TEKSTY

Overs., indl. og komm. v/ Lise Bek

Albertiana, vol. V, 2002, pp. 299–306.

Leon Battista Alberti, Om Billedkunsten. Oversættelse, indledning og kommentarer ved Lise Bek [translated into Danish from the Italian version “Della Pittura”, with variants and emendations from the Latin “De Pictura”, both from vol. Opere Volgari, ed. Grayson, vol. III, Bari 1973], Copenhagen, Nyt Nordisk Forlag Arnold Busck 2000, pp. [1-6] 7-329 [+7 blanks], ill. in the text.

In 1435, Alberti had completed a first version in Latin of his tract On Painting: De Pictura. In or before July 1436 he had also done a translation and revision into Italian, dedicated to Filippo Brunelleschi. It is debatable whether it is this Italian adaptation or the original Latin version that forms the basis of an another revision, dating from the late 1530s. It is however on this third version, dedicated to Giovanfrancesco Gonzaga of Mantua, that the Latin edition of 1540, printed in Basle, is based. This edition, however, presents ”no small measure” of different readings from a complex corpus of twenty MSS. When Cecil Grayson published his edition and English translation of De Pictura in 1972, based on a corpus of six MSS, he noted in his Preface that ”the Italian version has undeservedly enjoyed the greater editorial fortune”, in spite of it being ”less full and less precise in expression than the Latin version”. Nevertheless, this editorial trend has continued in the recent Scandinavian translations of the tract, first in Sölve Olsson’s Om målarkonsten from 1996, and now in Lise Bek’s work. Bek bases her translation on Grayson’s edition of the Italian version (from the Latin-Italian parallel-edition “De Pictura/Della Pittura” in Opere Volgari, vol. 3, Bari 1973). Apart from earlier translations based on the Italian version, Bek is not only including the more notable alterations from the Latin text (of the same edition), but also minor variants of reformulations and emendations are included in the Danish text within parentheses.
   While the Swedish translation is published with only a short Preface, Bek’s translation is more, much more, than just the first Danish translation of Alberti’s tract. The translation itself covers pp. 241-309, and is preceded by a lengthy essay on Alberti and his place in the Italian Renaissance. However introductory in plan and composition, the scope of this Introduction is closer to that of a monograph; rather, it is a biographical, historical and intellectual survey of Alberti, the Florentine Renaissance, and the humanist ideals of the time, but with steady and continuous reference to Alberti’s tract.
   Alberti, his life and ideas in general, and his Della Pittura in particular, are the focalizing points that bring the times, ideas and art works in our view. This is laid out as a series of concentric circles, narrowing in width while expanding in depth. Starting with “The Early Renaissance in Italy”, moving from there through the Florentine milieu (“Art, Culture and Business in the Florentine City-state”) to “Alberti and his Theory of Art” and “Alberti and his tract On Painting” respectively, we finally arrive at the tract itself. Bek’s introductory essay is an impressive accomplishment, written on top of studies in the field since 1960, and consequently with ease and clarity, the typical hallmarks of erudition-surplus.
   Even though Bek focuses on issues usually on the agenda in connection with Alberti and his Della Pittura—i.e. his theory of art, the neo-Platonic influences, the construzione legittima etc.—it is, I believe, not without reason that Bek’s introduction brings out those issues with more than customary emphasis and strength. When Alberti claims that he “wants to make an entirely new art out of painting” (§ 26, p. 268), Bek not only acknowledges his claim, but also demonstrates how and by which means this was achieved. Bek’s demonstration of Alberti’s claim is carried out with a clarity and depth that inevitably, but always implicitly, reaches to the very core of the (modern) notion of art. It is thus not without interest that Alberti’s pretentious claim of fabricating an entirely new art does not have the same weight in the Latin version. In Della Pittura we read: ”ma di nuovo fabrichiamo una arte di pittura …”, whereas De Pictura, in Grayson’s translation reads: “... but treating of the art in an entirely new way” (sed artem novissime recenseamus). This difference, between on the one hand creating an entirely new art of painting, and on the other rendering (its principles or theory) in a very new way, is significant. Probably, it is passages like this one which prompted Bek to base her translation, and thus her introduction, on the Italian rather than the Latin version. Bek argues that Alberti’s new theory of art is evidently “present in De Pictura, but that it is not until Della Pittura that it reaches full linguistic development” (p. 178). At any rate, Bek cites another passage where Alberti is linguistically more explicit in the Italian version than in the Latin one. It stems from paragraph 2, where Alberti uses the Italian term fingere instead of imitare, as in the Latin version. Of course, this could be a “slip of the pen”, as Bek notes, but, she continues, fictus was the term used in the contemporary literary debate to denote something created by imagination (and not imitated, casted or copied from reality). This imagination, or creative power, was a central concept and it was of paramount importance for Alberti to link it firmly to his “new art of painting”—a faculty of the artist which he later characterised as “a second God”.
