contrapposto: style and meaning in renaissance art

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Contrapposto: Style and Meaning in Renaissance Art Author(s): David Summers Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Sep., 1977), pp. 336-361Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3049668Accessed: 28-11-2015 06:50 UTC

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Contrapposto: Style and Meaning in Renaissance Art* David Summers

"... qualunque cosa fra loro o teco facciano i dipinti, tutto apartenga a hornare o a insegnarti la storia . . . Et farassi per loro dilettarsi de poeti et delli horatori; questi anno molti ornamenti communi col pittore."1

In memory of Charles Seymour, Jr.

It was thought for a long time that the Torso Belvedere was discovered in the Campo dei Fiori during the years of the reign of Julius II. In 1899, however, Lanciani argued that it was not the Torso Belvedere that had been found then but rather most

probably the sadly mutilated torso of a Discobolos, now almost

completely disguised in its restoration as a gladiator in the

Capitoline Museum.2 A drawing of the torso in the Library of Christ Church College, Oxford (Fig. 1), published by Lanciani, is dated by inscription to 1513, the year of Julius II's death; and the same inscription tells us that the torso was either drawn in or excavated near the house of Giovanni

Ciampolini, which was in the Campo dei Fiori.3 Ciampolini's was one of the earliest collections of antiquities and his torso of the Discobolos must have been held in some regard: after his death in 1518 and that of his heir Michele in 1519, the collection was bought at a high price by Giulio Romano and Penni in 1520.4 Thus a torso of the Discobolos, although it may never have been identified as such, or if it was identified, still left much to the imagination, surfaced at an opportune moment in the development of the Roman High Renaissance

style, and took its place, immediately following the death of

Raphael, in the collection of one of the foremost practitioners of the new maniera.

The real Torso Belvedere had been known for at least

seventy-five years when the Discobolos fragment was un- earthed. It had belonged to the Colonna since before 1435,

when its inscription, identifying it as a work of Apollonios of

Athens, son of Nestor, was recorded. It apparently remained in the possession of the Colonna until after the Sack of Rome, when Clement VII placed the fragment-which by this time had been made famous by Michelangelo-in the Belvedere

together with other much-admired pieces of Classical

sculpture.5 The story persists that the Torso Belvedere was not found

until about the same time as the Laocoon or the Apollo Belvedere largely because it exerted no influence upon Renaissance art until the early cinquecento, when, as the well-known art-historical story goes, Michelangelo perceived the realization of his own aims in it-so much so that it came to be called Michelangelo's Torso-and magnified his

conception of the human figure accordingly. I would like to

suggest, however, that the Torso Belvedere need not have gone unnoticed in the decades before its "discovery" by Michelangelo, but that it represented an alternative that the earlier Renaissance-and most especially its major writer, Leon Battista Alberti-consciously and with good reason

rejected; and when Michelangelo did turn appreciative eyes upon the Torso Belvedere he did so not in isolation but rather as a major participant in a reorientation of dominant Early Renaissance critical ideals. In this important instance, then, crucial change in Italian Renaissance art was not the result

simply of the chance rediscovery of notable antique sculpture;

* This article is a later version of a paper read at the symposium held in conjunction with the exhibition "Drawings and Prints of the First Maniera, 1515-1535," sponsored by the Department of Art, Brown University, and the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 22 February through 25 March 1973. I wish especially to express my gratitude to Professor Catherine Wilkinson of Brown University, the organizer of this exemplary exhibition, for the invitation to set down what probably would not have been written otherwise. I wish also to thank my distinguished audience at the symposium, whose several comments and criticisms I hope are satisfactorily incorporated or answered in the present draft of the paper. A bibliography of frequently cited sources follows the footnotes.

I L. B. Alberti, Della Pittura, ed. L. Mallk, Florence, 1950, 104 and 94. 2 R. Lanciani, "La raccolta antiquaria di Giovanni Ciampolini," Bulletino della Commissione Archaeologica Comunale di Roma, XxvlI, 1899, 101-115; for the restoration and history of the torso see H. Stuart Jones, A Catalogue of Ancient Sculptures Preserved in the Municipal Collections of Rome, The Museo Capitolino, Oxford, 1912, No. 50. Burckhardt (The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, New York, 1958, I, 192) lends his authority to the traditional idea that the Torso Belvedere was found in the time of Julius II. 3 The drawing bears the inscription: "cavato in casa di zampolino 1513 in Roma." C. F Bell (Drawings by the Old Masters in the Library of Christ

Church, Oxford, Oxford, 1914, 53) lists the drawing as "Italian School 1525-75." The inscribed attribution to Leonardo on the mount is of course wrong, although it is perhaps not meaningless. Leonardo arrived in Rome in December of 1513, and it is becoming clearer that his importance for events in Rome in the years immediately following was greater than Vasari has led us to believe. See K. Weil-Garris Posner, "Raphael's 'Transfiguration' and the Legacy of Leonardo," Art Quarterly, xxxv, 1972, 343-371.

4 Lanciani, "Raccolta," 108-110, including the contract of the sale and Giulio's testament dated 29 April 1524. Lanciani also gathered available evidence for Giovanni Ciampolini, a friend of Poliziano. See also H. Egger, Codex Escurialensis, Ein Skizzenbuch aus der Werkstatt Domenico Ghirlandaios, Vienna, 1909, 135-36.

5 Lanciani, "Raccolta," 101-07; Lanciani did not identify the Discobolos fragment, but rather offered it as a partial clarification of the history of the Torso Belvedere, with which he argued it had become confused. On the Renaissance history of the Torso Belvedere see also P. P. Bober, Drawings after the Antique by Amico Aspertini. Sketchbooks in the British Museum, London, 1957, 19, n. 1, with bibliography. P. Barocchi, ed., Scritti d'arte del cinquecento, Milan-Naples, 1971, I, 27, states that the Torso Belvedere (called Hercules in the Renaissance when it was not called the Torso) was found in the time of Alexander VI and remained in the Palazzo Colonna in Piazza SS. Apostoli until moved by Clement VII.



CONTRAPPOSTO 337

and however influential such discoveries may have been, we must finally look elsewhere to understand the receptivity to the more grandiloquent aspects of ancient art, which-far from being unknown to the early quattrocento-must have been visible from the first revived interest in the remains of antiquity.

We may begin to appreciate the critical significance of our two torsos by noting the outstanding similarity that no doubt got them confused in the first place, a pronounced twist. Shearman has shown the importance for the Mannerist style of Quintilian's comparison of the movement of Myron's Discobolos to ornate or unusual diction in rhetoric. The central image of Quintilian's passage is a curve, flexus, by means of which he effects an equation of motus and ornatus.

The body when held bolt upright has but little grace, for the face looks straight forward, the arms hang by the side, the feet are joined and the whole figure is stiff from top to toe. But that curve, I might almost call it motion, with which we are so familiar, gives an impression of action and animation ... Where can we find a more violent and elaborate attitude than that of the Discobolos of Myron? Yet the critic who disapproved of the figure because it was not upright, would merely show his utter failure to understand the sculptor's art, in which the very novelty and difficulty of execution is what most deserves our praise. A similar impression of grace and charm is produced by rhetorical figures . . . they involve a certain departure from the straight line and have the merit of variation from ordinary usage.6

Shearman connected this passage directly with Myron's statue and lists several instances of what he considers to be citations of the Discobolos in cinquecento art.7 The Discobolos as a type does not seem to have been recognized until the eighteenth century, however, and if the parallels put forward by Shearman-such as the suppliant nephew in Titian's portrait of Paul III-are more than coincidental, then the Renaissance must have had a fairly complete Discobolos of which we now have no knowledge, which of course is possible.8

But, proceeding from the fragment we know they did have, we must literally look at the problem from a different point of view in order to plot its influence. Steinberg has pointed out that when Francesco Salviati conspicuously adapted one of Michelangelo's figures from the Last Judgment to the task of stooping for the severed head of St. John the Baptist, the body of the saint at the executioner's feet was mutilated beyond all precedent because the trunk of the Baptist was also an intentionally recognizable quotation, this time of a Classical sculpture, which he identified as the Torso Belvedere (Fig. 2).9 There is, however, a simple difference between the Torso Belvedere and the trunk of Myron's Discobolos that is of importance here: they twist in opposite directions, the Discobolos to face its right, the Torso Belvedere to face its left. If Salviati meant the figure to be clearly recognizable, it seems improbable that he would have reversed it; and if we turn the figure over in our mind's eye we see that it is not the Torso Belvedere that is being cited, but the Discobolos. 10

Little could have been told about the appearance of Myron's statue from the battered hulk that is all we know the Renaissance to have had. It is tempting nonetheless to think that there was enough-the crucial flexus-to identify Giulio Romano's torso with Quintilian's text. If so, then Salviati meant to refer to the two paradigms, ancient and modern, of the embellished figural movement to which he himself was so devoted, and we can understand how the Discobolos, fragmen- tary as it was, could still bear distinguishable progeny in cinquecento art. Condivi described the Last Judgment from which the figure of Salviati's executioner was taken as a kind of summa in which Michelangelo had "expressed all that art is able of the human body, omitting no act or gesture."" And as we have seen, Myron's Discobolos was the single great precedent in Classical literature for the equation of movement in sculpture and varietas.

Before leaving it, note should be taken of how Salviati displayed his truncated model: it is seen from above, in such a way that the upper back and lower stomach, as well as fuzzily restored stumps of legs, are visible. A study for a soldier by Baccio Bandinelli, dated around 1520, is remarkably similar to the Discobolos seen from the same point of view (Figs. 3 and

6 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler, New York-London, 1921, 11, xiii, 9-11; and J. Shearman, Mannerism, Baltimore, 1967, 83-86.

7 Shearman, Mannerism, 85-86.

8 The Discobolos as a type seems to have been identified only late in the 18th century. See Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopiidie der Classischen Altertumswis- senschaft, xvi, I, Stuttgart, 1933, 1127. It was identified by Carlo Fea on the basis of the descriptions of Lucian (trans. A. M. Harmon, London-New York, 1921, iII, 346-47) and Quintilian. Gems (see A. Furtwingler, Die antiken Gemmen, Leipzig-Berlin, 1900, XLIV, n. 26) show the Discobolos from the side. Celio Calcagnini's "In statuam discoboli" (in G. B. Pigna, Carminum Libri Quattuor, Venice, 1553, 199-200) describes the figure as bent down to the right rather than to the left, and may be based on Lucian's text.

9 L. Steinberg, "Salviati's Beheading of St. John the Baptist, " Art News, LXX, 1972, 46-47.

10 A drawing (by Rosso Fiorentino) in Christ Church identified as Saint John the Baptist Preaching evidently quotes the Torso Belvedere in the left foreground figure, shown with a similarly perversely mutilated arm (J. Byam Shaw, Old Master Drawings from Christ Church, Oxford. A Loan Exhibition, Oxford, 1972, n. 63). The figure is reversed. Reversal, of course, was a prime means of concealing a debt or, as in this case, of varying a distinguished prototype (see E. H. Gombrich, "The Style 'all'antica': Imitation and Assimilation," Norm and Form. Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, London, 1966, 124); and the important point is that the Torso Belvedere more completely exemplified the stylistic position suggested by Quintilian's text than did the poor truncated remnant of the Discobolos. Citations of the Torso Belvedere, partially restored but still sufficiently mutilated to make their origin unmistakable, seem to have been a minor Mannerist topos. See R. Pallucchini, Sebastian Viniziano, Milan, 1944, pl. 88, a and b.

"1 A. Condivi, La vita di Michelangelo raccolta dal suo discepolo, ed. P. d'Ancona, Milan, 1928, 154.



338 THE ART BULLETIN

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CONTRAPPOSTO 339

4). 12 The literally neo-Classical Bandinelli seems evidently to have taken the sculpture as his model, and the strong definition of the figure to the knee (the head and arms are relatively credible as free restorations by Bandinelli) suggests a more

complete Discobolos than the Giulio Romano torso. However this may be, the drawing closely corresponds to the Discobolos in detail; it twists in the same direction, and perhaps most

important, it is shown in the same head-on, doubled-over, and strongly foreshortened fashion that Salviati would also choose. Taken together, these two works seem to provide a clue as to how artists of the cinquecento might have seen the Discobolos. Once the pattern is recognized, it can be seen that there are other conspicuous examples of this same figure which, although they would have become a self-generating series after a certain point, all stem in one way or another from the Discobolos. The central figure in Michelangelo's Brazen Serpent pendentive is perhaps the earliest example (Fig. 5); another is the central charging nude in Rosso Fiorentino's Moses and the Daughters of Jethro (Fig. 6); yet a third, here referring to his own collection of antiquities, is a fallen soldier in Giulio Romano's Battle of Maxentius and Constantine (Fig. 7).

This series of figures tells us not only how the Discobolos was seen, but it also provides a key to the critical significance of the figure, still in relation to Quintilian's text. Even in the context of the maniera, these head-on figures are singularly contorted and difficult, bold displays of varieta and facilita. They are in such violent movement as simultaneously to display front and rear. When thus described, the figures embody an antithesis, which, as we shall see, was a major form of rhetorical, of poetic, and, in the Renaissance, of pictorial ornament. Antithesis had a variety of translations and synonyms; one of these was contrapositum, which, as is well known, was the basis for the word contrapposto. 13 In this form antithesis was appropriated directly into the Renaissance language of painting, bringing most of its traditional literary meanings with it. There was a good reason for this appropriation, because antithesis occupied a unique place in the history of literary style, and its tradition of significance for poetry and rhetoric parallels and elucidates the use of its cognate in the

theory of the visual arts. But not to look too far ahead, it is enough for now to say that a work that made forthright use of a contrapposto, adding opposition of direction to a figura serpentinata, itself already a contrapposto, was an example of conspicuously ornate diction, intended for cognoscenti, as Quintilian had pronounced Myron's Discobolos to be.14

We must now return to the history of the Torso Belvedere to pick up another strand of the argument. It will be remembered that its inscription was recorded around 1435, and Lanciani believed that it might have been found earlier, in 1430 or 1432.15 Since it is an imposing sculpture in any case, and since it was owned by the Colonna, its discovery-at a time when interest in the still mostly buried marvels of antiquity was intense-can hardly have gone unnoticed. It might have been of special interest to two men centrally important in the history of Renaissance art: Donatello, and perhaps more important, the young abbreviatore apostolico, Leon Battista Alberti.16 With this second possibility in mind we may turn to an important and puzzling passage in Alberti's Della Pittura.

Like most theorists of the Renaissance, Alberti recognized the complexity of the central problem of the representation of movement, and he devoted several pages of his treatise on painting to the decorum of human actions. Some of his precepts, he says, were taken from nature. One of them, in a list of prescriptions for the limits of movements, states the rule that the waist is never twisted so much that the point of the shoulder is perpendicular above the navel, presumably because to surpass this limit is a physical impossibility. Later on, after listing a number of possible and impossible movements, Alberti turns to an artistic practice that seems to him to be totally inadmissable.

There are those who express too animated movements, making the chest and the small of the back visible at once in the same figure, an impossible and inappropriate [non condicente] thing; they think themselves deserving of praise because they hear that those images seem alive that violently move each member; and for this reason they make figures that seem to be fencers and actors, with none of the

12 Uffizi n. 6911F See A. Forlani in Mostra di disegni dei fondatori dell'Accademia delle Arti del Disegno nel IV centenario della fondazione, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi, Florence, 1963, n. 6. The drawing is a study for a soldier to the far right in Bandinelli's Massacre of the Innocents (Drawings and Prints of the First Maniera, 1515-35, Brown University-- Rhode Island School of Design, 22 February-25 March 1973, Cat. No. 1) engraved by Marco Dente (ibid., No. 90). Forlani does not connect the soldier with the Discobolos. In the preliminary drawing, the figure's left leg tucks under in the unusual manner characteristic of the Discobolos. Bandinelli's soldier-mostly in what it lacks-is similar to the Vatican Discobolos, brought from Hadrian's Villa in 1791. Hadrian's Villa was well known to Renaissance artists, and Bandinelli may possibly have seen it there, although it is hard to say-especially if recognized-why such a sculpture would not have come to wide attention long before the end of the 18th century. Forlani observes that the drawing served as the basis for the modello of Bandinelli's first Hercules and Caecus composition, formerly in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin. The reason for the similarity is probably the common source and its significance. Both Bandinelli's modello and Michelangelo's bozzetto in the Casa Buonarroti usually connected with the same program seem to be competing variations on the Discobolos theme. Bandinelli also used the same figure as the crowning contrapposto in the lower right corner of his antithesis-ridden Combat of Lust and Reason composition engraved by Nicholas Beatrizet (Bartsch 44). 13 Contrapposto as a characteristic Classical figural construction is connected by Shearman (Mannerism, 83) with a "figure of speech much

favored by Petrarch." The translation of "antithesis" by "contrapositum" is noted by Quintilian (Ix, iii. 81): "antithesis, which Roman writers call either contrapositum or contentio. " The figure is given signal importance by Augustine (see note 73 below); and extolled in similar terms by Isidore of Seville, who limits the field of possible translations to one: "Antitheta, quae Latine contraposita appellantur: quae, dum ex adverso ponuntur, sententiae pulchritudinem faciunt et in ornamento locutionis decentissima existunt" (Etymologiae 1. xxi, ed. W. M. Lindsay, Oxford, 1911, I, n.p.). Isidore provides an elaborate example of antithesis from Cicero (In Catilinum 11. 25) and, again like Augustine, cites the example of Ecclesiastes. See also Matthieu de Vendome, Ars versificatoria, III, 25ff. (E. Faral, Les Arts poetiques du XIIe et du XIlle si&cle, Paris, 1923, 173): "Antithetum est contrapositio, quando contraria contrariis opponuntur, ut apud Ovidium: (Metamorphoses I. 19) Frigida pugnabant calidis, humentia siccis/Mollia cum duris, sine pondere habentia pondus." Four kinds of antithesis are discussed in this instance, by construction, by noun, adjective, and verb, and examples of each are given from Ovid and from Bernardus Silvestris. 14 On the figura serpentinata as a contrapposto see D. Summers, "Maniera and Movement: The Figura Serpentinata," Art Quarterly, xxxv, 1972, 273.

s1 Lanciani, "Raccolta," 103. 16 Alberti was in Rome from 1431 to 1434; Donatello is mentioned as being in Rome in a letter of Poggio Braccionlini dated 23 September 1430; he had returned to Florence by the summer of 1433.




dignity of painting, whence not only are they without grace and sweetness, but even more they show the ingegno of the artist to be too fervent and furious [troppo fervente et furioso]. 17

Alberti had stated just before this that there were many artists guilty of the excess he describes, but he does not name them. We do not usually associate such contortions with the style of the early quattrocento, although certain figures by Donatello, or Jacopo della Quercia, or Nanni di Banco fit the description. 18 (Vasari praised Nanni's Porta della Mandorla relief highly for the movement of its angels, but believed it to be the work of Jacopo della Quercia.) Krautheimer has argued that the criticism was levelled at Donatello.19 And no better example of conspicuous figural ornament could be found in any work of the cinquecento than the stooping figure in the right foreground of Brunelleschi's competition relief (Fig. 8). This extreme contrapposto-a symbol of license, as we shall see, throughout the Renaissance critical tradition-together with the clear Classical quotation of the Spinario symmetrically opposite, differ in degree but not in kind from the subtler front-rear contrapposto of the servants in the lower left foreground of Ghiberti's competition panel (Fig. 9). It is the question of degree that must be stressed. Both Ghiberti and Brunelleschi followed a similar schema, with ancillary decorative figures in the foreground, the main narrative behind. The latter stated the story, the former embellished it.20 Furthermore it embellished it in a way that, as we shall

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5 Michelangelo, Brazen Serpent (detail). Rome, Vatican, Sistine Chapel (photo: Alinari)

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. ..... .............

