Renaissance Theories of Vision

Charles H. Carman, John Shannon Hendrix, Charles H. Carman, John Shannon Hendrix, Charles H. Carman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138245488
• eBook ISBN: 9781317066392
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

How are processes of vision, perception, and sensation conceived in the Renaissance? How are those conceptions made manifest in the arts? The essays in this volume address these and similar questions to establish important theoretical and philosophical bases for artistic production in the Renaissance and beyond. The essays also attend to the views of historically significant writers from the ancient classical period to the eighteenth century, including Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, St Augustine, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), Ibn Sahl, Marsilio Ficino, Nicholas of Cusa, Leon Battista Alberti, Gian Paolo Lomazzo, Gregorio Comanini, John Davies, Rene Descartes, Samuel van Hoogstraten, and George Berkeley. Contributors carefully scrutinize and illustrate the effect of changing and evolving ideas of intellectual and physical vision on artistic practice in Florence, Rome, Venice, England, Austria, and the Netherlands. The artists whose work and practices are discussed include Fra Angelico, Donatello, Leonardo da Vinci, Filippino Lippi, Giovanni Bellini, Raphael, Parmigianino, Titian, Bronzino, Johannes Gumpp and Rembrandt van Rijn. Taken together, the essays provide the reader with a fresh perspective on the intellectual confluence between art, science, philosophy, and literature across Renaissance Europe.

1
Introduction

John S. Hendrix and Charles H. Carman

Over the past few years a number of colleagues have expressed to us what they feel is the need for a volume of essays on Renaissance theories of vision that would address the following basic questions: how are processes of vision, perception, and sensation conceived in the Renaissance, and how are those conceptions manifest in the arts? This volume is a response to that need.

We began discussions at the Renaissance Society of America conference at the University of Cambridge in 2005, and organized a series of panels which took place at the RSA conferences in Miami in 2007 and Chicago in 2008. Encouraged by the very positive response to the panels, the result is a collection of papers that probe important theoretical and philosophical aspects of artistic production in the Renaissance. We are confident that the volume will be of great interest and use for all who are engaged in thinking about and rethinking the questions that are concerned with an understanding of how vision is constructed in the Renaissance.

Written by art and architectural historians, these insightful studies assay deeply into philosophical and literary material to focus on how theories of vision are applied to and manifest in the visual arts. While discussion of the ways of seeing in the visual arts runs throughout art historical studies, this is the first volume that we know of which elevates theories of vision to the dominant theme in art historical considerations of the Renaissance. Though more specifically focused on Renaissance vision, these essays are preceded by, and hopefully add fundamentally to, two significant earlier compilations that we are aware of: Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw,¹ and more recently The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages.² While the former established clearly a basis for intellectual seeing, the latter seeks to assert the importance of integrating theology into understanding meaning in medieval works of art. What is at stake is establishing not a one-to-one correspondence between textual significance and image, but rather how each might similarly frame shared philosophical or theological meaning. It is hoped that this present effort might help in establishing a sound foundation for further art historical studies that find the Renaissance to share a similar point of view.

The relationship of empirical and spiritual as it appears in both visual and literary imagery is ubiquitously represented in terms of a tension that is seen to naturally lead to the erosion of any sustained unity of oppositions. We think, for example, of recent works that postulate this split as basic,³ though others suggest ways to maintain some balance between material and spiritual perceptions of reality.⁴ The essayists in this volume take up the issue in various ways, and see more continuity than division between the material and the spiritual as it is imagined and represented in Renaissance culture.

While it is assumed that readers will select topics from this collection according to what strikes them as immediately interesting, we have arranged the essays chronologically with the aim in mind to lay a broad historical foundation that may allow one to gain a sense of comprehensiveness and continuity across several centuries and many countries. Important European locations are included in these discussions: Florence, Rome, England, Austria, and the Netherlands. They include, as well, views of such historically significant writers—from the ancient classical period to the eighteenth century—as Plato, Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, al-Kindi, Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham), Avicenna, Roger Bacon, John Peckham, Erasmus Witelo, Nicolas Cusanus, Leon Battista Alberti, Marsilio Ficino, Baldassare Castiglione, Agrippa von Nettesheim, Giorgio Vasari, Leonardo da Vinci, Gregorio Comanini, Gian Paolo Lomazzo, Sir John Davies, Samuel van Hoogstraten, and George Berkeley. Based on the theories of this rich tradition, the essayists carefully scrutinize and illustrate the effect of changing and evolving ideas of intellectual and physical vision on artistic practice through the works of artists such as Donatello, Fra Angelico, Andrea Mantegna, Leonardo da Vinci, Giovanni Bellini, Filippino Lippi, Titian, Raphael, Bronzino, Benvenuto Cellini, Johannes Gumpp, and Rembrandt van Rijn.

