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Francesco Mazzaferro
Cennino Cennini vs. Leon Battista Alberti.
variations on the concept of pictorial composition.
Part two
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Fig. 20) Roberto Rossellini, - TV series “The
Age of Cosimo de’ Medici” – Part II – “The power of Cosimo” – Brunelleschi
(centre) shows his plan for the Dom’s lantern
to Cosimo de’ Medici (right) and
Leon Battista Alberti (left) ©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 third 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.
Cennino Cennini, Leon Battista Alberti and
pictorial composition
This note is
about a very specific but relevant aspect: the way in which different art
historians have analysed comparatively the concept of art in general and of art
composition in painting, more specifically, in Cennino and Alberti. Three
authors are considered. The first one is the German Rudolf Kuhn, emeritus
Professor of History of Art at the University of Munich, who had several
publications on the topic, including monographs and surveys on the concept of
art and composition in Cennino Cennini, Leon Battista Alberti, the cyclical
monumental art of Trecento in Italy and throughout Renaissance, published
between 1980 and 2005. The second one is the Italian and US academic Latifah
Troncelliti, romance languages philologist and art historian in several US
universities (currently at Saint Bonaventure University, New York) who authored
a monograph on “The Two Parallel Realities of Alberti and Cennini – The Power
of Writing and the Visual Arts in the Italian Quattrocento” in 2004. The third
one is another German professor of the history and theory of art, Thomas
Puttfarken, who worked at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom, and
authored “The Discovery of Pictorial Composition. Theories of Visual Order in
Painting, 1400-1800”, published in 2000, shortly before his sudden death in
2006.
The three views
are not presented in a chronological order, but in a sequence which aims at
presenting the entire spectrum of ‘Cennini vs.Alberti’ comparisons, with the
three authors assigning to Cennino three different roles: Kuhn’s view
substantially confirms the thesis of Cennino’s weakness as a theorist, while
Alberti is the inventor of the concept of composition; Troncelliti, to the
contrary, sees in Cennino an artist already practising composition techniques
of the Renaissance, while Alberti’s contribution to Quattrocento’s art is
fundamentally questioned. While the first two authors do not hide their
preference for either Alberti (Kuhn) or Cennini (Troncelliti), for Puttfarken
they both belong to a phase of art which was not yet able to produce any
elaborate concept of pictorial composition.
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Figg. 21-22) Roberto Rossellini (1906-1977) – TV
Series “The Age of Cosimo de’ Medici”. Part III – Leon Battista Alberti: The
Humanism - The build-up of the facade of Santa Maria Novella in Florence (1973)
©Flamingo Video
|
Why
composition?
The Latin term compositio figures out at the beginning
of reflections on ‘how to compose’ in four different domains of art: rhetoric,
architecture, painting and music.
In rhetoric, as
seen in texts by Cicero and Quintilian, compositio
defines the correct combination of words, and the construction of the sentence.
As explained by Michael Baxandall, this concept did not refer at all to a
comprehensive ‘literature composition’; it aims at securing that a hierarchy of
rules ordered in four levels is respected: words create a phrase, phrases form
a clause, and clauses form a period.
In architecture,
compositio defines for Vitruvius the
features of symmetry and proportion of a building, as a feature affecting
visually the aesthetic of the building.
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| Fig. 23) Adriaen van Ostade (1610–1685), Self-portrait in the studio, 1663 |
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| Fig. 24) Giovanni Domenico Cerrini (1609–1681), The painter’s studio, first half of 17th century |
In painting, compositio at the time of Cennino and
Alberti was mainly the balance between bodies, their parts and other elements
in the surface. Alberti offers a useful definition: “Composition is the
procedure in painting whereby the parts are composed together in the picture.
The great work of the painter is not a colossus, but a ‘historia’, for there is
far more merit in a ‘historia’ than in a colossus. Parts of the ‘historia’ are
the bodies, part of the bodies is the member, and part of the member is the
surface (…). From the composition of surfaces arises that elegant harmony and
grace in bodies, which they call beauty”. Baxandall notes the perfect symmetry
with the above mentioned four-level concept of composition in rhetoric:
surfaces form members; members are combined in bodies; bodies form the painting.
In music, compositio is used since the time of old
Romans to design music production, and throughout all periods of Middle Age to
define increasingly complex concept of music making. As from the Renaissance
(with the cantus compositus, see the
Treatise “Liber de natura et proprietate
tonorum” – Book on the nature and the property of tones - by the Flemish Johannes
Tinctoris, published in Treviso in 1476) composition defines the idea of
polyphonic structures characterised by orderly vertical relations (intervals)
between all participating voices.