6 Rosso Fiorentino, Moses and the Daughters of Jethro (detail). Florence, Uffizi (photo: Alinari)

17 Alberti, Della Pittura, 96-97; and De Pictura (in L. B. Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture, ed. C. Grayson, London, 1972), 85. This passage may relate to Quintilian (In. iii. 105), where the movements of the orator are described as Alberti had just previously defined motions in general (De Pictura, 82-83), and circular motion, as a seventh species, is forbidden. This classification of movements was very common, and Alberti, who recommended all seven movements in an istoria, evidently drew his disapproval of vigorous contrapposto from other sources. The closest parallel seems to me to be Cicero, De Officiis I. xxxvi: "Nam et palaestrici motus sunt saepe odiosiores, et histrionum non nulli gestus ineptiis non vacant, et in utroque genere quae sunt recta et simplicia, laundantur. . . [in dress] sicut in plerisque rebus, mediocritas optima est." On the importance of the mean for Alberti see J. Bialostocki, "The Power of Beauty. A Utopian Idea of Leon Battista Alberti," Studien zur toskanischen Kunst. Festschrift fiir L. H. Heydenreich, Munich, 1964, 16, with bibliography. "8 Jacopo della Quercia's Adam for the Fonte Gaia Expulsion is closest to the Torso Belvedere of any figure in early quattrocento sculpture. Although A. C. Hanson (Jacopo della Quercia's Fonte Gaia, Oxford, 1965, 66) shows the more likely derivation of the figure from sarcophagi, the scale, torsion, and construction of human movement in the Expulsion relief show a keen sense for the stylistic virtues later to be admired in the Torso Belvedere, and one may understand how Vasari-and perhaps Michelangelo-could have given Jacopo such an important place in the development of Italian art (see G. Vasari, Le vite de' piu eccellenti pittori scultori ed architettori, ed. G. Milanesi, Florence, 1906, 11, 105). On movement in the Porta della Mandorla see H. W. Janson, "Nanni di Banco's Assumption of the Virgin on the Porta della Mandorla," Studies in Western Art. Acts of the Twentieth International Congress of the History of Art, Princeton, 1963, II, 98-107. 19 R. Krautheimer and T. Krautheimer-Hess, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Princeton, 1956, 327. 20 For both Alberti and Leonardo Bruni, an istoria was generally definable in terms of the same relationship of content and ornament. Alberti (see note 1 above) wrote that anything shown in a painting should serve either to ornament or to teach the istoria. Bruni, writing of the program for Ghiberti's second doors, advised that the istoria should have two things: "principalmente: l'una che siano illustri, l'altra che siano significanti. Illustri chiamo quelle che possono ben pascere l'occhio con varieth di disegno, significanti chiamo quelle che abbino importanza degna di memoria." In both cases ornamento and variett are discussed first. For Bruni's letter see Krautheimer, Ghiberti, 372, Doc. 52.



CONTRAPPOSTO 341

1 :I: ::-

7 Giulio Romano, The Battle of Maxentius and Constantine (detail). Vatican, Sala di Costantino (photo: Alinari)

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8 Filippo Brunelleschi, Sacrifice of Isaac (detail). Florence, Bargello (photo: Alinari-Art Reference Bureau)

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9 Lorenzo Ghiberti, Sacrifice of Isaac (detail). Florence, Bargello (photo: Alinari-Art Reference Bureau)

see, related the new istoria to a broad discussion of meaning and style. What was already at issue was the role of ornament in pictorial composition. Here, as it would be in innumerable

examples in the centuries to come, the ornament in point was antithesis, or contrapposto. Brunelleschi's composition was more ornate because its ornamentation was more obvious. Some thirty years later, Alberti did not invent but rather more

closely defined and greatly expanded the nascent formulation of pictorial eloquence evident in the two reliefs. Moderation

triumphed again. Alberti, to state the matter in terms of the two competing panels, brought his humanist arguments to bear in favor of the sweet, fluid, middle style shown by Ghiberti and would have proscribed Brunelleschi's stooping figure as excessive, as having more to do with art than with nature or narrative. 21

It is also possible that Alberti meant not only to refer to modern works, but also to the art of antiquity. In that case (as was necessarily true to a greater or lesser extent in any event), he would have been discussing those standards by which ancient art should be admitted to the repertory of modern forms, rejecting the alternative offered by the Torso Belvedere and the Discobolos as described by Quintilian.

If, for the sake of argument, we assume that Alberti was referring to the Torso Belvedere, we may begin to understand why Alberti would go out of his way to condemn one of the most powerful pieces of Classical sculpture that he could have known, a sculpture that would be enshrined by artists two or three generations later in the same tradition in which he wrote. In order more fully to understand his reasons, we must examine the end of his statement more closely. Alberti

objected first of all to such a figure because it was contrary to nature. Also, on the level of decorum, such striking movements departed from the sweet grace of youths and

virgins, the gentle, restrained, and aristocratic movements Alberti most preferred. But in the paragraph immediately following, we read that violent passions of the soul call for violent movements, and so the objection on grounds of decorum is not necessarily enough. It is finally the symptoma- tic relation of the animation of the figure represented to the

imagination from which it sprang that brings down his

disapproval. To a later generation it would be precisely such license, such obtrusive evidence of art, such embellishment, such maniera, that would make the kind of figure Alberti condemns desirable and even central. In critical terms that would later be inverted-especially to praise the works of Michelangelo-Alberti condemned such contrapposto figures and the ingegno of artists who produced them as "troppo fervente et furioso."

21 Although critical positions are often passionately held, the point should be made that it was quite possible to disapprove of individual solutions, or even of general stylistic intentions, and still to recognize the genius of an artist. As we shall see, competence was never at issue in the debate we are considering, and in fact what was adversely criticized was not too little art, but too much. When art shone forth itself, it undermined rhetorical purpose, or so most writers felt. Alberti could disapprove critically of Donatello's license, or Brunelleschi's, and remain amicissimo, just as Filarete could apply Alberti's censure of improper movements to Donatello's bronze doors for the Old Sacristy in S. Lorenzo and still, as the greatest sculptor of his time, award Donatello in imagination the commission for the doors of the Cathedral of Sforzinda.




Alberti himself recommended the composition of figures, groups of figures, and colors by the juxtaposition of opposites, that is, by contrapposto, and clearly considered this construction to be a prime means to the attainment of varieta. He provided more or less explicit instructions. "I desire all these movements to be in a painting: there are some bodies placed toward us, others away from us, and in one body some parts are shown to the observer, some are drawn back, some are high and some low."22 There were limits to such things, however, and it was because there were those who "surpassed every reason" in these matters that Alberti deemed it necessary to list the things he had gathered from nature that might assist the painter to the desired moderation. Those who surpassed every reason, as it turns out, are those who carry the formula of contrapposto too far, displaying opposites without mediation, in figures that show front and rear simultaneously, a thing impossible (contrary to nature) and non condicente (contrary to art). It is important to stress both of these criteria; because Alberti considered the artificial order to be no less important than the natural order, and the association of ornatus and ingenium implicit in his remarks is essential to an understanding of his critical position.

Exaggerated movements, we recall, express the overheated ingenium of the artist; and for Alberti, bent on supplying rules for the art of painting, ingenium was very nearly a negative term, at best a source for rules when they could be had in no other way. So, he wrote, rather than following the good example of Zeuxis and the maidens of Croton, a modern painter will instead "rashly trust in his own ingenium";23 and painters who paint without a model will never make beautiful things "by the light of their own ingenium."24 Finally, Alberti also ridiculed those painters, sculptors, orators, and poets who "begin some work with great enthusiasm, and then when their ardor cooled abandon it in a rough and unfinished state, and under impulse to do something different, devote themselves to fresh enterprises." The passage translated as "when their ardor cooled" reads "dum ardor ille ingenii deferbuit."25 And Alberti concludes that "diligence is no less welcome than native ability in many things-Siquidem non paucis in rebus ipsa diligentia grata non minus est quam omne ingenium."26

Alberti's use of the word ingenium is fairly exactly consistent

with its use in his major Classical sources. Pliny uses it in the sense of invention, and it is said of Timanthes (whom Alberti praises for showing Menelaus with his face covered in a painting of the Sacrifice of Iphigenia) that however great the painter's art might be, his ingenium surpasses it, clearly suggesting that ingenium is opposed to (or at least separate from) art and that it is the power to invent.27 Quintilian's inclusion of ingenium among those qualities beyond art (i.e., beyond instruction) is both consistent with Alberti's usage and an indication of why he treats the idea as he does.28 In a period of youthful confidence and vigorous creative activity such as the early Florentine quattrocento, Alberti's insistence upon ars as opposed to ingenium may well have had an immediate polemical purpose, of a piece with his rejection of extreme contrapposto, aimed at artists who, buoyed by a sense of freedom and aware of participation in momentous change, looked to no other authority than their own native force of imagination and talent. Alberti, on the other hand, took on the task of making painting a liberal art and, to that extent, of bridling license. Later on, when the art was established on a more truly neo-Classical course-a course set largely by Alberti-the question could be put in other terms. The painter "who begins some work with great enthusiasm, and then when his ardor cooled abandons it in a rough and unfinished state" reminds us inevitably of Leonardo, more specifically of the Adoration of the Magi and the beginning of the High Renaissance style. To follow this transformation would lead us away from our purpose, and it may be sufficient to cite one example that clearly shows the point-for-point inversion of Alberti's critical ideals, an inversion well advanced by the late quattrocento, which more or less coincided with what we call Mannerism.

For Alberti, decorum was governed partly by art and partly by nature, understood as the intelligible order of nature. On both points Alberti had ample grounds for rejecting human movements simultaneously visible front and rear. Plato called such coupling of opposing movements "disorderly and irrational," and Saint Augustine, applying similar principles to visible forms, observed that perception rejects certain things, for example, a figure bending over too far (showing both back

22 Alberti, Della Pittura, 95. 23 Ibid., 99. In section 56 of De Pictura, in which this phrase occurs, Alberti uses ingenium in a negative context four separate times. The significant exception to all this is his dedication of Della Pittura to Brunelleschi. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 104-05. 26 Ibid.; he warns against excessive diligence as well. 27 K. Jex-Blake and E. Sellers, The Elder Pliny's Chapters on the History of Art, Chicago, 1968, 116-17. Pliny cites as an example of Timanthes' ingenium the tiny satyrs measuring the thumb of a sleeping Cyclops, a story Alberti turns to another purpose. 28 Quintilian X. ii. 12: "the greatest qualities of the orator are beyond all imitation, by which I mean ingenium, inventio, vis, facilitas and all the qualities which are independent of art." Alberti also uses ingenium in a similarly positive sense; for example De Pictura, 72-73: "Maior enim est ingenii laus in historia quam in colosso." Ingenium was therefore double edged. M. Baxandall (Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observors of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, Oxford, 1971, 15) stresses the conventional nature in humanist writing of the phrase ars et ingenium,

which was often set antithetically, thus sharpening the opposition already fairly explicit between the ideas in a statement such as Quintilian's. The two terms together were meant to praise what were by implication mutually exclusive virtues of the artist, skill and imagination. Baxandall observes that, given the popularity of the term, simply to praise the art of a writer was to suggest that he had no ingenium; this could be reversed, of course, and it would have been little better to say that he had imagination without art. In any case, Alberti clearly understood ingenium to be both good and bad, subject to harmonizing iudicium. Michelangelo would insist on the same point (G. Vasari, Le vite di Michelangelo nelle redazioni del 1550 e del 1568, ed. P. Barocchi, Milan-Naples, 1962, 1, 128); "Voi avete avuto uno alla fabrica, che ha un grande ingegno"; Michelangelo responded: "Gli vero, ma gli ha cattivo giudizio." Vasari himself makes the same opposition in a significant fashion. After the destruction of the ancient monuments (Vasari-Milanesi, I, 232) architects had to work "non secondo le regole dell'arti predette (che non l'avevano), ma secondo la qualitO degl'ingegni loro." They achieved little by doing so, as Vasari insisted at length, and in these terms the great achievement he was chronicling was in large part the attainment of ars. On ingenium and iudicium see E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, New York, 1963, 296-301.



CONTRAPPOSTO 343

and front) or standing on its head (inverted); such things he called faults of order. 29 And after Alberti, in the cinquecento, Paolo Pino still considered the prohibition important enough to repeat and evidently disapproved of a compositional device fairly widespread by the time he wrote.30 In defense of such figures, we find that one of the participants in G. A. Gilio's Degli errori de'pittori. M. Pulidoro Saraceni, doctor of medicine, in a discussion of artistic license, enthusiastically endorses the license which the author wishes finally, when the point has been sufficiently debated, strictly to curtail. Gilio himself champions a Counter-Reformation sobriety rather closer as a critical position to Alberti than to the "Mannerist" position of his interlocutor, which by this time was on the wane. But what is expressed in the discussion is a precise inversion of critical terms. And its expression in this case is also the same, conspicuous contrapposto, or more generally conspicuous display of artificial construction.

Truly the ingegno of man is great, and all the more so when sometimes with charming and beautiful inventions he does that which nature cannot do by herself. In this regard, I understand that a painting was taken to Francis, King of France, in which an armed man was painted in such a way as to show his whole back; and the prudent and ingenious artist wishing also to show the front, and not being able to, charmingly painted a mirror in his hand, in which was shown his face, with the chest and all the rest, with such

charm that that generous king paid many hundreds of scudi for it.31

There is of course an obvious difference between Pulidoro's painting with a mirror (which belongs to the tradition of Giorgione's paragone painting of Saint George) and Alberti's forbidden figure, since one is achieved by reflection and the other shows both sides in a single figure. But clearly what nature cannot do and art can do is to show both sides of a figure at once. Alberti would have agreed, and therefore rejected such a figure as an inordinate display of art at the expense of nature; Pulidoro, more interested in art than nature, embraces the contrapposto precisely because of its artificiality and, in doing so, extols the ingegno of the artist that Alberti had been at such pains to circumscribe.

Alberti defined to a remarkable extent the understanding of conspicuous artifice and pictorial ornament for the artists and theorists who followed him. Through the extension of his ideas and the new pictorial solutions derived from them by Leonardo, his influence was immense. But much of Alberti's apparent influence owes to the fact that his ideas arose from, and then were understood within, a common critical tradition to which he gave specific neo-Classical shape; and within this tradition Alberti's position on the question of pictorial ornament must have been abundantly clear to his readers.