Some specific topics include the philosophy and science of optics (ancient, medieval, and early modern); an array of ocular functions such as visual rays, the optical nerve, and intromission and extramission theories of vision; single point perspective construction, catoptrics (the reflection of light from mirror surfaces), dioptrics (the refraction of light through lenses), light, and color. Analyses of physical phenomena are related to their sensual and conceptual functions, including the psychology of desire and sensorial experience as manifest within the philosophical tradition of Neoplatonism. Philosophical interpretations of light are explored, as well as the significance of the theology of redemption in the use of gesture and the gaze. Throughout, visual images are examined as the means to elucidate philosophical points of view. The visual and literary are seen to be mutually reflective of visuality as a shared understanding of how human beings perceive their relationship to the natural world in both physical and metaphysical terms.

Nader El-Bizri’s chapter carefully explains the more technical aspects of theories of vision in mathematical and geometrical applications, focusing on the Optics (De Aspectibus or Perspectivae) of Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) and its investigation of optics, dioptrics, and catoptrics, providing an exhaustive list of resources for the reader to further explore Arabic scholarship on vision. El-Bizri examines the influence on Ibn al-Haytham of Arabic scholars such as al-Kindi, the Banu Musa, Thabit ibn Qurra, al-Quhi, al-Sijzi, and Ibn Sahl, as well as the wide-ranging influence of Ibn al-Haytham on scholars important to the emerging early modern theories of vision in the West. Particularly important here are Franciscan scholars such as Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, John Peckham, and Erasmus Witelo, as well as figures such as Theodoric of Freiberg, Lorenzo Ghiberti, or Francesco Barozzi. In doing so, his chapter establishes a solid base that anchors the dialectic of physical and spiritual vision, variously probed in the subsequent chapters.

Charles Carman explores the relationship between the literal and the figurative in the single point perspective construction of Filippo Brunelleschi as codified by Leon Battista Alberti in his Della pittura. Often understood to be important in introducing a rationalized space through geometry, Carman views it as a way also to contextualize spirituality and intellectual content. He suggests that the distinctly different views about how perspective functions can be reconciled, that the rational and the spiritual/intellectual were intended to dialectically complement one another. In effect he argues, through an analysis of specific aspects of Albert’s text, that this perspective system serves to symbolize a divine ontology. In this way Renaissance pictorial space represents a pre-anthropocentric view of the divine or infinite embodied in empirical reality. Indeed, vision itself, as a basis for conceptualizing a geometric system of perspective, is seen as entailing a coincidence of opposites, a “paradox of conflating incommensurables,” much as the theologian/philosopher Nicholas of Cusa also contextualizes vision. Carman casts geometric perspective as a metaphorical apparatus, as more of an allusion than an illusion, which aims to conjoin sense experience to spiritual and intellectual experience. His work addresses the core of the subject of Renaissance theories of vision, that underlying the visual images there is a subject matter that reflects the epistemology of the Renaissance, the philosophical and theological structures of knowledge.

Allie Terry’s chapter on “Criminal vision in early modern Florence” focuses on images of Fra Angelico that reveal themselves as visual models of behavior and social values. In particular, she establishes how they were used as “pictures of redemption,” intended to invoke the desire for reform through stimulus to forgiveness, ascension of the soul, and spiritual reward. This includes the role that the pictorial representation of the gaze plays in defining social values, and the importance of the living, sentient body in the visual image to communicate those models of behavior and values, borrowing from the discipline of somaesthetics. In this regard, the author demonstrates how juxtaposition of the body and the spirit in the painted image enacts transitional and transformative states, both physically and psychologically. Overall, it is the performative aspects of the viewing experience that are explored, including suppositions about how the viewer is conditioned by the painting to facilitate a particular response.