What is common
to these different uses of the same word? And why does this concept of “compositio” still matter today?
First,
composition is a rule-based form of arts: it has to do with the orderly
combination of certain key elements and with the production of an eventual art
work through their combination, ensuring aesthetic results through measure,
balance and ratio. By definition, this implies that composition identifies only
one part of the artistic activity, excluding all those results which are
exclusively or prevalently led by phantasy (fantasia,
a term which Cennino included in his writing, opposing it to the ‘skill of the
hand’ and therefore to the systems of recipes and rules which had described in
the Book of the Art) or creation (ingenium,
a term used by Alberti to define that part of painting which cannot be taught
and learned, because it is immanently linked to the imaginative power of the
artist). For instance, in music the opposition of composition is improvisation:
the capacity to produce music without a defined music score (on which for
instance jazz is based).
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| Fig. 25) Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675), The Allegory of Painting |
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| Fig. 26) Gustav Courbet (1819 –1877), The Painter’s Studio |
Second, the term
was at the origin much more limited in scope than today. For instance, ‘compositio’ as rhetorical organisation
of a sentence is much smaller than today’s idea of ‘composition studies’, which
have become an academic field of literature criticism. In music, the term
‘composer’ is used today for every musician producing his or her music; also
sticking to more technical terminology in music, composition in English – as a
subject of study, equivalent to “Kompositionslehre”
in German, is much broader than the harmonic interplay between different
voices. And without no doubt, the concept of pictorial composition has much
evolved since the time of Cennini and Alberti (see for instance the recent
colloquium of the Warburg Institute on ‘Pictorial Composition from Medieval to
Modern Art’, opened by an essay on “Composition from Cennini and Alberti to
Vasari” by Charles Hope and concluded by an essay entitled “Towards a Science
of Art: the Concept of `Pure Composition' in Nineteenth– and Twentieth– century
Art Theory” by Hubert Locher.
Third,
notwithstanding these changes over centuries, the concept of composition still
matter. There is a part of art where the aesthetic results do not depend only
upon pure imagination and creative power, but where a system of rules, principles,
identifying prescriptions also defines the overall value of an art work. Over
centuries, artists have interpreted differently this core, trying at the same
time to expand the scope of rules, and continuing to adapt them. The set of
rules may therefore have become very different from the original system of
rules (for instance in music, with dodecaphony) or a very elusive one (again in
music, with aleatoric music), but still defines the difference with other art
pieces where any system of rules has completely disappeared, and the art work
is therefore conceived as a complete rule-less endeavour, which the public
cannot interpret according to any previously agreed parameters.
Rudolf Kuhn and the first analysis of composition in
Cennini and Alberti, or why Leon Battista beats Cennino 1:0
We owe to Rudolf
Kuhn a monograph on the theory on pictorial composition (1980), two parallel
essays on the concept of art and composition in Cennino (1991) and Leon
Battista Alberti (1984), and one monograph comparing the concept of composition
in Cennino and Alberti (2000). All of above mentioned writings are available in
German only. The author has posted them in full in the net. Lessons at the Tel
Aviv University in English are also available, from the year 2000.
Kuhn refers to
the study of pictorial composition in terms of choice of persons, locations,
events, appearance, disposition, decoration and figure schemes, modes, and
overall narrative by the artist. In line with the work of Marylin Aronberg
Lavin, he attempts to launch a new school of interpretation of history of
visual art, based on the study of composition theory and techniques, rather
than on the interpretation of historic context or on the art style. Turning to
Cennino and Alberti, Kuhn’s main source of inspiration on the interaction
between art theory and rhetoric is the last chapter of “Giotto and the Orators:
Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy” by Michael Baxandall in 1971.
Cennini
Kuhn’s starting
point on Cennini is a question mark. In Italian Trecento, fresco was the
technique to produce monumental cycle of histories (Cimabue, Giotto, Taddeo and
Agnolo Gaddi) and the same applied to the first part of Quattrocento (Benozzo
Gozzoli, Ghirlandaio, Filippo Lippi, Piero della Francesca). “Narrative” and “story
telling” or – in more technical terms - “pictorial composition” were therefore
at the very centre of the painter’s know-how. Why is it so that Cennino Cennini
– who lived among these two époques – did not devote an important part of his
book to this core aspect?