Alberti devoted much attention to varieta-which

29 Plato, Timaeus 43B; and Saint Augustine, De Musica xiv. 47 (Migne, Pat. Lat., xxxiI, col. 1188): "Sed nempe etiam formas visibiles sensus ipse aspernantur, aut pronas contra quam decet, aut capite deorsum, et similia, in quibus non inaequalitas, manente partium parilitate, sed perversitas improbatur." 30 P. Pino, Dialogo di pittura, Venice, 1548, in P. Barocchi, Trattati d'arte del cinquecento fra manierismo e controriforma, Bari, 1960, I, 101. 31 G. A. Gilio, Degli errori e degli abusi de'pittori circa l'istorie, Camerino, 1564, in Barocchi, Trattati, II, 17. The earliest example of the praise of such contrapposti seems to be in Bartolommeo Fazio's De viris illustribus (1456). In one of the figures in a painting now lost of women leaving the bath, Jan van Eyck showed "only the face and breast but then represented the hind parts of her body in a mirror painted on the wall opposite, so that you may see her back as well as her breast." See M. Baxandall, "Bartholomaeus Facius on Painting," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xxvii, 1964, 102; W. Stechow, Northern Renaissance Art, 1400-1600. Sources and Documents, Englewood Cliffs, 1966, 4-5; E. Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origin and Character, Cambridge, Mass., 1953, 2, n. 7. This evidently was regarded as a miracle of art and as such should be related to Giorgione's paragone painting of Saint George, described by Paolo Pino (Dialogo di pittura, in Barocchi, Trattati, I, 131) in which reflected images made it possible to see "integramente una figura a un sguardo solo." Strange as it may seem, the figure seen simultaneously front and rear, whether by reflection or twisting, was a perennial bone of contention, precisely because it connoted extreme artifice and display, which might be either praised or condemned. Alberti considered his prohibition important enough to repeat in his De Re Aedificatoria (p. 69) in the context of a Horatian argument against excessive novelty of invention. Leonardo already took a kindlier view than Alberti of what he called "moti composti." Writing of varieta in battle compositions, Leonardo recommended figures seen front, back, and side, but he especially praised for their "grand'artificio e grande vivaccita e movimento" those in which "una sola figura ti dimostra le gambe dinanzi e parte del profilo della spalla." Elsewhere, "quello che per alcuna operazione si richiede piegarsi in git et in traverso in un medesimo tempo." See Barocchi, Scritti, II, 1724-25, for text and references. Since Leonardo pre- scribes them for battle pieces, these figures fall more within the confines of thematic decorum, less in the realm of pure ornament; but they are admired first of all for their "grand'artificio." Shearman (Mannerism, 86) offers the example of a letter from Pietro Aretino to Vasari, praising a drawing of the Israelites Collecting Manna which, in its own rhetorical excess, would be convincing as irony (P. Aretino, Lettere sull'arte, ed. E. Camesasca, Milan,

1957, 1, 175). He selects for especially lavish treatment "the nude that, bent to the ground, displays front and back, to be, in virtue of its easy force and with the grace of its unforced ease, a magnet to the eye, in that having encountered it the eye holds it to itself until dazzled it turns elsewhere." Aretino continues to describe the drawing in terms of another pictorial contrapposto frequently met, the opposition of nude and clothed. "And of gentle movement is the maniera of the drapery of the members, covered and bare" [velate e scoprite]. Again, the popularity in the Renaissance of the so-called "Letto di Policleto" and the frequent repetitions of the forced contortions of the often quoted female figure seen from behind would arise, I would argue, from the recognition, broadly based in general critical terms, of the stylistic significance of such a figure as highly ornate. See E. H. Gombrich, Norm and Form, 126-27. And again, Aretino's description, adduced by Gombrich, of Giulio Romano's inventions as "anticamente moderni e modernamente antichi" is a tribute in kind. Such Mannerist attitudes were not to last for long, and Pirro Ligorio, clearly showing the impress of the insistence of Counter-Reformation writers such as Gilio upon decorum, returned to the position of Alberti, condemning painters who "are not ashamed to show bodies from in front and back at the same time" (D. R. Coffin, "Pirro Ligorio on the Nobility of the Arts," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xxvii, 1964, 200). Bernini made the same criticism on naturalistic grounds (Chantelou, Journal du voyage en France du Cavalier Bernin, Paris, 1930, 106. "Les Lombards ont et6 grands peintres, mais ils n'ont pas ete bons dessinateurs, car, voyez cette femme .. la partie d'en haut est tourn6e d'un c8t6 et celle d'en bas d'un autre, et de telle sorte que la nature ne peut faire cette contorsion"). There was a consistent association of ingegno with movenzia and, in analogy to rhetoric, with elocution in cinquecento theory. Lodovico Dolce (Barocchi, Trattati, 1, 161) divides painting into three parts, inventione, disegno e colorito. Invention has two sources: (1) history, from which the theme is taken semplicemente; and (2) ingegno. From ingegno come not only ordine and convenevolezza (roughly corresponding to disposition in rhetoric) but also attitudini, which are coupled with varieta and energia; all are in the realm of elocutio (style). Dolce concedes that much of this overlaps with his next category, disegno. Much of inventione, therefore, falls under the heading of elocution, as do disegno and colorito. The reason for this imbalance is that the source for Dolce's categories (as Barocchi's notes to the text imply) is not the rhetorical writers directly, but rather rhetorical categories as previously applied and adapted to the problems of poetry, as in Bernardino Daniello's Poetica (1536), in B. Weinberg, Trattati di poetica e retorica del '500, Bari, 1970, 1, 272.




amounted to artful composition and embellishment. But for Alberti the delectatio always linked with varietd&-principally by the rhetorical writers, by whom such issues had been by far most completely developed-was meant not to be itself the substance of art, but a means to an end. Embellishment served the function of instructing through delight and was thus subordinate to theme. For this reason Alberti rejected the

conspicuous contrapposto of the figure simultaneously visible front and rear in language very similar to Quintilian's censure of what he called mala adfectatio, "a fault in every kind of style"; it is a fault of elocution and includes all kinds of bombast, but also-and here his words draw near to those of Alberti-"the same name is applied to virtues carried to excess, when the ingenium loses its iudicium and is misled by the false appearance of beauty; it is the worst of all offenses against style, since other faults are due to carelessness, but this is deliberate ...,"32 "Where ornament is concerned," Quintilian also wrote,

vice and virtue are never far apart; for those that employ a vicious style of embellishment disguise their vices with the name of virtue . . . let none of our decadents accuse me of being an enemy to those who speak with grace and finish. I do not deny the existence of such a virtue, I merely deny that they possess it . .. Shall I prefer the barren plane and the myrtles trimly clipped, to the fruitful olive and the elm that weds the vine?33

The close theoretical kinship of poetry and painting in the Renaissance critical tradition was conclusively demonstrated and generously illustrated by Rensselaer W. Lee in 1940; and Horace's famous simile ut pictura poesis has thus come to provide a valuable key to the understanding of Renaissance artistic theory and practice.34 With the unprecedented importance of the visual arts from the beginning of the Italian Renaissance it became desirable almost immediately to formulate supporting theory, and in the absence of more than scattered references and fragments of such theory in the literature coming down from antiquity, other sources were turned to the task. But when Alberti wrote his De Pictura in

the early 1430's, the dawning cultural age for which he was spokesman was nearly as much in need of a poetics as it was of a theory of painting. For all intents and purposes the quattrocento had only the brief Ars Poetica of Horace, which was itself less than comprehensive. Aristotle's Poetics was not published until 1500 and its influence did not become widespread until considerably later. Of much greater importance than the Classical poetics for the early definition of Renaissance painting (and poetry too, for that matter) was the great tradition of rhetoric.35 This was true for several reasons. In the first place, there were a great number of writers on rhetoric, they were familiar and accessible, and the art they taught-prose composition-was more generally useful than poetry and, as a liberal art, was one of the indispensable bases of education. Virtually every aspect of discourse and all its critical problems and possibilities were covered by one or another of these authors. It should also be noted that Cicero and Quintilian-to take the two most important Latin authors-were rich with references and parallels to painting, references that must have been read with great interest and that must necessarily have reinforced the tendency of Renaissance readers to imagine vanished ancient painting within the critical framework of rhetoric. Also, the Middle Ages had recognized little distinction between poetry and rhetoric, which were grouped together as forms of eloquence, and this understanding-which gave poetry an uncertain place among the arts-persisted in the Renaissance. Finally, in the literature of antiquity the boundaries between rhetoric and poetry were fluid and Latin poets had appropriated a host of rhetorical techniques and devices to the writing of poetry. 36

The Ars Poetica of Horace itself is intimately tied to the rhetorical tradition in one major respect that, as we shall shortly see, is of great importance to our argument; for Horace, poetry was fundamentally determined by the audience for which it is written. So strong was this tendency, and so strong were rhetorical critical categories in the following centuries that, as Bernard Weinberg has pointed out, successive commentators on the Ars Poetica accentuated its rhetorical character; this was much to the taste of Renaissance writers on

32 Quintilian vIIi. iii. 56-58: "Style may be corrupted in as many ways as it may be adorned." Adfectatio in the Renaissance seems very nearly to have meant what "mannerism" in a negative sense has come to mean, and the word will appear frequently in what follows. See also Castiglione in a centrally important text (II libro del cortegiano, in Opere di Baldassare Castiglione, Giovanni della Casa, Benvenuto Cellini, ed. C. Cordie, Milan-Naples, 1960, 47): ". . . fuggir quanto pii si po, e come un asperissimo e pericoloso scoglio, la affettazione; e per dir forse una nova parola, usar in ogni cosa una certa sprezzatura che nasconda l'arte e dimostra cib, che si fa e dice, venir fatto senza fatica e quasi senza pensarvi. Da questo credo io che derivi assai la grazia: percht delle cose rare e ben fatte ognun sa la difficulth, onde in esse la facilith genera grandissima maraviglia..." 33 Quintilian VIII. iii. 7-9. 34 R. W. Lee, "'Ut Pictura Poesis': The Humanist Theory of Painting," Art Bulletin, xxII, 1940, 197-269; published separately under the same title, New York, 1967.

35 K. Borinski, Die Antike in Poetik und Kunsttheorie, Leipzig, 1914, 176 and passim, has stressed the importance of ancient rhetoric for the literature of Renaissance art. Lee, "Ut Pictura Poesis," is primarily concerned with the period between the middle of the 16th and the middle of the 18th centuries.

In my opinion, Lee very much underestimates the importance of the rhetorical writers for the Renaissance neo-Classical critical tradition. J. R. Spencer, "Ut Rhetorica pictura," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xx, 1957, as his title suggests, offers an alternative to Lee's hypothesis and catalogues Alberti's debt to Cicero and Quintilian. The effort is in the right direction, but the too-literal comparison of ancient rhetoric to De Pictura misplaces the emphasis of the investigation. Renaissance rhetoric was mostly, like poetry, written rather than spoken, and the results of M. Baxandall, centered on eloquence and the idea of composition (for which eloquence was the model) (Giotto and the Orators, 121-139), have opened the way to a more fruitful understanding of the adaptation of Classical rhetorical ideas.to Renaissance critical needs. 36 On ancient and medieval rhetoric see E. R. Curtius, European Literature, 62-78; on poetry and rhetoric, ibid., 145-166. The place of poetry among the arts in the Renaissance is treated by B. Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, Chicago, 1961, I, 1-37; C. S. Baldwin, Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice, Gloucester, 1959, 15ff., notes the continuation in the Renaissance of concern with elocutio in rhetoric and the fusion of the arts of poetry and rhetoric. See also D. L. Clark, Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance, New York, 1922, chaps. Iv and v.



CONTRAPPOSTO 345

poetics, who added specifically rhetorical formulations in interpreting and adapting the text.37

To take an author close to artistic events in Florence, Cristoforo Landino in his commentary on Horace, published in 1482, followed Cicero in maintaining the close relation of rhetoric and poetry. And when he described poetry as "bound together by varied rhythms" (variis numeris colligata); "circumscribed by separate measures" (distinctis pedibus circumscripta); and "adorned by various ornaments and various flowers" (ac varias denique luminibus variisque floribus illus- trata),38 Landino used terms that closely coincide with Cicero's lengthy discussion of the periodic style in the Orator, terms that, it might be noted, recall the basic categories of Alberti's De Pictura: circumscriptio, compositio, and receptio luminum. 39 What is suggested by this is what seems to have been the case: such stylistic terms moved freely from rhetoric to poetics, and from both to painting. They constituted, in a word, a common critical vocabulary.

As Landino assumed, poetry and rhetoric were generally considered to be alike in point of elocutio, which is usually translated as "style." Elocutio was the third part of rhetoric, more difficult than the first two parts, invention and disposition (what to say and how to arrange the subject matter, as Cicero defined them);40 it required much more artifice, having to do with composition as opposed to disposition, and with figures of speech and thought. Angelo Poliziano followed Cicero (and Landino) exactly when he wrote that "the poet is very close to the orator (as Cicero says); just as he is more restricted in rhythms, so is he freer in the choice of words.'"41 When Poliziano thus agreed with Cicero, he did not mean (as Cicero did not mean) to compare all rhetoric to poetry. He meant to compare the periodic style to poetry; this was the middle, embellished style, the good, modern, eloquent, suave style that Cicero himself had practiced and advocated. According to Cicero, what poetic and rhetorical eloquence shared was rhythm-numerus-and what finally distinguished them was the visibility of artificial order.42 Poetry spoke in meter, and prose necessarily used the same forms, which were limited in number; but to the degree that meter was obvious in prose, it constituted a grave fault of style.43 Thus rhetoric

could use the devices of poetry-still according to Cicero- subject to decorum; but in prose numerositas could be achieved not only by means of meter but also through the symmetry (concinnitas) of words or clauses.44

It is necessary to dwell at some length on Cicero's definition of eloquence because the question it raises-the visibility of artificial order in the completed work-will arise many times in what follows. It was by no means universally agreed that art should be hidden; many writers in theory-and more in practice-defended a conspicuously ornate style. The quotient of artificiality in Cicero's prose was of course high. And not only did he defend this style but he provided a buttressing psychology for the structure of eloquence which, since it articulates issues fundamental to the Renaissance discussion of all the arts, deserves our attention.

What is the origin of these devices? In the pleasure of the ear [ex aurium voluptate] . . . for what purpose are they used? To give pleasure [ad delectationem]. When? Always. In what place? Throughout the whole period [in tota continuatione verborum]. What produces the pleasure? The same phenom- ena as in verse; theory sets down the exact measure of these, but without theory the ear marks their limits with unconscious intuition [sed aures ipsae taciti eum sensu sine arte definiunt].45

In view of such remarks it is not difficult to understand why Renaissance writers, fascinated as they were by the periodic style,46 could so easily accept the identity of poetry and rhetoric; and the implications of this identity are important. Cicero stoutly maintained the numerositas was audible to all but the least human, and was therefore suitable to the instruction through delight of any audience.47 However that may be, there were within the suave mode itself distinctions with regard to audience that bore directly on matters of style. Since it used the same structural and ornamental devices, epideictic rhetoric, the genus demonstrativum, fell under the rubric of the middle suave style; the difference, between simple eloquence and epideictic, was not one of kind but of degree.48 Once again, visibility of artifice is the operative difference, and epideictic rhetoric displayed art unencumbered

37 On Horace and his commentators, B. Weinberg, History, 1, 71-110. As an example of the appropriation of rhetorical categories to poetics, see B. Daniello, Della poetica (Weinberg, Trattati, I, 243), who defines the three parts of poetry as follows: "l'invenzione prima delle cose, o vogliam dire ritrovamento; la disposizione poi, o ver ordine di esse; e finalmente la forma dello scrivere ornamente le gia ritrovate e disposte, che (latinamente partlando) elocuzione si chiama e che noi volgare, leggiadro et ornato parlare chiameremo." 38 Quoted in Weinberg, History, I, 80.

39 Alberti, De Pictura, 66-67. 40 Cicero, Orator (trans. H. M. Hubbell, London-Cambridge, 1962) xv. 51. These two parts require "less art and labor" than elocution. 41 A. Poliziano, Panepistemon, Opera, Rome, 1498, fols. Y ix-xiv and Z vi. Quoted in Weinberg, History, 1, 4; his source is Cicero, Orator xix. 66-xx, 68; and lix. 202. 42 Cicero frequently makes this distinction. See for example Orator liv. 183; lxvii. 222; lxvii. 227. Also Quintilian x. i. 28. And comparing poetry and rhetoric on another significant level, Quintilian IX. iv. 116: "Quem in poemate locum habet versificatio, eum in oratione compositio." 43 Cicero, Orator lxvii. 227. 44 Ibid., xliv. 149-50; Iv. 220-21. Concinnitas might be defined as the quality of formal relationship or the degree of clarity of symmetry.

