Francesco Mazzaferro
Cennino Cennini vs. Leon Battista Alberti:
variations on the concept of pictorial composition
Part One
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Fig. 12) Roberto Rossellini – TV Series “The
age of Cosimo de’ Medici” – Part III – “Leon Battista Alberti – Humanism” -
Leon Battista Alberti explains perspective ©Flamingo Video
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[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.]
NOTE: This is the second 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.
To read
the first post, please, click here.
Cennino and Leon Battista – condemned to an inevitable
comparison?
At the very
most, one and half or maximum two generations divided the Libro dell’Arte (Book of the Art) of Cennino Cennini and the De Pictura (Treatise on Painting) of
Leon Battista Alberti. According to the most widespread theory, Cennini’s book
might either be preceding the one of Alberti by around 40 years. But there are
scholars who would shorten the time lapse to twenty years and others who would
consider the two books as contemporaneous.
The eldest
available manuscript of Cennino’s Libro
dell’Arte includes the date of 1437. However, since the editors of the second
Italian edition in 1859 (the brothers Carlo and Gaetano Milanesi), the most
widespread theory is that date was added by a copyist, and that Cennino’s
treatise was drafted in the years between 1390 and 1400. According to the
recent philological analysis of the vernacular used by Cennino, Ulrich
Pfisterer, Professor of History of Italian Art at the Munich University
considers it must have finished much later, in 1415-1420. Moreover, Lise Bek
and Latifah Troncelliti take the view that the date of 1437 is indeed exact;
they follow Filippo Baldinucci and consider that the arguments made to exclude
1437 were inaccurate.
On Alberti’s De Pictura we know it was written around
1435. Traditionally, the dates accepted by scholars were 1435 for the Latin and
1436 for the vernacular version. However, recently the issue of the sequencing
among the two versions has been reopened. For instance, in the recent Edizione Nazionale delle Opere
di Leon Battista Alberti (National edition of the oeuvre
of Leon Battista Albert) Lucia Bertolini takes the view that vernacular text
was finished in 1435, before the Latin text.
Those who think
that the Libro dell’Arte was written
by Cennino Cennini in the late XIV century consider that the differences
between it and Leon Battista Alberti’s De
Pictura are a reflex of changes in art style and theory during those
decades. They stress that the young Cennino, operating in Tuscany and in Padua,
belonged to the late Gothic era. The Gaddis were the dominating workshop in
Florence in the last decades of Trecento, the times of the frescos by Agnolo
Gaddi in the Santa Croce Basilica. As
curial in the Pope’s administration during the years of the Ecumenical Council
in Florence (1431-1437), Alberti returned to the town of origin of his family from
exile shortly after Masaccio had completed his frescos in the Brancacci Chapel
(in the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine). Due to his sudden death in 1428,
Alberti did not make his acquaintance. However, after having been educated in a
comprehensive set of humanistic disciplines outside Florence, including in
Padua, Alberti contributed to the build-up of the early Quattrocento’s culture
in Florence and in many other locations of Italy. In conclusion, according to
this thesis, Cennino and Leon Battista would have operated in the same towns
(Florence and Padua) but with around 40 year difference among each other.
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| Fig. 13) St. Luke painting the Virgin, Icon |
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| Fig. 14) St. Luke painting the Virgin and the Child, Icon |
Those who think
– to the contrary - that the Libro
dell’Arte and De Pictura were
both written in the first decades of the XV century (possibly, even around the
same years) see the main difference between the two works both in their
different purposes as well as in their different rhetoric models. According to
this thesis, both Cennino and Alberti would belong to the early decades of
Renaissance, of which they represented however two diverse realities. The still
young Leon Battista Alberti produced a treatise (in Latin and vernacular)
addressed to a cultivated and interested public – mainly consisting of scholars
or upper class cultivated individuals - with interest in art theory, while the
elderly Cennino Cennino wrote down his expertise on art technique (in
vernacular only) as a practical manual for young painters, in order to
facilitate their learning process in Florentine workshops. As nicely shown by
the Danish scholar Lise Bek, in terms of rhetoric models, Alberti’s work based
itself on the model of classic oration, while Cennini’s one on the model of the
religious prayer. These diverse rhetoric models co-existed along the full
Quattrocento.