The core aspect
to consider, writes Kuhn, is that the Book
of the Art is not a comprehensive treaty on all aspects of visual art
creation. Cennino distinguishes between what is art creation by itself (it
calls it fantasia, phantasy) and operazioni di mano (skills of hand).
With one single exception (when Cennino says that painting – like poetry –
gives the possibility to the artist to compose figures which do not exist, like
centaurs), Cennino devotes his entire work to the second one only. According to
Kuhn, the Book of the Art is
expressly a handbook on the manual aspects of visual art production: nothing
more and nothing else. It does not exclude composition and ‘story telling’ because
it was an unknown concept, but because the author feels that a theory on it cannot
exist, and only phantasy (independently of any possible theory) can lead the
artist to compose stories.
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| Fig. 27) Bicci di Lorenzo, Annunciazione. 1414. Pieve di Santa Maria Assunta a Stia in Casentino (see http://mauriziobianchi.blogspot.com/) |
Nevertheless –
he says – some references to the concept of composition exist in Cennino’s
book. Let us examine what they are.
Painting in
Cennino’s world is mainly composed of two phases: design first and colouring
second. Cennino describes in detail the method of designing and colouring on a
wall or on a plate, both of which are based on a precise, rule-based sequencing
of phases. Composing is one (non-autonomous) phase of sketching designs on the
final image carrier. Kuhn explains that composition cannot be – in Cennino’s
view – an autonomous activity of the artist, because it is part of a rule-based
production cycle.
Composition – in
this sense of being a rule-based phase of manual art production – is the
distribution of the figures in space. It includes the identification of a
single unit of measure for all figures, including architecture: that unit, says
Cennino, is one third of the face of individuals (corresponding to the forehead
of a person), ensuring both proportion of bodies as well as space proportion
for figures and the story as a whole.
While
composition is not an autonomous part of painting, this does not imply that the
artist is not able of abstraction capacity. Cennino says that – through
exercise – the artist will reach a level by which he will be able to conceive
the designs “in his own mind”, before starting designing.
The lack of a
theory of composition does also not mean per se that there are not composition
rules which Cennini recommends, both for drawing as well as for colouring. On
drawing (chapter 67), the Book of the Art contains the recommendation to follow
measures and proportions among the figures, in particular making sure that
spaces and distances among figures are maintained equal. Before colouring, he
recommends to wait one day, to reconsider the composition. And on colours,
Cennino suggests (chapter 29) that the equilibrium between dark, mixed and hell
hues should be chosen in function of the ‘Storia’ and the figures to be
represented.
In particular on
the concepts of ‘spaces between figures’, Kuhn observes that it is not clear
whether they are simply geometrical and abstract space relations, which are
independent of the ‘history’, or whether they have to be in relation with the
position and role of the main frontal figures. Only in the latter case, this
might be considered a rule truly affecting pictorial composition.
The exclusion of
‘phantasy’ from the area covered by the Book
of the Art does not imply by itself that the painter should be given full
liberty of artistic creation, without any constriction set by an established
method or theory. Cennini sees the build-up of a personal style as a long
process, which inevitably goes through a long training (12 years, by rule)
under a single master, of whom each disciple should adopt the ‘manner’. Only at
the end of those 12 years the painter would be able to experiment his own style.
In conclusion,
Kuhn considers Cennini as not providing a theory of composition,
notwithstanding that fact that ‘narrative’ and ‘story telling’ were the main
features of painting cycles in those decades. Composition is also not seen as
an autonomous part of visual art activity. However, Cennini recommends some
composition techniques, both in terms of drawing as well as colouring. The lack
of prescriptive composition theory does not imply that artists would be able to
benefit of full creative liberty, as they are deemed to follow techniques and
style of their masters.
Alberti
For Rudolf Kuhn,
Alberti is the real inventor of the concept of composition in visual arts: the
one who was able to translate the concept of compositio from rhetoric (as it had been conceived by Quintilian
and Cicero) into painting, inaugurating a tradition which continued from him
until Kandinsky, Picasso and later on.
While Alberti
quotes in De Pictura the lost mosaic
of the Navicella by Giotto as a
valuable example of composition, for Kuhn two appropriate examples to see a
combination of those typical figures are the Taxation for the Temple of Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel of St.
Maria del Carmine in Florence and the School
of Athens by Raphael in the Vatican.