45 Ibid., Ix. 203. 46 Baxandall (Giotto and the Orators, 20-31) notes the admiration of Leonardo Bruni-as representative of early humanists-for the "antithetical or parallelizing character" of periodic prose. This was in fact a structural basis of the periodic style. Bruni's phrase "paria paribus redduntur aut contraria contrariis vel opposita inter se" clearly recalls Cicero's brief and often repeated descriptions of the suave dicendi genus, which employs "similitudinem aequalitatemque verborum; tum ex contrariis sumpta verbis, crebra crebris, paria paribus respondeant" (De Partitione Oratoria, trans. H. Rackham, London-Cambridge, 1960, vi. 21). 47 Cicero, Orator I. 168. 48 Ibid., xi. 37-xii. 38. Cicero confesses his admiration for the Gorgianic or Sophistic style, calling it "the nurse of that orator whom we wish to delineate" and considers epideictic to be indispensable practice for the cultivation of eloquence. Again (Orator lii. 175), discussing the Sophistic style, Cicero observes that Gorgias "was the first to employ clauses of equal length, with similar endings, and with antithesis, which, by their very nature, generally have a rhythmical cadence even if it is not intended." This is, of course, once again a brief but essential description of the middle style, but the use of these devices is subject to judgment and decorum, and Gorgias is finally condemned not for using them, but for using them immoderately. See also Orator lxii. 210 on the correct use of the rhythmic style.




by the need to instruct or move; it was a rhetoric of pure delectatio (i.e., of pure ornatus). In this respect, as the rhetorical writers often pointed out, it was like poetry. It was also intended for an audience of cognoscenti (as we will recall Myron's Discobolos also was), for a listener who "is not afraid that he will be deceived by the tricks of an artificial style," but rather "is grateful to the orator for ministering to the pleasure of his ear.'"49 Thus epideictic

indulges in a neatness and symmetry of sentences, and is allowed to use well defined and rounded periods; the ornamentation is done of set purpose, with no attempts at concealment, but openly and avowedly, so that words

correspond to words as if measured off in equal phrase. Frequently things inconsistent are placed side by side, and

things contrasted are paired [contraria comparentur], clauses are made to end in the same way and with similar sound

50

There is every reason to believe that, since the writers of the Renaissance so nearly equated poetry and rhetoric, it was a simple matter (and in fact was implicit in the first equation) to further identify poetry and the genus demonstrativum. Whether or not such an equation was explicitly made, the association of ornament-structural and merely embellishing-with poetry places the formula ut pictura poesis in a rather different light. Painting wholly or predominantly composed of visibly artificial elements implies an audience who know and savor the

difficult&; this in turn implied a fundamental stylistic decorum. A poet (or painter) might appeal to persons of such judgment (or flatter those who pretended to such judgment) by working in a style of pure eloquence, understood as evident and critically justifiable artifice. He might appeal, in other words, to precisely the sort of audience with which the maniera is associated. 51

Before leaving these questions, and before considering the antithesis in detail, it will be useful to follow the issues raised so far a bit further, since they touch upon the central critical notions of giudizio, varieta, and generally upon the underlying psychology of eloquence. We may begin by taking note of the role played by contraria in the passage from Cicero's Orator cited in the last paragraph. They are not simply ornaments, but possess in themselves a certain numerositas, and are integral to the structure of the period. Their organizing force was apprehended-unconsciously, so to speak-by the senses, and this apprehension Cicero believed to precede theory and to be innate in sense, as we have already observed. "Nature

herself implanted in our ears the power of judging long and short sounds as well as high and low in words."52 Poetry arises, then, not from the intellect but from speech and the senses; it is the sheer joy in sounds and variations of sounds that gave birth to poetry (and to eloquence), art following behind. For Cicero, the iudicium aurium is the same as the voluptas aurium and it was the exercise of this reason of sense that made eloquence possible.53

Cicero specifically represented hearing as discriminating between opposites; and the approval (or judgment) of sound by the sense of hearing expresses itself as pleasure. These ideas, which ultimately allowed him to base style in the activity of sense itself, proceeded from a theory of the nature of sense first expounded by Aristotle. Both Plato and Aristotle stated that "the beautiful is that which gives pleasure through hearing and sight."54 This sensate and unmetaphysical definition of beauty seems hardly as implicative as the better-known definitions of beauty as correspondence to an idea (beauty as truth) or as due relation or proportion, with all their philosophical and theological echoes; and yet this definition and the psychological notions that supported it provided an indispensable and universal principle for the Renaissance discussion of art, the "giudizio dell'occhio." "The pleasure of hearing and sight" was not itself left undefined, and in it the specific configuration of the notion of the pleasure of sense gave clear form to the treatment of what in this case are literally esthetic issues.

According to Aristotle, sense is a ratio; this, he argues, is evident from the fact that either excessive brightness or darkness are injurious to sight and that in general a mean between extremes is pleasurable to all five senses. Each sense has a unique realm of awareness-sight the visible, touch the tangible-and rather than being simply passive, each sense of its own nature makes distinctions among its peculiar objects, that is, between the "affective" qualities belonging to its realm of awareness. These "affective" qualities exist as contraries, so that sight discriminates between light and dark, taste between sweet and bitter, and both, more than simply discriminating, seek a mean.55

It must be stressed that this psychology was not necessarily directly linked to the study of Aristotle's De Anima, but was commonly assumed by Renaissance writers just as our own more mechanistic notions about the nature of perception are assumed today without reference to-or even knowledge of-those who formulated them. Sense was a "virtue" or "faculty," and its powers, simple in the examples we have examined, could be much more complex and developed; Cicero praised the discriminatory powers of sense in terms clearly anticipating the idea of "taste." Such iudicium Cicero

49 Ibid., lxi. 208.

5so Ibid., xii. 38.

51 In an ideally constituted republic, according to Poliziano, both forensic and epideictic rhetoric would flourish, and the context of his discussion makes it clear that there is little distinction between the charms of the poetry he commends and the refined discourse of private life. See his Oratio super Fabio Quintiliano et Statii Sylvis, in E. Garin, ed., Prosatori latini del quattrocento, Milan-Naples, 1952, 882: "Age vero ut nunquam forum, nunquam rostra, nunquam subsellia, nunquam conciones ineamus, quid tandem est in hoc ocio atque in hac privata vita iucundis, quid dulcius, quid humanitati accomodatius, quam eo sermonis genere uti, qui sententiis

refertus, verbis ornatus, facetiis urbanitateque expolitus, nihil rude, nihil ineptum habeat atque agreste?" 52 Cicero, Orator li. 173.

53 Ibid., xlviii. 160-61. The whole notion of varietas was given a similar basis by the rhetorical writers; see for example Quintilian (viii. iii. 52) criticizing oratory "all of one color," without varietas. "This is one of the surest signs of lack of art, and produces a uniquely unpleasing effect, not merely on the mind, but on the ear, on account of its sameness of thought, the uniformity of its figures, and the monotony of its structure [compositio]." 54 Plato, Hippias Major 298a; Aristotle, Topics 146a21.

55 Aristotle, De Anima 418-426.



CONTRAPPOSTO 347

considered an indication, like the activity of the intellect, of the lofty nature of the human soul.

In the first place our eyes have a finer perception of many things in the arts which appeal to the sense of sight, painting, modelling and sculpture and also in bodily movements and gestures, since the eyes judge beauty and arrangement [venustas et ordo] and so to speak propriety of color and shape, and also other more important matters, for they recognize virtues and vices, the angry and the friendly, the joyful and the sad, the brave man and the coward, the bold and the craven. The ears are likewise marvelously skillful organs of discrimination [iudicium]; they judge differences of tone; of pitch and key in the music of the voice and of wind and stringed instruments, and many different qualities of voice, sonorous and dull, smooth and rough, bass and treble, flexible and hard, distinctions discriminated [iudicantur] by the human ear alone.56

In his Ten Books of Architecture, Alberti followed this pattern closely in describing how the Greeks had achieved the beautiful in architecture, substituting for the iudicium aurium, from which Cicero had taken his principal examples, the giudizio dell'occhio.

She [Greece] began therefore to trace and deduce this art of building, as indeed she did all others, from the very lap of Nature itself, examining, weighing and considering it in all of its parts . . . enquiring . . . into the difference between those buildings which were highly praised, and those that were disliked ... She tried all Manner of Experiments, still tracing and keeping close to the footsteps of Nature, mingling uneven numbers with even, straight lines with curves, Light with shade, hoping that as it happens from the conjunction of male and female, she should by mixture of these opposites hit upon some third thing that would answer her purpose: Nor even in the most minute particulars did she neglect to weigh and consider all the parts over and over again, how those on the right agreed with those on the left, the upright with the platform, the nearer with remote, adding, diminishing, proportioning the great parts to the small, the similar with the dissimilar, the last to the first, till she had clearly demonstrated what rules were to be observed

. in those edifices which were designed chiefly for beauty57,

For Cicero the final appeal was to the ear; it was the

voluptas/iudicium aurium that demanded and justified ornatus, varietas, gratia, concinnitas, and all the many virtues cognate with the qualities of the terza maniera. It was also the ear that rejected faulty or too obvious rhythms. "However agreeable or important thoughts may be, still if they are expressed in words that are ill arranged, they will offend the ear, which is very fastidious in its judgment."s58 For Alberti and for Vasari, understandably enough, the final appeal was to the eye; for Vasari the figures of the seconda maniera were "crude e scorticate, che faceva difficoltai agli occhi e durezza nella maniera," "aspre e difficili agli occhi di chi le guardava,"59 and when he recapitulated much of the introduction to the third part of the Lives in his theoretical introduction to the art of sculpture, Vasari advised that "one may use no better measure than the judgment of the eye; which, even if a thing may be most well measured, and the eye remains offended by it, it will for this reason not cease to censure it." Pleasure and judgment again are one; and it is the eye that "con il giudicio" takes away and adds as it sees the disgrazia of the work, until finally it gives "proporzione, grazia, disegno e perfezione" such that the result will be praised "da ogni ottimo giudizio."59a

The antithesis occupied a unique and venerable place in the history of rhetoric and, more than being simply a figure of speech, was a structural device as well, which, as we have just briefly discussed, lent apparent order to expression.60 The antithesis was the principal compositional form of early artistic prose, the invention of which was associated with the sophist Giorgias of Leontini, and remained a constituent of the more varied periodic style. Even the briefest descriptions of this style seldom fail to mention antithesis, which was thus basic to what Cicero regarded as the modern style of eloquence. Aristotle wrote that a period could be organized in two ways. "It is either simply divided [i.e., conjunctive] or it is antithetical where, in each of the two members of the period one of a pair of opposites is put along with one of another pair, or the same word is used to bracket two opposites. "60' Aristotle justifies construction by antithesis by stating the principle, repeated innumerable times afterward, that the juxtaposition of two contraries heightened both by contrast. ". . . It is satisfying, because the significance of contrasted ideas is easily felt, especially when they are thus set side by side, and also because it has the effect of a logical argument; it is by putting

56 Cicero, De Natura Deorum II. Iviii (trans. H. Rackham, Cambridge- London, 1967).

57 Alberti, L'Architettura (De Re Aedificatoria. vi, III, ed. G. Orlandi, Milan, 1966, II, 452, here in the translation of G. Leoni, The Architecture of Leon Battista Alberti, London, 1726, II, 4). See also Castiglione, Cortegiano, 61-62. 58 Cicero, Orator xliv. 150; also lviii. 198, where it is argued that rhetoric is more difficult than poetry because it has no fixed rules (i.e., meter) but is subject only to the judgment of the pleasure of the ear. 59 Vasari-Milanesi, Iv, 9. 59a Vasari-Milanesi, 1, 151. 60 See A. Scaglione, The Classical Theory of Composition from Its Origins to the Present, Chapel Hill, 1972, 8ff, esp. 31 with bibliography; also on the early history of the form J. H. Finley, Jr., Thucydides, Cambridge, 1942,

250ff. On the-cultural scope of the figure see C. Norden, Die antike Kunstprosa, Leipzig, 1898, passim. Writing of Euphuism (p. 786), Norden identifies the formal antithesis as the signature of the style. "Man kann behaupten, dass sie in jenen Jahrhunderten das internationale Kunstmittel des Stils gewesen ist." Tracing the source of Euphuism to Spanish literature, Norden, before examining in detail the character of Spanish humanism, answers his own rhetorical question as to the final source of the style: "... dieser Antithesenstil oder, was dasselbe ist, dieser Satzparallelismus kann nur eine der vielen Erscheinungsformen jenes alten gorgianischen Schema sein, dessen tandelnde, auf Ohr und Auge sinnlich wirkende Art seit zwei Jahrtausenden auf Menschen verschiedenster Zunge seine Wirkung ausiibte und zur Nachahmung reizte, wie wir im ganzen Verlauf dieser Unter- suchungen erkannt haben." 60a Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1409b-10a (trans. W. Rhys Roberts, Oxford, 1946, n.p.)




two opposing conclusions side by side that you prove one of them false."61

At this point we may anticipate the argument a bit by suggesting the way in which this formula for the construction of meaning might be transferred to the problems of pictorial composition. Aristotle's argument that the meaning of contrasted ideas is easily apprehended, especially when they are set side by side, recalls at once Leonardo's often repeated maxim-applied at one time or another to all the major elements of pictorial composition-that, as he wrote of black and white and light and dark, "opposites always appear to intensify one another."62 ". . . In istorie one ought to mingle direct contraries so that they may afford a great contrast to one another, and all the more when they are in close proximity; that is, the ugly next to the beautiful, the big to the small, the old to the young, the strong to the weak; all should be varied as much as possible and close together."63 The painter, in short, should compose by antithesis, from chiaroscuro, through the construction of his narrative, to the figure serpentinate moving in the fictive world that resulted.64 Leonardo's observations and prescriptions on the subject of contrast should be understood not simply as the results of keen perception and empirical openness, but as half perceptual and half stylistic principles, ingeniously but directly adapted from similar ancient and commonly understood principles, whose dual purpose of pleasing and persuading was altogether more important than any simple correspondence to visual impression.

To return to the rhetorical tradition proper, Cicero, further along in the development of the ideas just examined in Aristotle's Rhetoric, passionately defended the periodic style integral to his own writing. Both Cicero's practice and his defense of his practice were of the greatest importance for all those writers who turned to his prose as a model. And, in another example of the adaptation of rhetorical stylistics to the theory of art, it was out of the cluster of ideas constituting Cicero's version of the periodic style that Alberti selected some of the major terms for his Ten Books of Architecture, concinnitas chief among them. Cicero's words were in fact formally precise enough to be easily and naturally turned to other purposes; for example:

. . . this is the second point on which we said the iudicium aurium is required. Sentences are rounded off either by arrangement or words-spontaneously, as it were-or by using a certain class of words in which there is an inherent

symmetry [aut quodam genere verborum in quibus ipsis concinnitas inest]. If they have similar case-endings, or if the clauses are equally balanced, or if contrary ideas are opposed [sive opponuntur contraria] then the completion of the

period is also achieved without apparent art.65

Here we might also consider a simple example of what Cicero meant by such statements in practice. In a discussion of the

relativity of personal styles, Cicero draws an analogy to

painting. "In picturis alios horrida inculta opaca, contra alios nitida laeta collustrata delectant."66 In such parallel and

61 Ibid., 1410a. Later rhetorical writers often discussed contrast in visual terms, pointing to the fusion of the visual and the aural at the root of their art. Quintilian considered energia-placing one's subject vividly before the eyes of his audience-to be the highest attainment of rhetorical skill; it was classed as an ornament and was to be had from the close study of nature (viii. iii. 61ff.). It was associated especially with the stirring of emotion (vi. ii. 32ff.). Cicero also associated such visual manifestness with ornament, but understood it more generally, and it is perhaps this that underlies his frequent metaphorical treatment of ornament in terms of light and color. "The style is brilliant if the words employed are chosen for their dignity and used metaphorically and in exaggeration and adjectivally and in duplication and synonymously and in harmony with the actual action and the

representation of the facts. For it is this department of oratory which almost sets the fact before the eyes-for it is the sense of sight that is most appealed to, although it is nevertheless possible for the rest of the senses and also most of all the mind itself to be affected. But the things that were said about the clear style all apply to the brilliant style, for brilliance is worth considerably more than the clearness above mentioned. The one helps the other make us feel that we actually see it before our eyes" (De Partitione Oratoria vi. 20-1). On such a view ornament is anything but extraneous. Contrary to modern rhetorical tastes, it is not simply statement that is finally most truthful; ornament rather restores the life lost in transformation of words. It is in some such sense that Leonardo, discussing varieta of movement, wrote that "In these precepts ofpainting an inquiry is made as to the best way of persuading of the nature of movement, as the orators persuade by words . . ." (Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting, ed. A. P. McMahon, Princeton, 1956, 385-386). The coupling of pictorial ornatus and energia will be encountered several times in what follows. 62 Leonardo, Treatise, 277 and 456. 63 Ibid., 271: "Dico che nelle istorie si debbe mischiare insieme viccinamente i retti contrari per che dano gran parangone l'uno al'altro e tanto piih quanto saranno piih propinqui cio il brutto viccino al bello el grande al piccholo el vechio al giovane il forte al debbole e cosi si varia quanto si po e

piti vicino."

64 See note 14 above. 65 Cicero, Orator xlix. 164. 66 Ibid., xi. 36. Alberti (Della Pittura, 101) seems to have split this antithesis when, writing of light and dark, he recommends that the painter learn to hate "le chose orride et obscure." There were a number of Classical

precedents for chiaroscuro-one of the chief antitheses, as must already have become apparent. These texts-all very much in agreement with the rhetorical texts in the nature of their justification of the construction of close opposites-were collected in the 17th century by Franciscus Junius (The Painting of the Ancients, London, 1638, 273-75). Plutarch, Moralia (trans. F C. Babbitt, London-New York, 1960) 57, 14, C: "painters... set off bright and brilliant colours by laying on dark and somber tints close beside them." Also Philostratus the Elder, Imagines (trans. A. Fairbanks, Cambridge-London, 1960) II. 3. 15-21: "The most contrary colors [here black and white] agree very well about the composition of an excellent beauty" (Junius's translation). Philostratus also writes that the delicate beauty of the female centaurs being described is set off by their horsey half. Junius also cites Philoponus's commentary on Aristotle's Meteorologica, an important source for color theory, on which see E. H. Gombrich, The

Heritage of Apelles. Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, Ithaca, 1976, 5. See also Alexander of Aphrodisias (Commentaire sur les Mettores d'Aristote, tr. de Guillaume de Morebeke, ed. A. J. Smet, Paris, 1968, 41-42) and Alexander's Problematum in Aristotelis Opera cum Averrois Commentariis, Venice, 1562, vii, 175, an important text translated by Poliziano (Alexandri Aphrodisei super Nonnullis Physicis Dubitationibus, in Opera Omnia Angeli Politiani, Rome, 1498, n.p.). In all these texts (following Aristotle) the opposition light/dark is an opposition near/far, the contrast thus creating relief, as in "Longinus," De Sublimitate 17. 2, here from Russell and Winterbottom, Ancient Literary Criticism, 481-82, where it is argued that brilliance of performance may itself conceal art, as in painting "when light and shadow are juxtaposed in colours on the same plane, the light seems more prominent to the eye, and both stands out and actually appears much nearer." Junius cites a commentator on the first book of Aristotle's Meteorologica (Olympiodoro . in Meteora Aristotelis Commentarii. Ioannis Grammatici Philoponi Scholia in Primum Meteorum Aristotelis Ioanne Baptista Camoto . . . Interprete, Venice, 1567). I have not consulted this text, which Junius translates as follows: "For this reason also is a blacke picture made upon a white ground. It is ever so, that contrary things are more apparent, being placed neer their contraries; whereas it is hard to discerne things like, placed among things of the same likeness." Finally, Pliny the Younger (Letters and Panegyrics, trans. B. Radice, London-New York, 1969), IIn, xIII. 4, uses the chiaroscuro metaphor in the context of a discussion of varietas: "Nec vero adfectanda sunt semper elata et excelsa. Nam ut in pictura lumen non alia res magis quam umbra commendat, ita orationem tam summittere quam attollere decet."



