The Architecture of Brunelleschi and the Origins of Perspective Theory in the Fifteenth

Century
Author(s): Giulio Carlo Argan and Nesca A. Robb
Source: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 9 (1946), pp. 96-121
Published by: The Warburg Institute
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/750311
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THE ARCHITECTURE OF BRUNELLESCHI AND THE
ORIGINS OF PERSPECTIVE THEORY IN
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY
By Giulio Carlo Argan
r | ahe invention of perspective and the discovery of antiquity: these two
1 events have for long been held to mark the beginnings of the Renaissance.
Modern criticism has sharply limited the importance of both events, and
above all of the second: so profound a transformation of the artistic conscience
could not clearly have been caused by external circumstances. It is not so
much needful to decide how far the artists of the early Quattrocento had
penetrated into the objective understanding of space (if indeed one can speak
of such an objective understanding) or into the knowledge of the documents
relating to antique art, as it is to discover the internal necessity that urged
them to seek that knowledge. In fact the same inward impulse is common to
both activities: the search for a more exact knowledge of space and that for
a more exact knowledge of antique art are inseparable, until such time at
least as the study of antique art assumes, as it does in the full maturity of
humanistic culture, an independent existence as the science of antiquity.
It is well known that the new ideal of beauty was defined, classically, as
a harmony of parts, in other words by means of the idea of proportion, which,
according to Vitruvius, is the same thing as the Greek 9axovLoc; and it was
with this same word that Euclid described geometrical congruity, which is
the fundamental principle of perspective. If perspective is the process by
which we arrive at proportion, that is to say, at beauty or the perfection of
art, it is also the process by which we reach the antique which is art par
excellence or perfect beauty.
The classical tradition had been neither lost nor extinguished throughout
the whole of the Middle Ages; on the contrary, it had been diffused and
popularized. To set oneself the task of rediscovering the ancients, meant
setting oneself to determine the concrete historical value of the achievements
of ancient art, as distinguished from its mediaeval corruptions and populariza-
tions. The activity by which we recognize value is judgment, and judgment
is an act of the total consciousness. Enthusiasm for, or faith in antiquity,
impulses which had had, during the Middle Ages their moments of genuine
exaltation, are henceforth insufficient: the formulation of judgment, since it
implies a definition of the value of consciousness, implies also a definition of
the value of reality, because such a judgment is a judgment of being and
not-being, of reality and non-reality.
What was sought for in ancient art was therefore not a transcendental
value, but, in opposition to mediaeval transcendentalism, an immanent value,
a conception of the world. The touchstone by which we recognize values is
reality: not a limitless and continuous reality which can be grasped only in
the particular, and in which man himself is absorbed, but nature as a reality
conceived by man and distinct from him as the object from the subject.
96
THE ARCHITECTURE OF BRUNFT.T.FjSCHI 97
Nature is the form of reality, in so far as it reveals and makes it tangible in
its full complexity: the laws of form are also the laws of nature, and the
mental process by which we arrive at the conception of nature is the same
as that which leads to the conception of form, that is to say of art.l The
Renaissance begins, so far as the figurative arts are concerned, when to
artistic activity is added the idea of art as a consciousness of its own act: it is
then that the mediaeval ars mechanica becomes ars liberalis. "Ancient art-
writes D. Frey2-appears to the Btestern mind as nature, with a heightened
significance whereby the natural becomes the expression of a profound truth
and of perfection. Thus in the West every tendency to naturalistic or rational-
istic development is always referable to a classical source."
The formulation of a common law for nature and for artistic form lies in
perspective: which may in general terms, be defined as the method or mental
procedure for the determination of value. In the writers of the Quattrocento
excepting naturally in Cennini and Ghiberti we see clearly the belief that
perspective is not simply a rule of optics which may also be applied to artistic
expression, but a procedure peculiar to art, which in art has its single and
logical end. Perspective is art itself in its totality: no relation is possible be-
tween the artist and the world except through the medium of perspective,
just as no relation is possible between the human spirit and reality short of
falling back upon the mediaeval antithesis of conceptualism and nominalism
unless we assume the conception of nature. Hence proceeds that identity
of perspective-painting and science, clearly aErmed by the theorists of the
Quattrocento.
The starting point of the controversy between modernists and tradition-
alists at the beginning ofthe Quattrocento seems to me to be notably indicated
in a passage, probably not devoid of polemical intentions, in the Pittura of
Alberti: "no man denies that of such things as we cannot see there is none
that appertaineth unto the painter: the painter studieth to depict only that
which is seen."
On the other hand, according to Cennini, a typical representative of the
traditionalist school, the painter's task is "to discover things unseen, that are
hid beneath the shadow of things natural." The exact interpretation of the
passage, which has been variously explained,3 is to be found in Chapter
lxxxvii of the same "Libro dell'Arte," where it is suggested to the painter
that: "if thou wouldst learn to paint mountains in a worthy manner, so that
they be like nature, take great stones which be rough and not cleansed and
draw them as they are, adding light and shade as it shall seem fit to thee."
Since the result to be aimed at is a symbol of the mountain, the object
(the stone) has no value in itself, apart from its external configuration,
1 For the nature-form relation in Renais- 3 E. Panofsky in Idea (Teubner ed., Berlin,
sance thought see E. Cassirer, Individuo e I924), p. 23 and note 94 has given a Neo-
Cosmo, tr. Federici, Florence, La Nuova Italia Platonic interpretation of this passage of
ed., p. 25I. Cennini; it is, however, a question of
2 D. Frey, L'Architettura della Rinascenza, mediaeval Neo-Platonism in the Plotinian
Rome, I924, p. 7. tradition.
98 GIULIO CARLO ARGAN
analogous to that of the mountain. The analogy is purely external, morpho-
logical; but the difference, which consists in the situation of the mountain
in space, is of no interest to the painter because the formal motive of his
picture is not spatial, and indeed takes no account of space. He will link
that image with others in obedience to a rhythmic or narrative coherence but
principally in obedience to a "manner" acquired through long discipleship
with his masters, that is, with tradition. From the perception of the material
datum (the stone) the artistic process is still a long one: and since its end is in
infinity or in abstraction, of what significance can the distance between the
neighbouring stone and the far-off mountain be when compared witll that?
When, on the other hand, Alberti affirms that the visible is the domain of the
painter, he does not refer to the mechanical perception of the eye and the
limited notions that derive from it, but to a full, total, sensory experience.
The eye may be considered as a mechanical and impersonal instrument, a
recording mechanism: instead the senses are already considered as a grade
of intelligence. Alberti, though he denies that the mental domain of the
painter can extend beyond the limits of the domain of the senses, yet affirms
that the artistic process does not begin, as it does for Cennini, with the data of
visible things, only to end in an abstraction, but takes place wholly within the
sphere of sensory experience as a process of understanding and investigation:
that very experience will not be complete and fully defined until after such
reflection.
Cennini restricted the painter's contact with reality as far as he could, so
as to leave the widest possible margin for tradition. Alberti, by making
the limits of reality coincide exactly with those of the sensory powers, refuses
any value to tradition considered as a complex of ideas learned without
reference to direct experience. It is true that Cennini also demands a contact
with reality (the stone which is copied as a symbol of the mountain): but that
is only because tradition is transmitted through moments of reality, which
are the lives of men. For Alberti, life is an ultimate value: it neither receives
nor transmits a universal inheritance, but rather, in its very consciousness of
its own finite nature, that is, in the completeness of its experience ofthe world,
it arrives at a point where it has the value of universality.
We have already pointed out that with the assumption of the idea of
nature as the limit or definition of reality, the value of consciousness or of
personality was contemporaneously in process of definition. Certainly man
also is, and feels himself to be, nature; but he feels himself to be so in so far
as he has already detached himself from unlimited reality, and the limits
within which he recognizes himself are marked by what he can grasp and
understand of reality, that is by nature. Nature and the Ego, born of the
same act, are governed by the same law; man identifies himself no longer
with the creation, but with the Creator.
The man of the Renaissance, in this Platonic determination of his to know
himself in nature, necessarily focussed his first and most ardent interest upon
his own native sensory capacity, upon his own naturalness. It has been justly
remarked that the opposition which the thought of the Renaissance lays down
THE ARCHITECTURE OF BRUNF.T.T.F.SCHI
99
as a first definition of personality is not that between man and nature, but
that between man (vir) and fate (fortuna); nature is "an organism not hostile
to man but akin to him, and dowered with intelligence, an open field wherein
he may extend his personality.''1 From the opposition of virtus and fortuna,
which derives from the Scholastic view of man's struggle for good against the
constant assaults of evil, the moral quality of personality emerged; Giovanni
Pisano, Giotto, Dante, Petrarch, were, during the Trecento, the great repre-
sentatives of this dramatic conception of life as a struggle for redemption.
