Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350-1450. (Oxford-Warburg Studies) by Michael Baxandall

by Michael Baxandall

`This handsomely illustrated book is an original attempt to make clear how much the art of the orators and the painters in the Renaissance had in common ... Extremely important for the history of art.' Neo-Latin News

Genres: Art, History, Nonfiction, Art History, Italy, Renaissance

Hardcover

First published June 6, 2013

About the author

Art historian who developed the theory of period eye. He worked as a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London as well as teaching at the Warburg Institute and the University of California.

Reviews

[Kalliope · Rating 4 out of 5]

The erudition of this book goes well over my head.

Nonetheless, it has been a worthwhile read since its main messages are so clear.

Baxandall’s goal is to examine the texts we have from the Italian Renaissance which discuss painterly and sculptural matters. More often than not, these types of documents are taken as keys to the art works themselves. Baxandall however questions what these documents really say.

Concentrating on the period 1340-1450, Baxandall starts out from his conception of language as a conspiracy against experiencing; a collective system that simplifies experience and reduces them to elements that can be easily manipulated.

Languages have their own rules and structures, and these will determine to a great extent that which any writer will want to express.

With this premise he proceeds to look at Italian humanist texts at a time when a group of men, while embracing the still forming vernacular languages, began rejecting the Latin that had survived till their times, the Medieval Latin. They set out to resurrect the Latin from classical times, the one that Cicero used. This neoclassical Latin coexisted peacefully with the vernacular. Each one had its place. One was for the educated (and male), was learnt from older texts, and had very particular uses. The other was used for living and for men and women.

With Petrarca at the head, Baxandall finds that when the humanists, or the Orators as he identifies them, wanted to refer to their contemporary arts, they used Ciceronian rhetoric models. These they imposed on those images. For example, notions such as invent, disposition, and elocutio, were adopted for the discussion of paintings, although the latter term was substituted by ethopoeia or the expression of the emotions.

Baxandall then traces how the Western humanist circles, which were poor in Greek knowledge, benefited tremendously from a single event. The arrival of Emanuel Chrysoloras (1355- 1415) had a great impact. He was a sage and diplomat from Byzance at the end of the fourteenth century, who upon his arrival in Florence established shop and began teaching Greek with great success. Apart from the popularity of his Greek lessons, this arrival also prompted the reverse itinerary as some Italians began to travel East with the idea of spending protracted times in Constantinople to absorb its culture. From 1400 onwards the availability of ancient Greek texts in the West increased noticeably.




The normative role that the renewal of Antiquity exerted is humorously seen in the way the very beginnings of Florentine painting were coined. The stock story is that Cimabue (1240 – 1302) led to the greater Giotto (1266-1337). This formula originates in the writings of one of these humanists. Villani borrowed from Pliny’s Natural History the scheme that Apollodore had been succeeded and surpassed by Zeuxis. He just substituted the names of the two Florentine painters. This account survives in today’s teaching.

Cimabue's



Giotto's




Apart from extending the bridge back to the lost shore of ancient Greece--even if this was done via the Orient where ancient Greek culture had survived in a somewhat frozen manner--Chrysoloras also left three letters with various descriptions. These were travel reports. Amongst other things they contain full-fledged examples of the Greek concept of ekphrasis, or textual descriptions of an image. For Baxandall these were seminal in the Western elaboration of a language for paintings.

Thanks to this renewed access to other sources and concepts brought by the link to Byzance, and from the somewhat stilted beginnings provided by Petrarch, Baxandall traces subsequent writings on art by other humanists. In this account he points at a certain discrepancy in the textual claims and the pictorial reality. The neoclassical extolling by early humanists in their writings was, however, very closely associated to artists that we would regard as Medieval, such as Pisanello (1395-1455) and even the earlier Gentile da Fabriano (1370-1427).


Pisanello's




Gentile's





As expected, the pursuit of the texts culminates with Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), and his De Pictura. Baxandall devotes the entire third part of his book to him. This treatise, written in Latin, and then translated into Italian by Alberti himself, has three parts. For us the most famous now is the first one with the crucial exposé on perspective and his concept of the pictorial window.









But it is the second part that offers greater interest to Baxandall, since that is the section where Alberti articulates a full system in the appreciation of a pictorial representation. Still borrowing from rhetoric, for he builds up a whole from constituting and balancing elements, Alberti however provided the building blocks for the growth of the Art in Art criticism for several centuries later.

And the corresponding painting to Alberti’s ideas Baxandall considers being the Lamentation of Christ by Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506). In it he sees a clear example of a lack of asperitas, the body of Christ is a good example of Alberti's quality of languidus, the painting is a coherent historia, there is enough varieties. And although all these terms or concepts Alberti had articulated while looking at a painting by Giotto, it was a later artist who incorporated them in his way of painting.


A sample of the normative powers of text.







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I have read this book in the French translation because the original is out of print and the extant copies frightfully expensive.

[Sean Tatol · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is clearly written for an audience with some knowledge of Latin in mind, and I don't have that knowledge. The passages of untranslated text are long enough that Google Translate isn't much more illuminating than skimming the text and vaguely processing some words you can recognize. The content is great, though, if you're interested in this kind of thing, and after the first chapter you're not so inundated with Latin. My only complaint is Giotto is barely mentioned as anything more than a passing reference, Pisanello and Mantegna figure much more prominently. My guess is the title wasn't Baxandall's idea.

[Zoé Lt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Très intéressant, mais il reste difficile à lire si on ne prend pas le temps, donc prenez-le, ça vaut le coup !