The biographies
of Cennini and Alberti are certainly also very different, but there are a few
things in common: for instance, they were both considered by Vasari as failed
painters. Nevertheless, it is most probable that Cennino – if ever asked –
would have been really surprised to be considered as an art theorist at all. In
his Book he repeatedly explains that the simple study alone of a written source
(including his own book) would never permit any young painter to learn the
profession, as only a long training under a master in a workshop would permit
it. However, almost his entire pictorial production went lost, while his book
met an enormous success since its re-discovery in 1821. Cennini is therefore
known mainly as a writer on art. On Alberti, several scholars – following
Julius von Schlosser - even questioned his possible categorisation as an
artist, and considered him as a humanist scholar and art theorist only, who
produced a compilation of classical theories on painting. They stressed his
lack of interest for the common concerns of artists of the time, and –
following Michael Baxandall – observed that, perhaps with the exception of a
few, mainly Mantegna and Piero della Francesca, Quattrocento painters had not
made any use of his art theories, too abstract or sophisticated for that time.
Others accepted the definition which Alberti gave of himself as ‘doctus artifex’ (a cultivated artist),
even if he mentions in the De Pictura
that he painted only in his free time, as a relaxation activity. In any case no
painting has also remained of him.
The focus of art
historians and philologists has often been on identifying both elements of
difference and continuity between the two Treatises
of Cennini and Alberti. In many respect, the almost immediate chronological
sequencing (or even the chronological coincidence) between the two works has
marked for ever the perception of Cennino’s work. For all scholars wanting to
fully assess Cennino’s work as an art writer, the comparison with Leon
Battista’s treatise has become a sort of obligatory test. Very often, Cennino
has not been assessed in his own right, but comparatively, in relation to the
later work of Leon Battista Alberti. The comparison has however provided
different results, since the personality of Alberti has also been assessed very
differently by different authors.
The case of the Viennese School of Art History
In his chapter
of the Kunstliteratur (first edited
in separate essays for students in 1914-1915 and later on published as a
monograph in 1924), Julius von Schlosser allocates Cennino as the last author
among the mediaeval art sources, while Leon Battista Alberti figures out as the
very first author among the theorists of Renaissance, and the De Pictura as the very first writing on
art of the new age, even before Ghiberti. However, Schlosser mostly stresses
analogies and elements of continuity among the two. He makes of Cennino the
inventor of concepts and terminology which will be used by Renaissance and
later on, until today, and presents a list of Italian terms in the Book
of the Art which are still universally used in almost languages of the
world to describe art techniques and discuss art. Interestingly, Schlosser has
a very similar view on Alberti, on whom he wrote an essay in 1929 entitled “A
problematic artist of the Renaissance”, coming to the conclusion that Alberti’s
figure as an artist was a pure invention of the following century and that he
did not belong at all to history of art (Kunstgeschicte,
which he defines in the terms developed by the Italian philosopher Benedetto
Croce), but to history of literature (Kunstliteratur).
Alberti was a master of rhetoric, not an art creator, according to Schlosser. He
was also not an architect in a real sense, but at most a decorator (producing
facades, but not buildings), while the real architect was Michelozzo. Alberti’s
main role was in the development of the history of language (Sprachengeschichte, in the terms
developed by the German linguist Karl Voßler). Schlosser
associates the two treatises, in the sense that both Cennini and Alberti tried
to write down a ‘normative grammar of arts’, although in very different ways
and with different results. They both attempted to find universal terms valid
to discuss art and describe beauty. For a completely opposite view in the
German world of Schlosser’s years, depicting Alberti as a true artist being
able to conjugate art creation with a complete acquaintance of Vitruvius, Plato
and Plotinus, see the essay by Willi Flemming of 1914.
Before von
Schlosser, the first generation of the Vienna School of History of Art had to
the contrary stressed, almost symbolically, the radical opposition between
Cennino and Alberti. On Cennino, previous Viennese art historians gave a much
less favourable assessment than Schlosser, with the introduction of the young
Albert Ilg to the 1871 first German translation of the Book of the Art, already commented in another post of this blog. On Alberti, the young Boehme art
historian Hubert Janitschek (the later professor and master of Abi Warburg)
wrote in his introduction to the 1877 first German critical edition and
translation of De Pictura, in
extremely appreciative terms. Those of Ilg and Janitschek were respectively the
first and the eleventh issue of the first series of history of art sources,
edited by Rudolf Eitelberger von Edelberg and entitled Quellenschriften für Kunstgeschichte und Kunsttechnik des Mittelalters
und der Renaissance.