Nature, conceived as full and lucid sensory experience, presupposes this moral
conceptiorl of personality; it is a reality already grasped and comprehended,
and so clear and transparent that the human person, that supreme example
and image ofthe perfection ofthe divine creation, can see itselfreflected there
as in a mirror. But this inspired, and indeed profoundly classic moment,
in which man becomes aware of his own naturalness, is not the end. Life
is not that moment, it is the series of such moments. If we start by affirming
the moral quality of personality; if, that is, we consider it in relation to an
end, there immediately arises the problem of the relation of life, in all its
activities, to its initial naturalness and to its final aim. And here we have
already the problem of history as a consciousness of its own "activity.'>2 In
fact if the final aim is complete self-knowledge, the whole life of the spirit will
consist in retracing its natural life, hitherto empiric, to an ideal ancestry or
an ideal genesis. Burdach's interpretation of the Renaissance as a regenera-
tion or rebirth in the antique (in a Christian, that is in an ethical sense)3 is
thus given its full force: the process of this palingenesis is history, through
which we are enabled to rediscover our true nature, and so to rise from an
empiric to a systematic conception of the world. Thus the opposition of the
identity of nature and history to the mediaeval identification of reality with
tradition, finds an historical justification, before it finds a theoretical one; in
the monuments of ancient art the artists of the Quattrocento seek to discover
their own Latin nature in its most essential characteristics. Even that first
description of humanity as virtus in opposition to fortuna then assumes a
precise historical significance; the very one that Petrarch gives it when he
proclaims that Roman virtS will take up arms agaiIlst the furore of the
"barbarian" invaders. It is the rational light of history that dispels the
darkness of hostile fate. This idea of Latin virtus is undoubtedly active in
Cennini, when he points out that Giotto "changed art from Greek into Latin,
and made it modern": the term "Latin" cannot certainly correspond to any
concrete figurative experiment, but only to the moral order of values. To
oriental mysticism in fact Giotto opposes a religious sentiment that fulfils
itself in drama, that is to say in action, and that can be measured in the
activities of practical life.
Of Brunelleschi, Manetti says that "he restored that fashion in buildings
which is called Roman or antique" "for before him these were all German
1 G. Nicco, introduction to the critical which it follows that "only in his history can
edition of the De Prospectiva Pingendi of Piero man give proof of his freedom and creative
della Francesca," Sansoni, Florence, I942, power" see E. Cassirer, op. cit., p. 73.
p. I7. 3 K. Burdach, Riforma, Rinascimento, Umane-
2 For the conception of life as activity, from simo, tr. Cantimori, Sansoni, Florence, I933.
GIULIO CARLO ARGAN IOO
and were called modern." In Manetti the Germans (Gothic Art) have taken
the place of the Greeks, of whom indeed, as Worringer has acutely pointed
out, they were the natural heirs. For Cennini the word modern has a positive
sense, for Manetti it has a negative one: for Cennini modern means actual,
for Manetti non-actual, since the corsivo has become the antique. Modern
has become the equivalent of the merely chronological; in the antique the
value of history is already implicit. That this is by no means an objective
inquiry is, however, revealed by the fact that Manetti is in nowise concerned
to determine whether Brunelleschi had rediscovered or invented the con-
structional laws of the ancients, laws being taken to mean both their technical
expedients and their "musical proportions," that is to say symmetry and
perspective; "those who might have taught him these things had been dead
for hundreds of years: and they are not to be found in writing, or if they be
found they may not well be understood; but his own industry and subtlety
did either rediscover them or else were themselves the discoverers." It is
significant that the same thought is to be found also in Alberti: "If this art
was ever described in writing we are those who have dug it up from under-
ground, and if it was never so described, we have drawn it from heaven."
To rediscover or to invent, to find the law of ancient art or of nature, are
one and the same thing; the same process by which we establish the concep-
tion of nature leads us on to establish the conception of beauty, or of artistic
perfection, and to recognize it as historically manifest in Roman art. Granted
that the investigation of nature and the investigation of history are inseparable,
the problem, which has tormented modern idealist critics, of the relatiors
between pictorial and scientific perspective, or more simply between art and
science, at the beginning of the Renaissance, loses its importance. It has
already been remarked that perspective is not a constant law, but a moment
in the history of the idea of space: whence it follows that the problem of sight,
in passing from optics to geometry, passes from the objective to the subjective
sphere.l It is certain, in any case, that the conception of the homogenous
quality of space is first set forth in the figurative arts, and then, consequently,
in the physical and mathematical sciersces.2
To our modern consciousness it seems obvious that, if the opposite had
occurred, art would have lost all creative power in the mechanical processes
of application and deduction. In judging thus it assumes as an absolute
principle a characteristic peculiar to Renaissance art, and fails to see its
historical significance: before the Renaissance the value of art lay not in
creation, but in repetition, irs continuing the tradition by remaining withirs
it, instead of breaking out of it in order to renew it. The value of creativity
which the zesthetic theory of the Renaissance recognizes in artistic achieve-
ment, derives from the idea that nature is ordered and therefore created by
the artist. The novelty or originality of a work of art is such only in so far
as the work of art emerges from tradition, and in emerging from it, contradicts
it; and since tradition is no longer a dogma, but an object of criticism, there
can be neither invention nor creation except through the medium of a critical
G. Nicco, op. cit., p. 29. tion of reality, E. Panofsky's essay "Die
2 For the systematic exposition of the Perspective als symbolische Form" (Vortrage
problem of central perspective as an abstrac- der Bibl. Warburg, IV, I924-25) iS essential.
THE ARCHITECTURE OF BRUNELLESCHI IOI
approach to tradition. The ordering or creation of nature is therefore not
an act of authority but an act of reason. The power of invention or of creation
comes to the artist not from the grace of God, but from the integrity of his
own consciousness, from the lucidity of his historical vision.
Cennini can take pleasure in making clear his own descent from Giotto by
way of ars uninterrupted traditiors that passes through Agnolo and Taddeo
Gaddi; for the artists of the Quattrocento, beginning at Masaccio, Giotto is
the great, isolated protagonist of the Trecento: the tradition that originated
in his art merely altered and obscured its value, a value which criticism alone
should determine. Even for Giotto art was mechanical, a craftsman's labour;
but the judgment of posterity recognizes in that 'Cfare" an ideal aim, which
it denies to that of imitators and followers, from the very fact that they are
such. To this "making" or "producing" the art of the Renaissance opposes
not abstract speculation but "genius," "invention";1 the artist in the process
of invention is conscious of the novelty of what he is doing, and so invention
is a "making" accompanied by judgment or the attribution of value.
There thus arises the idea of the artist-hero, a coryphaeus or protagonist
of history; but he is this in so far as he is conscious of the value of his own
activity, that is, in so far as he is himself an historian. His work breaks the
continuity of tradition to justify itself in history, just as it emerges from the
confusion of matter to justify itself in nature. The mental process which, in
the same act, eliminates matter and chronicle (or tradition) by judging them
as values, is, as we have said, perspective. This process is clearly described
by Alberti. Remember Ghiberti's dictum: "nothing can be seen except by
light." Though it is here considered as a physical phenomenon, this light is
still a divine emanation or irradiation, a first cause which is reflected in all
things and reveals them. Alberti on the contrary wishes to clarify the idea
of things: "we call that a thing which occupies a place." Glearly if anything
in nature exists in space, space also is nature; in fact it is the principle of
nature since the place which things occupy is necessarily antecedent to the
things. This may seem to imply a serious objection to the necessity, which
Alberti categorically affirms, of limiting the domain of art to the visible. We
must deduce from it that the experience of the senses is not primary, but
secondary. Reason is therefore the basis of life, even of the life of the senses.
In fact: "large, small3 long, short, high, low, wide, narrow, light, dark,
luminous, shadowy and all qualities of that kind-which because they may or
may not be added unto things, the philosophers are wont to call accidents-
are such that all knowledge of them is made by comparison." It is therefore
by reasoning that the accidents are distinguished from the substance of things.
But this substance is not, as has been assumed, their plastic form, their
volume: volume is perceived through the medium of light and shade, height
and width, and these qualities, too, have been placed among the accidents.
1 In Albertian terminology the faculty that "ingegno" and mathematical rationality, and
simultaneously investigates and invents, or in for the necessity of artistic creation as an
other words sums up and synthetizes the expression of the first, see Lionello Venturi,
moments of speculation and of action is Storia della critica d'arte, Italian ed., Florence,
"ingegno." For the distinction between I945,p. I28.
GIULIO GARLO ARGAN
I02
Moreover it is clear that in making his catalogue of accidents, Alberti intended
to exhaust all the possible forms of the visible. Strictly speaking, if a thing
had been stripped of all its accidents, nothing would remain of it except the
void in space left by its disappearance.1
But Alberti knows that if painting is concerned only with the visible, it is
impossible to separate the thing from its accidents: indeed the thing itself is
an accident until it is known "by comparison": it would be illimitably wide
and illimitably long, and illimitably deep if we did not establish the relation
between width, length, and depth; all dazzling light or impenetrable darkness
if we did not establish the relation between light and shade. We may say
therefore that the idea or substance of a thing is merely a position in space,
but that position is determined precisely by the fact that it gives a situation
proportionately (ter comparatione) to all the accidents, that is to say, because
it re-absorbs and eliminates the matter of which the thing is composed into
a system of proportional relations.
This is indeed the function of "design." The graphic outline is originally
linked with the colouristic matter as a boundary between zones of colour: in
the Trecentesque tradition it was purely a rhythmic pattern or a narrative in
rhyme and that rhythmic cadence was still dependent on the relation of the
line to an already formulated colouristic modulation. For Alberti the outline
is the edge of the surface, that is the boundary between fullness and void; nor
can we say that it belongs more to the fullness than to the void (or more to
the thing than to space) because its function is precisely that of mediating, or
of acting as a link and solder between one and the other. As has been seen,
in fact, emptiness cannot be thought of apart from fullness, nor can space be
conceived of separately from the things that occupy it. (When Masolino or
Paolo Uccello wish to represent the void independently of the full, they
reduce perspective to the Trecentesque idea of infinite spatiality.) The need
now becomes clear for a recourse to Euclidean geometry or to the Platonic
description of geometrical forms as perfect forms or ideas archetypes from
which all sensible forms are derived: geometrical forms are pure spatial sites
or pure metrical relations which in their own finitude express the whole of
space. It is not by chance that Alberti defines design in the same words as
those which his master, Francesco Filelfo, used in defining the idea as described
by Plato: a representation "ab omni materia separata."