   It would carry us too wide off the scope of this review to note all the manoeuvres discussed by Bek, and used by Alberti to promote painting as a liberal art (or even the liberal art). The ideas and inspirations behind this objective make up the weightiest part of Bek’s introduction (“Leon Battista Alberti and his theory of art”, pp. 139-230). Her discussion of the influences from rhetoric, the secular humanist ideology, neo-Platonic geometry and his theory of colour (“unfettered from its bonds to old-fashioned craftsmanship and to mineral or organic substances”, p. 197) as models and bricks in Alberti’s theoretical building are all convincingly demonstrated with exemplary clarity. The most important issue is, of course, the perspective, or the construzione legittima. But whereas the constructions of perspective, in the purely technical sense of the term, are the only parts commented by Grayson, Bek’s focus is not on “perspective as a device in itself for the creation of the largest possible effect of depth or space”, but as a “function of the geometry of the surface”. Even though Bek meticulously examines Alberti’s constructions as compared to those of his contemporary colleagues (in part 2 of her introduction), her central argument is that Alberti’s geometry has its theoretical foundation in neo-Platonic metaphysics in general and in Plato’s Timaios in particular (the only Platonic text known at the time, existing only as a fragment). Bek suspects that Alberti’s option for the triangle as preferred module for the construction of the ordered universe is based on its role in Plato’s Timaios (p. 170).
   Even though Bek’s explicit purpose as well as the method underlying the translation and the introduction are strictly historical, her strong emphasis on Alberti as pioneer of a theory of art inevitably—but still implicitly—underlines the lasting presence and relevance of Alberti’s tract for the next five centuries of “modern” art. In such a perspective, it is difficult for the reader to disregard reminiscences from, for instance, Winckelmann’s “ein Kunst des Contours” (cf. §§ 30-34), Edmund Burke’s physiological theories of the impact on the mind caused by the rays of light on the spectators’ cornea (§ 7 ff.), or even from Joseph Kosuth’s (mis)use of Anglo-saxon linguistic philosophy to proclaim an “art after philosophy”, along the same lines as Alberti’s (mis)use of Neo-platonic philosophy—“a humanistic art of painting and the artist as humanist”, as Bek labels one of Alberti’s objectives.
   More surprising and intriguing are Bek’s conspicuously numerous references to possible influences on Alberti’s theory from Northern art in general, and that of van Eyck in particular. The question of influences from the Italian Renaissance on the art of the North has often and continuously been discussed by scholars of Northern art. Naturally, when we are speaking of such early times as Florence in the 1430s, questions of influences from north to south are rarely discussed. These remarks are so much more startling that there is no evidence that any Northern panel was to be seen in Italy before—at the earliest—the 1440s. Bek’s hint, however, stems from the fact that Alberti accompanied cardinal Nicolò Albergati on his travels to Northern Europe a few years before he wrote his tract. The cardinal was portrayed by van Eyck in 1431-32, and on this occasion, Bek conjectures, Alberti could have had the opportunity to study the Ghent-Altarpiece, or some other works by van Eyck or other contemporary Flemish artists. More importantly, the issue is also raised in by Alberti himself in his tract. Bek notes that his discussion of light and shadow in § 46 could be inspired by the way van Eyck has rendered the reflection of light in water, metals, pearls and precious stones in the Ghent-Altarpiece (p. 196). On the other hand, we have to object, Alberti’s insistance that this rendering should be achieved through application of black and white colours, does not disclose any familiarity with the van Eyckian technique of successive applications of thin and translucent layers of paint. That is, unless “il biancho e ’l nero” should not here be understood as referring to pigments, but rather as having a theoretical, and thus more idealised, connotation; something like the degree of light in matter. Immediately, this does not seem to be the case, but taking into account Bek’s interpretation of the deeper motives of Alberti’s use of geometry, his application of rhetorics in a pictorial syntax and his theory of colours, it is not at all inconceivable. The next paragraph (§ 47) could give the impression that Alberti had heard of van Eycks technique. In Bek’s translation, one could indeed get the impression that Alberti is speaking of applying thin, transparent layers of colour. The passage, in which Alberti describes how to obtain light and shades on areas to make them appear three-dimensional, reads in Bek’s Danish translation (here, of course, again translated):

