, that of Timothy Kircher’s Living Well presents Alberti asgenuinely concerned with dening real virtue within the realm of existential reality thoughnot divorced from the fundamental moral charge of being a Christian. See also RiccardoFubini, Humanism and Secularization: From Petrarch to Valla (Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress, 2003).

41 Gadol, Alberti , 19. See the entire “Introduction” for discussion of prior viewsincluding Santinello’s.

42 Gadol, Alberti , 19.43 Gadol, Alberti , 28.


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wished to join abstract mathematical principles to something sensuous—

that is, to concretize them, join them with the phenomenal world, which he

expressly insists be a union guided by wisdom (Minerva). Yet, the author does

not account for what that wisdom is. And here lie essential questions: what

does Alberti mean by wisdom, where does it come from, and how does its

relationship with the sensuous world manifest itself? If, as Gadol suggests,like many later authors, Alberti’s new perspective denes a new artistic aim

that “was no longer to refer to something that transcends experience, but to

represent visual experience itself,”44 then, this does not address a concern

with what I will argue he understood by “wisdom.” In this regard we can see

emerging in the historiography of Alberti (whether also discussing Cusanus or

not), along with Santinello (to a degree) and with Harries (to a greater degree)

what I have suggested is a more or less anthropomorphic view of the role of

art. I will say more on this when discussing in greater detail the conicting

notions of the meaning of single point perspective in Chapter 4, but it is worthmentioning here that, for example, two fairy recent and prominent works,

another by Harries,45 and the other by Anthony Graon,46 both nd Alberti to

be paradigmatic of a modern rational outlook. And while they are not alone,

others we will discover also argue vigorously for a purely rational view of

single point perspective, defenders of a more metaphysical outlook have a

voice as well in this dichotomous judging of perspective.47

For the present, however, returning to the discussion of Gadol’s work,

if we take Alberti’s concern with wisdom seriously I do not think it could

be reduced to a material maer. Perhaps before asking what wisdom is, thequestion ought to be: what is or how is visual experience? If it only concerns

something in and of itself, then we have to reconcile that with Alberti’s

evidently ambiguous phrase that introduces the entire question, his notion

of “a greater sensate wisdom” (la piú grassa Minerva).48 Though variously

translated I am in agreement with those who take Minerva as a reference to

wisdom, which if correct calls into question what he means by a “sensate

wisdom.”49 Even more fundamentally we have to consider his notion of

how looking or seeing constitutes a basic understanding of painting as a

creative art. He has very intriguing things to say in this regard, seeminglycontradictory things that play o the tensions set up by his intention that the

painter be concerned with that “greater sensate wisdom”! On the one hand,

Alberti claims that “painting is in fact the ower of all the arts.”50 Yet when he

44 Gadol, Alberti , 103–4. Here the author is extrapolating from Alberti’s De architectura ,which she nds more developed in terms of explicit art theory. In contrast she nds Della piura “to not yet express any new theoretical development” (131).

45 Harries,Innity and Perspective.46 Graon,Leon Baista Alberti.47 The reader is referred again to Elkins’sPoetics of Perspective for a most comprehensive

bibliography and discussion of views regarding perspective.48 This is John Spencer’s translation. See hisLeon Baista Alberti On Painting (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 43.49 For a fuller discussion, see Chapter 2.50 Sinisgalli,The New De Pictura , 162, “ché già sia la piura ore d’ogni arte.”


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comes to describe the invention of painting he credits Narcissus, famous for

his aachment to self as a material sensuous/sensual araction. We know that

Narcissus in Ovid’s account was metamorphosed into a ower, which Alberti

acknowledges, but how does this claim square with his previous association of

painting with Minerva—that is, wisdom? Moreover, how do these references

function in framing the ensuing discussion of a geometric space? Here tooI will argue that they function dialectically, even ironically, to challenge the

centrality of a materialist naturalism, and to foster an understanding of what

resides unseen within the visible world.

But, again to Gadol, it is not my intention to say that she is entirely wrong.