The conception of design, as the common root of all the arts, that is, as the
designation of the absolute value of form, is therefore very closely related to
the conception of perspective: perspective is actually the method of design,
in so far as it is absolute representation. It is superfluous to point out that
representation and invention may be equivalent terms: because there can be
1 On the impossibility of imagining space of the thought of Cusanus, who was in Italy
as erepty, or as an "enclosing medium that in the early decades of the Isth cent. and
encloses nothing" see Cassirer, op. cit., p. 285. who certainly knew Alberti, see, besides
Alberti's conception of cognitione per com- Cassirer's fundamental work, G. Nicco, op.
paratione, the basis of the theory of propor- cit. To G. Nicco, too, we owe a notable essay
tion, is certainly related to the idea expressed on the development of perspective theory in
by Cusanus (De Docta Ignorantia I . I ): treatises from Euclid to Piero della Fran-
"Comparativa est omnis inquisitio, medio cesca, Le Arti, V, I942, no. 2, p. 59.
proportionis utens." On the great importance
THE ARCHITECTURE OF BRUNELLESCHI I03
no representation, but only mechanical imitation, if the image does not wholly
replace the object and become a substitute for it as a value or authentic
reality, just as nature, as a representation of reality, becomes the one authentic
reality for the thought of the Renaissance.
II
If we admit that the artistic process has a basis of historical thought, the
origin of the fundamental ideas of Renaissance Art-perspective and design-
must be sought in the work of an artist-hero: only through such a medium
could these ideas have any positive effect on the subsequent course of artistic
development. The "trattati d'arte" themselves, though ostensibly concerned
with a theoretical definition of the idea of art, are in reality the first attempts
at a history of art as a history of the artists, because their criterion is no other
than a generalization from those works of art in which they perceive an
absolute value. The formulation of the principle of perspective, or the inven-
tion of perspective, are ascribed by general consent to Brunelleschi: the first
person of that artistic trinity which is completed by Donatello and Masaccio.
On this point Manetti is uncompromising: "in those times he brought to
light and himself put into practice that which painters to-day call perspective
because it is a part of the science that consists in placing those diminutions
and enlargements that appear to men's eyes from afar or close at hand, both
skilfully and fittingly . . . and from him originated the rule which is the mean-
ing of all that has been done from that time to this."
It is interesting to note the distinction that Manetti makes between the
originating intuition of Brunelleschi and the codification or application of it
which the "dipintori" have successively ("oggi")drawn from it. The distinc-
tion is not purely chronological. For the painters, perspective is the law for
making "houses and plains and mountains and landscapes of every kind, and
in every place, with figures and other things of such a size as befits the distance
from which they are observed." Had Brunelleschi elaborated this rule as a law
of vision, Manetti would not have so accurately distinguished the Brunel-
leschian principle from the interpretation which has later been given to it
by other painters, who have applied it to a consideration of the external
world that has clearly no connection with architecture. It is thus impos-
sible to distinguish Brunelleschi's researches on perspective from his artistic
activity, that is to say, from his architecture: it is from this, as Manetti points
out, that the painters deduce their law of vision. This means that, since
architecture is free of any necessity to "imitate" reality, the formal discipline
of architecture must precede and condition the painter's contact with reality;
he will indeed study reality, because the painter's realm is the visible world,
but he will do so through the formal patterns of architecture. This is, we
think, the historical origin of the principle that architecture is the basis or
mother of all the arts: a principle easily reducible to the other (of design as
the common root of all the arts), which will be clearly formulated in the
Cinquecento. Architecture, indeed, as an art free from any necessity of
imitating reality, is design itself: representation separate from "ogni materia."
GIULIO CARLO ARGAN
Io4
It is now necessary to see how this law "which is the meaning of all that has
been done from that time to this" was developed in the architecture of
Brunelleschi.
Manetti, a mathematician, says of perspective: "not without reason, just
now did I call it science," for science is making "according to law." The Life
of Manetti is of later date than the Pittura of Alberti and is largely indebted
to it; and one of the most important innovations, in Alberti's treatise, was
perhaps that idea of "knowledge by comparison" which emerges in opposi-
tion to the Scholastic conception of knowledge as scire per causas. Since the
Pittura of Alberti consists of reflections on the great Masters of the early
Quattrocento, and particularly on Brunelleschi, it is to the latter that we may
attribute, not perhaps the formulation, but the first understanding of that
principle which for causes, understood as external moving forces, substitutes
laws, understood as immanent causes which are produced by the reciprocal
co-relation of phenomena. In the architecture of Brunelleschi, therefore,
must be sought the first understanding of design as an act of knowledge or
cognitione per comparatione, that is, the first laying down of that theory of pro-
portion, which in its turn becomes the basic criterion for the understanding
of ancient art.
That Brunelleschi had undertaken some inquiry into the laws of vision
may well be inferred from what Manetti tells us of the two panels on which
Brunelleschi had depicted the Baptistery and the Palazzo della Signoria. Yet
the very objects depicted, buildings and not landscapes, suggest that these
studies were not connected with the formulation of a general theory, but with
the concrete, particular figurative and architectonic interests of the artist.
Of the first of these two panels we know that the spectator had to look
at it reflected in a mirror, through an opening cut in the wood, at a distance
proportionate to that at which the painter had placed himself while at work:
moreover, instead of a painted sky there was a background of burnished silver
which reflected the real sky with its clouds moving before the wind. The
second panel, on the other hand, being too large to permit the use of this
device, was cut out along the line of the rooftops, and one loooked at it
against a background of sky.
Manetti's description is enough to show that the genesis of several ideas
on which Alberti was later to build up his perspective theory can be traced
back to Brunelleschi. By means of the device of the hole in the middle of the
picture, the spectator was constrained to look at the painting, reflected in the
mirror, from the same point of view as that in which the painter had placed
himself. The straight line which connects the painter's eye with the centre of
the thing depicted is already what Alberti will define as a centric ray: that is
the axis of the visual pyramid whose apex coincides with vanishing point.
So far we are still within the domain of vision, though it is even now most
important to observe that for Brunelleschi it is essential that vision should
have a single and constant point of view: hence the immobility and im-
partiality of the artist face to face with truth. But the painting must be
looked at in a mirror; and this is not merely an artifice for making the
spectator's point of view coincide with that of the painter. Alberti, who was
certainly familiar with Brunelleschi's essays in perspective, in fact advises the
THE ARCHITECTURE OF BRUNELLESCHI Io5
painter to make use of the mirror as a means of checking the artistic qualities
of his painting. When he speaks of obtaining an effect of relief by the propor-
tionate use of light and shade, Alberti advises: "and you will find in the
mirror a good judge; for, as I know how things that are well painted may
have great beauty in the mirror, so it is marvellous to see how every fault in
painting shows itself more ugly in the mirror. So let the mirror correct the
things which you have taken from nature." It is well known that the mirror
reverses the image: if the image is unsymmetrical the mirror will make this
defect more apparent, because it removes it from a position to which the eye
has grown accustomed: if, on the contrary, the image is perfectly symmetrical,
reversal will not be able to modify it. In other terms: if the painter has clearly
determined and constantly maintained his point of view, the centric ray of
the direct vision and that of the reflected vision will coincide, while otherwise
they will diverge. The question, it will be seen, is one of symmetry and
proportion.
Another important point: Brunelleschi does not paint the sky. In the first
panel he reflects it in a mirror-like surface, in the second he cuts out the wood
so that the real sky can insert itself into the picture. His interest therefore is
limited to things which as Alberti will say, occupy "a place": the sky does
not occupy "a place" and cannot be reduced to measure or known "per
comparatione." Since it cannot be represented, but only imitated, the artist
forbears to paint it. The strict logic of the argument is unexceptionable: but
it is the argument of an architect and not of a painter. If Filippo had wished
to lay down a general law of vision, and one that would therefore be equally
valid for the vision of landscape, he could not have failed to take the sky into
account. He does not take it into account because his reasoning is related
only to architecture, which is a finite space, that, by its own finitude or pro-
portion, gives definition also to the spatial atmosphere in which it is immersed;
and he forbears to paint the sky because buildings stand out against the real
sky and not against a painted background. It remains to be seen what value
Brunelleschi attributed to these exercises in perspective. It is clear that they
had a demonstrative or, as we should say now, a polemical aim. Such
polemics could only have been directed against the art of the late Trecento
tradition, for one thing because these pictorial essays belong to the first phase
of the Master's activity, between the last years of the fourteenth and the first
of the succeeding century. To those painters who were intent only on
decoration, Brunelleschi wished to demonstrate painting as an instrument of
knowledge. One might even ask oneself whether, in that atmosphere of
naturalistic propaganda, the happy invention of the silvery background
which reflects the light of the physical heavens, may not perhaps imply a
satirical and almost irreligious allusion to those shining backgrounds of fine
gold in which the devout painters of the tradition sought to mirror the mystic
light of God.
