Te l'avevo detto (I told you so).
After the failure and collapse of abstract art, Alberti's tract, On Painting, has new relevance that would have surprised Alberti. It is the intellectual foundation stone of the study of painting as a liberal art. Alberti is the world's first professor of painting.
When Alberti wrote, literacy was the reigning grace of the Renaissance man's repertoire of accomplishments. Alberti was not a painter. On Painting was written as a practical guide from the point of view of philosophy, and in particular, Plato's philosophy, which was, at the time, favored by The Academy.
Paying homage to Plato, Alberti cites the theory, articulated by Quintilian, that the art of painting originated with the tendency to see familiar faces in shadows and other random environment, and to fix those impressions by art. Art thus originated in the mind, the mind of man, the measure of all things.
This would seem to support the assertion by abstractionists that representational art is woefully mired in the senses. That is a simplistic notion of idealism. Many things are in the mind that are not intelligible. Representation is intelligible. Abstraction is not.
Alberti takes mathematics as grounds for his idealism. I think he means geometry, which is what perspective is, but he doesn't want to overplay his hand. Alberti means by mathematics numbers noumenal entities.
What Alberti seeks to avoid is embroiling his practical guide to painting in the perennial argument whether reality is in the mind, or outside the mind. He omits certain passages to this effect from his Italian edition, included in his Latin edition.
Perspective appears to prove that the mind, at least the mind's eye, is the ground of reality. The construction lines of a perspective drawing seem to converge on, and emerge from, the eye of the viewer much as a movie theater projector casts images outwardly at a screen stage. It is a valid comparison, metaphysically, but tangent to Alberti's thesis.
As proof that art is of the mind, consider the difference between perceiving a random face in the shadows, and perceiving the face of a specific individual, one known by name. The random face is an error of the senses. The recognized face is a function of the mind, of memory.
Alberti's argument thus leads to the kernel of his thesis, "historia," the exact word used by the translator in the 1972 English edition. Introduced by Alberti in part 60, in part 61 he offers historia as an attribute of composition. Conceptually, it induces comparisons with "narrative," a term currently in vogue, used to distinguish different versions of the same event. The painting tells a story (or should) says Alberti. What that story is remains to be told, but it is no random sense impression, one without meaning.
The exact word in Italian for history is storia, a term both too broad, and too narrow to stand as a definition of Alberti's intended meaning of historia in art. I lean towards caption, as it is both more explicit than title, while less epic than legend. As yet another good alternative, may I suggest moralia, as in the title of Plutarch's classic, Moralia. It resonates with similar overtones of didactic purpose.
And if the Moralia of Plutarch, then the Lives, of Plutarch may be said to caption what Alberti means by historia, as portraiture is the equivalent of biography. Alberti was undoubtedly familiar with both.* And, as no painting—no matter how large—can fully encompass a lengthy historical narrative in comprehensive detail, we must be content with the episodic format of historical painting.
"Suppose," I surmise, "I was to conduct tours of visitors at the museum of art. What could I tell the group about the back-story of each painting visited, its historia?" I must say, I wouldn't lead them to abstract painting, about which I can tell them nothing (nothing that they cannot see with their own eyes). I would lead them beyond abstraction, to works of art with a historia to tell.
* "For as in the poetry of Antimachus, and the paintings of Dionysius, the Kolophonians, we find a certain vigour and power..." -from Plutarch, Lives, section XXXVI "The Life of Caius Marcius Coriolanus," Alberti's reference to the unattractive face of Agesilaus the Lacedaemonian, in On Painting, Part 25.
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