More than anything it is to suggest that there is a tension in seeing Alberti

as “scientist” and “humanist,” a tension that indeed Gadol noticed.51 It is

not one that she resolves, however, at least not in the discussion of Alberti’s

view of perspective. This, I believe, is because she sees his treatise as

fundamentally guided by a drive towards rationality. It pervades her work,and that of many modern writers—certainly Harries and Graon, though

less so Santinello—and stands in the way of recognizing that Alberti, like

other humanists, did not see the world so much in rational terms as in

metaphorical/poetical terms.52 It is striking, for example, here and elsewhere

that there is precious lile discussion of how perspective functions to

illuminate the religious subject maer that it so oen articulates.53 The

importance of Alberti’s sense of a moral and theological concern only

emerges with any force in the laer sections of her book when discussing his

general philosophical outlook, which she considers to be inseparable fromhis contemporary religious environment. I will argue that it is precisely that

environment of a humanistic, theological nature that embraces and nurtures

a dialectical relationship between the objectivity of physical vision and the

subjectivity of spiritual vision.

One does not in the eenth century sensuously or intellectually objectify

the essence of anything spiritual. How would that be done to Christ, the

Trinity, the Virgin Mary, or any compilation of holy images? Their “reality”

can only be constituted by some belief in transcendence of the material,

objectively reasoned existence as it is experienced by humanity. Nevertheless,I do not mean that images of holy gures do not take on a naturalistic, or

51 For a fascinating and brilliantly informed discussion of the role of “science” and itsmeaning in understanding astrology and astronomy functioning in God’s universe to aecthuman aairs, see Mary Quinlan-McGrath, Inuences: Art, Optics, and Astrology in the ItalianRenaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

52 For an enlightening discussion of Alberti’s poetic tendencies within the well knowtradition of Florentine poetics, especially regarding Petrarch and Boccaccio, see TimothyKircher, Living Well , 187–223.

53 Samuel Y. Edgerton is a notable exception, for example in his most recent workThe Mirror, the Window, and the Telescope: How Renaissance Linear Perspective Changed Our Vision ofthe Universe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009); as is S.K. Heninger Jr.,The Subtext of Formin the English Renaissance: Proportion Poetical (University Park: University of PennsylvaniaPress, 1994). So, too, is Leo Steinberg’s Incessant Last Supper (New York: Zone Books, 2001),which recognizes the theologically symbolic aspects of Leonardo’s use of perspective. Alsonotable in this regard is Nicholas Temple’s Disclosing Horizons: Architecture, Perspective andRedemptive Space (New York: Routledge, 2007).


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if one insists “objective” characteristic—that is, that they appear more or

less as we appear to each other. They do, but always in a problematized

fashion, in a way that causes one to think beyond any simple identication

with material meaning. Certainly there is scholarship, art historical and

otherwise, that has been guided by an understanding of these parameters,

as has been mentioned above and in notes, and which will be called forthto support my own arguments. Still, what concerns me in this study is the

degree to which Alberti has been seen in rationalizing terms, especially

regarding analysis of his book On Painting , a concern addressed in the

chapters that follow. What I believe we will nd and what needs emphasis

within this obviously new art of the Renaissance is that its naturalism is

simultaneously leveraged, manipulated metaphorically to cause one to

“see” through apparent material reality to a higher transcendent truth

signaled by the gures depicted and the way the stories they constitute are

composed. A modern rationalistic, scientic notion of reality was not yet born and I will argue that it is not the meaning to be found in Alberti’s

On Painting. And while one might argue that Renaissance humanism led

to anthropomorphism, I would think it more fruitful to suggest that it did

not. Something may have become of the humanism that was constituted

and practiced during Alberti’s period, but that was later and evidently

lasting, aaching a tension to notions of humanism itself and certainly to

the meaning of single point perspective.54

Among the more modern works on Alberti, especially regarding his book On

Painting , in my view Gadol’s is the nest. I believe this even though it conveysa dualistic view of Alberti and Humanism and in spite of her eorts to see

an integrated, holistic gure.55 The eort to examine Alberti’s formulation of

a geometric perspective, together with discussions of intellectual similarities

to Cusanus will, I hope help to foster and buress a sense of unity to Alberti

and the general humanist, artistic eort to visualize the sacred within the

secular. I would be remiss, however, not to mention at least briey one other

54 Harries, “Cusanus and Alberti,” sees the turning point in Descartes, but also

beginning in Alberti (107–11). Moreover, Erwin Panofsky’s seminal text, Perspective asSymbolic Form , trans. Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1997) seems to haveinherited the kind of tension implied in seeing perspective as spiritual and yet inherentlyanthropomorphic, a division I will take up at the end of Chapter 4. On the topic of a turnto science and objectication of the universe that splits the spiritual and the rational andthe reaction of European artists of the seventeenth century, see Ths Weststen, The VisibleWorld: Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Art Theory and the Legitimation of Paining in the Dutch Golden Age , trans. Beverley Jackson and Lynne Richards (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UniversityPress, 2008).

