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Francesco Mazzaferro
Cennino Cennini vs. Leon Battista Alberti:
variations on the concept of pictorial composition
An introduction
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Fig. 1) Roberto Rossellini (1906-1977) -
TV
series “The Age of Cosimo de’ Medici” (1972) – Part II - “The power of Cosimo”
–
Cosimo de’ Medici, Leon Battista Alberti, Niccolò di Cocco Donati and Carlo
Marsupini (from right to the left) listen with concern to a church sermon against
the spreading of the new art in Florence. In the background, you can see
frescos in the old Giottesque style. Leon Battista Alberti is featured here by
Vincenzo Gazzolo. ©Flamingo Video
|
[On Cennino Cennini, see in this blog: "Cennini Project".
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 Rocco Sinisgalli, Leon Battista Alberti's new De Pictura, Edizioni Kappa, 2006. Please find below the first in a series of four posts dedicated to the comparison between Cennino Cennini and Leon Battista Alberti. Bibliographical quotations will be shown at the end of the last part.]
***
At the search of
the roots of the myth of Cennino Cennini and of the fortune of the Book of the Art, we are dealing here
with what has become – over the decades – an almost unavoidable milestone for the
work of almost every scholar: the comparison between Cennino Cennini and Leon
Battista Alberti, between the Libro
dell’Arte (Book of the Art) and the De
Pictura (On Painting).
The first thing
we discovered is that, while this comparison is certainly topical to understand
Cennino, it is equally significant to sharpen the focus on Leon Battista. Paraphrasing
a famous piece of Pirandello, both are Personaggi
in cerca d’autore (Characters in Search of an Author). They share many
features. First, while they have written famous books on painting, it is
impossible to assess their writings against the benchmark of almost any of
their paintings, for almost none of them reached our time. Second, very
different views exist on how to relate both of them to the art movements of their
time: the late Gothic and the early Renaissance, two periods which in many
respects coexisted and crossed each other. Third, assumptions on the timing and
goal of the drafting of their respective books largely diverge. This has opened
an ample room for interpretations, which also result in almost opposite results
when comparing the two.
In order to
focus more the comparison, we have concentrated our attention on the concept of
pictorial composition. We did it because we found out that both authors
discussed on what is art and offered the first references to pictorial
composition in art history. The verb ‘compose’ is used in pictorial terms for
the first time by Cennino, and a fully-fledged theory of composition is
proposed by Leon Battista.
We also
discovered that the use of the term ‘composition’ to painting has its parallels
in rhetoric, architecture and music. ‘Composition’
was, already at the time of Cennino and Leon Battista, a multi-disciplinary
concept of art. What is common to the four disciplines is that ‘composition’
delineates that part of art where creation is subject to rules, notably on the
way in which ‘parts’ must be ‘combined’; it can be therefore contrasted to the
other part of art where the artist’s imaginative powers can produce beauty
outside any predetermined conceptual framework. Cennino differentiates between
“skill of hand” and “phantasy”; Alberti between “art which can be learnt and
taught” and “the genius of the painter”.
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| Fig. 2) Masaccio, The Tribute, Florence, St Maria del Carmine, Brancacci Chapel, ca 1420 |
We considered
three recent authors which devoted some time and energy to the comparison
between Cennino and Leon Battista on pictorial composition. First, Rudolph
Kuhn. He sees Alberti as the inventor of the modern concept of composition,
while Cennino did not even manage to understand the concept of composition of
Giotto and the Giottesque, i.e. of his masters. It was Alberti – generations
afterwards – to make a theory of it. Second, Latifah Troncelliti. She reverts
completely the terms of the comparison. It is Cennino to display in his writing
the composition techniques of the first Quattrocento – describing the reality
of painting of his time – while Alberti has been a scholar of rhetoric, whose
theories were not known by the largest majority of painters in early
Quattrocento and found some echo only as from 1500 onwards. Third, Thomas
Puttfarken. He recognises the importance of composition in both Cennino and
Leon Battista, but comes to the conclusion that they both came short of
offering any complete theory of composition. The root of the modern concept of
pictorial composition – the one which ultimately played a role until the age of
Vassily Kandisky – is French baroque painting and art theory, not Italian
Renaissance. Early Quattrocento art theorist (including Cennino and Alberti)
could not really play a role, as they focused only on a few elements (mainly
the human body and pictorial perspective), but lacked the idea of a composition
as a holistic combination of factors, ultimately including the viewer himself.