The technical "miracle" of the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore (P1. 7a)
has distracted critics not a little from the significance which that long and
strenuous constructive labour holds in the art of Brunelleschi. Since it is
106
GIULIO
CARLO
ARGAN
known
that
Filippo
had
originally
planned
to
make
the
dome
in the
form
of
a hemisphere,
and
that
only
on second
thoughts
did
he decide
to carry
out
the
scheme
laid
down
in
Arnolfo's
model,
the
problem
of the
dome
would
seem
to
be reduced
to
a mere
question
of technique:
the
method
of vaulting
it
without
scaffiolding.
Was
it really
technically
impossible
to realize
Arnolfo's
plan
by tlle
usual
means?
One
may
easily
believe
that,
in those
first
decades
of the
Quattro-
cento,
no
artist
would
have
dared
to
build
vaulting
on so
vast
a scale;
it is
indeed
highly
probable
that
throughout
the
Trecento,
when
decoration
took
precedence
of construction,
there
may
have
been
a falling-off
in constructive
skill.
But
it is impossible
to
believe
that
Arnolfo
can
have
planned,
and
his
successors
raised
as far
as the
drum,
a building
which
the
technical
resources
of the
time
did
not
permit
them
to roof
over.
What
is
more,
Brunelleschi
never
even
thought
of using
the
traditional
technique.
From
the
outset
he
had
in
mind
the
idea
of building
the
dome
without
scaffolding;
he
might
give
up the
form
he
had
first
envisaged,
but
he
would
not
give
up
his
method
of construction.
Only
a mistaken
estimate
of Brunelleschi's
"classicism"
has
induced
the
belief
that
the
spherical
vault
represented
a formal
ideal,
later
sacrificed
to
contingent
needs.
When
we
remember
that
the
method
of vaulting
the
dome
without
scaffolding
had
been
deduced
from
the
Roman
circular
domes,
the
terms
of the
question
are
reversed:
the
most
reasonable
hypothesis
is that
Filippo
had
thought
first
of
a semi-circular
vault
because
it
was
from
such
models
that
he
had
evolved
his
system,
and
that
he returned
later
to
Arnolfo's
plan
when
he had
become
persuaded
that
the
system
might
equally
well
be applied
to
domes
with
ribs
and
pointed
arches.
This
method,
which
the
conclusive
researches
of Sam-
paolesil
have
shown
to
be of Roman
origin,
consists
in
walling
the
dome
with
courses
of bricks
disposed
in
a herring-bone
pattern.
Brunelleschi's
formal
ideal
did
not
end
in the
pattern
of the
pointed
arch
or of the
single
span:
it
was
the
ideal
of a form
capable
of sustaining
itself
throughout
the
process
of
its
own
growth,
of producing
the
force
that
sustains
it,
of disposing
itself
in
space
by
virtue
of its
own
interior
structural
coherence
and
vitality,
by its
natural
proportionality,
like
that
of "bones
and
mernbers."
The
herring-bone
method
of construction
is applied
in
Santa
Maria
del
Fiore,
on a much
larger
scale
than
it is in any
of the
ancient
models,
that
is
to say,
to the
measurements
of the
drum
already
constructed.
The
problem
set
by
Brunelleschi
consisted
therefore
in reducing
a gothic
dimension
to
pro-
j1ortion
through
the
principle
of self-support,
that
is
of the
autonomy
of the
form
in space.
Thus
the
double
vault
of the
dome
finds
a justification
not
only
practical
but
figurative
(in
the
actual
words
of Filippo
"so
that
it
may
appear
more
enlarged
and
splendid"):
the
artist
feels
the
need
for
establish-
ing
an exact
relation
between
the
form
of the
dome
and
the
various
properties
of space
that
are
summed
up in it.
In the
interior
the
curvature
of the
surfaces
of the
octagon,
sums
up
and
co-ordinates
the
various
spatial
trends
of the
1 p. Sampaolesi,
La Cupola
di Santa
Maria
particularly
on the
dome,
see the
studies
con-
del Fiore;
il progetto,
la costruzione,
Istituto
di tained
in
Atti
del I Congresso
;Nazionale
di
Archeologia
e Storia
dell'Arte,
Rome,
I94I.
Storia
dell'Architettura,
held
at Florence
in
On
sundry
Brunelleschian
problems,
but
I936
and
published
by Sansoni
in I938.
a Brunelleschi, Dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence (pp. I05 ffs.)
b Lantern of Dome (p. I I 2)
8
a Brunelleschi, Pazzi Chapel, Florence (p. I09)
b Brunelleschi, Detail of FaKade of Pazzi Chapel,
Florence (p. I og)
THE ARCHITECTURE OF BRUNELLESCHI
Io7
naves and the presbytery, as into a common horizon; on the exterior the ribs
mark the limit or the juncture between the masses of the building and the
circumambient space. If the effect of the dome is spatial, the process which
leads to the definition of space is a constructive process. But this constructive
labour differs from the mediaeval mechanica because its acts are no longer
repeated by tradition, but determined by reason: the coherence c?f these acts
must there be referred to a rational principle. Manetti says that in Rome
Brunelleschi "saw the ancients' methods of building and their symmetry; and
it seemed to him that he saw there very clearly a certain order, as of bones
and members." It is not a question of the generic anthropomorphism that
recurs, following on the traces of Vitruvius, in the treatise writers of the
Renaissance: it is a question of rational discrimination between the elements
that bear and the elements that are borne, and of their distribution according
to order, that is according to symmetry and proportion.
In Romanesque architecture as in Gothic, the artistic ideal to be realized,
though by different figurative methods, is the effect of unlimited space. In
the first, weight prevails over strain, and the effect of space depends upon
mass; in the second, strain prevails over weight and the effect depends on
linear tension. In either case the motive force is an energy that develops, and
tends to develop towards the infinite, but which finds a check and a deter-
mination in matter. And matter is already form, because if matter has already
a spiritual quality of its own as a divine creation, we cannot conceive of any
form that transcends it. Form, force, matter make up an indivisible unity:
force is not only relative to the hardness and the elasticity of matter, but also
to the thickness, the extension, the flexion, the outline, the section of the
element in which it is expressed. One may arrive at length at the sublimation
of matter to such a point that a mass which physically presses on the ground
can express an ascent; none the less, form remains a quality of matter, how-
beit a supernatural one, a revelation of its inner spirituality. A Gothic
cathedral tends in fact to be a compendium of all knowledge, that is of all
reality; and this not only, as Male has observed, in its decorative details but
in its deepest structural intentions. Since reality is the infinite in terms of
individual things, it is expressed in architecture by individual forces: Gothic
architecture is in fact the architecture of the individualization of forces.
Even the historical interest that attracts Brunelleschi to a study of the
antique would have no justification if he had not sought in antique art for a
standard of comparison in the criticism of tradition, that is for a means of
freeing himselffrom a tradition that was still alive: history is always a criticism
and an overcoming of tradition. Moreover, the very fact that the need
was felt for a spatial definition which should include and resolve the whole
problem of reality, necessarily presupposes the experience of Romanesque
and Gothic spatiality as the expression of infinite reality; this was the matter
which had to be reduced into measure. Brunelleschi's mental process in regard
to tradition is already that which Marsilio Ficino will define in Platonic terms:
"in corpore animus a singulis ad species, a specibus transit ad rationes"; or
since we are dealing with architecture, from individual forces to classes and
from classes to systems. To group several forces together into a class it is
necessary to define their quantity and quality; thus it happens that we are
GIULIO CARLO ARGAN
Io8
no longer dealing with forces in action or in development, such as strain and
stress, but with those that are developed or in equilibrium, such as weight
which has its exactly corresponding resistance. One might say, paraphrasing
Alberti, that our "knowledge" of forces is reached by "comparison," that is
by their reciprocal limitings and oppositions or by their reciprocal "propor-
tioning" of each other. Only when the dramatic conflict of forces has been
exhausted, only, that is, when a catharsis has been achieved, will architecture
cease to be a fragment of reality, and become a representation of reality. And
since experience which here means the experience of Gothic architecture,
in which the force of an element is in proportion to its "momento" or to its
extension and duration taught that the strength of a force is relative to a
space, to constant forces there must therefore correspond constant intervals.
This constancy of the relation between force and interval is the quality of
the single span arch as opposed to the pointed one. To compare the single
span with the pointed arch it was not necessary to go back to Vitruvius and
to ancient monuments: Tuscan Romanesque architecture was enough. Yet
the arcades of the Loggia degli Innocenti with their very wide and extended
span, are undoubtedly much more akin to the arches of the Loggia della
Signoria and even to the ogival arches of S. Maria Novella and S. Maria del
Fiore than to those of the church of the SS. Apostoli or of Roman monu-
ments. In the latter, indeed, the function of support is translated into an
equilibrium between the masses of fullness and of emptiness; in the former the
line has a value of its own as a supreme formal declaration of spatial infinity.
This is the value to which Brunelleschi would give a clear definition, measur-
ing the depth of the void by the actual outline of the arch. He reflects that in
the single span arch, all points of the semicircle are equi-distant in relation to
vanishing point, that is in relation to the apex of a half cone having its base
within the semicircle itself: therefore the width of the curve is relative to the
depth of the extension of the arch instead of to the weight which it sustains.
The arch is therefore always an "intercisione," "primo piano," in a perspective
progression which has its term at vanishing point; the curve of the arch, as
a projection of depth on a plane surface, has thus the value of a horizon.
