ENGLISH VERSION Rocco Sinisgalli. Il nuovo 'De Pictura' di Leon Battista Alberti. Edizioni Kappa, 2006

Leon Battista Alberti. Self-Portrait (?)
Paris, Cabinet des Médailles
(image Sailko)

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
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Rocco Sinisgalli

Il nuovo De Pictura 

di Leon Battista Alberti

Edizioni Kappa, 2006

Isbn 88-7890-731-6

[On Leon Battista Alberti see in this blog also: Leon Battista Alberti, Descriptio Urbis Romae, Edited by Jean-Yves Boriaud e Francesco Furlan, Florence, Leo S. Olschki, 2005; and Francesco Mazzaferro, Cennino Cennini vs. Leon Battista Alberti: variations on the concept of pictorial composition]

[1] The novelty to which the title explicitly refers [note of the editor: The new treatise on painting by Leon Battista Alberti] has nothing to do with the discovery of any further manuscript or any unpublished draft of Alberti's De Pictura (On painting). It refers instead to a different way of reading the evidence and the information already available to scholars, to reach (through a new critical edition of the work) often different results with respect to what, in the last thirty years, was the reference version, e.g. the edition prepared by Cecil Grayson

[2] When it comes to De Pictura, it almost always ends up quibbling about the sequencing of the versions of Alberti’s works; that is, given that both survived until our days, whether the first version was in Latin or in the vernacular. Let us sum up (hopefully in sufficiently clear terms) the terms of the problem: the Latin version of De Pictura is witnessed by a dozen manuscripts, some of them bearing a dedication to Giovanni Francesco Gonzaga and others not; the vulgar version reached us only in three copies, of which without any doubt the best preserved is the cod. II.IV.38 at the National Library of Florence. Modern critics (see p. 37-40) have tended to affirm that the Latin version was drafted before the vernacular one. Grayson in particular has argued that a group of Latin manuscripts (the one without the dedication to Gonzaga) preceded temporarily the vernacular version (dedicated to Brunelleschi), while a second set of Latin manuscripts (with the dedication to the Duke of Mantua, Gonzaga) was chronologically following it. The vernacular writing bears the date of 17 July 1436. Grayson’s main argument (and before him, of Mallè) is that the De Pictura in the vernacular version would have been translated from the Latin, in order to ensure the widest possible dissemination in the art workshops in Florence, where Latin was widely ignored. The dedication to Brunelleschi would, in this sense, be a tribute to the most impressive example of a class of architects and artists who, through their genius, freed from the mere belonging to corporations to bring to the forefront in a bold way the role and specificity of the artist. Grayson, in short, tries to combine together two somewhat conflicting needs: a) the vulgar version must be later than the Latin own, exactly to explain Alberti’s "didactic" purpose; b) the Latin version, however, must have been inspired later on by the vulgar, because otherwise it would be impossible to explain the dedication to Giovan Francesco Gonzaga (to clarify: it would have not been "politically correct" to dedicate the work first to a prince and later on to an artist, as this would have diminished the social position of the prince).

De Pictura. Manuscript 1448 dated 13 February 1518,
'Biblioteca Governativa' of Lucca

[3] Rocco Sinisgalli thinks otherwise. What matters most to us is that his argument is based on a scrupulous analysis of the texts. It is from a new translation of the Latin version of the De Pictura (which also highlights numerous misrepresentations on the part of Grayson, not perfectly mastering the Latin language) that the conclusion is drawn that the vernacular version precedes the Latin one. The analysis of the manuscripts in vernacular and in Latin shows a gradual enhancement of the arguments presented by Alberti, a symptom of a continuous reorganization and refinement of the material by the author. The vernacular, therefore, before the Latin; and before Latin because it would be "a paper trail of work," dedicated to Brunelleschi not only as a tribute to the artist, but as a request for help addressed to the great artist, to assist Alberti to better penetrate "the new science" of which he was availing himself. Risky misunderstandings are then solved in an original way: the "dedication" to the Gonzaga would actually not be a dedication at all; this interpretation would only be due to the incorrect translation of Grayson (pp. 39-40), while it would simply be a writing with which Alberti enriched the copy of the manuscript, which he donated to Giovan Francesco Gonzaga. It seems to us that the thesis by Sinisgalli has received an implicit support from the number of manuscripts which, to date, bear witness to the work, as we said before, only three specimens for the vernacular and twenty for Latin. It is true that, in these matters, even luck matters a lot, but if the vernacular issue had been a "popular science" text for the consumption of Florentine and Italian artists, we would have expected a very different proportion.

