Back to the XV century to discover what painting still aims at
Antonello da Messina, Ritratto d’uomo, 1476, Palazzo Madama, Torino.
Then Adam, knowing the sin he had committed, and being nobly endowed by God, as the root and origin and father of us all, discovered by his wisdom that it was necessary to find a way to live by his own manual exertions, and thus he began by digging and Eve by spinning. Afterwards he carried on many necessary arts, different each from the other; for they could not be all equally so. Now, the most worthy is Science; after which comes an art derived from science and dependent on the operations of the hand, and this is called Painting, for which we must be endowed with both imagination (fantasia) and skill in the hand, to discover unseen things concealed beneath the obscurity of natural objects, and to arrest them with the hand, presenting to the sight of that which did not before appear to exist. And well does it deserve to be placed in the rank next to science, and to be crowned by Poetry: and for this reason, that the poet, by the help of the science, becomes worthy, and free, and able to compose and bind together, or not, at pleasure.
From “The Book of Art of Cennino Cennini”, translated from Italian by Christina J. Herringham, George Allen & Unwin Ltd.
September 22, 2014