For Brunelleschi too, as for Donatello and Masaccio, Romanitas is in the
first instance "toscanita :" the definition of his own historical character begins
with that of his own natural character. If, in determining the spatial value
of the arch he relies on Tuscan Gothic architecture, in determining the
spatial value of the plane he relies on the more remote practice of Tuscan
Romanesque architecture. It would be interesting to know whether the
opinions expressed by Manetti in his excursus on the decadence of architecture
in the Middle Ages are entirely his own, or whether they go back, in part at
least, to Brunelleschi: it is anyhow significant, that in certain Florentine
Romanesque buildings he should see some reflection of classic splendour, and
should attribute them, by an error full of meaning, to the Carolingian period,
that is to the time of the most intense classical revival of the Middle Ages.
Brunelleschi's architecture preserves more than one reminiscence of the marble
inlays that adorned the walls of Florentine Romanesque churches, for example
in the pure "scrittura" of space on the flat surface by means of grey pilasters
and arcades on a white background. One might even venture to interpret the
THE ARCHITECTURE OF BRUNELLESCHI
IO9
faSade of the Pazzi Chapel (P1. 8a) as a development of the spatial theme of the
Romanesque inlays. One might point out that the artist had arrived through
the exercise of a subtle dialectic, at that absolute representation of space in the
flat, by identifying linear and chromatic values; and that in this mutual identi-
fication, the linear element is purged of the material quality of the outline just
as the chromatic element is purged of the material quality of the surface.
INhe bean-pattern frieze, the grooved pilasters are far from being a simple
reproduction of the antique: they are an alternation, almost a vibration, of
ligllt and shade (P1. 8b). Precisely because this plane generates light from the
frequency of its relations of light and shade, it may be distinguished from the
surface, which is always a defence in relation to an external source of light,
ancl becomes identified with the totality of space. And perhaps this is the
"intellectual" source of that light which in Piero della Francesca is no longer
physical but spatial. The Florentine Romanesque inlays were undoubtedly
a sign of a return to the fountain-head of the Byzantine tradition, perhaps
even of an obstinate Tuscan resistance to the renewing tide of Lombard
architecture. By means of these inlays an attempt was made to resolve the
effect of space which Lombard architecture enclosed within the complex
articulation of its masses, into chromatic terms on a flat surface.l Geometrical
forms, while eliminating any modulation in colouristic relations within the
design, employed colours in absolute terms of contrast on the surface: no
spatial hypothesis is possible beyond a strict equation of the opposing terms
of surface and depth. A most subtle and intimately Platonic process ofthought
warns the artist that if he thinks of space as possessing infinite depth, he will
find it quite impossible to distinguish it from the surface: therefore the
infinity of space cannot be a sensorzr perception or an "effect," but a concep-
tual representation or a "cause," such as are for instance the figures of
geometry. In this mediaeval Tuscan Platonism there are already to be found
the premises of the transcendental logic of a great German Platonist of the
fifteenth century, Cusanus.
For Brunelleschi the plane is the place on which there occurs the projec-
tion or definition of depth, not as an effect, but as pure value or geometric
form. Therefore the place is a pure mental abstraction, the precondition for
the representation of space. Alberti will translate this intuition of Brunelleschi's
into a formula: the surface is still matter, and as it were the outer skin of
things, although it is the extreme limit of matter, its suture with space; instead
the plane is a geometric entity, the "intersection" of the visual pyramid. In
fact the plane in Brunelleschi's architecture is an "intersection" and not a
surface; it is the place on to which the various spatial distances are projected,
and on which the infinite dimensions of space are reduced to the three dimen-
sions of perspective space. Since on the plane these distances cannot be valued
as effects (for they would be chaotically superimposed one upon another) but
only as measllrements, the plane is the condition of their "cognitione per
comparationeX' that is to say of their proportionality.
1 For a fuller analysis of the formal values manica e Romanica, Florence, Nemi, I936, and
of Romanesque and Gothic architecture in L'Architettura italiana del Duecento e del frecento,
Tuscany I refer the reader to my two Florence, Nemi, I937.
volumes, L'Architettura Protocristiana, Prero-
GIULIO GARLO ARGAN I IO
On the fagade of the Pazzi Chapel, for instance, every separate portion of
the plane has its point of reference in a corresponding value of depth in the
portico or the interior, and is a projection of this: hence the lack of an effective
articulation of the parts which are elements of limitation and not elements
of force, and the composition of the plane in squares and recesses (P1. ga)
"All surfaces of a body that are simultaneously visible," Alberti explains, "wili
form a pyramid composed of as many lesser facets as there are surfaces in
the thing seen." It is the principle of the homogeneity of space. But the
principle of the homogeneity of space destroys that of the homogeneity of
matter: for in order to think of space as homogenous, that is, as uninterrupted
by the presence of bodies, it is necessary to think of those bodies as composed
of space, that is as broken up into a succession of planes. Given this distinction
between the plane, as a complete representation of space, and the surface, it
is hard to accept the ingenious thesis of L. H. Heydenreichl who makes a
sharp distinction between the first and second phases of Brunelleschi's activity,
between the moment of the Wandbauten and that of the Pfeilerkomvtraktionen,
or between the period when the wall is only a raumbegrenzende Schale and
that irl which it arrives at a raumbildende Funktion. The cause of this sudden
stylistic evolution is said to be the journey to Rome, which Heydenreich
postpones to the years between I432 and I434; but the later researches of
Sampaolesi fix the date conclusively at a time previous to the beginning of
work on the dome. In fact there is a complete coherence between the works
of the first and second periods: the problem of Brunelleschi's artistic develop-
ment does not so much consist in determining the date ofthe journey to Rome,
as in forming a precise estimate of his relations with Donatello and Masaccio,
which were undoubtedly close and reciprocal.
According to Heydenreich's theory Brunelleschi's artistic development can
be codified into the artist's progressive abandonment of building to a longi-
tudinal plan, for building to a central plan, which is the classic scheme par
excellence, the most rigorous and systematic application of the Vitruvian
theory of the module. In reality, if one starts from the spatial premises of
Brunelleschi the two plans cannot be so sharply differentiated: on the con-
trary, they complete each other by turns. And here again we find, as funda-
mental, the practice of Gothic architecture, which so often unites the two
plans or imposes one upon the other. The dome of S. Maria del Fiore is itself
conceived as a co-ordination or synthesis of the longitudinal depths of the
naves and the stellate spaces of the octagon.
Both the Sacristy of S. Lorenzo and the Pazzi Chapel are typical examples
of the synthesis between a longitudinal plan and a central plan. In the Pazzi
Chapel (P1. gb), for instance, the simple tracing of an entablature and an
arcade on the plane carries the depth of the squared apse on to the longitudinal
walls: in the same way the depth of the windows opening to the front is graphi-
cally repeated between the sunk pilasters. Every plane has therefore the same
"content" of space. This solution is perfectly logical, because strictly speaking
a figure in plane geometry is no less representative of space than a figure in
solid geometry: indeed the hemispherical dome has the same function of
1 L. H. Heydenreich, "Spatwerke Brunel- lungen, I93I.
leschis," Jahrbuch der Preussischen Kunstsamm-
9
a Brunelleschi, Portico of Pazzi Chapel, Florence
(p. I I O)
b Brunelleschi, Interior of Pazzi Chapel, Florence (p. I I O)
o
a Brunelleschi5 San Lorenzo, Florence (p. I I 2)
b Interior of San Lorenzo (detail) (p. I I 2 )
THE ARCHITECTURE OF BRUNELLESCHI
I I I
summing up and concluding the contrasts between actual depth and depth
graphically represented. Architecture, therefore, is not an abstract and
symbolic representation of naturalistic space; on the contrary it is the material
quality of the mural construction which is transformed into space by the
rationality of the constructive process. In other terms, it is the space implicit
in the construction as an "effect," which is transformed into space-the
"cause" of architecture. Space, as pure representation, has therefore a
cathartic value as regards the realistic, dramatic, struggle between force and
matter, that is as regards the mechanics of the construction.
But the problem remains substantially unchanged when one passes from
these centralized longitudinal constructions to a genuine centralized con-
struction, the unfinished Rotonda degli Angeli.l The plan provided for an
octagonal building, with pilasters and radial chapels. The end walls of the
chapels were flat, the side walls hollowed out into niches. If Brunelleschi had
imagined the building as the co-ordination of lesser concaves to the major
concaves of the central space and of the dome, he would logically have
developed the end walls of the chapels into niches too. Since these end walls
W -
Eam v 4,fg5a.
l
Plan and Section of S. Maria degli Angeli, Florence (From Marchini's reconstruction).
are flat, vanisiling point will always fall on the plane, whatever the point of
view: the extreme limit of space wlll always be a plane and not an atmo-
spheric hollow. Hence one may deduce that the Rotonda degli Angeli is a
centralized construction developed or adjusted according to a longitudinal
vision; the very perspective curvature of the lateral niches of the chapels
tends to resolve itself into a single vanishing point, to bring it into focus or
centre it on the end plane. This is perhaps the culmination of the sarstematic
1 For a reconstruction of the original plan degli Angeli," Atti dsl I Congresso AXzionale
see G. Marchini, "Un disegno di Giuliano di di Storia dell'Architettura, Florence, Sansoni,
Sangallo riproducente l'alzato della Rotonda I938, p. I47.
