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Charles H. Carman, Leon Battista Alberti and Nicholas Cusanus: Towards an Epistemology of Vision for Italian Renaissance Art and Culture . Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Pp. 2018. £65.00 (cloth).

2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 2; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/690584

2379-3171

John S Hendrix,

Visual Culture and Art Theory

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewsCharles H. Carman, Leon Battista Alberti and Nicholas Cusanus: Towards an Epistemology of Vision for Italian Renaissance Art and Culture. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Pp. 2018. £65.00 (cloth).John Shannon HendrixJohn Shannon Hendrix Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis review is written in memoriam. Charles H. Carman passed away on July 26, 2016. He was a great friend and colleague. His contribution to our coedited volume Renaissance Theories of Vision (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010) stands as a prelude to his culminating work, Leon Battista Alberti and Nicholas Cusanus. The argument of the book is that Renaissance painting should not be seen as a secular, rationalized, and anthropocentric forerunner of modernism but rather as a theological and metaphysical continuation of medieval art. The modern Cartesian view that the rational and irrational, intellectual and spiritual, are opposed to each other did not exist in the Renaissance. They were rather intertwined in a dialectical relationship, as evidenced in particular in the writings of Alberti and Cusanus. Spirituality, divine ontology, and a liminal connection between the material, sense experience, and a higher intellectual understanding or wisdom, are symbolized by one-point perspective and represented metaphorically by a variety of devices used by Renaissance painters, including the vanishing point, doorway, window, garden, gold background, and light. The limen is the sensory threshold, the boundary of perception.Art historical interpretations of the use of perspective in Renaissance paintings, by the likes of Martin Kemp, Kim Veltman, Karsten Harries, Joan Gadol, J. V. Field, David Summers, and Anthony Grafton, are dominated by rationalist, mechanistic explanations that deny any symbolic content of a divine ontology and emphasize the empirical and scientific nature of Alberti’s explanation of perspective in his treatise On Painting (De pictura, 1439–41). As Harries wrote in Infinity and Perspective (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), “Alberti’s art is incompatible with this spiritual perspective,” looking through the material to a spiritual significance. The present book presents a strong counterargument. The possibility of such spiritual content has been allowed by a few, notably Samuel Edgerton and S. K. Heninger, Erwin Panofsky, and Leo Steinberg, and the present book builds upon these. Panofsky, in his 1924 essay “Die Perspektive als symbolische Form,” saw perspective as “transforming the ousia (reality) into the phainomenon (appearance),” whereby reducing “the divine to a mere subject matter for human consciousness, but for that very reason, conversely it expands human consciousness into a vessel for the divine.” The present book explores the ambiguities and contradiction inherent in this statement, which opens the way for the argument of the book.Alberti wrote in On Painting: “Mathematicians measure with their minds alone the forms of things separated from all matter. Since we wish the object to be seen we will use a more sensate wisdom (più grassa Minerva).” Through sense experience the painting can lead the viewer to a transcendent form of wisdom or knowledge (Minerva) beyond the sense experience of the painting alone (Narcissus). This higher form of intellect is represented by Alberti’s famous emblem of a winged eye in his On the Family (Della famiglia, 1433–40), describing a disembodied vision that recalls the higher spiritual vision in the Paradiso of Dante, and the higher intellectual capacity disconnected from sense experience, the nous poietikos, which dominated classical and medieval philosophy.The dialectic of sense and intellect is also core to the writings of Nicholas Cusanus, especially in the figura paradigmatica in his On Conjecture (De coniecturis, ca. 1442), which poses a series of coincidences of opposites: sense/intellect, finite/infinite, unity/multiplicity. These coincidences of opposites also define the limen created by the metaphorical devices in Renaissance paintings, which lead to a higher intellectual perception or understanding, a discerning of the spiritual through the material, a realization of the invisible through the visible, the infinite through the finite. For Cusanus, the knowledge of finite reality is determined by differences, as it was for Plato. Cusanus also invokes the dialectic of complicato/explicato, in the unfolding of the unity of God into the multiplicity of matter, which is represented by the unfolding of a material space from the vanishing point in one-point perspective. Carman points to a number of paintings to illustrate this, notably the Tribute Money of Masaccio, Last Supper of Leonardo da Vinci, the Disputa of Raphael, the Annunciation in the St. Anthony Polyptych of Piero della Francesca, and the Annunciation of Piermatteo d’Amelia. In the Last Supper, the unfolding is reiterated mathematically, as the triune groupings of the Trinity become the quadripartite groupings of the material world.Alberti’s well-known concept of istoria in painting, the creation of a narrative, involves the making visible of intellectual concepts, and the coincidence of opposites staged at the liminal point of the painted representation. The istoria corresponds to the idea of Cusanus in On Seeking God (De quaerendo deum, 1445) that one is able to “enlarge the nature of sensible vision in the presence of the eye of the intellect and from this nature construct a ladder of ascent.” God is understood though images from the sensible world. This must be the basis of any understanding of Renaissance art, which is rarely a purely mathematical or geometrical exercise, as some commentators would have it.According to Carman, nature as the liminal plane between the material and spiritual, finite and infinite, is seen in Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis. Nature is seen as a portal to the mind of God and an inner visuality. The naturalistic setting, along with the corporealized figure of St. Francis, allow us to see “the divine infinite unfolded within the finite world” (85). The Cortona Annunciation of Fra Angelico presents nature as paradise or Garden of Eden, where nature functions as a metaphor for the promise of paradise. In the Pesaro Coronation of the Virgin of Giovanni Bellini, an earthly image of heavenly Jerusalem evokes the spiritual in nature. The Coronation of the Virgin also exploits the window as the liminal plane, staging the coincidence of opposites, as does the Last Supper of Leonardo, Madonna of the Rock of Vincenzo Foppa, or the Portrait of an Old Man and a Young Boy by Domenico Ghirlandaio. The window in Brunelleschi’s perspective experiment with the painted scale model image of the Baptistery can also be included. Carman finds that the portal or doorway is highlighted in the painting by d’Amelia (now in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, also attributed to Antoniazzo Romano). A gold background as limen can be found in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Annunciation in Siena, Bellini’s Eternal Father in Pesaro, and Romano’s Madonna and Child in Perugia.Carman thus concludes that the combined theories of Alberti and Cusanus, as illustrated in the paintings, constitute a convincing epistemology of vision in the Renaissance. The symbolic and metaphorical content of the paintings displays a “fundamental theology of seeing the unseen” (163), in a dialectical interaction of the material (sensed) and spiritual (intuited). James Elkins, in Renaissance Theory (London: Routledge, 2008), stated that the view that “the nature of humanism somehow contaminated art with rationalism … is a pervasive, almost irresistible force in modern scholarship.” The present book argues that the view of Renaissance humanism as predominately rationalist is a historical misinterpretation. There was no Cartesian distinction between the rational and irrational. The material and spiritual, finite and infinite were intertwined in a dialectical relationship, as displayed in the art. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by History of Humanities Volume 2, Number 1Spring 2017 Sponsored by the Society for the History of the Humanities Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/690584 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.