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| Fig. 28) Raphael, The School of Athens, 1509-1510 |
The starting
point of Kuhn’s discussion on Alberti is the division of the De Pictura in three books. The first
book includes mathematical and geometric basis of visual arts (including theory
of perspective and colours), and therefore defines the contribution which other
disciplines (geometry, optics) may give to art: this is what the artist needs
to know, but it was not art by itself. His attention is therefore mainly on the
second book, which describes “art” as a sub-set of painting. Art consists of
those elements of painting which may be autonomously taught and learned. The
third book (on the painter) includes all aspects of art more directly related
to art creation, which – according to Alberti – cannot be systematised and
framed in any theory, because they belong to genius, talent, creative power, and
therefore to personal, inborn and not transmissible skills. As it was the case
of Cennino (see above: contrast between ‘skill of hands’ and ‘phantasy’),
Alberti defines a strict perimeter of the elements of art which can be properly
transmitted to the reader through theory, covering them in the second book.
Alberti’s
definition of art in the second book comprises three areas: circumscription,
composition and reception of light. Circumscription and reception of light are
– by and large – not radically different from Cennino’s basic concepts of
‘drawing’ and ‘colouring’. Composition is new, and sets up a system of rules
which should contribute to achieve what Alberti defines (both in the Latin and
vernacular version) as concinnitas: the
painting must fit with a number of features which define its beautiful harmony.
Several authors translate concinnitas
as ‘elegant harmony’. With a very modern
word, it might be called ‘fitness’, i.e. a situation where all necessary
elements fit nicely together.
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| Fig. 29) Raphael, School of Athens, compositional scheme, drawing by Gert Fischer ©Peter Lang - Courtesy |
In a passage
already mentioned in the first part of this blog, composition is construed in
terms which are drawn from rhetorical texts to define the coordination between
words, phrases, clauses and periods. The largest unit is what even Cecil
Grayson (Alberti most important translator in modern languages) did not dare to
translate from the Latin ‘historia’. Using modern language, I would perhaps say:
narrative. The narrative is composed of ‘bodies’, any ‘body’ consists of
‘members’ (legs, arms, heads, etc.), and any ‘member’ is made of ‘surfaces’.
The smallest unit of account of a composition is therefore a geometric concept
(surface), on which Alberti had dwelled in the first book, describing surfaces
as the basis of perspective theory: surfaces are created by the interception of
objects with the visual pyramid.
Surfaces,
members and bodies can all be composed. Kuhn explains that the composition of
surfaces leads to the plasticity of figures, the composition of members to the
movement of figures, and the composition of bodies to the action of figures.
When all elements are composed, this leads to the universal plasticity of
figures, the universal movement of figures and their universal action.
Interestingly,
Kuhn also observes that Alberti does not set at the very centre of painting the
portrait or the altarpiece, but the ‘story telling image’ (erzählende Bild), and that such images must aim at capturing the
eyes of both the expert and the laymen.
Does the fact
that story telling images (historiae)
are ultimately composed of geometric surfaces imply that Alberti makes an
unexpected early opening to abstract painting? Not at all, as compositions
serve two purposes in visual arts: first, they express the richness of things
in nature; second, they give an idea of the variety of positions and movements.
Commenting on variety, Kuhn notes that this concept can not only be displayed
through a multiplicity of physical differences but also through a richness of
different mental and psychological attitudes.
While Cennini
conceives composition as an integral phase of visual art implementation, for
Alberti composition is an autonomous phase, preceding implementation, based on
preparation of designs on paper.
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Fig. 30) Raphael,
study for a group and a figure for the School of Athens, Vienna, Albertina
©Peter
Lang - Courtesy
|
So far,
following Kuhn, only those aspects of De
Pictura have been mentioned which are included in the second book, since
they belong to the concept of art, as a discipline which can be framed in a
theory and may therefore be taught and learned. However, composition also
includes aspects which cannot belong to the second book of De Pictura, as they do not simply reflect a system of rules, but
are also the pure result of creative energy (ingenium). Also in Alberti’s case, the absence of rules does not
imply that the painter can make whatever use of his creative powers. Here
Alberti recommends avoiding an excessive fullness in the composition,
maintaining appropriateness, dignity and equilibrium. He also recommends a
combination of all colours, dark and hell ones.
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Fig. 31) Raphael, study for a group and a
figure for the School of Athens, Frankfurt, Städelsches Kunstinstitut
©Peter
Lang - Courtesy
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In conclusion,
Kuhn shows that Alberti has elaborated a complete theory of composition, as an
autonomous part of visual art ideation, based on the combination of differently
normalised, typical figures, and the interaction of bodies, members and
surfaces. Composition helps story-telling and narration.
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