“(it. It should be done thus:) First you have to cover (lat. = change), as with a very light layer of dew, the paint on the surface entirely to its outline (lat. = borderline) with as much white or black as needed. Thereafter another layer (lat. of dew so to speak) is applied on top of the first, then an additional (lat. and another, successively further away from the borderline) […].”

Interesting here are the “very light/thin layers of dew” (levissimo quasi rore in Latin; leggierissima rugiada in Italian) and “another layer”. A term like “layer” is not used in the Latin or Italian versions. The Latin version uses the term irrorationes, “sprinklings”, in Grayson’s translation, which, as far as I can judge, could be interpreted in terms of “van Eyckian” translucent heightenings, which poetically speaking could indeed be likened to dew. To me, the passages seem to describe a technique of shading by purely graphic means, more like hatching in drawings. The question is intricate and interesting, but however it may be, in its overall design nothing could be more distant from Alberti’s theory of painting than Northern art. Alberti’s focus on figure rather than ground, and his disregard of landscape in favour of architectural settings, his recommendation to limit the number of figures, his ideas of composition and of clearness stand in strong contrast—not to say direct opposition—to Northern art.
This might also be the reason why Northern art never hatched any theory, and at the same time it underlines —and this is the prime achievement of Bek’s excellent translation and introduction—the importance of Alberti’s text, not only in the perspective of the Florentine Renaissance, but in the ongoing discussion of art history and art theory since then. Even though following the Italian text very closely, Bek’s translation is, one could say, consequently in line with her interpretation of the text, and in that sense it is superior and more “alert” than the Swedish translation. However, the editorial principle of Alberti’s tract is, from my point of view, unfortunate. On the one hand, one could choose to render the Italian text as “it is” (this is the case with the “colloquial” Swedish translation), or one could attempt to establish an “ideal text” with all that it implies with regard to apparatus and compromised readability. As already said, the Italian text is defined as the basis, though without excluding shifts to the Latin version where this text is preferred. When variants occur, whether Latin or Italian, they are inserted in a primitive system of parentheses with (lat. = …) or (it. = …) respectively, which makes the reading—through and over the many parentheses—rather annoying. In this case, I suspect that this way of including the variant readings represents an attempt to satisfy requirements of completeness, while dismissing the burdens of a sufficient apparatus for the sake of readability.

The consequence is that we are solidly planted between two editorial principles, achieving the advantages of none and the disadvantages of both. Whatever the status of the Italian text might be (to me it gives the impression of a shortened, but also revised and improved, version), I would prefer having the translation of the Italian text as it is, supplemented with original terms, variants and emendations in footnotes. Apart from this reservation, Bek’s achievement is an altogether lucid, admirably learned and engaged introduction to Leon Battista Alberti and the Italian Renaissance, that indubitably will exercise its influence on Danish scholarship in this area, and, maybe even more importantly, that will have a lasting influence upon the general public as well.

Jan Bäcklund