Notebook

Notebook, 1993- Ut Pictura Poesis - Lee, Rensselaer W. Ut Pictura Poesis, The Humanistic Theory of Painting. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc. 1967

Preface [1967 Edition]

This essay attempts to define the humanistic theory of painting and record in broad terms its development from its beginning in the fifteenth century to the eighteenth when new forces in critical thought and in art began to cause its decline. Everywhere in the theory is the fundamental assumption--an assumption which is made no longer--that good painting, like good poetry, is the ideal imitation of human action. From this it follows that painters, like poets, must express general, not local, truth through subjects which education in the Biblical narratives and the Greco-Roman classics has made universally known and interesting; must deploy a rich variety of human emotion; and must aim not merely to please, but also to instruct mankind. This theory, like much of the art of the period, had its roots in antiquity. It was specifically certain famous comparisons of poetry and painting in Aristotle and Horace that prompted the critics of painting, who found no real theory of painting in antiquity, to take over the ancient literary theory pretty much lock, stock, and barrel and make it apply to an art for which it was not originally intended. The results of this process and the changing fortunes of the doctrine through the Renaissance, Mannerist, and Baroque periods are an interesting commentary on the progress of the arts. And if the critics sometimes went astray in forcing a literary aesthetic on the pictorial art, they were, on the whole, more right than wrong. In fact, they found their raison d'être for a humanistic theory of painting not only in the prescriptions of ancient authors for a humanistic literature, but in Italian art itself which, from Cimabue and Giotto to Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian, had been concerned at its best with truth, which is in the highest sense representative of human action and emotion. And, in any case, a direct or implied comparison of painting with poetry was natural enough when the painters, like their ancient forebears, drew so largely for their inspiration on the great poetry of the past and present.

Written some twenty-five years ago, this study, in a sense interdisciplinary, seems to have served the purposes both of art and literary historians, and even, at times, of musicologists. It has been, I am told, useful not only to mature scholars, but to graduate students and undergraduates as well. I hope, then, that its release in book form from its rather stately and inaccessible prison in the Art Bulletin will bring some satisfaction both to the teachers who have been good [p. vii] enough to assign it to their students and to the students who have often found it hard to lay their hands on. The opportunity has been taken to make certain corrections in the text, to improve some illustrations where better copy has come to hand, and to add an index.

If I were writing the essay today, its essential argument and conclusions would stand very much as they are. However, I would mitigate the overemphasis of certain judgments. I would not, for instance, condemn out of hand Charles Le Brun's allegorical histories with a clever phrase borrowed from Tennyson, nor would I call Annibale Carraci's Rinaldo and Armida in Naples, though it is no masterpiece, an intolerable picture. More important, since the appearance of the essay in 1940, several scholars have published works that valuably supplement or correct what I have written. First among these is Denis Mahon's Studies in Seicento Art and Theory [London, 1947], with its important discovery of a fragment of an early seventeenth-century treatise on painting by Giovanni Battista Agucchi that anticipates the theory of Bellori by half a century. In an article entitled "Antique Frameworks for Renaissance Art Theory: Alberti and Pino," in Marsyas, Vol. III [1946], Creighton Gilbert demonstrated that it was the Venetian painter and writer Paolo Pino, not Ludovico Dolce as I had said, who first clearly divided the labor of the painter into the three categories of disegno, inventione, and colorire, which correspond to the three major divisions of the art of rhetoric among the ancients. In his brilliant book Galileo as a Critic of the Arts [The Hague, 1954], Erwin Panofsky's discussion of the great astronomer's contribution to the paragone literature is one that I should have liked to have at hand when I discussed Leonardo's paragone. For a number of the sixteenth century treatises I discuss I refer the reader to the critical introductions, bibliography and notes in Paola Barocchi's Trattati d'arte del cinquecento fra manierismo e controriforma, Vols. 1 and 2 [Bari, 1960-62]. Mark Roskill's new edition of Ludovico Dolce's Dialogo della pittura, which will shortly be published in the monograph series of the College Art Association of America and the Archaeological Institute of America, also contains valuable matter for the study of the humanistic theory of painting during the sixteenth century.

Rensselaer W. Lee

[pp. vii-viii]

[Lee, Rensselaer W. Ut Pictura Poesis, The Humanistic Theory of Painting. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc. 1967.]

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