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| Fig. 15) Roberto Rossellini (1906-1977) - TV Series “The age of Cosimo de’ Medici”. Part III – Leon Battista Alberti: Humanism - Leon Battista Alberti’s shows to some guests his ‘camera obscura’ (1973) ©Flamingo Video |
Ilg assessed
Cennino as a failed artist, incapable of any innovative strength, unaware of
already existing humanistic works of his contemporaries and completely avulse
from the Gesammtgeist, the overall
spirit, of Renaissance. Paradoxically, for Albert Ilg Cennino’s main merit was
exactly his ‘retro’ mentality. His unwillingness to keep pace with the new
spirit let him draft his treatise like if time had not passed. Thereby, with
the benefit of insight, he permitted us to learn about the art techniques of
the previous century and in particular Giotto and the Giottesque world, which
would otherwise have gone lost for ever. Hubert Janitschek states that it would
be impossible to find a “more abrupt opposite” to Alberti’s treatise than the
one of Cennino, despite of the chronological proximity. Of Cennino, Janitschek
stresses the almost exclusive focus on technics and, above all, the “pretty
narrow-mindedness and most limited horizon” (kleinliche Engherzigkeit und beschränktesten Gesichtskreis); of
Alberti, “an almost sovereign disdain for everything that makes up the craft in
the arts, and to the contrary a thorough taking on what belongs to the actual
processes of artistic creation”. The comparison continues with a reference to
Cennino’s Book of the Art as “the
last legacy of a dying art époque” (a term which Ilg had already used seven
years before in his 1871 introduction) and to Alberti’s De Pictura as “the art programme of the new breaking present”. Of
Alberti, Janitschek stresses the cult of nature inspiring the entire text, the
enthusiastic love for beauty, and “the liberation of art from any other
external purpose or goal, declaring beauty as its own goal”. Janitschek
concluded that Alberti’s text fundamentally inspired Renaissance and in
particular Leonardo in his later treaty on painting.
Ups and down of two symbolic reference figures over
the last 150 years: Cennino’s and Alberti’s sponsors
Both Cennini as
well as Alberti benefited in the past of phases of substantial historic
overstatement, where their role has been magnified most probably beyond what is
reasonable.
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| Fig. 16) Follower of Quinten Massys, ‘St. Luke painting the Vergin and the Child (ca. 1520) |
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| Fig. 17) Maertenvan Heemskerck, S. Luke painting the Virgin (ca. 1545) |
Speaking about
Cennino Cennini’s magnification, the leading Italian art critic Lionello
Venturi (1925) strengthened Cennino Cennini’s pacesetter role stating that his
famous definition of painting as combination of fantasia (phantasy) and operazione di mano (skill of hand) will
not find “across the entire Renaissance such an eminent voice, such a
crystalline conscience of the creative feature of art (…) In between two
civilisations, Cennino shows himself as the linking point between two
conceptions of art.” On the one hand, by soliciting painters to follow nature,
he is an innovator (this is already Renaissance, he says); on the other hand,
by stating that imitating nature can be at best learned under to long-lasting
influence of one single master only, he still belongs to Middle Age. The double
source of inspiration (nature and style) reflects the transition, to Venturi’s
eyes, between the two ages. “The Book of
the Art is not yet a Renaissance Treaty, even if it is not anymore a simple
recipe book of Middle Age. Giotto and Dante have opened a new horizon; but the
lightening has produced effects only for a short time, and Cennino quieted anew
in his profession; however, he did it only after having pronounced – naively –
a few very high, very fine things, which are worth being respected even if they
are heard after centuries.” My brother has posted in this blog a detailed
census of the translations published in different languages of Cennino’s work,
testifying the fortune of his Book of the
Art. In 2008, the Gemäldegalerie of Berlin also devoted an exhibition to
Cennino as a painter, on which a separate blog is being prepared.
