VIII. Virtù Visiva

When Leonardo is explaining why the painter's depiction of a battle is superior to the poet's--a superiority that he measures in terms of directness, vividness, and truth--he declares that in contrast to the long and tedious description fo a poem, the painter shows the vivid and manifold action of a battle in a single instant;^ and he says much the same thing when he comments on the poet's disadvantage as compared with the painter in the representation of bodily beauty. Thus the poet must render things piecemeal as "if a face were to be revealed bit by bit, with the part previously shown covered up, so that we are prevented by our own forgetfulness from comparing any harmony of proportions, because the eye cannot embrace the whole simultaneously in its field of vision," whereas a painting would represent all the parts of the face at the same instant, like so many voices joined together in sweet harmony.^ This passage recalls Lessing's famous comment on the indistinctness of Ariosto's long and detailed description of Alcina which Dolce, as we have seen, praised as a model for painters to follow^--a comment in which Lessing illustrates his view that since the successive addition of details in description cannot result in a clear [p. 57] and definite image of coexistent forms, descriptive poetry is not the province of the poet, and cannot challenge painting in depicting the beat of the external world. And in pointing out the painter's capacity, which the poet does not share, to represent figures or details that one apprehends in a single moment of time, Leonardo clearly anticipated Lessing's virtually identical definition of painting as an art of figures coexistent in a space that has for its province the depiction of objective reality.^ Furthermore when he observes that "the only true office of the poet is to invent the words of people, who are conversing together,"^ he seems to have in mind something that approximates Lessing's definition of poetry as an art of words succeeding one another in time in which, as the German critic was to add, the poetry must deal not with description, but with progressive human actions and emotions.^ Leonardo thus anticipated by two and a half centuries Lessing's famous distinction between poetry and painting.

Now it is self-evident, despite the abstract logic of cubism or the vagaries of expressionism, that the painter's art must generally be based on the representation of the natural world as apprehended by the eye, and the fact that major provinces of the painter's art--landscape, interior scenes, and still-life--represent definite categories of visual experience that have no analogies among the historical genres of literature, is eloquent illustration of this truth.^ It does not follow, however, as Leonardo argued, that painting is the superior art, or even that its images of the world of nature are more vivid, for who can say that "that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude" of which the poet wrote presents less vivid images to the mind than the natural eye. In the early eighteenth century when we begin to see in literature the first stirrings of an interest in the beauty of external nature that was to culminate in the Romantic Movement, a critic of literature, Joseph Addison, again praised the sense of sight in words that would have won high praise from Leonardo himself: "Our sight," he says, "is the most perfect and most delightful of all our senses. It fills the mind with the largest variety of ideas, converses with its objects at the greatest distance, and continues the longest in action without being tired or satiated with its proper enjoyments."^ And when the English man of letters writes that "description runs yet further from the things it represents than painting; for a picture bears a real resemblance to its original which letters and syllables are wholly void of,"^ he seems merely to echo at a distance of two centuries Leonardo's famous remark that painting stands to poetry in the same relation as a body to its cast shadow, since "poetry puts down her subjects in imaginary written characters, while painting puts down the identical reflections that the eye receives as if they were real."^ Addison goes on to say that "colors speak all languages, but words are understood only by such a people or nation,"^ an observation that he probably owed to De Piles,^ but which again may trace its ancestry in the Renaissance to Leonardo's remark that literature [p. 58] requires commentators and explanations, whereas the work of a painter [since, Leonardo means, his language is the universal language of sight ] will be understood by all who behold it.^ And this as a notion that in later criticism was curiously inconsistent with the doctrine of the learned painter, for whereas the one praised the language of painting as superior to that of poetry in its universal appeal, the other sought to turn this language into a mere pictorial equivalent of literary texts, in short to make it a language that none but the initiate could understand. But when Addison comes to write of what he calls the secondary pleasure of the imagination--those that do not result directly from the sight of natural objects, but may accompany the experience of works of art or literature--he speaks of the power of words to evoke vivid images in the mind's eye in a way that is directly opposed to the doctrine of Leonardo, and contains a truth of which the Florentine was scarcely aware. For if painting reproduces nature with an objective reality that words can never attain [so far he would agree with Leonardo], still "words, when well chosen, have so great a force in them that a description often gives us more lively ideas than a sight of things themselves."^ The inward eye thus possesses for the literary critic at least as keen a sight as the outward eye possessed for the critic of painting, but with this point of view the Abbé du Bos, whose thinking along these lines was thoroughly Leonardesque, was a few years later to disagree. Du Bos makes a distinction that recalls Leonardo between the "signes naturels" of painting and the "signes artificiels" of poetry,^ and argues that the former act more powerfully on the human imagination than the latter because they act as Leonardo would have said, "per la via della virtù visiva" --through the power of sight.^ And so it follows for Du Bos that the most moving poetry is tragedy, not only for its expressive power, but because it resembles painting to the extent that it is a spectacle presented on the stage and so appeals directly to the eye.^