GIULIO CARLO ARGAN
I I2
search for a synthesis of the two spatial formult of tradition. Brunelleschi
knows that space is not an effect, but a cause or law alike of the central and
of the longitudinal scheme: that is to say, he strives to deduce a single law
from the two different spatial effects or the two essential data of the tradi-
tional phenomenology of space.l
It is indeed worthy of note that the plan of the lantern of the dome (Pl. 7b),
one of the Master's last works, repeats almost exactly the plan of the
Rotonda degli Angeli.2 When one considers that the lantern is a structure
opened and imposed in its completeness upon an intersection of planes with
a common source, one may easily conclude that the problem of the Rotonda
is not one of co-ordinated gravitation round a central axis, but one of the
disintegration of mass into a complex of intersecting planes: not the problem
of the mass that contains space, but that of space which penetrates and dis-
solves the mass. Such, in fact, is the function of the lantern in relation to the
dome: the buttresses of the lantern, which correspond to the ribs of the dome,
suggest the rotation of the mass in infinite space: and in that possibility of
rotation is made clear the single end to which all the spatial elements of the
building, in their proportional relations, may be reduced. As the dome pro-
portions the mass of the building, so the lantern "proportions" the mass of
the dome to the infinity of space. The high and narrow windows of the
lantern accentuate the evidence of this pure intersection of planes, and to-
gether with the niches hollowed out in the buttresses, and those of the
colonnade placed at the base of the drum, balance, by their concavity, the
dilatation of the dome: so that through this belated revision it emerges indeed
"enlarged" to the utmost limits of space.
A relation similar to that between the Pazzi Chapel and the Rotonda degli
Angeli may also be pointed out between the two great basilical constructions:
San Lorenzo with the simple plan of the Latin cross and Santo Spirito where
the colonnades are also developed along the walls of the transept and of the
presbytery. In San Lorenzo (P1. I oa,b) the ratio of the arch of the side chapels
1 On this point it is important to note the
contrast drawn by Panofsky ("Die Perspek-
tive als symbolische Form") between the
scenography of Vitruvius as a winkelperspek-
tivische Sonstraktion, and central perspective
which assumes the scene to be depicted on a
plane instead of on a concave surface. Sceno-
graphy finds its typical expression in the
centralized plan (omnium linearum ad circini
centrum responsus). Therefore classical art
was eine reine Korperkunst and thought of space
as "aggregato" (cf. Cassirer, op. cit., p. 285).
The distinction between scenography and
perspective corresponds to the distinction
between perstectiva communis and perspectiva
artificialis, drawn in I505 by Jean Pelerin and
immediately seized upon by Durer (see J. von
Schlosser, Die Kunstliteratur) Schroll, Vienna,
I924, p. 227). This distinction is not main-
tained by the Italian theorists who regard
beauty as immanent in nature; in the
northern theorists, on the contrary, beauty,
as a pure abstraction, transcends nature.
Hence it is legitimate to seek for the previous
history of central perspective in Gothic Art
with its tendency to the infinite prolongation
of its lines (see besides Panofsky, op. cit., G. I.
Kern, "Die F,ntwicklung der zentral-per-
spektivischen Konstruktion in der Euro-
paischen Malerei von der Spatantike bis zur
Mitte des XV Jahrhunderts," Forschungen u.
Fortschritte, I937): it is a search which must,
however, resolve itself into demonstrating
that the artists of the early Isth century,
especially Brunelleschi, must have had a full
understanding of Gothic art.
2 Heydenreich treats at length of the
Rotonda degli Angeli, the lantern, and the
exedra of the dome in his highly important
essay on the later work of Brunelleschi in
3ahrbuch der Preussischen Kunstsammlungen,
I93I -
THE ARCHITECTURE OF BRUNELLESCHI I I3
to the arch of the naves is as 3 to 5; therefore the two arches have a common
vanishing point and are two succeeding sections of the same visual pyramid.
Thus the depth of the chapels is transmitted and resolved through the brick
vaulting of the extension into the arches of the central nave. The three walls of
the small chapels are framed by strongly modelled cornices: thus the walls fall
into the background in three directions, and the value of depth which cannot
be developed within such small dimensions is condensed into the modelling
of the cornices. In fact, if one imagines a depth divided into equal spaces, it
is clear that, as we increase our distance, the spaces between member and
member become, when seen in perspective, thicker and closer: by making
the modelling of the members more complex, that is, by implicating the
intervals or distances with the quality of the plastic objects, one will obtain,
in the actual form of the disposal of the members the representation of un-
plumbable depth. And how easy it is to see, and how easy it would be to
illustrate with precise examples, the same process at work in the low relief
of Donatello.
The succession of spaces which is projected into the arcades of the central
aisle is thus a typical perspective succession from the horizon (the end walls of
the chapels) to the foreground (the arch of the nave) . In Santo Spirito (P1. I I )
the ratio between the arch of the chapels and that of the nave is of I to I:
and the chapels are reduced to the concavity of niches. So the lateral spaces
are not graduated perspectively, but directly inserted and articulated into
the arches of the nave. Every column of the nave, to which there corresponds
a half-column in the side aisle, thus stands out in its plastic form, from the
concavity of tsvo contiguous niches. Not the parallel planes of the centre
aisle, but the plastic succession of arches and columns sums up the space of
the side aisles and of the chapels. In fact, if the artist in San Lorenzo has
given distinct sources of light to the centre aisle and the side aisles, if, that is,
he conceived them as distinct and co-ordinated spatial entities, in Santo
Spirito, the side aisles have no source of light in themselves, because their
spaces constitute a single plastic organism with the colonnades of the centre
aisle. If in San Lorenzo the axis of the centre aisle was simply an axis of
symmetry for the proportional distribution of spatial intervals, in Santo
Spirito it is the ground plan of the "centralized" vision. Space is no longer
graphically described in geometrical forms, but realized in the proportions-
metrical, chiaroscural and luminous-of plastic form.
So the column itself acquires value as a member; it is no longer the cesura
placed between successive spatial intervals, but as Alberti would say a
thing that occupies "a place." In its proportions, or in the plastic quality of
its form it resolves all the "accidents" of stress: its value in architecture hence-
forth is that of a protagonist of space, as is that of the human form in painting
and sculpture. The relation between the emergence of the columns and the
concavity ofthe niches in Santo Spirito is in fact, plastically and luministically,
a typically Masacciesque relation.
Niches are thus the spatial Leitmotif of the later works of Brunelleschi.
But it is not a question of chiaroscural or atmospheric values, of a mass of
void in opposition to a mass of fullness. In Santo Spirito a window breaks
the continuity of the chiaroscuro of the curved surface: the niches in the but-
GIULIO CARLO ARGAN
I I4
tresses of the lantern and those in the Rotonda are also open so as to avoid
a pictorial effect of atmosphere. If, in fact, the spatial interval between two
members is plastically expressed in the actual modelling of the members the
space enclosed between those two cannot be indefinite: the curve of the niche
gives a sense of indefinite space, of something beyond the horizon, of the sky.
In this sense it is a development of the conception of the plane as a representa-
tion of space, that is as a synthesis of depth and surface.
It is clear that a complete representation of space cannot admit a dis-
tinction between the space internal and the space external to the building:
hence that reciprocal integration of internal and external which we have
already noted in the Pazzi Chapel, which was provided for in the original
plan of Santo Spirito, which is fully realized in the open architecture of the
lantern and which is, above all, the central problem in the long constructive
meditations on the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore. The building is now
conceived as a pure structure which inserts itself into empiric spatiality and
proportions it, or reduces it to perspective space: like early exercises in paint-
ing, the building is an instrument of knowledge, the instrument that creates
perspective. In more general terms, the building is the instrument which,
through the rationality of its process of construction, transforms a confused
and unlimited reality into clear and ordered nature. By this same process
the mediaeval mechanica, which had reached its loftiest expression in the free
play of forces in infinite spatiality, becomes ars liberalis.
At this point there arises the problem, the analysis of which is precluded
by the limits of this study, of the value of modelling in the architectonic
members of Brunelleschi: that is of the value of design as an expression of
perspective space, and in general as a spatial calligraphy or language. If the
framework is in substance, no other than a "spatial object" or a boundary (an
edge, as Alberti will say a propos of contour in painting) of the surface, which
gradually incorporates with itself and realizes in plastic terms all the various
spatial positions of that surface, we can aErm that Brunelleschi's search for the
"bones and members" is the true historical basis of Quattrocento design: that
is of the line (think of Andrea del Castagno and Pollaiulo) which, in the out-
line of a body and of a body in motion, that is with its forces at their utmost
tension implies the whole of space. That is why Brunelleschi's architecture,
confronting the problem of the figurative tradition in all its aspects, is at once
architecture, painting and sculpture: that is to say, it resolves the mechanica
of the particular technical traditions into a unitary conception of art. From
this moment art, which considers itself as a cognitive activity, can no longer
tolerate a classification of its forms according to the quality of manual labour
involved in them or according to their traditional range of expressiveness.
The discussions which follow in the treatises ofthe Renaissance on the qualities
peculiar to the various arts will tend not so much to classify them, as to relate
them in order of merit to a common ideal of art. This also explains why
Brunelleschi's references to the art of the Gothic tradition become more
frequent in the last period of his activity, in other words with the increase of
his figurative experience; the case of Santo Spirito is typical, since it is
certainly the most "classical" of Brunelleschi's constructional ideas and is yet,
at the same time, the most significant fruit of the artist's meditatiorls on the
ll
a Brunelleschi, San Spirito, Florence (p. II3)
b Interior of San Spirito (detail) (p. I I 3) c Interior of San Spirito (detail) (p. I I3)
a Ghiberti, Sacrifice of Abraham, Bargello
Florence (p. II6)
b Brunelleschi, Sacrifice of Abraham, Bargello,
Florence (p. II5)
c-Donatello, David, Bargello,
Florence (p. I I9)
d Donatello, Herod's Feast, S. Giovanni, Siena (p. II7)
THE ARCHITECTURE OF BRUNFsT4TaFjSCHI I I 5
most recent tradition of Tuscan architecture: the Cathedral of Orvieto, and
as Salmi has pointed out, the Cathedral of Siena.l Like every process of
historical understanding, or, which is the same, of critical reflection, the idea
of perspective, the more it is clarified and developed in the mind of the
artist, the more it enlarges that mind to take in new experience.