In her chapter on Donatello’s bronze tondo, the Chellini Madonna, Amy R. Bloch provides a concrete example of how theories of vision—including optics, dioptrics and color theory—were generated in late medieval scholarship, and how they can be applied to an explanation of Renaissance artistic production. Her heuristic example is shaped around Donatello’s hypothetical use of the unique hollowed-out depression on the reverse of the tondo executed for Giovanni Chellini, for the purpose of casting glass copies of the image on the front. Speculating about glass figures of the Virgin and Child, Bloch explores the implications of the theology of light, considering the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius in the role that light can play in transporting the viewer from the material to the immaterial realm. She uncovers the theological implications of the transformation of one substance to another in sculpture, and the same implications of additive sculpture in various media, as representing the divine creation of humanity. In considering how the images cast in glass might be viewed in fifteenth-century Florence, Bloch discusses the classical and medieval intromission and extramission theories of vision, in particular as found in the Liber canonis of Avicenna, which Chellini possessed in his library, and the De aspectibus of Ibn al-Haytham, the treatise examined in the previous chapter by Nader El-Bizri, which was well known in fifteenth-century Florence. Ultimately, viewing the glass copy of the tondo would be compared to participating in the Eucharist of the Transubstantiation, as rays of light passing through the glass effigy could be seen as the word or spirit of God. Thus it becomes clear how the interpretive effort might benefit from interweaving the metaphorical hues of text and image to create a richly colored fabric, one that might be understood to reflect the mind’s grasp of shared notions figured forth into the light of the physical world.

John Hendrix’s understanding of Marsilio Ficino’s De amore and its implications for artistic production in Quattrocento Florence and beyond adds much to the sense of a shared visuality that joins the figurative in both text and image. The De amore (Commentary on Plato’s Symposium) expresses some of the basic aesthetic theories of the Platonic Academy in Florence, whose discourse had a profound influence on artistic production. The thesis of the chapter argues that seeing, in regular vision and in viewing a work of art, is a function of love or desire, and a philosophical point of view. Perspectival construction itself is a product of this desire to link vision with desire and thought, and it can be seen as a vocabulary element in the language of visual production in the same way that language itself enacts love and desire. The chapter examines the influence of Plotinus on the philosophy of Ficino as fundamental for aesthetic theory during the Renaissance. Leon Battista Alberti’s De pictura and Piero della Francesca’s De prospectiva pingendi, the chapter argues, reveal the importance of the Plotinian theory of perception as a conceptual process. This is especially evident for Hendrix in the distinction Alberti and Piero make between seeing as, on the one hand, a process that conceptually unifies the sensible world, and on the other hand, a perception wherein the sensible world can only be given as fragmented and multiple.

Liana De Girolami Cheney analyzes the aesthetic theory of Leonardo da Vinci, also echoing a common theme among these chapters that envisions a unity between empirical and spiritual implications. Examining the Notebooks and Treatise on Painting of Leonardo, Cheney discusses the influence on Leonardo of the ancient and medieval science of optics, including the intromission theory. She examines how Leonardo combines the importance of experimentation with the concept of forming laws through vision, and scientific theories of the eye (anatomical, physiological, neurological) with mathematics and geometry, in particular linear perspective. Her conclusion, for example, that the eye is ultimately able to see “divine things,” helps draw the dialectics of material and spiritual vision into a useful understanding of Renaissance visuality. And, she does so by analyzing Leonardo’s Uffizi Annunciation of 1472–78, to show how the artist formulates principles of painting in relation to theories of vision consistent with understanding the natural and divine as complementary.

Subsequently, for Christian Kleinbub, cloud putti in Italian Renaissance painting represent the boundaries of the visible world. Indeed, they illustrate the theological concept of the invisible being made visible, or the visionary made accessible to the corporeal eye. Focusing on paintings by Andrea Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, Filippino Lippi, Fra Bartolommeo, and Raphael, for example, Kleinbub explores the appeal to internal experience through vision in painting that does not include geometric perspectival construction as a rationalized space. These works are seen as paradigmatic of more imaginative models of vision that are later manifest in the subjective spirituality and mysticism of the Counter Reformation and Baroque period. The author excavates textual, theological precedents in Augustine and Thomas Aquinas to help explain such manifestations of the spiritual. Following a track from the embodied putti of Mantegna to the transparent putti of Bellini, to the theological glory of the putti of Titian, the more integrated putti of Lippi and Bartolommeo, and finally to those of Raphael, we find revealed ubiquitous, liminally veiled images of the essence of what is concretely sacred and which provide access to the supernatural.

Nicholas Temple then explores the role that pictorial space plays in communicating the function of gesture in its ethical, political, and theological implications in Raphael’s School of Athens and Disputa. The analysis discloses how “gestures reveal a deeply embedded redemptive understanding of human experience.” Temple interprets Raphael’s single point geometric construction and its role in establishing relationships between gestures, creating an istoria, and enacting an anamnesis or recollection, to communicate important philosophical and theological themes, in particular as they are related to classical precedents. With erudite understanding of the dialectics of the metaphysical and the empirical—spiritus and sensus—and their interactive roles in the evolving tradition of vita contemplativa and vita activa, Temple explains the role of geometry as an epistemological scaffolding, as pictured in the School of Athens and represented in its architecture, rendered to facilitate Raphael’s goal in articulating this interaction of the material and the spiritual.

