The Art of Human Composition in Giovanni Pontano’s De principe liber

Abstract

There is a famous passage at the beginning of Book III of Il Libro del Cortegiano (1528) in which Baldesar Castiglione, in his opening address to Messer Alfonso Ariosto, compares the glorious court of Urbino to the mighty body of Hercules.1 While this description shows the author’s reliance on classical sources in developing the political themes of Il Cortegiano,2 it also reveals, from an artistic perspective, a strong interest during the Italian Renaissance in the study of the human body and its proportions. In the visual arts, Renaissance painters, sculptors and architects studied the human figure as an expression of mathematical relationships and geometric forms. In the fifteenth century, the revival of the classics brought to the foreground the great literary works of antiquity. Vitruvius’ treatise on architecture (De architectura), for instance, played a significant role in revitalizing the study of the human figure. Artists like Brunelleschi and Donatello sought to discover the principles which the classical artist had followed when creating such beautiful works. Their analysis of classical architecture led them to an understanding