The first
interpretation – by Rudolph Kuhn – has
its roots in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was the Vienna
School of Art History – with the first publication in German of the texts of
the Book of the Art (1871) and De Pictura (1877) – to create the
diametrically opposed view of Cennino as representative of a dying art and of
Alberti as champion of a new age. The former had the merit to live in the past
(permitting us to recover information on Giotto’s time) and the latter to live
in the future (influencing thereby Leonardo and the theory of art in the mature
Renaissance). In parallel, Jacob Burckhardt created in 1860 the figure of
Alberti as universal genius, capable to have his own full merits both in art,
literature, philosophy and exact sciences.
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| Fig. 3) Agnolo Gaddi (1350-1396). Trittico, copy in the Alberti Chapel, St. Caterina, Florence, 1390 ca |
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| Fig. 4) Agnolo
Gaddi (1350-1396), History of the true cross,
Two Representatives of the Alberti family 1380 ca, Santa Croce, Florence |
The second
interpretation has its own roots in Julius von Schlosser. Schlosser came to the
conclusion that both Cennino as well as Leon Battista did not belong to the
history of art per se. However, they played a crucial role as art writers,
setting up the terminology which would be used for centuries (and basically still
today) to describe painting. Von Schlosser’s view should be intended literally.
As to Cennino, he considers him as a failed painter. As to Leon Battista, he
writes of him as “a non-artist”: he did not produce paintings or sculptures
(although he authored De Pictura and De Statua), and had a very limited
production in the field of architecture: the real creator was Michelozzo, and
Alberti only acted as a designer of facades. It should be mentioned that von
Schlosser devoted two surveys to the topic. His assessment cannot be easily
ignored, as it is today often the case.
The roots of the
second interpretation would not be complete if one did not consider the work of
Lise Beck and Ulrich Pfisterer for Cennino and of Edward Wright and Michael
Baxandall for Leon Battista. Lise Beck questioned radically the contemporary
view of Cennino as a painter of the late Middle Age, both in terms of timing,
concepts and style: she re-framed him as a painter of the first decades of the
Quattrocento, drafting as a practitioner for practitioners and reflecting the
reality of the activity of Quattrocento painters (all still craftsmen, included
the most famous ones). Ulrich Pfisterer – on the basis of a philological
analysis of the text – found out it must have been written in 1415. Turning to
Leon Battista, Edward Wright and Michael Baxandall discovered that Alberti
worked as a rhetoric scholar, first
designing his writing according to the same structure as Quintilian, second
using – also in the case of his composition theory – exactly the arguments
which Quintilian and Cicero used to describe composition in literature, third
offering to the reader a collation of existing literature on painting (more
than drafting a new one) and fourth avoiding cautiously to include any
reference to any contemporary work of art.
It goes without
saying that these views solicited a fierce response among all those who
considered Alberti not only as a true artist, but as one of the masters of the
first generation of Renaissance art creators in Florence as well as in several
locations in Upper Italy. Lucia Bertolini in her premise to the critical
version of the vernacular version of De
Pictura of 2011 very strongly rejects this thesis. She sees in Alberti a
painter (educated in his early years before Florence, thereby before he came to
make acquaintance with the first Quattrocento painting), stresses that he
declared his intention to write his book ‘as a painter’ and rejects the
interpretation according to which rhetoric would display painting in his book.
This is not only
an ‘Italian’ polemical argument to defend a ‘national champion’. In France, for
instance, Florence Vuilleumier gave in 1993 a devastating critical assessment
of the new French translation edited by Jean-Lous Schefer one year before, one
hundred fifty years after the publication of the first French translation.