55 This seems to be typical as we noted in citing Harries,Innity and Perspective , andGraon, Alberti: Master Builder. More positive in viewing Alberti’s relationship to advancinghumanist, moral imperatives is M. Barry Katz, Leon Baista Alberti and The Humanist Theoryof the Arts (Washington, DC: The Catholic University Press of America, 1977). Most recentlysee Kircher’s Living Well (6), where he assigns a unique role for Alberti in relationship tohumanism, one critical of humanist pretensions to virtue: “Alberti’s irony focused on thehuman proclivity to deception and self-deception, and exposed the contradiction withinhumanism between appearances and reality. It identied the gap between the phenomenaof cultural authority and their actual value, between the pretension of moral wisdom andgenuine ignorance.”


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important work that takes a broad humanistic view of Alberti, by Dorothy

Koenigsberger.56 Without developing Alberti’s concept of perspective in any

detail she does capture some essence of its importance by emphasizing that

its geometry lent a theoretical quality and signaled a direct relationship with

nature’s underlying geometrical structure and therefore is reective of a

divine universal harmony.57

Moreover, she sees Alberti’s view of harmony in nature, as well as his

positing of an innite space (the point at innity in his pyramid of perspective)

to be analogous to Cusanus’s view of nature as harmoniously organized in

relationship to the innite divine.58 Perhaps most importantly, Koenigsberger

perceives Alberti’s thinking process as similar to what she refers to as

Cusanus’s “knowing power in the mind.”59 Although not developed in the

detail that I will aempt, she relates this to Alberti’s perspective scheme,

which posits an innity, and to Cusanus, who posits God as innity. Her

perception embraces the notion that Alberti intends the viewer to struggle tosee the innite (ultimately God) just as Cusanus did, who explicitly sets this

relationship within the context of mankind’s inability to actually know the

innite while at the same time nding it necessary to exercise the power of

the ability to apprehend God, which is realized in ever greater degrees in the

comprehension of His creation—that is, nature. Indeed, apparently for each

“the mind is made so that its seeing is an image of God’s knowing.”60 I believe

that her perceptions are accurate and in terms of a broad approach to Alberti,

Cusanus, and the Renaissance (and in no small measure to art, especially

regarding Leonardo), I nd my views bear out much of what she intimates.61

Regarding my sense of how Alberti and Cusanus express important

aspects of a Renaissance epistemology of vision, I mention here the following

interpretive works that more exclusively embrace the works of Cusanus.

Most helpful have been Clyde Lee Miller’s Reading Cusanus in a Conjectural

Universe;62 Nancy Hudson’s Becoming God: The Doctrine of Theosis in Nicholas of

Cusa ,63 as well as numerous articles dealing with aspects of the various texts

of Cusanus, which will appear in citations throughout the following chapters.

56 Dorothy Koenigsberger,Renaissance Man and Creative Thinking: A History of Conceptsof Harmony 1400–1700 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979).

57 Koenigsberger,Renaissance Man , 39, passim.58 Koenigsberger,Renaissance Man , 115, also relates this train of thought to the

importance of the Christian Neo-Platonic tradition and extends this inuence in importantways to the art and thought of Leonardo da Vinci: “Alberti and Leonardo appear to havetaken their assumptions about the powers and processes of the human mind from Cusa.”Greater emphasis is placed throughout, however, on a closer, even direct inuence betweenCusanus and Leonardo.

59 Koenigsberger,Renaissance Man , 121.60 Koenigsberger,Renaissance Man, 118. She refers in this section to Cusanus’sOn

Learned Ignorance in relation to Alberti’s On Painting.61 I will return to Koenigsberger’s work at various points, especially regarding her

recognition of the importance of the meaning of the “point” (as in point, line, surface, etc.) asan idea that ultimately references divine origin. See Chapter 3.

62 Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy 37 (Washington, DC: The CatholicUniversity Press of America, 2003).

63 (Washington, DC: The Catholic University Press of America, 2007).


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Though these studies treat Cusanus as a theologian and philosopher, and for

the most part do not touch on his relationship with Alberti or with painting,

they are instructive in oering broadly useful ways of understanding how

Cusanus brings God and humanity into a necessary dialectical relationship.

