CHAPTER TWO Disegno The Invention of an Art we are building anew an art of painting. \ = Leon Battista Alberti! ape. as an art is a discovery of the Renaissance. This is hardly to claim that the practice of drawing was unknown before the fifteenth century; modes of delineation had been the essential component of the pictorial arts since remote antiquity. Only in the Quattrocento, however, that is, in the early Renaissance in Italy, does drawing, come to be consciously and programmatically recognized as a distinctive activity, fundamental to painting and the related visual arts and yet separate from them. Only in the early Renaissance does the practice of drawing become theorized, and this occurs as a consequence,Disegno intellectual and technical, of new attitudes toward painting and, ultimately, toward the painter It relates both to the accommodation of the pictorial arts to the evoly- ing cultural values of humanism and to the studio practices of a new generation of artists. 1. Albertis Finding The locus classicus for this phenomenon is the resonant little volume on painting, ‘written by Leon Battista Alberti in 1435. This first humanist treatise devoted to a > traitionally @echanical att responds to and participates in the exciting new devel- ‘opments in painting in early fifteenth-century Florence. Just returned from family exile Alberti recognizes and celebrates the artistic achievements and ambitions of the Florentines: “di nuovo fabrichiamo un'arte di pittura.”* Rationalizing practice and articulating theoretical foundations for the art of Donatello, Ghiberti, Luca della Robbia, Masaccio, and, especially, Brunelleschi, to whom he addressed Della pitura, the Italian version of his text, Alberti structured his book on the model of ancient rhetorical treatises.’ In his dedicatory letter he describes the division to Brunelleschi: Br goal hte Hicks th Ciel Gathorang? eoneanetoioety nature from which arises this delightful and most noble art. The second book puts the art in the hand of the artist, distinguishing its parts and demonstrating all. The third instructs the artist how he can and should acquire perfect skill and knowledge in the art of painting. In the first book, “tutto matematico,” Alberti establishes the Euclidean basis for theart, demonstrating the simple geometry behind the recently invented system of | artificial perspective that so radically distinguished the new painting of the Quat- trocento from all that preceded it. Indeed, it was just this rationalization of pictorial rendering, the systematization of spatial representation, that inspired and permitted Albest’s search for the theoretical foundations of painting in optics and geometry. Taking his professional readers slowly through the fundamentals of plane geometry from point, to line, to plane ~ he lays out the essentially linear base for represen- tation, the determination of the foreshortened coordinared groundplane that will provide the standard of commensurability for the painter's composition. Mixing geometric theorems of similar triangles and optical theories of visual reception and perception, he describes painting as an intersection of the visual pyramid, a record ofvisual rays cut at a certain moment on their way to the eye. Perspective involves seeing through and painting may therefore be analogized to a transparent window. Nonetheless, the goal of the system is less illusion than measure. Commensurabil- inyis the operative value, the predictability of proportion that permits rational con- trol of perspectival diminution on the picture plane and adapts its grids and patterns to the subjective agent of the viewing eye (Fig. 11) + 35sour 26 Drawing Acts Sides in Graphic Expression and Representation In book 2, which “puts the art in the hand of the artist,” Alberti’s strategy shifts from the mathematical to the rhetorical, his inspiration from Euclid to Cicero and Quintilian. Again, the aim is a rational understanding of the art, the articulation of its fundamental principles. As in the overall structure of his treatise, Alberti follows the models of ancient rhetoric, dividing his art into three parts: “painting is com- posed of circumscription, gomposition, and the reception of light” (‘1 31). With this he postulates e-tripartite definition of painting that_will resonate through the Renaissance tradition of art theorizing. Translated as/“disegno, comensuratio et col- orare” by Piero della Francesca,’ this aesthetic trinity-will find its vernacular epit- ome in the sixteenth century ag disegno, invenzione, and colorire. Albert's circon- serizione articulates the very basis for disegno, for drawing in its functional sense as delineation, linear representation, and his paragraph on the term lays the foun- dation for subsequent critical appreciation of the art: Gircuinseription describes the turning of the outline [Vattorniare dellorlo| in the painting, They say that Parrhasios .. . was most expert in this and had studied these lines most attentively. I say that one should take care that this circumscription is done with the most subile lines, such that they can hardly be seen, like those the painter Apelles used to practice and compete with Protogenes. Circumscription is none other than the drawing of the outline [disegnamento del’orlo}, which when done with too apparent a line in a painting will look not like the margin of a surface but like a crack, | should like only the movement of the out- line [Fandare dell'orlo] to be fallowed in circumscription; to this, I affirm, one must devote the utmost practice. No composition and no reception of light can be praised where there is not also good circum- scription. Nori it unusual to see a good circumscription alone, thats, a ‘good drawing by itself be most pleasing [cio® uno buono disegno per sé essere gratissimo). (1 31) Alberti’s brief disquisition on drawing is remarkable in several ways. Pillaging the anecdotal stores of antiquity, Pliny in particular, he moves from the historical cele- bration of the well-drawn line and the aesthetics of linear subtlety to injunctions concerning actual practice. Drawing is established as the foundation for painting. Without it neither composition nor coloring can succeed; but drawing itself has the potential to stand alone, independent of the other two terms. A subtle contour, Alberti | recognizes ~slipping from Apelles to Parthasios ~ is a marvel to behold a line across aa surface that inflects itself spatially to transcend the flat reality of that surface, line | that has no equivalent in nature and therefore must seem not to exist even as it describes natural form ~a paradox that will greatly worry and fascinate Leonardo da | Vinci. Like ancient Pliny, Alberti too seems ready to celebrate the single line, In this passage he acknowledges the independence of drawing as an art. As the art of draw- ing emerges in its own right, with its own aesthetic values, Alberti explicitly confirms that autonomy: “cio? uno buono disegno per sé essere gratissimo.””