Indeed Schefer had offered a very mild argument of the ‘rhetoric’ argument, but
that had not prevented an explosion of strong feelings. To show how much souls
may have heated up since then, it is sufficient to say that two other French
translations of De Pictura – taking
diverse views – followed in the last twenty years.
The third
interpretation is the most sophisticated, but also the most difficult to
explain. In extreme simplified terms, there is no art without public, and
without the liberty of the viewer not only to play a passive role as spectator,
but an active role, assigning a meaning to the art work. It is the dialogue
between the artist and the art creator, the relation between intentions of the
artist to assign a privileged role to the viewer and his expected/unexpected
reaction, and the interplay between expectations and reactions of the viewer,
which defines a composition. Interestingly, Puttfarken ‘structuralists’ views
on the weakness of Quattrocento art theorists in this respect are diametrically
opposed by the ‘de-structuralist’ reading of the French editors of the 2012
edition of De Pictura, Golsenne and
Prevost.
Reading Kuhn, Troncelliti,
Puttfarken and several other authors, we also discovered that different views
exist on how the books we examined impact the development of art. In general,
there seems to be consensus that both books were not used in the workshops as
manuals inspiring apprenticeship and vocational training. Some interpret
Cennini’s Libro dell’Arte as a
pamphlet supporting the continuation of the guild’s system (submitting painters
to a system reducing their freedom), while others see in Alberti’s De Pictura a pamphlet for its
termination (leading to their independence). This was all but a minor item, at
that time: at the top of his fortune,
even Brunelleschi himself had been brought into prison in Florence for a few
days, as he had refused to pay tax to the guilds.
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| Fig. 5) Benozzo Gozzoli, Cosimo de’ Medici. Florence, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, 1459 |
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| Fig. 6) Masaccio,Brancacci-Chapel
(Florence) 1425-28 Differently
attributed portraits of artists (possibly including, from right to left, Brunelleschi, Alberti or Donatello, Masaccio or Masolino |
Concerning the
issue of composition, it is interesting to see that different authors either recognise
in the work of Masaccio and Raphael either the influence of Cennino
(distribution of space according to rules of equal distribution, see Troncelliti and Amanda Lille of the National Gallery) or of Leon
Battista (balanced composition of diverse figures, see Kuhn). It must be observed that
none of the two authors included any reference to any work of his contemporary
fellow painters: there is no reference to any of the Gaddi’s works in Cennino,
and no reference to any Quattrocento painting in Leon Battista. This opens up
an immense margin for interpretation on whether and how the two books
influenced the course of painting.
In his “General
Theory of Employment, Interest and Money”, John Maynard Keynes wrote: “The
ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and
when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the
world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be
quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some
defunct economist.” What he meant is that – contrary to what is often thought -
the strength of ideas is in the medium term much more important than any
material interests. Contrary to what is often thought, all of us are more often
unaware prisoners of our past than active inventers of our future.
This is also
true for history of art. The different views on Cennino Cennini and Leon
Battista Alberti who are still prevailing in today’s discussion have origin in
the build-up of the discipline of art history mid of the nineteenth century.
The global myths of Cennino and Leon Battista do not really date back to
Renaissance. They were created in the time space of one hundred years,
separating the rediscovery of the manuscript in the late 1810s, the first
translation of the works in several languages and the later reviews at the
beginning of the Twentieth century. The space between 1810s-1910s are the 100
years between Napoleon and the First World War, characterised by profound
cultural transformations, seeing our societies at the search of old and new
roots which would provide legitimacy to new political and social orders. These
are the years of global imperialism for England and France, of dominance,
consolidation and collapse for Austria-Hungary and of political unification for
Italy and Germany. These are the years in which are societies are fractured by
deep material and ideological differences. These are also the years in which
Europe lost – step by step, almost without noticing it – centrality in the
world. Searching for identity in the past may have trapped us for the future.