The infinite world of reality which the art and thought of the Middle
Ages had discovered and illumined by the light of grace, that whole world
in which the Trecento had beheld the course of man's struggle for spiritual
salvation, could only have been eliminated by the substitution of an arid
conceptual system; from whence would have emerged not a Renaissance but
a darker Middle Age.
It is in the Trecento that line, which in the Byzantine tradition had
been pure arabesque or a boundary between zones of colour, frees itself to
take on an intense descriptive value and to become the outline of things
animated by an eternal rhythm of movement, the very rhythm of their
pcLssing and vanishing in the continuity of time. In architecture, line des-
cribes the flow of forces, as in painting and sculpture it describes the flow
offeelings. It is this line which, through the spatial abstraction of Brunelleschi,
becomes design in the art of the Renaissance. The line is a quality of the
thing; it belongs to and characterizes it. Design is a quality of space, as the
supreme synthesis or cause of things. That is why Alberti points out that line
should not separate (or we shall fall back into the world of individual things)
but should join or give proportion. Design is the framework, the articulation,
the structure of space. The process that leads from reality or spatial infinity
to perspective, and from perspective to design, is precisely that which Marsilio
proclaims as proper to the animus in corpore (and the artist is in fact animus in
corpore in the highest sense): a progress from individual things to species and
from species to rationes. Design, which Alberti identifies with the Platonic
idea, is in fact the supreme ratio.2
III
Since man too is, by his origins, a portion of reality, the rational process
of space is not applicable to external reality alone; it is the very process of
consciousness and is therefore valid for the reality in which human life consists,
for the world of passion and sentiment. We propose to point out briefly the
ethical impulse behind this process of knowledge.
Manetti, speaking of the relief submitted by Brunelleschi in the competi-
tion for the Baptistery doors (P1. I2b), observes that everyone was amazed by
the force and freedom of the "attitudes": "the attitude of Abraham, the atti-
tude of the finger beneath his chin, his readiness," and that of the angel "the
way in which he takes his hand" etc. In this relief"there is no member that is
not instinct with spirit." He goes on to praise Filippo for having finished his
1 M. Salmi, "Note sulla chiesa di S. "Idea" cf. Panofsky, Idea and Lionello
Spirito," Atti del I Congresso di Storia dell'Ar- Venturi, Storia della Critica d'Arte, Florence,
chitettura, Florence, I938, p. I59. I945, pp. I28 i.
2For the development of design as an
II6 GIULIO CARLO ARGAN
story in a short time "because he was strong in the exercise of his art" while
Ghiberti "did many times destroy and remake his, both as a whole and in
parts" and completed his work "in a great while."
Here are two opposite methods and two opposite results. Ghiberti pro-
ceeds slowly, perfecting the details, Filippo executes swiftly and confidently:
in the former, ideation and execution are inseparable and develop side by
side, each furthering the other, in the latter, they are distinct and successive
moments. Lorenzo is the man of tradition, and the source of his inspiration is
in his own labour as a craftsman: Filippo is the modern man of will who first
plans and decides and then executes. The result appears in the vital force of
the "attitudes," the energy of the actions, the intensity ("spirito") of every
part: Abraham has decided on the sacrifice and undertakes it without hesita-
tion, but the will of the angel is in conflict with his will. In Ghiberti's relief
(P1. I2a), on the contrary, Abraham's action is hesitant; it does not express a
decision, but only a wavering intention: he seems to be delaying in order to
await the arrival of the angel who is still far off in heaven. The time of the
drama is ill-defined because the space is ill-defined. The rock and the body
of Isaac are inclined in opposite directions: the oblique spur of rock separates
the group of the sacrifice from that of the servants with the ass. These two
distinct zones correspond to different times: the anecdote of the servants
postpones the imminence of the drama. In Brunelleschi's relief the line is
single because the space is single. From the two stooping servants at the
bottom, the composition rises into a pyramid whose apex coincides with the
most dramatic moment, the hand of the angel which grasps the arm of
Abraham. The movement, too, is single: the tension of Abraham's body has
its release in the figure of the servant drinking, and the contortion of Isaac's
body is the culminating point of the rhythm of angles that begins in the figure
of the servant who is extracting a thorn from his foot. A single concatenated
movement, like a swift play of light, simultaneously expresses both move-
ments: Abraham about to strike and the angel stopping him. The group of
servants with the ass is no longer anecdotal; from that foreground the dramatic
representation develops, with lightning force, up to the- final gesture.
If the problem of the definition of space is inseparable from that of the
artistic development of the Master, we must conclude, given the date of this
relief, that the first postulates of perspective are laid down in it. One of these
is the reduction of narrative to drama, of temporal succession to the unity of
place, of the evocation to the representation of an action.
The relief astounded its contemporaries by what we should nowadays call
its violent realism. In point of fact the novelty of the work lies in its strongly
marked archaic accent. The conventional rhythms of line and of delicate
chiaroscuro are broken so as to give place to a hard cutting of planes to form
masses of alternating light and shade. This modelling and the force and con-
catenation of the movements are clear indications: Filippo, passing over the
Trecentesque tradition, had sought his dramatic sources in Giovanni Pisano:
the angel's gesture itself, to quote only the dramatic climax of the scene, has
its precedent in the Last Judgment of the Pisano pulpit. But in Giovanni
Pisano the rhythm had been swift, increasing, in continual tension: here the
moments of the story are distinguished and individualized, but are seen
THE ARCHITEGTURE OF BRUNELLESCHI I I7
simultaneously in their final resolution. The principle of "intersection", if we
are not mistaken, was applied to time before it was applied to space, unless
indeed the new idea of space is a consequence of that sudden arrestation of
time.
The sculpture of Donatello is undoubtedly the record of a new mode of
conceiving the dramatic quality of life. In Rome, Filippo, and Donatello
together sought out and measured the relics of Roman Art, but Donatello,
says his biographer, ;'never opened his eyes to architecture." Nor did Filippo
trouble to initiate him into it, as though "he saw that Donato had no aptitude
therein." Vasari, in his turn, records that Filippo blamed his friend for
representing the crucified Christ in the form of a peasant. Filippo, who had
been thought too much of a realist by the judges in the competition,
found that Donatello sometimes carried realism to excess. Donatello's world
is in fact the world of feeling and of drama, the world of pure action: in his
sculpture a popular Tuscan ethos is exalted to the level of the classical epos.
The passage of Manetti warns us, if such a warning is necessary, that
Donatello, who was of anything but a speculative temperament, did not start
from theoretic premises: yet he is undoubtedly the first artist to construct a
figured representation perspectively. Oertell believes that he can place the
first determination of vanishing point in the relief of St. George and the
Dragon, dated about I4I6. We instead, are concerned to show that in this
relief the receding planes of the cave and the portico, by contracting space,
cause the flattened masses of the horse and its rider to stand out with an
effect of plastic emergence. Perspective has therefore a value of contrast, as
opposed to that which it holds, for example, in the painting of Masolino, where
it serves as guide to the rhythmic alignment ofthe figures. It proportions both
space and figures, contrasting the figure with space, or, since the figure is in
the foreground, contrasting surface and depth.
A more precise construction with central perspective may be found in the
relief of Herod's Feast, which can be dated between I425 and I42 7 (Pl. I 2d) .
Vanishing point is clearly distinguished in the middle of the central arcade,
and coincides with the elbow of the viol-player; the architraves, the pilasters,
the flight of steps ascending on the right, the ends of the beams set into the
pilasters all concur exactly at that point and determine an absolute unity of
space. Nor has this architecture a generic function as a spatial site: it is a
complex, yet broken structure, that enters into the life of the action, dis-
tinguishes its episodes, and even, by its air of antique ruin, plays its part in
the pathos of the scene. In this, on the other hand, it is certainly possible to
distinguish various stages of the narrative (the dance, the presentation of the
severed head, the different emotional reactions of the spectators); but the
action, in that single and co-active space, is itself single and its various
narrative phases, occurring in the same time and in the same space, become
a clash of passions in action. The clash of passions is expressed by the sharp
divergences of the figures whicll leave an empty space in the centre. The
figures move along intersecting paths; they do not rest on predetermined
planes, but by their movement create opposing planes, which means that they
1 R. Oertel, "Die Fruhwerke des Masac- I933*
cio," Marburger jrahrbuch fur Kunstze issenschaft,
II8 GIULIO CAltLO ARGAN
define space in its three dimensions. Gothic rhythm dissolved the figure into
the limitless space of the background; here Salome's legs indicate a rotatory
movement in a direction opposite to that of the movement of the arms and
bust, and the soldier presenting the charger is constructed on two planes at
right angles to each other which make a sharp angle on the perpendicular that
falls from the shoulders to the knee. The architecture which is developed
towards the centre in extended frontal planes, grows thick with columns and
pilasters at the sides, which means that it multiplies spatial suggestions in
relation to the mass of the figures that crowd to left and right. Space does not
contain these things, it is the things which by their proportional equilibrium
or, in this case, the figures by the individual character of their movements,
which define space. Light itself in this enclosed space, circumscribed within
the limits of an action, can no longer break in from an external source; it, too,
is a quality of things which is broken up into spatial planes; and in the
opposition of those planes it too is dissolved into contrasting zones of light
and shade. It is no longer light that produces light and shade, for it is pro-
duced by the intensity of that contrast, that is, it is inherent in the plastic
fact, or in form.