CONTRAPPOSTO 349

symmetry of corresponding words are both what Cicero called concinnitas, and also a varied but clear antithesis in the groups of words thus composed.

Cicero often made the point that by such formal means order could be achieved without evident artifice. As we have seen, the effect of such arguments is to separate the mechanics of the period from simple embellishment, to extend the proper usefulness of such stylistic means, and to root eloquence in intelligent perception itself, in the iudicium aurium. It was the idea of the consonance of the nature of sound and the nature of perception that Augustine developed to argue that both participated in a higher unifying principle, finally allowing Alberti to call concinnitas a principle essential both to the mind and to nature.67 For our purposes, it is sufficient to say that Cicero's statement further established antithesis as a general compositional device, rather than a specific embellishment, which of course it may also be. And with this idea in mind we may now better understand Cicero's inaequabilis varietas, which he regarded as a form of the epideictic, rhetoric intended for the delight of a cultured audience through artificial means. In his De Partitione Oratoria Cicero wrote that

in speeches the purpose of which is to give pleasure there are several modes of arrangement . . . chronological .. arrangement in classes; or we ascend from smaller to larger or . . . with inaequabilis varietas, intertwining small matters with great ones, simple with complicated, obscure with clear [obscura dilucidis], cheerful with gloomy, incredible with probable, all of the methods falling under the head of embellishment [exornatio].68

Both antithesis in rhetoric and its offspring, contrapposto in painting, could be used in a number of ways. Sometimes it was a mere amplification, an embellishment in a simple sense, one figure among many. But the importance and persistence of the rhetorical form no doubt owes in large part to its broader significance, its also being able to be compositional, essential to the structure of a unit of meaning. On a compositional level it could be ornate (as in Cicero's inaequabilis varietas) or, as Aristotle described, it could simply be a means to clear presentation. One way or the other it added brilliance and

perspicuity. Alberti, it will be remembered, recommended the attainment of varietic through contraposition in his discussion of movement. He recommended the same for color in a passage the sense of which was repeated many times as the tradition of Renaissance art theory unfolded, and his words once again provide a summary of many of the ideas discussed so far.

. every kind and sort of color should be seen in a

painting, to be admired with much delight and pleasure. There will be grace when one color is greatly different from the others near it. When you paint Diana leading her troop, the robes of one nymph should be green, of another white, of another rose, of another yellow, each a different color, so that light colors are always near other different dark colors. This contrast [comparatione] will be beautiful where the colors are most clear and bright . . . Dark colors stand among lights not without some dignity and light colors are well mixed among the darks. Thus, as I have said, the painter will dispose his colors.69

The antithesis as a stylistic device continued and at the same time underwent a profound transformation in late

antiquity and the Middle Ages. The strength of the Christian tradition was of course great during the Renaissance, and even if Alberti stayed close to his ancient models in discussing stylistic questions, the influence of his ideas could hardly have failed to be deeply marked by cognate Christian ideas. As Curtius has pointed out, Augustine, to take an outstanding example, strongly favored in his writings those few formal means Cicero had listed as essential to the periodic style, the antithesis chief among them.70 He did this, it should be noted, in splendid literary practice as well as theory, thus concentrating, while imbuing with Christian meaning and

authority, the stylistic form whose history we have followed in Aristotle and Cicero. So, for example, when Augustine calls the knowledge of God "simply manifold, and uniform in its

variety," "comprehending all incomprehensibles" with an

"incomprehensible comprehension," he combines the ancient

description of the divine nature by coincidentia oppositorum,

67 Alberti, De Re Aedificatoria Ix, v (pp. 816-17). 68 Cicero, De Partitione Oratoria iv. 12. See also S. Speroni, Dialogo della rhetorica, Venice, 1596 (here from Barocchi, Scritti, 1, 262): "Che si come ii dipintore et il poeta, due artefici all'oratore sembianti, per diletto di noi fanno versi et imagini di diverse maniere: quali orribili, quai piacevoli, quai dolenti e quai lieti; cost il buono oratore non solamente con le facezie, con gli ornamenti e co'numeri, ed amore, ma ad ira, ad odio et ad invidia movendo, suol dilettar gli ascoltanti." There were of course bounds to such things, and Leonardo (see C. Pedretti, Leonardo da Vinci on Painting, A Lost [Book Libro A. ], London, 1965, 60, n. 58) expands Alberti's principle that the istoria should "move the soul" of the viewer (and states his own principle that paintings are visible all at once) to deny the possibility that paintings can embody simultaneously opposing emotions. "Convenienze de parti delle istorie non misterai i malincoliosi e lacrimosi e piangenti colli allegri e ridenti, imperocche la Natura da che colli piangenti si lacrimi e colli ridenti si allegri, e si separa li loro risi e pianti." Confusion of opposites was also a conventional way of describing chaos, and it was fairly common to speak of close opposites as ugly. See for example Alberti, De Pictura, 72-73, where it is said that the surfaces, which are the building blocks of the istoria, must be composed with concinnitas et gratia. Faces that have some surfaces large, others small, some protruding, others hollow, are ugly. Faces in which pleasing lights pass gradually into agreeable shadows (amena lumina in umbras suaves defluant) will be beautiful.

69 Alberti, De Pictura, 90-93. The reference in this passage to Pliny xxxv. 96 (The Elder Pliny's Chapters on the History of Art, ed. D. Jex-Blake and E. Sellers, Chicago, 1968, 130-32) is an important one. Apelles had done a painting of Diana and her nymphs which, together with his equestrian portrait of Antigonos, was most preferred by those who knew art (peritiores artis praeferunt omnibus eius operibus ... Dianam sacrificantium virginum choro mixtam). The painting was said to surpass the verses on the same theme by Homer (Odyssey vi. 102). See also Cicero, Orator xix. 65. "They [the Sophists] introduce fables, they use far-fetched metaphors and arrange them as painters do color combinations (disponunt ut pictores varietatem colorum, paria paribus referunt, adversa contrariis, saepissimeque similiter extrema definiunt.) Huic generi historia finitima est." An important constituent of Alberti's use of the termhistoria as the type of humanist painting, it seems to me, is the definition of historia by the rhetorical writers as ornate, related to epideictic (Quintilian x. i. 31: "Est enim proxima poetis et

quodammodo carmen solutum . . ."; it is written to record events for

posterity and to win glory for its author and it uses more unusual words and freer figures), but at the same time, in contrast to poetic (fictive) and verisimilitudinous narrative (such as comedy), concerned with actual fact, and possessing "force in proportion to its truth" (Quintilian ii. Iv. 2). 70 Curtius, European Literature, 74.




now made one with rhetorical embellishment, which has become celebrative; antithesis is developed in its potentiality for the expression of paradox.71 For Augustine not only has the significance of the forms changed but also the psychology presupposed by them. Numerositas, concinnitas, the iudicium aurium were not only inherent in sense as Cicero had said, but they were also intimations of a congruity between the sensing mind and the order-finally the unity-of its world, and therefore a sign of grace.72 Aristotle had grounded the use of antithesis in its immediate appeal, in the ease with which contraries were remembered and in their kinship with the forms of logical argument. But for Augustine this same immediate appeal gave on to transcendental reality, and stylistic categories thus came to be categories of Christian ontology. In Book xI, chap. 18 of the City of God, Augustine applies the antithesis metaphorically to the task of accounting for the existence of evil in the universe. It will be useful to quote this passage in full, both because it provides a wide range of antitheses and also because it may stand as an example of the kind of meaning they had come to have.

Now God would never create any man, much less any angel, if he already knew that he was destined to be evil, were he not equally aware how he was to turn them to account in the interest of the good and thereby add luster to the succession of the ages as if it were an exquisite poem enhanced by what might be called antitheses. Antitheses, as they are termed, are among the most elegant ornaments of style. In Latin they might be called opposita or, more accurately, contraposita. We are not in the habit of using this term, although Latin and indeed the languages of all nations employ the same ornaments of style. These antitheses are gracefully demonstrated by the apostle Paul too, in his second letter to the Corinthians, where he says: "With the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; in honour and dishonour, in ill repute and in good repute; treated as imposters, and yet truthful; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold we live; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, and yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything." So, just as beauty of

language is achieved by a contrast of opposites in this way, the beauty of the course of this world is built up by a kind of rhetoric, not of words but of things, which employs this contrast of opposites. This is very clearly stated in the book of Ecclesiasticus as follows: "Good is the opposite of evil, and life the opposite of death; so the sinner is the opposite of the godly. And so you are to regard all the works of the Most High: two by two, one the opposite of the other."73

Opposition or contrast are necessary constituents of meaning, both visual and conceptual, and it would be difficult to discuss anything for very long without recourse to contrary principles. In view of the general importance to meaning of contraries, the hunter of antitheses may seem hard pressed to distinguish them from mere opposition. Admittedly there are shadowy cases, but for the most part the difference is as clear in context as chiaroscuro in painting. Cicero gives as an example of an antithesis the passage "id quod scis prodest nihil; id quod nescis obest, " counterposing scire and nescire, prodesse and obesse. 74 Although Cicero argues that such a construction produces numerositas "etiam sine industria," conscious manipulation and artifice are-to say the least-conspicuously evident in it. Such a common device as antithesis could be illustrated with countless examples, and any selection is necessarily arbitrary. Nevertheless, a small number will suffice to show that a defining characteristic is precisely such visibility of art, the manipulation of word order to place opposites abruptly together, or place them symmetrically or, inflecting them slightly from such relationships, to place them in a context of artificial construction otherwise highly wrought. So Cicero again: "vicit pudorem libido, timorem audacia, rationem amentia. "75 Or finally in an example dear to the Renaissance, the last three lines of Petrarch's sonnet "In nobil sangue vita umile e queta":

E non so che nelli occhi, che 'n un punto Po far chiara la notte, oscuro il giorno E'l mel amaro et addolcir l'assenzio

(And I know not what in her eyes may in an instant

71 Augustine, De Civitate Dei xII. 18 (here The City of God Against the Pagans, trans. D. S. Wiesen, Cambridge-London, 1968, 495-96). On the tradition of coincidentia oppositorum and its transformation by Nicholas Cusanus see E. Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, Philadelphia, 1972; also R. L. Colie, Paradoxia epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox, Princeton, 1966, esp. 3-40. Colie is concerned throughout with paradox as a mode of thought rather than with antithesis as a figure of speech. 72 Augustine, De Vera Religione xxx. 55: "In all the arts it is symmetry (convenientia) that gives pleasure, preserving unity and making the whole beautiful. Symmetry demands unity and equality, the similarity of like parts; or the graded arrangement of parts which are dissimilar. But who can find absolute equality of similarity in bodily objects? ... True equality and similitude, true and primal unity, are not perceived by the eye of the flesh or by any bodily sense, but are known by the mind." And ibid., xliii. 81: "...

the universal form is perfectly identical with the unity from which it springs, so that all other things, so far as they have being and resemble unity, are made according to that form." 73 Augustine, De Civitate Dei xi. 18 See also Augustine, De Ordine I. 7. E. Auerbach (Lingua letterario e publico nella tarda antichita latina e nel medievo, Milan, 1960, 76, n. 20) points to the affinity to mystical literature in the paradox of the Passion (e.g., O passio desiderabilis! O mors admirabilis! Quid mirabilius, quam quod mors vivificet, vulnera sanent, sanguis album faciat .. ..) and the antithetical paradox typical of love poetry from Proven<al through Petrarch and the Renaissance. 74 Cicero, Orator xlix. 166-67.

7s Cicero, Pro Cluentio 15 (here The Speeches, trans. H. Grose Hodge, Cambridge-London, 1943, 236).



CONTRAPPOSTO 351

Make bright night and darken day Make honey bitter, sweeten wormwood)76

In sum, what these literary antitheses as representative of their kind have in common is evidently artificial juxtaposition or balancing of contraries as distinct from the simple inclusion of opposites in a unit of meaning.

The careful definition of antithesis is also desirable because the general importance of opposition specifically manifested itself in numerous philosophical categories forming a

widespread tradition of their own, a tradition that intersected at many points with Renaissance art theory and criticism. We have already discussed the importance of such categories for Aristotle's psychology and, to take two more familiar examples, Aristotle defined change as the passage between contrary principles or color by degrees between the extremes of black and white.77 The need to make an adequate distinction between opposition and antithesis may be illustrated once again from Alberti's Della Pittura. His

description of Diana's troop, decked out in bright contrasting colors, was, as I have argued, a prescription for antithesis, the kind and degree of embellishment (and the relation of embellishment to composition) being more or less directly comparable to antithesis as a figure in rhetoric and poetry. But Alberti's definition of ricezione di lume within limits of light and dark (or white and black) is consistent with categories like those just mentioned in Aristotle.78 The fact of the matter is that there was a natural affinity between such contrary principles and antithesis. Thus black and white (or light and

dark) could (and did) become chairoscuro, a conscious embellishment, in the hands of Leonardo and those who followed him. Similar transformations of oppositions into antitheses occurred often in both prose and poetry. So Alanus de Insulis, paralleling the sub-lunary spheres and the microcosm, states his argument both in physical principles and poetic antitheses. "Sicut enim quatuor elementorum concors discordia, unica pluralitas, consonantia dissonans, consensus dissentiens, mundialis regiae structuras conciliat, sic quatuor conplexionum compar disparitas, inaequalis aequalitas, deformis conformitas, divisa identitas, aedificium corporis humani compaginat."79 Or Marsilio Ficino, in his commentary on Plato's Symposium, described the beginning of the world in similar terms. "Formationem, mundum Latine, Graece kosmon, id est ornamentum vocamus." In the beginning there was chaos without the ornament of forms. "In omnibus denique Amor chaos comitatur, praecedit mundum torpentia suscitat, obscura illuminat, vivificat mortuos, format informia, perficit imperfecta."s80

The formula of antithesis was thus a capacious one, and content from many intellectual regions could be brought to it, and all was subjected to a unity by the strength of the form itself. Augustine could argue his theodicy in a precisely parallel fashion by substituting light and dark in painting for antithesis in poetry; "for as the beauty of a picture is increased by well-managed shadow, so, to the eye that has skill to discern it, the universe is beautified even by sinners."'81

If anything, the syntactical force of the antithesis, defined by Aristotle and sustained in a broad and continuous tradition

76 Canzoniere ccxv (here Francesco Petrarca, Rime, Trionfi e poesie latine, ed. E Neri, G. Martellotti, E. Bianchi, N. Sapegno, Milan-Naples, 1951, 287). Similarly Michelangelo (Rime, ed. E. N. Girardi, Bari, 1967, 60-61, n. 104):

Pur mi consola assai l'esser concesso Far giorno chiar mia oscura notte al sole Che a voi fu dato al nascer per compagno.

Girardi associates this sonnet with Tommaso Cavalieri, dating it 1535-1541. Pietro Bembo's Gli Asolani (Venice, 1505), Opere in volgare, ed. M. Marti, Florence, 1961, 63, provides a number of variations on standard Petrarchan bitter-sweet, fire-ice antitheses, and at the beginning of Book II we find a splendid example of antithetical construction, which may be used to illustrate several points. "A me pare . . . che, avendo la natura noi uomini (1) di spirito e di membra formati; queste (2) mortali e deboli, quello durevole e sempiterno . . . la celeste parte di noi molte volte, di che si pasca o dove abiti non curiamo, ponendole pure innanzi pidi tosto (3) le foglie amare del vizio, che i frutti dolcissimi della virtu, nello oscuro e basso uso di quello pi6 spesso rinchiusa tenendola, che nelle chiare et alte operazioni di questa invitandola a soggiornare." To begin with (3), the construction is parallel, amare corresponding to dolcissimi, vizio to virtu, AB-A'B'; in (2) the antitheses are symmetrical, mortali corresponding to sempiterno, deboli to durevole, AB-B'A'; in (1) the cardinal Christian conceptual opposition of body and spirit is changed, as perhaps too obvious, into the opposition spirito-membra. In this case the significance of the opposition is clarified and partly carried by the form itself. 77 Aristotle, On Coming-To-Be and Passing Away 328b. 26ff (trans. E. S. Forster, Cambridge-London, 1965, 264ff) and De Caelo 286a. For a discussion of Aristotle's theory of color and its use by Alberti see S. Y. Edgerton, Jr., "Alberti's Colour Theory: A Medieval Bottle without Renaissance Wine," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xxxii, 1969, 109-134. 78 Alberti, De Pictura, 86-93.