The figure of
Leon Battista Alberti assumed an almost epic dimension with the publication of
the “Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy” by Jacob Burckhardt in 1860, in
which he was displayed as the first representative of a new civilisation,
capable of a universal culture, encompassing even the personal features of
being an extraordinary gymnast and of a clairvoyant. “But among these many-sided
men, some, who may truly be called all-sided, tower above the rest. Before
analysing the general phases of life and culture of this period, we may here,
on the threshold of the fifteenth century, consider for a moment the figure of
one of these giants – Leon Battista Alberti. His biography, which is only a
fragment, speaks of him but little as an artist, and makes no mention at all of
his great significance in the history of architecture. We shall now see what he
was, apart from these special claims to distinction. In all by which praise is
won, Leon Battista was from his childhood the first. Of his various gymnastic
feats and exercises we read with astonishment how, with his feet together, he
could spring over a man’s head; how in the cathedral, he threw a coin in the
air till it was heard to ring against the distant roof; how the wildest horses
trembled under him. In three things he desired to appear faultless to others,
in walking, in riding, and in speaking. He learned music without a master, and
yet his compositions were admired by professional judges. Under the pressure of
poverty, he studied both civil and canonical law for many years, till
exhaustion brought on a severe illness. In his twenty-four year, finding his
memory for works weakened, but his sense of facts unimpaired, he set to work at
physics and mathematics. And all while he acquired every sort of accomplishment
and dexterity, down to cobblers, about the secrets and peculiarities of their
craft. Painting and modelling he practiced by the way, and especially excelled
in admirable likeness from memory. Great admiration was excited by his
mysterious ‘camera obscura’, in which
he showed at one time the stars and the moon rising over rocky hills, at
another wide landscapes with mountains and gulfs receding into dim perspective,
and with fleets advancing on waters in shade or sunshine. And that which others
created he welcomed joyfully, and held every human achievement which followed
the laws of beauty for something almost divine. To all this must be added his
literary works, first of all those on art, which are landmarks and authorities
of the first order for the Renaissance of Form, especially in architecture;
then his Latin prose writings – novels and other works – of which some have
been taken for productions of antiquity; his elegies, eclogues, and humorous
dinner-speeches. He also wrote an Italian treatise on domestic like in four
books; and even a funeral oration on his dog. His serious and witty sayings
were thought worth collecting, and specimens of them, many columns long, are
quoted in his biography. And all that he had and knew he imparted, as rich
natures always do, without the least reserve, giving away his chief discoveries
for nothing. But the deepest spring of his nature has yet to be spoken of – the
sympathetic intensity with which he entered into the whole life around him. At
the sight of noble treed and waving cornfields he shed tears; handsome and
dignified old men he honoured as ‘a delight of nature,’ and could never look at
them enough. Perfectly formed animals won his goodwill as being specially
favoured by nature, and more than once, when he was ill, the sight of a
beautiful landscape cured him. No wonder that those who saw him in this close
and mysterious communion with the world scribed to him the gift of prophecy. He
was said to have foretold a bloody catastrophe in the family of Este, the fate
of Florence and that of the Popes many years beforehand, and to be able to read
in the countenances and the hearts of men. It need not be added that an iron
will pervaded and sustained his whole personality; like all the great men of
the Renaissance, he said, ‘Men can do all things if they will’.” (English
translation by Samuel George Chetwynd Middlemore).
With Burckhardt,
a new myth was born: Alberti. Jean Louis Schefer, in his introduction to a
recent translation of De Pictura into
French, refers to the historical fortune of the myth of Alberti as polyhydric
genius, which was confirmed by several scholars along the Nineteenth and Twentieth
century.
For the larger
public in Italy, this ‘heroic’ image of Alberti materialised in everybody’s
house with a TV series which the Italian public channel RAI committed to the
leading neo-realist film director Roberto Rossellini. The TV series – entitled
‘The Age of Cosimo de’ Medici’ was in three parts, the third of which was
entirely dedicated to Leon Battista Alberti. It was shown by Rai first channel
among 1972 and 1973, in occasion of the 500th anniversary of his
death. It is still recalled for “the seriousness of purpose, its educational
thrust and its beautiful re-inactment of the 15th century in Italy” (see
Blakeslee).
Also in the
1970s, one of the famous Italian scholars on humanism and Renaissance, Eugenio
Garin, published in 1975 a few studies revealing a profound undertone of
pessimism in Alberti’s thought, recently re-published in a collection of
studies in 2013. Paraphrasing Blaise Pascal, Garin spoke about ‘the misery and
greatness of the man’, finding out that the first was often prevailing. However,
all in all, Alberti’s myth remained largely intact.
