rushthatspeaks (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks) wrote2010-09-05 12:29 am
rushthatspeaks) wrote2010-09-05 12:29 am
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On Painting, Leon Battista Alberti (365 Books, Day 7)
Leon Battista Alberti's little treatise On Painting (De Pictura), 1435, is one of the books that made modernity, and almost too short to be as significant as it is. It was to Alberti's knowledge the first book on painting; Alberti was a friend of Brunelleschi, who did the dome of the Cathedral of Florence, and the two of them together have a fair claim on having invented perspective. It is a book which resolutely avoids the philosophical questions about what is the basis of seeing, the scientific questions about the shape of the eye, in order to concentrate on the visual representation of forms: a book published in Italy in 1435 which never once mentions God. It came out in a dual edition, both in Latin and in Tuscan, and Alberti stated specifically that the reason for the vernacular edition was accessibility, for he wanted every painting student to be able to read it without a churchman's education. And read it they did. Michelangelo, da Vinci would not look remotely similar without Alberti, neither in their paintings nor, necessarily, in their lives, for Alberti implicitly defines the role of the painter in society in a way that began the long process of separation of humanist art from religious art. I've heard about On Painting for years, it's one of those books people assume you've read if you read Renaissance studies at all and also still a book people recommend to artists.
What has it got for a reader now? Well, Alberti's tips and tricks still hold. His discussion of perspective is both clear and complex, so that I didn't really feel I was following it entirely but was fairly certain that, given time, I could, and his individual notes seem as though they would be useful. Look at your picture in a mirror and you'll see where it's really gone wrong, is one. Never use a white so white you can't go whiter, a black so dark you can't go blacker, or you'll have no way to delineate any change in texture you may decide on later. A good way to draw an object, he says, is to make a grid of thread in a standing frame, and put the object behind it; then make a similar grid on your paper and trace the outline of the object among the corresponding intersections in the grid. I can tell without trying it that this would give me a quicker and more accurate still life than I would get otherwise.
But the thing that I found most interesting is how modern he isn't, the things that now come across as totally alien. For example, his discussion of perspective is based entirely upon the concept that the eye emits rays which encounter objects and bring back details about them. The eye emits these rays in a pyramid, with the eye at the apex, and different rays have different properties of collecting color or shade or texture. The thing is, this is totally untrue, but it is behaviorally indistinguishable from the truth when one is talking about, say, a vanishing point, so it doesn't harm his argument. Or color. There are, of course, four primary colors (excepting black and white), on which all the rest are based: red, for fire, blue-green, for water, a smoky gray for air, and ash-colored, for earth. I find the combination of the book that might have been written yesterday with the system of thought that has in many ways perished very charming, and this carried me through the fact that I am not, not being a painter, entirely up to all the technicalities.
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What has it got for a reader now? Well, Alberti's tips and tricks still hold. His discussion of perspective is both clear and complex, so that I didn't really feel I was following it entirely but was fairly certain that, given time, I could, and his individual notes seem as though they would be useful. Look at your picture in a mirror and you'll see where it's really gone wrong, is one. Never use a white so white you can't go whiter, a black so dark you can't go blacker, or you'll have no way to delineate any change in texture you may decide on later. A good way to draw an object, he says, is to make a grid of thread in a standing frame, and put the object behind it; then make a similar grid on your paper and trace the outline of the object among the corresponding intersections in the grid. I can tell without trying it that this would give me a quicker and more accurate still life than I would get otherwise.
But the thing that I found most interesting is how modern he isn't, the things that now come across as totally alien. For example, his discussion of perspective is based entirely upon the concept that the eye emits rays which encounter objects and bring back details about them. The eye emits these rays in a pyramid, with the eye at the apex, and different rays have different properties of collecting color or shade or texture. The thing is, this is totally untrue, but it is behaviorally indistinguishable from the truth when one is talking about, say, a vanishing point, so it doesn't harm his argument. Or color. There are, of course, four primary colors (excepting black and white), on which all the rest are based: red, for fire, blue-green, for water, a smoky gray for air, and ash-colored, for earth. I find the combination of the book that might have been written yesterday with the system of thought that has in many ways perished very charming, and this carried me through the fact that I am not, not being a painter, entirely up to all the technicalities.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are