Page 97 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

fig. i. Unknown Italian artist,
Ideal City. c. 1500, oil on panel.
Staatliche Museen, Berlin

outstanding individuals. Aeneas Sylvius Pic- inner regions of the human body or the exotic provide the underlying theme of the following
colomini, who became Pope Pius n, is a perfect regions of the earth) with such illusionistic skill discussion of the rationalization of space, the
example and was recognized as such by Burk- that spectators suddenly became privileged eye- human body, and Leonardo and Diirer.
hardt. As a geographer and an ambassador, he witnesses. This is not to say that the new tech-
recorded vivid eyewitness accounts of people niques of representation automatically lifted
and places in such distant lands as Scotland. As what Burkhardt called the medieval "veil... of THE RATIONALIZATION OF
a humanist, he wrote autobiographical Com- faith and illusion/' Indeed, the very illusionist SPACE: GEOMETRY AND THE
mentaries, in which he acts as a sober observer power of the new techniques could make the MAN-MADE ENVIRONMENT
of himself and others. As captain of the Church completely imaginary seem to have been taken Renaissance thinkers did not hesitate to connect
and proud leader of the Sienese family of the from life. A case in point is Dtirer's famous the ordering of space with the highest organiz-
Piccolomini, he transformed his native village of Rhinoceros (cat. 206), which for generations of ing principles of the universe. The humanist
Corsignano into an exemplary new town of the natural historians came to embody the essence Alberti, who was an architect and theorist of art
Renaissance, renamed Pienza in his honor. Yet of "rhinocerosity" more truly than the beast as well as a writer, wrote a Latin satire, Momus
this exemplar of Burkhardt's Renaissance man itself. Armor-plated and —as the medieval bes- (The Prince), in which Jove searches, at first
determined that the internal disposition of the tiary required —the constitutional enemy of the unavailingly, for a means to bring order into the
cathedral in Pienza should follow the medieval elephant, Diirer's invention may be regarded as chaos of earthly existence. This chaos had been
pattern of a "hall church" with Gothic win- another parallel of Pienza in the sphere of visual orchestrated by Momus, the wayward son of
6
dows. In a sense, the human figures repre- representation, bearing compelling witness Night, who had been expelled from the heavens
sented in the works of art in the section of this both to the new visual techniques for the con- and was now reveling in his capricious rule on
exhibition devoted to the human body are struction of a world of rational understanding earth. The contradictory and sophistic opinions
fleshly Pienzas —amalgams of medieval and and to the necessary retention of important ele- of the philosophers Jove consults in his quest
modern, laid out according to the new measures ments from established frameworks of meaning. provide him with no clear guidance on the best
and in accordance with the empirical scrutiny of In its double-edged nature, the visual weapon model for a new world order. The first signs of
forms and functions, yet deeply imbued with forged by the Renaissance revolution is perhaps enlightenment come when he sees a stupendous
Christian traditions about sin and grace, body no different from any other truly revolutionary architectural creation, a great Colosseum-style
and soul. agent. The direction in which any such weapon theater, whose harmonious design signals the
Albrecht Diirer and Leonardo da Vinci are the cuts into the prevailing notions of reality can rational system that should underlie the cosmos
perfect Burkhardtian figures in the visual arts, only be determined by a complex series of as a whole and its component parts. Jove laments
attesting in their closely related yet highly indi- mutually reinforcing and sometimes contradic- his own earlier stupidity in "not having turned
vidual ways that genuinely new manners of tory motivations in the participants' mental and to the constructors of such an extraordinary
representing man and nature developed in the political lives. The works gathered in this work, rather than the philosophers, to plan the
years on either side of 1500. Both men played exhibition under the general heading of "The model of the world of the future/' 7
exceptional roles in forging new tools of visual Mean and Measure of All Things" have been Alberti makes it equally clear in his short but
communication — tools that could illustrate the selected to bear suggestive witness to some of seminal treatise Delia pittura (On Painting),
known world with fresh analytical force and the more Burkhardtian of these motivations in written in Latin in 1435 and translated into
summon up unknown worlds (whether the the period around 1492. These motivations also Italian a year later, that painters play no lesser a

96 CIRCA 1492