Leon Battista Alberti and Nicholas Cusanus

Towards an Epistemology of Vision for Italian Renaissance Art and Culture

Charles H. Carman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780367433284
• eBook ISBN: 9781317105725
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

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 study reveals a shared epistemology of vision. And, the author argues, it is one that reflects 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 figures 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 finite and infinite 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.

1

Alberti and Cusanus: An Overview

Roberto Rossellini’s film The Age of Cosimo de’ Medici (1972) pairs the humanist writer Leon Battista 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 film an array of famous artists, writers, political leaders, and important church figures 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 figure along with allies and enemies, while the archbishop Antoninus makes a brief appearance. Recently completed art works are viewed, notably Masaccio’s Trinity, and his Tribute 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 figures together in the same spaces, which so often unite saints from disparate time periods, sometimes with contemporary identifiable personalities.³ Such images evoke the power of memory, binding past moments into the full conscious present of the inextricably intersecting 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 offers 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 settled with less concern for the sacred. And though it is unclear whether Rossellini’s Alberti in the film is sufficiently cognizant of the as yet sacred revelations that Masaccio offered, the Alberti as we may come to understand him would have indeed understood.

Even as Alberti in the film 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 offered as what finite humanity can know of and about the infinite. 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 matter that it was written after the presumed date of the encounters taking place, which begin in 1434 with Alberti’s return to Florence in 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) often refer to as ingegno, meaning the ability to have insight and create new meaning.⁵

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 intellectual exchange 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 shifting scenes that constitute known historical circumstances and places, much like naturalistic fifteenth century painting in which history is rewritten, 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 scientific collaboration for the benefit of citizens in their relationship to church 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 latter’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 of such an imagined exchange. And, as has often 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.

Briefly, 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’s and 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 affiliations with the papal court, within the circumstances surrounding the councils of Ferrara and Florence (Rossellini’s context) during the years 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 confirming 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 finds 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 little more disposed to the technical and less to the speculative,¹² Santinello, nevertheless, recognizes that he too “knows how to find 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 different directions: Cusanus starting from an unknown, unseable God, Alberti from 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 explicit in 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 the opera 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 visualizing what 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 differs 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 attempt to elucidate that Alberti does suggest painting embraces a divine-like creative process. Important, as well, is not so much the product, as the way in 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 little recognized observation, brings this common thread together around Alberti’s discussion of the single point, geometric perspective in his Della pittura. With its emphasis on mathematical laws and the importance of setting the proportions of the structure according to those of an ideal man, he compares 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 ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface: Perspectiva ut Poesis
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Alberti and Cusanus: An Overview
• 2 On Painting: Setting the Stage and “Tutta la Storia”1
• 3 The Eye of the Mind: Where it Goes, What it Sees
• 4 Divine and Human Vision: Perspective and the Coincidence of Opposites1
• 5 Disclosing Metaphors 1: Ways into Perspective
• 6 Disclosing Metaphors 2: The Window, The Flower, and The Map1
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index