Painting as a 'modern art': The era of Giotto

摘要

This dissertation studies the "modern art" (arte moderna) of painting as it was practiced and conceived in fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century Italy. The three chapters analyze texts ranging in date from the 1390s to the 1440s that describe painting as "modern." In each case, Giotto stands at the center of the discussion. Together, these sources demonstrate that the Middle Ages had its own distinctive criteria for the "modernity" of an "art," and that these criteria not only persisted, but even guided painting into the period known as the Renaissance.;The first chapter studies Cennino Cennini's famous assertion, written around 1400, that Giotto "changed the art of painting from Greek into Latin and made it modern." In order to understand this statement, which has long intrigued scholars, I propose that it is necessary to better understand the genre in which Cennini was writing. I argue that the form, structure, and conceptual parameters of Cennini's handbook (the Libro dell'arte) are the same as those of a wide variety of contemporary treatises on the "arts"---that is, artes, in the wide, medieval sense of the term that encompassed activities as diverse as arithmetic, poetry, carpentry, music, and preaching. Within this genre of late medieval technical literature, to make an art "modern" meant setting it on a new foundation in "science" (scientia) and rationalizing its procedures accordingly. When we compare the techniques described in Cennini's handbook with those of a Byzantine Greek treatise known in Italy during the same years, we see that the difference between the "Greek" and "modern" art of painting satisfied these same criteria. Giotto, in Cennini's eyes, had rationalized painting as a mode of production, imitating nature more closely not only in its outward appearance, but also inwardly, in its manner of operation.;The second chapter studies a novella written by the Florentine poet and novelist Franco Sacchetti in the 1390s. In it, a debate arises among the leading Florentine artists of the mid-fourteenth century as to who the greatest painter had been aside from Giotto. Alberto Arnoldi, a prominent sculptor of the time, "resolves" the debate by arguing that a group of "modern painters" had in fact superseded Giotto: the women of Florence, experts in their use of makeup. In support of this ironic claim, Alberto embarks on a long, detailed description of the feats of modern makeup: the improvement of complexion, the straightening of the nose, etc. As I show, each and every one of these cosmetic transformations actually corresponds to a characteristic visual difference between Greek and "modern" paintings. Praising makeup as if it were painting, Alberto mocks the putatively "vulgar" outlook that understood painting's modernization as a process of mere beautification, neglecting the criteria proper to the "art" as such. Sacchetti thus writes in defense of a more sophisticated conception of "modern art" akin to Cennini's, but in doing so reveals that this concept belonged to a circumscribed group of elite painters and intellectuals who consciously defined their views against those of the general populace.;The final chapter considers the fate of this fourteenth-century concept of "modern art" in the Renaissance by studying the work of the Paduan physician Michele Savonarola. Writing in the 1440s, Savonarola praised Giotto as the painter who "first modernized (modernizavit) ancient and mosaic figures," but also criticized him and his followers for their failure to fully rationalize the art's underlying idea (idea): the ideal human form. As a corrective, Savonarola develops a physiologically and statistically accurate canon of proportion to serve as a new scientific foundation for the art. In his mind, however, this ongoing process of modernization cannot help but steer the art back to the same state of perfection that Polykleitos had established in antiquity. Cennini's paradigm persists, but in practice, modernization is now indistinguishable from the imitation of the ancients.