Echoing Narcissus in Alberti's Della Pittura

Abstract

treatise on painting: the Latin Depictura of 1435 and the vernacular Della pittura of 1436.1 The treatise is organized, in each case, into three books treating in turn, geometry and perspective, the foundations of painting, and the elements of istoria or narrative painting. It is well established by now that the Della pittura is a work of Humanist rhetoric with literary, pedagogical and ethical aspirations rather than a painter's handbook in the tradition of Cennino Cennini's The Book of the Art of Painting?. The most outstanding feature distinguishing Alberti's text from artisanal guides is his reference to classical authors, especially to Quintillian, Cicero and to Pliny. Equally ambitious and unprecedented in Alberti's Della pittura is the ascription of the origins of painting to Narcissus, a figure derived ultimately from Ovid's Metamorphoses.3 Rather than linking his text on painting to practical artists' manuals, Alberti turns to a Latin poem celebrating the instability of the world in constant flux, where origins or founding acts are most often of a violent kind, including rape, incest, and murder. This turn to pagan mythology is not unique in Alberti's theoretical writing; H. Janson suggests, for example, that Alberti's account of the invention of sculpture from anthropomorphic tree trunks in the De statua reverses 'the well-known myth of Daphne turned into a laurel tree'.4 But: 'as a privileged mode of signifying, the recounting of a mythical tale within a literary text reveals concerns, whether conscious or unconscious, which are basic to that text'.5 Alberti creates a new genre when writing about painting in the Della pittura, calling attention to and gendering his self-conscious innovation by creating a new founding myth figuring Narcissus as the inventor of painting. The Della pittura locates itself in a humanist intertextual community, rewriting or subjecting classical sources to a textual appropriation in part to establish authority among professional and social rivals in republican Florence.6 Posed against the Utopian dream of literary men and painters working together to produce inventions in painting (i.e. istorie) are Alberti's allusions to a contentious public and its potential objections.7 His critics presumably were eager to limit painting to the status of craft, to oppose its elevation to a liberal art. The Della pittura constitutes itself then as an adversarial or potentially embattled text produced for friends; an inner circle of like-minded colleagues and disciplines defined in opposition to the detractors, critics, rivals and nemici. The 'autobiographical imagination' at work in the