Leon Battista Alberti: On Painting by Leon Battista Alberti

Author:Leon Battista Alberti [Alberti, Leon Battista]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781139039499
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

Book Three The Painter

1

But to educate the painter to perfection, in order that he can obtain all the praises of which we have spoken, at the moment when several thoughts still remain that I think ought not to be completely neglected in these commentaries, let us report them in the briefest way possible.

2

It is the task of the painter to delimit and depict with lines and colors on a surface any assigned bodies to such a point that – given a certain distance and a certain position of the centric ray – painted things that you see appear, each [at the same time], prominent and very much like the assigned bodies.(1) The purpose of the painter is to obtain from a work praise, favor, and approval more than riches, a [feature] that he will certainly gain provided his painting will capture the eyes and hearts of the observers and, above all, will make [hearts] palpitate. We have said on what conditions these things can take place when we first spoke about composition and reception of light. But I wish that the painter, in order that he be able to obtain all these [conditions] in the best way, is firstly a man both honest and educated in the praiseworthy arts.(2) In fact, everyone knows how honesty – more so than admiration of every activity or art – is valid to gain the benevolence of the people. There are no doubts, then, that the benevolence of many contributes very much to procuring praise and, above all, riches [by] the artist, if it is true that the rich are sometimes moved by this benevolence more than by the skill of art, or rather offer earnings to him who firstly is modest and virtuous after they have dismissed another who may be, if you please, more skilled but perhaps dissolute. Things being so, the artist will have to be moderate in his morals, of great humanity and availability, in order to also obtain benevolence – [a] firm defense against poverty – and benefits, the best help to [the] perfection of art.

3

Furthermore, I wish that the painter be expert, as far as possible, in all liberal arts, but above all I desire in him the knowledge of geometry. I certainly agree with Pamphilus, a very ancient and very famous painter, from whom the young nobles learned painting for the first time.(3) His opinion, in fact, was that no one by ignoring geometry would have been a good painter. Certainly, our rudiments, from which one extracts a whole, complete, and precise technique of painting, are easily assimilable by a geometrician. I also believe that for those who ignore this science neither rudiments nor some procedures of painting can be sufficiently comprehensible. I, therefore, claim that geometry absolutely must not be neglected by painters. It will not be useless if they will find pleasure very near to poets and orators;(4) in fact, these certainly have many qualities in common with the painter. Indeed, those literary men, not

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