I found Miller’s work particularly informative in the way he pulls together

Cusanus’s writing around the theme of conjecturing—that is, aempting toput into metaphorical terms what is beyond reason and rational vision:

Knowers are always making new proposals and constructing dierent conceptualand verbal metaphors and symbols as they engage the created and uncreatedrealities they yearn to know. Nicholas’ best metaphors, whether for God or theuniverse, involve thinking moving through and beyond varying perspectiveswhile remaining aware that our progress and any resulting understanding areprovisional. The theoretical world Nicholas constructs, especially in philosophicaltheology, is thus always conjectural, always metaphorical, and always dialectical.64

Alberti too, as I have suggested already, set forth a perspective (in both

the broad sense of seeing into, and in the specic seeing into of single point,

geometric perspective) that is metaphorical and dialectical in nature. There is

much to draw upon in both writers to bear this out.

Hudson’s work is particularly illuminating, as she develops the guiding

theological notions of theosis and theophany:

Just as theosis is a transformative movement returning the created order toGod, it is matched by an outward movement of divine self-manifestation. This

movement, known as theophany, is foundational to theosis because of the originalunitive relationship between the two orders that it establishes.65

The complementary nature of salvation as humanity moves towards God

and His manifestation within creation and especially as the Logos in being

(Christ) empowers the ability to achieve a return. All this, I will argue,

is fundamental to what Alberti implies about how vision is understood to

facilitate the interaction of God’s immanence and humanity’s share in it. This

relationship is essential, moreover, for understanding how naturalism in

general functions not just to capture the world as seen but also as an avenue

towards glimpsing God’s imminent presence. Both Alberti and Cusanus share

a sense of this dialectical vision that depends exactly upon the interrelationship

of theosis and theophany as Hudson explains it.

Another work that has greatly reinforced the direction of my thinking in

these essays is Elizabeth Brient’s The Immanence of the Innite: Hans Blumenberg

and the Threshold to Modernity.66 Here we nd a very targeted thesis that

refutes, on the one hand, Blumberg’s justication of the modern world as a

nal resolution to the dualism of man/God, maer/spirit (his notion of the

persistence and power of Gnosticism) by the “realization of this-worldly

64 Miller,Reading Cusanus , 248.65 Hudson,Becoming God , 9.66 (Washington, DC: The Catholic University Press of America, 2002).


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possibilities through the mastery and alteration of reality.”67 On the other

hand, her argument seeks to uphold the ancient Greek notion of Cosmos as

developed through the Middle Ages in Neoplatonism, including importantly

Cusanus, as the force that keeps man/God, body/spirit in a functioning

relationship: “indeed, throughout the Christian tradition emphasis on divine

transcendence was at the same time balanced with a corresponding emphasison divine immanence.”68

Brient, Hudson, Miller, Gadol, Koenigsberger, and Santinello in my reading,

help to frame the context of much of what I argue in this project regarding

Alberti and Cusanus: that the Renaissance as articulated in the works of

Alberti (especially his On Painting) need not be understood as a turning

point in the development of a secularist, materialist epistemology—at least

as implied by some of the prominent modern authors we have noted—and

that the ideas found in his work and in the visual manifestations of a theology

depicted in worldly, or naturalistic, terms need not seem at odds, one with theother. The overarching point that I am seeking to stress is that the Renaissance

is not so much a beginning of anthropocentrism as it is a point of discovering

how the divine is perceived to be evident in the natural world, allowing it

to serve as the avenue to the improvement of human life and ultimately to

transcendence in the aerlife. All of this seems to me to strengthen the need to

know how that functions in Alberti’s ideas about painting and in works of art

that so ubiquitously display the divine in naturalistic guise, which leads me

to the following section.

The Reality of Nature and the Nature of Reality: Reassessing Renaissance

Notions of Vision

Having outlined some of the fundamental concerns of this study along with

inuential historical views on Alberti and Cusanus, I want to establish rst

what is perhaps most fundamental: the meaning of “nature” as it applies to

our understanding of Italian Renaissance art and culture. Is “nature,” for the

Renaissance, the physical substance of reality, or can it refer to a conception ofunderlying laws? If the laer, “nature” is not so much what is grasped by the

senses as it is what is understood by the mind. This, of course, reects a long

tradition that reached an evident level of maturation in early eenth-century

humanism, but which was certainly present in the late medieval period.69

67 Brient,Immanence of the Innite , 9–10.68 Brient,Immanence of the Innite�

Visual Culture in Early Modernity.

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Transcript of Visual Culture in Early Modernity.