The literature
on Alberti is really very large, and it would go much beyond the scope of this
note to refer to the recurrent publications and articles on him. On De Pictura, it is however compulsory to
make reference to the recent critical edition of the vernacular version, edited
by Lucia Bertolini. She is the champion of a reading of Alberti’s work as a
manual written by an artist for other artists, first in vernacular and later on
in Latin. Alberti himself – writes Ms Bertolini – has declared explicitly to
write De Pictura as a painter, aware of
all technical and practical implications of this profession. However, Bertolini
explains, Alberti refers to two concepts of artist. The first one is a
‘concrete and historically determined figure (…)fully immerged in the
social-cultural identity of his time’; it is to him that Alberti offers his
recommendations, to make sure he would have all necessary know-how to produce
art in a modern way, in full awareness that this is an historical experiment,
since real painters had never made use of those techniques nor had ever shown
interest for those theories. The second
one is an ideal, not yet existing, painter, the above mentioned “doctus artifex“, that is the painter who has already absorbed not only the
technical and theoretical, but also ethical and philosophical prescriptions
contained in De Pictura. Alberti
represents the proto-type of such new painter (including the fact that he
indeed practiced painting), and his book offers a complete description of the
“physical, cultural and professional space” in which his activity is performed.
Bertolini concludes with the hypothesis that Alberti must have learned painting
during his years in Padova and Bologna, ahead of his stay in Florence.
Ups and down of two symbolic reference figures over
the last 150 years: Cennino’s and Alberti’s critics
Still today,
discussions on the role of Cennini and Alberti in art and art theory are
contentious, and criticism has put into question all past certainties. So, for
instance, there have been cases in which the two authors – instead of being
magnified – have been to a certain extent debunked.
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| Fig. 18) Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), The painter’s studio –fresco, Florence, 1563 ca |
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| Fig. 19) Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), St. Luke painting the Virgin, after 1565 |
For Cennino
Cennini this occurred in 2003, with the edition of his Book of the Art by Fabio Frezzato. The editor came to the
conclusion that the expression “Art” (in the title Book of the Art) should not be intended in the modern sense of ‘the
activity of an artist’ and even not in the broader sense of ‘the activity of a
craftsman working on art products’, but as the mediaeval “ars”, which is the guild having overall control of all activities
of its members (whatever they activity; an ars existed for carpenters, bakers,
etc.). Cennini’s Book of the Art, in his view, would not be the autonomous
expression of the intent to compile a manual for painters – to transmit
know-how across generations – but, at the request of either the guild in Padua
or in Florence, an ideological text aimed at defending the corporative interests
of the association and convincing young painters not to rebel against that
system. The text might have served the purpose of perpetuating the control of
the guilds on the painters, at a time in which they may have tried to free
themselves from that control (it should be recalled that even Brunelleschi was
imprisoned a few days in Florence for not having paid his fees to the guild).
Cennino’s insistent advice to the artist to remain at least 12 years under
complete control of one master would not be the naïve expression of a primitive
spirit, but the repressive propaganda of a system of power and control,
inhibiting space of freedoms to painters. In any case, this is Frezzato’s main
conclusion, the text was not really written to circulate as manual among
painters, as most of them would have not been in a position to even read it.
Interestingly, Alberti’s De Pictura
is interpreted as taking the exactly opposite view that artists should be freed
from all existing ties and obligations vis-à-vis the guilds.
Elements of
reflection debunking Alberti’s work also exist. The traditional reading of
Alberti’s work is that it was produced in two versions, one in Latin and the
other in vernacular, in order to catch the largest possible public: through
Latin the scholars, through vernacular the painters. Alberti would have
therefore been the first author trying to associate practitioners with erudite
experts, putting his universal know-how to the disposal of different sectors of
the society, in a quite democratic way. Another post in this blog – reviewing a
monograph of Rocco Sinisgalli on the “new Alberti” in 2006 – has already
discussed the weaknesses of this interpretation. Elisabetta di Stefano has
reviewed all arguments, stressing that none of the leading Renaissance artists
ever read De Pictura, whether in
Latin or vernacular, with the exception of Filarete and perhaps Mantegna and
Piero della Francesco (Michael Baxandall – as already mentioned – found that
there is little proof, perhaps again with the exception of the above mentioned
artists, that any of Alberti’s techniques was ever implemented in the
Renaissance). The text required the understanding of notions which were not
available to artists at that time. Leon Battista wrote for a different public:
not the artists (who were still in the XV century craftsmen), but a selected
public of sophisticated scholars and literates, none of which practising art.
Certainly, Ms di Stefano stresses, Alberti inaugurated art criticism as an
autonomous discipline addressing an interested public of laymen, not exercising
painting. On the other hand, his main addressees were the circles of sponsors, maecenas, purchasers, collectors, and
generally speaking ‘well-connected personalities’, who could have materially
provided Alberti himself with sufficient social prestige to make sure his
reputation would be further increased. He made later use of that reputation in
his years in Rome.
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