At this point we may legitimately ask whether this conception of space
as something which is not reproduced by the work of art but as something
which the work of art itself disposes and realizes, had been reached by
Donatello independently or through the medium of Brunelleschi. In the
former case the similarity ofthe results obtained would be almost inexplicable;
in the latter the analogy between the results might suggest the hypothesis that
Brunelleschi had at some time formulated a general theory of vision and that
Donatello had subordinated his own artistic activity to this theoretic disciple-
ship.
Since perspective is not simply a theory, but is the essence of the archi-
tecture of Brunelleschi, the Brunelleschi-Donatello relationship, which cer-
tainly exists, is a figurative relationship. In Herod's Feast the masses of the
figures cluster along the sides of the central space, just as in Santo Spirito the
spaces of the side aisles and chapels are resolved into the void of the centre
aisle; the whole scene is envisaged as a succession of parallel "intersections"
which are projected on to-the foreground; space, as a comprehensive void,
annuls itself by implicating itself with the modelling of the figures, just as it
does by implicating itself with the modelling of the members in the architec-
ture of Filippo. It is perhaps the first figured work in which perspective is
assumed not as a law, but as a value in the representation; and the hypothesis
that this represents the point of contact between Brunelleschi's architecture
and the now imminent painting of Masaccio is not unreasonable. What is
the special pathos, the special dramatic exigency that sees in perspective
representation the condition needful for its realization? What is the motive
behind this translation of the phases of the narrative from time to space, in
such a way that the importance and the function of each figure in the action
is determined by its spatial situation, or rather by the greater or less vigour
of its movements as creators of space? It has already been pointed out that
this dramatic necessity corresponds to a moral conception which distinguishes
decision from relative activity, and the immediate and complete fulfilment of
THE ARCHITEGTURE OF BRUNELLESCHI I I9
the one recognizes also the rational and moral validity of the other. To make
a fully mature decision means making clear to oneself the causes that lead
one to act: it means therefore justifying one's action historically. In action,
all causes remote and immediate, direct and indirect, are simultaneously
brought into play in a mutual compensation or equilibrium which is already
proportion in nuce: in action, emotional causes are already, in fact, realized or
resolved just as, in Brunelleschi's architecture, all the forces are always realized
or in equilibrium and never incomplete or in tension. Therefore, the action,
as an effect which exhausts all causes, is always cathartic: it is representation
par excellence. This explains why the sculpture of Donatello develops in a
continuous crescendo of dramatic intensity: the more intense the dramatic
action, the more full and complete wil] be the catharsis and the loftier will be
the degree of universality or of classicality attained. It explains, too, why
this dramatic quality can be realized equally in the pure movement of the
figures almost without spatial elements (example the reliefs on the pulpit
of San Lorenzo) or in pure perspective abstraction almost free from figure
movements (example-the tondi of the life of St. John in the sacristy of San
Lorenzo). This moral conception is the basis of the typically Quattrocento
idea of the hero as the protagonist of a drama, or a being in whom great
physical pre-eminence, that is a fullness of sensory vitality, corresponds to a
clear consciousness and a steadfast will: this is that animus in corpore, the
knowledge of which is the first stage of the supreme knowledge which is that
of the animus separatus.
It will not then seem strange to seek in the most typical, the almost sym-
bolical, delineation of the heroic ideal of the Quattrocento-the "David" of
Donatello (P1. I2C) a complete transposition, and almost a transubstantia-
tion, of perspective space into the human form: the ideal origin of the natural-
istic anthropomorphism of the Renaissance. In fact, in this statue, the delicate
modelling does not cut across the movement in the anatomy of the figure, but
resolves it into a linked balance of spatial allusion, of depth and emergence,
which are all subsequently resolved on the plane of intersection. This is
determined by the shaft of light, which descending from the brim of the hat,
falls at a tangent to the figure, wavering over the smooth surfaces and barely
touching the chief points of emergence, to terminate at the base in the brief,
intense, pictorial episode of Goliath's head. This complete identification of
space and light explains why the already noted crescendo of drama or intensity
of action is also, in Donatello's sculptures, a crescendo of pictorial intensity,
of vivid contrasts between light and dark. In the pure plasticity of the
"David" there is already the promise of the plastic dissolution of the
"Magdalene" in the Baptistery.
Perspective is therefore the law upon which the composition of a historia
is based. The theory of the historia occupies a large part of the second book
of the Pittura of Alberti: and the critics have too readily neglected this part,
thinking it void of any positive figurative content. Thus they have come to
refer Alberti's analysis of formal material to natural vision, when in reality
this is concerned with the supreme aim of the artist: the composition of a
historia. Alberti explicitly declares that the historia is composed of bodies,
the bodies of members and the members of surfaces: figurative morphology
GIULIO CARLO ARGAN I20
and syntax, which he has previously explained, exist for the attainment of
this literary aim. Beauty, it is trlle, is created by the composition of the
surfaces, but beauty or perfection according to the ancient models, is not yet
the historia. Although Alberti cites several examples of ancient historae one
gets the impression that he considers the historia as a superseding of beauty
in a moral sense, that is not as something pertaining to the memory of
antiquity, but as a fact of the "modern" consciousness. To the practice of
ancient art he adds the living practice of the art of Donatello and Masaccio.
What are the ideal conditions of the "historia" ? The standards which Alberti
lays down in this matter correspond exactly to the theory of painting as
intersection: intersection is the necessary condition of the literary dignity of
the historia. It is true that Alberti, though he proclaims that he wishes to
write as a painter, is a man of letters; it is also true that the painting and
sculpture of the Quattrocento are not, in a strict sense, literary or humanistic;
it is none the less important that criticism should feel the need of considering
these formal questions on a plane of literary and humanistic dignity. The
form does not attain this dignity by the quality of its "content," but by its
own formal quality or by the way in which it resolves that content.
In order that such a figured work may attain the value of a historia it is
of the first importance, Alberti explains, that every figure should be indi-
vidualized both in its physical conformation and in the attributes that are
proper to it. The result of such individualization is variety, though variety
should not be allowed to distract one from the central theme to be repre-
sented. The number of figures must be limited so that the historia does not
degenerate into confusion: therefore the painter must distribute the full and
the void in due proportion. This is the very condition of plastic form as the
supreme value of proportion. The figures must have concordant movements,
that is the action must take place at a single moment of time and space;
the same movements must not be repeated by different figures, since every
one has its special function. When he comes to movements Alberti does not
forget that the painter can represent only what can be seen; the movements
of the soul can therefore be expressed only through the actions and move-
ments of the body, and the painter will only consider movements "which are
made by changing place." It is therefore true of movements, considered as
movements of the soul, just as it is true of things, that they exist in so far as
they occupy "a place." These movements must next be developed in all
directions; that is there can be no historia unless the action builds up the
whole of space. Alberti further requires that in every historia one figure
should introduce or comment on the action, or, in other words, should inter-
pose between the spectator and the action a mental distance (which is the
pre-condition of a catharsis) corresponding to the optical distance which
perspective requires between the eye and the object, so that the latter may
not invade the field of vision but instead may be proportioned by and resolved
into space.
The historia, therefore, is the typical and perfect product of ingegno:
at once the culminating point and the moral justification of artistic creation.
The historia, indeed, is an "invention" or a "fiction"; but only in the sense
that it transposes the realistic chronicle of facts into the sphere of universal
THE ARCHITECTURE OF BRUNELLESCHI I2I
ideas, and is thus a cathartic representation. The equivalence of "fiction"
and "invention," while it does away with any suggestion of mimesis in the
first term, and with any suggestion of the arbitrary in the second, clarifies
the value of the term historia, which is not merely the record or exposition of
an action, but the raising of it to an eternal, or, precisely an historical signifi-
cance.
It is impossible to overlook the analogy of this idea of the historia with
the idea of ancient drama, which the culture of the Renaissance had inherited
from Aristotle's Poetics. Tragedy is an action that acquires a universal
value either by reason of the nobility and moral elevation of the contending
persons, or because of the magnitude of the action brought about by a com-
bination of the slowly marshalled forces of destiny; hidden purposes of the
gods that are realized and take shape in the passions and actions of men. For
this reason dramatic action takes on an exemplary moral value, not in a
pedagogical or moralistic, but in a profoundly solemn sense.
The historia is always exemplary or, more generally, allegorical (one may
recall Alberti's description ofthe "Calumny of Apelles" on which Botticelli was
to draw) by reason of its profound naturalistic content. All reality flows into
the action, filling it and finding in it the act that manifests and reveals, that is,
"creates," reality though only perhaps through the mute and solemn sugges-
tions of a few essential movements. Nature itself, in its loftiest manifestation,
speaks and acts in dramatic action. In order therefore that the historia may
have its full value and that human actions should be stripped of all that is of
merely occasional or anecdotal significance, they must be referred to the very
origin of things, to the beginnings of space, to the cosmic genesis of light and
shade. Only in this world which he creates and orders by his own act can man
be fully himself.
The problem of space as a dimension of action, or as the supreme demon-
stration of man's dominion over reality, is the problem (which still awaits a
critical solution) of the painting of Masaccio.