Benozzo Gozzoli, Piero della Francesca) from the idealized Venetian work that followed it. The Florentine school was equipped, as it were, with a surveyor’s rod. These cartographers of the studio showed the same scientific bent, the same concern for accuracy in their conquest of space as the actual map-makers of the age. Later, Leonardo worked as a chief engineer for Cesare Borgia, and his maps are famous. The New World took its name, though somewhat fortuitously, from a Florentine traveller, Amerigo Vespucci, who was an agent of the Medici Bank.
Handy helps to the painter for achieving correctness were offered by Leon Battista Alberti, the quattrocento architect, in his little treatise Della Pittura. He recommended the use of a thin veil or net, to section the object to be painted, like transparent ruled paper. Leonardo used the net and so did Dürer. The invention of the camera obscura or a device resembling it is given by some writers to Alberti. Besides these scientific aids, Alberti also furnished prescriptions for subject matter, to be drawn from the antique: the Death of Meleager, for example, the Immolation of Iphigenia, the Calumny of Apelles. And he advised the use of a ‘commentator’ or chorus figure in a painting: ‘someone who admonishes and points out to us what is happening there or beckons with his hand for us to see’. A painting should have ‘copiousness and variety’, that is, it should contain ‘old, young, maidens, women, youths, young boys, fowls, small dogs, birds, horses, sheep, buildings, provinces.... There ought to be some nude and others part nude and part clothed in the painting. But always make use of shame and modesty. The parts of the body that are ugly to see and, in the same way, others that give little pleasure should be covered with draperies, a few fronds, or the hand.’
Alberti was a gentleman, descended from a powerful noble family of imperialists and enemies of Florence whose stronghold had been Prato, many centuries before his time. As a gentleman, he was a spokesman for ‘correctness’ and a well-bred neo-classicism which was incongruous, on the whole, with the place-spirit and genius of his native city. He tried, unsuccessfully, to introduce the classic orders into Florentine architecture, which resisted subjugation to a book of rules. The tyranny of form he sought to impose was more attractive to the rulers of Mantua and Rimini—the Gonzaga and the Malatesta—for whom he did his best architectural work, in a rich neoclassical style. As a literary man, he perpetrated a fraud—a Latin comedy called Philodoxius, which he passed off as the work of ‘Lepidus’, an ancient Roman poet.
For the pioneer artists, his contemporaries, the new spatial science was something more than a device for attaining academic propriety or correct proportions in a painting. It was an eerie marvel, a mystery, partaking of the uncanny; to a nature like Uccello’s, it had all the charm of magic. The vanishing point, towards which all the lines of a painting race to converge, as if bent on their own annihilation, exercised a spell like that of the ever-disappearing horizon towards which Columbus sailed with his mutinous crew—the brink of the world, as it was then thought to be. The vanishing point, if contemplated steadily, can induce a feeling of metaphysical giddiness, for this point is precisely the centre at which the picture ought to disappear, a zero exerting on the ‘solid’ realities of the canvas a potent attraction, as though it would suck the whole—old, young, maidens, women, small dogs, sheep, buildings, provinces—down the funnel of its own nothingness. That is, the very fulcrum on which the picture rests, the organizing principle of its apparent stability, is at the same time the site at which the picture dissolves. Uccello, fascinated by perspective, was the first ‘cracked’ artist of modern times.
He was born Paolo di Dono, and his people came from Pratovecchio,
Handy helps to the painter for achieving correctness were offered by Leon Battista Alberti, the quattrocento architect, in his little treatise Della Pittura. He recommended the use of a thin veil or net, to section the object to be painted, like transparent ruled paper. Leonardo used the net and so did Dürer. The invention of the camera obscura or a device resembling it is given by some writers to Alberti. Besides these scientific aids, Alberti also furnished prescriptions for subject matter, to be drawn from the antique: the Death of Meleager, for example, the Immolation of Iphigenia, the Calumny of Apelles. And he advised the use of a ‘commentator’ or chorus figure in a painting: ‘someone who admonishes and points out to us what is happening there or beckons with his hand for us to see’. A painting should have ‘copiousness and variety’, that is, it should contain ‘old, young, maidens, women, youths, young boys, fowls, small dogs, birds, horses, sheep, buildings, provinces.... There ought to be some nude and others part nude and part clothed in the painting. But always make use of shame and modesty. The parts of the body that are ugly to see and, in the same way, others that give little pleasure should be covered with draperies, a few fronds, or the hand.’
Alberti was a gentleman, descended from a powerful noble family of imperialists and enemies of Florence whose stronghold had been Prato, many centuries before his time. As a gentleman, he was a spokesman for ‘correctness’ and a well-bred neo-classicism which was incongruous, on the whole, with the place-spirit and genius of his native city. He tried, unsuccessfully, to introduce the classic orders into Florentine architecture, which resisted subjugation to a book of rules. The tyranny of form he sought to impose was more attractive to the rulers of Mantua and Rimini—the Gonzaga and the Malatesta—for whom he did his best architectural work, in a rich neoclassical style. As a literary man, he perpetrated a fraud—a Latin comedy called Philodoxius, which he passed off as the work of ‘Lepidus’, an ancient Roman poet.
For the pioneer artists, his contemporaries, the new spatial science was something more than a device for attaining academic propriety or correct proportions in a painting. It was an eerie marvel, a mystery, partaking of the uncanny; to a nature like Uccello’s, it had all the charm of magic. The vanishing point, towards which all the lines of a painting race to converge, as if bent on their own annihilation, exercised a spell like that of the ever-disappearing horizon towards which Columbus sailed with his mutinous crew—the brink of the world, as it was then thought to be. The vanishing point, if contemplated steadily, can induce a feeling of metaphysical giddiness, for this point is precisely the centre at which the picture ought to disappear, a zero exerting on the ‘solid’ realities of the canvas a potent attraction, as though it would suck the whole—old, young, maidens, women, small dogs, sheep, buildings, provinces—down the funnel of its own nothingness. That is, the very fulcrum on which the picture rests, the organizing principle of its apparent stability, is at the same time the site at which the picture dissolves. Uccello, fascinated by perspective, was the first ‘cracked’ artist of modern times.
He was born Paolo di Dono, and his people came from Pratovecchio,
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