Thijs Weststeijn contributes an insightful examination of the coexistence of intromission and extramission theories of vision in Renaissance cultural production. In particular, he wants to understand how the viewing of a work of art was expected to take place in the Renaissance, and how works of art stage modes of vision. Weststeijn examines classical and medieval foundations, in particular the intromission theories of Aristotle, Alhazen and Averroes, and the extramission theories of Plato and Galen. He looks as well at Southern cultural production, such as the theories of vision of Marsilio Ficino (Theologia Platonica and De amore), Leon Battista Alberti (Della pittura), Gregorio Comanini (Il Figino), and Gian Paolo Lomazzo (Trattato della pittura), and the courtly love lyrics of Baldassare Castiglione in the Libro del cortegiano. And finally, he moves into an examination of Northern cultural production through the theory of vision of Samuel van Hoogstraten, a pupil of Rembrandt, as well as through the optical theory of Agrippa von Nettesheim, particularly the De occulta philosophia. Among the various art works that Weststeijn selects to demonstrate the reciprocal relationship between theory and meaning in images are the Salome of Titian, the Pygmalion and Galatea of Bronzino, the Perseus of Benvenuto Cellini, and versions of the Judith and Holofernes by Cristofano Allori and Peter Paul Rubens.

Faye Tudor then conveys the reader into the fascinating ambiguity of the mirror metaphor and the role its reflective power plays in optics and catoptrics within Renaissance theories of vision. She takes as examples both a work of literature by an English author, Sir John Davies, and a painting by an Austrian painter, Johannes Gumpp, as illustrations of the importance of mirror reflection in Renaissance thought, and its proliferation in Renaissance artistic production. From the development of optical theory in classical philosophy as a basis for the proliferation of interest in optics and catoptrics, she explains how the mirror is seen as both providing access to sensible reality and distorting it. By examining the use of the mirror as a metaphor for the mind in relation to the senses, the author explores the classical distinction between discursive reason and intuition. Here again, what emerges as a common theme independently explored in one way or another by all the authors in this volume is that discursive reason or logic is seen as a mirror reflection of intelligibles or archetypal concepts. The status of burgeoning empirical reasoning again seems to collide with spiritual/metaphysical instantiations aided by a metaphor that binds one mode of vision to another.

In the final chapter, Alice Crawford Berghof examines the relation between depth perception and the sense of touch in late Renaissance art. The chapter establishes an analogy between the “rough style” of Rembrandt, the sprezzatura of Velázquez, and the notion of the “tangible object” of George Berkeley. Berghof argues that there is a connection between real tactile information and imagined visual information, which may be a presumed or unexplained cognitive connection, and which creates a narrative, which is a form of experience in depth perception. By taking as a point of departure the question as to whether depth perception is the product of immediate, visceral sense experience or is constructed intellectually as a product of experience (Berkeley), the author seeks to combine the two positions in aesthetic theory.

Pointing beyond their specific topics and the lessons learned from the wide and deep array of authors drawn upon, who constitute the foundation material informing their arguments, the authors of these works take up underlying issues that seem to continually surface in discussions of visuality, text and image—especially those of how to deal with the appearance of the real in what is still essentially a spiritually/metaphysically driven conception of the role of art. As a short collection of essays, however, they are not intended to be an exhaustive exploration of critical issues. Rather, the hope is that the ideas presented here might be seen as participating in a newly developing disciplinary direction in art historical scholarship, one that integrates underlying theories of vision with artistic production in order to more fully understand both intention and reception.

In the desire to introduce a comprehensive understanding of Renaissance theories of vision, the volume offers a wide and rich range of historiographical perspectives and theoretical positions as the basis for analysis. Every chapter establishes a sound historiographical framework in which to develop...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Classical optics and the perspectivae traditions leading to the Renaissance
• 3 Meanings of perspective in the Renaissance: Tensions and resolution
• 4 Criminal vision in early modern Florence: Fra Angelico’s altarpiece for “Il Tempio” and the Magdalenian gaze
• 5 Donatello’s Chellini Madonna, light, and vision
• 6 Perception as a function of desire in the Renaissance
• 7 Leonardo da Vinci’s theory of vision and creativity: The Uffizi Annunciation
• 8 At the boundaries of sight: The Italian Renaissance cloud putto
• 9 Gesture and perspective in Raphael’s School of Athens
• 10 Seeing and the transfer of spirits in early modern art theory
• 11 “All in him selfe as in a glass he sees”: Mirrors and vision in the Renaissance
• 12 “Nearest the tangible earth”: Rembrandt, Samuel van Hoogstraten, George Berkeley, and the optics of touch
• Bibliography
• Index