It is unprofitable to argue, as Leonardo did, that the mind's eye sees more darkly than the outward eye or that the poet's imagery leaves less vivid marks on the mind than the painter's conveys to the sight, for on the basis of their own experience some will always agree with Leonardo, others with Addison. But it would certainly be the consensus of opinion that if descriptive poetry or prose produces a series of vivid images in the mind, these do not, in general experience, unite to form a clear simultaneous impression of various forms, details, and colors, such as one has in beholding a picture or a scene in nature. But the point which should be made here is that at the beginning of the eighteenth century a new impulse to seek the beginnings of knowledge not in any a priori endowment of the human soul, but in the data of sense experience, led to a new awareness of the senses as organs of knowledge. And between Leonardo, greatest exemplary of the empirical ardor of the Renaissance, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and Du Bos near the beginning of the eighteenth, the clear insistence that painting is primarily an art whose function it is to represent to the eye the forms and beauty of the external world was in eclipse.^ It as in eclipse, that is, during the two centuries in which the doctrine ut pictura poesis was in process of [p. 59] evolution, when the critics were all too eager to turn the poet into a painter of pictures and the painter into one who shared subject matter and expression and a set of rules for good invention with the poet. And it was in the writing of Du Bos, who was deeply influenced by the empiricism of the English philosopher John Locke and by Addisons' essays [themselves owing much to Locke] on the effect of visual experience on the imagination;^ that we first find in the criticism of painting any well-formulated theory that it opposed to the abstract doctrine of the Academicians. For in applying the rules of poetry to painting, critics like Félibien and Le Brun had so intellectualized the pictorial art that its primary character as a visual art capable of affecting the human imagination only through its initial power over the sense of sight, was largely neglected.

But if painting to Leonardo could more vividly than poetry represent the beauty of a face, or of forests, valleys, fields, and streams,^ it could also--and here Leonardo argues against those who would claim for poetry the total realm of the mind's activity--represent the motions of the mind, by which he chiefly means the passions of the soul in so far as they are expressed by movements of the body.^ And when in the Trattato, he was not defending painting against poetry and there was no occasion for pressing the argument, Leonardo expressly states, as we have seen, that it is in the manifestation of the mind's activity through bodily movement [not in the depiction of the beauty of nature of which he sometimes writes with so much personal feeling and imagination]^ that the most important part of the painter's art lies.^ Thus in arguing that the province of the mind is not denied to the painter, Leonardo at the same time restricts him to that inward activity that through the body makes itself palpable to the sight. And this again was an excellent distinction and one that later critics who tended to read into painting more expression of the thinking and feeling man than the painter could possibly depict in a single figure would have done well to consider. The implications of Leonardo's distinction are brought out in the mid-sixteenth century, when Dolce describes the painter as one intent on imitating through lines and colors all that is represented to the eye--and this, of course, includes the depiction of mental and of psychic life through expressive bodily movement--and the poet as imitating with words not only the external world [wherein most critics considered him a painter] but also "that which is represented to the intellect."^ By this phrase Dolce would appear to mean intellectual concepts and the temporal processes of thought, as distinguished from visual imagery. A few years earlier, Benedetto Varchi had also managed this same general distinction, arguing that it is chiefly the poet's business to imitate il di dentro --the concepts, and passions of the soul, that are within--and the painterÍs, il di fuori --the bodies and features of the outer world.^ He added prudently [p. 60] that they may invade each other's territory to some extent, or the poet will also paint, as it were, the outer world, and the painter will represent the "affetti" as best he can, though he can never do this as happily as the poet--a point of view which is again a direct anticipation of the central doctrine of Lessing. But this vital distinction between the sister arts was obscured, if not altogether lost, in the late sixteenth century in the Mannerist doctrine that the painter's standard of artistic imitation was not to be found in selecting the best from external nature, but in contemplating an idea of perfection--or what Zuccari was to call disegno interno --in the mind's eye.^ And it was not a distinction which, in the seventeenth century, the Cartesian habit of making painting purely a function of the human reason would tend to encourage. Again it was Du Bos in the early eighteenth century who in a discerning chapter on the subjects most suited to the poet and to the painter,^ distinguished carefully for the first time in nearly two centuries between the painter's field as di fuori and the poet's as di dentro . Du Bos remarks particularly on the ability of the former to represent, as the poet cannot without loss of unity, the different emotions of a large group of persons simultaneously interested in an action, as well as the age, sex, and dress of each, their individual characters so far as these may be rendered in visible signs, and the setting in which the group is placed, much of which the poet, because his is a temporal art, could only do--and here Leonardo would have again agreed--at the risk of lengthy and tiresome description. But the advantages of the temporal over the spatial art are that the poet can represent the sublime or subtle thought that accompanies the passions of the soul as the painter cannot, for all his greater vividness in portraying the emotions; just as he can render intricacies of moral character denied to the painter, and can impart to events a heightened meaning, because they are dramatically related to preceding events. This last Du Bos calls in the language of his day "le sublime de rapport" --a virtue obviously denied the painter, because he must confine himself to a single event in a single moment of time. In all such arguments one will recognize again, but this time at close range, a direct anticipation of Lessing. But it was Leonardo who, two centuries before, in claiming for the painter the depiction of those aspects of the mind's activity that are revealed in the body, had conceded to the poet other kinds of mental activity that the painter's art is unable to express.^

[pp. 56-61]

* Symbol for the phonetic accent in this word not available on the computer.