79 Alanus de Insulis, De Planctu Naturae, in J.-P. Migne, Pat. lat. ccx, Paris, 1855, 443. Many examples of such florid antithesis might be given from this work and from Alanus's Anticlaudianus. Pseudo-Aristotle (On the

Cosmos, trans. D. J. Furley, Cambridge-London, 1965, 379) argues that nature loves opposites, in the elements, in the sexes, and likens this to art (here in the translation of Apuleius, Opuscules philosophiques et fragments, ed. J. Beaujeu, Paris, 1973, 139): "artesque ipsae, naturam imitantes, ex inparibus paria faciunt: pictura ex discordibus pigmentorum coloribus, atris atque albis, luteis et puniceis, confusione modica temperatis, imagines iis quae imitatur similes facit. Ipsa etiam musica, quae de longis et brevibus, acutis et gravioribus sonis constat tam diversis et dissonis vocibus, harmoniam consonam reddit." This author adds to the same list of colors used by the greatest painters of antiquity provided by Pliny (Natural History xxxv. 50) the information that these colors were understood as pairs of opposites and could be set antithetically. 80 M. Ficino, Commentary on Plato's Symposium, ed. and trans. S. R. Jayne, Columbia, 1944, 39-40. See also above, note 13, the example from Ovid's Metamorphoses adduced by Matthieu de Vend6me. The inscription on a copy after a drawing by Antonio Pollaiuolo ("Antonij Jacobi excellentissimj ac eximij florentinj pictoris scultorisque prestantissimi hoc opus est-eum qui hominum imaginem fecit-vide quam mirum in membra redegit") alludes, as B. Degenhart points out ("Unbekannte Zeichnungen Francescos di Giorgio," Zeitschrift ftir Kunstgeschichte, viii, 1939, 125-135), to the beginning of Ovid's Metamorphoses (I. 17ff; see note 13 above and I. 22ff.: "Hanc deus et melior litem natura diremit . . ." God separated earth and sky, land and sea, air and ether and imposed order and place upon them. "Sic ubi dispositam quisquis fuit ille deorum/ congeriem secuit sectamque in membra coegit"). Degenhart understands the reference to mean that Pollaiuolo, who showed the figure front, back, and from the side with arms removed, had devised a way of showing a three-dimensional model clearly in two dimensions. However that may be, such presentation, as the composition of the London Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian shows, could also be exploited as conspicuous contrapposto; and the inscription should perhaps be understood to mean not that Pollaiuolo's composition of the members of the figure was like the orderly cosmos but that it was like the compositional order of this famous example of antithesis. Ficino, who argued that love existed in chaos, sees love as the force that makes chaos an "ornament of forms" by making opposite principles subordinate one to another. 81 Augustine, De Civitate Dei xl. 23.




Af

AWLS-.

10 Raphael, Transfiguration. Rome, Pinacoteca Vaticana (photo: Alinari)

-44

11 Raphael, Saint Michael. Paris, Louvre

through antiquity, was heightened and purified during the Middle Ages, culminating with fateful consequences for the Renaissance in the poetry of Petrarch. As is well known, the incidence of antitheses is high in Petrarch's poetry, and the elaboration and exploitation of these antitheses was the essence of the Petrarchism to which his poetry gave rise.82 When Giorgio Vasari praised Classical sculpture "nella lor dolcezza e nelle loro asprezze" he echoed one of the pillars of Petrarchism, Canzoniere 132.83 He was voicing a critical judgment bringing together the development of two strains of antithesis: contrapposto composition, adapted out of the rhetorical writers by Alberti and translated into pictorial form by Leonardo; and the medieval tradition, begun from the sources to which the Renaissance theorists of painting had turned, but profoundly and in its own way modified.

The critical question concerning the use of ornament in rhetoric hinged upon its visibility. The more evident was the ornament (invariably identified with art or artifice) the less rhetorical and more poetic it was-assuming of course that it was done with requisite skill. (The exception to this rule is the genus demonstrativum, which constructed from pure ornament

according to rules peculiar to the art of rhetoric.) The application of similar critical principles to painting may easily be imagined. Any painting might be expected to have contrasts of light and dark, but only certain paintings or styles of painting abruptly counterpose extreme values. Raphael's La Belle Jardiniere is clearly worked out in terms of value contrasts, and it is most likely that, just as Raphael studied Leonardo's compositions of shapes and forms, he was also aware of his principles of light-dark construction in arriving at his own solution. Similarly, in the Disputa, Raphael, precisely recapitulating Pliny in practice, studied chiaroscuro as a separate theme in preliminary drawings, but softened and concealed the value contrasts in his finished fresco.84 In the Transfiguration (Fig. 10), however, or the Saint Michael (Fig. 11), construction by contrast is evident in itself. If the parallel of painting to rhetoric (and poetry) is sound, then three important conclusions may be drawn about paintings such as the Transfiguration and the Saint Michael: chiaroscuro (and contrapposto generally) was understood as a pictorial embellishment; there was an acknowledged mode of embellished painting; and this mode implied an audience of giudiciosi e intendenti. Here again is Cicero on the rhetoric of display:

. . in history and epideictic oratory, as it is called, it is

82 L. Forster, The Icy Fire. Five Studies in European Petrarchism, Cambridge, 1969, 1-60 with bibliography. Antithesis provides both ornament and clarity on several levels of structure (unlike metaphor, for example) and was uniquely broadly applicable. See for example H. Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence, London, 1577, 160, who discusses antitheses under the general heading of comparatio. Antithesis makes the matter "plainly discerned"; it "is a most excellent ornament of eloquence, serving most aptly to amplification, it graceth and bewtifieth the oration with pleasant varietie,

and giveth single perspicuity and light by the opposition, it is so generall that it may serve to amplifie and garnish any grave and weighty cause." It is cautioned that antitheses should not grow to such a multitude as to betray "affectation, a fault which ought to be shunned." 83 Vasari-Milanesi, vI, 10. 84 On Pliny's tonos and harmogen see note 92 below.



CONTRAPPOSTO 353

desirable to have everything done in the periodical style of Isocrates and Theopompus, so that the language runs on as if enclosed in a circle until it comes to an end with each phrase complete and perfect. Consequently, since the invention of this style-call it circumscriptio or comprehensio, or continuatio, or ambitus, if you will-no one worth counting as an author has written an oration designed for entertainment [ad delectationem] and alien to the courtroom and the contests of public life without shaping nearly all his sentences in the mould of rhythm [in quadrum numerumque]. For since the listener is not one who is afraid that he will be deceived by the tricks of an artificial style, he is grateful to the orator for ministering to the pleasure of his ear. 85

Aside from chiaroscuro, opposition supplied an elastic formula for the treatment of color which, however much modified from writer to writer, prevailed through many repetitions. Usually juxtaposition of opposing colors was not advocated, and a mean was recommended. But the underlying formula of opposition is important, since it meant that, like chiaroscuro in contrast with graded transition, contrasted rather than blended colors could be displayed ornamentally as contrapposti. As usual it is Alberti who leads the way in this matter. Although Alberti made much of the lack of ancient texts in introducing the subject of color, and states that in the absence of theory he necessarily drew upon his own ingegno, 86

he was not without antique guidance when he formulated his famous description of Diana and her nymphs. He turned to the example of embellishment in rhetoric, specifically to the antithesis. But whereas Alberti seems to have wished to keep contrapposto, with its connotations of embellishment, separate from this basic structural category of ricezione di lume, Lodovico Dolce extended the formula of contrapposto to include light and dark in general, thus counterposing what in Alberti had been a mere conceptual polarity. "The principal part of colorito is the contendimento that light makes with shadow" [fa il lume con l'ombra].87 Contendimento, which means contrast or conflict, is a fairly rare word, and one wonders whether it is not a simple translation of the Latin

contentio, which was a synonym for antithesis.88 If this is not the case, then Dolce, while maintaining the same formula, may have followed Alberti in making light and dark limits, and he continues that between these limits "a mean is found, that unites one contrary with the other and makes the figures seem round, and more or less distant according to need."89 Baldassare Castiglione, once again discussing chiaroscuro, had been less interested in the mean favored by Dolce than in the extremes, and his remarks on the subject are to my mind directly related to Leonardo's theories of contrapposto pictorial composition. "The best painters . . . show the light of relief and make relief appear by means of shadow; and so with light they deepen the shadows of planes [an Albertian touch] and bring together diverse colors in such a way that through this diversity one better shows off the other, and the placing of the figures contrary one to the other helps them to achieve that end which is the intention of the painter."90 It is noteworthy that Castiglione moves freely in the course of this passage from the abrupt juxtaposition of chiaroscuro and color to composition of figures by contrapposto. According to Leonardo's principles of composition, he was fully justified in doing so, for both are ornaments of the same kind. Giorgio Vasari further extended this identification of chiaroscuro and composizione, systematizing the identification of light/dark, near/far. "All paintings then . . ought to be made so united in their colors, that those figures in istorie which are most important are done chiare chiare; draperies of semi-dark color should be placed behind those more forward . . . indeed, little by little, as figures diminish inwards, they become also equally darker by degrees, both in color of flesh and clothing.91

The major source for all these pronouncements on the proper use of color-with the possible exception of Alberti's-is Pliny's history of painting. Pliny's account of the development of light and color in painting-perhaps behind and certainly parallel to Alberti's division of ricezione di lume and colore-was influential for Leonardo's use of color and provided a powerful precedent for (and perhaps stimulus toward) the formula of contrapposto in painting.

Art at last differentiated itself and discovered light and shade, the several hues being so employed as to enhance one another by contrast [lumen atque umbras, differentia colorum

85 Cicero, Orator lxi. 208. 86 See above, note 69.

87 Dolce, Aretino (Barocchi, Trattati, I, 183). This description of the behavior of light, dark, and color was incorporated by Dolce into his detailed critical praise of Titian, who "camina di pari con la natura, onde ogni sua figura e viva." Titian avoided "vaghezza vana," "ornamenti affettati" and "crudezza"; rather in his paintings "combattono e scherzano sempre i lumi con l'ombre, e perdono e diminuiscono con quell'istesso che fa la medesima natura" (ibid., 200). Here the vividness of contrast is the desirable and most visible quality, touching on the fundamental justification of antithesis as energia. 88 Cicero, De Oratore III. liii. 205; or Quintilian, note 13 above. 89 Dolce, Aretino, 183; it was usual to discuss color (hue) as the resolution of contrasts of value (chiaroscuro); see, for example, Vasari-Milanesi, 1, 171. "Questo si fatto piano dal pittore con retto giudizio mantenuto nel mezzo chiaro e negli estremi e ne'fondi scuro ed accompagnato tra questi e quello da colore mezzano tra il chiaro e lo scuro." And note 91 above. But also (ibid., 179), contrast could exist among hues in a painting or figure as a whole as well as between values. "L'unione nella pittura e una discordanza di colore diversi accordati insieme, i quali, nella diversita di piti divise,

mostrano differentemente distinte l'una dall'altra le parti delle figure; come le carni dai capelli, ed un panno diverso di colore dall'altro." 90 Castiglione, Cortegiano, 101. It is being argued that the courtier should be possessed of antithetical virtues, such as daring and modesty. "Per6 bisogna che sappia valersene, e per lo paragone e quasi contrarieta dell'una talor far che l'altra sia piu chiaramente conosciuta: come i boni pittori, i quali con l'ombra fanno apparere e mostrano i lumi de'rilevi; e cos' col lume profondano l'ombre dei piani, e compagnano i colori diversi insieme di modo che per quella diversita l'uno e l'altro meglio si dimostra, e '1 posar delle figure contrario l'una all'altra le aiuta a far quell'officio che e intenzione del pittore." 91 Vasari-Milanesi, 1, 179. Evident and ever more clearly stated in the repetitions of this formula is the equation of near-far and light-dark. This is an adaptation of an Aristotelian doctrine (Meteorologica, 374b; trans. H. D. P. Lee, Cambridge-London, 1962, 255ff): "Black is in a sort of negation of sight; an object is black because sight fails; so everything at a distance looks blacker, because sight does not reach it." See Edgerton, "Alberti's Colour Theory," 119. The Pseudo-Longinus (De Sublimitate. 17; see note 66 above) argues that in painting light is seen before shade, just as in rhetoric the brilliance of a figure may outshine-and so conceal-its artifice.




alterna vice sese excitante]. Later on glow [splendor]-a different thing to light-was introduced. The transition between light and shade they called tonos, but the arrangement of hues and the transition from one color to another harmonization or harmogen. 92

Vasari's friend and intellectual advisor Vincenzo Borghini similarly defined pictorial composition by analogy to music; "as high and low voices composed together with reason and rule make a most sweet harmony and consonance," so in the composition of paintings "a composition of great things with small, of distant with near results in a consonance and harmony most pleasing to the eye."93 "This composition, this discordanza concorde, this harmony and proportion" Borghini identifies with perspective.94 But one does not have to read very far to realize that he is not so much concerned with measured transition or spatial clarity as with the clear juxtaposition of opposites. Again, he calls such "musica pittoresca" "il condimento, l'ornamento e la grazia della pittura." Borghini assures us that the parallel to music is meant not actually to equate painting and music, but rather more strongly to make his point about the nature of pictorial composition; he also offers the example of poetry, which he discusses on similar formal grounds. ". . . Long and short

syllables . . . composed together with rule, make that beautiful composition; so those fars and nears make a perfect painting."''s

From Alberti onwards, contrapposto was a general construc- tive principle-perhaps the major component of varieta-with many important applications, and from Leonardo onwards it was the foundation of a pictorial eloquence that encompassed chiaroscuro and figure serpentinate as well as juxtaposition of colors, of beautiful and ugly, young and old, near to far, and so forth. Of course, after Leonardo this eloquence was made up of practical solutions of great expressive flexibility as well as theoretical precepts, forming in themselves a complete and more or less self-sufficient style. At the end of the cinquecento, Giovanni Coscia, again arguing that painting and music are sisters, repeats the arguments of Vasari and Borghini, broadening them to cover a wide range of pictorial antitheses.

As the musician avails himself also of dissonances, in order to make his harmony seem sweeter and more smooth [soave], so the painter, wishing that colors make a more beautiful effect, and render greater charm [vaghezza] to the viewer, uses contraries one against the other [contrarij l'uno

all'altro] so that making a history, he makes shadowy figures, consonant with a clear distance or figures that, on account of distance, are dimmed in color, and in this way, with these dimmings [sbattimenti] and distancings [lontananze] they make the principal figures bright [allegre] and with relief they make a marvelous concord; and similarly in complexions [carnagioni] they make, next to a maiden an old woman, and where many are dressed they use some nude figures [usano alcuni pezzi di figure nude] and many other contrasts [contrasti].96

With Coscia's last words we have one of the forms in which the idea of contrapposto passed into the general neo-Classical tradition. Specific reference to rhetoric is forgotten, and with it the connotations of audience and embellishment inherent in the rhetorical context become less explicit. Fdlibien, writing after the immediate transformation of Classical ideas had been achieved, and when contrapposto composition was many generations old, its status changed to that of a broad practical canon, defined "contrast" as "a word much used by painters and sculptors to express the diversity of figures which appear in their works and the variety which should be evident in the position and movement of members of the body and in all attitudes in general. This is why they say 'to contrast,' meaning to vary the actions and dispositions of the figures."97 Or Roger de Piles, who was clearly familiar with the tradition we have followed, and was well aware of its immediate sources: "Contrast is a diversity in the disposition of objects and of the members of figures. For example, if in a group of three figures, one appears frontally, another from the rear and a third from the side, it is said that there is a contrast. Further, it is said that a figure is well contrasted when in its posture the members are opposed to each other, either that they cross or that they turn to different sides." And again:

The word contrast is not used in our language except among painters, who took it from the Italians. It signifies an opposition which is encountered among objects in connec- tion with the lines that form them as a whole or in part. It includes not only the different movements of figures, but the different positions of the members and of all the other objects that occur together, in a manner, appearing without affectation and only for the purpose of giving more energy to the expression of the theme. Thus, one can define contrast: an opposition of the lines which form objects, by means of which they complement one another.9'"

92 Pliny, xxxv. 29.

93 V. Borghini, Selva di notizie, in Barocchi, Scritti, 1, 648. 94 Ibid., 649. For the Classical and medieval precedents of the idea of concordia discors see L. Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony, Baltimore, 1963, 9ff. In the frontispiece of the edition of 1518 of his De Harmonia Musicorum Instrumentorum, Franchino Gafurio is shown delivering the dictum "Harmonia est discordia concors"; see R. Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, New York, 1971, 124. See also Vasari, note 95 above.

95 Ibid., 650-51. Borghini's near/far antithesis at once recalls the small figures in Pontormo's Carmignano Visitation or Parmigianino's Madonna of the Long Neck, both in other respects pure constructions in grazia e varieta. 96 R. Alberti and E Zuccaro, Origine e progresso dell'Accademia del Disegno di Roma (Pavia, 1604); here in Scritti d'arte di Federico Zuccaro, ed. D. Heikamp, Florence, 1961, 63. The oration was delivered 27 March 1594.

97 A. F61ibien, Des principes de 1' architecture, de la sculpture, de la peinture et des autres arts qui en cdpendent, Paris, 1699, 383, s. v. "contraste." 98 Texts cited by W. Kambartel, Symmetrie und Schbnheit. Ober mbgliche Voraussetzungen des neueren Kunstbewusstseins in der Architekturtheorie Claude Perraults, Munich, 1972, 50. Kambartel mistakenly asserts that the concept of contrast (which he correctly sees as the companion to bilateral symmetry) first appears in 17th-century art theory. Rather, as Roger de Piles recognizes, it came from the Italian and was, as we have argued, a fundamental tenet of neo-Classical painting from Alberti onwards. Kambartel does not consider the rhetorical-poetic basis of contrast (at all times so closely linked with essential varieti) an omission that greatly distorts his history. As I shall argue in another place, bilateral symmetry as a conscious esthetic principle also, .finally, has some of its roots in similar rhetorical-poetic rather than mathematical principles, as Kambartel has argued.



CONTRAPPOSTO 355

If the suspicion still lingers that such arguments are merely the result of the imposition of rhetorical categories upon painting, it should be emphasized that De Piles explicitly relates the ideas to painters. Bernini also provides some understanding both of the continuation and evolution of these ideas in the Baroque. According to Chantelou, Bernini remarked apropos of the difficulties of architecture, that geometry and perspective were necessary to the architect. Bernini added, fully in harmony with the Renaissance distinction and opposition between quantitative and qualita- tive proportion, that "it was necessary to have a good eye for judging well i contrapposti; things appear to us not only as they are, but in relation to their surroundings, which modify their appearance."99 If this seems like a simple and too general principle, it is because the simplicity of this statement is in an inverse relation to the scope of its possible application. In his own practice-to which I'oeil pour bien juger is still closely bound-Bernini not only adjusted part to part of his sculpture on the basis of this principle, but in his example of its application to architecture, contrapposto clearly had the weightiest possible consequences; the colonnade of St. Peter's was made as low as possible in order to make Maderno's fagade, which was criticized for being too squat, seem high by contrast. It is significant that Bernini used the word contrapposto; the term reflected not only an optical principle (still ultimately rooted in the psychology of Aristotle), but retained the fully esthetic ambivalence it had had in the Renaissance, signifying sensory judgment and the understanding of composition as a harmony of opposites.

