Art and Humanism in Early Renaissance Padua: Cennini, Vergerio and Petrarch on Imitation*

Abstract

A number of passages in Cennino Cennini's early fifteenth-century craft handbook, the Libro dell'Arte, have captured the attentionof art historians — most particularly its spectacular first chapter, which defines painting in terms indebted to late medieval poetics and which praises artistic imagination in terms ultimately derived (though significantly transformed) from Horace's Ars poetica. I would like to focus critical attention on another section of the Libro that is equally rich and complex in both its sources and its transformations — Cennini's treatment of imitation and style, articulated most pointedly in chapter 27, “How to Strive to Copy and Draw from as Few Mastersas Possible.” Cennini's discussion of copying masters will be examined in relation to humanist ideas on literary imitation, and this particular aspect of the relation between painting and poetry in theLibrowill be explored in light of the author's residency in Padua during the last years of the Trecento.