[4] Sinisgalli does not stop there: apart from translation errors made by Grayson, in fact, he takes note that the English edition offered by the latter is conducted on a collation of the Latin manuscripts, however without any indication of the philological criteria according to which a term is preferred to the other or vice versa (p. 41). It is the firm conviction of the Italian scholar that Leon Battista has continued to work on the manuscript for several years, and that the various manuscripts can witness the developments. Not only that. Grayson, in fact, completely neglects the first printed version (editio princeps) in Latin of the work, published in Basel in 1540. It is not clear why he behaves in this manner. According to Sinisgalli, the Basel princeps is the last stage of Alberti’s efforts, contained in a manuscript which is conventionally called "par excellence" (and of which we do not unfortunately have any witness). This manuscript may have been written by Alberti between 1466 and 1468 (p. 26) and delivered as a gift to Johannes Müller von Königsberg, called Giovanni Regiomontanus, the German mathematician and astronomer who was a friend of Alberti and that, once left Italy, brought with him the text in order to publish it. Regiomontanus died, and the manuscript was kept in circles very close to Albrecht Dürer (see p. 27-29), who certainly had the opportunity to consult and possibly even to own it. Later on, the manuscript would be received by the mathematician Thomas Venatorius, curator of the Basel princeps. The editio princeps would then have been taken from the manuscript "par excellence", completed around 1466-1468 by Alberti himself, and as such most faithful expression of his thought. For this reason, the critical edition of Sinisgalli differs from that of Grayson, not being, in his Latin version, the product of a collation of manuscripts, but the transcript of the princeps of Basel (the princeps version is also reproduced photographically in a size-reduced version at pp. 541-573). The theses by Sinisgalli are bold and evocative; however, it will still take years of work to substantiate or refute them. Regardless of it, there is a further merit to be ascribed to the Italian scholar, and has to do with the editorial fortune of the work.

Title-Page of the'editio princeps of Basilea (1540)
Library, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, David K. E. Bruce Fund

[5] The editorial fortune of De Pictura relies solely on its Latin version and in particular on the princeps of Basel. The version in vernacular (as evidenced by the three manuscripts which were mentioned at the beginning) had no follow-up until 1847, when it was published by Anicio Bonucci (see p. 37). It is based on the Basel princeps that the first Italian translations were conducted, first by Ludovico Domenichi (1547) and above all by Cosimo Bartoli in 1568 (of Bartoli we will have to say that he also translated the De re aedificatoria in 1550 and De Statua also in 1568). Bartoli's version was in turn inserted in the editio princeps of the Treatise on Painting by Leonardo da Vinci (Paris, 1651). In short, it is a text that cannot be overlooked, because with it centuries of artists and scholars had to confront with it (extending its influence to the Balkans; see on it The Greek Translation of Leonardo da Vinci's Treatise on Painting by Panagiotis Doxaras: the Athenian Codex (1724).

[6] Sinisgalli presents first of all a comparison of the De Pictura’s texts respectively in the vernacular version, the princeps of Basel, in his new Italian translation of the princeps and in English. It follows a rich series of reasoned notes (pp. 275-469) in Italian and English. In these "several issues regarding words, phrases and sentences are extracted and examined in relation to the translations and comments not only by Grayson, but also by J.L. Schefer , who translated the De Pictura in French in 1992, of O. Bätschmann and C.Schaublin that did the same thing in German in 2000, and John Spencer, who created an English translation from the vernacular with some additions from Latin in 1956 (reprint 1966) [editor's note: in this collection is available a reprint of the second edition]" (p. 49). It follows a section entitled Confronti (Comparisons) (pp. 471-509) in which "I took from the notes some significant passages, respectively, from the vulgar, from the Latin version in Basel ... and my two translations in Italian and in English, placing them in a comparative way, always in parallel columns side by side, with the same passages translated from Grayson, Schefer, Bätschmann/Schaublin and Spencer" (ibid.). But the wealth of the work is almost endless: for example, it is only right to mention the pages dedicated to the variations between the princeps of Basel and the Latin version collated by Grayson (pp. 513-528).

[7] We purposely left at the end one of the most significant aspects, namely iconography, in which Sinisgalli can really give the best of himself. There are more than 120 pages which show the work, and there are over two hundred original drawings and hand-made diagrams through which the scholar (who is a historian of perspective) has translated visually the signs and geometric perspective that Alberti provides in De Pictura. And here, instead of concluding, one should start, because, as well known, the lack of illustrations in Alberti’s manuscripts is one of the most debated issues by art historians and philologists. There are those who, in fact, assign to bad luck the fact that in practice there is no single hand-made drawing or diagram by Alberti and those who, instead, make this condition dependent upon a precise determination of Alberti himself. But here we do not intend to bore the reader further and we prefer to refer to the notes affixed to the essay by Mario Carpo and Francesco Furlan on Riproducibilità e trasmissione dell’immagine tecnico-scientifica nell’opera dell’Alberti (Reproducibility and transmission of scientific and technical image in the work of Alberti) published in the Descriptio Urbis Romae (Description of the City of Rome) (Florence, Leo S. Olschki publishers, 2005).

[8] According to statements of the author of this work, only 250 copies were printed.

[9] The work was published in English in 2011 by Cambridge University Press, and since October 2013 is available (in English) at a far lower price as e-book. Also in 2011, Lucia Bertolini has published, under the National Edition of the Works of Leon Battista Alberti, a diplomatic edition of the vulgar version of De Pictura, where she appears icy against Sinisgalli: "The editor, an excellent scholar of perspective, is credited with having demonstrated, in 2006, the temporal precedence of the vernacular version before the Latin one, although he cites the work in which that priority had already been clearly established by philology in 2000" (Leon Battista Alberti's De Pictura. Redazione volgare)`` (On Painting.Vernacular edition), edited by Lucia Bertolini, p. 78). The work of 2000, of course, was by Bertolini herself.