Since the antithesis was a major stylistic form in Western literature, there was considerable support to be had for the idea of contrapposto composition in a period that habitually thought of visual meaning in terms of rhetoric and poetry, and style in terms of eloquence. But there was also evidence that ancient art itself arose from similar premises, and Xenophon, writing without reference to literature, defined both painting and sculpture in terms so close to the High Renaissance notion of contrapposto-as evident in Leonardo and those who followed his innovations at whatever remove-that it must be imagined that the text was regarded as a major remnant of Classical art theory, surviving from the best period. In a brief section of the Memorabilia-perhaps already known to Alberti by the early 1430's-Xenophon purports to record two dialogues of Socrates, one with the great painter Parrhasios, another with the sculptor Cliton. "Well, Parrhasios, is painting the representation of visible things? Certainly by making likenesses with colors you imitate forms which are

deep and high, shadowy and light, hard and soft, rough and smooth and young and old."100 We are next told-in full agreement with the prime commonplace of Renaissance art theory-that when the painter wishes to show perfect beauty, and finds no single person who corresponds to his idea, he copies the most beautiful features from many models, thus making the whole beautiful. From beginning to end, the dialogue is in complete accord with the tenets of cinquecento art theory, and having extracted these two essential points from Parrhasios, Socrates proceeds to instruct the painter in the central mystery of his own art, its power to embody through expression and action the workings of the soul, thus making the invisible visible, and demonstrating the truly spiritual nature of painting. Parrhasios argues that nothing can be imitated "which has neither proportions nor color . . and which, in fact, is not even visible."101 But Socrates convinces him that men's souls are in fact representable in expressions of the face and movements of the body, concluding with the argument that it is better to paint noble men than villains. The discussion of sculpture also takes the form of counterposition, strictly analogous to the figura serpentinata. 102 The ends of sculpture and painting are said to be the same, the expression of the movements of men's minds. Socrates notes the lifelikeness of Cliton's sculpture, observing that he must imitate living models. Cliton replies that he does.

Then you have certainly remarked, and that with no little exactness, the natural disposition of all the parts, in all the different postures of the body: for, whilst some of these are extended, others remain bent; when that is raised above its natural height, this sinks below it; these are relaxed, and those again are contracted, to give the greater force to the meditated blow, and the more these things are attended to, the nearer you approach to life. 103

To summarize, a clear apprehension of the virtues and necessary uses of ornament together with an equally clear appreciation of its vices and abuses was part and parcel of the Classical critical tradition, which was most perfectly developed in the tradition of rhetorical literature. Not only was the new language of pictorial composition assisted in many ways by attention to the rhetorical writers, but the language and character of embellishment were set, its relation to content defined in a number of alternatives, and in many ways these were the crucial issues. At the broadest level the question was ethical. Dionysius of Halicarnassus favored the middle style "because it is a mean-and excellence is a mean in life and actions too, according to Aristotle and his

99 For a discussion of this and related texts see T. K. Kitao, "Bernini's Church Facades: Method of Design and the Contrapposti, " Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, xxIv, 1965, 263-284, here 282-83. 100 Alberti's remarks about Parrhasios and Socrates (De Pictura, 66-67) are referred by Grayson to Pliny (xxxv. 67-68) and to Xenophon (see following note for reference). Alberti's words are so close to Quintilian (xII. x. 4), however, that this seems the immediate source, as suggested by Mallk (Della Pittura, 82) and Spencer (Leon Battista Alberti on Painting, trans. J. R. Spencer, New Haven, 1966, 121). The question of whether or not Alberti used Xenophon is therefore in doubt. He could have, since there were many

manuscripts available in the early quattrocento (R. R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries: From the Carolingian Age to the End of the Renaissance, New York, 1964, 492-93). 101 Xenophon, Memorabilia. III, x. The translation is from J. J. Pollitt, The Art of Greece 1400-31 B. C., Englewood Cliffs, 1965, 160.

10o Ibid.

102 Summers, "Figura serpentinata," 272-73. 103 Xenophon, Memorabilia. iii, x.




school."104 The congruence in this instance of critical with ethical or psychological or physical categories reinforced the tendency toward the mean and underscored the distrust of excess. Given the transference of the idea of elocutio from rhetorical to pictorial composition implied by the use of contrapposti, it required a major change in taste-in terms that had been understood from the beginning of the Renaissance-to an art of ornatus comparable to poetry or epideictic in order for pure artifice to be admired in the art of antiquity or encouraged in the art of the present. At the same time, the appreciation of an art of ornatus signalled a new social function of art, since a different audience was implied by what became a dominant stylistic trend (although not a universal one, since other choices were always possible). It was clear to Alberti what mannerism would be in these general critical terms, even though he could not have foretold specifically what difficult& would be added to the canon of ornament as the decades passed. He had, in fact, attempted to bridle, on the model of Ciceronian eloquence, the strong tendencies toward such a pure but restricted art that he saw around him.

In such a context we should understand Alberti's censure of extreme contrapposto. It was excessive and licentious, having more to do with art-and with the artist, it is important to recall-than with the matter at hand. Most later writers would agree with Alberti's position on contrapposto: it was necessary for the sake of varieti, but had to be used with discretion. As we have seen, Leonardo wrote of counterposition as a fundamental article of pictorial invention, followed rather less boldly by Paolo Pino and Lodovico Dolce.105 At the end of the cinquecento, Gregorio Comanini, whose Il Figino was published in 1591, provided a succinct recapitulation of earlier writers on the subject of contrapposto, and his remarks deserve examination in some detail. The topic is taken up in the midst of a long and concrete comparison of painting and poetry. Just having likened figural proportion to the metrics of verse, the painter Ambrogio Figino (whose name was given to the dialogue and who is the speaker at this point) moves on to what must be regarded as a higher level of elocution.

Nor should I neglect to say how the poet in the composition [tessitura] of his verses tempers the bitterness [asprezza] of two words by placing a sweet one between them; so the painter brushes [sparge] a color halfway between the one and the other when these two colors seem extreme; and in the midst of many sturdy and muscular figures, he mixes some others that are lighter and more graceful to sweeten the work and take away an excess of severity. And as the poet plays with antitheses, or with contrapposti, so the painter counterposes in one single painting figures of women and

men, infants and old, the depth of the sea to the land, valleys to mountains; and other similar counterpositions are made, from which not a little charm [vaghezza] is born in painting; which we also see born of contraries in good poems. And it is well to consider that, as regards the use of antitheses, the same advice applies to painter and poet.

There follows a rather tedious-but nonetheless instructive- example of the proper use of antithesis. It must be used with sprezzatura, and an example of this virtue in practice is provided from a commentary by Torquato Tasso on a poem by Giovanni della Casa. These three lines are singled out for praise:

Anzi il dolce aer puro e questa luce Chiara, che'l mondo agli occhi nostri scopre, Traesti tu d'abissi oscuri e misti

Sprezzatura consists in this case in the following: in order to avoid two antithetical faults, baseness and affection, Della Casa answered the words puro and chiara with the words oscuri and misti, then added the word dolce for which he gave no counterpart. It is this last slight rupture of expectation (for there was no more conventional antithesis that dolcelamaro) that earns praise for its "judicious disdain." After a less convincing example of the same thing from Petrarch, Figino continues.

In the style of dignity and magnificence [Figino throughout is discoursing on the heroic mode] the too frequent occurrence of metaphor and antithesis much diminishes the grandeur and majesty of the oration, or poem, just as a judicious disdain of them as explained above ornaments and heightens it. Similarly, if the painter who, when he has painted an infant, will place an old man next to him; or next to a man a woman; next to a giant a dwarf, or next to a beautiful girl an ugly old woman, and next to a white Scythian a black moor, will make an improper and affected thing, and he must be clever in his variation of his figures and contrive to display in his works a noble negligence rather than a base diligence [a contrapposto itself]. Of movement I say the same; if whenever the occasion arises to make a figure standing upright, or that shows the breast and all the fore parts of the body, he always makes next to them a seated figure, or one that shows the shoulders and all the back, he will be considered without fail an artist who is affected [affettato] and even ridiculous. 106

Figino gives us a fairly full catalogue of contrapposti and at the same time affords further insight into the critical question of their piroper use. Contrasting colors should not be set against one another, but should be harmonized, a mean struck

104 D. A. Russell and M. Winterbottom, Ancient Literary Criticism, Oxford, 1972, 340; for the famous doctrine of the mean, Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1108b, 12ff: "There are three kinds of disposition, then two of them vices, involving excess and deficiency respectively, and one a virtue, viz. the mean, and all are in a sense opposed to all." Such principles could of course be widely applied and Castiglione's remark that, in dancing, movements "troppo gagliardi e sforzati," and in music "quelle diminuzioni forti e replicate che mostrano pidi arte che dolcezza" (Cortegiano, 213) is closely similar to Alberti's reservations about extreme contrapposto. In his De Dignitate et Excellentia Hominis, Giannozzo Manetti (Prosatori latini del quattrocento, Milan-Naples, 1952, 429, 449) answered the argument that

the senses may be damaged by excess (as Aristotle stated), thus demonstrating the weakness and vulnerability of the human condition, by insisting that one should avoid such extremes and seek the mean. "When we use the senses in a measured and moderate fashion, not only are we not wearied, we are rather restored and soothed. And if it is impossible to deny that nature has given us weak and frail bodies . . . she has also abundantly furnished us with many remedies for our weakness and fragility." 105 Summers, "Figura serpentinata," 274. 106 G. Comanini, I1 Figino overo del fine della pittura, Mantua, 1591, in Barocchi, Trattati, III, 360-64.



CONTRAPPOSTO 357

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12 Sebastiano del Piombo, S. Giovanni Crisostomo Altarpiece, (detail). Venice, S. Giovanni Crisostomo (photo: Alinari)

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between them. In this Comanini agrees with most writers, beginning with Alberti. But it was possible to occupy a critical position in which colors were set against one another, consciously to pursue the ornate and the licentious. The advice about sprezzatura must also be remembered; Della Casa's chiastic lines are anything but free of ornament, and the cure for obvious artificiality was evidently not less art, but more.

To take another specific example, Alberti, writing on varietd, recommends that there should be "some figures erect, shown full-face . . and others with the face contrario and the arms folded, the feet joined."107 All such varieta, according to Alberti, should be "moderate and grave, with dignity and truth." Lodovico Dolce, who called varieta "the principal marvel of nature," recommended pictorial construction by counterposition, going so far as to say that painters lacking varieta have nothing. 08 He counsels against excess, however, and as an example of a virtue become a vice, belittles painters who "having painted a youth . . . make next to him an old man or an infant, and so, next to a girl, and old lady; and similarly, having made a face in profile, they make another full-face or three-quarters" [occhio e mezzo]. 109 Such juxtaposi- tions are common in Renaissance painting and we may appreciate what Dolce's interlocutor Aretino meant in a detail of Sebastiano's S. Giovanni Crisostomo Altarpiece, or, even more clearly, in Pontormo's Carmignano Visitation (compare Figs. 12 and 13). Since artifice and ornament were so closely identified critically, and since both together were the nub of the critical issue, it is probably to be expected that it would be in practice such as this, and not in the writings of the theorists, nearly all of whom held to the Albertian mean on

the question, that an art of ornatus found expression, and in fact for a time dominated; far from varieta that is "moderate and grave, with dignity and truth," Pontormo especially purified the compositional formula until it is evident in itself, obscuring or profoundly modifying the content of the painting. The image has crystallized along lines defined by critical desiderata, contrapposto chief among them.

The formula of contrapposto was generous enough to encompass a whole gamut of expressive aims. In literature, antithesis fueled the imagination of poets of various talents during the centuries of Petrarch's influence, and, as a poetic device, its use ranged from conventional formula, stylish repetition in numberless Petrarchist poems, to the lofty antitheses of Gongora.110 Again, we might trace a similar expressive range in late Renaissance painting and sculpture, from the literary, nostalgic grace of Raphael's Galatea to the brooding, Augustinian chiaroscuro of his Transfiguration, from Pontormo's Empoli Saint Michael to the S. Michele Visdomini Altarpiece, or from the languid, nameless movements of the Sistine ignudi to the polar, unresolved tension of the Boboli Slaves.

Contrapposto composition could also encompass a number of apparently different artistic styles. Michelangelo's Brazen Serpent pendentive and Raphael's Transfiguration (Figs. 5 and 10) are participants in about the same degree, whatever their "stylistic" differences. Michelangelo's Medici Chapel designs and Pontormo's Poggio a Caiano lunettes are also closely

107 Alberti, Della Pittura, 119. 108 Dolce, Aretino, 179. Dolce's discussion of varieti is conventionally rhetorical, but unusual, although not unique, in grounding variety in nature. 109 Ibid. This formula for variety in the composition of heads (as well as colors) was evidently considerably older than Alberti; it was easily adapted

to the new humanist format, came always to be discussed in terms of contrapposto, and could be exploited in itself as ornamental structure. 110 In addition to L. Forster, Icy Fire (note 82 above), see D. Alonso, Estudios y ensayos Gongorinos, Madrid, 1960, 117-173, "La simetria bilateral."




comparable essays in contrapposto composition.111 The literary form of contrapposto, as we have seen, had a long career, signifying clarity and order on the one hand, paradox on the other, and embellishment in both instances, Classical and Christian. The same expressive range might be expected in visual contrapposti. But within or beyond such directly transferred possibilities of meaning, there also doubtless occurred what might be called a disjunctive influence of the form. That is, in the visual arts, implementation of the new form created an expressive potential over and above the original intentions of its inventors. Chiaroscuro especially opened a vast new area of visual meaning exploited long after its High Renaissance use had been forgotten. However this may have been, since the compositional device of contrapposto was originally defined with reference to rhetoric and poetry, it edged easily and without transformation into iconography, making form and meaning structurally congruent. Raphael's Transfiguration is built around chiaroscuro and figure serpentinate, and it also juxtaposes Heaven and earth, natural and supernatural, near and far; his Saint Michael counterposes light and dark (as Sebastiano calls it, "tutte chiare e tutte nere"),112 figure serpentinate, good and evil (Figs. 10-11). Whatever else it might represent or signify, Michelangelo's Victory (Fig. 14) counterposes youth and age, and states the main figure in the purest figura serpentinata. The psychomachic themes for which the Victory is the conspicuous prototype-Vincenzo Danti's L'Onore che vince l'Inganno, for example, or the groups from Michelangelo's catafalque-are contrapposti, visually and conceptually in the same degree. In the Medici Chapel the jovial and saturnine temperaments are counterposed in Giuliano and Lorenzo de'Medici, and the Times of Day are set in double contrapposto. And, as in the earlier examples, Michelangelo stated his allegorical figures in the purest figure serpentinate. To this list of illustrations might also be added such salient essays in maniera as Rosso Fiorentino's Dead Christ with Angels, Parmigianino's Vision of Saint Jerome, or Beccafumi's first Saint Michael Altarpiece.

It must be stressed that these essays in pure ornatus are not finally merely ornate in the unhappy modern sense of the word. The language of rhetoric, and the critical language of the Renaissance to which it contributed so much, recognized

the dangers of excessive art, but at the same time held it in a certain respect. Moreover, differences outside the Classical rules were hard to chart; decorum and the mean were too pliable final arbiters, defining only imprecisely where license and excess began, and it was no easy matter critically to distinguish lack of skill or order from the flight of genius beyond any rule. Quintilian damned ornate diction in much the same terms he used to praise the Discobolos, just as Vasari abused medieval architecture in much the same words he used to praise the architecture of Michelangelo.113 Asianism was in the fullest sense a sin, clearly seductive to many an avowed partisan of the Attic manner. Restraint always implied excess, the mean extremes, embellishment pure art. Stylishness, maniera, was thus inextricably joined to artistic freedom as the Renaissance understood it; it pointed onward to license- usually a negative term in reference to rhetoric, more neutral or even positive with reference to poetry; when positively interpreted, as it was to praise the art of Michelangelo, license was virtually indistinguishable from pure making, the region of divine furor, where work and artist alike are possessed of grace.114 This departure from accepted rules had its own conventions (as is always the case), but at its highest limits the artist was newly isolated, like the mad poet of Horace, who, obsessed with his own meters, perhaps talks to no one. And to sieze the forms of the beautiful in themselves, to order worlds sustained by the pure apparent energy of the forms of ornatus, to combine and recombine them at one's will, was to transcend them in the act of making, to surpass art through art. None of this was possible within the constraints of nature, submission to purpose or usage.

