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The Art of Human Composition in Giovanni Pontano’s De principe liber

2014; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 129; Issue: 3SS Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mln.2014.0032

1080-6598

Giuseppe Falvo,

History of Medicine Studies

The Art of Human Composition in Giovanni Pontano’s De principe liber Giuseppe Falvo (bio) There is a famous passage at the beginning of Book III of Il Libro del Cortegiano (1528) in which Baldesar Castiglione, in his opening address to Messer Alfonso Ariosto, compares the glorious court of Urbino to the mighty body of Hercules.1 While this description shows the author’s reliance on classical sources in developing the political themes of Il Cortegiano,2 it also reveals, from an artistic perspective, a strong interest during the Italian Renaissance in the study of the human body and its proportions. In the visual arts, Renaissance painters, sculptors and architects studied the human figure as an expression of mathematical relationships and geometric forms. In the fifteenth century, the revival of the classics brought to the foreground the great literary works of antiquity. Vitruvius’ treatise on architecture (De architectura), for instance, played a significant role in revitalizing the study of the human figure. Artists like Brunelleschi and Donatello sought to discover the principles which the classical artist had followed when creating such beautiful works. Their analysis of classical architecture led them to an understanding [End Page S21] of how a building is proportioned to the human body.3 As proof of the harmony and perfection of the human figure, Vitruvius describes in his treatise how a well-built man fits with extended hands and feet exactly into the most perfect geometrical figures, circle and square. The world-renowned drawing of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian man which exemplifies the blending of art and science during the Renaissance, provides perhaps the best example of Leonardo’s keen interest in proportion. Like other contemporary artists, Leonardo believed that the workings of the human body are an analogy for the workings of the universe. Inspired by the same classical principles, Leon Battista Alberti, one of the leading art theorists of the fifteenth century, in his De re aedificatoria (1452) relied on Vitruvius in his twofold definition of beauty. On one hand, Alberti describes beauty as “a certain regular harmony of all the parts of a thing of such a kind that nothing could be added or taken away or altered without making it less pleasing” (VI, 2). On the other, he speaks of beauty as a “kind of harmony and concord of all the parts to form a whole which is constructed according to a fixed number, and a certain relation and order, as symmetry, the highest and most perfect law of nature, demands” (IX, 5).4 In another important passage, in which the hand of the artist is described as a guided instrument to give life to the material supplied by nature, Alberti associates the intellectual skills of the artist with the rhetorical skills of the ancient orator while stressing the need to cultivate a style that is based on beauty, harmony and balance: What pleases us in the most beautiful and lovely things springs either from a rational inspiration of the mind, or from the hand of the artist, or is produced by nature from materials. The business of the mind is the choice, division, ordering and things of that kind, which give dignity to the work. The business of the human hand is the collecting, adding, taking away, outlining, careful working and things of that kind, which give grace to the work.5 As art historians have shown in their studies on the role of classical rhetoric in the visual arts, from the pioneering work of Rensselaer W. Lee’s Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (1967) to [End Page S22] the most recent contribution of Caroline Van Eck’s Classical Rhetoric in the Visual Arts (2007), L. B. Alberti and his followers resorted to the authority of the ancients to elevate painting to the higher status of the liberal arts. Humanists of the fifteenth century turned primarily to Cicero and Quintilian for their theories on the art of painting and poetry.6 One of the most quoted passages by art historians that points to the close relation between rhetoric and the visual arts is from a letter of 1452, written by the humanist pope Pius II, Enea Silvio...