The most common
interpretation of the comparison between the writings of Cennino and Alberti is
that they would mark with their works on painting – in clear opposition – the discontinuity
between Middle Age and Renaissance. Cennino would be the last representative of
a world in which painting still belonged to craft, and Alberti the discoverer
of composition, i.e. of art as pure intellectual exercise. The first would
represent the ultimate residual of a world anchored in religion, the second the
first theorist of a world based on the centrality of the individual. Yet, for some
of those accepting this argument, Cennino would already contain at least a core
of elements of novelty, marking at the same time the end of the old world and
the very start of the new one, and Alberti would still conserve a few features
of mediaeval treatises.
One should
reflect on how much this interpretation (and more general the interpretation of
those decades as marking an abrupt breaking point in the history of countries)
was in reality functional to the need of legitimising the culture of the
Nineteenth century as being directly linked to the new world of Renaissance and
its civic powers, and not to Middle Age and its religion-based culture, as the
ultimate source of legitimacy. These reflections on art were at the core of the
search for identity of old and new polities in the nineteenth century. In
Italy, for instance, marking the abrupt break was the pre-condition to accept a
political and cultural continuity between Renaissance and Risorgimento. It was
also necessary to mark the liberation of the new State from the cultural
competition of the Church, hosted in Rome since much longer than the new-born
united nation.
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| Fig. 7) Parri Spinelli, Predella from the Madonna of Misericordia, Arezzo,1435-37 |
The same logic supporting
the narrative of a break between the old and new world (in the space of one-two
generations) was valid not only in Italy, but also elsewhere. Myths like those
of Alberti were of universal value: finding in Renaissance the ancient and
noble roots of the process of modernisation – in a century like the Nineteenth
marked by the industrial revolution, the irruption of technologies in people’s
life, but also a radical disruption of ancient social models – was as important
and reassuring, as centuries before had been the rediscovery of the ancient visual
world of Latins and Greeks for Renaissance itself. And for the
Twentieth century, marked by any horror, the confirmation of our ancient roots
in Renaissance was a much-needed confirmation that – despite all what went
fundamentally wrong since World War I – our world had a basis in a system of
values permeated of rationality and progress, while dark ages belonged to the
past.
We found out
that a different interpretation of the comparison of Cennino and Alberti is that
they were not the radically different symbols of two conflicting worlds –
marking, with their contrast, a sea change in art and civilisation – but in
reality belonged to the same culture, both representing, despite the obvious
differences, the first attempt to progressively put into writing the language
of art.
This thesis sees
the importance of Cennino and Alberti in particular as inventors of the
specialised jargon of art history which will continue to be used up to today,
despite changes in style and taste. Compared to the first interpretation, it is
a more sophisticated attempt to identify Cennino and Alberti (this time in
tandem, on the same side) as the inventors of our world: it goes back to a
concept of social and historical development – rooted in historicism – which
cannot be marked by revolutions, but by continuity and, only when needed, by
smooth corrections. It is not a coincidence that the thesis was elaborated by a
fundamentally conservative art historian like Julius von Schlosser. For him the
core difference is not in terms of time (Middle Age against Renaissance) but of
categories of the universal spirit: is it art or literature, does it belong to
the world of poesis (creation) or rhetoric (explanation)? Schlosser’s answer is
that both Cennini and Alberti belonged to the latter: shaping our language was
their added value.
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Fig. 8) Roberto
Rossellini, - TV series “The Age of Cosimo de’ Medici” – Part III –
“Leon
Battista Alberti - Humanism” - Leon Battista Alberti shows the plan for the
Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini ©Flamingo Video
|
The third view
we considered relegates both Cennino and Alberti to the far past. They are not
seen any more as the founding fathers of our aesthetic world, but as the
representatives of their own time, with their strengths and weaknesses. Between
them and us, the world has continuously changed, and we look at them with
critical distance. The nature of the creative art process cannot be seen
anymore as the function of long trends and cycles, uninterrupted for centuries,
but has empirical origins. If Schlosser reflects – indirectly through Croce –
German idealism, and thereby social conservatism, this different view lays
fundamentally in line with a pragmatic view of history. The reference standard
of the analysis is not any more set in the past (the antiques, Renaissance) but
in the present or recent present, marking the idea of progress and innovation
as engine of history. As Heraclitus explained us, πάντα ῥεῖ ("everything
flows").