Both antithetical composition and the related idea of the giudizio dell'occhio-the two major themes with which this paper has been concerned-were rooted in an appeal to the sense of sight. Light and dark, together with color, were, still according to Aristotle, the special objects of the sense of sight. And generally antithesis provided a conceptual means for dealing with change. The antitheses of courtly poetry characteristically described the emotions; Ovid's often

11 The schematic contrapposto evident in Pontormo's Poggio a Caiano lunette and the Medici Chapel is both extraordinary and similar. Pontormo strongly counterposes back/front, male/female, nude/clothed, youth and age, in a context of inflected but close symmetry analogous to the reflected pyramidal groups of the Medici Chapel. K. Weil-Garris Posner ("Comments on the Medici Chapel and Pontormo's Lunette at Poggio a Caiano," Burlington Magazine, cxv, 1973, 641-49) discusses connections between the two projects. 112 In a letter to Michelangelo of 2 July 1518 (K. Frey, ed., Sammlung ausgewiihlter Briefe an Michelagniolo Buonarroti, Berlin, 1899, xcI, 104-05). See also the discussion in S. Freedberg, Painting of the High Renaissance in Rome and Florence, Cambridge, Mass. 1961, I, 353; and K. W.-G. Posner, "Raphael's 'Transfiguration,' " 352-53. 113 In terms close to Alberti's (note 17 above), Quintilian (viii. Pr. 33) writes, "Ea debent praestare sine dubio et admirabilem et iucundam orationem, verum admirabilem non sic, quomodo prodigia miramur, et iucundam non deformi voluptate sed cum laude ac dignitate coniuncta." Or II. v. 8-13: "Nam sermo rectus et secundum naturam enuntiatus nihil habere ex ingenio videtur; illa vero, quae utconque deflexa sunt, tanquam esquisitiora miramur; non aliter quam distoris et quocunque modo produgiosis corporibus apud quosdam maius est pretium quam iis, quae nihil

ex communi habitu boni perdiderunt." In the introduction to the third part of his Lives, Vasari (Vasari-Milanesi, Iv, 7-8) wrote that one of the accomplishments of the seconda maniera was ordine, which "fu il dividere l'un genere da l'altro, si che toccasse ad ogni corpo le membra sue e non si cambiasse pii tra loro il Dorico, lo Ionico,il Corintio ed il Toscano." Michelangelo, however, was described as having achieved the virtuoso Composite order by just such anti-canonical combination. The regions prior to art and beyond art (both subject to ingegno, but only one to giudizio) were characterized in the same terms. See D. Summers, "Michelangelo on Architecture," Art Bulletin, LIV, 1972, 154-55. 114 These issues require a study to themselves; but as a clear and simple statement of the transference of grace from artist to artifact we may consider the following passage from Vincenzo Danti (Il primo libro di un trattato delle perfette proporzioni (Florence, 1567), in Barocchi, Trattati, 1, 230. "E quando si dice tallora alcuna cosa esser graziosa, la quale non e uomo, ne di lui imagine o figura; possiamo dire che questa si fatta grazia sia un ritratto della grazia, che vera e ferma non pu6 vedersi, secondo il parer mio, se non nell'uomo. E ancor che possa essere, in molte cose che l'arte compone, un certa grazia, pid in una che in un'altra; io dir6 che questa venga per un dono particolare dell'ingegno e del giudizio, che in alcuni degli artefici pih, et in altri risplende meno."



CONTRAPPOSTO 359

14 Michelangelo, Victory. Florence, Palazzo Vecchio (photo: Alinari)

repeated cosmogony described generation and corruption; and more than describing it, or recounting its conceptual parts, antithesis as a form of expression presented it with a peculiar vividness, perspicuitas. It was the fundamentally visual character of antithesis that justified its constant comparison to painting. It was considered the special power of painting as an art of imitation to see its subject before the eyes with a vividness surpassing that of any other art. Antithesis, uniquely among structures of thought, had the same force.

Contrapposto could be decorative or structural, as we have seen; in either case its final justification lay in its vividness, the clarity with which art by direct contrast could make opposites evident, or bring them into harmony. On this level antithesis touched on basic principles and there was a continuous relation between nature, or our knowledge of nature, and art. We may recall Alberti's famous maxim, a restatement of Aristotle's notion, that "large, small; long, short; high, low; broad, narrow; bright, dark; light and shadow and every similar thing which, because it may or may not belong to a thing, the philosopher call accidents [as opposed to substance], are such that they are known through comparison" [comparatione].115 The point is backed up with examples from Virgil, Pliny's account of ancient painting, and everyday experience before being directed to the definition of the proper use of black and white in painting.

Lorenzo de'Medici, who required of a painting that it be pleasing in itself-material, or workmanship, or suitability to purpose aside-speaks of contrapposto in terms distinctly reminiscent of Alberti.116 Like Alberti, Lorenzo is discussing relative knowledge, opinion, which, citing Plato, he defines as a mean between true knowledge and ignorance. The reference to Plato is doubly significant because Lorenzo ends his meditation on relative knowledge with a wa'rning against it, calling it an illusion to be shunned in favor of the absolute, thus placing the beauty of his lady above the harmony of warring contrasts. But such Platonizing reservations not- withstanding, his words explore in some detail the relation of antithesis and variet&, which he considers to be virtually the same. We are, he says, always unsatisfied with opinion, because the mind is content only with the true. What we can know relatively we know per comparazione. He adduces examples very much like Alberti's. A man of normal height-three braccia-would be small if four were the norm. The Ethiopians call those among them white who are lighter than most, and the same among the Italians would be black. Good and riches are similarly relative. He then considers the example of a pearl, prized so far as it is bright and clear, or the more as it approaches true and perfect whiteness; if it were placed on a dark field or against a dark color, so that the comparazione of its contrary might make the pearl seem nearer perfection, this effect would be an illusion, because the whiteness of the pearl itself could not have changed. Still, from this illusion a kind of beauty is born, "that proceeds from the variety and distinction of things, because one takes force from the other, and it seems that each more approaches its perfection."'17 The emphasis on seeming, although negative in this instance, is consistent with the Renaissance understanding of the illusory and paradoxical nature of painting. And there is an important fusion of structurally related ideas here, of ornatus with the laws of vision and, beyond that, with the laws of time and nature.

Again, Lorenzo Ghiberti, explaining the action of light and color, remarked that color is not apparent in itself, but is the result of light striking something, which gives it form. His example is a stained-glass window, which makes light visible as color; and, he adds, the light "is seen because of the dark places inside, since in this way the contrary that is placed beside its contrary appears more clearly."' 18 This analysis of perception is the result of an assumption about visual experience that is borne out by visual experience. It is consistent both in content and expression with the ideas we have been examining and illustrates the continuity between nature and experience, art and eloquence. There were several such coincidences, all pointing from the static to the active, and all of them, like chiaroscuro, essential to the new pictorial structure. The theory of human and animal movement, central to Renaissance artistic intentions, was based on

11 Alberti, Della Pittura, 68-69. 116 Lorenzo de'Medici, Comento sopra alcuni de' suoi sonetti, Opere, ed. A. Simioni, Bari, 1939, I, 68. ". . . volendo che una pittura interamente piaccia, bisogna adiungervi questa parte: che la cosa dipinta ancora per se diletti."

117 Ibid., 134-35. See also Selve d'Amore, I, 27-28. "Contrarie voci fanno un suon soavel E diversi color bellezza nuova;/ Piace la voce acuta per la grave/ nel nero il bianco la sua grazia troval Fatto che l'un nemico all'altro giova. ." "8 L. Ghiberti, I Commentari, ed. O. Morisani, Naples, 1947, 99.




opposition from Aristotle to Leonardo.119 It can only have been regarded as a corroboration of the objectivity of the beautiful that the construction of function in this case

precisely fit the realization of varieta. And, still on the level of the artificial, there was, as we have seen, ample textual reason to believe that the great painting of the past had made use of the contraposition of bright and dark. 120

These ideas may also be brought to bear on questions of

major stylistic change. The transition from the first to the second books of Alberti's De Pictura makes it evident that the scientific basis of painting-perspective-is significant for the whole istoria to be constructed upon it as perspicuitas, clarity of organization, insuring convincing vividness.121 As such, perspective was replaceable by antithesis, which fulfilled a similar demand of presentation. In what might be called visual rhetorical terms, in short, perspective and antithesis were much the same. Chiaroscuro (to take the visually most inclusive and compositionally most basic form of antithesis) thus could complement perspective, or even make it redundant and supplant it, without compromising the all-important sensuous truth and immediacy of the image. It was Leonardo who most deeply understood the rhetorical vividness of

counterposition, who first probed and then realized it as a mode of synthesis equal and alternative to perspective. The Adoration of the Magi is split half and half, light and dark, at the same time that regions of space are painstakingly clarified

by perspective study. Earlier, the dark trees set against the white horizon in the Uffizi Annunciation (again in conjunction with careful perspective construction) record the first urgings of this solution; and the portrait of Ginevra de'Benci establishes it as a principle of composition, excluding a mass of visible data for one underlying and concentrating analogue to the vividness of things really seen. In the Madonna of the Rocks the synthesis of the empirical and the compositional is complete, realized on the highest level of istoria. After Leonardo the perceptual aspect of antithesis, which made it

applicable to words and images alike-and perhaps most

deeply to images, the basic justifying metaphor-was forgotten, and the form became, even in the hands of

Raphael, rhetorical in a flatter sense of the word. For Leonardo contrast pointed up truth, darkness light, and the tension of these opposites would not resolve itself in a higher mediating principle, other, perhaps, than the artist-viewer himself, and thus finally fixed even the artist's eye in the realm of the seen. But for most central Italian painters immediately after him who used the formula of contrapposto-and here chiaroscuro is especially intended-it was embellishment, the exornatio of Cicero's inaequabilis varietas. One senses, in fact, that the form had undergone this change in its significance for Leonardo himself when, late in his life, he painted his Louvre Saint John the Baptist. Later Caravaggio, although pointedly abandoning the multiform embellishments of Mannerist art, could still touch and in fact more powerfully exploit the rhetorical truth of chiaroscuro, giving his figures the presence of life itself, consistent with the intention of his images, by placing them in a situation of artificial, now supernatural, contrast.

Whether he surmised it from clues in the writing of Alberti or Leonardo, or extracted it from the abundant evidence in the paintings themselves, Heinrich Walfflin recognized the High Renaissance Classical style to be based upon what he termed "invention of composition by contrasts."122 This coincidence between the creative results and what can be glimpsed of an

aspect of the thought suggests that these ideas, far from being mere literary echoes, nourished the formation of a great style of painting. Some of the art theory of the Renaissance is far from practice and little more than humanist literary exercise; and many of its major themes are not the major themes of painting itself. But this is by no means true of all of it, and, even in the worst examples (just as in modern theory and criticism), however far speculation may stray into purely verbal

possibilities, it is still of its time and circles a living center that can be located. What seems to us a dry list of contextless Classical citations was for the Renaissance reader resonant and

suggestive within a system of assumptions we no longer hold. The Renaissance was much closer than we to the antiquity it emulated, and the conceptual structures shared by the two

119 See Summers, "Figura serpentinata," 275-78. Leonardo's general principle of human movement (J. P. Richter, The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, London, 1883, II, 120, n. 826; "Dello andare dell'omo. L'andare dell'omo e sempre a uso dell'universale andare delli animali di 4 piedi, imperoche siccome essi movono i loro piedi in croce a uso del trotto del cavallo, cosi l'omo in croce si move le sue 4 membra, cioe se caccia inanti il pie destro per caminare, egli caccia inanzi con quello il braccio sinistro, e sempre cosi sequita") is taken more or less directly from Aristotle, De Incessu Animalium, 712a 25. See Aristotelis Opera cum Averrois Commentariis, Venice, 1562-1574 (facs. Frankfurt am Main, 1962), vI, 210v. 120 See note 66 above. 121 Quintilian on elocution (viii. ii. 22) calls perspicuitas the orator's first virtue; it makes language "et doctis probabilis et planus imperitis." As in Alberti, the enunciation of the premise that the composition should be clear to learned and unlearned alike (De Pictura, 78-79) precedes a discussion of ornatus; for "correctness and lucidity are not enough" (VIII. iii. 2), and ornament further serves to convince. "For when our audience find it a pleasure to listen, their attention and their readiness to believe what they hear are both alike increased, while they are generally filled with delight, and sometimes even transported by admiration." This is a description of the middle style; see Quintilian viii. iii. 42; citing Cicero, De Partitione Oratoria vI. 19-22; and Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Russell, Ancient Literary Criticism, 314-35) where a style of figured clarity is advocated as best, able to sway learned and unlearned alike. Alberti's section on varieta (De Pictura,

78-79) follows the order of Quintilian's paragraphs containing the Discobolos passage (see again note 6 above); like Quintilian he describes variety in terms of human movement, and does so in very nearly the same words. That Alberti was reading his antique source closely is suggested by the fact that he takes up immediately after the passage on varietas the story of Apelles' showing the one-eyed Antigonus in profile. What was omitted in this sequence is the Discobolos passage, which smacked of epideictic, rhetoric (and sculpture) for cognoscenti, and was consequently counter to the premise that the istoria should be accessible to all. Alberti substitutes a long section on the decorum of movement, which, although governed by the prior principle of varieti, should be taken from nature. This too is bracketed within the same sequence from Quintilian, since Alberti proceeds to the discussion of Timanthes' Sacrifice of Iphigenia (which in the Institutio follows the Antigonus episode) as an example of the movements of the soul, repeating Quintilian almost verbatim, as both Spencer (On Painting, 78, n. 63) and Grayson (De Pictura, 82, n. 47) agree. Alberti, in short, used Quintilian critically, following him closely in this treatment and justification of varieta and movement, but pointedly excluding the Discobolos passage, replacing it with a more natural (as opposed to artificial) doctrine of movement-actually more consistent with Quintilian's overall critical position; see notes 32 and 119 above-and concluding with a prohibition of figures such as the Discobolos. 122 H. W6lfflin, Classic Art, London-New York, 258ff.



CONTRAPPOSTO 361

periods, now understood with great difficulty, were then the universal heritage of the educated. It was precisely out of such a universal heritage that the High Renaissance style grew. This new Classical style was integrally related to the understood

meaning of a Classical style, fed partly by the remains of ancient art, partly by the vast literature of ancient stylistics, and partly by contemporary needs, circumstances, assumptions, and habits. A Classical style did not simply imply restraint, decorum, and the mean. Cicero himself, as Poliziano pointed out, felt the beauty of the Asian style and made it a part of his own practice.123 Indeed, Cicero defended the ornate style in terms well known to Renaissance writers on

painting beginning with Alberti. According to the rhetorical tradition, ornatus and its experiential counterpart delectatio were the esthetic substance of poetry; voluptas was near iudicium. It was this more sensuous side of the Classical tradition that was lost to sight during the centuries of ever-constricting Classicism between our times and the Renaissance; and from the point of view of latterday neo-Classicism it is difficult to understand the psychological and cultural sources of the High Renaissance style. The achievement of the beautiful-a task to which Italian artists set themselves more or less single-mindedly over several generations-was modelled in many ways on the achievement of eloquence, and was a balance of reason and delight, the known and the sensed, the timeless and the circumstantial. In Alberti's De Pictura the development achieved its first and to a certain extent its determinative definition, inseparably mingled with the esthetic ideals of humanist eloquence. The Ciceronian period and High Renaissance composition are thus sisters in a tradition, and the great painters of the High Renaissance, at once reclaiming and creating the lost art of the past, could boast with Bembo that their ancient language "had been so far purged of the rust of the untaught centuries that today it has regained its ancient splendor and charm."124

University of Pittsburgh

123 Prosatori Latini, 881. 124 P. Bembo, Opere in Volgare, 309.

Bibliography of Frequently Cited Sources

Alberti, L. B., L'Architettura (De Re Aedificatoria), ed. G. Orlandi, Milan, 1966, 2 vols.

, Della pittura, ed. L. Mallk, Florence, 1950.

, On Painting and on Sculpture, ed. C. Grayson, London, 1972.

Barocchi, P., ed., Scritti d'arte del Cinquecento, Milan-Naples, 1971, 2 vols.

(to date).

, Trattati d'arte del cinquecento fra manierismo e controriforma, Bari, 1960, 3 vols.

Baxandall, M., Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, Oxford, 1971.

Bembo, P., Opere in volgare, ed. M. Marti, Florence, 1961

Chantelou, P. Freart de, Journal du Voyage en France du Cavalier Bernin, Paris, 1930.

Cicero, De Partitione Oratoria, trans. H. Rackham, London-Cambridge, 1960.

, Orator, trans. H. M. Hubbell, London-Cambridge, 1962.

Curtius, E. R., European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, New York, 1963.

Edgerton, S. Y., Jr., "Alberti's Colour Theory: A Medieval Bottle without Renaissance Wine," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xxxII, 1969, 109-134.

Gombrich, E. H., "The Style all'Antica: Imitation and Assimilation," Norm and Form. Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, London, 1966.

Jex-Blake, K., and E. Sellers, The Elder Pliny's Chapters on the History of Art, Chicago, 1968.

Lanciani, R., "La Raccolta antiquaria di Giovanni Ciampolini," Bulletino della Commissione Archaeologica Comunale di Roma, ser. v, xxvII, 1899, 101-115.

Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting, ed. A. P. McMahon, Princeton, 1956, 2 vols.

Opere di Baldassare Castiglione, Giovanni della Casa, Benvenuto Cellini, ed. C. Cordie, Milan-Naples, 1960.

Poliziano, A., Opera Omnia, Rome, 1498.

Prosatori latini del quattrocetto, ed. E. Garin, Milan-Naples, 1960.

Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler, New York-London, 1931, 4 vols.

Russell, D. A., and M. Winterbottom, Ancient Literary Criticism, Oxford, 1972.

Shearman, J., Mannerism, Baltimore, 1967.

Summers, D., "Maniera and Movement: The Figura Serpentinata," Art Quarterly, xxxv, 1972, 269-301.

Vasari, G., Le Vite di Michelangelo nelle redazioni del 1550 e del 1568, ed. P. Barocchi, Milan-Naples, 1962, 5 vols.

, Le Vite de' piti eccellenti pittori scultori ed architettori, ed. G. Milanesi,

Florence, 1906, 8 vols.

Weil-Garris Posner, K., "Raphael's Transfiguration and the Legacy of Leonardo," Art Quarterly, xxxv, 1972, 343-371.

Weinberg, B., ed., Trattati di poetica e retorica del '500, Bari, 1970, 2 vols.



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