The Inventor of Painting

First published in vol. IV of Albertiana (2001), pp.165–187, the journal of the Société Internationale Leon Battista Alberti, Hubert Damisch's ‘L'Inventeur de la Peinture’ reconsiders two descriptions of the mythic origins of the art of painting found in Alberti's On Painting (the ‘vernacular’ Italian version) and Pliny's Natural History. Although Alberti's text is clearly indebted to his ancient predecessors', he folds in, for purely theoretical reasons, the figure of Narcissus as the inventor of painting. This addition expands the traditional idea of painting as originating from an attempt to outline a cast shadow, or as an attempt to imitate nature, and allows for a more thorough analysis of the role that desire and ‘specular duplication’ plays in the paradoxical essence of painting, an art which simultaneously seeks to ‘embrace’ and ‘nullify’ its planar surface. (Kent Minturn) Leon Battista Alberti's writings offer explicit proof that he had read Pliny: Pliny's Natural History is one of the declared sources of his De pictura. But Alberti's borrowings from Pliny's text are, ultimately, less important than the displacements and interpolations for which the Natural History provided the overall pretext and subject matter. Rather than making use of this ‘source’ like a mirror to reflect his own thought, Alberti knew how to put it to his own ends the better to indicate, by way of difference, the novelty of his work.

Art · Art history · Literature · Natural (archaeology) · Painting · Shadow (psychology) · Subject (documents) · Vernacular · Architecture and Art History Studies · Computer Science · History · Philosophy

• Narcissus and the Moon

  Open Access•Davide Messina•Signata•2021

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