In conclusion,
this research has not only documented how much a comparison between two authors
can lead to a variety of results, but may lead to draw two conclusions, the
first among the difference between the two books and the second on pictorial
composition.
On the books. While art
critics and philologists have examined a very large set of arguments, there is
perhaps something simpler that they have forgotten: the difference between
personalities and professional preferences. My field is economics. When reading
papers or notes, I may be confronted at times with colleagues who would exhaust
their work in the econometric analysis of facts – possibly only producing
equations, graphs and tables and describing causalities only in the form of
coefficients, forgetting about any text - and others who – in order to explain
the world – would write a long
descriptive and judgemental text, with an exhaustive narrative, but at times
with very few figures. We are different, and we create differently.
After all, who
can exclude that Cennino’s focus in his Book
of the Art on art technique, recipes, manual procedures etc. was not the
result of the general coordinates of the time in which he lived, not of the
lack of a global theoretical capacity or cultural incapability to have a global
picture of art, but in prevalence of his personal preferences for hands-on
technical knowledge? And who can really exclude that Leon Battista Alberti –
even if he had been an inhabitant of Florence at Giotto’s time – would have
revealed the same personal preference for a broad, systematic and abstract
discussion on arts, like many encyclopaedic thinkers of Middle Age also did in
other areas, and would have similarly excluded any technical nitty-gritty?
Cennino may have
been in love with the techniques to extract pigments, exactly in the same way
in which a bio-chemist today would find exciting to find out a new active
pharmaceutical ingredient or an engineer to design ways to make a new
ecological technology available for mass production. And Leon Battista may have
been in love of systematic theory, in the same way in which a physicist today
may enjoy finding out a new infinitesimal particle, confirming the holistic
view of the universe, from a millisecond after the big bang until today.
Contrary to what generally thought, these are all creative processes, which
combine the same elements of composition and invention, in a radically
different way. Looking at the list of Nobel prizes, it is difficult to say
whether our world is closer to Cennino or Leon Battista.
Turning to
contemporary art, perhaps Cennino today would be the street artist Banksy,
while Leon Battista would be Carolyn Christov–Bakargiev. Of Banksy nobody knows
the identity, but it is clear he has definitely impacted our collective taste
for art. Carolyn Christov–Bakargiev has been recently named “the most
influential thinker in the contemporary art world”. She used to be the curator
of the Museum of Modern Art in Rivoli, the Artistic Director of Documenta in
Kassel in 2012 and will take care next year of the 14th Istanbul Biennial. In
Kassel, she edited for Documenta 100 notebooks and a three volume catalogue in
cooperation with an extremely broad list of scientists, philosophers,
psychoanalysts, anthropologists, poets and writers. As you see, history repeats
itself.
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| Fig. 9) Banksy, Shop Until You Drop, Mayfair, London |
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| Fig. 10) dOCUMENTA (13), The third volume of the catalogue |
On composition. The cross-over of professional experience (art
history, philology) shown in most pieces we read show
that composition was – already at that time – a concept of global art. Painting
composition was seen (see Cennini) as equivalent to poetry, and was codified
(see Alberti) according to the same conceptual categories as rhetoric and
architecture.
Combining the four
types of compositions we have identified already existing at the time of our
authors (literature, architecture, music and painting) has been at the very
centre of our shared culture worldwide. What is a Monteverdi opera, if not
compositions in rhetoric, architecture, painting and music, combined together,
defining a system of rules common to all of them? And what is today’s cinema
production, if not a combination of the respective extended concepts of
composition? And what about conceptual art and today’s installations: do they
eliminate any aesthetic concept of rule-based composition, or are they the
ultimate product of it? Is there a
red line linking Cennino Cennini, Leon Battista Alberti and Ai Weiwei? Yes, perhaps one exists.
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Fig. 11) Ai Weiwei's 'Evidence' installation,
featuring 6,000 antique Chinese stools, Berlin, 2014
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